Authors: Charles Fort
Wild Talents (15 page)
Upon June 13, 1885, a resident of Pondicherry, Madras, India, was sitting in a closed room, when a mist appeared near him. At the same time there was a violent explosion. This man, M. Andre, sent an account to the French Academy. I take from a report, in
L’Astronomie,
1886-310. M. Andre tried to explain in conventional terms, mentioning that at the time the weather was semi-stormy, and that an hour later rain fell heavily.
In times still farther back, the mist would have been told of, as the partly materialized form of an enemy, who had expressed his malices explosively. In times, still somewhere in the future, this may seem the most likely explanation.
Or the mist was something like the partly visible smoking fuse of an invisible bomb that had been discharged by a distant witch or wizard. And that does not seem to me to be much more of a marvel than would be somebody’s ability to blow up a quantity of dynamite, though at a distance, and with no connecting wires.
In the
New York Herald Tribune,
Nov. 29, 1931, there is an account of the doings of Kurt Schimkus, of Berlin, who had arrived, in Chicago, to demonstrate his ability to discharge, from a distance, explosives, by means of what he called his “anti-war rays.” According to reports from Germany, Schimkus had so exploded submarine mines and stores of buried cartridges. Herr Schimkus will have success and renown, I think: he knows that nothing great and noble and of benefit to mankind has ever been accomplished without much lubrication. He announced that slaughter was far-removed from his visions: that he was an agency for peace on earth and good will to man, because by exploding an enemy’s munitions, with his “anti-war rays,” he would make war impossible. Innocently, myself, I speculate upon the possible use of “psychic bombs,” in blowing up tree stumps, in the cause of new pastures.
In the
New York Herald Tribune,
March 25, 1931, there is a story of an explosion that may have been set off by “rays” that at present are not understood. It is the story of the explosion that wrecked the sealing ship,
Viking,
off Horse Island, north of New Brunswick. It reminds me of the woman, who, in the New York hotel, feared fire. This ship was upon a moving picture expedition. Varrick Frissell, film producer, aboard this vessel, started to think of the kegs of powder aboard, and he became apprehensive. He started to make a warning sign to hang on the door of the powder room. Just then the ship blew up.
New York Herald Tribune,
Dec. 13, 1931—an account of disasters to two wives of a man—not a datum of his relations, or former relations, with anybody else. In the year 1924, illness was upon the wife of W.A. Baker, an oil man, who lived in Pasadena, California. It was said that her affliction was cancer. She was found, hanged, in her home. It was said that despondency had driven her to suicide. In the year 1926, Baker married again. Upon the night of Dec. 12, 1931, there was an explosion, somewhere under the bed of the second Mrs. Baker, or in the room underneath. The bed was hurled to the ceiling, and Mrs. Baker was killed. It was a tremendous explosion, but nobody else in the house was harmed.
Bomb experts investigated. They concluded that no known explosive had been used. They said that there had been no escape of gas. “The full force of the explosion seemed concentrated almost beneath Mrs. Baker’s room.”
In the years 1921-22, and early in the year 1923, there were, in England and other countries, explosions of coal such as had never occurred before. There was a violent explosion in a grate in a house in Guildford, near London, which killed a woman, and knocked down walls of the house (London
Daily News,
Sept. 16, 1921). There were other explosions of coal, during this year, but in 1922 attention was attracted by many instances.
In this period there was much disaffection among British coal miners. There was a suspicion that miners were mixing dynamite into coal. But, whether we think that the miners had anything to do with these explosions, or not, suspicions against them, in England, were checked by the circumstances that no case of the finding of dynamite in coal was reported, and that there were no explosions of coal in the rough processes of shipments.
There came reports from France. Then stoves, in which was burned British coal, were blowing up in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The climax came about the first of January, 1923, when in one day there were several of these explosions in Paris, and explosions in three towns in England.
About the first of January, 1921, Mr. T.S. Frost, of 8 Ferristone-road, Hornsey, London, bought a load of coal. In his home were three children, Gordon, Bertie, and Muriel. I take data from the London newspapers, but especially from the local newspapers, the
Hornsey Journal,
and the
North Middlesex Chronicle.
In the grates of this house, coal exploded. Also, coal in buckets exploded. A policeman was called in. He made his report upon coal that not only exploded, but hopped out of grates, and sauntered along floors, so remarkable that an inspector of police investigated. According to a newspaper, it was this Inspector’s statement that he had picked up a piece of coal, which had broken into three parts, and had then vanished from his hands. It was said that burning coals leaped from grates, and fell in showers in other rooms, having passed through walls, without leaving signs of this passage. Flatirons, coal buckets, other objects “danced.” Ornaments were dislodged, but fell to the floor without breaking. A pot on a tripod swung, though nobody was near it. The phenomena occurred in the presence of one of the boys, especially, and sometimes in the presence of the other boy.
There has been no poltergeist case better investigated. I know of no denial of the phenomena by any investigator. One of the witnesses was the Rev. A.L. Gardiner, vicar of St. Gabriel’s, Wood Green, London. “There can be no doubt of the phenomena. I have seen them, myself.” Another witness was Dr. Herbert Lemerle, of Hornsey. Dr. Lemerle told of a clock that mysteriously vanished. Upon the 8th of May, a public meeting was held in Hornsey, to discuss the phenomena.
In the newspapers there was a tendency to explain it all as mischief by the children of this household.
The child, Muriel, terrified by the doings, died upon April 1st. The boy, Gordon, frightened into a nervous breakdown, was taken to the Lewisham Hospital.
The coal in all these cases was coal from British coal mines. The newspapers that told of these explosions told of the bitterness and vengefulness of British coal miners, enraged by hardships and reduced wages, uncommon in even their harsh experiences—
Or see back—
There’s a shout of vengefulness, in Hyde Park, London—far away, in Gloucestershire, an ancient mansion bursts into flames.
16
But why this everlasting attempt to solve something?—whereas I it is our acceptance that, in a final sense, there is, in phenomenal affairs, nothing—or that there is only the state of something-nothing—so that all problems are only soluble-insoluble—or that most of the social problems we have, today, were at one time conceived of as solutions of preceding problems—or that every Moses leads his people out of Egypt into perhaps a damn sight worse—Promised Lands of watered milk and much-adulterated honey—so why these everlasting attempts to solve something?
But to take surgical operations upon warders of Sing Sing Prison, and the loss of rectitude by lace curtains, and the vanishing man of Berlin; “Typhoid Mary,” and a Chinese hair-clipper, and explosions of coal, and bodies on benches in a Harlem Park—
Robert Browning’s conception was to take three sounds, and make, not a fourth, but a star.
Out of seven colors, not to lay on daubs, but to paint a picture.
Out of seven million Americans, Russians, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and on, so long as geography holds out, not to pile a population, but to organize—more or less—into New York City.
Sulphur and lava in a barren plain, and a salty block of stone, shaped roughly like a woman—signs of erosion on rocks far above water level—a meteor that had set a bush afire—the differences of languages of peoples—and all the other elements that organized into
Genesis.
Data of variations and heredity and adaptations; of multiplications and of checks and of the doctrine of Malthus; of acquired characters and of transmissions—and they organized into
The Origin of Species
—
Just as, once upon a time, minerals that had affinity for one another came together and took on geometrical appearances.
But a crystal is not supposed to be either a prohibition or an anti-prohibition argument. I know of a crystal of quartz that weighs several hundred pounds. But it has not been mistaken for propaganda—
Or all theories—theological, scientific, philosophical—and that they represent the same organizing process—but that self-conscious theorists, instead of recognizing that thought-forms were appearing in their minds, as in wider existence have appeared crystalline constructions, have believed that it was immortal Truth that they were conceiving.
Oxygen and sulphur and carbon—
Or Emma Piggott and Ambrose Small and Rose Smith—
Or let’s have just a little, minor expression, or organization, a small composition, arranging the data of poltergeist girls. The elements of this synthesis are moving objects, fires, girls in strange surroundings, youth and the atavism of youth.
