Re "the abyss":

for whatever use this may serve to those of you pondering these matters, and since
Gavin brought up Milton (a very superior linguist). In the KJV translation of the Bible (as good as any for this purpose), the statement is,"... and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the Deep." The term "hovered" is descriptive of the picture of the mother hen covering her brood of eggs or newly hatched chicks - this causes a diminutive of the next image -- the Deep, which is the Hebrew word "tim-" derived from Babylonian "Tiamat", a goddess of Chaos and a great dragon, who slain and hewn into many pieces forms the matter of creation (common mythological theme) - All of which implies absolute control on the part of the "brooder" (may be used instead of "Hovered") -- All of which was assembled by Priestly classes of redactors after the return from Babylon (circa 5th - 4th cent. BC). The second Creation story (Gen. 2, 2ff) is the familiar anthropomorphic myth of great antiquity using the wild desert deities' name "yahweh" - different character from Gen 1:1 (elohim).

drf

"Why shouldn't the Abyss be the dominant theme of my work?" (SLCAS, p. 25) One thing that occurs to me about the Abyss is that it is itself a paradox: it is a Something that is literally a Nothing, like the number Zero. I think that this probably appealed greatly to CAS. The late Carl Buchanan wrote a nice explication on "Ode to the Abyss" which will appear in FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS.

Best,
Scott

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Why shouldn't the Abyss be the dominant theme of
> my work?" (SLCAS, p. 25) One thing that occurs
> to me about the Abyss is that it is itself a
> paradox: it is a Something that is literally a
> Nothing, like the number Zero.

I'm sure CAS new some version of the below -no abyss with out (insert antonym here)

Quote:

When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.

Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.

-- Tao Te Ching

I wrote the following story awhile ago. Part of the plot deals with the idea of God "outsourcing" his creative functions to 'the abyss', in much the same way that a modern corporation outsources jobs to a foreign country, --although this idea does tend to get rather obscured in the welter of other ideas with which I built up the plot.

The style of my writing in this story may come off sounding kind of flippant and coy, but this was not my intention. Rather, at the time I wrote it I had been reading a great deal of pulp and mystery authors, and, from their bland, almost mathematical style of writing, I had the idea that fictional narratives should be written like mathematical equations, --hence the dense, colorless style of the language, trying to crammed as many hypotheses into the story as possible, all to be "solved" at the end. Naturally, my ventures into 'Oulippo'-style mathematical writing did not go over well with any of the editors I submitted my stories too, although, as the folks at the magazine-format Weird Tales returned my story with a letter beginning 'Dear Karvin', as they did with three other stories I wrote, I can't think that they read my work too closely.

"The Paranormal Investigator"
by
Gavin Callaghan


James B. Hatrack III, amateur detective, leisurely reclined upon a gilded couch in his ornately appointed parlor, a dram of tea in a blue china cup balancing itself precariously on a flatly held marble palm. Possessed of the strange ability to adapt his posture to every curve and cushion of any object on which he sat, he looked so liquid that, at any moment, I feared he might simply slide off of the sofa and onto the floor, collapsing in a florid mess of purple silk, a blind and shapeless ectoplasm wearing a lavender coat, leisurely exploring every inch of its surroundings with the flat feelers of its arms. As this was the pose he would adopt before me whenever he would utter his most serious prognostications, pronouncements often of a bizarre and paradoxical nature which I would dutifully pretend to take down, such as "In the future, pants will make great strides", or "Opium will once again become the 'opiate of the masses'", I expected at any moment he would start in with yet another fantastic recital, but instead he just lay there, wrapped in the flaccid web of his own legs and arms, with no possible means of escape unless there should be some sudden and unexpected dissolution of the vital properties of his form.

I was informing him of the details of my latest acquisition, an original copy of Joachim Forz Ringelborg's De Ratione Studii in Latin, Hatrack infuriatingly nodding his lolling head like a broken marionette in time with the facts of my recital, drool from his wide slack mouth just staining the edge of his impeccable white collar as his lips brushed back and forth across the fabric at an impossible angle, as if his neck had been snapped beneath the weight of Atlas.

"Quite interesting, quite interesting," he enthused unconvincingly, in a way which showed he had far more interesting things upon his mind. "In fact," he began, "it reminds me of my latest case."

"'Latest case'?" I queried. "I was not aware of your having been retained by anybody."

"I haven't been," he returned, voluntarily restoring his muscle tone just long enough to crane forward and take a sip of tea. "It's a purely personal matter I've been working on."

"I see," I answered with a smile; it was just as I had thought. No one had yet hired the services of my friend, and I doubted whether anyone ever would, his pronounced stochastic extravagances consistently serving to hinder rather than to help all his investigatory endeavors. Even so, I could not wait to hear what he had to say next.

"That book you have there--," he said, lifting a limp hand just long enough to indicate my battered copy of Ringelborg's manic scholastic text. "Is it real?"

I laughed. "That is not a fair question to ask anybody," I warned Hatrack. "Especially me!"

"Oh, damn it all, Linton, --I know very well of your oft-expressed doubts concerning the fact of your own existence, but this has nothing to do with that. Is the book authentic? Was it actually printed, as you say, in 1650? Are the quarto pages made out of genuine paper? Is the spine genuine leather? Are the boards genuine vellum?"

"Why, yes, it would seem so, yes," I answered. "What is this all about?"

In a move which I could never have predicted, and which could not have hurt him any more than it hurt me, I suddenly saw my friend's body effortlessly straighten and rise, cleaving once again to the customary rigidity of its skeleton as he left off his overstuffed chair and walked with quick, silent military steps to a display case on the far wall, where a number of what I thought to be Dadaist-type ready-mades had been sitting. There were soda bottles, and scissors, and books, and appliances; there were clothes, and posters, and magazines, and newspapers, all gravely illuminated by a series of yellow lights behind doors of locked glass. I had been meaning to ask him the reason for this collection of apparent junk, especially given its obvious dissimilarity with the tone of neo-Decadent aestheticism prevailing throughout the rest of his apartment, but in my eagerness to inform him of my great acquisition the question had unfortunately slipped my mind, and I merely assumed that my friend had lately become interested somehow in making a study, given his own long-running interest in the metaphysics of art and beauty, into the phenomenological aspects of Pop Art and their relation to the categorical perceptions of reality.

Diligently, almost with awe, he took a key from an inside pocket and unlocked the cabinet, religiously selecting a book from the top shelf and then just as carefully shutting the door. Returning across the room, he quickly handed the book to me and then swiftly resumed his former portrait of lassitude in his divan, looking as limp as a scarecrow being assaulted by the wind, so that even his hair was blown back across the tapestried cushion as he fell.

In my hands I held a copy of the seventh printing of a hardcover edition of the latest diet method propounded by a popular female fitness guru. "No thanks, I'm trying to cut down," I said with a painful twinge, ready to set it aside after only a cursory glance. "Why did you want me to see this?"

I looked at Hatrack, but, whether his adynamia was real or feigned he was completely dead to the world. Poor man-- he had never ceased to bemoan, whenever he had got the chance, the damage that watching television had wrought upon his thought processes, damage which had prevented him from achieving his rightfully prominent place in the structure of society and which was never so glaringly evident than at such times as now.

I therefore returned my attention to the book, flipping through the pages with growing interest. There was indeed something strange about them, their appearance and their texture, a quality which also extended to the dust jacket and the boards; all had a strange, thick, plasticine quality, as if the entire book had been silk-screened or lithographed in some way onto some sort of a durable artificial polymer. A test copy of some sort, I thought at first, or perhaps an edition made for the use of Army men or astronauts to withstands the punishing environments of the battlefield or deep space. Then I saw that the apparent color photograph of the authoress wearing shiny black leotard on the cover was not a photograph at all, it had been drawn, while the whole entire type of the rest of the book had been written entirely by hand, reproducing the original in the most accurate and exquisite style, superfluously recreating a mass market diet book which was already easily available in every library and book store. While a work of art in every way, the whole book was nevertheless a fake. The amount of work which must have gone into its making was completely staggering.

It was then that I noticed the mark: a small seal stamped on the cover perpendicular to the spine, followed by a name which, although apparently written in Latin characters, was too garbled and strange to be read. The mark itself reminded me of an angel: two loops, like an infinity symbol, the large loop surmounted by a smaller one, the two small arms of an Orans curving upward from the intersection of the two loops, like the prayerful arc of an angel's wings. That the mark had nothing to do with any aspect of the publishing trade I felt quite sure, matching as it did none of the publishing companies or individual imprints with which I was familiar.

