The Book of the Damned (25 page)
Read The Book of the Damned Online
Authors: Charles Fort
Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the
Scientific American,
Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be, say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible, to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by the
Scientific American
is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds, presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. The writer says that they looked to him like “a field of broken ice.” Beneath is a picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in water. The resemblance between the two pictures is striking—nevertheless, it seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile or so from this earth’s surface—
Unless:
The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.
Or that normally this earth’s gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen miles outward—but that gravitation must be rhythmic.
Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only insecure approximations.
We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance, to Herbert Spencer’s chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.
If everything else—light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks; and arrival and departure of the seasons—if everything else is variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.
So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in detail. For description of what I call a “blur,” see
Pop. Sci. News,
February, 1884—sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, “a white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright.”
We accept that sometimes fields of ice pass between the sun and the earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or superimposed fields would obscure the sun—that there have been occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:
Flammarion,
The Atmosphere,
p. 394:
That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:
There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.
Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889: sand and “solid chunks of ice” reported to have fallen
(Science,
April 19, 1889).
In
Symons’ Meteorological Magazine,
32-172,
are outlined rough-edged but smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Manassas, Virginia, Aug. 10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice—as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In
Cosmos,
3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice. That, I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.
Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance, we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this should not be taken as an absolute.
Monthly Weather Review,
July, 1894:
That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June 3, 1894, was reported.
Fragments of ice fell from the sky.
They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our acceptance: and, according to the writer in the
Review,
“gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand.”
This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the “damned,” or before we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied—but without comment—in the
Scientific American,
71-371.
Our theology is something like this:
Of course we ought to be damned—but we revolt against adjudication by infants, turtles, and lambs.
We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There’s a lesson to me in the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth—then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting—that note upon the ice that fell at Derby—water trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like stalactites from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at the underside of an aerial ice lump, and seemed to see a papillation similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then—but then—if icicles should form upon the underside of a sheet of aerial ice, that would be by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of course an expression of gravitation—and, if water melting from ice should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the ice does not, because the ice is heavier—that is, in masses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at present. Our expression upon icicles:
A vast field of aerial ice—it is inert to this earth’s gravitation—but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation—by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles—then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles.
Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said
(Monthly Weather Review,
June, 1882) that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters—that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones.
The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize—not forming by accretion—in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see
Nature,
61-594. Note the size—“some of them the size of turkeys’ eggs.”
It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the underside of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.
Monthly Weather Review,
June, 1889:
That, at Oswego, N.Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N.Y.)
Leader,
there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that “resembled the fragments of icicles.”
Monthly Weather Review,
29-506:
That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary hail, fell pieces of ice “formed like icicles, the size and shape of lead pencils that had been cut into sections about three-eighths of an inch in length.”
So our data of the Super-Sargasso Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for weeks at a time, an ice-field may hang motionless over a part of this earth’s surface—the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until late in the afternoon, I should say—part of it has sagged, but is held up by cohesion with the main mass—whereupon we have such an occurrence as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time—or fall of water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of this earth’s surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun’s rays had had time for their effects:
Monthly Weather Review,
October, 1886:
That, according to the Charlotte
Chronicle,
Oct. 21, 1886, for three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N.C, localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o’clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.
This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the Salvation Army. The account by the Signal Service observer, at Charlotte, published in the
Review,
follows:
“An unusual phenomenon was witnessed on the 21st: having been informed that, for some weeks prior to date, rain had been falling daily, after 3 p.m., on a particular spot, near two trees, corner of 9th and D streets, I visited the place, and saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at 4:47 and 4:55 p.m., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 p.m., a light shower of rain fell from a cloudless sky . . . Sometimes the precipitation falls over an area of half an acre, but always appears to center at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only.”
14
We see conventionally. It is not only that we think and act and speak and dress alike, because of our surrender to social attempt at Entity, in which we are only super-cellular. We see what it is “proper” that we should see. It is orthodox enough to say that a horse is not a horse, to an infant—any more than is an orange an orange to the unsophisticated. It’s interesting to walk along a street sometimes and look at things and wonder what they’d look like, if we hadn’t been taught to see horses and trees and houses as horses and trees and houses. I think that to super-sight they are local stresses merging indistinguishably into one another, in an all-inclusive nexus.
I think that it would be credible enough to say that many times have Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria crossed telescopic fields of vision, and were not even seen—because it wouldn’t be proper to see them; it wouldn’t be respectable, and it wouldn’t be respectful: it would be insulting to old bones to see them: it would bring on evil influences from the relics of St. Isaac to see them.
But our data:
Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are adrift in interplanetary tides and currents: the data that we shall have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of this earth—
But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Entity of this solar system as a whole—
The question that we can’t very well evade:
Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by astronomers?
I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or are held in temporary suspension near it—then some of them must often have been within the diameter of an astronomer’s hypnosis.
Our general expression:
That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but also that there are tramp vessels:
That, upon the super-ocean, there are regularized planets, but also that there are tramp worlds:
That astronomers are like mercantile purists who would deny commercial vagabondage.
Our acceptance is that vast celestial vagabonds have been excluded by astronomers, primarily because their irresponsibilities are an affront to the pure and the precise, or to attempted positivism; and secondarily because they have not been seen so very often. The planets steadily reflect the light of the sun: upon this uniformity a system that we call Primary Astronomy has been built up; but now the subject matter of Advanced Astronomy is data of celestial phenomena that are sometimes light and sometimes dark, varying like some of the satellites of Jupiter, but with a wider range. However, light or dark, they have been seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their exclusion is—that they don’t fit in.
With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern. Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years ago, but now they’re sanctioned by Prof. Barnard—and, if he says they’re all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing something wrong or ridiculous—the close kinship we note so often between the evil and the absurd—I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that’s a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists, admit that’s so. In the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object—he calls it an “object”—in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies outside this solar system. But in the
Astrophysical Journal,
1916-1, he modifies into regarding them as “dark nebulae.” That’s not so interesting.
We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come ciders and coke and coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been seen from this earth—by professional astronomers. It will be noted that throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins—as, by hypnosis and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power of the system that preceded them—or Continuity would be smashed. There’s a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the Positive Absolute—oh, well—
What I emphasize here is that our damned data are observations by astronomers of the highest standing, excommunicated by astronomers of similar standing—but backed up by the dominant spirit of their era—to which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged. It would seem sometimes, in this book, as if our revolts were against the dogmatisms and pontifications of single scientists of eminence. This is only a convenience, because it seems necessary to personify. If we look over
Philosophical Transactions,
or the publications of the Royal Astronomical Society, for instance, we see that Herschel, for instance, was as powerless as any boy stargazer, to enforce acceptance of any observation of his that did not harmonize with the system that was growing up as independently of him and all other astronomers, as a phase in the development of an embryo compels all cells to take on appearances concordantly with the design and the predetermined progress and schedule of the whole.
Visitors to Venus:
Evans,
Ways of the Planets,
p. 140:
That, in 1645, a body large enough to look like a satellite was seen near Venus. Four times in the first half of the 18th century, a similar observation was reported. The last report occurred in 1767.
A large body has been seen—seven times, according to
Science Gossip,
1886-178—near Venus. At least one astronomer, Houzeau, accepted these observations and named the—world, planet, super-construction—“Neith.” His views are mentioned “in passing, but without endorsement,” in the
Trans. N.Y.
Acad.,
5-249.
Houzeau or someone writing for the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper—outer darkness for both alike. A new satellite in this solar system might be a little disturbing—though the formulas of Laplace, which were considered final in his day, have survived the admittance of five or six hundred bodies not included in those formulas—a satellite to Venus might be a little disturbing, but would be explained—but a large body approaching a planet—staying awhile—going away—coming back some other time—anchoring, as it were—
Azuria is pretty bad, but Azuria is no worse than Neith.
Astrophysical Journal,
1-127:
A light-reflecting body, or a bright spot near Mars: seen Nov. 25, 1894, by Prof. Pickering and others, at the Lowell Observatory, above an unilluminated part of Mars—self-luminous, it would seem—thought to have been a cloud—but estimated to have been about twenty miles away from the planet.
Luminous spot seen moving across the disk of Mercury, in 1799, by Harding and Schroeter.
(Monthly Notices of the R.A.S.,
38-338.)
In the first Bulletin issued by the Lowell Observatory, in 1903, Prof. Lowell describes a body that was seen on the terminator of Mars, May 20, 1903. On May 27, it was “suspected.” If still there, it had moved, we are told, about 300 miles—“probably a dust cloud.”
Very conspicuous and brilliant spots seen on the disk of Mars, October and November, 1911.
(Popular Astronomy,
Vol. 19, No. 10.)
So one of them accepted six or seven observations that were in agreement, except that they could not be regularized, upon a world—planet—satellite—and he gave it a name. He named it “Neith.”
Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria and Super-Romanimus—
Or heresy and orthodoxy and the oneness of all quasiness, and our ways and means and methods are the very same. Or, if we name things that may not be, we are not of lonely guilt in the nomenclature of absences—
But now Leverrier and “Vulcan.”
