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Joy of Fort
Regarding the debate about ‘Middle-aged Mulder Syndrome’ [FT415:58-59]: encountering Fort for the first time in the late 1970s as a teenager, via Phenomena, Fortean Times and Fort’s Books, what I found (and find!) so exciting and liberating was the gloriously freewheeling playfulness of his imagination; the shamanic, poetic-magical speculations; the cosmic romance and humour of it all; strange objects flying across the Moon: vast, super-celestial, luminous wheels churning through the midnight oceans; owl men scaring children in a rural churchyard: a burning figure runs across a Wiltshire field… a man walks behind some horses and is never seen again… time-slips; dreamlike synchronicities and correspondences; a naked man seen roaming the grounds of Lord (Tutankhamun) Carnarvon’s estate on the day of his death… etc, etc etc.
For me, that’s Fort’s great legacy and gift, rather than questions over whether these things ‘happened’ or are ‘real’; allowing the imagination to open in wonder to the cosmos.
But more importantly, Fort reawakens the forgotten, mythmaking power of imagination; reinstates that ancient sense of imagination as something implicit in the very structure and fabric of reality. Or, as William Blake put it: “To open the immortal eye of man inwards into eternity, ever-expanding in the bosom of God the human imagination”.
Thank you squared for your absolutely brilliant magazine, such a blessed and sanity-preserving corrective to the increasing sterility and anonymity of our times. May the frogs
