Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned
by Skylaire Alfvegren
Continued...
Fort’s universe-view may be more relevant now than ever before. “Up to WWII, people had been led to believe great things from science, including the end to ignorance, poverty, famine, disease and war. Since then, confidence in scientists (rather than science) has declined,” Rickard notes. “At this point, almost every form of authority--including government, the Church, the law, doctors—has been called into question. In a way, modern western society is rudderless compared to earlier eras.”
Fort wrote of the cosmic joker, and his writing illuminates the transient and cyclical nature of reality. Many younger people discovered Fort via Fortean Times, like Mark Pilkington, film maker and editor of the U.K.’s Strange Attractor (an anthology of cultural marginalia). He finds Fort’s approach to be “an extremely useful lens through which to view the world around us.” Whether examining science, religion, politics: question everything, accept nothing at face value.
“Human beings simultaneously look to the past and the future for inspiration, but even these are endlessly changing as our attitudes towards both evolve—for example, most futurological predictions prove to be way off the mark, while we are constantly discovering that our ancestors were far smarter than we have previously given them credit for,” Pilkington says. “Today’s orthodoxy might well be tomorrow’s heresy, or vice versa—what looks like madness one year may be mainstream science the next.”
A gentleman who works for a large military contractor “in a position of reasonable responsibility” discovered Fort after sifting through the works of cryptozoologist Bernard Huevelmans. He had encountered a “cryptid” at age 13 and was looking for answers. (“Cryptid” is the technical term for a creature either unrecognized by conventional zoology, or a beast who defies logical explanation altogether).
If you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing stranger can happen to you all day. If you’ve read Fort, it’s the same thing,” he says. Fort’s work, “other than being terribly amusing, gives you an operating philosophy of what to do when you encounter something you can’t explain.”
II.
Fort’s influence on popular culture is without debate—from the memorable froggy “skyfall” in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia to the X Files. Novelist Stephen King and English comics genius Alan Moore are among Fort’s contemporary accolytes.