Leverrier again.
Or to demonstrate the collapsibility of a froth, stick a pin in the largest bubble of it. Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth stuff—but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it.
So Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan.”
And we repeat, and it will do us small good to repeat. If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized—being themselves hypnotized, or they could not hypnotize others—or that the hypnotist’s control is not the masterful power that it is popularly supposed to be, but only transference of state from one hypnotic to another—
If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized, you will not be able even to remember. Ten pages from here, and Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan” will have fallen from your mind, like beans from a magnet, or like data of cold meteorites from the mind of a Thomson.
Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan.”
And much the good it will do us to repeat.
But at least temporarily we shall have an impression of a historic fiasco, such as, in our acceptance, could occur only in a quasi-existence.
In 1859, Dr. Lescarbault, an amateur astronomer, of Orgères, France, announced that, upon March 26, of that year, he had seen a body of planetary size cross the sun. We are in a subject that is now as unholy to the present system as ever were its own subjects to the system that preceded it, or as ever were slanders against miracles to the preceding system. Nevertheless few textbooks go so far as quite to disregard this tragedy. The method of the systematists is slightingly to give a few instances of the unholy, and dispose of the few. If it were desirable to them to deny that there are mountains upon this earth, they would record a few observations upon some slight eminences near Orange, N.J., but say that commuters, though estimable persons in several ways, are likely to have their observations mixed. The textbooks casually mention a few of the “supposed” observations upon “Vulcan,” and then pass on.
Dr. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier, who hastened to Orgères—
Because this announcement assimilated with his own calculations upon a planet between Mercury and the sun—
Because this solar system itself has never attained positiveness in the aspect of Regularity: there are to Mercury, as there are to Neptune, phenomena irreconcilable with the formulas, or motions that betray influence by something else.
We are told that Leverrier “satisfied himself as to the substantial accuracy of the reported observation.” The story of this investigation is told in
Monthly Notices,
20-98. It seems too bad to threaten the naïve little thing with our rude sophistications, but it is amusingly of the ingenuousness of the age from which present dogmas have survived. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier. Leverrier hastened to Orgères. But he was careful not to tell Lescarbault who he was. Went right in and “subjected Dr. Lescarbault to a very severe cross-examination”—just the way you or I may feel at liberty to go into anybody’s home and be severe with people—“pressing him hard step by step”—just as anyone might go into someone else’s house and press him hard, though unknown to the hard-pressed one. Not until he was satisfied, did Leverrier reveal his identity. I suppose Dr. Lescarbault expressed astonishment. I think there’s something Utopian about this: it’s so unlike the standoffishness of New York life.
Leverrier gave the name “Vulcan” to the object that Dr. Lescarbault had reported.
By the same means by which he is, even to this day, supposed—by the faithful—to have discovered Neptune, he had already announced the probable existence of an Intra-Mercurial body, or group of bodies. He had five observations besides Lescarbault’s upon something that had been seen to cross the sun. In accordance with the mathematical hypnoses of his era, he studied these six transits. Out of them he. computed elements giving “Vulcan” a period of about twenty days, or a formula for heliocentric longitude at any time.
But he placed the time of best observation away up in 1877.
But even so, or considering that he still had probably a good many years to live, it may strike one that he was a little rash—that is if one has not gone very deep into the study of hypnoses—that, having “discovered” Neptune by a method which, in our acceptance, had no more to recommend it than had once equally well-thought-of methods of witch-finding, he should not have taken such chances: that if he was right as to Neptune, but should be wrong as to “Vulcan,” his average would be away below that of most fortune-tellers, who could scarcely hope to do business upon a fifty percent, basis—all that the reasoning of a tyro in hypnoses.
The date: March 22, 1877.
The scientific world was up on its hind legs nosing the sky. The thing had been done so authoritatively. Never a pope had said a thing with more of the seeming of finality. If six observations correlated, what more could be asked? The Editor of
Nature,
a week before the predicted event, though cautious, said that it is difficult to explain how six observers, unknown to one another, could have data that could be formulated, if they were not related phenomena.
In a way, at this point occurs the crisis of our whole book.
Formulas are against us.
But can astronomic formulas, backed up by observations in agreement, taken many years apart, calculated by a Leverrier, be as meaningless, in a positive sense, as all other quasi-things that we have encountered so far?
The preparations they made, before March 22, 1877. In England, the Astronomer Royal made it the expectation of his life: notified observers at Madras, Melbourne, Sydney, and New Zealand, and arranged with observers in Chili and the United States. M. Struve had prepared for observations in Siberia and Japan—
