But most of Fort’s writing is not about the adventure of our metaphysical expansion into “new lands.” It is about us as someone else’s adventure and land. For now, at least, it is we who are the colonized. Fort could be quite beautiful about these visitors—beautifully terrifying, that is. He had reports, for example, of immense ships that floated before the sun, the moon, and Mars. He gave one a fanciful name, “Melanicus . . . Prince of Dark Bodies.” It was a
Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One. . . . hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.
He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he’s a vast, black, brooding vampire. (BD 209–10)
A bit further down, he sings again of “the vast dark thing that looked like a poised crow of unholy dimensions” (BD 225).
But why does Melanicus come? What, pray ye, is the poised crow of unholy dimensions after? And why—the “greatest of mysteries”—do these invaders not make themselves better known? Fort finds this “notion that we must be interesting” a very curious one (BD 143). Basically, we’re not, so there is hardly a mystery here. “It’s probably for moral reason that they stay way—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them” (BD 162).
There are also what he calls “dangers of near approach.” Nevertheless, “our own ships that dare not venture close to a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore,” he points out. So “why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys . . . ?” (BD 162).
But in other places Fort develops the notion that these super-constructions have been communicating with us all along, but only through a sect or secret society.39 It is these “certain esoteric ones of this earth’s inhabitants” who aid these other races in their colonization of us (BD 136). It only takes a few: “We think of India—the millions of natives who are ruled by a small band of esoterics—only because they receive support and direction from—somewhere else—or from England” (BD 152). He will also, however, entertain the more democratic idea that there are some worlds that are trying to communicate with all of us. It depends on the different data and what they suggest (BD 143).
But there are darker possibilities still. Earth may not be a colony at all. It may be a farm:
Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?
Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?
I think we’re property. (BD 163)
Shit.
Which brings us to one of the most striking, and most gnostic, aspects of Fort’s system, that is, his notion that the principle mechanism by which we are kept in our pens is religion. What Fort shouts in these most remarkable of passages is what some Jewish and Christian gnostics shouted in the first few centuries of the common era, namely, that orthodox religion, to the extent that it privileges violent deities demanding sacrifice, is demonic not metaphorically, but really. Those who do not know believe that they worship God. They in fact worship demons.
I am not exaggerating. Here is a rather typical passage from Fort: “That a new prophet had appeared upon the moon, and had excited new hope of evoking response from the bland and shining Stupidity that has so often been mistaken for God, or from the Appalling that is so identified with Divinity—from the clutched and menacing fist that has so often been worshipped” (NL 428). Here’s another, this time on poltergeist disturbances: “Sometimes I am going to try to find out why so many of these disturbances have occurred in the homes of clergymen. . . . Perhaps going to heaven makes people atheists” (LO 693). In a similar gnostic rage against the shining Stupidity we mistake for God, Fort reads the Chicago Tribune of June 10, 1889. Fifteen thousand innocent souls were drowned in the Johnstown flood when the dam broke. The survivors threw away, even burned, their Bibles, so obvious was the futility of their faith (LO 764). This is religion for Fort. A patent lie. A gross fraud. A Bible to burn after the floodwaters have swept away your children.
And a deadly demon. In the winter of 1904–5, a religious mania, a revival, swept through Northumberland, England (LO 650–65).40 So too did a series of bizarre occult events, as if they were somehow linked to the devotional fervor or “psycho-electricity” of the people, as if the people, Fort suggests, were “human batteries” that the occult events were feeding upon, thus growing more brilliant “with nourishing ecstasies” (LO 655). Terrifying objects appeared in the sky. One “shining thing” followed Mrs. Jones’s car, even when it turned from road to road in a vain effort to shake its pursuer. The same damned things were seen hovering over chapels. Things flew about, or seemed to appear out of nowhere, in a local butcher shop. Something was slaughtering sheep in the fields (one is reminded here of the cattle mutilations of contemporary UFO lore). Three different people were nearly buried as dead before they awoke from strangely profound trances. An elderly woman was not so lucky. She was mysteriously burned to a crisp in a case of “spontaneous combustion.” Fort does not believe in spontaneous combustions. But he’s willing to entertain the existence of “beings, that, with a flaming process, consume men and women, but . . . mostly pick out women.” The Liverpool Echo of January 18, 1905, put the situation this way in its headline: “Wales in the Grip of Supernatural Forces!” Fort, in his typical suspicions, is not so sure. “Supernatural” is not a word he used lightly. As for the events of Northumberland in the winter of 1904–5, perhaps these were not occult beings at all, but rather “projected mentalities of living human beings” (LO 694).
