Lo! (25 page)
Authors: Charles Fort
We cannot divorce the idea of reciprocity from the idea of relations, and relating something to the Absolute would be relating the Absolute to something. This is defeating an alleged concept of the Absolute, with the pseudo-idea of the Relative Absolute. The doctrine of Prof. Einstein’s is based not upon an absolute finding, but upon a question:
Which is the more graspable interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiments:
That no motion of this earth in an orbit is indicated, because the velocity of light is absolute;
Or that no motion of this earth in an orbit is indicated, because this earth is stationary?
Unfortunately for my own expressions, I have to ask a third question:
Who, except someone who was out to boost a theory ever has demonstrated that light has any velocity?
Prof. Einstein is a Girondist of the Scientific Revolution. His revolt is against classical mechanics, but his methods and his delusions are as antiquated as what he attacks. But it is my expression that he has functioned. Though his strokes were wobbles, he has shown with his palsies the insecurities of that in Science which has been worshipfully regarded as the Most High.
It is my expression that the dissolution of phenomenal things is as much a matter of internal disorders as the effect of any external force, and that the slump of so many astronomers in favor of Einstein, who has made good in nothing, indicates a state of dissatisfaction that may precede a revolution—or that, if a revolt starts in the Observatories, hosts of irreconcilable observations will be published by the astronomers themselves, cutting down distances of planets and stars enormously. I shall note an observation by an astronomer, such as probably no astronomer, in the past, would have published. It seems to have been recorded reluctantly, and a conventional explanation was attempted—but it was published.
I take from a clipping, from the
Los Angeles Evening Herald,
April 28, 1930, which was sent to me by Mr. L.E. Stein, of Los Angeles. In an account of the eclipse of the sun, April 28, 1930, Dr. H.M. Jeffers, staff astronomer of Lick Observatory, says: “We expected the shadow to be but half a mile in width. Instead of that, I think that it was nearer five miles broad.” He says: “It may be suggested by others that the broad shadow was cast by astronomical errors due to the moon being closer to the earth than we have placed it in theory. But I don’t believe that this broad belt was caused by anything but refraction.”
The difference between half a mile and five miles is great. If the prophets of Lick Observatory did not take refraction into consideration, all the rest of their supposed knowledge may be attributable to incompetence. This difference may mean that the moon is not more than a day’s journey away from this earth.
In
The Earth and the Stars,
p. 211, Abbot tells of the spectroscopic determinations, by which the new star in Perseus (Feb. 22, 1901) was “found” to be at a distance of 300 light-years from this earth. The news was published in the newspapers. A new star had appeared, about the year 1600, and its light was not seen upon this earth, until Feb. 22, 1901. And the astronomers were able to tell this—that away back, at a moment when Queen Elizabeth—well, whatever she was doing—maybe it wouldn’t be any too discreet to inquire into just what she was doing—but the astronomers told that just when Queen Elizabeth was doing whatever she was doing, the heavens were doing a new star. And where am I, comparatively? Where are my poor, little yarns of flows of methylated spirits from ceilings, and “mysterious strangers,” and bodies on railroad lines, compared with a yarn of the new star and Queen Elizabeth?
But the good, little star restores my conceit. In the face of all spectroscopes in all Observatories, it shot out nebulous rings that moved at a rate of two or three seconds of arc a day. If they were 300 light-years away, this was a velocity far greater than that of light is said to be. If they were 300 light-years away, it was motion at the rate of 220,000 miles a second. There were dogmas that could not stand this, and the spectroscopic determinations, which were in agreement, were another case of agreements working out, as they shouldn’t have worked out. The astronomers had to cut down one of their beloved immensities. Whether as a matter of gallantry, or not, they spread a denial for Queen Elizabeth’s reputation to tread upon, saving that from the mud of an inquiry into just what Her Majesty was doing, and substituting unromantic speculations upon what, say, Andrew Jackson was up to.
Abbot’s way of explaining the mistake is by attributing the first “pronouncements” to “the roughness of the observations.”
All over this earth, astronomers were agreeing in these “determinations.” They were refinements until something else appeared and roughened them.
It would seem that, after this fiasco of the readjusted interest in what historical personages were doing, astronomers should have learned something. But, if Prof. Todd is right, in his characterization of them, that is impossible. About twenty years later, this situation, essentially the same in all particulars, repeated. Upon May 27, 1925, a new star was discovered in the southern constellation Pictor. By spectroscopic determination, its distance was “determined” to be 540 light-years. See this stated in a bulletin of the Harvard Observatory, November, 1927.
March 27, 1928—the new star split.
When the split was seen, astronomers of the South African Observatory repudiated the gospel of their spectroscopes of three years before. There must have been much roughness, even though there had been three years in which to plane down the splinters. They cut the distance from 540 to forty light-years. If there should be any more reductions like this, there may start a slump of immensities down toward a conception of a thinkable-sized formation of stars. A distance cut down 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 500 x 186,000 miles is a pretty good start.
Prof. Einstein, having no means of doing anything of the kind, predicts a displacement of the stars.
Astronomers go out upon an expedition to observe an eclipse, and, not knowing that Einstein has no special means of predicting anything, they report, presumably because they want so to report, that he is right.
Then eclipse after eclipse—and Einstein is wrong.
But he has cast an ancient system into internal dissensions, and has cast doubts upon antiquities of thought almost as if his pedantic guesses had had better luck.
Whether the time has come, or not, here is something that looks as if it is coming:
An editorial in the
New York Sun,
Sept. 3, 1930: views of somebody else quoted:
“The public is being played upon and utterly misled by the dreamery of the rival mathematical astronomers and physicists—not to mention the clerics—who are raising the game of notoriety to a fine art; in rivalry to religious mysticism, a scientific pornography is being developed, and attracts the more because it is mysterious.”
These are the views of Professor Henry E. Armstrong, emeritus head of the department of chemistry, at City and Guilds College
:
South Kensington, London.
This is revolt inside. That is what develops into revolution.
Prof. Armstrong’s accusation of pornography may seem unduly stimulating: but, judging by their lecheries in other respects, one sees that all that the astronomers have to do is to discover that stars have sex, and they’ll have us sneaking to bookstores, for salacious “pronouncements” and “determinations” upon the latest celestial scandals. This would popularize them. And after anything becomes popular—then what?
That the time has come—or is coming—or more of the revolt within—
Or that, if they cannot continue upon their present pretenses of progress, the astronomers must return from their motionless excursions. A generation ago, they told of inconceivable distances of stars. Then they said that they had, a thousand times, multiplied some of these distances: but, if the inconceivable be multiplied any number of times, it is still the same old inconceivability. If, at the unthinkable, thought stops, but if thought must move somewhere, the astronomers, who cannot go on expansively, will, if they do think, have to think in reductions. If the time has come, there will be a crash in the Observatories, with astronomers in a panic selling short on inconceivabilities.
Upon Sept. 2, 1930, began a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Chicago. A paper that was read by Dr. P. Van de Kamp may be a signal for a panic. Said he: “Some of the stars may actually be thousands of light-years nearer than astronomy believes them to be.”
That—with some extensions—is about what I am saying.
Says the astronomer Leverrier—back in times when an astronomical system is growing up, and is of use in combating an older and decaying orthodoxy, and needs support and prestige—says he—“Look in the sky, and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Uranus.”
“Lo!” as some of the astronomers say in their books. At a point in the sky that can be said—to anybody who does not inquire into the statements—to be almost exactly the point of Leverrier’s calculations, is found the planet Uranus, to which—for all the public knows—can be attributed the perturbations of Uranus.
Up goes the useful renown of the astronomers. Supported by this triumph, they function.
But, if they’re only the figments of one of the dream-like developments of our pseudo-existence, they, too, must pass away, and they must go by way of slaughter, or by way of laughter. Considering all their doings, I think that through hilarity would be the fitter exit.
Later:
“Look at the sky,” we are told that the astronomer Lowell said, “and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Neptune.”
But this is in the year 1930.
Nevertheless we are told that a planet is found almost exactly at the point of the calculations. The exultations of the astronomers are spreadheaded.
But this is later. The damned thing takes a tack that shows that it could no more have been perturbing Neptune than I, anyway just at present, could cast a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences into disorder by walking past it.
They must be murdered, or we shall laugh them away. There is always something that can be said in favor of murder, but in the case of the astronomers that would be willful waste of the stuff for laughter. Orthodox astronomers have said that Leverrier used no mathematical method by which he could have determined the position of Neptune. See Lowell’s
The Evolution of Worlds,
p. 124. By way of stuff for the laugh, I mention that one of these disbelieving astronomers was Lowell.
One time, in a mood of depression, I went to the New York Public Library, and feeling a want for a little, light reading, I put in a slip for Lowell’s
Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet.
