Acclaim for Lawrence Weschler’s
MR. WILSON’S CABINET
of WONDER
‘A gem of a book … by turns irony-laden and seriously charged … a witty, discursive exploration that manages to encompass the very idea of the museum itself.”
—Newsday
‘A brilliant meditation on human creativity.”
—New York magazine
‘Weschler is a nonfiction writer with a poet’s ear.”
—The New York Times Book Review
‘Teems with ambiguity and amazement.… The more we read of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the more dizzyingly vague is the border between illusion and reality.”
—Seattle Times
‘A delightful book whose plot is pure curiosity and whose subject is the beauty of things that can’t be known for sure.”
—Ian Frazier
“This is travel literature of the rarest, most elegant sort: a book that recounts a journey of the mind. Lawrence Weschler has ventured into the strange and murky zone between the real and the imaginary … and he proves to be an excellent guide, persuading us to follow him by the sheer force of his wit and an unflagging sense of wonder.”
—Paul Auster
“A small jewel of a book, as intricate and astonishing as the wonders it describes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this marvelous study of a bizarre museum and its self-mocking, polymath creator, Weschler finds an epiphany of that vast movement of discovery and wonder which created the first museums … and that heady state of mind—compounded of collection mania, mad taxonomy, imaginative exuberance, and naif wonder—which formed the prelude to modern science. I found it enthralling.”
—Oliver Sacks
Lawrence Weschler
MR. WILSON’S CABINET of WONDER
Lawrence Weschler has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since the early 1980s, and is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1989 and Magazine Reporting in 1992). Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, constitutes the latest installment in Weschler’s ongoing Passions and Wonders series, earlier volumes of which include Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and Shapinsky’s Karma, Boggs’s Bills and Other True-Life Tales. His other books include David Hockney’s Cameraworks; The Passion of Poland; and A Miracle, a Universe. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and daughter.
(illustration credit col.1)
Also by Lawrence Weschler
A Miracle, a Universe:
Settling Accounts with Torturers
Shapinsky’s Karma, Boggs’s Bills
and Other True-Life Tales
David Hockney’s Cameraworks
The Passion of Poland
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees:
A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum (1822) (illustration credit col.2)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Lawrence Weschler All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Portions of this book were previously published, in abridged form, in Harper’s.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: • RES: Excerpts from “Inquiry as Collection” by Adalgisa Lugli (RES, Autumn 1986). Reprinted by permission of RES. • Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: Excerpts from articles by Ricky Jay (Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1994 and vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1995). Reprinted by permission of Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, published by W&V Dailey, 8216 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90046.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Weschler, Lawrence.
Mr. Wilson’s cabinet of wonder / Lawrence Weschler.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83398-3
1. Museum of Jurassic Technology—History. 2. Wilson, David. 3. Popular culture—United States—History. 4. Museum—Philosophy. 5. Collectors and collecting—History. I. Title.
AM101.L725W47 1995
069′5—dc20 95-5996
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
For Sara
my own living wonder
Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
—MICHAEL FARADAY
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I
Inhaling the Spore
PART II
Cerebral Growth
Notes
Acknowledgments and Sources
Illustration Credits
PART I
Inhaling the Spore
Megaloponera foetens (the Cameroonian
stink ant) with forehead rampant
Deep in the Cameroonian rain forests of west-central Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant—indeed, one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear—survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.
On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.
Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.
The fungus, for its part, lives on: it continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant’s head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.
THE GREAT MIDCENTURY American neurophysiologist Geoffrey Sonnabend inhaled his spore, as it were, one insomniac night in 1936 while convalescing from a combined physical and nervous breakdown (brought on, in part, by the collapse of his earlier investigation into memory pathways in carp) at a small resort near the majestic Iguazú Falls, in the so-called Mesopotamian region along the Argentinean-Brazilian-Paraguayan frontier. Earlier that evening, he had attended a recital of German Romantic lieder given by the great Romanian-American vocalist, Madalena Delani. Delani, one of the leading soloists on the international concert circuit of her day, had won frequent praise from the likes of the New York Times’s Sidney Soledon, who once surmised that the uniquely plaintive quality of her vocal instr
ument—its texture, as he described it, of being “steeped in a sense of loss”—might have derived from the fact that the singer suffered from a form of Korsakov’s syndrome, with its attendant obliteration of virtually all short- and intermediate-term memory, with the exception, in her case, of the memory of music itself.
