Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  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.

  But the world is not all Sameness. There is also real Difference. Like all good comparativists, Fort works through both sameness and difference. His comparativism unites, and it separates, and by so doing it rearranges the world anew. The sameness side is carried by the connections of coincidence as these are glimpsed within the hard work of data collection and classification. The difference side is carried by the competing and contradictory claims of the cultural, religious, philosophical, and scientific systems vis-à-vis one another. Fort does not have to argue against this or that system. He is smarter than that. He simply allows them to be themselves, sets them on the same comparative table, and then watches them deconstruct each other: “We have only faith to guide us, say the theologians. Which faith?” (LO 712). It is really that devastatingly simple.

&
nbsp; In the end, however, no Difference can survive the ultimate Sameness. The truth of things for Fort is that we exist in “an underlying nexus in which all things, in our existence are different manifestations” (NL 333). Fort meant this quite literally. Or quite imaginatively. Fort wonders what it all would look like if we hadn’t been trained to see horses, houses, and trees. He concludes that to “super-sight” they would look like “local stresses merging indistinguishably into one another, in an all-inclusive nexus” (BD 192). Appearances, then, are just that: appearances. They are not the real. Security and certainty, moreover, are little more than species of a “bright and shining delusion,” for “we are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly” (NL 335).

  But this quaking black jelly takes its own forms, becomes its own stories, and we can detect the outlines of these forms and the plots of these stories by carefully and bravely looking at the stuff that is normally disregarded. To interpret the world, then, for Fort is first to accept the data as real data, to not disregard that which has been damned by science or religion as “irrational” or “anecdotal” or “impossible,” but to allow all the pieces and parts, and especially the anomalous ones, to fall into place through the bumps in the nexus called “coincidences” until a picture begins to emerge within the black jelly, until a Whole organically emerges from the parts.

  The Three Eras or Dominants: Fort’s Philosophy of History

  In his Politics of the Imagination, Colin Bennett has recently read Fort through the prism of postmodern theory. The analogies between Fortean philosophy and contemporary postmodernism are indeed significant and extensive, if not actually astonishing. I have already hinted at them, and I will trace them in my own way shortly. But it also must be said immediately and up front that Fort is finally far too much for most postmodern writers. Whereas the latter almost always lack a metaphysical base, indeed consciously and vociferously eschew one as the Great Sin, Fort clearly possessed a developed and consistent monist metaphysics through which he read, and into which he subsumed, the “differences” and “gaps” of his anomalous material. Moreover, he fully acknowledged these metaphysical commitments. He sinned boldly.

  He may, then, have agreed with, indeed presciently foresaw, the postmodern condition and its deconstructionist penchant for seeing reality as a language game in which every term or concept refers only to other terms and concepts within one huge self-referential web of local meaning. He may have also recognized that every such linguistic system of thought is without a final base or stable standard, that it is more or less arbitrary, that it must exclude or “damn” data to exist at all, but that the damned always return to haunt it and, finally, to collapse it. “All organizations of thought,” he wrote, “must be baseless in themselves, and of course be not final, or they could not change, and must bear within themselves those elements that will, in time, destroy them” (NL 388). He may have also recognized, acutely, that every form of knowing is an “era knowing” bound to the concepts and assumptions of the culture and clime. “There is no intelligence except era-intelligence” (LO 428). Expressed within another metaphor, intellectual systems are little more than fashions: “I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while” (WT 993). “My own acceptance,” he explained further, “is that ours is an organic existence, and that our thoughts are the phenomena of its eras, quite as its rocks and trees and forms of life are; and that I think as I think, mostly, though not absolutely, because of the era I am living in” (LO 604–5).

  But it is precisely that “though not absolutely” that haunts us here. For Fort also suggested that all of these quasi systems with their quasi standards and false senses of completeness are struggling within a “oneness of allness” or “Continuity” (BD 239). There is thus—and he italicizes this—“an underlying oneness in all confusions” (LO 542). By means of the inclusion of ever greater swaths of data, human thought is developing for Fort, and this toward what he called “the gossip of angels,” that “final utterance” that “would include all things.” This final utterance, however, must paradoxically be “unutterable” in our “quasi-existence, where to think is to include but also to exclude, or be not final” (BD 249). Thus to think at all is “to localize” for Fort, to mistake the part for the Whole. But, like the self-described metaphysician that he was, he sought to think into infinity, to universalize, even if he knew he must eventually “pull back” in order “to make our own outline” by excluding and including (BD 178). He even hinted that this infinite Truth (which, yes, he capitalized) could be experienced—or, more accurately, identified with: “A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of possibilities—he may himself become Truth” (BD 14).

