The Book of the Damned Part 25

Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hamps.h.i.+re, be met again in Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society--

It is only a dawning credulity.

Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form, and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.

Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of the accursed:

_Comptes Rendus_, 1887-182:

That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm"--two months before the reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton--a small stone had fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 millimeters in diameter; 5 millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. Reported to the French Academy by M. Sudre, professor of the Normal School, Tarbes.

This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too greatly resisted--the stone was covered with ice.

This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to human hands and human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone--"tres regulier." "Il a ete a.s.surement travaille."

There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: nothing of other objects or debris that fell at or near this date, in France. The thing had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a machine responds to its stimulus, the explanation appears in _Comptes Rendus_ that this stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then flung down.

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In _La Nature_, 1887, and in _L'Annee Scientifique_, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of _Nature_, 1887. Fa.s.sig lists a paper upon it in the _Annuaire de Soc. Met._, 1887.

Not a word of discussion.

Not a subsequent mention can I find.

Our own expression:

What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain?

A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.

9

My own pseudo-conclusion:

That we've been d.a.m.ned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' sp.a.w.n or frogs' sp.a.w.n, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been d.a.m.ned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the accursed.

If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of dream-phantasms.

Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky--as if in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything into something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that if something can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in that way--or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but, of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are, in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer.

Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of "true meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a field"--"found in making a road"--"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen times. Someone fis.h.i.+ng in Lake Okeechobee, brought up an object in his fis.h.i.+ng net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it. The U.S.

National Museum accepts it.

If we have accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic material"--one instance of "carbonaceous" matter--if it be too difficult to utter the word "coal"--we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums.

There is something of ultra-pathos--of cosmic sadness--in this universal search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by either inspiration or a.n.a.lysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown--or renewed hope and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that could also be universal. It's as if "true meteoritic material" were a "rock of ages" to some scientific men. They cling. But clingers cannot hold out welcoming arms.

The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward--as it were.

Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it built up a system, which, to anyone so obsessed by his own hypnoses that he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an intellectual anaemia built upon infinitesimal debilities.

In _Science_, n.s., 31-298, E.D. Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, a.s.serts or confesses that often have objects of material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him He says that these things have been accompanied by a.s.surances that they have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses.

They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They were on the ground in the first place. It is only by coincidence that lightning has struck, or that a real meteorite, which was unfindable, has struck near objects of slag and limestone.

Mr. Hovey says that the list might be extended indefinitely. That's a tantalizing suggestion of some very interesting stuff--

He says:

"But it is not worth while."

I'd like to know what strange, d.a.m.ned, excommunicated things have been sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that they had seen what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk ridicule, to make up bundles, go to express offices, and write letters. I accept that over the door of every museum, into which such things enter, is written:

"Abandon Hope."

If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or cinders, said to have fallen from the sky, we are not--except by a.s.sociation with the "carbonaceous" meteorites--strong in our impression that coal sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning super-constructions up somewhere--

In _Comptes Rendus_, 91-197, M. Daubree tells the same story. Our acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same story.

Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates proportionately to its multiplicity. M. Daubree says that often have strange d.a.m.ned things been sent to the French museums, accompanied by a.s.surances that they had been seen to fall from the sky. Especially to our interest, he mentions coal and slag.

Excluded.

Buried un-named and undated in Science's potter's field.

I do not say that the data of the d.a.m.ned should have the same rights as the data of the saved. That would be justice. That would be of the Positive Absolute, and, though the ideal of, a violation of, the very essence of quasi-existence, wherein only to have the appearance of being is to express a preponderance of force one way or another--or inequilibrium, or inconsistency, or injustice.

Our acceptance is that the pa.s.sing away of exclusionism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century: that G.o.ds of the twentieth century will sustain our notions be they ever so unwashed and frowsy. But, in our own expressions, we are limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousnesses. At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence--or imponderable, I think--that pervades the twentieth century, we have not the superst.i.tion that we are offering anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less superst.i.tious and credulous than any logician, savage, curator, or rustic.

An orthodox demonstration, in terms of which we shall have some heresies, is that if things found in coal could have got there only by falling there--they fell there.

So, in the _Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Mems._, 2-9-306, it is argued that certain roundish stones that have been found in coal are "fossil aerolites": that they had fallen from the sky, ages ago, when the coal was soft, because the coal had closed around them, showing no sign of entrance.

_Proc. Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland_, 1-1-121:

That, in a lump of coal, from a mine in Scotland, an iron instrument had been found--

"The interest attaching to this singular relic arises from the fact of its having been found in the heart of a piece of coal, seven feet under the surface."

If we accept that this object of iron was of workmans.h.i.+p beyond the means and skill of the primitive men who may have lived in Scotland when coal was forming there--

"The instrument was considered to be modern."

That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the _Proceedings_:

That in modern times someone may have bored for coal, and that his drill may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated.