The Unusual Becomes Usual – Walter E. Harris III on Fortean Politics
Connect-the-Dots: Holistic WeltanschauungBy Mankh (Walter E. Harris III). Axis of LogicAxis of Logic / Thursday, Feb 9, 2012“What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual!”
- Sherlock Holmes
. . .
The Unusual Becomes Usual
It is helpful to note what The Powers That Be wish to exclude. One, they don’t want people to peacefully assemble (hence the wave of raids on Occupy encampments), and two, they don’t want people’s hearts and minds to learn different approaches to reality. Again, not much new here, as much of all history is built on deliberate amnesia; we are trained to, uh, what’s that word, oh yeah, forget . . . because remembering the truth is a powerful thing! Memory can be painful, too, yet is part of the path to recovery.
Charles Hoy Fort, who lived from 1874 to 1932, researched and wrote about those who are forgotten and excluded. Fort considered modern science the new religion and he sought to resurrect the “unusual” by showing that it was, in fact, usual, or simply, a part of the fabric of Existence that much of science so readily ignored (in order to prove its theories).
Fort’s The Book of the Damned begins:
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.
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.8
To give but one example of the “excluded” that Fort researched voluminously (before there was Internet access!): “Scientific American, July 12, 1873: “A shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance is the reported result of a recent rainstorm at Kansas City, Mo.” As to having been there “in the first place”: Little frogs found in London, after a heavy storm, July 30, 1838. (Notes and Queries, 8-7-437); Little toads found in a desert, after a rainfall (Notes and Queries, 8-8-493).”9
The unexplained makes us slow down, take time to ponder, and attempt to understand. On the surface, the news may appear to be the mere reporting of isolated events, yet as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective reminds us: we must study the “unusual” . . . so as to connect the dots. Two wrongs still don’t make a right, but several unusuals can make a usual.
Weltanschauung: from the German, Welt = world & Anschauung = view
Reflective of Fort’s approach, is the following quote from a recent article by Adrian Salbuchi:
“It’s high time we make the necessary quantum leaps that will allow us to start joining the dots. We need to move away from silo mentality paradigms, and towards a much more holistic Weltanschauung. We have become too ’specialised,’ which leads to narrow-mindedness. We talk about finance but never join the dots on its geopolitical overtones. We talk about politics but are blind to underlying social forces. We think Hollywood is only about ‘entertainment,’ not realising how they implant ideas and behaviour patterns into our collective psyche.”10
Mistreatment of books and related information sources is but one category, a dot that connects to a wider system of suppression.
Read the rest here:
