Yeah, so I haven't used this category as much as I thought.  But now I am starting to apply a little more thought to exactly what I want to say about the Forteans--or at least some of them--and so thought I might make use of it again.

I still have some reading to do, but I think I've finished collecting information on the San Francisco Bay Area Forteans through the 1950s, and so am in the early stages of combining it into what will eventually become an article.  But to what end?

As noted earlier, thinking about Forteans is one way of thinking about collecting, and what collecting means in a world that becomes increasingly oriented around consumption.

From a completely different angle, one can also think of Forteans as superstitious hold-outs--people who turn their back on science to embrace irrationalism and unreason.  Certainly, there are plenty of examples in Doubt of Tiffany Thayer standing against reason simply for the sake of standing against reason.  Even many Forteans thought so. 

Among Boucher’s great enthusiasms was Sherlock Holmes.  He wrote radio plays about the fictional detective’s exploits, essays about him, anthologized other works about Holmes, and belonged to the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Homes fan group (not unlike, in its way, some of the science fiction fan groups; apparently, the Irregulars were all men, but when Boucher and an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle formed a Bay Area chapter they were so inundated with requests from women to join that they formed a women’s auxiliary group, which demonstrates, at least a little, some of Boucher’s liberalism and sense of social justice).  His books made regular reference to Holmes—not surprising since those who belonged to the Irregulars had to have read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels and short stories and pass a test. 

It is worth spending a few moments thinking about this fascination with Sherlockiana, as there are a couple of ways in which it connects to Fortean activities.

As I discovered in writing my book on Bigfoot, Sherlock Holmes was a favorite among cryptozoologists: Bernard Heuvelmans considered himself the Sherlock Holmes of Zoology and Holmes’s aphorism, “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” was repeatedly quoted by those such as Grover Krantz who were deeply committed to proving the existence of Sasquatch.

Certainly, part of this interest in Holmes merely reflected the fact that he had become the very epitome of scientific detection—even people with no knowledge of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories and four novels know of the name and know its meaning.  As well, there very well could have been a somewhat closer connection, in that Holmes was often referred to in the men’s adventure magazines which published so much about Bigfoot in the 1960s and 1970s, and so Bigfooters would have often tripped over references to Holmes.

But there’s another reason, too, I think Holmes appealed to Bigfooters: because, as historian Michael Saler says, he embodied a certain kind of rationality that was attractive to Bigfooters.  The rise of modernity and the power of science in the first part of the twentieth century, made many people worried that magic, imagination, and enchantment were being drained from the world.  Not to put to fine a point on it, but there was a sense that—in Max Weber’s phrase—the “Iron Cage” of Rationality, Science, and Bureaucracy—yes, all capitalized—conspired to turn all of us moderns into drones, mere numbers in a larger symptom.  That fear, obviously, has dwindled some but not gone away.  Holmes’s showed how to confront this dilemma and triumph over it—how to accept rationality and reason but imbue it with imagination.  Saler writes, “Holmes solved cases by relating seemingly discrete facts to a more encompassing and meaningful configuration, whose integuments were derived from a combination of rigorous observation, precise logic, and lively imagination.”  Bigfooters saw themselves employing the exact same method.  Scientists themselves were slaves to instrumental reasoning; they lacked the imagination to understand all of the subtle clues.  Bigfooters, on the contrary, could see how the tracks, the hair, the sightings added up to something exciting, something wonderful—that reason could enchant the world.  That ratiocination could prove the improbable.  Such as the existence of a monster in the Pacific Northwest woods.

Or, more broadly, that Forteans, perceptive to life’s clues and blessed with an imagination, could add up those observations and discover wonders ignored by science: falling rocks, UFOs, teleportation or, more grandly, our Et overlords or the Super Sargasso Sea that hovered above the Earth.

(A similar form of what Saler calls “animistic reason,” the melding of imagination of rationality, motivates science fiction writing, as well).

But this statement—that Forteans might believe in a Super-Sargasso Sea from which strange objects fall onto the Earth—needs to be immediately qualified, and interest in Sherlockiana shows how.

One conceit of the Baker Street Irregulars was that Holmes really existed—that Arthur Conan Doyle merely chronicled the real life exploits of a detective.  They celebrated Holmes’s birthday (the theologically meaningful January 6), for example.  There were even biographies written of Holmes.  In one of his mysteries, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, Boucher himself played around with this idea: the dedication read, “All characters portrayed or referred to in this novel are fictitious, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, to whom this book is dedicated.”

Of course Boucher knew that Sherlock Holmes was fictional, as did other members of the Baker Street Irregulars, and even those who wrote a biography of Holmes.  But they were, Saler argues, indulging another response to the grim prospects of modernity: using what he calls the “ironic imagination.”  By suspending disbelief and playing around with the idea that a fictional character actually existed, they could enchant the world—make it seem magical and wonderful—while not giving up on rationality, while recognizing that what they were doing was play.

Fortean interests, I would argue, are often driven by this self-same ironic imagination.  Indeed, Fort said explicitly that he did not believe in all of his theories—nor did all of his followers.  They didn’t really think that there was a giant sea surrounding the world.  But the idea of it made the world seem more interesting, more magical.

Boucher’s interest in Holmes, then, was (possibly) of a piece with his interest in Fort.  It was a way of reclaiming a space for the imagination in a world that threatened to destroy it.

The most obvious way, at least when one thinks of Charles Fort himself, is as a collector.  Fort spent years in New York and British libraries collecting reports of the strange, the inexplicable, which he then filed according to his own system: a hue collection.

Collecting has been central to much Fortean activity since then.  In the reprint edition of his Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, for example, Ivan Sanderson said that Forteanism could only be advanced y scouring libraries for more reports of the unknown.  And he was an inveterate collector himself. joking that when he died, he would not be buried, but filed amid his collection.

I have recently learned that Booth Tarkington, one of the founding members of the Fortean Society, wrote a book called The Collector's Whatnot.  That's probably worth checking out.

While I collect a little more information on Kenneth MacNichol, I'm starting a new series: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fortean.

The poet Wallace Stevens famously said that there were Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  I don't know much (read: anything) about Wallace Stevens, but the Wikipedia entry on him suggests that he had a Fortean flair.  He wrote,

“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."

Charles Fort, I think, would have understood this.  Stevens is saying that there are perceptions--things we experience and know about--that come before reason, or scientific understanding.  And some of these things, then, might later be dropped out when reason is applied--experiences left unexplained.  Damned facts.  The entry explains,

[I]n Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning.

And thus we can see how there might be thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird: as the mind sorts through different ways of making reality.

Similarly, there might be thirteen ways of looking at anything.

Including Forteans.

I have yet to make up my mind about how exactly to structure a history of the Forteans.  In large part that's because I am still engaging with the data.  But there is also the act of imagination--or, to switch metaphors--the (intellectual) tools any of us has available, the ways of thinking.  And so this series will explore different ways of thinking about Forteans, different intellectual tools for making sense of them, different historical approaches, different ways of looking.