Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  But if the world is finally a Martian fiction for Fort, it is a fiction out of which we can, conceivably at least, awaken and “step off the page,” much like his imagined moving-picture villain stepping out of the movie screen. Fort, it turns out, is not finally bound to a mechanistic Nirvana. Hence Fort’s fascinating reference to X in a reply to the charge that his writings were inconsistent. “In ‘X,’” he mused, “I have pointed out that, though there’s nothing wrong with me personally, I am a delusion in super-imagination, and inconsistency must therefore be expected from me—but if I’m so rational as to be aware of my irrationality? Why, then, I have glimmers of the awakening and awareness of super-imagination.”16

  Such striking lines strongly suggest that the acts of collection, comparison, and systematization were not simple or banal activities for Charles Fort. They contained awesome power. They constituted a kind of an occult metapractice that could lead, at any moment, to just such a sudden awakening. Hence Fort’s obscure claim that “systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening” (BD 22). He, at least, collected, classified, and compared to wake up, to become more fully conscious of reality-as-fiction. He wanted out of this bad novel.

  Final awakening aside for a moment, Fort was unhappy with both X and Y and destroyed them, or so it is believed, before he finally set out to write his most famous published work, The Book of the Damned. He had also burned twenty-five thousand of his notes earlier in the century.17 Apparently, he liked to burn things he had written—before, he suggested, they burned him. Living in a cramped apartment in a tenement building stuffed with hundreds of shoe boxes filled with tens of thousands of flammable sheets of paper was not exactly the safest thing to do. But one suspects reasons other than those concerning rational safety codes. Charles Fort, after all, was playing with fire in other ways too, and he certainly did not feel himself unduly bound to the self-imposed limits of reason.

  In any case, he was about to experience his own awakening beyond reason’s bounds. Still obsessing at the end of the alphabet, he wrote Dreiser in 1918 as he researched and wrote his way to what would become The Book of the Damned:

  Dreiser!

  I have discovered Z!

  Fort!18

  The Parable of the Peaches: Fort’s Mischievous Monistic Life

  Charles Hoy Fort was born on August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, to an upper-middle-class family. They were grocers of Old Dutch descent. His mother died shortly after his youngest brother, Clarence, was born, when Charles was just four. Their father, Charles Nelson Fort, quickly remarried. Charles and his two brothers, Raymond and Clarence, appear to have hated their father. The boys referred to him in the plural, as “They” or “Them.” Charles Nelson Fort was a Victorian authoritarian figure who did things like beat his boys with a dog whip or smack them in the face when they could not pronounce King James English during their Bible lessons. One day, for example, little Charles kept referring to how Moses had “smut” the rock instead of having “smote” it. After adjusting his hat and necktie in the mirror, the father smote his child on the face to fix, once and for all, the boy’s poor King James pronunciation.19

  And this was just the beginning. When the boys got too big to smote, “They” would lock the two brothers “in a little, dark room, giving us bread and water, sentencing us to several days or several weeks of solitude.” Already here, though, Fort’s redeeming humor shines through. The boys would often sing to make the time go faster. “Then singing patriotic songs, half defiantly because of the noise we were making. About ‘Let freedom ring.’ Adding, ‘Freedom don’t ring here.’ Hearing our new mother, under the air shaft, laugh at this. Then we, too, would laugh: for we could never be mean when others were not.”20 It is not difficult to see why Charles Fort grew up to question all authority. It is also not difficult to see why Steinmeyer suggests that X was not emanating from Mars but from Albany, New York, that is, from the memories of Fort’s hated father and all those terrible, basically “evil,” controlling punishments.21 In this view at least, Fort’s paranoid extraterrestrial fantasy finds its psychological origins in overwhelming childhood trauma.

  Or was it the physical abuse and emotional trauma that opened him up to the extraterrestrial gnosis?

  Interestingly, Fort’s intellectual penchant for finding anomalies or contradictions in systems of thought began precisely as the modern study of religion began, that is, with an honest recognition of the contradictions in that same King James Bible—smote, smut, and all. “When a small boy,” Fort explained, “we puzzled over inconsistencies in the Bible, and asked questions that could not be answered satisfactorily.” He was also quickly growing tired of the dull round of his upper-middle-class life. “We should not have expressed the heresy,” he writes in his typical understated humor, “but felt there was some kind of life higher than that of a dealer in groceries.”22 Between the Bible, the groceries, and the solitary confinement, he was also dreaming of becoming a naturalist, and he became fascinated with the problems and promises of classification as these were being practiced in natural history and the museums. Darwin again.

  Not that he thought that things could ever be definitively classified into stable essences. Later in life, he would describe himself as a monist. He would think of the world as a vast Oneness where anything could become anything else, where things were not things at all but relations. Early in life, of course, he was not quite so abstract. But he found a way to express a similar intuition, this time in the terms of a prank involving the fruits, vegetables, and labels of Their grocery store. Enter the parable of the peaches. Fort himself tells the story in Wild Talents toward the very end of his life. It is repeated in most accounts of his life and work. In other words, it has become something of a legend. It goes like this.

  “In days of yore,” Fort explains (he wrote like that), he was “an especially bad young one.” His punishment was to be sent to the grocery store on Saturdays, where he was forced to labor for his sins. This often involved the task of peeling off the labels from cans of fruits and vegetables of another dealer and pasting on his father’s labels instead. In other words, it involved a commercial version of classification as deception. One day he found himself with pyramids of cans, but only peach labels left in his sticky armory. Here is what happened next:

  I pasted the peach labels on the peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren’t apricots peaches? I went on, mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientist. (WT 850)

  The moral of the parable is two-edged and remarkably nuanced. On one level, it appears to suggest that our classification schemes are more or less useful, and more or less deceitful, and more or less profitable. But they certainly do not accurately reflect the true nature of things. We sell someone else’s goods and pretend they are ours. On another level, the parable appears to suggest something a bit deeper, namely, that even the real nature of things does not reflect the real nature of things. What appears to be plums, or cherries, or succotash is really all peaches. The deceitful label is true. The fraud is fact. Everything is one thing.

  I am reminded here of something once quipped about the bizarre facts of astrophysics and cosmic evolution: “Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”23 Fort would have laughed at that one, and then added: “or peaches.”

  Fort would continue to live out such mixing and matchings, and eat them. Steinmeyer tells the delightful story of Thanksgiving dinner at the Forts in 1917: Charles served up a new preserve he called “Topeacho,” a blend of tomatoes and peaches. He would also invent a dish called “To-pruno,” this time with tomatoes and, yep, prunes.24 Fort delights in such comedic transformations, which he also sees everywhere in the evolutionary process:

  I think that Thou Shalt Not was written on high, addressed to fi
shes. Whereupon a fish climbed a tree. Or that it is a law that hybrids shall be sterile—and that, not two, but three, animals went into a conspiracy, out of which came the okapi. There is a “law” of specialization. Evolutionists make much of it. Stores specialize, so that dealers in pants do not sell prunes. But then appear drugstores, which sell drugs, books, soups, and mouse traps. (WT 976)

  We are back to the peach labels.

  The peach labels, the tree-climbing fish, and the poor okapi are all in turn reminiscent of another famous Fortean anecdote, that of a board game he invented called “Super-checkers.” This invention of Fort, which he apparently constructed some time in the late 1920s, involved the usual checkerboard design, except that Fort’s board boasted 1,600 squares. “It was in a moment of creative frenzy,” he wrote. “I took a fat lady’s gingham apron, some yards of cardboard, and several pounds of carpet tacks, and solved all the problems in the world.”25 By “solving all the problems in the world,” what Fort likely meant was that his Super-checkers game was like every other system human beings have invented: it was a game, with artificial rules that are more or less useful, but that can also always be bent or ignored and are in the end more or less arbitrary. The Fortean universe operates remarkably like this Super-checkers game. It is much too vast to keep track of, and if it appears to follow the rules we cast for it most of the time, it also “cheats” occasionally, particularly every time a frog or school of fish falls out the sky. Such a universe can hardly be trusted.

  Looked at as a whole, what should we make of such a life, at once so ordinary and so extraordinary? And how exactly should we enter the utterly bizarre world of his books? Earlier, I referred to Fort as a journalist of the metaphysical. This is true enough, especially with reference to his early career as a journalist and later newspaper source-texts. But the label finally obscures as much as it reveals. When he has not been read as an inspired prophet, Fort has usually been read as a wit or entertainer, as a major inspiration of pulp fiction and sci-fi literature, or as a countercultural icon.26 Such understandings all carry their own truths, but such reception histories also tend to obscure the fact that Fort was also a systematic thinker who practiced a very definite comparative method, developed a philosophy of history that was oddly, presciently postmodern, and operated out of a sophisticated dialectical metaphysics that provided all of this with a very distinct grounding or base. I want to treat this Fortean comparativism, postmodern philosophy of history, and dialectical metaphysics, each in turn, before I then approach his dark mythology, and, finally, his magical anthropology.

  Recall that the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as “a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality.”27 This could just as easily describe a Fortean text. Recall also that Todorov defines the fantastic in terms of a certain irreducible indeterminacy, that is, in terms of the reader’s hesitation and indecision about whether what is encountered in the text is illusory or real. “The fantastic,” Todorov reminds us, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”28 Fort again saw the same irreducible indeterminacy in his subject matter. Hence his reflections on his own wavering opinions about what he calls “the very ordinary witchcraft” of telepathy: “When I incline to think that there is telepathy, the experiments are convincing that there is. When I think over the same experiments, and incline against them, they indicate that there isn’t” (WT 962). This indeterminacy is not tangential to the subject. It is no fluke or anecdote. Like a quantum event that can be measured as a particle or a wave—and Fort knew all about this—this indeterminacy is the subject.

  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 dem
onized 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).