Maybe. But Fort seems most convinced of the alien-invasion thesis and in a subsequent demonic theory of religion. The two are connected in his mind. We have submitted to our own colonization, and through the very mechanisms of our deepest belief and most heartfelt piety no less. We are thus colonized from within:
Angels.
Hordes upon hordes of them. . . .
I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers . . . I should say that we’re now under cultivation: that we’re conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts. (BD 216–17)
It is easy to imagine a more rational theory of religion. It is difficult to imagine a more radical one.
Evolution, Wild Talents, and the Poltergeist Girls: Fort’s Magical Anthropology
Toward the very end of his life, Fort published his last two books: Lo! which appeared in 1931, and Wild Talents, which appeared a year later in 1932, as Fort lay dying. In many ways, these two books constitute a single work, a vast two-volume meditation on the subject of anomalous human beings, on supermen and superwomen, but also supergirls and superboys. After collecting “294 records of showers of living things,” Fort now turns his gaze to falling—or blazing, or telekinetic, or telepathic—people (LO 544). Lo! thus opens with a confused, naked man in a city street, seemingly transported against his will and knowledge, like the falling fish, from somewhere else.
From the naked man in the city street, Fort will continue to dwell, relentlessly, on such anomalous scenes and strange powers for the next five hundred pages, as he effectively reverses his theoretical gaze and begins to ponder the question of what we must look like to an alien form of intelligence, whether we may constitute some kind of psychical experience or occult dimension for them. “I suspect, in other worlds, or in other parts of one existence,” he suggests, that “there is esoteric knowledge of human beings of this earth, kept back from common knowledge.” “This is easi
ly thinkable,” he now jokes, “because even upon this earth there is little knowledge of human beings” (LO 617). He even suggests that “the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost-world—but that it is our existence—that when the spirits die they become human beings” (WT, 898). We, in essence, are their heaven.
Fort was quite serious about the occult dimensions of Human Being, about the humanities as mysteries. And he did not restrict this idea to the usual topic of extraordinary forms or altered states of consciousness. He extended it to our Bodies, which was precisely the announced, capitalized, and italicized subject of Wild Talents (WT 848). This is where the key subject of evolution comes in. Central to both of these last two books was the notion that evolution, or Development, as he preferred to call it in his un-Darwinian capitalized language, has intentionally endowed certain human beings with anomalous physical and psychical abilities toward some distant end or future goal: “There is a fortune teller in every womb,” he asserted in another one of those striking one-liners (LO 732). Fort called these evolving magical powers gifted in the womb “wild talents,” by which he meant “something that comes and goes, and is under no control, but that may be caught and trained” (WT 1049).
Fort’s notion of wild talents appears to be a double echo of both Frederic Myers’s earlier notion of spiritual evolution and William James’s earlier notion of wild facts. By the latter expression, James referred to the data of mystical literature and psychical research that lie strewn across the surface of history, still unassimilated, still rejected by the scientism of the academic mind. For James, such wild facts always threaten “to break up the accepted system,” particularly the accepted scientific system of the universities.41 This is pure Charles Fort before Charles Fort. And why not? Fort had certainly read his share of William James, although James probably knew nothing of Charles Fort.
Like James again, Fort was very thoughtful and systematic about these matters. Indeed, he had developed an entire evolutionary mysticism and cultural psychology around the notion of such wild talents. He suggested, for example, that they were all “specializations” of some much larger shape-shifting power. Myers and his colleagues had guessed the same thing through their metanotion of the telepathic law, and later parapsychologists would guess again through their similar metanotion of psi. In one of Fort’s rougher neologisms, he himself called this metapower trans-mediumization, a term that appears to be a combination of Catholic sacramental theology’s transubstantiation (the sacred power of the Eucharistic rite to transform ordinary bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ) with the materialized objects and substances (think: ectoplasm) that seemed to manifest through a few talented mediums.
Regardless of its linguistic origins and intended allusions, the term for Fort signaled the ability of the imaginal to become real and the real imaginal, or, in his own words now, “the imposition of the imaginary-physical upon the physical-imaginary” (WT 1048). It is the old controversy of the relationship of mind and matter, he points out. “But, in the philosophy of the hyphen, an uncrossable gap is disposed of, and the problem is rendered into thinkable terms, by asking whether mind-matter can act upon matter-mind” (WT 1055). Here is Fort’s clearest expression of the idea:
The real, as it is called, or the objective, the external, the material, cannot be absolutely set apart from the subjective, or the imaginary: but there are quasi attributes of the imaginary. There have been occurrences that I think were transmediumizations, because I think that they were marked by indications of having carried over, from an imaginative origin, into physical being, or into what is called “real life,” the quasi-attributes of their origin. (WT 1049)
This is a key idea for Fort, as he thinks it has something to do with evolution and, particularly, with the ways different species can take on strikingly intentional forms, like the insect that evolves into a veritable stick or leaf—the “wereleaf,” as he puts it in his typical humor, and then literally pins to his apartment wall: “I have thought of leaf insects as pictorial representations wrought in the bodies of insects, by their imaginations, or by the imaginative qualities of the substances of their bodies—back in plastic times, when insects were probably not so set in their ways as they now are” (WT 1024; italics mine). Basically, what Fort is proposing here is a kind of imaginal evolution, a biological process driven by an unidentified, and probably unknowable, Imagination. We are back to Myers’s entomological notion of the imaginal on its way to the perfect imago of the insect, in this case a literal insect!