I got even more amusement than I had expected.
Just where was this point, determined by Lowell, almost exactly in which his planet was found? The spreadheads—the special articles—over and over in the newspapers of the world—“almost exactly.”
Says Lowell, page 105: “Precise determination of its place does not seem possible. A general direction alone is predicable.”
The stuff for a laugh that is as satisfactory as murder is in the solemn announcements, by the astronomers, about April Fool’s Day, 1930, that they had found Lowell’s planet almost exactly in the place, precise determination of which does not seem possible—
Their chatter over Lowell’s magnificent accuracy in pointing in a general direction—
Then the tack of a thing that showed that it could not have been all this indefiniteness, anyway—265 years, instead of 3,000 years—
And instead of going the thing was coming.
If they can’t tell whether something is coming or going, their solemn announcements upon nearness or farness may be equally laughable.
If by mathematical means Adams and Leverrier did not determine the position of the planet Neptune, or if it was, in an opinion that Lowell quotes, “a happy accident,” how account for such happiness, or for this timely and sensational boost to a prestige, if we suspect that it was not altogether an accident?
My expression is that herein I’d typify my idea of organic control which, concealed under human vanity, makes us think that we are doing all things ourselves, gives support to human institutions, when they are timely and are functioning, and then casts its favorites into rout and fiasco, when they have outlived their functioning period.
If Leverrier really had had powers by which he could have pointed to an unseen planet that would have been a finality of knowledge that would be support to a prestige that could never be overthrown. Suppose a church had ever been established upon foundations not composed of the stuff of lies and frauds and latent laughter. Let the churchman stand upon other than gibberish and mummery, and there’d be nothing by which to laugh away his despotisms.
Say that, whether it be a notion of organic control, or not, we accept any theory of Growth, or Development, or Evolution—
Then we accept that the solemnest of our existence’s phenomena are of a wobbling tissue—rocks of ages that are only hardened muds —or that a lie is the heart of everything sacred—
Because otherwise there could not be Growth, or Development, or Evolution.
21
A trek of circumstances that kicks up a dust of details—a vast and dirty movement that is powdered with particulars—
The gossip of men and women, and the yells of brats—whether dinner is ever going to be ready, or not—young couples in their nightly sneaks—and what the hell has become of the grease for the wheels?—who’s got a match?
It’s a wagon train that feels out across a prairie.
A drink of water—a chaw of tobacco—just where to borrow a cupful of flour—and yet, even though at its time any of these wants comes first, there is something behind all—
The hope for Californian gold.
The wagon train feels out across the prairie. It traces a path that other wagon trains make more distinct—and then so rolls a movement that to this day can be seen the ruts of its wheels.
But behind the visions of gold, and the imagined feel of nuggets, there is something else—
The gold plays out. A dominant motive turns to something else. Now a social growth feels out. Its material of people, who otherwise would have been stationary, has been moved to the west.
The first, faint structures in an embryonic organism are of cartilage. They are replaced by bone.
The paths across prairies turn to lines of steel.
Or that once upon a time, purposefully, to stimulate future developments, gold was strewn in California—and that there had been control upon the depositions, so that only enough to stimulate a development, and not enough to destroy a financial system had been strewn—
That in other parts of this earth, in far back times, there had been purposeful plantings of the little, yellow slugs that would—when their time should come—bring about other extensions of social growths.
But the word
purposeful,
and the word
providential,
are usurped words. They are of the language of theologians, and are meant to express an idea of a presiding being, ruling existence, superior to it, and not of it, or not implicit to it. I’d rather go on using these words, denying their ownership by any special cult, than to coin new words. With no necessity for thinking of an external designer and controller, I can think of design and control and providence and purpose and preparation for future uses, if I can think not loosely of Nature, but of a Nature, as an organic whole. Every being, except for its dependence upon environment, is God to its parts.
It is upon the northern parts of this earth that the civilizations that have persisted have grown up, then extending themselves colonially southward. History, like South America and Africa, tapers southward. There are no ruins of temples, pyramids, obelisks in Australia, Argentina, South Africa. Preponderantly peninsulas are southward droops. As if by design, or as if concordantly with an accentuation of lands and peoples in the north, the sun shines about a week longer in the north, each year, than in the south. The coldness in the less important Antarctic regions is more intense than in the Arctic, and here there is no vegetation like the grasses and flowers of the Arctic, in the summertime. Life withers southward. Musk oxen, bears, wolves, foxes, lemmings in the Far North—but there are only amphibious mammals in the Antarctic. Fields of Arctic poppies in the Arctic summertime—but summer in the Antarctic is gray with straggling lichens. If this earth be top-shaped as some of the geodesists think, it is a bloom that is stemmed with desolation.
