The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 371 of 376

Page 371 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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Hunting parties [p. 307] We have had a story, and now we shall tell it over from contemporaneous sources. We have had the later accounts first very largely for an impression of the correlating effect that time brings about, by addition, disregard and distortion. For instance, the "dead calm in a single day." If | had found that the excitement did die out rather soon, I'd incline to accept that nothing extraordinary had occurred. | found that the excitement had continued for weeks. | recognize this as a well-adapted thing to say, to divert attention from a discorrelate. All phenomena are "explained" in the terms of the Dominant of their era. This is why we give up trying really to explain, and content ourselves with expressing. Devils that might print marks in snow are correlates to the third Dominant back from this era. So it was an adjustment by nineteenth-century correlates, or human tropisms, to say that the marks in the snow were clawed. Hoof-like marks are not only horsey but devilish. It had to be said in the nineteenth century that those prints showed claw- marks. We shall see that this was stated by Prof. Owen, one of the greatest biologists of his day--except that Darwin didn't think so. But | shall give reference to two representations of them that can be seen in the New York Public Library. In neither representation is there the faintest suggestion of a claw-mark. There never has been a Prof. Owen who has explained: he has correlated. Another adaptation, in the later accounts, is that of leading this discorrelate to the Old Dominant into the familiar scenery of a fairy story, and discredit it by assimilation to the conventionally fictitious--so the idea of the baying, terrified hounds, and forest like enchanted forests, which no one dared to enter. were organized, but the baying, terrified hounds do not appear in contemporaneous accounts. The story of the kangaroo looks like adaptation to needs for an animal that could spring far, because marks were found in the snow on roofs of houses. But so astonishing is the extent of snow that was marked that after a while another kangaroo was added.