Such a superpower not only drives biological evolution. It also is at the base and center of psychocultural evolution, an especially elaborate process for Fort that selects out different human potentials and actualizes them when they are needed, that is, when they become “marketable” at a particular time and place (he even made up a “job ad” for poltergeist girls in order to joke about how unmarketable this stuff was at his, and no doubt our, particular cultural moment). Such wild talents are latent in us all—“It is monism that if anybody’s a wizard, everybody is, to some degree, a wizard”—but they require much discipline and attention to manifest at all, and this is something our culture and our markets simply will not allow: “My notion is that wild talents exist in the profusion of the weeds of the fields. Also my notion is that, were it not for the conventions of markets, many weeds could be developed into valuable, edible vegetables” (WT 1039).
Still within this same model, he considered the advancing social activities of art, science, and religion—whose cutting-edge developments are always considered useless and preposterous by the established offended system (NL 530)—to be expressions of these same human potentials, all aimed at a distant future awakening that no one yet grasps. Evolution, in other words, is not simply about physical mutations. It is also about cultural mutations. Evolution is that process that expresses and represses the wild talents latent in us all.
Fort was especially interested in one particularly strong comparative pattern he had noticed, namely, that these wild talents often manifested in adolescents, particularly, he hints, in adolescents in emotionally difficult or abusive situations, such as orphans or young house servants. Young girls were especially evident. Or vulnerable. There was, for example, the story of John Shattock’s farmhouse reported in the Glasgow News of May 20, 1878. A hayrack burst into flames when a twelve-year-old servant girl passed by. That was only the beginning. Things around her in the house would move—things like dishes and loaves of bread. More ominously, small fires kept breaking out around her. A priest was sent for, no doubt to perform an exorcism. The stable burned down. Fort noted that such fire scenes were usually very localized and occured in broad daylight, instead of at night when they would have been far more dangerous. Usually, moreover, they broke out in the presence of a girl between the ages of twelve and twenty (WT 919). He was suggesting, I gather, that these pyropsychic scenes served symbolic purposes, that is, that they were meant to express rage and not cause physical harm.
Twelve-year-old Willie Boughs was a different case. The San Francisco Bulletin of October 14, 1886, reported on his sufferings in Turlock, Madison County, California. Willie could set things on fire “by his glance.” He was thrown out of school for this wild talent, and then he was thrown out of his home by his parents. A kind farmer took him in and sent him to school again. “On the first day, there were five fires in the school: one in the center of the ceiling, one in the teacher’s desk, one in her wardrobe, and two on the wall. The boy discovered all, and cried from fright. The trustees met and expelled him, that night” (WT 920). The New York Herald of October 16, 1886, reported on the same events. One can only imagine what poor Willie thought.
On a related note, there was that odd recorded ability of human beings who were allegedly capable of setting things on fire by breathing on them. Human dragons. From there Fort paints a veritable X-Men scenario, with potential mutants roaming the streets of New York:
The phenome
na look to me like a survival of a power that may have been common in the times of primitive men. Breathing dry leaves afire would, once upon a time, be a miracle of the highest value. . . . If we can think of our existence as a whole—perhaps only one of countless existences in the cosmos—as a developing organism, we can think of a fire-inducing power appearing automatically in some human beings, at a time of its need in the development of human phenomena. . . . most likely beginning humbly, regarded as freaks; most likely persecuted at first, but becoming established . . . [Then] their fall from importance, and the dwindling of them into their present, rare occurrence—but the preservation of them, as occasionals, by Nature, as an insurance, because there’s no knowing when we’ll all go back to savagery again . . . Conceive of a powerful backward slide, and one conceives of the appearance, by only an accentuation of the existing, of hosts of werewolves and wereskunks and werehyenas in the streets of New York City. (WT 926–27)
Whereas an author of the impossible like Frederic Myers conceived of telepathic abilities as hints of a future evolutionary development, an author like Charles Fort conceived of psychical abilities as fossils of the past, as evolutionary leftovers, as it were, that might yet be reactualized again.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 19