Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  As such ideas make more than obvious, Fort’s relationship to the Darwinian model of evolution is, to put it mildly, not exactly a traditional one. In places, he clearly rejects Darwinism as “positively baseless,” but he immediately notes that it is far superior to anything that preceded it in terms of its organization and consistency (BD 24). In short, it is a better system, a better theory, a closer approximation to the truth of things. What Fort clearly rejects about Darwinism is its purposelessness, that is, its insistence on random selection and mutation toward no particular end. Fort is an evolutionary thinker of sorts, but one who insists on a kind of intelligent design,—an intelligent design, however, without a Designer. He is thus careful to point out that he wishes to give no aid or comfort to anti-Darwinians and fundamentalists. There is no Christian God in his system. We would say now that “God” is an emergent property of a system for Fort: “I am God to the cells that compose me,” he would write in Wild Talents (WT 877).

  The other major difference between Darwin’s biology and Fort’s metaphysics is that for Darwin only the past can influence the present, whereas for Fort the future also influences the present via orthogenesis, or what he also calls Development. He thus prefers to think of the “Geo-system” as a kind of huge egg, an “incubating organism of which this earth is the nucleus.” In more contemporary terms, the earth is a self-regulating ecosystem evolving toward its own innate plan or design:

  In a technical sense we give up the doctrine of Evolution. Ours is an expression upon Super-embryonic Development, in one enclosed system. Ours is an expression upon Design underlying and manifesting in all things within this one system, with a Final Designer left out, because we know of no designing force that is not itself the product of remoter design. . . . it is not altogether anti-Darwinian: the concept of Development replaces the concept of Evolution, but we accept the process of Selection, not to anything loosely known as Environment, but relatively to underlying Schedule and Design, predetermined and supervised, as it were, but by nothing that we conceive in anthropomorphic terms. (NL 528–29)

  What it all comes down to is a question of time and whether one privileges the past, the present, or the future. Darwinism concerns itself with present adaptations as the biological results of past challenges and selections, but “there is no place for the influence of the future upon the present,” Fort correctly notes (NL 529). There is in Fort’s system. Indeed, it is the future that acts as a kind of occult attractor or magnet, pulling everything in the past and the present toward its own superstate, which Fort himself considers predetermined but which he leaves entirely open ended, except for some tantalizing hints about an “awakening.” Fort’s preferred expression for this cosmic process is “Super-embryonic Development.” Human beings are “cellular units” in this Embryo called Earth. It is all “one integrating organism, and we,” Fort now sings, “have heard its pulse” (NL 531–32).

  It is within this same Super-embryonic Development that Fort began in Lo! to conceive of strange human abilities, particularly something he called there, for the first time, “teleportation” (LO 553). Hence the confused naked man in the city street with which the book opens. This is a technical term, first announced in 1931, that would have an incredible run in twentieth-century science fiction, superhero comics, and metaphysical film, from the “Beam me up” of Star Trek, through the X-Men’s teleporting Nightcrawler, to the recent movie Jumper. Teleportation is also a crucial concept for Fort, partly because it helps explain all the falling matter of his earlier two books, partly because it serves a certain balancing or distributive role in the Super-Embryo. Teleportation is the natural mechanism through which the Super-Embryo of Earth distributes things where they are needed at the moment. Although the agency behind teleportation is certainly “not exclusively human” (LO 572)—so Fort can conceive, for example, of the “occult powers of trees” that need rain—it can be harnessed by human beings, if usually unconsciously (LO 571).

  Humorously, absurdly, much of this falling stuff makes little sense now. As nineteenth-century documented reports of “manna” in Asia Minor suggested to Fort, the stuff, once needed desperately thousands of years ago, just keeps on falling into the present, despite the fact that no one needs it any longer. “This looks like stupidity,” even “idiocy,” Fort observes (LO 554, 601). Perhaps this is why his publisher wanted to title Lo! his third book, God Is an Idiot.42 Fort rejected this idea—why is not clear, as he clearly did think that the common images of God amounted to idiocy, or at least shining Stupidity—but he pressed the point further anyway. “To keep on sending little frogs, where, so far as can be seen, there is no need for little frogs, is like persistently, if not brutally, keeping right on teaching Latin and Greek, for instance. What’s that for?” (LO 668) Poor ol’ Fred Myers, the Cambridge classicist, would have rolled in his grave at that one. Had, of course, Fred been in his grave, which is doubtful, given what he had written.

  Some of the most delightful scenes in Wild Talents involve Fort’s experiments with his own wild talents. Consider, for example, the story of the falling picture. We began this book with an epigraph from Wild Talents. “Read a book, or look at a picture,” we began. There is a story behind this. We return now to Letter E in Box 27.

