Lo!

Charles Fort Lo! (1931)
I never really considered the possibility of this having been published as a paperback, and never expected to see a copy, or to ever be in the position of reading the thing. My knowledge of Fort is sketchy beyond that the term Fortean - referring to mysteries which seemingly defy science and rational understanding - derives from his name, because he seems to have been one of the first to attempt to quantify paranormal phenomena as a legitimate area of investigation. Despite having regularly read Fortean Times for at least a couple of years back there, I'd fostered an image of Fort as a late Victorian iconoclast taking a sort of proto-Dadaist delight in that which made no sense and which pissed off scientists. This, it turns out, is only part of the story.

For starters, I have my dates wrong, and Fort's Book of the Damned was published in 1919 so he's more recent than I had realised. Nevertheless, he writes like a late Victorian, and his understanding of the sciences seems mostly pre-Copernicus in so much as that he doesn't seem to be entirely convinced of the Earth moving around the sun. The case for the defence, at least on this score, holds that Fort was throwing stuff out there for the sake of argument without even necessarily believing it himself, just to keep us on our toes. This may well be true, but it doesn't really help anyone engaged in the act of trying to read the fucking thing.

Fort's testimony is both absorbing and infuriating, and probably absorbing because it's infuriating. He digresses, breaks off and switches track half way through a sentence as one might in spoken conversation, talks to himself, speaks in riddles, forms new words, and cloaks half of whatever he's trying to say in the most ludicrous - if admittedly vivid - allegories or similes, requiring a certain degree of translation on the part of the reader. His narrative voice has something of the carnival barker about it with touches of a Victorian William Shatner, and certain passages are accordingly both exhausting and impenetrable.

March 23, 24, 25—a watery sky sat on the Adirondack Mountains. It began to slide. It ripped its slants on a peak, and the tops of lamp posts disappeared in the streets of Troy and Albany. Literary event, at Paterson, N.J.—something that was called "a great cloudburst" grabbed a factory chimney, and on a ruled page of streets scrawled a messy message. With the guts of horses and other obscenities, it put in popularising touches. The list of dead, in Colombus, Ohio, would probably reach a thousand. Connecticut River rising rapidly. Delaware River, at Trenton, N.J., 14 feet above normal.

That which he writes about is intriguing - showers of fish or frogs, mysterious lights in the sky, strange noises in the night, missing persons, or persons such as Kasper Hauser who seemingly appear from nowhere; and Fort takes obvious and infectious delight in relating incidences of this sort of thing, noting common patterns, and refuting what explanations may have been given. He even attempts his own explanations, invoking supposedly spontaneous instances of teleportation as a sort of common cause, which works for the sake of argument but places the author on an increasingly shoddy footing as the book squirms towards its profoundly unsatisfying conclusion.

In his favour, Fort presents a sturdy argument against science as dogma, and takes communicable pleasure in doing so.

Our data have been bullied by two tyrannies. On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of "the departed". On the other side, conventional science has pronounced against everything that does not harmonise with its systematisation. The scientist goes investigating, about as, to match ribbons, a woman goes shopping. The spiritualist stuffs the maws of his emotions. One is too dainty, and the other is gross. Perhaps, between these two, we shall some day be considered models of well-bred behaviour.

This works fine until the reader notices what he's actually been saying with all those colourful metaphors. What, he asks, if the stars are not so far away as we have been told, but are actually more like heavenly volcanoes studding the inside of a vast sphere? It would explain a lot, he suggests, and certainly it would explain the phenomena he has described, but for the fact that it's obviously bollocks and here we've been sat all this time, labouring under the illusion of dealing with a man who knows what the fuck he's talking about, or even one who knows what is meant by the term evidence. Mysterious clouds of volcanic ash may prove such and such a point in the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity, but possibly not when your evidence of the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity is simply being unable to find any newspaper article referring to the same for that particular month. Likewise, the last few chapters of the book border on embarrassing, muttering and mumbling over how that Mr. Einstein probably made most of it up whilst affecting a display of laughter at the occasional errors of astronomers, yet apparently missing the point that if astronomers are even able to make errors calculating the movement of celestial objects, then maybe it's because those celestial objects are actually moving rather than being stationary upside down space volcanoes, you fucking tit.

It's entertaining up to a point, but I'm reminded that Lo! belongs to the era of the Nazis with their similarly nutty ideas regarding the possibilities of a hollow earth, world ice, and racial supremacy, in which context, Fort's baroque bullshit seems less charming. As Willy Ley wrote from his own experience in Pseudoscience in Naziland, as published in Astounding back in 1947:

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman and the American the Bible.

The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by way of hysterics and physical force. Not every German, of course. Not even a majority, but it seems to me that the percentage of people so inclined is higher in Germany than in other countries. It was the willingness of a noticeable proportion of the Germans to rate rhetoric above research and intuition above knowledge, that brought to power a political party which was frankly and loudly anti-intellectual. The Nazis not only burned books they disliked, they also classified theoretical physicists with Jews and Marxists.

Small wonder the pseudoscientists experienced a heyday under such a regime — but it would be a mistake to believe that these pseudosciences which I am going to describe, originated with the Nazis. They existed, and to some extent even flourished, before Hitler. But then they were hemmed in by the authority of the scientists—after Hitler had become Führer it was almost the other way round.

I'm not trying to suggest, that pseudoscience is necessarily dangerous in itself, but it can be symptomatic of a certain strain of fuckwittery which has proven itself historically conducive to the rise of dangerous mad cunts; and Fort's crowing whilst stood on such thin ice was never a good look. Nor, I might argue, was it particularly helpful in shedding any light upon that which he purports to investigate, and which seems deserving of better than either sneering dismissal or Fort's own fevered patronage.