THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED BY CHARLES FORT

2012-01-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

THE BOOK OF THEDAMNED

BY

CHARLES FORT

"Aprocession of the damned.

By thedamned, I mean the excluded.

We shallhave a procession of data that Science has excluded."

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 ofthem fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animatedby 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 arerags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here andthere will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highestrespectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gauntsuperstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. Thenaïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere andthe 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 aggregatevoice 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, isDogmatic Science.
But they'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and theclowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries—but thesolidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that passand pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, butarrange 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 whichwon'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; thatsalvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursedtatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some laterday, back they'll go whence they came.

Ebook Foryou

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED BY CHARLES FORT

THE BOOK OF THEDAMNED

BY

CHARLES FORT