  Obviously, then, if Charles Fort practiced a kind of postmodernism, and I agree with Bennett that he did, it was a paranormal postmodernism akin to what David Ray Griffin has called a “constructive” or “revisionary postmodernism,” which Griffin, much like Fort before him, links to both a naturalistic panentheism—that is, to a real metaphysics—and to the anomalous data or “white crows” of parapsychology.30

  Here is how Charles Fort thought in threes.

  Fort liked the number three, perhaps because it had “mystic significance” in earlier religious systems (NL 474), perhaps because Nikola Tesla, the American inventor and “mad scientist,” believed that the vibrations he received from Martians on his wireless apparatus seemed to come in triplets (NL 494). Mystics and Martians aside, Fort certainly thought in threes. Indeed, his entire system works through the neat dialectical progression of three Dominants or Eras: (1) the Old Dominant of Religion, which he associates with the epistemology of belief and the professionalism of priests; (2) the present Dominant of materialistic Science, which he associates with the epistemology of explanation and the professionalism of scientists; and (3) the New Dominant of what he calls Intermediatism, which he associates with the epistemology of expression or acceptance and the professionalism of a new brand of individuating wizards and witches. Whereas the first two Dominants work from the systemic principle of Exclusionism, that is, they must exclude data to survive as stable systems, the New Dominant works from the systemic principle of Inclusionism, that is, it builds an open-ended system and preserves it through the confusing inclusion of data, theoretically all data, however bizarre and offending, toward some future awakening.

  The gossip of angels.

  Fort gives a date when the Old Dominant or former era finally gave way to the present one: “around 1860.” This is when he noticed that the learned journals he was reading begin to lose their “glimmers of quasi-individuality,” that is, this is when the data of the damned start to fade away before the higher organizations of aggressively and defensively intolerant scientific explanations (NL 239). This is also, of course, the precise period of Darwin’s ascendance. The Origin of Species had just appeared the previous year, in 1859. We’ll get to that.

  Fort is brutal on both religion and science, although he makes, as we shall see, some crucial concessions to each that end up defining the dialectical contours of his own third system. Here are two typical passages on his two great enemies:

  Or my own acceptance that we do not really think at all; that we correlate around super-magnets that I call Dominants—a Spiritual Dominant in one age, and responsibly to it up spring monasteries, and the stake and the cross are its symbols; a Materialist Dominant, and up spring laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its ikons—that we’re nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession of magnets that displace preceding magnets. (BD 241)

  Or with more bite now:

  It is my expression that the two outstanding blessings, benefits, or “gifts of God” to humanity, are Science and Religion. I deduce this—or that the annals of both are such trails of slaughter, deception, exploitation, and hypocrisy that they must be of enormous good to balance with their appalling evils. (LO 762)

  As the
latter passage makes clear, what the two Dominants of religion and science share is their Exclusionism, a basic intolerance that inevitably leads, particularly in the case of religion, to real-world violence. Obviously, Charles Fort was much more than a wit.

  The Old Dominant of religion holds a special place in Fort’s rhetoric. It is the model of intolerance, delusion, and Exclusionism. Deeply immersed in psychical research and its metaphors, Fort often preferred to see the power of religion as a psychological one akin to hypnosis (BD 12).31 Religion, then, is a kind of consensual trance that settles over an entire civilization and era. Accordingly, one can no more argue with a true believer than one can “demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus” (BD 17). Like the hippopotamus-table, religion is also a lie and a laugh:

  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. . . .

  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—

  But a lie and a laugh on the way to something else:

  Because otherwise there could not be Growth, or Development, or Evolution. (LO 730)

  “It is probable that all religions are founded upon ancient jokes and hoaxes,” Fort adds a few pages down (LO 793). Then he dissolves the entire category of “religion” back into the human complex from which it arose so darkly, so violently: