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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
ASTRONOMY.
And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a
street's been torn up.
There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in
the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire
somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs --
The watchman and his one little system.
Ethics.
And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very
"select" seminary.
Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness,
murder --
Excluded.
The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the
single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have
illusion of this state -- but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a
drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by the
negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is
to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance,
it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening
consciousness of a real existence.
But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance
to efforts to realize or to become real -- because it is feeling that realness has
been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the attitude of the
sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of acceptance;
to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over, amounts to
paltriness and puerility, of scientific dogmas and standards. Or, if several
persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion
that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the
others.
So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system --
But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped
worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks;
worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in
hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like
the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions
made of iron and steel --
Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke
and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel -- but the masses of iron that
have fallen upon this earth.
Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions --
Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an
expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of
iron, but of steel, have fallen upon this earth --
But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of
a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?
Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost
impenetrable density.
Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of
his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.
The greatest of mysteries:
Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?
Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so
seriously the notion -- that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral
reasons that they stay away -- but even so, there must be some degraded ones among
them.
Or physical reasons:
When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading
ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world
would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others
that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which
approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular
supposition.
But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting.
Bugs and germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are
too interesting.
Dangers of near approach -- nevertheless our own ships that dare
not venture close onto a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore --
Why not diplomatic relations established between the United
States and Cyclorea -- which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a
remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent
here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and
to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes
made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African
chief to some one's old silk hat from New York or London?
The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems
immediately acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of all
problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and painfully
conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for answers -- using such words
as "obvious" and "solution" conventionally --
Or:
Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese,
cattle?
Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen
that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of
compensation?
I think we're property.
I should say we belong to something:
That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that
other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for
possession, but that now it's owned by something:
That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.
Nothing in our own times -- perhaps -- because I am thinking of
certain notes I have -- has ever appeared upon this earth, from somewhere else, so
openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as Hudson sailed up his river.
But as to surreptitious visits to this earth, in recent times, or as to
emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every
indication of intent to evade or avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our
data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.
But, in this vast subject, I shall have to do considerable
neglecting or disregarding, myself. I don't see how I can, in this book, take up
all the subject of possible use of humanity to some other mode of existence, or
the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth something.
Pigs, geese, cattle.
First find out they are owned.
Then find out the whyness of it.
I suspect that, after all, we're useful -- that among contesting
claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to
us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more
primitive, owners of us -- all others warned off -- that all this has been known,
perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of
which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or
overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere
else -- in our mysterious usefulness.
But I accept that, in the past, before proprietorship was
established, inhabitants of a host of other worlds have -- dropped here, hopped
here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored -- walked here, for all I know -- been pulled
here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited
occasionally, have visited periodically for hunting, trading, replenishing
harems, mining: have been unable to stay here, have established colonies here,
have been lost here; far-advanced peoples, or things, and primitive peoples or
whatever they were: white ones, black ones, yellow ones --
I have a very convincing datum that the ancient Britons were
blue ones.
Of course we are told by conventional anthropologists that
they only painted themselves blue, but in our own advanced anthropology, they
were veritable blue ones--
Annals of Philosophy, 14-51:
Note of a blue child born in England. [Note: see Rh-Negative
file -- Webmaster]
That's atavism.
Giants and fairies. We accept them, of course. Or, if we pride
ourselves upon being awfully far-advanced, I don't know how to sustain our
conceit except by very largely going far back. Science of to-day -- the
superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow -- the superstition of to-day.
Notice of a stone ax, 17 inches long: 9 inches across broad
end, (Proc. Soc. Ants. of Scotland, 1-9-184).
American Antiquarian, 18-60:
Copper ax from an Ohio mound: 22 inches long; weight 38
pounds.
American Anthropologist, n.s.,
8-229:
Stone ax found at Birchwood, Wisconsin -- exhibited in the
collection of the Missouri Historical Society -- found with "the pointed
end" embedded in the soil -- for all I know, may have dropped there -- 28
inches long, 14 wide, 11 thick -- weight over 300 pounds.
Of the footprints, in sandstone, near Carson, Nevada --
each
print 18 to 20 inches long. (Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-26-139.)
These footprints are very clear and well-defined: reproduction
of them in the Journal -- but they assimilate with the System, like sour
apples to other systems: so Prof. Marsh, a loyal and unscrupulous systematist,
argues:
"The size of these footprints and specially the width
between the right and left series are strong evidence that they were not made by
men, as has been so generally supposed."
