Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (25 page)

Such damned scenes aside, the truth is that Fort remains unclear or undecided about almost all of the specifics of his alien hermeneutic, although the general storyline remains quite consistent. Fort, for example, goes back and forth about whether the spaceships are of a material, a spiritual, or some other subtle or “highly attenuated” matter (NL 420). In places, he appears to imagine these ships in quite physical and literal terms. In other places, he suggests that they appear as psychical phenomena, “that some kinds of beings from outer space can adapt to our conditions, which may be like the bottom of a sea, and have been seen, but have been supposed to be psychic phenomena” (NL 507). Or, in another expression still, that “things coming to this earth would be like things rising to an attenuated medium—and exploding—sometimes incandescently” (BD 282). In such passages, Fort appears to be suggesting that different worlds, many different worlds, exist in a sort of parallel fashion. There are “vast, amorphous aerial regions, to which such definite words as ‘worlds' and ‘planets' seem inapplicable” (BD 136).

Numerous occult and Theosophical authors before him and many science fiction and New Age writers after him invoked the scientific language of “dimensions” to explain what Fort was expressing here. But Fort expressly rejected such language, mostly because he did not understand it
and
thought it to be an intellectual cop-out: “Oh, yes, I have heard of ‘the fourth dimension,' but I am going to do myself some credit by not lugging in that particular way of showing that I don't know what I'm writing about” (NL 567). In other places, he lugs it in anyway, inevitably as a fourth or even fifth psychical dimension (NL 461).

The metaphors also shift dramatically when it comes to the nature of the upper world from which such super-constructions emerge, as if they were floating in our sky. Most basically, these metaphors shift back and forth between images of
water
and images of
land
. The Super-Sargasso Sea image, for example, pounds its waves throughout
The Book of the Damned
. But
New Lands
, Fort's second book, opens with a very different and in some way opposite metaphor, that of “lands in the sky.” The opening lines of this second book echo those of the first:

Lands in the sky—

That they are nearby—

That they do not move.

I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—

The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!

This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.

There will be data. There will be many. (NL 313)

As these opening lines make clear, this new image of land is in fact connected to the earlier image of water through a specific colonial narrative. By “New Lands,” Fort is invoking the European experience of “discovering” the new land of America across the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Much like Myers, he is employing the European discovery of America, which was always there, of course, as a symbol for the acceptance and exploration of all that is occult and unknown to us now, which has always been there, of course.

America, then, is the New Land par excellence, the Land of the Occult that we would do well not to deny simply because we have not dedicated sufficient resources to its discovery and exploration. We have not even admitted its existence yet. “I am simply pointing out,” Fort explained in an especially funny passage,

everybody's inability seriously to spend time upon something, which, according to his preconceptions, is nonsense. Scientists, in matter of our data, have been like somebody in Europe, before the year 1492, hearing stories of lands to the west,
going
out on the ocean for an hour or so, in a row-boat, and then saying, whether exactly in these words, or not: “Oh, hell! There ain't no America.” (LO 625)

But there is such an America. And we are called not only to admit this Secret America, but to explore it and expand into it. Interestingly, here the colonized begins to become the colonizer. Fort goes back and forth on this. In places, we are clearly the colonized, hence he compares our sighting of super-constructions in the sky to “savages upon an island-beach” gazing out at three ships in the bay on October 12, 1492 (NL 471). In other places, it appears that Fort has taken this basic Wellsian narrative of the colonizer colonized, accepted its basic claim, and then reversed it. Yes, in truth, we are the colonized, and always have been. But if we can only take seriously the data of our long colonization now, we can cease to be so and can become our own explorers. We can cease being written by the paranormal and become our own authors of the paranormal. We can cease to live in someone else's novel and write our own. We can
expand
.

And we must, whether we will or no. Fort suggests that this is somehow inevitable, that we are born explorers and must have somewhere to go. “The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions” (NL 313). Fort suggests this expansion is necessary to prevent an “explosion,” that we need, as it were, “San Salvadors of the Sky” or “a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents” (NL 314). He can be quite lyrical about this need to expand, this human drive to explore and colonize, first the planet, then the farthest reaches of inner and outer space: “Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse” (NL 314).

Not that he claims to have gotten very far. He is all too aware of how the adventure has only just begun. Our cognitive maps, including Fort's own, are clearly filled with silly and gross errors: “My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia” (BD 213). He was very, very clear about this: “We consider that we are entitled to at least 13 pages of gross and stupid errors. After that we shall have to explain” (NL 389). Given that he thought these “new lands” were just a few miles above us, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that modern astronomy was all wrong about the vastness of space, we must grant Fort significantly more than thirteen pages of gross and stupid errors. One hundred
and
thirty is more like it. The truth is, as Damon Knight pointed out, that much of
New Lands
is simply embarrassing to read now. We can well understand why Fort needed these new lands to be so close and the earth so stable (he could see no other way to explain how the super-constructions got here so easily), but the fact remains that he was spectacularly wrong about all of this.
³⁸
This is where a concept like dimensions may look far more fantastic, but is in fact far more rational and helpful.

