The Book of the Damned

A flock of gorged, heavy-weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky-- They had disgorged. Prof. Fassig lists the substance, in his "Bibliography," as fish spawn. McAtee (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1918) lists it as a jelly-like material, supposed to have been the "dried" spawn either of fishes or of some batrachian. Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all things new, there can be what is called progress-- That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity: If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity. Every resistance is itself divided into parts resisting one another. The simplest strategy seems to be--never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts fighting one another. We are merging away from carnal to gelatinous substance, and here there is an abundance of instances or reports of instances. These data are so improper they're obscene to the science of today, but we shall see that science, before it became so rigorous, was not so prudish. Chladni was not, and Greg was not. I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often fallen from the sky-- Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous? That meteors tear through and detach fragments? That fragments are brought down by storms? That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through something that quivers? I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky is gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are.