"I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written" -- Charles Fort, 1874-1932
Yes, Charles Fort died in 1932. He is only "still living" in the sense that "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus". Fort still has followers, and people still delight in reading him. He may be considered among the principal founders of modern pseudo-scientific journalism. In his Book of the Damned (1919) and other writings, Fort explored such phenomena as spontaneous human combustion, falling frogs (or fish, see below), levitation, UFOs, unexplained appearances and disappearances, poltergeists, ESP, teleportation (a term which he coined), alien abduction, and everything to do with the occult, the paranormal, and the supernatural.
To those who read my recent post on fortune telling, I promise I haven't suddenly gone off the deep end. Today is Fort's birthday, the other day was National Psychic Day, it's just an accident of the calendar. And anyway, I discovered Fort's writing over 30 years ago; Dover Books published a wonderful edition. Fort's fans included Theodore Dreiser (who helped him get published), Booth Tarkington (who wrote an intro to one of his books), Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Clarence Darrow, many of whom were among the founders of The Fortean Society in 1931. Obviously, these people were not "believers" per se in these phenomenon in the Victorian manner of, say, Arthur Conan Doyle. So-called Forteanism is not about credulous, slavish belief. Quite the opposite. It is more about making space in your brain for imagination, which the strict and joyless empiricism of modern science and journalism doesn't permit. Fort's writing contains elements of satire (in the Ambrose Bierce vein), hoax, and genuine curiosity about the world. It reminds me of a concept in Scottish law somewhat alien in American jurisprudence. NOT PROVEN. In other words, neither guilty nor not guilty, neither true nor false, simply not proven.
I relate massively to Fort's psychology. The son of an authoritarian father, he resented the shackles of an imposed and "official" system of the nature of reality. He was an autodidact, a solitary cat who spent most of his time in libraries, collecting arcane anecdotes. Most of his early writing was fiction, especially science fiction, which tells you precisely where he was coming from. (Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson, also fans). But unlike some others who drifted from the creation of fiction to leading actual cults (I won't insult their followers by naming names today), Fort never became the thing he hated, he never invented his own competing system that he would lord over, not even a prankish satirical one, such as the Church of the Subgenus. Lovers of the weird do perpetuate his name through such instruments as the International Fortean Organization (INFO, founded 1965) and The Fortean Times (founded 1973), but these organizations look nothing like Scientology (there, I said it).
Now, in the age of QAnon we see the danger. Some people are smart enough and emotionally secure enough to contemplate the wonders of this strange world without A) feeling the need to explain them out of existence, or B) on the flip side, swallowing them whole like tablets (that's a double entendre, that is). A distressing number of people just believe whatever they're told. To be Fortean is to be open, and undogmatic, the bitch of neither science nor religion, and that's pretty much where I like to live. Today, I think I will celebrate Charles Fort's birthday by contacting him...with my planchette.
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