But most of Fort's writing is not about the adventure of our metaphysical expansion into “new lands.” It is about
us as someone else's adventure and land
. For now, at least, it is we who are the colonized. Fort could be quite beautiful about these visitors—beautifully terrifying, that is. He had reports, for example, of immense ships that floated before the sun, the moon, and Mars. He gave one a fanciful name, “Melanicus . . . Prince of Dark Bodies.” It was a

Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One. . . . hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.

He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black, brooding vampire. (BD 209–10)

A bit further down, he sings again of “the vast dark thing that looked like a poised crow of unholy dimensions” (BD 225).

But why does Melanicus come? What, pray ye, is the poised crow of unholy dimensions after? And why—the “greatest of mysteries”—do these invaders not make themselves better known? Fort finds this “notion that we must be interesting” a very curious one (BD 143). Basically, we're not, so there is hardly a mystery here. “It's probably for moral reason that they stay way—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them” (BD 162).

There are also what he calls “dangers of near approach.” Nevertheless, “our own ships that dare not venture close to a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore,” he points out. So “why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys . . . ?” (BD 162).

But
in other places Fort develops the notion that these super-constructions have been communicating with us all along, but only through a sect or secret society.
³⁹
It is these “certain esoteric ones of this earth's inhabitants” who aid these other races in their colonization of us (BD 136). It only takes a few: “We think of India—the millions of natives who are ruled by a small band of esoterics—only because they receive support and direction from—somewhere else—or from England” (BD 152). He will also, however, entertain the more democratic idea that there are some worlds that are trying to communicate with all of us. It depends on the different data and what they suggest (BD 143).

But there are darker possibilities still. Earth may not be a colony at all. It may be a farm:

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?

Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

I think we're property. (BD 163)

Shit.

Which brings us to one of the most striking, and most gnostic, aspects of Fort's system, that is, his notion that the principle mechanism by which we are kept in our pens is religion. What Fort shouts in these most remarkable of passages is what some Jewish and Christian gnostics shouted in the first few centuries of the common era, namely, that orthodox religion, to the extent that it privileges violent deities demanding sacrifice, is demonic not metaphorically, but
really
. Those who do not know believe that they worship God. They in fact worship demons.

I am not exaggerating. Here is a rather typical passage from Fort: “That a new prophet had appeared upon the moon, and had excited new hope of evoking response from 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). Here's another, this time on poltergeist disturbances: “Sometimes I am going to try to find out why so many of these disturbances have occurred in the homes of clergymen. . . . Perhaps going to heaven makes people atheists” (LO 693). In a similar gnostic rage against the shining Stupidity we mistake for God, Fort reads the
Chicago Tribune
of June 10, 1889. Fifteen thousand innocent souls were drowned in the Johnstown flood when the dam broke. The survivors threw away, even burned, their Bibles, so obvious was the futility of their faith (LO 764).
This
is religion for Fort. A patent lie. A gross fraud. A Bible to burn after the floodwaters have swept away your children.

And a deadly demon. In the winter of 1904–5, a religious mania, a revival, swept through Northumberland, England (LO 650–65).
⁴⁰
So too did a series of bizarre occult events, as if they were somehow linked to the devotional fervor or “psycho-electricity” of the people, as if the people, Fort suggests, were “human batteries” that the occult events were feeding upon, thus growing more brilliant “with nourishing ecstasies” (LO 655). Terrifying objects appeared in the sky. One “shining thing” followed Mrs. Jones's car, even when it turned from road to road in a vain effort to shake its pursuer. The same damned things were seen hovering over chapels. Things flew about, or seemed to appear out of nowhere, in a local butcher shop. Something was slaughtering sheep in the fields (one is reminded here of the cattle mutilations of contemporary UFO lore). Three different people were nearly buried as dead before they awoke from strangely profound trances. An elderly woman was not so lucky. She was mysteriously burned to a crisp in a case of “spontaneous combustion.” Fort does not believe in spontaneous combustions. But he's willing to entertain the existence of “beings, that, with a flaming process, consume men and women, but . . . mostly pick out women.” The
Liverpool Echo
of January 18, 1905, put the situation this way in its headline: “Wales in the Grip of Supernatural Forces!” Fort, in his typical suspicions, is not so sure. “Supernatural” is not a word he used lightly. As for the events of Northumberland in the winter of 1904–5, perhaps these were not occult beings at all, but rather “projected mentalities of living human beings” (LO 694).

Maybe. But Fort seems most convinced of the alien-invasion thesis and in a subsequent demonic theory of religion. The two are connected in his mind. We have submitted to our own colonization, and through the very mechanisms of our deepest belief and most heartfelt piety no less. We are thus colonized
from within
:

Angels.

Hordes upon hordes of them. . . .

I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers . . . I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts. (BD 216–17)

It is easy to imagine a more rational theory of religion. It is difficult to imagine a more radical one.