"What's going on here?" I wondered aloud.

Hatrack allowed himself a smile; as expected, I had fallen resolutely into his trap. "Ah, as ever, the back story is the thing," he said, raising his eyebrows without deigning to open his eyes.

I sighed. Always with him it was the back story that was the thing; like the time Hatrack had whispered into my ear, "Just a little back story you may not be aware of," during a TV commercial for Fabrese air-freshener, before launching into a weird history of the father and daughter shown in the ad, the scene in which the nubile daughter bends to smell her pink bedroom rug actually representing, according to Hatrack, with more than a trace of plausibility, the aftermath of what was in fact a long series of incestuous incidents between father and daughter, the daughter now smelling her room for traces of her father's xxxxx which had dripped out of her xxxx and onto the candy bright carpet.

"I happened upon the first of the 'replicas', which you currently hold in your hands, quite by accident," he now informed me. "Of course I at once noticed the rather Gaussian mark on it, and realized it had nothing to do with the product. And then one after another, by wildly improbable coincidence, they all fell into my grasp, as if the larger design of the universe were conspiring with the lesser designs of some unknown artist or group of artists in order to complete their work."

"So you have more of these…replicas….?" I exclaimed.

"The entire contents of that display case back there," he informed me. "All 'forgeries', ---if that is the correct word for them."

"But who would do this, and to what purpose?" I asked, astonished.

And here, Hatrack smiled, and, in a tabescent pantomime which by now revolted even me, fluttered his lash-long fingers in an invalitudinary approximation of a wave, and whispered, like one not long for the world, "Go and see for yourself."

And so it was that I proceeded across the chamber and saw that it was true, --the display case filled with objects which all closely resembled everyday consumer products but for slight and yet singular differences which could not be easily explained away, and on each item the same artist's symbol of the miniature angel along with the same unreadable Latin inscription. Lifting up a brand-new pair of regular household scissors, still in their cardboard packaging, I found the angel mark clearly stamped near the pivot of the bow-handled blade, the hard plastic shell of the packaging warping inward from the heat of my touch and still retaining the mark of my fingertips when I drew them away, as if it were organic and permeable in some way.

Hatrack both coughed and laughed and said, "The spectrometer readings say that those scissors not steel, but some sort of colored crystal. Toss them on the floor and they'll smash, though I'd assume they are still sharp enough to be used."

Then there was the portable radio, a black plastic Shintani model with all of the regular features of a mass-produced Japanese radio. Next to the forged trademark, however, I once again found the familiar figure-eight of the angel sign, stamped a bright white with a tiny "TM" etched right beside it. "What is this made from, licorice?" I asked, --for suddenly the gleaming black shell of the box reminded me of nothing other than something from the candy house of a wicked witch in a fairy tale, where the everyday objects of the workaday world were replaced with gingerbread walls, and wafer doors, and edible chairs, a place of dangerous similitudes and beauteous fantasies.

"You're not far off," Hatrack confirmed. "Some sort of spun sugar, though I wouldn't eat it if I were you. But you can break off a piece."

Turning to radio over and over in my hands, I then noticed a corner where, as often happens with plastic appliances, the manufacturer's shell had become cracked, losing several prominent shards, and so I snapped off and sniffed at a small piece, without, as I was advised, daring to eat it. It was a windup model, like the kind that campers use in the woods and which the military sometimes drops for propaganda purposes behind enemy lines, and despite the damage to the exterior I found that it still played perfectly, aside from some odd outbursts of occasional static, what Hatrack called cryptically "the music of the spheres."

"This is most improbable," I said, deploringly.

"It is nothing of the sort," Hatrack answered firmly from his couch. "It is Art."

Nor did the wonders cease there. There were movie posters and food products and video tapes and wine, fake trash and even fake Polaroid's with fake photographs inside, imitations of someone else's presumably real moments, likewise preserved in time. The fake palm pilot alone was a masterpiece of engineering, --the microscopic lines of its circuits, like writing on parchment, traced with some sort of conductive silver ink upon thin flakes of slate-like stone, the cybernetic illuminations from a computerized missal, which functioned just like an actual microchip. In a fundamental way, though, none of this surprised me, just as it did not surprise me that Hatrack would quietly work to amass a collection such as this, or that such objects would, during the course of his life, somehow find their way to him, these items being only as artificial as Hatrack was himself, --and everyone, I think, having a fondness for kindred things.

Turning Hatrack's magnifying glass from the inner circuits of the electronic organizer to the unidentifiable trademark on its exterior, I tried to read the name beside the sign, but could not succeed in making heads or tails of it:
"H FDiDF"

"But what can these words mean?" I asked, exasperated.

"It is a well known fact that carven letters, of Latin origin, have been found engraved upon prehistoric tablets uncovered throughout the whole of America and all over Europe. See Charles Hoy Fort's The Book of the Damned, the seventh printing of the 1959 collected edition, pages 156-159," Hatrack quoted, infuriatingly tasking his impeccable memory. "I believe that the signature upon these 'replicas' is written in the same pre-Latin alphabet."

"So, what of it?" I asked.

"Don't you see?" he asked, suddenly sitting up and clenching his fist in a way which dispelled any doubts that his former weakness was anything but a weird pantomime engaged in purely for my own perceived benefit. "Those prehistoric stone tablets with Latin characters predated the Latin language itself, and therefore were copied before the fact. In the same way, I think that all of these fakes in my display case are ancient. The diet book, the stethoscope, the palm pilot, all of them are approximations, made millennia ago, of objects which are now in use today. I may have found that fake diet book in the exercise section of the Barnes & Noble bookstore, but it had worked its way to the surface strata of reality just as well as any fossil or relic exposed by the slow weathering of rain or wind, surfacing within the popular consciousness like the gradual revelation of a post-hypnotic plan."

"My God, Hatrack, what are you suggesting?"

"Have I never shown you my 'space templates'?" he inquired, setting down his by now empty cup of tea. "I've been working on them on and off for several years now, in these notebooks, here; topographical representations of trans-dimensional shapes to be used as new layouts for spatial reality, --experimental templates, in other words, for new shapes into which space can be poured or translated into, or which can themselves be inserted, self-contained, into space itself without disturbing the larger reality around them. Like molds, if you will."

Hatrack opened one of the black sketchbooks on the low table beside his divan, revealing a series of twisting diagrams of unfamiliar hyper-dimensional forms, along with the mathematical formulae needed to create them. "These drawings are only the visible portions of the equations," Hatrack informed me; "how they look after they are translated into visual shapes. It's the same principal the alchemists used with their curiously-shaped alembics, athanors, and tubes, and their ritual of distilling and heating their elemental powders over and over again, performing the same processes for over a decade or more, --slowly changing the subatomic relation between matter, mass, and the space these elements occupied through time, stretching and bending the very bonds of their atoms as well as their bonds with surrounding space. It was an art, Linton, what they called the Great Work, --an endless repetitive ritual spanning the decades, and linking their lives with the very elements whose shapes and properties they were transforming, so that the life of the Alchemist mirrored the life of the universe, the path between birth and death the same as that between matter's creation and ultimate apocalypse."

"I'm not quite sure I follow you," I said.

"What I'm saying is that it's possible to mold space, like the alchemists did, into new shapes, --shapes like these space-templates in my sketchbook here, shapes which have special, --one might almost say occult--, significance. Nikola Tesla once said, and I quote, that the globe shape on top of his Wardenclyffe Electrical Tower in Colorado Springs was 'only the carrying out of a discovery I made that any amount of electricity within reason could be stored provided you make it of a certain shape. Electricians today do not appreciate that yet. But that small construction enabled me to produce with this small plant many times the effect that could be produced by an ordinary plant of a hundred times the size.'

"It is this unexplored feature of space which allows storm clouds to form tornados, to create temperatures of millions and sometimes even billions of degrees in the atmosphere, and even, on occasion, to break through into extra-dimensional space using a plasma-fusion process very similar to that of collapsing black holes in space, resulting in such phenomena as 'ball lightning' and 'storm meteorites', ---carved stones which are sometimes shot to Earth during lightning storms with pre-Latin letters engraved upon them. The Navy's current experiments using collapsing bubbles to create fusion reactions utilize a similar process, creating temperatures in the laboratory as hot as those in the core of a star, and in time it should be possible to use the spatial templates I have designed to create miniature plasma matrices, machines as small as an atom which will use a 'twist in space' to generate a huge amount of fusion energy, opening portals to black holes, temporal wormholes, or other dimensions.