Madalena Delani and Geoffrey Sonnabend at Iguazú Falls (1936)
Although Geoffrey left the concert hall that evening without ever meeting Delani, the concert had electrified him, and through a sleepless night he conceived, as if in a single blast of inspiration, the entire model of intersecting plane and cone that was to constitute the basis for his radical new theory of memory, a theory he’d spend the next decade painstakingly elaborating in his three-volume Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1946). Memory, for Sonnabend, was an illusion. Forgetting, not remembering, was the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective, as he explained in the introduction to his turgid masterwork, “We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and irretrievability of its moments and events” (p. 16). He himself went on to expand on this doctrine through the explication of an increasingly intricate model in which a so-called Cone of Obliscence is bisected by Planes of Experience, which are continually slicing through the cone at changing though precise angles. The theory was perhaps at its most suggestive as it broached such uncanny shadow phenomena as the experiences of premonition, déjà vu, and foreboding. But once the plane of any particular experience had passed through the cone, the experience was irretrievably forgotten—and all else was illusion. A particularly haunting conclusion, in that no sooner had Sonnabend published his magnum opus than both he and it fell largely into oblivion.
As for Delani, ironically, utterly unbeknownst to Sonnabend, she herself had perished in a freak automobile accident within a few days of her concert at Iguazú Falls.
Plane of Experience bisecting Cone of Obliscence
Dozo dwelling pierced by deprong mori
FOR HIS PART, Donald R. Griffith, Rockefeller University’s eminent chiroptologist (and author of Listening in the Dark: Echolocation in Bats and Men), appears to have inhaled something suspiciously sporelike back in 1952, while reading the field reports of an obscure late-nineteenth-century American ethnographer named Bernard Maston. While doing field work, in 1872, among the Dozo of the Tripsicum Plateau of the circum-Caribbean region of northern South America, Maston reported having heard several accounts of the deprong mori, or piercing devil, which he described as “a small demon which the local savages believe able to penetrate solid objects,” such as the walls of their thatch huts and, in one instance, even a child’s outstretched arm.
Almost eighty years later, while reviewing some of Maston’s notes in the Archive, Donald R. Griffith, for some reason, as he later recounted, “smelled a bat.” He and a band of assistants undertook an arduous eight-month expedition to the Tripsicum Plateau, where Griffith grew increasingly convinced that he was dealing not with just any bat but with a very special bat indeed: specifically, the tiny Myotis lucifugus, which though previously documented had never before been studied in detail. It became Griffith’s hypothesis that while most bats deploy frequencies in the ultrasonic range to assist them in the echolocation that enables them to fly in the dark, Myotis lucifugus had evolved a highly specialized form of echolocation based upon ultraviolet wavelengths, which even, in some instances, verged into the neighboring X-ray band of the wave spectrum. Furthermore, these particular bats had evolved highly elaborate nose leaves, or horns, which allowed them to focus their echo-wave transmissions in a narrow beam. All of which would account for the wide range of bizarre effects described by Maston’s informants.
Echolocation in bats
Griffith and his team lacked only proof. Time after time, the little devils, on the very verge of capture, would fly seamlessly through their nets. So Griffith devised a brilliant snaring device, consisting of five solid-lead walls, each one eight inches thick, twenty feet high, and two hundred feet long—all of them arrayed in a radial pattern, like spokes of a giant wheel, along the forest floor. The team affixed seismic sensors all along the walls in an intricate gridlike pattern, and proceeded to wait.
Electromagnetic spectrum
Elaborate nose leaves
For two months, the monitors recorded not a thing—surely the bats were simply avoiding the massive, and massively incongruous, lead walls—and Griffith began to despair of ever confirming his hypothesis. Finally, however, early on the morning of August 18th at 4:13 A.M., the sensors recorded a pock. The number-three wall had received an impact of magnitude 10×3 ergs twelve feet above the forest floor and 193 feet out from the center of the wheel. The team members carted an X-ray viewing device out to the indicated spot, and sure enough, at a depth of 7⅛ inches, they located the first Myotis lucifugus ever contained by man, “eternally frozen in a mass of solid lead.”
