Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (22 page)

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.

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:

Just as much as it has been light, religion has been darkness. Today it is twilight. In the past it was mercy and charity and persecution and bloody, maniacal, sadistic hatred—hymns from chapels and screams from holy slaughterhouses—aspirations going up from this earth, with smoke from burning bodies. I can say that from religion we have never had opposition, because there never has been religion—that is that religion never has existed, as apart from all other virtues and vices and blessings and scourges—that, like all other alleged things, beings, or institutions, religion never has, in a final sense, had identity. (WT 999)

And we could go on, for a very long time, citing other similar passages. Perhaps we should. Then at least we could recognize the unrecognized
“damned”
fact that Charles Fort was as radical a theorist of religion as any. But we won't.

The present Dominant of science has taken over and copied the Old Dominant of religion. The priests have changed their vestments for lab coats and exchanged religious dogmas for scientific ones. Thus Fort can write of a “scientific priestcraft” who shout “Thou shalt not!” in their “frozen textbooks” (NL 315). The spirit and structure of their arguments retain the same, essentially religious dimension. As does everyone else's for that matter: “Every conversation is a conflict of missionaries,” he writes, “each trying to convert the other, to assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself” (BD 171). But this does not mean that science has made no advances on religion. It most definitely has. Nor does it mean that we should stop proselytizing one another. How else could we make any progress? Thus after comparing a particular chemist to an imbecile, Fort has second thoughts: “I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher” (BD 32). Well, that's a relief.

As his language of “old” and “new” Dominants makes crystal clear, the present Dominant of science is an unmistakable advance over the Old Dominant of religion for Fort. This hardly makes science omniscient or absolute, however. Where science errs for Fort is in its pride, in its arrogance, in its failure to recognize its own limitations. Its absolute materialism and mechanism are particularly odious as well: they are powerful half-truths that imagine themselves to be the whole Truth. Fort hears a storm approaching: “We are in a hole in time. Cavern of Conventional Science—walls that are dogmas, from which drips ancient wisdom in a patter of slimy opinions—but we have heard a storm of data outside” (NL 396). Such thunder outside signals for Fort the approach of a New Dominant, a new era, of which he is the prophet: “affairs upon this earth” are “fluttering upon the edge of a new era,” he asserts, “and I give expression to coming thoughts of that era” (LO 712).

He does not imagine, of course, that his particular expressions of this new era are absolute, only that they include more and exclude less and so better approximate the Truth of things. This is why he also calls his New Dominant a species of Intermediatism. This is hardly a grand or arrogant term. It is a humble term. It implies, after all, its own demise. It is an open-ended system “intermediate,” in between, on its way to the Truth. But it is
not
the Truth, and it too “must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasidelusion.” It is this sense of being intermediate, of thinking in between, that constitutes Fort's central insight. For him, at least, such a sense opens up to a potential gnosis or awakening in one of his most striking passages: