The Joys of Crackpot Literature

On the many dangers, possibilities and thrills of disreputable speculation.

Hare-brained theories have always appealed to me. A hare is fast, sensitive to all manner of threats, and prodigiously fertile. When considering what kind of animal you’d want your own mind to emulate, I’d say you could do a lot worse than the hare.

Given the opportunity, I linger in the jumbled esoteric sections of used bookstores - Tarot next to UFOs next to the revelations of Lourdes next to tantric semen-retention next to the Runic alphabet next to recovered past-life memories next to the real, actual, really actual purpose of the pyramids.

Hi, weirdness

There are a lot of roads into crackpot literature. You can come in through religion, politics, history, science fiction, or health and wellness.

While the mainstream of peer-reviewed research, scientifically accepted fact and generally accepted theory isn’t laid out in black and white, you develop a sense of when you’ve left it. For me, the departure is the part of the book, lecture or conversation when I catch myself thinking wait, how come I’ve never heard this before?

This is also a sign that we’ve reached the point where things are getting good. Sometimes that moment occurs fifty pages in. Often, it’s apparent from the cover, like a spaceship over a pyramid. In many of these works, the writers dispense with respectability straightaway. They’ll introduce themselves with the reasons that corrupt academic institutions have failed to teach us the real truth.

Unreliable narrators

All reasoning is motivated reasoning. The problem with most writers is that their motivations are painfully jejune. They want to show that they’re sane, or ethical, or relatable, or likable or educated. It results in the high-minded, chummy tone that dominates our publishing world and the media outlets for the smart-identified. It’s like being smothered with a pillow from West Elm.

So what’s the agenda of crackpot writers? It can be alienation and suspicion bordering on paranoia. Sometimes it’s an earnest desire to share an idiosyncratic idea at all costs.

Sometimes it’s megalomania - that they alone have seen through the veil, interpreted the tablets, read between the lies, conversed with the entities or received the revelation. As a reader, I say that’s all for the good. If they want to raise the stakes like that, then let’s see what they got.

There are also the deeply reasonable people who encounter a baffling personal experience or an inexplicable phenomenon and can’t let it go.

Looking out the window

The grandfather of today’s crackpots is probably Charles Fort, who split his 58 years almost evenly between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He collected anomalies from newspapers. There were a lot of them, like fish raining down from the sky on a cloudless days.

In a way, he was an anti-scientist. He wasn’t looking for what does happen or what tends to happen or what can happen. He was looking for what really can’t happen, but does. He collected these in several volumes and created a small, but highly influential movement.

One of his intellectual descendants is the late John Keel, who’s known best for the book and movie The Mothman Prophesies, about a rash of inexplicable events in West Virginia preceding the collapse of a suspension bridge into the Ohio River. Keel wasn’t afraid to speculate about red-eyed mothmen, men in black, sasquatches, UFOs and ancient civilizations. His work can be bold and it can be spooky and it sometimes follows him home. It captures the inward-curling nature of these investigations.

Keel’s work tends to render the inexplicable even still more inexplicable. He works outside of categories, taking a sasquatch and a nearby UFO sighting as simply figures on a far stranger ground. His speculations lead to further speculations, away from the center, rather than towards one. One of his books postulated that all religious visions and anomalous phenomena in human history were just malfunctions of an ancient population-control device from a lost civilization with low batteries. He spun the idea out rather nicely, then abandoned it.

Saving the appearances

The real intellectual challenge of a crackpot theory is in elaborating a strange explanation that fits the facts at hand. As Owen Barfield titled his difficult book on the dangers involved in creating a working model of the world, Saving the Appearances is the first job of any theory. The stranger the theory seems, the more work it has to do to fit the particulars of our experience.

Consider Zecharia Sitchin, who posited that the earth was visited every few thousand years by a planet on a multi-solar-system orbit, whose inhabitants bred the early human species as gold-mining slaves, who revolted. He says it’s all written down, clear as day, in the cuneiform tablets.

His interpretation of the tablets would seem to explain our species’ sudden historical adoption of settled agricultural civilization, our cross-cultural conception of capricious gods, our love of gold, and our species’ highly uneven intellectual and cooperative capabilities. And I can’t read cuneiform - so I can’t call any of it into question.