Wild Talents (25 page)
Authors: Charles Fort
Or the uses of witchcraft in warfare—
But that, without the sanction of hypocrisy, superintendence by hypocrisy, the blessing by hypocrisy, nothing ever does come about—
Or military demonstrations of the overwhelming effects of trained hates—scientific uses of destructive bolts of a million hate-power—the blasting of enemies by disciplined ferocities—
And the reduction of cannons to the importance of fire crackers—a battleship at sea, or a toy boat in a bathtub—
The palpitations of hypocrisy—the brass bands of hypocrisy—the peace on earth and good will to man of hypocrisy—or much celebration, because of the solemn agreements of nations to scrap their battleships and armed aeroplanes—outlawry of poison gases, and the melting of cannon—once it is recognized that these things aren’t worth a damn in the Era of Witchcraft—
But of course not that witchcraft would be practiced in warfare. Oh, no: witchcraft would make war too terrible. Really, the Christian thing to do would be to develop the uses of the new magic, so that in the future a war could not even be contemplated.
Later: A squad of poltergeist girls—and they pick a fleet out of the sea, or out of the sky—if, as far back as the year 1923, something picked French aeroplanes out of the sky—arguing that some nations that renounced fleets as obsolete would go on building them just the same.
Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.
A regiment bursts into flames and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battlefield. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.
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That everything that is desirable is not worth having—that happiness and unhappiness are emotional rhythms that are so nearly independent of one’s circumstances that good news or bad news only stimulate the amplitude of these waves, without affecting the ratio of ups to downs—or that one might as well try to make, in a pond, waves that are altitudes only as to try to be happy without suffering equal and corresponding unhappiness.
But, so severely stated, this is mechanistic philosophy.
And I am a mechanist-immechanist.
Sometimes something that is desirable is not only not worth having, but is a damn sight worse than that.
Is life worth living? Like everybody else, I have many times asked that question, usually deciding negatively, because I am most likely to ask myself whether life is worth living at times when I am convinced it isn’t. One day, in one of my frequent, and probably incurable, scientific moments, it occurred to me to find out. For a month, at the end of each day, I set down a plus sign or a minus sign, indicating that, in my opinion, life had, or had not, been worth living, that day. At the end of the month, I totaled up, and I can’t say that I was altogether pleased to learn that the pluses had won the game. It is not dignified to be optimistic.
I had no units by which to make my alleged determinations. Some of the plus days may have been only faintly positive and, here and there, one of the minus days may have been so ferociously negative as to balance a dozen faintly positive days. Of course I did attempt gradations of notation, but they were only cutting pseudo-units into smaller pseudo-units. Also, out of a highly negative, or very distressing, experience, one may learn something that will mean a row of pluses in the future. Also, some pluses simply mean that one has misinterpreted events of a day, and is in for much minus—
Or that nothing—a joy or a sorrow, the planet Jupiter, or an electron—can be picked out of its environment, so as finally to be labeled either plus or minus, because as a finally identifiable thing it does not exist—or that such attempted isolations and determinations are only scientific.
I have picked out witchcraft, as if there were witchcraft, as an identifiable thing, state, or activity. But, if by witchcraft, I mean phenomena as diverse as the mimicry of a leaf by a leaf-insect, and illnesses in a house where “Typhoid Mary” was cooking, and the harmless impalement, on spears, of children, I mean, by witchcraft in general, nothing that can be picked out of one commonality of phenomena. All phenomena are rhythmic, somewhere between the metrical and the frenzied, with final extremes unreachable in an existence of the metrical-unmetrical. The mechanical theory of existence is as narrowly lopsided as would be a theory that all things are good, large, or hot. It is Puritanism. It is the textbook science that tells of the clockwork revolutions of the planet Jupiter, and omits mention of Jupiter’s little, vagabond moons, which would be fired from any job, in human affairs, because of their unpunctualities—and omits mention that there’s a good deal the matter with the clockwork of most clocks. Mechanistic philosophy is a dream of a finality of exact responses to stimuli, and of absolute equivalences. Inasmuch as the advantages and disadvantages of anything can no more be picked out, isolated, identified, and quantitatively determined, than can the rise of a wave be clipped from its fall, it is only scientific dreamery to say what anything is equal and opposite to.
And, at the same time, in the midst of a submergence in commonality, there is a permeation of all phenomena by an individuality that is so marked that, just as truly as all things merge indistinguishably into all other things, all things represent the unmergeable. So then there is something pervasive of every action and every advantage that makes it alone, incommensurable, and incomparable with a reaction, or a disadvantage.
Our state of the hyphen is the state of the gamble. Go to no den of a mathematician for enlightenment. Try Monte Carlo. Out of science is fading certainty as fast as ever it departed from theology. In its place we have adventure. Accepting that there is witchcraft, in the sense in which we accept that there is electricity, magnetism, or life, the acceptance is that there is no absolute poise between advantages and disadvantages—
Or that practical witchcraft, or the development of wild talents, might be of such benefits as to draw in future records of human affairs the new dividing line of
A.W.
and
B.W.
—or might be a catastrophe that would drive all human life back into Indians, or Zulus, or things furrier—
If by any chance the evils of witchcraft could compare with, or beat to an issue, the demoralizations of law, justice, business, sex, literature, education, pacifism, militarism, idealism, materialism, which at present, are incomprehensibly not yet equal and opposite to stabilizations that are saving us from, or are denying us, the jungles—
Or let all persons of foresight, if of sedentary habits, shift positions occasionally, so as not to suppress too much their vertebral stubs that their descendants may need as the bases of more graceful appendages.
