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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By Charles Fort
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
MY own pseudo-conclusion:
That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great
scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves; that
little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of
water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have
anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns,
underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances,
presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or
fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've
been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with
pseudo-life derived from conveniences.
Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit
they're the accursed.
If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a
jury of dream-phantasms.
Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It
is considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be accounted
for in any way other than that they fell from the sky -- as if in the haze of
uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the essence of everything, or
in merging away of everything into something else, there could be anything that
could be accounted for in only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason
that if something can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in
that way -- or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but, of
course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in quasi-existence. In our
acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are, in our "existence,"
premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awareness of surroundings in
the mind of a dreamer.
Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of
"true meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem
incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that
the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity all
day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn that some of
the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a
field" -- "found in making a road" -- "turned up by the
plow" occurs a dozen times. Someone fishing in Lake Okechobee, brought up
an object in his fishing net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it.
The U.S. National Museum accepts it.
If we accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic
material" -- one instance of "carbonaceous" matter -- if it be too
difficult to utter the word "coal" -- we see that in this
inclusion-exclusion, as in every other means of forming an opinion, false
inclusion and false exclusion have |
