{"collection":"fort","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/fort/wild/wild16.htm","path":"fort/wild/wild16.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/fort/wild/wild16.htm","text":"Wild Talents, by Charles Fort, [1933]\nBut why this everlasting attempt to solve something?\u2014whereas it is our acceptance that, in a final sense, there is, in phenomenal affairs, nothing\u2014or that there is only the state of something-nothing\u2014so that all problems are only soluble-insoluble\u2014or that most of the social problems we have, today, were at one time conceived of as solutions of preceding problems\u2014or that every Moses leads his people out of Egypt into perhaps a damn sight worse\u2014Promised Lands of watered milk and much-adulterated honey\u2014so why these everlasting attempts to solve something?\nBut to take surgical operations upon warders of Sing Sing Prison, and the loss of rectitude by lace curtains, and the vanishing man of Berlin; \"Typhoid Mary,\" and a Chinese hair-clipper, and explosions of coal, and bodies on benches in a Harlem Park\u2014\nRobert Browning's conception was to take three sounds, and make, not a fourth, but a star.\nOut of seven colors, not to lay on daubs, but to paint a picture. Out of seven million Americans, Russians, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and on, so long as geography holds out, not to pile a population, but to organize\u2014more or less\u2014into New York City.\nSulphur and lava in a barren plain, and a salty block of stone, shaped roughly like a woman\u2014signs of erosion on rocks far above water-level\u2014a meteor that had set a bush afire\u2014the differences of languages of peoples\u2014and all the other elements that organized into Genesis.\nData of variations and heredity and adaptations; of multiplications and of checks and of the doctrine of Malthus; of acquired characters and of transmissions\u2014and they organized into The Origin of Species\u2014\nJust as, once upon a time, minerals that had affinity for one another came together and took on geometrical appearances. But a crystal is not supposed to be either a prohibition or an\nanti-prohibition argument. I know of a crystal of quartz that weighs several hundred pounds. But it has not been mistaken for propaganda\u2014\nOr all theories\u2014theological, scientific, philosophical\u2014and that they represent the same organizing process\u2014but that self-conscious theorists, instead of recognizing that thought-forms were appearing in their minds, as in wider existence have appeared crystalline constructions, have believed that it was immortal Truth that they were conceiving.\nOxygen and sulphur and carbon\u2014\nOr Emma Piggott and Ambrose Small and Rose Smith\u2014\nOr let's have just a little, minor expression, or organization, a small composition, arranging the data of poltergeist girls. The elements of this synthesis are moving objects, fires, girls in strange surroundings, youth and the atavism of youth.\nCase of Jennie Bramwell\u2014she was an adopted daughter. The Antigonish girl was an adopted daughter. See the Dagg case\u2014adopted daughter. \"Adoption\" is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and \"adopted daughters,\" as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters; under hard taskmasters, in strange surroundings\u2014\nOr the first uncertain and precarious appearances of human beings upon this earth\u2014and a need for them, and a fostering, a nurturing, a protection, far different from conditions in these swarming times, when the need is for eliminations\u2014\nA lost child in primordial woods\u2014and the value of her, which no genius, king, or leveler of kings, has today\u2014\nThat objects moved in her presence\u2014fruits of trees that came down from the trees and set themselves beside her\u2014the shaking of bushes that cast, to her, berries\u2014then night and coldness\u2014faggots, joining twigs, and dancing around her\u2014heaping\u2014the crackling of flames to warm her\u2014\nOr that, to this day, grotesque capers of chairs, the antics of sofas, and the seeming wantonness of flames are survivals of co-operations\nthat once upon a time moved even the trees, when a child was lost in a forest.\nThe old mathematicians had this aesthetic appraisal of their thoughts: they wrought theorems and calculi \"for elegance,\" and were scornful of uses. But virtually everything that they produced \"for elegance\" was put to work by astronomers, navigators, surveyors. I assemble, compositionally, what I call data: but I am much depressed, perhaps, fearing that they have meaning outside themselves, or may be useful.\nThere is, upon this earth, today, at least one artist. Prof. Albert Einstein put together, into what he called one organic whole, such a diversity of elements as electro-magnetic waves and irregularities in the motions of the planet Mercury; the fall of a stone from a train to an embankment, the geometry of hyper-space, and accelerated co-ordinate systems, and Lorentz transformations, and the displacements of stars during eclipses\u2014\nAnd the exploitation of everything by something, or, more or less remotely, by everything else\u2014the need of astronomers for Einsteinism, because it was so encouragingly unintelligible, whereas schoolboys were beginning to pick Newtonism to pieces\u2014and in the year 1918 it was announced that the useful Einstein had predicted displacements of stars, according to his theory, and that his predictions had been confirmed.\nFor purposes of renewed confirmation\u2014or maybe in innocence of trying to confirm anything, or at least not consciously intending to observe whatever was wanted\u2014an expedition was sent by Lick Observatory to report upon the displacement of stars during the solar eclipse of October, 1922. The astronomers of this expedition agreed that the displacements of stars confirmed Einstein, the Prophet. Einstein was said to be useful, and, in California, school children, dressed in white, sang unto him kindred unintelligibilities. In New York, mounted policemen roughly held back crowds from him, just as he, to make his system of thoughts, had clubbed many astronomical data into insensibility. He had taken into his system of thoughts irregularities of the planet Mercury, but had left out irregularities of the planet Venus. Crowds took him into their holiday-making, but omitted asking what it was all about.\nUpon June 12, 1931, Prof. Erwin Freundlicher reported to the Physics Association of Berlin that, according to his observations, during the eclipse of May 9, 1929, stars were not displaced, as, according to Einstein, they should be\u2014or that, outside itself, Einsteinism is meaningless.\nThere was no excitement over this tragedy, or comedy, because this earth's intellectuals, mostly, take notice only when they're told to take notice; and to orthodoxy it seemed wisest that this earth's thinkers should not think about this. Prof. Freundlicher's explained the astronomers of the Lick expedition, quite as I explain all astronomers. He gave his opinion that they had confirmed Einstein because \"they had left out of consideration observations that did not fit in with the results that they wanted to obtain.\" If there be much more of such agreements with me, I shall have to hunt me some new heresies. For an account of Prof. Freundlicher's report, see the New York Herald Tribune, June 14, 1931.\nOutside itself Einsteinism has no meaning.\nAs a worthless thing\u2014As an unrelated thing its state is that of which artists have dreamed, in their quest for absoluteness\u2014the dream of \"art for art's sake.\"\nUp to Dec. 6, 1931, I thought of Prof. Einstein's theories as almost alone, or as representing almost sublime worthlessness. But New York Times, Dec. 6, 1931\u2014scientists of the University of California, experimenting upon an admixture of phosphorus in the food of swine, were developing luminous pigs. \"Just what they will be good for has not yet been announced.\"\nMine is a dream of being not worth a displaced star to anybody. I protest that with the elements of this book my only motive is compositional\u2014but comes the suspicion that I protest too much.\nThere has been a gathering of suggestions\u2014that there are subtler \"rays\" than anything that is known in radioactivity, and that they may be developed into usefulness. The Ascot Cup and the Dublin jewels\u2014and, if they were switched away by a means of transportation now not commonly known, a common knowledge may be developed to enormous advantage in commercial and recreational and explorative transportations.\nIn the period of my writing of this book, Californian scientists\nwere trying to make pigs shine at night. Another scientist, who could not yet announce much usefulness, was feeding skimmed milk to huckleberries. For all I know one of us may revolutionize something or another.","title":"Wild Talents: 16","type":"page"}