There are no deposits of coal in the southern parts that compare with deposits in the northern parts. The greatest abundance of oil supplies is north of the equator. It looks like organic preparation, in formative times, before human life appeared upon this earth, for civilizations that would grow up in the north. For ages, peoples of this earth were ignorant of the uses of coal and oil, upon which their later developments would depend.
But so conventionalized are the thoughts of most persons, upon this subject, that if, for instance, my expression is that gold was strewn in California in preparation for future uses, there must be either a visualization of an aggrandized man, who walked about, slinging nuggets, or a denial that, except in the mind of a man, there can be purpose, or control, or design, or providence—
But the making of a lung in an embryonic being that cannot breathe—but it will breathe. This making of a lung is a preparation for future uses. Or the depositions of tissues that are muscles that are not, but that will be, used. Mechanical foresight, or preparation for future uses, pervades every embryonic being. There is a fortune-teller in every womb.
Still, not altogether only theological have been speculations upon the existence of purpose, or design, control, or guidance in “Nature.” There are philosophical doctrines known as
orthogenesis
and
entelechy.
Again we are in a situation that we have noted. If there be orthogenesis, or guidance from within—within what? Heretofore, this doctrine has provided no outlines within which to think. All that is required for thinkableness, instead of bafflement, is to give up attempted notions upon Nature, as Universality, and conceive of one thinkable-sized existence, of shape that is representable in thought, and conceive of an organic orthogenesis within that.
In the organic sense, there is, in the Arctic regions, no great need for water. Though the coldness is not so intense here as it is commonly supposed to be, the climate nevertheless prevents much colonization. I have never read of a deluge in the Arctic. Thunderstorms are very uncommon. Some explorers have never seen a thunderstorm in the Arctic regions. And at the same time there are oppressively warm, or almost tropical, summer days in the Arctic. Instead of the enormous falls of snow, of common suppositions, the fall of snow, in the Far North, is “very light” (Stefansson). It looks like organically economic neglect of a part that cannot be used. Where, as reliefs, thunderstorms are not needed, there are, except as vagaries, no thunderstorms, though the summertime conditions in places of need and no need are much alike. See Heilprin’s account of his experiences in Greenland—summer days so nearly tropical that pitch melted from the seams of his ship.
The alternations that are known as the seasons are beneficial. They have come about accidentally, or they have been worked out by Automatic Design, or by all-pervasive intelligence, or by equilibration, if that word be preferred to the word “intelligence.” It looks as if more complexly a problem was solved. It is commonly thought that only brains solve problems, or, rather, approximate to solutions: but every living thing that carries a weapon, or a tool, has, presumably not with its brains, but with the intelligence that pervades all substances—so then with the intelligence of its body—solved a problem. It looks as if more complexly a problem was solved, as I say, though in anything like a real, or final, sense, no problem ever has been solved. By the varying incidence of the sun, alternations of fruitfulness and rest could be brought about in the north and the south, but that left rhythms small in the tropics. It looks as if here, intelligently, were brought about the changes that are known as the dry season and the rainy season.
I have never read a satisfactory explanation of this alternation, in conventional, meteorological terms.
In the April rains there is evidence, or might be, if we could have a rational idea as to what we mean by evidence, of design, and an automatically intelligent provision and control. Something is controlling the motions of the planets, according to all appearances that we take as appearances of control. Accepting this, I am only amplifying. Rains, of a gentle and frequent kind that is most beneficial to young plants, or best adapted to them, fall in April. Conventional biology is too one-sided. It treats of adaptation of plants to rain. We see also the adaptation of rains to plants. But there must be either the conventionally theological, or the organic, view, to see this reciprocity. If one prefers to think of a kind and loving deity, who is sending the April rains, he will have to consider—or, rather, will be faced by—records of other rains, which are of the loving kindness of slaughter and desolation and woe.