Case of Jennie Bramwell—she was an adopted daughter. The Antigonish girl was an adopted daughter. See the Dagg case—adopted daughter. “Adoption” is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and “adopted daughters,” as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under hard taskmasters, in strange surroundings—
Or the first uncertain and precarious appearances of human beings upon this earth—and a need for them, and a fostering, a nurturing, a protection, far different from conditions in these swarming times, when the need is for eliminations—
A lost child in primordial woods—and the value of her, which no genius, king, or leveler of kings, has today—
That objects moved in her presence—fruits of trees that came down from the trees and set themselves beside her—the shaking of bushes that cast, to her, berries—then night and coldness—faggots, joining twigs, and dancing around her—heaping—the crackling of flames to warm her—
Or that, to this day, grotesque capers of chairs, the antics of sofas, and the seeming wantonness of flames are survivals of co-operations that once upon a time moved even the trees, when a child was lost in a forest.
The old mathematicians had this aesthetic appraisal of their thoughts: they wrought theorems and calculi “for elegance,” and were scornful of uses. But virtually everything that they produced “for elegance” was put to work by astronomers, navigators, surveyors. I assemble, compositionally, what I call data: but I am much depressed, perhaps, fearing that they have meaning outside themselves, or may be useful.
There is, upon this earth, today, at least one artist. Prof. Albert Einstein put together, into what he called one organic whole, such a diversity of elements as electro-magnetic waves and irregularities in the motions of the planet Mercury; the fall of a stone from a train to an embankment, the geometry of hyper-space, and accelerated coordinate systems, and Lorentz transformations, and the displacements of stars during eclipses—
And the exploitation of everything by something, or, more or less remotely, by everything else—the need of astronomers for Einsteinism, because it was so encouragingly unintelligible, whereas schoolboys were beginning to pick Newtonism to pieces—and in the year 1918 it was announced that the useful Einstein had predicted displacements of stars, according to his theory, and that his predictions had been confirmed.
For purposes of renewed confirmation—or maybe in innocence of trying to confirm anything, or at least not consciously intending to observe whatever was wanted—an expedition was sent by Lick Observatory to report upon the displacement of stars during the solar eclipse of October, 1922. The astronomers of this expedition agreed that the displacements of stars confirmed Einstein, the Prophet. Einstein was said to be useful, and, in California, school children, dressed in white, sang unto him kindred unintelligibilities. In New York, mounted policemen roughly held back crowds from him, just as he, to make his system of thoughts, had clubbed many astronomical data into insensibility. He had taken into his system of thoughts irregularities of the planet Mercury, but had left out irregularities of the planet Venus. Crowds took him into their holiday-making, but omitted asking what it was all about.
Upon June 12, 1931, Prof. Erwin Freundlicher reported to the Physics Association of Berlin that according to his observations, during the eclipse of May 9, 1929, stars were not displaced, as, according to Einstein, they should be—or that, outside itself, Einsteinism is meaningless.
There was no excitement over this tragedy, or comedy, because this earth’s intellectuals, mostly, take notice only when they’re told to take notice; and to orthodoxy it seemed wisest that this earth’s thinkers should not think about this. Prof. Freundlicher’s explained the astronomers of the Lick expedition, quite as I explain all astronomers. He gave his opinion that they had confirmed Einstein because “they had left out of consideration observations that did not fit in with the results that they wanted to obtain.” If there be much more of such agreements with me, I shall have to hunt me some new heresies. For an account of Prof. Freundlicher’s report, see the
New York Herald Tribune,
June 14, 1931.
Outside itself Einsteinism has no meaning.
As a worthless thing—as an unrelated thing its state is that of which artists have dreamed, in their quest for absoluteness—the dream of “art for art’s sake.”
Up to Dec. 6, 1931, I thought of Prof. Einstein’s theories as almost alone, or as representing almost sublime worthlessness. But
New York Times,
Dec. 6, 1931—scientists of the University of California, experimenting upon an admixture of phosphorus in the food of swine, were developing luminous pigs. “Just what they will be good for has not yet been announced.”
Mine is a dream of being not worth a displaced star to anybody. I protest that with the elements of this book my only motive is compositional—but comes the suspicion that I protest too much.
There has been a gathering of suggestions—that there are subtler “rays” than anything that is known in radioactivity, and that they may be developed into usefulness. The Ascot Cup and the Dublin jewels—and, if they were switched away by a means of transportation now not commonly known, a common knowledge may be developed to enormous advantage in commercial and recreational and explorative transportations.
In the period of my writing of this book, Californian scientists were trying to make pigs shine at night. Another scientist, who could not yet announce much usefulness, was feeding skimmed milk to huckleberries. For all I know one of us may revolutionize something or another.