Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (26 page)

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 easily 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 phenomena 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.

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).