There is some, unknown condition that ameliorates the climate of Great Britain, as if this center of colony-sporing were prepared for by an automatic purposefulness, and protected from the rigors of the same latitudes in the west. Once upon a time, one of the wiseman’s most definite concepts was the Gulf Stream. They wrote about its “absolute demarcation” from surrounding waters. They were as sure of the Gulf Stream as they are today that the stars are trillions of miles away. Lately so much has been written upon the inconceivability of the Gulf Stream having effect upon climate farther from its source than somewhere around Cape Hatteras that I shall not go into that subject. Something is especially warming Great Britain, and it cannot be thought to be the Gulf Stream. It may be an organically providential amelioration. It may play out, when the functioning period of Great Britain passes away. I am not much given to prophecy, but I’ll take this chance—that if England loses India, we may expect hard winters in England.
Our acceptance is that nations work together, or operate against one another functionally, or as guided by the murderous supervisions of a whole Organism. Or, apologizing again, I call such organized slaughter,
super-metabolism.
So enormous is the subject of human history, as affected by its partness in a whole, that I shall reserve it for treatment some other time. Monastically—though some other time I shall pluralistically take another view, as well—the acceptance is that human beings have not existed as individuals any more than have cells in an animal organism existences of their own. Still, one must consider that there is something of individuality, or contrariness in every cell. This view of submergence is now so widespread that it is expressed by writers in many fields of thought. But they lack the concept of a whole, trying to think of a social organism as a whole, though clearly every social quasi-organism has relations with other social quasi-organisms, and is dependent enormously, or vitally, upon environment. Other thinkers, or more than doubtful thinkers, say that they think of the unthinkable Absolute as the whole.
I have a notion that, for ages, as a factor in an automatic plan, the Australian part of our existence’s nucleus, this earth, was reserved. If this be not easy to think, it is equally hard to think why Australia, in its fertile parts, was not colonized by Asiatics. There was relative isolation. But it was not geographical isolation: the distance between Cape York, Australia, and New Guinea is only 100 miles. There was an approximation to isolation so extreme that one type of animal life grew up and prevailed. This gap was jumped by the marsupials of Australia. Then the question is—why, if not obediently to an inhibition, was it not jumped the other way? Of course we can have no absolute expressions, but just when the dingoes and the wild cattle of Queensland first arrived in Australia is still considered debatable.
There were civilizations in the Americas, but they were civilizations that could not resist the relatively late-appearing Europeans. Long before, there had been other civilizations in Central America, but they had disappeared, or they had been removed. The extinction of them is, by archaeologists, considered as mysterious, as is the extinction of the dinosaurs, by the paleontologists—or as, by cells of a later period, might be considered the designed and scheduled, or purposeful, extinction of cartilage cells in an embryo.
The expression is that Australia and the Americas were reserved, as relative blanks, in which human life upon this earth could shake off, after a fashion, many conventions and traditional hamperings, and start somewhat anew.
Drones appear in a beehive. They are reserved. At first they contribute nothing to the welfare of the hive, but there is a providence that looks after them just so long as they will be of future use. This is automatic foresight and purpose, according to automatic plan, in a beehive, regarded as a whole. The God of the bees is the Hive. There is no necessity to think of an external control, nor of any being, presiding over the bees and directing their affairs.
Reservations besides those in the affairs of bees and men are common. Some trees have buds that are not permitted to develop. These are known as
dormants,
and are held in reserve, against the possibility of a destruction of the tree’s developed leaves. In one way or another, there are reservations in every organism.
We think of inter-mundane isolations that have been maintained, as once the Americas were kept separated from Europe, not by vast and untraversable distances, but by belief in vast and untraversable distances. I have no sense of loneliness in thinking that the inorganic sciences that are, by inertia, holding out for the isolation of this earth, have lost much power over minds. There are dissatisfactions and contempts everywhere.
There may be civilizations in the lands of the stars, or it may be that, in the concavity of a starry shell, vast, habitable regions have been held in reserve for colonization from this earth. Though there is considerable opposition to wars, they are, as at any moving picture place, one can see, still popular: but other eliminations of human beings have waned, and it is likely that for a long time birth control will have no more than its present control upon births. The pestilences that used to remove millions are no longer so much heard of. It may be that an organic existence is, by lessening eliminations, preparing a pressure of populations upon this earth that can have relief only in enormous colonizing outlets somewhere else. It is as if concordantly, the United States has shut down, as a relief, to superabundances of people in Europe, and as if representing the same purpose or plan, Australia and Canada, as well as the United States, are shutting out Asiatics. It is as if cooperatively with the simultaneous variations of need, aviation is developing, as the means of migratory reliefs—
If there be a nearby land that is a revolving shell of stars—
And if, according to data that I have collected, there be not increasing coldness and attenuation of air, past a zone not far from this earth.
