wowza, nice roll
Fort began a career in journalism back in the late 1890s, in New York. An interest in outlandish stories grew into a serious pursuit of phenomena without scientific explanation, and he became a full-time writer on this topic, relocating to London a couple of years ago to access the British Museum archives. He’s published three books along these lines, which you easily get hold of - The Book of the Damned, New Lands, and a novel called The Outcast Manufacturers. The novel is nothing much to speak of, but the other two are rich collections of inexplicable events with criticisms of attempts at scientific rationalisation. He suggests - satirically, you think - the notion of a “Super-Sargasso Sea” where all lost things go, occasionally emerging again heedless of space or time.
Alongside these are occasional articles. One dated August 1925 reports what Fort describes as an ‘outbreak of somnambulistic art’ in the spring of 1925. He lists numerous artists, musicians and poets who claimed to have awoken from deep dreams to find themselves at work on elaborate compositions. In one case, a New England sculptor named Henry Wilcox, the dreamer had completed a detailed bas-relief with antique-seeming inscriptions before waking. The work (thought to be a representation of Poseidon) was exhibited to a mixed reception, and stolen from a gallery two months later. Fort pieces this together with other events around the globe:
“Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926.”
He finishes with a suggestion that the earthquake detected throughout the Pacific coasts around that time was accompanied by a ‘quake’ in the collective unconsciousness, causing a particular series of impressions to arise in the minds of people around the world, and particularly those already accustomed to drawing on subconscious influences.
