Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (19 page)

Besides, he reasoned, if the events that fascinated him so were not happening in the modern world, well then, they were of only historical interest and could not speak to his own present questions. The S.P.R., recall, had made the exact same decision before him. Even in the modern world, however, he was only marginally interested in those rare visions glimpsed in fleeting dreams or darkened séance rooms. Oh, he read and thought about such things, a great deal really, mostly through all the issues of the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
that he faithfully read in the library. By his own confession, he clearly accepted the reality of psychical phenomena. He affirmed the occult powers of the British superpsychic D. D. Home, and he often used the word “occult” to describe his own materials. But he was deeply suspicious of all talk of (or with) departed spirits, and he wanted no part of Spiritualism, which he associated with cranks and Fundamentalism.
²
In the end, his were mostly “sunlight mysteries” (WT 916), as he called them—strange things that come, usually unbidden, to ordinary people in ordinary circumstances in small towns and on city streets, and then show up in the papers, almost always in confused and baffled ways.

It is precisely this ordinariness that makes Fort's thought so extraordinary. As we shall see soon enough, Fort's radical monism expresses a world in which it is not so much that nothing is supernatural, but rather that
everything
is (LO 655). Fort, that is, locates the paranormal not simply in the rare experiences of a telepathic communication (although it appears here too) or in the invisible mathematical worlds of quantum physics (although he looked there as well, before anyone else, as far as I can tell). He finds it rather, in Colin Bennet's words now, in “the full light of noon on a thronged high street, from crowded rooms, from reports of ship's captains, baffled farmers, puzzled housewives, and scared families.”
³
Or, as the poet-journalist Benjamin De Casseres described his friend's books: “There is something tremendously real, annoyingly solid about Fort. His is the first attempt in the history of human thought to bring mysticism and trans-material phenomena down to (or maybe lift it up to) something concrete.”
⁴
Which is to say that Charles Fort discovers the paranormal in the normal.

Which
is another way of saying that in Fort's materials and methods, the sacred was in transit again out of its earlier religious registers. The Fortean mysteries, after all, do not involve spiritual flights of ecstasy or unions with beloved deities, much less historically distant prophetic revelations or some singular and complete oriental enlightenment. Part of this is because his seemingly arbitrary 1800 rule effectively prevented him from privileging what had always been privileged, that is, the ancient world and the Bible. Fort would have none of that. What he would have are tablecloths and lace curtains bursting into flames around teenage boys and girls (mostly girls, it turns out), or, even better, rains of fish, periwinkles, frogs, crabs, or unidentified biological matter falling from the sky and piling up in the ditches for anyone to see. Or smell.

Fort, by the way, was not the first American writer to notice the fish. Earlier, Henry David Thoreau had wryly observed that “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
⁵
That is pure Charles Fort.

But how to explain the Transcendentalist trout? Technically speaking, Fort never explained anything. What he was best at was showing how previous religious and scientific methods fail to explain the world as it is. He was particularly hard on what he called the “evil of specialization.” Fort felt that specialization prevents us from seeing the hidden connections between different domains of knowledge and data. “He knew,” Damon Knight explains, “that we can only see what we are looking for, and he was tantalized by the feeling that there are unsuspected patterns all around us, which would be visible if we only knew where and how to look.”
⁶
Within this kind of broad scanning, specialization is a kind of tunnel vision that effectively blinds people from seeing the hidden patterns of the Big Picture, which emerges only from perceiving the relations or meaningful coincidences between things and events (NL 446–47). Specialists see only what they are allowed to see, what their systems have deemed “real” and meaningful. “Ordinary theologians have overlooked crabs and periwinkles,” he noted wryly (LO 548). But he would not. He was an intellectually promiscuous adventurer, a journalist of the metaphysical in search of what we might call, with only slight apologies to Freud, the parapsychology of everyday life.
⁷

We could also say that Charles Fort was a
collector
, a collector of anomalies reported in his standard sources that were inevitably offered forced or bogus explanations by the official intellectuals of the time, or, more likely, simply ignored and passed over until the next day's distractions called “news.” Though he had worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, he
would
not be so distracted. He would collect tens of thousands of notes on such anomalies. At one point in 1931, he mentions having written sixty thousand of them (LO 576). Earlier in life, he had organized these into hundreds of alphabetically arranged shoeboxes in his Bronx apartment. So he might write something like this: “March 11, 1924—see Charles Fort's
Notes
, Letter E, Box 27” (WT 977). We'll come back to Letter E in Box 27. And this collecting practice went considerably beyond words. On the walls of his Bronx apartment, he framed “specimens of giant spiders, butterflies, weird creatures adept at concealment . . . and—under glass—a specimen of some stuff that looks like dirty, shredded asbestos which had fallen from the sky in quantities covering several acres.”
⁸

There are at least two ways to describe such anomalies and Fort's eccentric desire to collect them in glass frames and shoeboxes (and where were all those shoes?): an excessive or impossible way, and a humble or respectable way. The excessive way is to suggest that Charles Fort was a collector of superpowers, which were humble enough sometimes (like the framed insect on his wall that looked exactly like a stick), but at other times they were
really
super. It is difficult to read much of Fort without being struck by his vocabulary of the super. The
normal
of Myers's
supernormal
has dropped away. Everything is potentially just
super
now. Fort thus writes of a super-bat, super-biology, super-cellular, super-chemistry, super-constructions, a super-dragon, a super-egotist, Super-embryology, the super-evangelical, super-evil, super-geography, super-Hibernia, a super-imagination, Super-Israelimus, super-magnets, the super-mercantile, a super-mind, Super-Niagaras, a super-ocean, super-personification, the super-piratic, super-ravages, super-religion, Super-Romanimus, the Super-Sargasso Sea, super-scientific attempts, super-sociology, super-sight, super-things, super-vehicles, super-vessels, super-voyagers, super-whiskeys (with ultra-bibles, no less), and super-wolves. Obviously, the concept of the super was a central one in the thought of Charles Fort. In most of these cases, the expression carries a distinct but expansive meaning, one somewhere between and beyond our own present concepts of the
paranormal
and the
extraterrestrial
. We'll get to that too.

The more humble or respectable way to describe both the events Fort collected and his desire to collect them is to say that Charles Fort was a collector of coincidences. These were coincidences, however, that he felt—he could not quite say why—signaled some larger, and perhaps literally cosmic, truth. He was on the intuitive trail of, well,
something
. Here is how he put the matter:

Sometimes
I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my store. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note; and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on. (WT 861–62)

This is why, beginning in 1906, he began his famous reading practice in the New York Public Library. Charles generally spent his mornings working at home and his afternoons in the library. He and his wife, Anna, would then often go to the movies in the evenings. This was a nightly ritual that appeared to have only reinforced Charles's most basic conviction that “the imagined and the physical” were deeply intertwined, if not actually identical on some level: “According to some viewpoints,” he wrote, “I might as well try to think of a villain, in a moving picture, suddenly jumping from the screen, and attacking people in the audience. I haven't tried that, yet” (WT 1010). Which implies, of course, that he had tried other things. Or that he might still try this one.

The couple lived in poverty for a good share of their life together (at one point Charles was hawking all their belongings and breaking up the chairs to heat the apartment) until a wealthy uncle of Charles, Frank A. Fort, died on May 28, 1916, and left his nephew an inheritance that allowed Charles and Anna to live in relative comfort and peace (then a wealthy aunt died, leaving a bit more). Happily, Charles's literary talents early on attracted the attention—stunned worship, really—of the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who once described Fort in a letter to the writer as “the most fascinating literary figure since Poe. You, who for all I know may be the progenitor of an entirely new world viewpoint.”
⁹
Dreiser was not exaggerating. And Dreiser's fascination was echoed by other literary figures, including Booth Tarkington, who described Fort's pen as a “brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse,” Buckminster Fuller, who wrote the introduction for Knight's biography, and numerous science-fiction writers, who borrowed generously from Fort's data for their own fictional purposes.
¹⁰
Indeed, in many cases, later science fiction reads like a series of imaginative riffs, with techno-realistic pictures now, on Charles Fort.

It was Dreiser who bought and printed some of Fort's early humorous short stories and, more importantly, acted as a literary agent of sorts for
Fort's
first and most famous “nonfiction” book,
The Book of the Damned
. Of sorts. Dreiser basically threatened his own publisher: if he didn't publish Fort, he wouldn't publish Dreiser.

When he died at the age of fifty-seven on May 3, 1932, at 11:55 p.m., Charles Fort had published one novel,
The Outcast Manufacturers
(1909), and four really weird books:
The Book of the Damned
(1919),
New Lands
(1923),
Lo!
(1931), and
Wild Talents
(1932). Fort's note to Dreiser upon the appearance of the second and most famous book captures something of their relationship: “I send you this afternoon by express,
The Book of the Damned
. It is a religion. Our beer-man comes Tuesdays.”
¹¹
Advanced copies of the last book, on anomalous human beings, were delivered to Fort as he faded away on his deathbed. He was too weak to hold them, much less drink beer on Tuesday.

It is not, however, quite true to say that
The Book of the Damned
was Fort's first work of nonfiction. To begin with, in 1901 Fort had already completed a draft of a youthful autobiography entitled
Many Parts
, only a portion of which has survived. The title is from Shakespeare's famous lines in
As You Like It
: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
¹²
As with Shakespeare's collapsing of the stage into life and life into the stage (or my earlier discussion of the personality as a persona, as a “mask”), Fort denied in principle any stable distinction between fiction and reality. He hated, for example, how books were divided up as “fiction” or “nonfiction” in the libraries (WT 863). “I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either.” There is only “the hyphenated state of truth-fiction” (WT 864).

Nor, as we have already noted, did Fort believe in any stable distinction between the imagined and the physical (WT 1010). As with Myers's notion of the imaginal, the imagination, properly understood in its true scope, is nearly omnipotent in Fort's worldview. Indeed, it is so powerful (and potentially perverse) that Fort suggested in more than one context that we are all living in someone else's novel, which was not a particularly good one. “Some of us,” he observed, “seem almost alive—like characters in something a novelist is writing” (BD 79). There thus can be no final conclusions or firm beliefs or even arguments “in the fiction that we're living,” only what he calls “pseudo-conclusions” and “expressions” (WT 1009). The world, after all, may be imagined and written anew tomorrow in some other way, on some other page.

Fort was quite serious about the fictional nature of reality. Hence his two earlier book manuscripts, entitled
X
and
Y
(1915–16), about two
complimentary
metaphysical forces. As Jim Steinmeyer, his most recent biographer, explains, “the missing manuscript for
X
has always been the Holy Grail of readers of Charles Fort.” It is not difficult to see why. In Steinmeyer's reconstruction of the lost manuscript, largely through Fort's correspondence with Dreiser in a three-page letter dated May 1, 1915, it appears that
X
was a more confessional crank version of the worldview that later would be more or less agnostically presented in
The Book of the Damned
. Dreiser was stunned by the thesis of
X
, which involved the idea that all of earthly biological and social reality is a kind of movie (we would now say “virtual world”) projected from the rays of some unknown alien consciousness. Dreiser, who then had a dream that seemed to confirm the thesis, summed up Fort's X this way: “