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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
CHARLES FORT
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
Table of Contents
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i
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
CHARLES FORT
This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
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Scanned at Sacred−Texts.com by JB Hare.
Chapter I
A PROCESSION of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or
they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been
damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and
things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit
little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale
stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and
the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
The ultra−respectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit
of the whole is processional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.
But they'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the
whole with their buffooneries—but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that
pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in
mass−formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.
* * *
So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.
Or everything that is, won't be.
And everything that isn't, will be —
But, of course, will be that which won't be —
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is
commonly and absurdly called “existence,” is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay
damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions
will be sleek angels. Then the sub−inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.
* * *
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that
which is commonly called “being” is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the
appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the
heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay
there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
different expressions of an all−inclusive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a
degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena,
including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation
would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on
both sides of the attempted border−line.
As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:
That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more reasonable than that of redness and
yellowness has ever been conceived of.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a multitude of data. Had it not done so, there would be
nothing with which to seem to be. Science has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data. Then,
if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of admission is continuous with every basis of
exclusion, Science must have excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness and
yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all standards, all means of forming an opinion —
Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the fallacy that there are positive
differences to judge by —
That the quest of all intellection has been for something—a fact, a basis, a generalization, law, formula, a
major premise that is positive: that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things are
self−evident—whereas, by evidence we mean the support of something else —
That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and
condemned as if it had been attained.
What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no
positive differences.
A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not,
then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs'
houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos—or a shell is a house to a hermit crab—or
was to the mollusk that made it—or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at
Washington and a shell on the sea−shore are seen to be continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively
distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to
define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon
of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions.
White coral islands in a dark blue sea.
Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference one from another—but
all are only projections from the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not positive. In all
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
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