Disposable Lit Reviews

Ace, 1919/1941
287 pp.

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Very few people ever achieve the historic honor of having their names become adjectives. Charles Fort did it almost entirely on the basis of this one book, a compendium of physical anomalies which defied the explanations of the scientific orthodoxies of the time. Orthodoxies come and go, of course, and Fort hoped that his book would help expand the boundaries of the newer orthodoxies so that they could accommodate the anomalous accounts he had dredged up from newspapers and journals the world over. In his parlance (and Fort, untrained in most sciences, loved to make his own terms when he needed them), the “damned” are those phenomena which, because they do not lend themselves to explanation under the terms of current scientific understanding, are excluded and ignored by the practitioners of said sciences, rather than accepted as evidence that the current understanding may not be whole. In practical terms, this usually means things that have fallen from the sky.

Some see it as an absurd reduction to refer to Charles Fort as the man who wrote about “rains of fishes and such,” but anomalous objects falling to earth are really the centerpiece of his research. Fort does not pretend to treat the breadth of the “paranormal,” a term which came into vogue only long after; psychic and spiritual phenomena are beyond his scope, as is cryptozoology except by the broadest of definitions. His researches intersect with and inform modern UFOlogy, which of course did not start its talk of flying saucers and “little green men” for another three decades after the publication of this book. The alternatives to normalcy which are the pop-cultural inheritance of the X-Files generation simply didn’t exist in Fort’s time, nor did he consider himself the former of new orthodoxies from the scientific heresies he tabulates. In his terms, each era of discovery is dominated by a newer and better “dominant” (what we would call a “paradigm”), each coming closer to a philosophy which he called “positivism,” a state in which all truths are contiguous and whole. Our current perception, alas, is only “intermediate,” with most of our stated “truths” containing some admixture of falsehood, and most of our falsehoods containing some kernal of truth, to such a degree that no dogmatic statement is ever decisively factual. And his main demonstration of that “intermediate” character comes in challenging the scientific understanding of the world with things that fall from the sky.

Fish. Frogs. Blood and flesh. Red dust. Industrial ash. Huge chunks of ice. Hailstones with dozens of separate layers. Bits of worked metal. Stones. Most such accounts are dismissed by contemporary authority either as mistaken in their original observation, or through the arbitrary presumption of convenient whirlwinds or other terrestrial phenomena which, were they they real culprit, would be particular enough in their functioning as to still constitute a natural wonder. (Why would a whirlwind pick up ONLY frogs to deposit during a rainstorm — with no other flora or fauna included? And why would it recur, dropping frogs in the same location two days apart?)

In combating absolute declarations, Fort works hard to avoid absolutes of his own; though he puts out alternative explanations, he usually calls them “acceptances,” accepting such explanations only provisionally until better ones come along. And that’s fortunate, because while the “dominants” successive to his own time are no better for accommodating his anomalous data, they have more certainly cut off the plausibility of his own acceptances. There is no “Super-Sargasso Sea,” an area in the distant atmosphere where things carried skyward remain for months or even years before falling earthward. There are no huge airborne sheets of ice, balanced on the edge of Earth’s gravity until a meteor or some other body knocks a section loose. There are no aerial ponds, couched within a gelatinous material which sometimes leaks and lets schools of young fish all the same age plummet to precise terrestrial locations. The placeholder explanations which Fort advanced seem almost to lack imagination to a readership which can conceive of things like time travel or rifts in the fabric of spacetime. Forts’ cataloged anomalies are more anomalous than he imagined, as the “acceptances” he advanced have been ruled out by further exploration.

The book is a dense one; Charles Fort does not go out of his way to be reader-friendly, and instead writes like a man in a dead heat to get all of his information into one document, and thus willing often to forgo niceties of grammar and syntax; whole pages at a time are nothing but sentence fragments, or in some cases, a single sentence fragment. Fort’s prose reminds me of nothing so much as the examples I’ve read of Richard Shaver, the “underground robots are beaming my brain” kook, who likewise often seemed as if he were trying to force a bowling ball of concept through the garden hose of human vocabulary.

And then there are those moments when Fort’s steady stream of names, dates, and pertinent facts breaks down, and suddenly the immensity of the worldview he’s trying to convey as he constructs it forces him into something like haunting proto-beat poetry:

Vast and black. The thing that was poised, like a crow over the moon.

Round and smooth. Cannon balls. Things that have fallen from the sky to this earth.

Our slippery brains.

Things like cannon balls have fallen, in storms, upon this earth. Like cannon balls are things that, in storms, have fallen to this earth.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood.

The Book of the Damned is an artifact, not only of mysteries which have largely remained unexplained and unexamined by the “new dominant,” but also of a time when even the alternative explanations or hypotheses provisionally put forward seem in retrospect to be quaint and tied to unexamined ideas about technology, the possibility of travelers from the stars, and the remarkable non-alienness of any postulated aliens. Fort never understood the immense distances that comprise “outer space,” and the emptiness between small points of rock and fire; he postulated alien fly-bys, but placed them in coal-powered vessels to explain unaccountable falls of ash and soot. His attempts to provide plausible explanations which are almost embarrassing in hindsight lends credence to one of his oft-repeated metaphors: We are deep-sea fish, staring upwards through the murk, seeing the occasional ship’s hull and examining the rare object or substance dumped overboard, examining fragmentary evidence without sufficient context even to hazard a defensible guess. A “dominant” paradigm which encompasses Fort’s amassed “damned” evidence has now to be a greater break from previous worldviews than Fort ever guessed.

“Here are the data.

“Make what you will, yourself, of them.”