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Charles Fort, The Man Who Invented the Supernatural Author's Introduction “And science is a turtle that says its own shell encloses all things.”
Human beings are nitwits. We process information in notoriously idiotic ways—which explains the persistence of carnival operators, psychics, used car salesmen, advertising executives, and politicians. Despite the common perception, they don’t really need to be crooked, because we’re perfectly capable of watching their skills and misinterpreting them on the slant. Abraham Lincoln may have been technically right when he said “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” but there’s no pride in so vague, or so small, a proportion of success. One of my favorite constructions is the reassuring phrase “That makes sense.” Nothing actually “makes” sense, and, more often than not, sense is assigned in retrospect. Because something occurs or exists, we comfort ourselves that it has been perfectly explainable and predictable. The clouds painted on the television weatherman’s map demonstrate how today’s rainstorm “made sense”; an obscure business hiccup explains that Wall Street’s sudden dip “made sense.” For centuries, physicians were bleeding patients; the sun was circling the earth; and priests were offering human sacrifices: these similarly “made sense.” We search for the formula of understanding—we assume that the world is rational and understandable—and we convince ourselves that there is a simple way in which it must all make sense. Psychologists tell us that our brains love to form patterns—assembling information to draw larger conclusions. Our pattern-making abilities are usually offered as proof of highly evolved human thought. But it is that fondness for patterns—the habitual need to look at pieces and infer a larger picture—that causes problems. If you gave someone a quart of paint and, instead of merely asking the color, wondered if it were tartan, polka-dot, or striped paint, you’d have the same analogy. Recognizing our faults, we’ve gradually evolved the scientific method, a system of checks and balances, taking bits from Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes. It’s a way of looking at data, conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions. But despite our best intentions and the hallowed status of the scientific method, it can still be subject to individual foibles and pitfalls. It is a process that human beings thought of, for humans to think about things in reliable ways, because humans have such unreliable tendencies when it comes to thinking about things. In other words, it’s the best we’ll do under the circumstances. The author Charles Fort wrote, “I confess to childish liking for making little designs, or arrangements of data, myself. And every formal design depends upon blanks, as much as upon occupied spaces.” At a time when people were desperate for patterns, Charles Fort insisted that we should wonder about the patterns we’d been given, and beware the blanks. * * * * * Charles Fort was a frustrated fiction writer who became obsessed with a new kind of story. “Before the first manifestation of Dadaism and Surrealism,” wrote Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their book The Morning of the Magicians, “Charles Fort introduced into science what Tzara, Breton and their disciples were to introduce into art and literature: a defiant refusal to pay at a game where everybody cheats, a furious insistence that there is ‘something else.’” “Strip yourself of custom, habit, education, the conventionalized mental clothes of millions of years and presto! You are a candidate for wonders,” according to Fort’s friend, the journalist and poet Benjamin De Casseres.
“Fortean,” as an adjective, can apply to a general class of oddities, and Fort’s name surfaces in discussions of the paranormal. But “fortean” usually suggests a cool, wry, open-minded analysis of these mysteries. Today the author is heralded as a godfather of supernatural writing, and even his staunchest critics admire him as a genius of a crank. He’s inspired science fiction stories, served as an example to generations of later authors, and appeared as a character in a comic book. But in writing the actual story of Charles Fort, I’m describing a confluence of specific oddities. Of course, the story includes his notoriously unsettling data, which he relentlessly pried from libraries in New York and London. But it also involves the social climate in which Fort wrote, the audience he was writing for (both his friends and his many unknown readers), and the particular character of Charles Fort. Coincidentally, all of these elements were able to combine—the right time and the right place—to produce four memorable and influential books. Fort offered the final fillip.
In other words, we’ve simply been missing part of the pattern. * * * * * Throughout his career, Fort assiduously avoided definitions and classifications, so I’m convinced he would have objected to the title “The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.” For example, he was uncomfortable with the notion of “invention” and wondered whether Watt really invented the steam engine or the Wright brothers invented the flying machine. In his book New Lands, Fort wrote: “One of the greatest of secrets that have eventually been found out was for ages blabbed by all the pots and kettles in the world—but that the secret of the steam engine could not reveal itself until came the time for its co-ordination with the other phenomena and the requirements of the Industrial Age.” Similarly, Fort argued with the word “supernatural.” It was a word, he wrote in Lo!, “that has no place in my vocabulary. In my view, it has no meaning, or distinguishment. If there never has been, finally, a natural explanation of anything, everything is, naturally enough, the supernatural.” The generation before Fort, the Victorians, was in love with various aspects of the supernatural, including mind-reading, mesmerism, and spiritualism—and often gave these phenomena the patina of scientific study and analysis. What Fort invented was our modern view of the paranormal. He worked as a pure agnostic; rather than building up his phenomena to the status of miracles, he tore down the hallowed traditions of religion and science. After Fort, it was no longer possible to discuss these subjects without debating the nature of reality. After Fort, the supernatural was no longer associated with religiosity, but was presented as a natural, if unexpected, part of our world: those nagging “believe it or not” facts suggesting that our belief system is misguided—at best—and conspiratorial—at worst. As De Casseres wrote of Fort’s accomplishments, “There is something tremendously real, annoyingly solid about Fort. His is the first attempt in the history of human thought to bring mysticism and trans-material phenomena down to (or maybe lift it up to) something concrete.” Readers are still arguing whether Fort pointed out the foibles in our thinking, or exploited them. Just as he suggested that a particular moment had been steam-engine time, it’s important to realize that his timeless supernatural mysteries were gathered and published at a precisely supernatural time in history. By the early 1920s, Americans were discovering that the world was a strange place. Charles Fort could demonstrate that it was even stranger than anyone suspected. Frogs fell from the sky. Blood rained from the heavens. Mysterious airships visited the earth. Dogs talked. People disappeared. He asked why, but, even more vexing, he asked why we weren’t paying attention. Taking his cue from Fort, author Damon Knight speculated, “If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?” It wasn’t the myriad of Fort’s phenomena that stunned readers, but one underlying suggestion that human beings have always found to be hair-raising: The world is actually irrational. |
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In Technopoly, the late Neil Postman’s book about the way we think about technology, the author recalled one of his students suffering a hot, muggy day in a room without air conditioning. When the student was told that the thermometer read ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, he quickly replied, “No wonder it’s so hot!”