A Scientific Supplement
Maynard Shipley best epitomizes though who saw in Fort’s work not an attack on science, but a supplement to it. Shipley placed a high value on scientific knowledge. He studied criminology, sociology, astrology, and evolutionary biology. In the early 1920s, he (especially) and Deford (to a lesser extent) started writing for Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books, easing their tight financial situation. Shipley authored 30 titles (de Ford fifteen), twenty-three on scientific subjects. In 1924, concerned about the threat that religious fundamentalism posed to the teaching of evolution, he founded the Science League to defend scientists against Christian dogma. So, he was not inclined to accept Fort’s attacks on science or ridiculing of scientists: Fort was especially harsh on astronomers, suggesting that the stars were only a few miles away and that there was a Super-Sargasso Sea above the Earth, and it was from here that mysterious objects fell. In his letters to Fort and his review of Lo!, Shipley dismissed this theorizing and Fort’s understanding of the true practice of science: it wasn’t just idle theorizing, but based on profound entanglements with the natural world.
But Shipley was fascinated by the many damned facts that Fort collected. This was data, he said, that needed to be taken seriously. Fort’s data, Shipley said in the New York Times, are “difficult to accept but impossible, in all honesty, to ignore.” Shipley’s willingness to consider Fort’s data makes sense in light of his own experiences. Their house in Sausalito, for example, seemed to have been haunted, with mysteriously moving objects and a bed that drove every sleeper out before the night was over. In 1919, Shipley accepted a commission from Scientific American to investigate Dr. Albert Abrams (1863-1924), of San Francisco, who was making incredible claims about his electronic medicine. Shipley was open to the possibility, and at first even believed that Abrams was doing work, but eventually had to conclude that the doctor was either a charlatan or dupe. Shipley came to believe that scientific laws were too provincial, failing to account for all natural laws. De Ford wrote,
He was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.
Fort seemed to Shipley a soul-mate, of sorts, the “Enfant Terrible of Science” as he (and, later, de Ford) dubbed him, “bringing the family skeletons to the dinner table when distinguished guests are present.” It was the job of scientists to account for these skeletons, these damned data. Fort’s work thus supplemented science.
Kenneth MacNichol (1887-1954) may also have been among those who saw Fort as adding to science, although this claim is more speculative, as MacNichol remains relatively unknown. A pulp writer traumatized by the Great War, MacNichol found his way to San Francisco after years of traveling the world, eventually marrying for the fifth and sixth times in the Bay Area, the fifth time to Polly Lamb (Goforth) (1901-1956), a writer who also considered herself a sorceress. He opened Pencraft University, a writing school, at 478 Union in San Francisco, which is where Chapter Two held many of its meetings. As part of the curriculum, MacNichol was teaching Alfred Korzybski’s (1879-1950)General Semantics, presumably as laid out in Science and Sanity (1933). General Semantics was an incredibly complex system of “non-Aristotelian” logic, but can be glossed as the claim that words do not adequately represent reality, and so people need to be liberated from their linguistic tradition so that they can confront reality more fully. It is not clear exactly how MacNichol used Korzybski’s system—although he gave a lecture at a General Semantics conference on “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers”—but it seems fair to say that General Semantics was meant to make knowledge—including science—truer. MacNichol was also using Fort in his courses at Pencraft, and it is not too much to suspect that he found in Fort some of what he found in Korzybski: that what had been ignored might be a key to making science better.
Maynard Shipley best epitomizes though who saw in Fort’s work not an attack on science, but a supplement to it. Shipley placed a high value on scientific knowledge. He studied criminology, sociology, astrology, and evolutionary biology. In the early 1920s, he (especially) and Deford (to a lesser extent) started writing for Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books, easing their tight financial situation. Shipley authored 30 titles (de Ford fifteen), twenty-three on scientific subjects. In 1924, concerned about the threat that religious fundamentalism posed to the teaching of evolution, he founded the Science League to defend scientists against Christian dogma. So, he was not inclined to accept Fort’s attacks on science or ridiculing of scientists: Fort was especially harsh on astronomers, suggesting that the stars were only a few miles away and that there was a Super-Sargasso Sea above the Earth, and it was from here that mysterious objects fell. In his letters to Fort and his review of Lo!, Shipley dismissed this theorizing and Fort’s understanding of the true practice of science: it wasn’t just idle theorizing, but based on profound entanglements with the natural world.
But Shipley was fascinated by the many damned facts that Fort collected. This was data, he said, that needed to be taken seriously. Fort’s data, Shipley said in the New York Times, are “difficult to accept but impossible, in all honesty, to ignore.” Shipley’s willingness to consider Fort’s data makes sense in light of his own experiences. Their house in Sausalito, for example, seemed to have been haunted, with mysteriously moving objects and a bed that drove every sleeper out before the night was over. In 1919, Shipley accepted a commission from Scientific American to investigate Dr. Albert Abrams (1863-1924), of San Francisco, who was making incredible claims about his electronic medicine. Shipley was open to the possibility, and at first even believed that Abrams was doing work, but eventually had to conclude that the doctor was either a charlatan or dupe. Shipley came to believe that scientific laws were too provincial, failing to account for all natural laws. De Ford wrote,
He was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.
Fort seemed to Shipley a soul-mate, of sorts, the “Enfant Terrible of Science” as he (and, later, de Ford) dubbed him, “bringing the family skeletons to the dinner table when distinguished guests are present.” It was the job of scientists to account for these skeletons, these damned data. Fort’s work thus supplemented science.
Kenneth MacNichol (1887-1954) may also have been among those who saw Fort as adding to science, although this claim is more speculative, as MacNichol remains relatively unknown. A pulp writer traumatized by the Great War, MacNichol found his way to San Francisco after years of traveling the world, eventually marrying for the fifth and sixth times in the Bay Area, the fifth time to Polly Lamb (Goforth) (1901-1956), a writer who also considered herself a sorceress. He opened Pencraft University, a writing school, at 478 Union in San Francisco, which is where Chapter Two held many of its meetings. As part of the curriculum, MacNichol was teaching Alfred Korzybski’s (1879-1950)General Semantics, presumably as laid out in Science and Sanity (1933). General Semantics was an incredibly complex system of “non-Aristotelian” logic, but can be glossed as the claim that words do not adequately represent reality, and so people need to be liberated from their linguistic tradition so that they can confront reality more fully. It is not clear exactly how MacNichol used Korzybski’s system—although he gave a lecture at a General Semantics conference on “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers”—but it seems fair to say that General Semantics was meant to make knowledge—including science—truer. MacNichol was also using Fort in his courses at Pencraft, and it is not too much to suspect that he found in Fort some of what he found in Korzybski: that what had been ignored might be a key to making science better.