"In the same way, then," he went on, "I believe these 'found objects' in my display case are likewise 'templates', of a sort, --prehistoric extra-dimensional works of art from a world or artisan whose artworks work to prefigure our own. Perhaps they act like seeds, planting certain forms or ideas within our reality, sowing the probable course that events will take, radiating on the quantum level, like an atomic particle, in order to affect future outcomes and probabilities. In a way, they may be leftovers, blueprints, working models, if you will, mere debris which have been used to create the very shape of our present world, and which I have painstakingly found and collected here, --quite, I would expect, against the rules."

I sighed. Hatrack's weird ability to spin absurd theories about the most banal of events, --while he evidently saw it as the principle asset in his chosen profession of detective--, often left something to be desired in the realm of common sense. His long-held theory about the Vietnam War, for example, which he never ceased to enumerate, that the massive defoliation efforts undertaken by the U.S. Armed Forces in South Vietnam, using Agent Orange and napalm to destroy huge areas of jungle, actually had nothing to do with defeating Communism at all but were instead merely the front for a covert campaign being waged against trees, and in particular some evil form of plant life which was hiding in the Vietnamese forests, --a theory which he most recently justified by citing the example of the similarly slow progress of U.S. forces against armed insurgents in Iraq, an unforested and nearly treeless country--, showed the limits and the impracticality which frequently characterized his ratiocinations.

"A prehistoric diet-plan book?" I asked. "Are you mad?"

"Oh come on now, Linton," scoffed Hatrack, evidently quite disappointed. "Our present point in history is merely the prehistory of some equally prehistoric later date, --a precursor to some other 'modern' period which will find your bones quite as preposterous as you now find Atlantis, its glories all turned to dust. If books can be printed now, who is to say the gods, or the architects of our present destiny, could not have printed them in the past, as a sort of quantum guide to the pop culture of our own era? In which case, it is the objects in my cabinet there which are the originals, and all the rest of the consumer goods sold in our society which are the copies, this collection here representing 'the thing as such', an archive of the thing in itself, existing beyond the categories of existence and usually unperceived by our senses within reality."

"Aren't you making a bit much out of what is obviously someone's idea of a prank?" I asked.

"If it is a prank, it is a very costly one, and one which assumes that its perpetrators have an infinitude of resources, time, skill and money, as well as a near cosmic system of prediction and planning in order to pull it off, and direct their seemingly random creations to me," countered Hatrack. "If the pranksters are thus possessed of seemingly cosmic knowledge, is it too much then to assume that they are indeed from among the ranks of higher beings or the immortals? Besides, if you look in the indices in the front of the diet-plan book, you can see that the copyright date is 12 billion years B.C."

"Very well," I acquiesced, unable, for the moment, to advance any more plausible explanation for the weird collection in amassed Hatrack's display case. "Let's say they are not forgeries, and that they are 'quantum templates.' Then the next question is, 'quantum templates' created by whom? 'The Gods', you say?"

"Ah, there's the rub," Hatrack admitted. "The situation becomes a bit more complicated with the copies of the copies---"

"With the what?" I stammered.

"Come along, and I'll show you," he said, and suddenly he shot up straight as a tailor's dummy and led the way to what I took to be his bedroom, --night black till his hand found the switch, which illuminated not the room proper but only a second display case located beside his copious book collection, upon whose multi-leveled glass-fronted shelves yet another compilation of seemingly recent "found objects" was collected.

"The imitations of the 'imitations'," he said somberly, with a slight trace of sadness or fear, as if in the presence of something which he took to be quite dangerous or evil, ---though why my normally unflappable friend should fear a display case of what appeared to be a mere selection of everyday consumer goods I could not venture to guess.

Without stirring from my side, where he lingered near the doorway, he held out a ring of dangling metal keys, and prompted, "Go ahead and look, but do not touch them," a sudden hacking cough cutting off the last solemn words of his whispered warning.

I did as I was told and opened the middle glass door, and was instantly wafted in the face with a hot gust of air, like the stored-up waves billowing up from within a pre-heated oven.

"Oh, I should have warned you about that," Hatrack belatedly put in. "'Hot off the presses', you might say."

After the heat had largely dispersed, I then looked down to find what looked to be a mirror image of the items on display in the cabinet in the other room, --each with some small difference, however, which I was at first unable to pinpoint, barred as I was from touching the items. Here too there were lamps, and toys, and books, and aplliances, but each one was ruined, or sickly, or soiled in some way.

Is it possible, I wondered, grimly looking over each item, to detect the particular impress of child labor upon an object?, or does not every object in existence, as Lionel Johnson once said, savor of the pain which inevitably went into the making of it?-- the rack of the time-clock making waste of the worker's days, the monotonous repetitive toil dividing the endless wheel of his hours, so that every anonymous object, whether from the assembly line of his hand or the ink line of his pen, becomes imprinted with his hunger, his weariness, his forever unfulfilled desires, before it then arrives neatly wrapped in the consumer's greedy hand. But here there was something more, like the aura of some other, greater kind of servitude, a grandeur transcendent yet soiled, like the substandard perpetuation of some dark archetype throughout reality, the snake-like form of the Prince of this World, running in and out through each item like a single thread to bind them all together.

On these items, the "angel" trademark was gone, replaced by quite another exergual mark, a defaced circular insignia which constituted the one single misprint or flaw that I could find upon each of them without my actually handling the objects, the symbol, a series of either rising or descending concentric circles, partially missing on some of them and reduced to the point of illegibility on others, so that I could not fully see what it was, ---like the defaced name or face of a god fallen out of favor in Ancient Egypt, vandalized by the priests of another, much earlier, god. What's more, the names which followed the vandalized mark were here different on each, --words like "STENDEC", "IYNKICIDU", "ALGMOR" and "RPSTOVAL", as if these duplicates were all the result of a number of different hands, quite unlike the single name, "H FDiDF", which was reproduced beside the angel exergue throughout the other display case. There was a certain cheapness about them, too; as if they were a distant echo of reality, rather than, as Hatrack theorized, a quantum precursor of it.

"Where did you find them?" I asked curiously, restraining myself from touching them as requested, yet finding it increasingly difficult for me to do so.

"'Find them'?" Hatrack asked, sounding amused, but when I turned and looked at him, still standing framed in the open doorway and painfully clutching his chest, I saw that he was deadly serious. "I did not find them. They simply appeared here."

"They what?" I asked.

"They appeared, one by one, in my apartment, every time I brought home another find for the display case in the other room," he patiently explained. "I bought this second display case to hold them."

"But why keep them in here?" I asked. "Why not keep them with the others?"

He laughed, even more painfully now, each breath seeming to cut like a knife into his chest. "Because," he said, "--this is the result," and with that he lifted up an oddly-blackened piece of tattered cloth, looking somewhat like the hide of a dead rat, a single white tag, seemingly untouched by the flames, depending from the midst of the scorched fur with the "angel mark" upon it.

"This was once a teddy bear from the angelic display case, constructed from some strange fibrous metal I could never identify," he explained. "As an experiment, I set it side by side with its duplicate, which you see in there, and the original was blasted to pieces."

I turned and looked within the display case, and saw that it was just as he had said, a fat white stuffed bear sitting lazily with its stubby arms and legs outstretched, its tag branded with the same defaced design written upon all the others. And suddenly, I could see the bear being sewn, could see each and every hand which separately assembled each painfully-woven part, wracking and wrecking the material substance of some previous archetype in order to imitate the new form of some alien design, a one-dimensional sweatshop creating from nothingness a cheap toy in which was preserved a silent memorial to the wasteful horror of their endless toil, catering to some foreign gluttonous appetite which necessitated its export and continual production. It was a hideous bear, the post autopsy rearrangement of something made previously of bodilessness and light, sitting now and forever upon a cold slab for humanity's astonishment and shame, a living symbol of whole universes subjugated and closed down, reduced to assembly lines where existence's forms were bartered, and cheapened, for eventual display of their products upon the shelves of our sight.

I turned, shaking.

A sly smile, somewhat hopeful, stole across my friend's face. "You saw it too, didn't you? The hives, thousands of them, millions of them, which made the objects in that cabinet? The hundreds of authors which drew them, like the Babel of a thousand gods. That, I theorize, is how it is done. One designer for the originals, a million designers for the copied disease, all of them stamped with the now-banned symbol of Saklas, the demiurge responsible for all visible things."

"Then who is responsible for the objects in the first case?" I asked, referring to the display case in the other room, and not realizing, I suppose, that I was actually asking a metaphysical question.

Hatrack smiled. "Sir Wallis Budge has proven that monotheism, a belief in a hidden and unseen God, was actually the first and single most important belief system to the Egyptian mind; that it pre-existed and then co-existed alongside polytheism, and the Egyptians saw no contradiction. The other gods were merely the interchangeable masks that the one true God wore, while he himself remained intangible and forever out of sight, his image abstract, mathematical, hidden in the dark inner tabernacle of their priests' most holy shrines, untouchable and vacant, yet everywhere all at once.

"I think that the objects in the original display case come from this hidden center, which I call 'The Forge', --and that copies in the display case here in my bedroom are forgeries, mere replicas of the immaculate objects from within The Forge. For example, if you were to look inside the diet-book copy in the replicated display case, --an action which I strongly would not recommend--, you would find that, not only is the copyright date recent, in fact it changes from day to day, so that it always shows the present time, --as it will, I suppose, until the end of time. The question is, who is the forger, whether of the forge or of the forgeries? Whose name the name, or the name that was stricken?…. I think it most probable that…." And at this point my friend was seized by another spastic fit of coughing which taxed to the uttermost the fragile limits of his anatomy. The very engine of his breath seemed to be sputtering out like a dying motor.

"Oh, poppycock," I said, and at once turned to grab up one of the items in the case, momentarily forgetting his strongly worded caveat that I not do so.

"No! No! Do not!!" Hatrack screamed. "Touch it not!" ---and all at once he had run across the room toward me, overcoming his former fear of proximity to the cabinet in the heat of his frenzy. "You've nearly killed us all!" he wailed, his iron hand drawing my own away from a hat in the case which I had only just missed grazing by millimeters, his other hand wrapped around his chest, his thin body bent nearly double as he swayed back and forth with some clearly overriding pain. And then he fell forward, limp as a doll, head smacking against the floor.

While I had been half-certain that all the previous languorous gymnastics in which my friend had indulged had all been part of his weird and usually inappropriate sense of theatrical necessity, there was no faking this fit. He lay unconscious on the floor, twitching horribly as I bent down toward him, his hand still clutching my arm.

"I say there, James, are you quite all right?" I inquired, terribly worried. Suddenly, it was just like "The Case of the Invisible Needles" all over again, when Hatrack had come to my dorm room screaming in pain and clutching the back of his leg, complaining that someone had been placing invisible pins upon public toilet seats, and that during the course of his investigation he had unknowingly sat on one.

But my friend could not answer, and suddenly relinquished his hold of my hand, his arm folding back upon the bedroom carpet, his whiplash fingers cringing inward upon his palm. He looked up at me as if I were incredibly far away, now, and I bent down lower so that I could hear him, Hatrack now pitifully struggling for breath. Poor fellow, he was evidently at his last gasp.

"Don't you see?" he pleaded, his final words a whisper. "You and I, we are templates, too. The day after the first replica appeared in my apartment, I found this on my arm," and he lifted back a starched white cuff to reveal a bony arm equally white, upon the delicate skin the by-now-familiar sign of an angelic Lemniscate stamped as clearly as those upon all the other immortal works of clay in the other room. The same weird signature was there too, as a statement of ownership, maybe, or perhaps, to my friend, the supreme triumph of artifice and artificiality. He had finally become one with the very objects d'art that he adored, drawn from the same cloth, molded from the same mold. I struggled for words, and wondered if the same brand were now somewhere upon my body, too. If so, we were all works of Art, he and I and everything, all indelibly marked with the name of….

"We cannot touch the things in the replica case, or we shall die," he went on, "explode in flames just like the stuffed bear… I touched one of the replicas once, and it nearly killed me. Ever since then, I have been unable to hold any of them. Even being in the same room with them tears the very fabric of my being apart… We…."

I stared at Hatrack with silent horror, --but something was bothering me. Suddenly I let go my friend's head and let his skull fall once again with a notable clunk. "You fraud, you impudent fraud!" I charged, and, as he struggled to draw himself free, I wrested his tattooed arm away from his side and drew down his cuff past the incriminatory mark. There, I wiped my hand across the skin and instantly saw that the sign had been written upon his arm with ink, --probably in a hasty attempt to fool me, sometime after I had arrived. The whole thing had been a plot from the beginning. For how could Hatrack have even touched the replicas in the display case, if he were liable to explode simply from coming into contact with them?

"It's a fraud, a forgery," I accused him. "You alone are the true forger, as well as the forgery…"

Hatrack did not try to restrain his laughter at my expense, as I fruitlessly pummeled his offending limb. What before had seemed to be coughing was now the laughter of unrestrained amusement, his body limp against my castigating blows. "All right, all right, stop, I confess!" he cried. "The great detective; you finally figured it out. I really had you going. --You were probably going to go home and search your own body for the mark, weren't you? Too bad I didn't have an ink stamp, so that I could discretely place it on your skin before you left…"

I stood up. "And to think I took your whole story about the templates seriously," I said sullenly, drawing out the plastic fragment of the fake radio from the other room and tossing it uncaringly into the display case nearby. "The whole idea that God---"

My last words were cut off by Hatrack's sudden lunge and a shout, and before I knew it my friend had leapt up with an unheard of dynamism and pulled me away from the replica-display case with near superhuman speed. All at once there was a detonation, and beneath the concussive force which drove myself and my friend downward I heard the sound of creaking metal and breaking glass, as the display case was shattered and everything in it sent flying in all directions through the air. I turned around to see the case reduced to a crushed, burnt-out shell, dented and smoking, the bedroom filled with glass and smouldering fires, the objects in the case all still whole and intact, and sitting pristine in their new locations, as if oblivious to their dislocation, untouched and untouchable, soulless clones of the beauteous objects of this world, sent forth from unending factories in the infinite dark.

"You fool," Hatrack admonished. "The templates I showed you are real, I just drew that sign on my arm as a joke. Good thing it wasn't the whole object you tossed in there, or you would have blown us all to hell."

"…Maybe that's where these things were forged," I suggested, dusting my trousers off, and wiping a few burning embers off of my dark coat.

My friend smiled at that, as if it matched and thereby reinforced the course of his own speculations. "Listen, Linton," Hatrack pressed me earnestly. "You know my methods. It was not difficult for me to track down the distributor of the original templates using inventory lists provided by the stores where I first found them, or from there to locate their single manufacturer. I found the manufacturer housed within an enormous office building, a complex so large and circuitous that when I finally found the rooms of the factory, they were orientated in such a fashion within the building that I could no longer be certain of the relation of the interior to the exterior, or where the rooms were situated in relation to the greater whole; whether they lay in the center of the building, the high ceilings hidden like a steeple within the larger square of the structure, or whether in fact the rooms lay in some obscure nave somewhere off to the side.

"Of people there were none in evidence, and no clear indication that any had been there for quite some time-- the room consisting simply of row upon row of unevenly aligned chairs all facing a huge blank wall at the front, as if waiting for something to happen-- this wall forming the central compass point within the room, completely oblivious to the directionless, amorphous space which reigned in the building outside. It was the center of attention, like a generator of some sort, the flat screen of a TV set which would never change, or the floor of a theater stage which had been flipped up like a box-lid, forever closing off into an invisible space the dimensions of the floorboards, and carrying on in secret its processions and dramas within the undiscovered spaces of its plane. There was a strange sense of stasis in this room, as if the chairs facing the wall were balanced precariously, perched upon the ledge of some hair-trigger mechanism about to launch them toward the flat face of some grand finality which never came.

"There was not a sign of dust upon the floor or the chairs, nor could I picture anyone, other than myself, ever venturing in upon this sacred turf for their cleansing or cleaning, and rather its absence seemed that simply no dust had ever been allowed to settle upon them, just as there is never any dust upon the face of reality itself, nor can one ever surprise space or place and catch them sleeping, space being everywhere the same and waiting. What was being bartered there? What was being sold or bought? What problem there was being fixed, what structure built, invisible to thought? Nothing. The wall before me, which matched me stare for stare, was the end of all paths, of all factories, of all constructions, of all endeavors. It waits for nothing; we wait for it, forever self-sufficient and kept unto itself, a blank slate, a face without a name…"

I said nothing. I did indeed know my friend's methods, and it was quite obvious to me that he had simply become lost in the big city while fruitlessly tracking down some vague address which an exasperated employee had finally condescended to name, and that he had then apparently wandered into a church without ever realizing what it was.

Hatrack, of course, knew none of this, still lost in the glories of some other, dimly-seen realization, --of the super-generator where our reality had long ago been concocted, every form of every thing laid out in advance, the place where the unseen original templates for our game of life were forged. But then the clearness of his vision dimmed for him, and he became suddenly more morose and glum. His eyes gleamed with the revival of renewed and torturous languor, as an old and familiar hunger stole over him once again. "I wonder what's on?" he asked, leading the way toward the television. "Quick Linton, --the remote!!!"




Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 16 Feb 06 | 08:45PM by Gavin Callaghan.

I have never had experiences of this nature. Nor do I take this issue seriously. I would like to add that it is in poor taste and a waste of time to spend any effort on this disturbing subject.


Julian (aka Raven10)

Julian L Hawksworth

By coincidence, I came across the following passage after reading your note:

"For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monk lover with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common reef of the Romantic--the ridiculous." (Andrew Lang, intro. To "The Death Wake", p. 14)

Needless to say, it is quite a coincidence to encounter a coincidence while engaging in a discussion about what Arthur Koestler, in his book on the same topic, calls "The Roots of Coincidence."

As for myself, I have nothing whatever else to add on this matter, which has long been the source, for whatever reason, of dissention, nor have I the energy or idealism left to enter the battle lists now. Read instead the earlier arguments made by Lovecraft against the critics of his "Dagon", or the even earlier statements made by the various pre-Romantics and Spasmodics in defense what English critics deemed the ridiculousness and vulgar barbarity of their works. As Charles Hoy Fort observed, two weapons are mightier than either the pen or the sword-- and they are censorship, and ridicule (what he called the scissors and the smile). (Watch the Fox news network, or old news coverage of the Kerry campaign, or read the columns of conservative "bloggers", to see both of these weapons used in action, and to a highly effective degree. )

Many important things are, of course, ultimately ridiculous. Sex. Eating. Love. Prayer. The awe of the Sublime. (A Harvard professor apparently once described sex thus: "The pleasure is momentary, the posture ridiculous, and the pain endless.") And while ridiculousness is of course no guarantor of importance, one should never be too quick to dismiss a topic simply based upon one's discomfort with it or because of unscientific taboo.

But perhaps to be few among the many is the saving grace of a magician. To be just one among an entire generation of alchemists, what would that be like? To live lost amid a general population of magicians; everyone's every statement an invocation, everyone's words lost among a Babel of conflicting spells, --what would happen then?

Reproduced below are some general statements of Charles Fort from his four collected works, sorted by myself according to topic, which perhaps have some bearing on this matter. CAS and HPL apparently both read Fort, although CAS disliked his prose style, and HPL disputed the veracity of Fort's sources. It is Fort's visionary thinking, however, which come across as being the most important in his writings, not his data, many of Forts theories and ideas running parallel to things currently at the focus of modern physics. And scientists, and science itself, I think, (which is currently lost in a world of self-reflecting paradoxes and illusions, --what J. W. Dunne, in his "The Serial Universe", calls the problem of "infinite regression") could only benefit from making a thorough study of the implications of Fort's ideas.


The Wit and Genius of Charles Hoy Fort:

"It is either that our data are not of coincidences, or that everything's a coincidence." (LO, 772)

"It's every man for himself, and save who can---and damnation is in accepting any messiah's offers of salvation….It's everybody for himself, or he isn't anybody…..(…)…out of his illusion that he has a self, he may develop one." (WT, 995)

"The astronomers are issuing pronouncements upon what can't be seen with telescopes. The physicists are announcing discoveries that can't be seen with microscopes. I wonder whether anybody can see any meaning in an accusation that my stories are about invisibles." (WT, 970)


On Conservatives (of all stripes):
"Conservatism is our opposition. But I am in considerable sympathy with conservatives. I am often lazy, myself. It's evenings, when I'm somewhat played out, when I'm likely to be most conservative. Everything that is highest and noblest in my composition is most pronounced when I'm not good for much. I may be quite savage, mornings: but, as my energy plays out, I become nobler and nobler, and lazier, and conservativer. Most likely my last utterance will be a platitude, if I've been dying long enough. If not, I shall probably laugh." (WT, 870)

On the News Media, Politics:
"The newspapers are supposed to be avid for sensational news, but they have their conventions, and unaccountable lights and objects in the sky are not supposed to have sex, and it is likely that hosts of strange, but sexless, occurrences have been reported, but have not been told of in the newspapers." (LO, 631)

"The geologist from Washington, having investigated nothing that he had been sent to investigate, returned to Washington, which also, by the way, is a place where there's plenty to investigate…" (LO, 625)

"It seems to me that an existence that is capable of sending young butchers to medical schools, and young boilermakers to studios, would be capable of sending young crocodiles to Over-Norton, Oxfordshire, England. When I go on to think of what gets into the Houses of Congress, I expect to come upon data of mysterious distributions of cocoanuts in Greenland." (LO, 592)

"It stands out, as a vast, sullen refusal to mix into a frenzy of phosphorescent confetti. It is a solid-looking gloom, such as, some election night, the Woolworth Building would be, if Republican, and all the rest of Broadway hysterical with a Democratic celebration." (LO, 821)

"Well, then, if there are magicians, why haven't magicians seized upon political powers? I don't know that they haven't." (WT, 1035)

"Nevertheless I sometimes doubt that astronomers represent especial incompetence. They remind me too much of uplifters and grocers, philanthropists, expert accountants, makers of treaties, characters in international conferences, psychic researchers, biologists. The astronomers seem to me about as capitalists seem to socialists, and about as socialists seem to capitalists, or about as Presbyterians seem to Baptists; as Democrats seem to Republicans, or as artists of one school seem to artists of another school." (NL, 333)

On Tyranny and War, etc.:
"Mostly in times of peace arise great military reputations." (LO, 650)

"Chivalry can't die, so long as there is tyranny: every tyrant has been much given to protecting somebody or something." (WT, 932)

"As it is, we have had a rest, and can do the necessary breeding, before again starting up
atrocities." (WT, 1005)

"There was no more knowledge of what it was all about than in many other battles…(…)…Battlefields on land have, after a while, turned quiet with graveyards…" (LO, 782)

"…the bland and shining Stupidity that has so often been mistaken for God, or from the Appalling that is so identified with Divinity--from the clutched and menacing fist that has so often been worshipped." (NL, 428)

"Defeat has been unconsciously the quest of all religions, all philosophies, and all sciences. If they were consciously trying to lose, they would be successes." (LO, 724)

"But I am a practical thinker, and a useful citizen, on the track of much efficiency, which will be at the disposal of God's second choice of people--which I think we must be, judging by the afflictions that are upon us, at this time of writing---a power that would, by this great nation, be used only righteously, if anybody could ever distinguish between righteousness and exploitation and tyranny. One of the engaging paradoxes of our existence--…..is that a million times a crime is patriotism.…. …..If we could have new abominations, so unmistakably abominable as to hush the lubricators, who plan murder to stop slaughter---but that is only dreamery…." (WT, 957)

On Science:
"The astronomers are issuing pronouncements upon what can't be seen with telescopes. The physicists are announcing discoveries that can't be seen with microscopes. I wonder whether anybody can see any meaning in an accusation that my stories are about invisibles." (WT, 970)

"Somewhere, all the opposition to the data of this book is because the data are not in agreement with something that is not known." (WT, 1016)

"Human eyes have been made to see human invaders." (LO, 659)

"All living things are selected by environment, said Darwin. Then, according to him, when he shifted aspects, all things constituting living environment are selected. Darwinism: that selection selects." (WT, 941)

"That motion follows least resistance.
How are we to identify least resistance?
If motion follows it.
Then motion goes where motion goes." (NL, 388)

"In some so-called savage tribes the feeble-minded are held in great respect. It is generally recognized that the definition of an object in terms of itself is a sign of feeble-mindedness. All scientists begin by using this kind of definition, and in our communities scientists are held in great respect."

"Suppose Newton did see an apple fall to the ground, and was so inspired, or victimized, into conceiving in terms of universal attraction. But had he tried to take a bone away from a dog, he would have had another impression, and would have been quite as well justified in explaining in terms of universal repulsion. If, as to all inter-acting things, electric, biologic, psychologic, economic, sociologic, magnetic, chemic, as well as canine, repulsion is as much of a determinant as is attraction, the Law of Gravitation, which is an attempt to explain in terms of attraction only, is as false as the dogmas upon all other subjects if couched terms of attraction only." (NL, 372)

"Conventional biology is too one-sided. It treats of adaptation of plants to rain. We see also the adaptation of rains to plants." (LO, 735)

"But I also think that there is nothing in this subject that is more reasonable than is the Taboo that is preventing, or delaying, development. I mean that semi-enlightenment that so earnestly, and with such keen, one-sided foresight fought to suppress gunpowder and the printing press and the discovery of America." (WT, 1041)

"Smugness and falseness and sequences of re-adjusting fatalities--and yet so great is the power of astronomic science that it can outlive its 'mortal' blows by the simple process of forgetting them, and, in general, simply by denying that it can make mistakes. Upon page 245, Old and New Astronomy, Richard Proctor says--'The ideas of astronomers in these questions of distance have not changed, and, in the present position of astronomy, based (in such respects) on absolute demarcation, they cannot change.'" (NL, 338)

"Darwinism concerns itself with the adaptations of the present, and does heed the part that the past has played, but, in Darwinism, there is no place for the influence of the future upon the present." (NL, 529)

"Sir Isaac Newton looked at the falling moon, and explained all things in terms of attraction. It would be just as logical to look at the rising moon, and explain all things in terms of repulsion. It would be more widely logical to cancel falls with rises, and explain that there is nothing." (LO, 713)

"The literature of the academic ends with the obituary." (LO, 714)

"Domes of Observatories look like big snail shells. Architectural symbolism…. If newspaper editors were like astronomers, they'd send out photographers, rather busily, and, perhaps years later, if they could condescend from journalism into doing some newspaper work, they'd examine plates. They'd tell of a fire that had occurred long before. They'd write up some fashion notes upon the modes in their readers' childhood. Like dealers in stale stars, they'd wonder at a lack of public interest." (LO, 818)

"I wonder what ironic fellow first called these snug, little centers of inattention Observatories. He had a wit of his own, whoever he was." (LO, 824)

"Why biologists should be somewhat less dogmatic than astronomers, or why association with the other animals should be rather more liberalizing than is communion with the stars is not mysterious. One can look at a rhinoceros and at the same time be able to think. But the stupefying, little stars shine with a hypnotic effect, like other glittering points." (LO, 614)

"We have conclusions, which are the products of senility or incompetence or credulity, and then argue from them to premises. We forget this process, and then argue from the premises, thinking we began there." (LO, 547)

"All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations to outside forces. All are attempted completenesses." (BOK, 9)

"….that oneness cannot be explained, because the process of explaining is the interpreting of something in terms of something else." (BOD, 53)

"I accept that over the door of every museum, into which such things enter, is written:
'Abandon Hope'." (BOD, 128)

"In astronomical books, published in the past, appeared reproductions of photographs of this nebula, which were as artfully touched up, I should say, as any life of a saint ever was by any theologian." (LO, 814)

"Every severe, or chaste, treatise upon mechanics is only a fairy story of frictionless and non-extensible characters that interact up to the 'happy ending.'….(…)…the tellers of theorems represent the quality of intellect in the most primitive times of Hollywood." (LO, 611)

"…our data have been held back by no outspoken conspiracy, but by an inhibition similar to that by which a great deal of biology, for instance, is not taught to children." (NL, 450)

"Whoever said that the pen is mightier than something else, overlooked the mightiest of all, and that's the scissors." (LO, 756)

"To this day, no conventional scientist will admit that there is a relation. But, if there is, there is also another relation. That is between his dogmas and the slaughters of people." (LO, 779)

"Astronomers are pretty keen at detecting something that has been pointed out to them,….." (LO, 817)

"It is the System that nourishes and rewards, and also freezes out life with the chill of disregard." (BOD, 207)

"Every astronomic triumph is a bright light accompanied by an imbecility…" (NL, 335)

"…and somewhere in the beauty of a theorem, or of a peacock, lurks the grotesque." (LO, 669)

"As to the Law of Gravitation, I prefer to take one simple stand:
Orthodoxy accepts the correlation and equivalence of forces:
Gravitation is one of these forces.
All other forces have phenomena of repulsion and of inertness irrespective of distance, as well as of attraction.
But Newtonian Gravitation admits attraction only:
Then Newtonian Gravitation can be only one-third acceptable even to the orthodox, or there is denial of the correlation and equivalence of forces." (BOD, 91)

"We used to crucify, but now we ridicule: or, in the loss of vigor of all progress, the spike has etherealized into the laugh." (BOD, 181)

"Mr. Symons was a man who probably did more for the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time: therefore he probably did more to hold back the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time." (BOD, 182)

"For some other instances of [Sir Isaac Newton's] love of numbers, see, in his book upon the Prophecies of Daniel, his determinations upon the eleventh horn of Daniel's fourth animal. If that demonstration be not very acceptable nowadays, some of his other works may now be archaic…(…)….he preferred to think that this earth is one of the moving planets. To this degree had he the 'profundity' that we read about. He wrote no books upon the first and second horns of his dilemma: he simply disregarded the dilemma." (NL, 375)

"That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it cannot be influenced only by its own inertia, so that there is no way of knowing what the phenomena of inertia may be; that, if all things are reacting to an infinitude of forces, there is no way of knowing what the effects of only one impressed force would be; that if every reaction is continuous with its action, it cannot be conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it might be equal and opposite to-- Or that Newton's three laws are three articles of faith;--" (BOD, 13)

"..people thought they knew what matter was…..Now we are told that the ultimates are waves. It is impossible to think of a wave…. To say that the 'ultimate waves' are electrical comes no closer to saying anything. If there is no definition of electricity better than that of saying that it is a mode of motion, we're not enlighteningly told that the 'ultimate waves' are moving motions." (WT, 898)

"It was traveling far, and going to trouble and expense to maintain the shine of purity [of Science], the polish of which was threatened by no more than a youngster, of whom most of the world had never heard before. What I pick up is that there must have been an alarm that was no ordinary alarm, somewhere." (WT, 1057)

"Out of science is fading certainty as fast as ever it departed from theology. In its place we have adventure." (WT, 1044)

"Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of a science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. But what he is awed by is Mutilation. To our crippled intellects, only the maimed is what we call understandable, because the unclipped ramifies away into all other things. According to my aesthetics, what is meant by the beautiful is symmetrical deformation." (WT, 10190

"There can be no science, or pretended science, except upon the basis of ideal certainty….The attempt to take the principle of uncertainty--or the principle of unprincipledness--into science is about the same as would be an attempt by theologians to preach the word of God, and also include atheism in their doctrines." (WT, 905-6)

"…I cannot accept that ever has any action-reaction been cut in two, its parts separated, and isolated, so that it could be determined what either part was equal to." (WT, 982)

"One would like to know what, when time after time, the sky was probably spectacular with new light, the astronomers were doing, in these 178 years. We may be able to answer that question, if we can find out what the astronomers are doing now." (LO, 793)

"There is much in Dickens' grotesqueries that has the correspondence with experience that is called 'truth', whereas such Euclidean characters as 'mathematical points' are the vacancies that might be expected from a mind that had had scarcely any experience." (WT, 863)

"I think, therefore I am.
We have to accept that in order to think, the thinker must be of existence prior to thought.
Why do I think?
Because I am.
Why am I?
Because I think.(…)….
I am a being who thinks: therefore I am a being who thinks. In this circular stupidity there is a simple unity which commends it to the conventional lovers of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
I do not think. I have never had a thought. Therefore something or another. I do not think, but thoughts occur in what is said to be 'my' mind--though, instead of being 'in' it, they are it--just as inhabitants do not occur in a city, but are the city." (941)

"Or all theories--theological, scientific, philosophical--and that they represent the same organizing process--but that self-conscious theorists, instead of recognizing that thought-forms were appearing in their minds, as in wider existence have appeared crystalline constructions, have believed it was immortal truth they were conceiving." (WT, 950)

"I have often experimented. When I incline to think that there is telepathy, the experiments are convincing that there is. When I think over the same experiments and incline against, they indicate that there isn't." (WT, 962)

"All such 'demonstrations' start with the implied assumption that there is not witchcraft, and then show that there is not witchcraft…The 'demonstration' was that there is not witchcraft in a hospital ward, and that therefore there is not witchcraft." (WT, 985)

"Opponents to the idea of witchcraft are much influenced by their inability to conceive how anybody could make apples rot; inability to visualize the process of drying a cow, or entering into the organism of a hen, and stopping her productions….Also they cannot conceive how something makes apples grow, or why they don't rot on trees; how the milk of a cow is secreted, or why she shouldn't be dry; how the egg of a hen develops. And science does not tell them." (WT, 995)

