Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (21 page)

Todorov cites the Russian theologian and mystic Vladimir Solovyov in order to add an important tagline to his definition of the fantastic: “In the genuine fantastic,” Solovyov suggested, “there is always the external and formal possibility of a simple explanation of phenomena, but at the same time this explanation is completely stripped of internal probability.”
²⁹
Fort again engages in precisely this rhetorical move: he will often cite scientific explanations for his anomalous events, but only to show how far they fall short, how silly they really are in the face of the offending data. Like a good fantastic writer, he will strip such naturalistic explanations of internal probability.

Like
good fantastic literature yet again, Fort's texts fulfill another requirement of Todorov's genre, that is, they integrate the reader into the fantastic world that they are portraying. It is
the reader's hesitation
between a natural, reductive, or fictive reading and a supernatural, occult, or realist reading that constitutes the first and most important condition of the fantastic. Fort accomplishes this through the very nature of his sources, which, after all, are often newspapers with real place-names and real dates describing real events in the same world the reader inhabits. Fort thus brings the fantastic into the real world, or better, he shows that the real world is
already
fantastic, and always has been. By doing so, he dissolves the boundaries between the imaginary and the real and scatters endless seeds of metaphysical confusion.

In the end, however, it may be even more accurate to suggest that Charles Fort is finally a comedian of the fantastic, that it is his humor, above all else, that rhetorically creates the metaphysical hesitations and open-ended nature of his texts. Charles Fort is a very funny writer. As a few typical examples of Fort's delightful style, consider the following scenes. On March 12, 1890, residents of Ashland, Ohio, swore that a ghostly city had appeared over their little town. The pious read it as—what else?—an apparition of “The New Jerusalem.” A physicist was a bit more reasonable. He interpreted it as a mirage of Sandusky, Ohio, which happens to be over sixty miles down the road from Ashland. Fort, in his usual style, lampooned both the faithful and the rational explanations. The apparition, Fort wrote, “may have been a revelation of heaven, and for all I know heaven may resemble Sandusky, and those of us who have no desire to go to Sandusky may ponder that point” (NL 459). In other places, he waxes eloquently on the dubious correspondence his dubious books tend to produce: “I have had an extensive, though one-sided, correspondence,” he observes, “with people who may not be, about things that probably aren't” (LO 609). Here's another: “Now and then admirers of my good works write to me, and try to convert me into believing things that I say” (LO 641).

It is hard not to like this guy.

There are many things that could be said about the function and import of such textual moments: their rhetorical uses as a protective or qualifying strategy (things that are presented as funny can be true or false, or both at the same time); their entertainment value (it is easy to keep reading this man's big books for more Sanduskys or “things that probably aren't”); or, finally, their philosophical uses as a rhetorical form of transcendence (for to laugh at something is to step outside of it and no longer be bound by its rules). I will get to all of these dimensions of Fortean humor in due
time,
but for now it seems sufficient to suggest only that any essay or book about Charles Fort that is not funny is not sufficiently reflective of the man or his work. Which is all to say that if the reader does anything with my words below, I hope that he or she at least laughs. If not, this chapter will be about many things, even the fantastic narrative of Western occulture, but it will certainly not be about Charles Fort.

Collecting
and Classifying the Data of the Damned: Fort's Comparative Method

Methodologically speaking, Fort was first and foremost a comparativist who understood perfectly well that knowledge arises from how one collects and classifies data. “By
explanation
,” he pointed out succinctly, “I mean
organization
” (LO 551). But he also knew that the data themselves are never innocent, that much depends upon
which
data the comparativist selects from the weltering mass of stuff that is the world of information. Fort's most basic comparative principle worked from the conviction that one should privilege “the data of the damned,” that is, all that stuff that had been rejected, facilely explained away, or literally demonized by the two most recent reigning orders of knowledge of Western culture, religion and science. Only then, he thought, can we begin to sketch the outlines of a bigger, more expansive and inclusive reality. Only then can we approximate a Truth we may never reach but that is nevertheless worth reaching for.

What this implied and required, of course, was that Fort's thought become inherently and structurally transgressive. If Truth lies outside every system, if every system is only an approximation or partial actualization of this Truth, then a better approach to the Truth can only be had by going outside the present system, that is, by transgressing the proper order of things. “I do not know how to find out anything new,” he pointed out with faultless logic, “without being offensive” (LO 547). Still within this same offensive logic, Fort is deeply suspicious of any socially sanctioned truth, particularly any such truth that smells of piety or humility. “I am suspicious of all this wisdom,” he writes, “because it makes for humility and contentment. These thoughts are community-thoughts, and tend to suppress the individual.” Such “wisdom” or “humility” are nothing but more attempts to reduce the human being to a machine, to a cog in a social wheel. Such community-thoughts are thus seen as “corollaries of mechanistic philosophy, and I represent a revolt against mechanistic philosophy.” It is not that he did not see the truth of mechanistic models. Quite the
contrary,
mechanistic philosophy applies “to a great deal.” Fort's point was rather that it does not, and cannot, explain everything, that mechanism can never be “absolute” (WT 975).

