The Book of the Damned Part 50

We have instances of three objects that were seen in the sky in a s.p.a.ce of three months, and this concurrence seems to me to be something to judge by. Science has been built upon concurrence: so have been most of the fallacies and fanaticisms. I feel the positivism of a Leverrier, or instinctively take to the notion that all three of these observations relate to the same object. However, I don't formulate them and predict the next transit. Here's another chance for me to become a fixed star--but as usual--oh, well--

A point in Intermediatism:

That the Intermediatist is likely to be a flaccid compromiser.

Our own att.i.tude:

Ours is a partly positive and partly negative state, or a state in which nothing is finally positive or finally negative--

But, if positivism attract you, go ahead and try: you will be in harmony with cosmic endeavor--but Continuity will resist you. Only to have appearance in quasiness is to be proportionately positive, but beyond a degree of attempted positivism, Continuity will rise to pull you back.

Success, as it is called--though there is only success-failure in Intermediateness--will, in Intermediateness, be yours proportionately as you are in adjustment with its own state, or some positivism mixed with compromise and retreat. To be very positive is to be a Napoleon Bonaparte, against whom the rest of civilization will sooner or later combine. For interesting data, see newspaper accounts of fate of one Dowie, of Chicago.

Intermediatism, then, is recognition that our state is only a quasi-state: it is no bar to one who desires to be positive: it is recognition that he cannot be positive and remain in a state that is positive-negative. Or that a great positivist--isolated--with no system to support him--will be crucified, or will starve to death, or will be put in jail and beaten to death--that these are the birth-pangs of translation to the Positive Absolute.

So, though positive-negative, myself, I feel the attraction of the positive pole of our intermediate state, and attempt to correlate these three data: to see them h.o.m.ogeneously; to think that they relate to one object.

In the aeronautic journals and in the London _Times_ there is no mention of escaped balloons, in the summer or fall of 1898. In the _New York Times_ there is no mention of ballooning in Canada or the United States, in the summer of 1898.

London _Times_, Sept. 29, 1885:

A clipping from the _Royal Gazette_, of Bermuda, of Sept. 8, 1885, sent to the _Times_ by General Lefroy:

That, upon Aug. 27, 1885, at about 8:30 A.M., there was observed by Mrs.

Adelina D. Ba.s.sett, "a strange object in the clouds, coming from the north." She called the attention of Mrs. L. Lowell to it, and they were both somewhat alarmed. However, they continued to watch the object steadily for some time. It drew nearer. It was of triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it. While crossing the land it had appeared to descend, but, as it went out to sea, it ascended, and continued to ascend, until it was lost to sight high in the clouds.

Or with such power to ascend, I don't think much myself of the notion that it was an escaped balloon, partly deflated. Nevertheless, General Lefroy, correlating with Exclusionism, attempts to give a terrestrial interpretation to this occurrence. He argues that the thing may have been a balloon that had escaped from France or England--or the only aerial thing of terrestrial origin that, even to this date of about thirty-five years later, has been thought to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He accounts for the triangular form by deflation--"a shapeless bag, barely able to float." My own acceptance is that great deflation does not accord with observations upon its power to ascend.

In the _Times_, Oct. 1, 1885, Charles Harding, of the R.M.S., argues that if it had been a balloon from Europe, surely it would have been seen and reported by many vessels. Whether he was as good a Briton as the General or not, he shows awareness of the United States--or that the thing may have been a partly collapsed balloon that had escaped from the United States.

General Lefroy wrote to _Nature_ about it (_Nature_, 33-99), saying--whatever his sensitivenesses may have been--that the columns of the _Times_ were "hardly suitable" for such a discussion. If, in the past, there had been more persons like General Lefroy, we'd have better than the mere fragments of data that in most cases are too broken up very well to piece together. He took the trouble to write to a friend of his, W.H. Gosling, of Bermuda--who also was an extraordinary person. He went to the trouble of interviewing Mrs. Ba.s.sett and Mrs. Lowell. Their description to him was somewhat different:

An object from which nets were suspended--

Deflated balloon, with its network hanging from it--

A super-dragnet?

That something was trawling overhead?

The birds of Baton Rouge.

Mr. Gosling wrote that the item of chains, or suggestion of a basket that had been attached, had originated with Mr. Ba.s.sett, who had not seen the object. Mr. Gosling mentioned a balloon that had escaped from Paris in July. He tells of a balloon that fell in Chicago, September 17, or three weeks later than the Bermuda object.

It's one incredibility against another, with disregards and convictions governed by whichever of the two Dominants looms stronger in each reader's mind. That he can't think for himself any more than I can is understood.

My own correlates:

I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think that we may be of some use after all. I think that dragnets have often come down and have been mistaken for whirlwinds and waterspouts. Some accounts of seeming structure in whirlwinds and waterspouts are astonis.h.i.+ng. And I have data that, in this book, I can't take up at all--mysterious disappearances. I think we're fished for. But this is a little expression on the side: relates to trespa.s.sers; has nothing to do with the subject that I shall take up at some other time--or our use to some other mode of seeming that has a legal right to us.

_Nature_, 33-137:

"Our Paris correspondent writes that in relation to the balloon which is said to have been seen over Bermuda, in September, no ascent took place in France which can account for it."