  Letter E, it turns out, is a note about how Fort, inspired by his reading in the British Museum Library about poltergeists, had decided to “experiment” while he was living in London, at 39 Marchmont Street, W.C. 1, he tells us with some uncalled for precision. It was March 11, 1924. Fort was—what else?—reading. He heard a thump. He found a picture had fallen near a curtain, which shook vigorously for “several seconds” after the fall. The next morning he examined the brass ring on the back of the picture. It appeared to be sheered in two places by some force. He now recalled two other pictures falling in the apartment. Six days later, he was startled by a loud “crackling sound,” as if glass was breaking. But no glass broke. He found a fourth fallen picture on the 28th. He suspected that, “in some unknown way, I was the one doing this.” He seemed to hope so anyway. Another fell on July 26. And another on October 22, as he stared at a picture and thought about all the others falling. Then another, this time in the landlady’s apartment, on the night of September 28. A year later, on October 15, 1929, now back in New York, “or anyway in the Bronx,” Charles is discussing this with Anna. A pan fell in the closet. Fort explains two more experiments in two more consecutive years:

  Oct. 18, 1930—I made an experiment. I read these notes aloud to A [Anna], to see whether there be a repetition of the experience of Oct. 15, 1929 [the pan in the closet]. Nothing fell.

  Nov. 19, 1931—tried that again. Nothing moved. Well, then, if I’m not a wizard, I’m not going to let anybody else tell me that he’s a wizard. (WT 976–80)

  But Fort remains troubled by what happened over those months. He can’t shake the conviction that there was some relationship between his state of mind and all those pictures falling. He continues to pursue his wizadry, this time with a little more luck. This wild experiment involves him walking down 42nd Street and believing that he could somehow “see” what was ahead of him. An odd phrase pops into his head: “Turkey tracks in red snow.” He was working in the library on cases of red snow, so this phrase signaled a connection between what he was reading and what he believed was about to appear in the physical world. He soon comes upon a store window selling fountain pens. They are lined up in the window display, “grouped in fours, one behind, and the three others trifurcating from it, on a back-ground of pink cardboard,” that is, like turkey tracks in red snow.

  “At last I was a wizard!” (WT 1036).

  But then the next experiment fails. And the next. And the next. It is difficult to accuse this man of hubris:

  Say that I experimented about a thousand times. Out of a thousand attempts, I can record only three seemingly striking successes, though I recall some minor ones. Throughout this book, I have taken the stand that nobody can be always wrong, but
it does seem to me that I approximated so highly that I am nothing short of a negative genius. (WT 1037)

  Still, he cannot shake the hits, so extraordinary did they feel. He is equally impressed by “the triviality and casualness of them.” Turkey tracks made out of fountain pens in a store window are not exactly about changing the world. Nor are tipping tables in séance rooms. But still, what do these things signal, what do they mean? Quite a lot, Fort suggests, for “the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch” (WT 1045).

  But he also recognizes that he only experimented for a month, and that it takes five years to learn the basics of a skill like writing a book. What he seems to be suggesting here is that we get what we want, or more accurately, what our cultures want us to get and so reward. But what if things were different? What if these “coincidences” could be put to some use? If he can take down a picture by just looking at it, why not a whole house? Indeed, why not build a house this way too?

  All around are wild talents, and it occurs to nobody to try to cultivate them, except as expressions of personal feelings, or as freaks for which to charge admission. I conceive of powers and the uses of human powers that will some day transcend the stunts of music halls and séances and sideshows, as public utilities have passed beyond the toy-stages of their origins. (WT 1041)

  Thus appears the magical outlines of Fort’s Third Dominant, the era of witchcraft. Whereas this age of materialism, the industrial era, trains young men “to the glory of the job” and convinces them that “all magics, except their own industrial magics, are fakes, superstitions, or newspaper yarns,” Fort dreams of a coming era in which human beings can openly acknowledge, harness, and hone their wild talents (WT 1028–29). Humorously, again as if to protect himself from the implications of his own thought, he imagines “batteries of witches teleported to Nicaragua where speedily they cut a canal by dissolving trees and rocks,” but then sees admittedly that there is nothing more reasonable than the taboo against this stuff, since with the advantages of witchcraft also comes the possibility of “criminal enormities” (WT 1041).

  And just how would such practical witchcraft be used in warfare? Fort lets loose:

  Later: A squad of poltergeist girls—and they pick a fleet out of the sea, or out of the sky. . . . Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.

  A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battlefield. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum. (WT 1042)

  We can smile at such scenes, and laugh at Fort’s outrageousness, not to mention his keen psychological descriptions of the gossip of girls. But there would be many others who would seriously posit something called super-psi. And still others who would dream of similar psychotronic displays, namely, cold war psychic spies and something called “remote viewing.” And they were perfectly serious.

  It was in this way that Charles Fort sang his saga with volume and page numbers. It was in this way that he laid the seeds of a Super-Story through those monistic peaches, that marching data of the damned, the philosophy of the hyphen, the New Era of witchcraft, quantum teleportations, super-constructions in the sky, New Lands, falling fishes, galactic colonialism, evolutionary superpowers, and gum-chewing poltergeist girls. By so doing, he set the table for later writers of the anomalous, of the pulp magazines and early science fiction, the UFO, and those most popular of all possessors of wild talents, the American superheroes.

  And us? What should we make of all of this?