"…'conventionalists', are more subtle than I am, and prefer their views, because mine are so obvious." (LO, 791)

"It does occur to me that there might be good results, if the next millionaire who contemplates donating a big telescope, should, instead, send around to the 'Observatories' big quantities of black coffee:….." (LO, 827)

"My general situation is that of any mathematician. Consider any of his theorems. The parallelogram of forces. In the textbooks, this demonstration works out--if the incident forces be without irregularities--if resistances be unchanging--if the body acted upon be changeless--if the student has no awareness of the changes and the irregularities that are everywhere." (WT, 1000)

"It is said that by gravitation is meant the attraction of all things proportionately to mass and inversely as the square of the distance. Mass would mean inter-attraction holding together final particles, if there were final particles. Then, until final particles be discovered, only one term of this expression survives, or mass is attraction. But distance is only the extent of mass, unless one holds out for absolute vacuum among planets, a position against which we could bring a host of data. But there is no possible means of expressing that gravitation is anything other than attraction. So…gravitation is the gravitation of all gravitations proportionately to gravitation and inversely square of gravitation. In a quasi-existence, nothing more sensible than this can be said upon any so-called subject---…." (BOD, 137)

"If nobody knows what constitutes a quantity of matter, the astronomer has no idea what he means by mass. His is a science of masses….(…)
"The concept of mass is a borrowing from the theologians, who are in no position to lend anything. The theologians could not confidently treat of human characters, personalities, dispositions, temperaments, nor intellects, all of which are shifts: so they said that they conceived of finals, or unchangeable, which they called 'souls'. If economists and psychologists and sociologists should disregard all that is of hopes and fears and wants and other changes of human nature, and take 'souls' for their units, they would have sciences as aristocratic and sterile as the science of astronomy, which is concerned with souls, under the name of masses. A final, or unchangeable, must be thought of as a state of unrelatedness….. So when an astronomer formulates, or says he formulates, the effects of one mass, or one planet, as a mass, upon another, his meaningless statement might as well be that the subject of his equations is the relations of unrelatedness." (LO, 715-6)

"'Science is systematized and formulated knowledge.'
(…)…. A magnet scientifically picks out and classifies iron filings from a mass of various materials. Science does not exist, as a distinguishable entity." (WT, 1004)

"…they are 'of an amusing character, thus clearly showing they were of terrestrial, and not of a celestial, character.' Just why celestiality, or that of it which, too, is only of Intermediateness should not be quite as amusing as terrestriality is beyond our reasoning powers, which we have agreed are not ordinary. Of course there is nothing amusing about wedges and spheres at all--or Archimedes and Euclid are humorists. It is that they were described derisively." (BOD, 116)

"Quartz is upon the 'index prohibitory' of Science. A monk who read Darwin would sin no more than would a scientist who would admit that, except by 'up and down' process, quartz has ever fallen from the sky--…" (BOD, 118)

"The text-books omit this:
That, instead of the orbit of Neptune agreeing with the calculations of Adams and Leverrier, it was so different-- that Leverrier said that it was not the planet of his calculations." (BOD, 138)

"One does not apologize for the gods and at the same time feel quite utterly prostrate before them." (BOD, 115)

"What has become of smallpox? Where are yellow fever and cholera?…But serums, say the doctors. But there are enormous areas in the Americas and Europe, where vaccines have never penetrated. But they did it, say the doctors.
"Eclipses occur, and savages are frightened. The medicine men wave wands--the sun is cured--they did it." (WT, 1018)

"It is impossible to get anywhere by reasoning. This is because--as can be shown, monistically---there isn't anywhere. Or it is impossible to get anywhere, because one can get everywhere." (WT, 1035)

"…--however, there never has been an explanation that did not itself have to be explained." (NL, 420)

"The astronomers explained. They went on calculating, and ten years later were still calculating….It would be heroic were it not mania." (NL, 320)

"St Augustine, with his orthodoxy, was never in--well, very much worse--difficulties than are the faithful here." (BOD, 132)

"…--but it must be noted that scientific explanations do often work out rather well--but say in medical treatments, if ailments are mostly fancied; or in stock-market transactions, except in a crisis; or in expert testimony in the courts, except when set aside by other expert testimony---" (LO, 551)

"The stone belongs to a class of phenomena that is repulsive to the System….the mere mention of it is as nearly certainly the stimulus to a conventional reaction as is a charged body to an electroscope or a glass of beer to a prohibitionist." (BOD, 153)

"To say that something can be mathematically demonstrated has no more meaning than to say of something else that it can be politically demonstrated." (LO, 717)

"The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts and amusements." (WT, 899)

"…that there never has been an astronomic discovery other than the observational or accidental." (NL, 319)

"Science is very much like the Civil War, in the U.S.A. No matter which side won, it would have been an American victory. By Science, I mean conventionalization of alleged knowledge…(…)…Science is a maw, or a headless and limbless stomach, an amoeba-like gut that maintains itself by incorporating the assailable and rejecting the indigestible," (LO, 628)

"As to most of us, the symbols of the infinitesimal calculus humble independent thinking into the conviction that used to be enforced by drops of blood from a statue." (NL, 320)

"That, in celestial phenomena, as well as in all other fields of research, the irregular, or the unformulable, or the unalterable, is present in at least equal representation with the uniform:…that the science of Astronomy concerns itself with only one aspect of existence, because of course there can be no science of the obverse phenomena…" (NL, 328)

"A Darwin writes a book about species. By what constitutes a species? He does not know. A Newton explains all things in terms of gravitation. But what is gravitation?" (LO, 587)

"Perhaps the origin of leprosy in England was in personal witchcraft--or that if the Bible had never devastated England, nobody there would have had the idea of leprosy--…" (WT, 1019)

His Theories…..:
"But, if Virgin Marys were replaced by images of Mrs. Sanger, there would be no such useful murders." (LO, 809)

"I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right---that there is a ghost-world---but that it is our existence---that when spirits die they become human beings." (WT, 898)

"Now and then admirers of my good works write to me, and try to convert me into believing things that I say. He would have to be an eloquent admirer, who could persuade me into thinking that our present expression is not at least a little fanciful." (LO, 641)

"I now have a theory that our existence is a phantom--that it died, long ago, probably of old age---that the thing is a ghost. So the unreality of its composition---its phantom justice and make-believe juries and incredible judges." (WT, 879)

"…I can think of my thoughts as nothing but the products of coercions. I'd not do these slaves the honor of believing them. They impose upon me only to the degree of temporary acceptance of some of them." (WT, 942)

"Sometime I am going to try to find out why so many of these disturbances have occurred in the homes of clergymen. Why have so many supposed spirits of the departed tormented clergymen? Perhaps going to heaven makes people atheists." (LO, 693)

"I think not of a widening of truth, but of a lessening of error. I am naïve enough in my own ways, but I have not the youthful hopes of a John Stuart Mill and Francis Bacon." (LO, 701)

"But, in our expressions, we are limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousness. At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence, or imponderable, I think--that pervades the twentieth century, we have not the superstition that we are offering anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage, curator, or rustic." (BOD, 129)

"The God of all idealists is Malnutrition. If all crimes are expressions of energy, it is unjust to pick on men for their crimes. A higher jurisprudence would indict their breakfasts. A good cook is responsible for more evil than ever the Demon Rum has been: and, if we'd all sit down and starve to death, at last would be realized Utopia." (WT. 1020)

"…it seems no more incredible that up in the seemingly unoccupied sky there should be hosts of living things than that the seeming blank of the ocean should swarm with life." (NL, 418)

"To have an opinion, one must overlook something." (LO, 559)

"Not that I mean anything by anything." (WT, 1026)

"I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either." (WT, 864)

"If there ever have been instances of teleportations of human beings from somewhere else to this earth, an examination of inmates of infirmaries and workhouses and asylums might lead to some marvelous astronomical disclosures." (LO, 678)

"If good and evil are continuous, any crime can be linked with any virtue." (LO, 669)

"It is out of blasphemies that new religions arise. It is by thinking things that schoolboys know better than to think that discoveries are made. It is because our visions are not delirious enough, or degraded, or nonsensical enough, that all of us are not prophets. Let any thoughtful, properly trained man, who has had all the benefits of an academic education, predict---at least, then, we know what won't be." (WT, 1046)

"But that, without the sanction of hypocrisy, superintendence by hypocrisy, the blessing by hypocrisy, nothing ever does come about--" (WT, 1042)

