TRTR(I.3) Resource Addition - I'll Be Damned

[Erik T. Burns]

that is a great find.

i think Fort's prose & angle on things is very pynchonesque too -- the
pynchon perhaps most of all of the short story "Entropy",  esp this: "That
all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization, harmony,
consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real."

as for WG & TR, that makes sense too; his characters are always in search of
the real, and often they can "recognize" it if not actually access it or
live it (because, after all, it "lives" them)



On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>wrote:

> The Book of the Damned, by Charles Fort, is mentioned and quoted in
> Chapter 3 ("By the damned, I mean the excluded"/"By prostitution, I
> seem to mean usefulness"/"maybe we're fished for"):
>
> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22472/22472-h/22472-h.htm
>
> From Fort:
>
> By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something
> else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a
> reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we
> mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do
> not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do
> merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is
> nothing with which to merge.
>
> That, though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable
> that the universal can be localized: but that high approximations
> there may be, and that these approximate successes may be translated
> out of Intermediateness into Realness—quite as, in a relative sense,
> the industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness,
> or out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines
> which seem, when set up in factories, to have more of Realness than
> they had when only imagined.
>
> That all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization,
> harmony, consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real.
>
> So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like
> a purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call
> Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but
> expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a
> real existence.
>
> Our acceptance is that Science, though usually thought of so
> specifically, or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a
> prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this
> one spirit animating all Intermediateness: that, if Science could
> absolutely exclude all data but its own present data, or that which is
> assimilable with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real
> system, with positively definite outlines—it would be real.
>
> Its seeming approximation to consistency, stability,
> system—positiveness or realness—is sustained by damning the
> irreconcilable or the unassimilable—
>
> All would be well.
>
> All would be heavenly—
>
> If the damned would only stay damned.
>
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