So these excluders. Stranglers of Minerva. Desperadoes of
disregard. Above all, or below all, the anthropologists. I'm inspired with a new
insult -- some one offends me: I wish to express almost absolute contempt for
him -- he's a systematistic anthropologist. Simply to read something of this kind
is not so impressive as to see for one's self: if any one will take the trouble
to look up these footprints, as pictured in the Journal, he will either
agree with Prof. Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as
profoundly enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval
monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, or of the
spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, upon us of the more
nearly real:
That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic
footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.
We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of
course -- Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we shall have
to admit that there are remains of many tremendous habitations of giants upon
this earth, and that their appearances here were more than casual -- but their
bones -- or the absence of their bones --
Except -- that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my
disposition may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History, dark
cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils -- or old bones that have been
found upon this earth -- gigantic things -- that have been reconstructed into
terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs -- but my uncheerfulness --
The dodo did it.
On one of the floors below the fossils, they have
reconstructed dodo. It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such -- but it's been
reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly--
Fairies.
"Fairy crosses."
Harper's Weekly, 50-715:
That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny
Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses
have been found.
A race of tiny beings.
They crucified cockroaches.
Exquisite beings -- but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their
diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified.
The "fairy crosses," we are told in Harper's
Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is
said, in the Scientific American, 79-395, that some of them are no
larger than the head of a pin.
They have been found in two other states, but all in Virginia
are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain.
We are reminded of the Chinese seals in Ireland.
I suppose they fell there.
Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This
time we are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead,
but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real, sensibilities
will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to explain the
"fairy crosses." Their response was the usual tropism -- "Geologists say they are crystals." The writer in Harper's
Weekly points out that this "hold up," or this anæsthetic, if
theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage pangs of the unexplained,
fails to account for the localized distributions of these objects -- which make me
think of both aggregation and separation at the bottom of the sea, if from a
wrecked ship, similar objects should fall in large numbers but at different
times.
But some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese.
Conceivably there might be a mineral that would have a
diversity of geometric forms, at the same time restricted to the expression of
the cross, because snowflakes, for instance, have diversity but restriction to
the hexagon, but the guilty geologists, cold-blooded as astronomers and chemists
and all the other deep-sea fishes -- though less profoundly of the pseudo-saved
than the wretched anthropologists -- disregarded the very datum -- that it was wise
to disregard:
That the "fairy crosses" are not all made of the
same material.
It's the same old disregard, or it's the same old
psycho-tropism, or process of assimilation. Crystals are geometric forms.
Crystals are included in the System. So then "fairy crosses" are
crystals. But that different minerals should, in a few different regions, be
inspired to turn into different forms of the cross -- is the kind of resistance
that we call less nearly real than our own acceptances.
We now come to some "cursed" little things that are
of the "lost," but for the "salvation" of which scientific
missionaries have done their damdest.
"Pigmy flints."
They can't very well be denied.
They're lost and well known.
"Pigmy flints" are tiny, prehistoric implements.
Some of them are a quarter of an inch in size. England, India, France, South
Africa -- they've been found in many parts of the world -- whether showered there or
not. They belong high up in the froth of the accursed: they are not denied, and
they have not been disregarded; there is an abundant literature upon this
subject. One attempt to rationalize them, or assimilate them, or take them into
the scientific fold, has been the notion that they were toys of prehistoric
children. It sounds reasonable. But, of course, by the reasonable we mean that
for which the equally reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out -- except
that we modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some
phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others. Against
the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where "pigmy
flints" are found, all flints are pigmies -- at least so in India, where,
when larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations
by strata. (Wilson.)
The datum that, just at present, leads me to accept that these
flints were made by beings about the size of pickles, is a point brought out by
Prof. Wilson (Rept. National Museum, 1892-455):
Not only that the flints are tiny but that the chipping upon
them is "minute."
Struggle for expression, in the mind of a 19th-century-ite, of
an idea that did not belong to his era:
In Science Gossip, 1896-36, R. A. Gatty says:
"So fine is the chipping that to see the workmanship a
magnifying glass is necessary."
I think that would be absolutely convincing, if there were
anything -- absolutely anything -- either that tiny beings, from pickle to cucumber
stature made these things, or that ordinary savages made them under magnifying
glasses.
The idea that we are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is
rather intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I admit --
or boast -- but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our own method is the
scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we think of the
inhabitants of Elvera --
By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant's world:
Monstrator.
Spindle-shaped world -- about 100,000 miles along its major
axis -- more details to be published later.
