The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 8 of 376

Page 8 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page Content (OCR)

Venus de Milo. universal. in astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi- different--we give different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium: that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a child an earth worm is not an animal. It is to the biologist. By "beauty," | mean that which seems complete. Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful. A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful. Found on a battlefield--obviously a part--not beautiful. But everything in our experience is only a part of something else that in turn is only a part of still something else--or that there is nothing beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are intermediate to beauty and ugliness--that only universality is complete: that only the complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of the