Last of August: not September. In the London _Times_ there is no mention of balloon ascents in Great Britain, in the summer of 1885, but mention of two ascents in France. Both balloons had escaped. In _L'Aeronaute_, August, 1885, it is said that these balloons had been sent up from fetes of the fourteenth of July--44 days before the observation at Bermuda.

The aeronauts were Gower and Eloy. Gower's balloon was found floating on the ocean, but Eloy's balloon was not found. Upon the 17th of July it was reported by a sea captain: still in the air; still inflated.

But this balloon of Eloy's was a small exhibition balloon, made for short ascents from fetes and fair grounds. In _La Nature_, 1885-2-131, it is said that it was a very small balloon, incapable of remaining long in the air.

As to contemporaneous ballooning in the United States, I find only one account: an ascent in Connecticut, July 29, 1885. Upon leaving this balloon, the aeronauts had pulled the "rip cord," "turning it inside out." (_New York Times_, Aug. 10, 1885.)

To the Intermediatist, the accusation of "anthropomorphism" is meaningless. There is nothing in anything that is unique or positively different. We'd be materialists were it not quite as rational to express the material in terms of the immaterial as to express the immaterial in terms of the material. Oneness of allness in quasiness. I will engage to write the formula of any novel in psycho-chemic terms, or draw its graph in psycho-mechanic terms: or write, in romantic terms, the circ.u.mstances and sequences of any chemic or electric or magnetic reaction: or express any historic event in algebraic terms--or see Boole and Jevons for economic situations expressed algebraically.

I think of the Dominants as I think of persons--not meaning that they are real persons--not meaning that we are real persons--

Or the Old Dominant and its jealousy, and its suppression of all things and thoughts that endangered its supremacy. In reading discussions of papers, by scientific societies, I have often noted how, when they approached forbidden--or irreconcilable--subjects, the discussions were thrown into confusion and ramification. It's as if scientific discussions have often been led astray--as if purposefully--as if by something directive, hovering over them. Of course I mean only the Spirit of all Development. Just so, in any embryo, cells that would tend to vary from the appearances of their era are compelled to correlate.

In _Nature_, 90-169, Charles Tilden Smith writes that, at Chisbury, Wilts.h.i.+re, England, April 8, 1912, he saw something in the sky--

"--unlike anything that I had ever seen before."

"Although I have studied the skies for many years, I have never seen anything like it."

He saw two stationary dark patches upon clouds.

The extraordinary part:

They were stationary upon clouds that were rapidly moving.

They were fan-shaped--or triangular--and varied in size, but kept the same position upon different clouds as cloud after cloud came along. For more than half an hour Mr. Smith watched these dark patches--

His impression as to the one that appeared first:

That it was "really a heavy shadow cast upon a thin veil of clouds by some unseen object away in the west, which was intercepting the sun's rays."

Upon page 244, of this volume of _Nature_, is a letter from another correspondent, to the effect that similar shadows are cast by mountains upon clouds, and that no doubt Mr. Smith was right in attributing the appearance to "some unseen object, which was intercepting the sun's rays." But the Old Dominant that was a jealous Dominant, and the wrath of the Old Dominant against such an irreconcilability as large, opaque objects in the sky, casting down shadows upon clouds. Still the Dominants are suave very often, or are not absolute G.o.ds, and the way attention was led away from this subject is an interesting study in quasi-divine bamboozlement. Upon page 268, Charles J.P. Cave, the meteorologist, writes that, upon April 5 and 8, at Ditcham Park, Petersfield, he had observed a similar appearance, while watching some pilot balloons--but he describes something not in the least like a shadow on clouds, but a stationary cloud--the inference seems to be that the shadows at Chisbury may have been shadows of pilot balloons. Upon page 322, another correspondent writes upon shadows cast by mountains; upon page 348 someone else carries on the divergence by discussing this third letter: then someone takes up the third letter mathematically; and then there is a correction of error in this mathematic demonstration--I think it looks very much like what I think it looks like.

But the mystery here:

That the dark patches at Chisbury could not have been cast by stationary pilot balloons that were to the west, or that were between clouds and the setting sun. If, to the west of Chisbury, a stationary object were high in the air, intercepting the sun's rays, the shadow of the stationary object would not have been stationary, but would have moved higher and higher with the setting of the sun.

I have to think of something that is in accord with no other data whatsoever:

A luminous body--not the sun--in the sky--but, because of some unknown principle or atmospheric condition, its light extended down only about to the clouds; that from it were suspended two triangular objects, like the object that was seen in Bermuda; that it was this light that fell short of the earth that these objects intercepted; that the objects were drawn up and lowered from something overhead, so that, in its light, their shadows changed size.

If my grope seem to have no grasp in it, and, if a stationary balloon will, in half an hour, not cast a stationary shadow from the setting sun, we have to think of two triangular objects that accurately maintained positions in a line between sun and clouds, and at the same time approached and receded from clouds. Whatever it may have been, it's enough to make the devout make the sign of the crucible, or whatever the devotees of the Old Dominant do in the presence of a new correlate.

Vast, black thing poised like a crow over the moon.

It is our acceptance that these two shadows of Chisbury looked, from the moon, like vast things, black as crows, poised over the earth. It is our acceptance that two triangular luminosities and then two triangular patches, like vast black things, poised like crows over the moon, and, like the triangularities at Chisbury, have been seen upon, or over, the moon: