On Fort’s Beliefs:
What Charles Fort believed about the truth of the “damned” that he collated is unclear. There is a quote of his that gets used to establish that he thought it was all hokum: “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.” However, I think that it is worth taking that quote in context:
I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs. But I accept, with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time, that showers of an edible substance that has not been traced to an origin upon this earth, have fallen from the sky, in Asia Minor.
This is from his book, Lo!, and to explain the last sentence it is from an chapter discussing manna – like this, not like blue potion – falling from the sky.
To begin, if it is a statement of Fort’s beliefs, it is a statement within the kayfabe. Notably, Think to New Worlds suggest statements outside of it to suggest that he did not believe what he was writing, but this in and of itself is within the context of his lying to you, or operating with such perennial credulity that it amounts to a lie.
And the article itself out-Däniken’s Däniken in taking an event from Exodus (et al), dismisses the relgious explanation, dismisses the scientific explanation (some tenuous idea about windblown edible plants), and frames it into Fortean pseudoscience of omnispermia.
But the context that matters is both at the core of Think to New Worlds and missed by it. The author contextualizes Fort’s work in the sense of Modernist thinking. This quote is among the most explicit of that connection.
Fort is no Fox Mulder. Fort disbelieves. Or his character does. But Fort’s disbelief is one that starts to mimic the worst sort of skeptical behavior, the second opinion bias at the core of everyone Just Asking Questions.
But to the extent that Modernism amounts to some combination of a cynical resolution to the Romantic-Enlightenment didactic and the disillusionment resulting out of late Colonialism and global War, this drops Charles Fort smack in that field. This is the language of a Fitzgerald character. If all the different philosophical and scientific modes have been tried and found wanting, what are we left with? Fucking UFOs? Yeah, sure, I guess!?!
Bad Review vs Bad Review
When I write a bad review, it tends to fall into one of two categories, either where I am disappointed because I was rooting hard for the book going into it or where I feel like the author has done something to make me turn off the safeties. The majority is the former.
However, there is also the time when I think something is a bad review, like the review itself is weaker than I want it to be. This splits into another Pareto of times when I want to write a book in response to the book, because I feel like there is so much to address there, and so have to settle for something less, and times when Clio looks away and I am more generally unhappy with my work.
The review on this book maybe separate from any of those.
Substantially, this book is technical. I do not mean difficult to understand, but the author has a box with a round hole and this is going to explicate every time anything might fit. And thesis going to thesis, which is fine. But what that means is that each and every part requires a sort of engagement with the specific underlying article. The topicality here is not so dense that I could not accomplish that, but it would be dull, too catalogue-like.
But to not do that, when that is what the book does, feels like I am leaving too much of the book on the table, like my review fails to address the book’s core material.
So I want to fix that. But fixing that would require a project of a scope that I am not interested in engaging, because I am not, because, unlike the rat thing, I feel like I have more interesting applications for my time. And maybe that is why I would never manage to do this sort of thing professionally.
CITATION HEEDED 