MEGALOPONERA FOETENS, MYOTIS LUCIFUGUS, Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani, the Dozo and the deprong mori, Bernard Maston and Donald R. Griffith—these and countless other spores rain down and down upon a small nondescript storefront operation located along the main commercial drag of downtown Culver City in the middle of West Los Angeles’s endless pseudo-urban sprawl: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, according to a fading blue banner facing the street.
Myotis lucifugus, “eternally frozen in a mass of solid lead”
Flanked on one side by a carpet store and a derelict (seemingly long-abandoned) real estate office, and on the other by a forensics lab and a Thai restaurant (and on the first side, a bit further along, by a PIP printing outlet, an India Sweets and Spices mart, and a Hare Krishna temple; while on the other, further on up the block, by Manuel’s. Auto Body Shop, In-and-Out Burger, and a Blockbuster Video franchise), the museum presents precisely the sort of anonymous-looking facade one might easily pass right by. Which most days would be just as well, since most days it’s closed.
The 9300 block of Venice Boulevard, Culver City, California; at center, the Museum of Jurassic Technology (illustration credit 1.1)
But if you’d happened to have heard of it, as I began hearing of it a couple of years ago on my occasional visits to L.A. (it’s been at its present site for a bit over seven years now) and thus actively sought it out; or else, if you just happened to be dallying at the bus stop right outside its portals on one of those occasions when it actually was open (Thursday evenings, and Saturdays and Sundays noon to six)—and bus waits in L.A. tend to be endless at all times—well, then, your curiosity piqued, you might just find yourself going up and tentatively pressing its door buzzer. While waiting for an answer, you might study, for example, the curious little diorama slotted into the wall off to the side of the entry (a diminutive white urn surrounded by floating pearlescent moths) or another equally perplexing diorama off to the other side of the entry (three chemistry-set bottles arrayed in a curiously loving display: oxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumina, according to their labels); or, still waiting, your gaze might float up to another banner rippling above the entryway (this one featuring the image of a strangely generic archaic sculpted head—part Minoan, part Easter Island—with, above it, the letters A, E, and N, each capped by a long macron) …
At length the door is likely to open, and usually it will be David Hildebrand Wilson himself, the museum’s founder and director, a small and unassuming man, perhaps in his mid-forties, who will be smiling there solicitously (as if it were specifically you he’d been expecting all along) and happily bidding you to enter.
It’s dark in there. As your eyes adjust, you take in an old wooden desk, on top of which a small sign proposes an admissions donation of $2.50, though Wilson quickly assures you that this is a neighborhood museum and hence free to anybody from the neighborh
ood, and that, furthermore, he considers the bus-stop bench to be an integral part of the neighborhood. He leaves it to you to decide what that means, and for that matter, he leaves it all to you. He has returned to his seat behind the desk and to his reading (two dusty, antiquated books, the last time I was there, one entitled Mental Hospitals, the other The Elements of Folk Psychology). The foyer, as it were, features a kind of half-hearted attempt at a gift shop, but probably you won’t tarry long as your curiosity is already being drawn toward the museum proper.
And it’s here that you’ll encounter, across a maze of discrete alcoves, in meticulous displays exactingly laid out, the ant, the bat, the falls, the diva, the insomniac … A preserved sample of the stink ant, for example, has its mandibles embedded into the stalk of a plastic fern in a standard natural-history-museum-style diorama. Sure enough, a thin spike is erupting out of its head. There’s a telephone receiver beside the vitrine, and if you pick it up you’ll hear the entire history of Megaloponera foetens, largely as I conveyed it at the outset of this account.
A whole wing of the museum has been given over to the so-called Sonnabend-Delani Halls, where, among other things, you’ll find an astonishingly well-realized aquarium-sized diorama of Iguazú Falls, complete with gushing, recirculating water. It turns out, or so the nearby phone receiver informs you, that the Falls were doubly significant in Sonnabend’s life, for they were also the place where, fifty years earlier, his parents had first met. His father, Wilhelm, a young German structural engineer, had been trying to span the Falls with a vast suspension bridge, but the project came to naught, his dream collapsing irrevocably into the abyss a mere day short of completion. From either side of the diorama at the museum, you can see where Wilhelm’s bridge would have gone: from head on, you can peer through an eyepiece and, miraculously, see the bridge itself, hovering serenely over the cataract. The effect is so vividly realized that you’ll look again from the sides—your eyes, or something, must be playing tricks on you—but nothing is there except falling water.
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 1