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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
SHORT chapter coming now, and it's the worst of them all. I
think it's speculative. It's a lapse from our usual pseudo-standards. I think it
must mean that the preceding chapter was very efficiently done, and that now by
the rhythm of all quasi-things -- which can't be real things, if they're rhythms,
because a rhythm is an appearance that turns into its own opposite and then back
again -- but now, to pay up, we're what we weren't. Short chapter, and I think
we'll fill in with several points in Intermediatism.
A puzzle:
If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute,
the Positive Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining itself,
via a third state, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that we're trying to
conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Universalness from Nothingness.
Take that up yourself, if you're willing to run the risk of disappearing with
such velocity that you'll leave an incandescent train behind, and risk being
infinitely happy forever, whereas you probably don't want to be happy -- I'll
sidestep that myself, and try to be intelligible by regarding the Positive
Absolute from the aspect of Realness instead of Universalness, recalling that by
both Realness and Universalness we mean the same state, or that which does not
merge away into something else, because there is nothing else. So the idea is
that out of Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of
Universalness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness. Just
so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that materialize into
machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or books in paper and ink are
graduations from unrealness to realness -- in relative terms. It would seem then
that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the
Negative Absolute. But the absolute cannot be the related -- of course a
confession that we can't really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit
to the unlimited. Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that
we can't do worse than has been done by metaphysicians [202/203] in the past, we
accept that the absolute can't be the related. So then that our quasi-state is
not a real relation, if nothing in it is real. On the other hand, it is not an
unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal. It seems thinkable that the
Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or
be only quasi-related, or be unrelated, in final terms, or at least, not be the
related, in final terms.
As to free will and Intermediatism -- same answer as to
everything else. By free will we mean Independence -- or that which does not merge
away into something else -- so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor
slave-will -- but a different approximation for every so-called person toward one
or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing this seems to me
to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical:
that we're free to do what we have to do.
I am not convinced that we make a fetich of the preposterous.
I think our feeling is that in first groupings there's no knowing what will
afterward be acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that
grow on trees, he should record that he heard of birds that grow on trees: then
let sorting over of data occur afterward. The one thing that we try to tone
down, but that is to a great degree unavoidable is having our data all mixed up
like Long Island and Florida in the minds of early American explorers. My own
notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which
the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of
Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication with this
earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this earth. Whether that
world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus -- must be the subject of later
inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve up everything now and leave
nothing to our disciples.
I have been very much struck with phenomena of "cup
marks."
They look to me like symbols of communication.
But they do not look to me like means of communication between
some of the inhabitants of this earth and other inhabitants of this earth.
My own impression is that some external force has marked, with
symbols, rocks of this earth, from far away.
I do not think that cup marks are inscribed communications
among different inhabitants of this earth, because it seems too unacceptable
that inhabitants of China, Scotland, and America should all have conceived of
the same system.
Cup marks are strings of cup-like impressions in rocks.
Sometimes there are rings around them, and sometimes they have only
semi-circles. Great Britain, America, France, Algeria, Circassia, Palestine:
they're virtually everywhere -- except in the far north, I think. In China, cliffs
are dotted with them. Upon a cliff near Lake Como, there is a maze of these
markings. In Italy and Spain and India they occur in enormous numbers.
Given that a force, say like electric force, could, from a
distance, mark such a substance as rocks, as, from a distance of hundreds of
miles, selenium can be marked by telephotographers -- but I am of two minds--
The Lost Explorers from Somewhere, and an attempt, from
Somewhere, to communicate with them: so a frenzy of showering of messages toward
this earth, in the hope that some of them would mark rocks near the lost
explorers--
Or that somewhere upon this earth, there is an especial rocky
surface, or receptor, or polar construction, or a steep, conical hill, upon
which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that at
times messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from the
receptor;
That perhaps forces behind the history of this earth have left
upon these rocks of Palestine and England and India and China records that may
some day be deciphered, of their misdirected instructions to certain esoteric
ones -- Order of the Freemasons -- the Jesuits--
I emphasize the row-formation of cup marks:
Prof. Douglas (Saturday Review, Nov. 24, 1883):
"Whatever may have been their motive, the cup-markers
showed a decided liking for arranging their sculpturing in regularly spaced
rows."
That cup marks are an archaic form of inscription was first
suggested by Canon Greenwell many years ago. But more specifically adumbratory
to our own expression are the observations of Rivett-Carnac (Jour. Roy.
Asiatic Soc., 1903-515):
That the Braille system of raised dots is an inverted
arrangement of cup marks: also that there are strong resemblances to Morse code.
But no tame and systematized archaeologist can do more than casually point out
resemblances, and merely suggest that strings of cup marks look like messages,
because -- China, Switzerland, Algeria, America -- if messages they be, there seems
to be no escape from attributing one origin to them -- then, if messages they be,
I accept one external origin, to which the whole surface of this earth was
accessible, for them.
Something else that we emphasize:
That rows of cup marks have often been likened to foot prints.
But, in this similitude, their uni-linear arrangement must be
disregarded -- of course often they're mixed up in every way, but arrangement in
single lines is very common. It is odd that they should so often be likened to
footprints: I suppose there are exceptional cases, but unless it's something
that hops on one foot, or a cat going along a narrow fence-top, I don't think of
anything that makes footprints one directly ahead of another -- Cop, in a station,
walking along a chalk line, perhaps.
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Cup-marked
sandstone at Mauchline, Ayrshire |
Cup-marked
stone, Susa |
Upon the Witch's Stone, near Ratho, Scotland, there are
twenty-four cups, varying in size from one and a half to three inches in
diameter, arranged in approximately straight lines. Locally it is explained that
these are tracks of a dog's feet (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland, 2-4-79).
Similar marks are scattered bewilderingly all around the Witch's Stone -- like a
frenzy of telegraphing, or like messages repeating and repeating, trying to
localize differently.
In Inverness-shire, cup marks are called "fairies'
footmarks." At Valna's church, Norway, and St. Peter's, Ambleteuse, there
are such marks, said to be horses' hoofprints. The rocks of Clare, Ireland, are
marked with prints supposed to have been made by a mythical cow
("Folklore," 21-184).
We now have such a ghost of a thing that I'd not like to be
interpreted as offering it as a datum: it simply illustrates what I mean by the
notion of symbols, like cups, or like footprints, which, if like those of horses
or cows, are the reverse of, or the negatives of, cups -- of symbols that are
regularly received somewhere upon this earth -- steep, conical hill, somewhere, I
think -- but that have often alighted in wrong places -- considerably to the
mystification of persons waking up some morning to find them upon formerly blank
spaces.
An ancient record -- still worse, an ancient Chinese
record -- of
a courtyard of a palace -- dwellers of the palace waking up one morning, finding
the courtyard marked with tracks like the footprints of an ox -- supposed that the
devil did it. (Notes and Queries, 9-6-225.)
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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