But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the
inhabitants of Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as
clouds of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions -- for mice, I should say: for
bees, very likely -- or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the
heathen -- horrified with any one who would gorge himself with more than a bean at
a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dew drop at
a time -- hordes to tiny missionaries, determined that right should prevail,
determining right by their own minutenesses.
They must have been missionaries.
Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.
The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own
little world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the
exquisite to the enormous -- gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal -- half a dozen
of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook -- torn away in a mighty
torrent --
Or never anything but conventional, we adopt from Darwin:
"The geological records are incomplete."
Their flints would survive, but, as to their fragile
bodies -- one might as well search for prehistoric frost-traceries. A little
whirlwind -- Elverean carried away a hundred yards -- body never found by his
companions. They'd mourn for the departed. Conventional emotion to have: they'd
mourn. There'd have to be a funeral: there's no getting away from funerals. So I
adopt an explanation that I take from the anthropologists: burial in effigy.
Perhaps the Elvereans would not come to this earth again until many years later
-- another distressing occurrence -- one little mausoleum for all burials in
effigy.
London Times, July 20, 1836:
That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for
rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat.
In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they
pulled out.
Little cave.
Seventeen tiny coffins.
Three or four inches long.
In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were
dressed differently both in style and material. There were two tiers of eight
coffins each, and a third tier begun, with one coffin.
The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery
here:
That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little
cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite
decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of
age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent-looking.
In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of
Scotland, 3-12-460, there is a full account of this find. Three of the
coffins and three of the figures are pictured.
So Elvera with its downy forests and its microscopic oyster
shells -- and if the Elvereans be not very far-advanced, they take baths -- with
sponges the size of pin-heads --
Or that catastrophes have occurred: that fragments of Elvera
have fallen to this earth:
In Popular Science, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing
of the corals and sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr. Hahn had asserted
that he had found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that
their "notable peculiarity" is their "extreme smallness."
The corals, for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial
corals. "They represent a veritable pigmy animal kingdom," says
Bingham.
The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I
think, at the time of their occasional visits to this earth -- though, of course,
in a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of anything
may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and detectives and
jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal Astronomical Society
recognize this indeterminateness, but have the delusion that in the method of
agreement there is final, or real evidence. The method is good enough for an
"existence" that is only semi-real, but also it is the method of
reasoning by which witches were burned, and by which ghosts have been feared.
I'd not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think
that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition.
But stories of them have been supported by astonishing fabrications of details
and of different accounts in agreement.
So, if a giant left impressions of his bare feet in the
ground, that is not to say that he was a primitive -- bulk of culture out taking
the Kneipp cure. So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric
construction, the inattention to details by its builders -- signifies anything you
please -- ambitious dwarfs or giants -- if giants, that they were little more than
cave men, or that they were post-impressionist architects from a very
far-advanced civilization.
If there are other worlds, there are tutelary worlds --
or that
Kepler, for instance, could not have been absolutely wrong: that his notion of
an angel assigned to push along and guide each planet may not be very
acceptable, but that, abstractedly, or in the notion of a tutelary relation, we
may find acceptance.
Only to be is to be tutelary.
Our general expression:
That "everything" in Intermediateness is not a
thing, but is an endeavor to become something -- by breaking away from its
continuity, or merging away, with all other phenomena -- is an attempt to break
away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute -- if it
have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:
That to this process there are two aspects:
Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all
other things -- if it have not given in or subordinated to -- or have not been
assimilated by -- some higher attempted system, unity, organization, entity,
harmony, equilibrium --
And repulsion, or the attempt of everything to exclude or
disregard the unassimilable.
Universality of the process:
Anything conceivable:
A tree. It is doing all it can to assimilate substances of the
soil and substances of the air, and sunshine, too, into tree-substance:
obversely it is rejecting or excluding or disregarding that which it cannot
assimilate.
Cow grazing, pig rooting, tiger stalking: planets trying, or
acting, to capture comets; rag pickers and the Christian religion, and a cat
down headfirst in a garbage can; nations fighting for more territory, sciences
correlating the data they can, trust magnates organizing, chorus girl out for a
little late supper -- all of them stopped somewhere by the unassimilable. Chorus
girl and the broiled lobster. If she eats not shell and all she represents
universal failure to positivize. Also, if she does she represents universal
failure to positivize: her ensuing disorders will translate her to the Negative
Absolute.
Or Science and some of our cursed hard-shelled data.