Perhaps this rage against herd-thinking or machine-speak is also why the reader can occasionally detect something at once monstrous and beautiful in Fort's raging prose. “I suspect that it may be regrettable,” he admitted, “but, though I am much of a builder, I can't be somewhat happy, as a writer, unless also I'm mauling something. Most likely this is the werewolf in my composition” (WT 905). Or, now perhaps hinting at the union of opposites that informed all of his thinking, “that there is nothing that is beautiful and white, aglow against tangle and dark, that is not symbolized by froth on a vampire's mouth” (WT 877).

One of the clearest and most dramatic expressions of this transgressive or offensive aspect of Fort's thought occurs in the very first lines of
The Book of the Damned
. These are worth quoting at length, as they introduce Fort's prophetic voice to the world and set down some of the basic terms of his own system. Here is how he begins in 1919, in what is essentially an oracular voice:

A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march.

He then goes on to define what he means by “the damned” and comments on the radical relativism of human history, where worlds replace worlds that have replaced other worlds:

So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.

But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.

Or everything that is, won't be.

And everything isn't, will be—

But, of course, will be that which won't be—

He then becomes still more abstract as he introduces his dialectical monism through the classical philosophical terms of existence and being:

It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called “existence,” is a rhythm
of
heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. . . .

It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called “being” is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.

At this point, he sounds remarkably like Derrida on
différance
, or Foucault on the
episteme
as a temporary and relative order of knowledge and power. There are clear resonances here. But then one realizes that these resonances are essentially photographic negatives of one another, that Fort is more like the
opposite
of Derrida and Foucault, acknowledging both Difference and Sameness but finally privileging Sameness:

But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese. (BD 3–4)

Fort will go on to define “existence” as a shifting, unstable intermediate zone between what he will later call the Negative Absolute and the Positive Absolute, but which he calls here, in a more mythical vein, “hell” and “heaven.” “Being” is also defined as that ideal state that includes more and more and excludes less and less until one sees that one is like “a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese.” Fort's humor is already an expression not of a cynical skepticism or a futile relativism, but of a mystical monism, and laughter unites everything.

Everything spins out of this irreverent monism. Every opinion, which is also every mistake, is a result of privileging some aspect of this Oneness over every other aspect. Error results when parts attempt to be wholes, when the bug imagines itself as fundamentally different from the mouse in the same orange cheese. “To have any opinion, one must overlook something” (LO 559). So too with every standard and opinion. They are all forms of orangeness on a spectrum of reds and yellows (BD 5).

What Fort is most interested in is how much of the world a system must exclude to form an opinion. He was deeply bothered by how easy it is to disregard or damn a datum. Early in his first book, he introduces a metaphor that will help him explain this strange feature of human beings. It
will
come to play a more and more central role in his other books. Enter, or swim in, the metaphor of the deep-sea fishes:

I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes: How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?

They wouldn't try—

Or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind. (BD 26)

And what, he asks, would such a deep-sea fish learn if it bumped into a steel plate that had fallen from some wrecked ship above? Probably nothing at all. “Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose” (BD 162). Fort calls the metaphysical ocean “above” us—whatever that means—the Super-Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea, we might recall, was that legendary no-place in the Atlantic Ocean where mysterious crosscurrents were said to make whole ships disappear. Fort adds his “super” and makes of the Super-Sargasso Sea a kind of metaphorical space in which he will gather all of his damned data until the waters around the swimming reader are filled with floating and falling debris, “material for the deep-sea fishes to disregard” (BD 119).

It is not simply a matter of stuff randomly falling through the texts, however. Fort is not so simple or so naive. He has a specific means for locating the steel plates of the ship in the deep-sea waters of his data. He knows exactly what it feels like to bump his fishy nose up against something strange and steely. That feeling, that bump, is called a “coincidence.” Here is a typical bump on the nose, this one involving the slow falling of stones from the sky or from a specific point in the ceiling of a house:

Somebody in France, in the year 1842, told of slow-moving stones, and somebody in Sumatra, in the year 1903, told of slow-moving stones. It would be strange, if two liars should invent this circumstance—

And that is where I get, when I reason. (LO 566)

It is easy to disregard one such report. Merely an “anecdote,” as the scientists like to say in their pseudo-explanation. But two now? Then three? Then, with enough time in the library, three dozen from different parts of the world and in different decades? Just how long can we go on like this until we admit that this is real data, and that we haven't the slightest idea where to put it? How long until we see the ship's steel plate bumping up against our now sore noses?

This
reasoned comparativism that worked through researched coincidences was very striking to Fort. His data, he felt, spoke far “too much of coincidences of coincidences” (BD 120; cf. BD 183). What, he finally realized, he was really interested in was not the events or the things themselves, which were meaningless in themselves, but
the relation of things
that appears within the comparative method. He knew that this relation was partly a function of his own interpretive inclinations, but he also suspected that it was really “out there,” that it was not simply a subjective fantasy on his part. “I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences,” he concluded. “What if some of them should not be coincidences?” (WT 846). In the end, he concluded that at least some of these coincidences were an expression, like everything else, of “an underlying oneness” (WT 850). Coincidences, in other words, are grounded in a deeper Oneness of which they are distant echoes, reflections, or signs. Jung would come to the exact same conclusion later with his notion of synchronicity as an expression of the
unus mundus
, the World as One.