American Religious Liberalism

Ten: The Dominant, the Damned, and the Discs: On the Metaphysical Liberalism of Charles Fort and Its Afterlives

t e n The Dominant, the Damned, and the Discs On the Metaphysi­ cal Liberalism of Charles Fort and Its Afterlives J e ff r e y J . K r i pa l Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people. —Anonymous, quoted in David Christian, Maps of Time Once upon a time, a man named Charles Fort (1874–1932) sat at a table in the New York Public Library or the British Museum in London, spending more or less every working day for a quarter century reading the entire runs of every scientific journal and newspaper he could find, in English or French. “A search for the unexplained,” he explained, “became an obsession.” That is something of an understatement. Here is how he joked about a typical day at the office: “I was doing one of my relatively minor jobs, which was going through the London Daily Mail, for a period of about twenty-­ five years, when I came upon this—”1 What he came upon was certainly unusual enough. In his quite ordinary newspapers and journals he found reports of fish, crabs, periwinkles, and other unidentified biological matter that fell from the sky and piled up in the ditches for anyone to see. Or smell. He found reports of rocks that fell slowly from the ceiling of a farmhouse, or from the sky as if materializing out of nowhere just a few feet up. He found orphaned boys and servant girls who had the curious 227 228 Jeffrey J. Kripal habit of psychically setting thing on fire, seemingly unconsciously and almost always in broad daylight (so no one, he reasoned, would get hurt). He found objects, animals, even human beings appearing out of nowhere on a cold city street or in the room of a house, apparently “teleported,” as he put it, from somewhere else. That word that he coined, “teleportation,” would have a long history in later science fiction. Perhaps most of all, though, Fort found numerous reports of what he called “super-­ constructions” in the sky. These were essentially spaceships, float­ ing over cities around the world, shining searchlights, baffling witnesses, and other­ wise making a mess of the rational order: “One of them about the size of Brook­ lyn, I should say, offhand. And one or more of them wheel-­ shaped things a goodly num­ ber of square miles in area” (BD 136). These super-­ constructions float through all of Fort’s texts, giving his implied narrative, which he seldom makes explicit, a certain ominous quality. Within just four pages of his 1923 New Lands, for example (468–71), covering only a few months of newspaper clippings, we encounter reports from Oxford and London, England, as well as Nymegen, Holland. But the real action appears to be in the United States, at least in 1897, with what came to be known as the “great airship wave.” In these four pages on this year, Fort invokes reports from Kansas City, Chicago, Evanston, New York, Omaha, Dodge City, Brule (in Wisconsin), Sistersville (in West Virginia), and Lake Erie (a “queer-­ looking boat” rose up out of the waters there [NL 470]). The states of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin all appear as well, but Texas holds a special place in whatever news Fort is tracking. Reports come in from Benton, Fort Worth, Dallas, Marshall, Ennis, and Beaumont. Here’s how the New York Sun described the airship seen over Texas: “It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle, and small at both ends, with great wings, resembling those of an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great searchlights, and was sailing in a southeasterly direction, with the velocity of the wind, presenting a magnificent appearance” (NL 469). Geezus. The possibleimplicationsof such impossible stories hardly escape Fort, who had a keenly criti­ cal mind and a penchant for questioning pretty much everything . Something of a postcolonial theorist before his time, he invokes the night of Oc­ to­ ber 12, 1492, and the image of Native Ameri­ cans gazing out over the ocean waters at lights they had never seen before. The earlier inhabitants of the New World, of course, would have explained the unfamiliar in terms of the fa- The Dominant, the Damned, and the Discs 229 miliar. Their wise men, Fort explains, would have concluded something along these lines: “So there...