One speaks of the tutelarian as if it were something distinct
in itself. So one speaks of a tree, a saint, a barrel of pork, the Rocky
Mountains. One speaks of missionaries, as if they were positively different, or
had an identity of their own, or were a species by themselves. To the
Intermediatist, everything that seems to have identity is only attempted
identity, and every species is continuous with all other species, or that which
is called the specific is only emphasis upon some aspect of the general. If
there are cats, they're only emphasis upon universal felinity. There is nothing
that does not partake of that of which the missionary, or the tutelary, is the
special. Every conversation is a conflict of missionaries, each trying to
convert the other, to assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself. If no
progress be made, mutual repulsion will follow.
If other worlds have ever in the past had relations with this
earth, they were attempted positivizations: to extend themselves, by colonies,
upon this earth; to convert, or assimilate, indigenous inhabitants of this
earth.
Or parent-worlds and their colonies here --
Super-Romanimus --
Or where the first Romans came from.
It's as good as the Romulus and Remus story.
Super-Israelimus --
Or that, despite modern reasoning upon this subject, there was
once something that was super-parental to tutelary to early orientals.
Azuria, which was tutelary to the early Britons:
Azuria, whence came the blue Britons, whose descendants
gradually diluting, like blueing in a wash-tub, where a faucet's turned on, have
been most emphasized of sub-tutelarians, or assimilators ever since.
World that were once tutelarian worlds -- before this earth
became sole property of one of them -- their attempts to convert or assimilate
-- but then the state that comes to all things in their missionary-frustrations
-- unacceptance by all stomachs of some things; rejection
by all societies of some units; glaciers that sort over and cast out stones --
Repulsion. Wrath of the baffled missionary. There is not other
wrath. All repulsion is reaction to the unassimilable.
So then the wrath of Azuria --
Because surrounding peoples of this earth would not assimilate
with her own colonists in the part of the earth that we now call England.
I don't know that there has ever been more nearly just,
reasonable, or logical wrath, in this earth's history -- if there is no other
wrath.
The wrath of Azuria, because the other peoples of this earth
would not turn blue to suit her.
History is a department of human delusion that interests us.
We are able to give a little advancement to history. In the vitrified forts of a
few parts of Europe, we find data that the Humes and Gibbons have disregarded.
The vitrified forts surrounding England, but not in England.
The vitrified forts of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and
Bohemia.
Or that, once upon a time, with electric blasts, Azuria tried
to swipe this earth clear of the peoples who resisted her.
The vast blue bulk of Azuria appeared in the sky. Clouds
turned green. The sun was formless and purple in the vibrations of wrath that
were emanating from Azuria. The whitish, or yellowish, or brownish peoples of
Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia fled to hill tops and built forts. In a
real existence, hill tops, or easiest accessibility to an aerial enemy, would be
the last choice in refuges. But here, in quasi-existence, if we're accustomed to
run to hill tops, in times of danger, we run to them just the same, even with
danger closest to hill tops. Very common in quasi-existence: attempt to escape
by running closer to the pursuing.
They built forts, or already had forts, on hill tops.
Something poured electricity upon them.
The stones of these forts exist to this day, vitrified, or
melted and turned to glass.
The archæologists have jumped from one conclusion to another,
like the "rapid chamois" we read of a while ago, to account for
vitrified forts, always restricted by the commandment that unless their
conclusions conformed to such tenets as Exclusionism, of the System, they would
be excommunicated. So archæologists, in their medieval dread of
excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of terrestrial
experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old assimilating of all
that could be assimilated, and disregard the unassimilable, conventionalizing
into the explanation that vitrified forts were made by prehistoric peoples who
built vast fires -- often remote from wood-supply -- to melt externally, and to
cement together, the stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so
within itself a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. So
Miss Russel, in the Journal of the B. A. A., has pointed out that it is
seldom that single stones, to say nothing of long walls, of large houses that
are burned to the ground, are vitrified.
If we pay a little attention to this subject, before starting
to write upon it, which is one of the ways of being more nearly real than
oppositions so far encountered by us, we find:
That the stones of these forts are vitrified in no reference
to cementing them: that they are cemented here and there, in streaks, as if
special blasts had struck, or played, upon them.
Then one thinks of lightning?
Once upon a time something melted, in streaks, the stones of
forts on the tops of hills in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.
Lightning selects the isolated and conspicuous.
But some of the vitrified forts are not upon tops of hills:
some are very inconspicuous: their walls too are vitrified in streaks.
Something once had effect, similar to lightning, upon forts,
mostly on hills, in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.
But upon hills, all over the rest of the world, are remains of
forts that are not vitrified.
There is only one crime, in the local sense, and that is not
to turn blue, if the gods are blue: but, in the universal sense, the one crime
is not to turn the gods themselves green, if you're green.
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
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