Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned pages 4-5

It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to include 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 unalike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both of them are only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only 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 that that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived of.

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