But my own expression is that any state of being that can so survive its altruists and its egotists, its benefactors and its exploiters, its artists, gunmen, bankers, lawyers, and doctors would be almost immune to the eviler magics of witchcraft, because it is itself a miracle.
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Stunts of sideshows, and the miracles of pietists, and the phenomena of spiritualistic medium—
Or that the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch. Or much of the “parlor magic” of times gone by, and now it is industrial chemistry. And taboo, by which earlier experimenters in the trained forces of today were under suspicion as traffickers with demons.
I take for a pseudo-principle, by which I mean a standard of judgment that sometimes works out, and sometimes doesn’t work out—which is as near to wisdom as I can arrive, in an existence of truth-nonsense—that, someday to be considered right, is first to be unholy. It is out of blasphemy that new religions arise. It is by thinking things that schoolboys know better than to think that discoveries are made. It is because our visions are not delirious enough, or degraded, or nonsensical enough, that all of us are not prophets. Let any thoughtful, properly trained man, who has had all the benefits of an academic education, predict—at least, then, we know what won’t be. We have, then, at our command, a kind of negative clairvoyance—if we know just where to go for an insight into what won’t be.
The trail of a working witchcraft—but, if we are traffickers with demons, the traffic isn’t much congested, at present. Someday almost every particular in this book may look quaint, but it may be that the principle of putting the witches to work will seem as sound as now seems the employment of steam and electric demons. Our instances of practical witchcraft have been practical enough, so long as they were paying attractions at exhibitions, but the exhibition implies the marvel, or what people regard as the marvel, and the spirit of this book is of commonplaceness, or of coming commonplaceness—or that there isn’t anything in it, except of course its vagaries of theories and minor interpretations, that won’t someday be considered as unsensational as the subject-matters of textbooks upon chemistry and mechanics. My interest is in magic, as the daily grind—the miracle as a job—sorceries as public utilities.
There is one manifestation of witchcraft that has been put to work. It is a miracle with a job.
Dowsing.
It is commonly known as water-divining. It is witchcraft. One cannot say that, because of some unknown chemical, or bio-chemical, affinity, a wand bends in a hand, in the presence of underground water. The wand bends only in the hand of a magician.
It is witchcraft. So, though there are scientists who are giving in to its existence, there are others, or hosts of others, who never will give in. Something about both kinds of scientists was published in
Time,
Feb. 9, 1931. It was said that Oscar E. Meinzer, of the U.S. Geological Survey, having investigated dowsers, had published his findings which were that “further tests . . . of so-called ‘witching’ for water, oil, or other minerals, would be a misuse of public funds.” Also it was shown that conclusions by Dr. Charles Albert Browne, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, disagreed with Mr. Meinzer’s findings. “On a large sugar beet estate near Magdeburg, Dr. Browne saw one of Germany’s most famed dowsers at work. Covering his chest with a padded leather jacket, the dowser took in his hands a looped steel divining rod and began to pace the ground. Suddenly the loop shot upward and hit him a sharp blow on the chest. Continuing, he charted the outlines of an underground stream. Then, using an aluminum rod, which he said was much more sensitive, he estimated the depth of the stream. A rod of still another metal indicated that the water was good to drink. When Dr. Browne tried to use the rod, himself, he could get no chest blows unless the dowser was holding one end. Dr. Browne then questioned German scientists. The majority answered that, with all humbuggery discounted, a large number of successes remained, which could not be accounted for by luck or chance.” For queer places—or for places in which scientists of not so far back would have predicted that such yokelry as dowsing would never be admitted—see
Science,
Jan. 23, 1931, or the
Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution,
1928, p. 325. Here full particulars of Dr. Browne’s investigation are published.
The Department of Public Works, of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, has employed a dowser since the year 1916
(Notes and Queries,
150-235).
New York Times,
July 26, 1931—two Australian states were employing dowsers.
I don’t know that I mean much by that. The freaks and faddists who get themselves employed by governments make me think that I am not very convincing here. But I have no record of a dowser with a political job before the year 1916: and, wherever I got all this respectfulness of mine for the job, it is the entrance of magic into the job that I am bent upon showing.
In the London
Observer,
May 2, 1926, it is said that the Government of Bombay was employing an official water diviner, who, in one district of scarcity of water, had indicated about fifty sources of supply at forty-seven of which water had been found. The writer of this account says that members of one of the biggest firms of well-boring engineers had informed him that they had successfully employed dowsers in Wales, Oxfordshire, and Surrey.
In
Nature,
Sept. 8, 1928, there is an account, by Dr. A.E.M. Geddes, of experiments with dowsers. Dr. Geddes’ conclusion is that the faculty of water-divining is possessed by some persons, who respond to at present unknown, external stimuli.
It is not that I am maintaining that out of the mouths of babes, and from the vaporings of yokels, we shall receive wisdom—but that sometimes we may. Peasants have believed in dowsing, and scientists used to believe that dowsing was only a belief of peasants. Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may be only a myth, after all.
In the matter of dowsing, the opposition that Mr. Meinzer represents is as understandable as is the opposition that once was waged by priestcraft against the system that he now represents. Let in, against the former dominant, data of raised beaches, or of deposits of fossils, and each intruder would make a way for other iniquities. Now, relatively to the taboo of today, let in any of the occurrences told of in this book, and by its suggestions and affiliations, or linkages, it would make an opening for an eruption.
Very largely, dowsing, or witchcraft put to work, has been let in.