A whopper is coming.
Later it will be as reasonable, by familiarity, as anything else ever
said.
If someone should study the stone of Cashel, as Champollion studied the
Rosetta stone, he might--or, rather, would inevitably--find meaning in
those lines, and translate them into English--
Nevertheless I begin to suspect something else: something more subtle
and esoteric than graven characters upon stones that have fallen from
the sky, in attempts to communicate. The notion that other worlds are
attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion
is that it is not attempt at all--that it was achievement centuries ago.
I should like to send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen,
say, somewhere in New Hampshire--
And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone--trace
down his affiliations--keep track of him--
Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at Stockholm,
say--
Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be met again in
Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or
meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society--
It is only a dawning credulity.
Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen
from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So
far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty
bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form,
and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the
Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.
Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of the
accursed:
_Comptes Rendus_, 1887-182:
That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm"--two months before the
reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton--a small stone had
fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 millimeters in diameter; 5
millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. Reported to the French Academy by
M. Sudre, professor of the Normal School, Tarbes.
This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too greatly
resisted--the stone was covered with ice.
This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to human hands and
human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone--"tres regulier." "Il a
ete assurement travaille."
There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: nothing of other
objects or debris that fell at or near this date, in France. The thing
had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a machine responds
to its stimulus, the explanation appears in _Comptes Rendus_ that this
stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then flung down.
It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important
than this occurred. In _La Nature_, 1887, and in _L'Annee Scientifique_,
1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer
numbers of _Nature_, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the _Annuaire
de Soc. Met._, 1887.
Not a word of discussion.
Not a subsequent mention can I find.
Our own expression:
What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may
explain?
A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20,
1887.
9
My own pseudo-conclusion:
That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific
principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little
harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets
of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes
have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all
clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that
pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot
distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have
visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and
skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived
from conveniences.
Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the
accursed.
If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of
dream-phantasms.
Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is
considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be
accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky--as if
in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the
essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything into
something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in
only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that if something
can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in that
way--or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but,
of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in
quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are,
in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning
awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer.
Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of "true
meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem incredible
that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that the
date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity
all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn
that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a
field"--"found in making a road"--"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen
times. Someone fishing in Lake Okeechobee, brought up an object in his
fishing net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it. The U.S.
National Museum accepts it.
If we have accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic
material"--one instance of "carbonaceous" matter--if it be too difficult
to utter the word "coal"--we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in
every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false
exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums.
There is something of ultra-pathos--of cosmic sadness--in this universal
search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by
either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham
of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown--or renewed hope
and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that
could also be universal. It's as if "true meteoritic material" were a
"rock of ages" to some scientific men. They cling. But clingers cannot
hold out welcoming arms.
The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing
to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All
sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or
until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward--as it were.
Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only
points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to
atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it
built up a system, which, to anyone so obsessed by his own hypnoses that
he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an
intellectual anaemia built upon infinitesimal debilities.
In _Science_, n.s., 31-298, E.D. Hovey, of the American Museum of
Natural History, asserts or confesses that often have objects of
material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him He
says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they
have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses.
They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They
were on the ground in the first place. It is only by coincidence that
lightning has struck, or that a real meteorite, which was unfindable,
has struck near objects of slag and limestone.
Mr. Hovey says that the list might be extended indefinitely. That's a
tantalizing suggestion of some very interesting stuff--
He says:
"But it is not worth while."
I'd like to know what strange, damned, excommunicated things have been
sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that they had seen
what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk ridicule, to make up
bundles, go to express offices, and write letters. I accept that over
the door of every museum, into which such things enter, is written:
"Abandon Hope."
If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or cinders,
said to have fallen from the sky, we are not--except by association with
the "carbonaceous" meteorites--strong in our impression that coal
sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning super-constructions up
somewhere--
In _Comptes Rendus_, 91-197, M. Daubree tells the same story. Our
acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same story.
Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates proportionately to
its multiplicity. M. Daubree says that often have strange damned things
been sent to the French museums, accompanied by assurances that they had
been seen to fall from the sky. Especially to our interest, he mentions
coal and slag.
Excluded.
Buried un-named and undated in Science's potter's field.
I do not say that the data of the damned should have the same rights as
the data of the saved. That would be justice. That would be of the
Positive Absolute, and, though the ideal of, a violation of, the very
essence of quasi-existence, wherein only to have the appearance of being
is to express a preponderance of force one way or another--or
inequilibrium, or inconsistency, or injustice.
Our acceptance is that the passing away of exclusionism is a phenomenon
of the twentieth century: that gods of the twentieth century will
sustain our notions be they ever so unwashed and frowsy. But, in our own
expressions, we are limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very
same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek,
suave preposterousnesses. At any rate, though we are inspired by an
especial subtle essence--or imponderable, I think--that pervades the
twentieth century, we have not the superstition that we are offering
anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that
we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage,
curator, or rustic.
An orthodox demonstration, in terms of which we shall have some
heresies, is that if things found in coal could have got there only by
falling there--they fell there.
So, in the _Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Mems._, 2-9-306, it is argued
that certain roundish stones that have been found in coal are "fossil
aerolites": that they had fallen from the sky, ages ago, when the coal
was soft, because the coal had closed around them, showing no sign of
entrance.
_Proc. Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland_, 1-1-121:
That, in a lump of coal, from a mine in Scotland, an iron instrument had
been found--
"The interest attaching to this singular relic arises from the fact of
its having been found in the heart of a piece of coal, seven feet under
the surface."
If we accept that this object of iron was of workmanship beyond the
means and skill of the primitive men who may have lived in Scotland when
coal was forming there--
"The instrument was considered to be modern."
That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to
realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the
_Proceedings_:
That in modern times someone may have bored for coal, and that his drill
may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated.
Why he should have abandoned such easily accessible coal, I don't know.
The important point is that there was no sign of boring: that this
instrument was in a lump of coal that had closed around it so that its
presence was not suspected, until the lump of coal was broken.
No mention can I find of this damned thing in any other publication. Of
course there is an alternative here: the thing may not have fallen from
the sky: if in coal-forming times, in Scotland, there were, indigenous
to this earth, no men capable of making such an iron instrument, it may
have been left behind by visitors from other worlds.
In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is
permitted to us, because we are quite as desirous to make acceptable
that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we
note:
That in _Notes and Queries_, 11-1-408, there is an account of an ancient
copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, at a depth of
from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The design upon it is
said to be of a monk kneeling before a virgin and child: a legend upon
the margin is said to be: "St. Jordanis Monachi Spaldingie."