"If anybody wonders why, if these seeming navigators can come close to this earth--…--they do not then come all the way to this earth, let him ask a sea captain why said captain never purposefully descends to the bottom of the ocean, though traveling often not far away." (NL, 507)

"I expect some day to rationalize demonology, but just at present we are scarcely far enough advanced to go so far back." (BOD, 67)

"…instead of being virtually blank, space must be archipelagic." (NL, 414)

"This is too definite to suit my notions of us phenomena. The unadulterated, whether of the food we eat, or the air we breathe, or of idealism, or of villainy, is unfindable. Even adultery is adulterated. There are qualms and other mixtures." (WT, 1061)

"…logic, science, art, religion are, in our 'existence', premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer." (BOD, 126)

"In general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this should not be taken as an absolute." (BOD, 189)

"…:but something that the Methodist-wiseman cannot learn is that a still better method is that of not being so tied to any particular method." (LO, 657)

"…much that is commonplace today was once upon a time denounced from pulpits as the way to Hell. For all I know, a couple of kids flopped into a boat. I don't feel hellish about it….. (…) …Let stockholders of transportation companies get ahold of this, and, if I'm not satisfied with having merely science and religion against me, I'll have opposition enough to suit anybody who can get along without popularity." (LO, 695)

"Dear me--once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward 'cranks'. And now here I am, a 'crank', myself. Like most writers, I have the moralist somewhere in my composition….." (WT, 895)

"A barrier to rational thinking, in anything like a final sense, is continuity, because only fictitiously can anything be picked out of a nexus of all things phenomenal, to think about. So it is not mysterious that philosophy, with its false, or fictitious, differences, and therefore false, or fictitious, problems, is as much baffled as it was several thousand years ago." (LO, 605)

"…I now have a theory that, of themselves, men never did evolve from lower animals: but that, in early and plastic times, a human being from somewhere else appeared upon this earth, and that many kinds of animals took him for a model, and rudely and grotesquely imitated his appearance….." (WT, 966)

"Space is curved, and behind space, or space-time, there is nothing, says Prof. Einstein. Also may he be construed as saying that it is only relatively to something else that anything can be curved." (WT, 995)

"There are dark lanes or rifts in the Milky Way that are like branches from main lanes or rifts, and the rifts sometimes have well-defined edges. In many regions where there are dark rifts there are lines of stars that are roughly parallel--" (NL, 379)

"Our data are glimpses of an epoch that is approaching with far-away explosions. It is vibrating on its edges with the tread of distant space armies." (NL, 389)

On Usefulness and Applied Science:
"The diabolical thought of Usefulness rises in my mind.
"If ever I can make up my mind to declare myself the enemy of all mankind, then I shall turn altruist, and devote my life to being of use and of benefit to my fellow-beings….(…)…Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you, and you may make the litter of their circumstances what you have made of your own. The good Samaritan binds up wounds with poison ivy….Automobiles, and their seemingly indispensable services---but automobiles and crime and a million exasperations. There are persons who think they see clear advantages in the use of a telephone--then the telephone rings." (WT, 981)

"The one great ambition in my life, for which I would abandon my typewriter at any time--well, not if I were joyously setting down some particularly nasty little swipe at priests or scientists--is to say to chairs and tables, 'Fall in! forward! March!' and have them obey me. I have tried this, as I don't mind recording, because one can't be of an enquiring mind and experimental nature, and also be very sensible. But a more unmilitary lot of furniture than mine, nobody has. Most likely, for these attempts, I'll be hounded by pacifists. I should very much like to be a wizard, and be of great negative benefit to my fellow beings, by doing nothing for anybody. And I have had many experiences that lead me to think that almost everybody else would not only like to be a wizard, but at times thinks he is one. I think that he is right. It is monism that if anybody's a wizard, everybody is, to some degree, a wizard." (WT, 1039)

On the cruelty of existence:
"The fun of everything, in our existence of comedy-tragedy---and I was suspicious of the story of the Chinamen, as told by English reporters, because it was a story of panic that omitted the jokes---mania without the smile. Every fiendish occurrence that gnashes its circumstances, and sinks its particulars into a victim, wags a joke." (WT, 882)

"…because, if anything's absurd, everything's absurd, or, rather, has in it some degree or aspect of absurdity…" (BOD, 121)

"Battles and shipwrecks, and especially diseases, are materials for humorists, and the fun of funerals never will be exhausted." (LO, 563)

"But there's a depression from anything, once the humorists get ahold of it." (LO, 636)

"Is life worth living? Like everybody else, I have many times asked that question, usually deciding negatively, because I am most likely to ask myself whether life is living at times when I am convinced it isn't." (WT, 1043)

On "Mass Psychology":
"If somebody should like to write a book, but is like millions of persons who would like to write books, but fortunately don't know just what to write about, I suggest a study of scares, with the idea of showing that they were not altogether hysteria and mass psychology, and that there may have been something to be scared about." (WT, 883)

"Collective hallucination is another of the dismissal-labels by which conventionalists shirk thinking…One man's story, if not to the liking of conventionalists, is not accepted, because it is not supported: and then testimony by more than one is not accepted, if undesirable, because that is collective hallucination. …Among their own amusing disregards is that of overlooking that, quite as truly may their own agreements be collective hallucination." (LO, 699)

"Almost all people of all eras are hypnotics. Their beliefs are induced beliefs. The proper authorities saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and people believed properly." (WT, 1061)

"…young men are trained to the glory of the job, and dream and invent in fields that are likely to interest stockholders, and are schooled into thinking that all magics, except their own industrial magics, are fakes, superstitions, or newspaper yarns." (WT, 1029)

On Women:
"I have a long list of Jacks, ranging from the rippers and stranglers to the egg throwers and the ink squirters: but Mary Maloney is the only alleged Jill in my collection. Women don't do such things. They have their own deviltries." (WT, 885)

"…in the London Mail, Sept. 26, 1923, there was an account of something like this [an invisible monster], but far away. It was a facetious account. Murderous things always have, somewhere, been regarded humorously. Or fondly. No address was published, or probably this one would have received letters from women, wanting to marry it." (WT, 888)

"There are some backward ones, today, who do not believe in witches: but every married man knows better." (LO, 643)

"Naturally enough, wherever Cupid is, cupidity is not far away, and both haunt morgues." (LO, 682)

"If we will personify what I consider an organism, what he, or more likely she, has not, is any conception of moderation." (LO, 758)

"I do not know how to find out anything new without being offensive. To the ignorant, all things are pure: all knowledge is, or implies, the degradation of something. One who learns of metabolism, looks at a Venus and realizes she's partly rotten." (LO, 547)

"Meteors frequently fall to this earth during earthquakes, but that may be only by coincidence, just as offsprings so often appear after marriage--indicating nothing exclusively of relationships, inasmuch as we have heard of cases of alleged independent reproduction. Let the feminists become only a little more fanatical, and they will probably publish lists of instances of female independence. It is either that our data are not of coincidences, or that everything's a coincidence." (LO, 772)

Poetry:
"I think that the geyser of corpses that sprang from Riobamba toward the sky must have been an interesting sight. If I were a painter, I'd like that subject. But this cataract of dried leaves, too, is a study in the rhythms of the dead." (BOD, 255)

"…--and the fall of blood--three days the fall of blood from the broken red brooks of a living island whose mutilations are scenery--" (NL 415)

"A new era of new happiness with new hells to pay; ambitions somewhat realized, and hopes dashed to nothing; new crimes, pastimes, products, employments, unemployments; labor troubles, or strikes that would be world-wide; new delights, new diseases, disasters such as never before been heard of---" (WT, 1030)

"A paw of water, clawed with chasms, had grabbed these people." (LO, 750)

"It's every man for himself, and save who can---and damnation is in accepting any messiah's offers of salvation….It's everybody for himself, or he isn't anybody…..(…)…out of his illusion that he has a self, he may develop one." (WT, 995)

"…and had the impression that he would have, looking at a dynamo, or at a storm at sea, at something falling from a table, or at a baby crawling---that he was in the presence of the unknown." (WT, 1028)

WORKS CITED

Fort, Charles Hoy. The Books of Charles Fort. Intro. By Tiffany Thayer. Published for the Fortean Society by Henry Holt and Co., New York. 7th printing, October 1959. Includes The Book of the Damned (BOD), Lo! (LO), New Lands (NL), and Wild Talents. (WT).





















Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 26 Feb 06 | 06:35PM by Gavin Callaghan.