  For now, it is enough to acknowledge that if Charles Fort had any reliable and truly indisputable wild talent, it was his talent as a writer. Steinmeyer concludes his recent biography with this fair and balanced assessment. American writers like Dreiser, Hecht, and Tarkington, of course, had early on seen something similar, if in a more astonished vein. I in turn have added my own impossible readings here. More specifically, I have tried to foreground Fort’s comparative, philosophical, and hermeneutical practices and show how, through them, Fort came to understand that writing can morph into something that is truly mythical in scope and power, that writing can become a veritable occult practice, an act of the super-imagination through which one can wake up and, some day, step out of the Cave of Consensus. This was his technique anyway for realizing how we are being written by the paranormal, and how we might finally step out of this bad novel and begin to write ourselves.

  In the end, then, the real wizardry of Charles Fort resides not in the turkey-track shop window (although those were pens), or in all those falling apartment pictures, but in those four wonderful books and the weird ways they might reveal hidden patterns and new meanings and so order the world anew for their stunned readers. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

  three

  THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY OF FOLKLORE

  Jacques Vallee and the UFO Phenomenon

  If it were possible to make three-dimensional holograms with mass, and to project them through time I would say this is what the farmer saw. . . . Are we dealing. . .with a parallel universe, where there are human races living, and where we may go at our expense, never to return to the present? . . . From that mysterious universe, have objects that can materialize and “dematerialize” at will been projected? Are the UFO’s “windows” rather than “objects”?

  —JACQUES VALLEE, Passport to Magonia

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  When I first read Jacques Vallee, I knew immediately that I had found a writer who had something important to teach us about the history of Western esotericism, about the truths of traditional folklore, about the mysterious attractions of modern science fiction, and about the reality of paranormal phenomena—all those imaginal realities and damned facts that point toward what Vallee has called “the apparent magical qualities of human consciousness.”1 I knew, in other words, that I was reading another author of the impossible.

  It was not just what Vallee writes, although that is impossible enough. It was how he writes it, how he makes the impossible possible through the sophistication of his suspicions and the complex ways that his comparative imagination puts together the pieces and parts of his historical data in order to form a radically different picture-puzzle of things. I was also fascinated by the way he relates material from the ancient and medieval worlds to our own ultramodern one. He obviously does not consider time absolute, nor does he idolize local culture as the measure of all things. The study of history for him is not about an “us” and a “them,” all solipsistically locked into our little decades and languages and cultural practices. It is about a global “we” spanning multiple millennia and countless local expressions of a vast psychical system. Just as significantly, Vallee’s comparative imagination adamantly refuses to be located in any single order of knowledge. Here, after all, is a pioneering computer scientist and venture capitalist who purchases rare editions of Paracelsus and writes like a mystically inclined humanist. Even as a young man, he scoffed at the dysfunctional ways his education had separated the literary and the technical modes of thought, and he felt little but disgust for scientists who were contemptuous of science fiction. Fantasy, for him at least, was a mode of serious speculative thought.2

  He certainly lived up to these youthful ideals. Vallee has speculated about multidimensional universes and mythological control systems worthy of any science-fiction novel (of which he himself has now written five), but he has also helped map Mars, published on pulsar fundamental frequencies, and written books about business strategies and information technology. His business career and cultural presence similarly reflect this double persona. Vallee wa
s an early entrepreneur in the computer industry of Silicon Valley and the development of the Internet. He was also the inspiration for the character of the French scientist Claude Lacombe, played by Francois Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  In terms of my present reflections, Jacques Vallee dwells exactly where I have suggested the contemporary gnostic intellectual dwells, that is, in a modern form of gnosis or forbidden knowledge well beyond reason and completely beyond belief. These are my terms, not his. But his are remarkably, astonishingly close. He too, after all, uses the phrase “beyond reason” to describe his subject matter, and he presents his life as a passionate pursuit of “forbidden science,” the title phrase of his published journals that speaks of a radical rejection of reason’s claim to exhaust the possible.3 He is thus dismissive of “the constipated rationalists who are the new arbiters of French thought” (FS 1:192). He similarly scoffs at the Enlightenment rationalist philosophers, who trapped us all in a boring “bureaucratic cage for two centuries” (FS 1:97). And he is positively disgusted with “the old scientists,” who deny the very reality of the problem of UFOs. Vallee had already had enough of their reasonable, respectable nonsense in 1961, when he wrote this in his journals: “Our research would be emasculated by their lack of creativity and their need to reduce everything to that dull state of uniformity they mistakenly label as rationalism” (FS 1:52).

  Not that doctrinal religion fares any better than dogmatic rationalism within Vallee’s deeply personal gnosis. He is profoundly suspicious of institutional religion, which he sees primarily as a kind of social control system, certainly not as a deposit of eternal truths. He thus confesses a “lack of faith in the common images of God.” Which is not to say that he does not possess his own spiritual sensibilities. These in fact are profound, as we shall see, but he prefers to label them as expressions of mysticism, not religion. Mysticism, for Vallee, has nothing to do with religion and its doctrinal formulations. Rather, it is “an orientation of consciousness, a direction of thought away from ordinary space-time.”4 We will see that he means this quite literally, even scientifically, in a forbidden sort of way.