Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

by Lawrence Weschler

  “What’s this?” Diana asked him. “Your life’s work?”

  And he just smiled.

  FOR ITS FIRST SEVERAL YEARS, the Museum of Jurassic Technology existed in the form of “loans from the Collection” extended to scattered galleries, museums, and community centers—it had no physical base of its own. Then one day, about seven years ago, while driving home from his other life’s professional studio in Culver City, David noticed that a nearby storefront he’d had his eye on for some time had suddenly gone vacant. (Before that it had served as a fireworks factory, a sheepskin outlet, and, most recently, as an overflow storeroom for the neighboring forensics lab.) David signed a lease on the spot, taking over the 1,500 square feet. (“When we first moved in,” he recalls, “we had to clear out thousands of little blocks of wax with samples from people’s bodies embedded inside.”) Within a few months he’d reunited his museum’s traveling diaspora, mounted his first exhibition, and without the slightest flash or ceremony, simply hung the banner out and opened up for business.

  Passersby, on occasion, would wander in. Many would wander right back out. But some would stay and linger. David tells the story of one fellow who spent a long time in the back amidst the exhibits and then, emerging, spent almost as long a time studying the pencil sharpener on his desk. “It was just a regular pencil sharpener,” David assures me, “it wasn’t meant to be an exhibit. But he couldn’t get enough of it.” And he tells another story about an old Jamaican gentleman named John Thomas who also spent a long time in the back and then came out crying. “He said, ‘I realize this is a museum but to me it’s more like a church.’ ” David seems equally—and almost equivalently—moved by both stories. (In a way, they’re the same story.) Occasionally visitors are moved to offer more substantial financial contributions to the museum, and along a wall in the foyer there’s an engraved honor roll acknowledging the support of these patrons in much the same spirit of parody mingled with reverence that characterizes most everything else about the museum. Other visitors began volunteering their services to sit at the desk or else to help fabricate the new installations. In talking about the museum, David continually defers authorship: he is always talking about “our” goals and what “we” are planning to do next. In part this is one of his typical self-effacing gambits; but it’s also true that the museum has generated a community—or anyway, that it’s no longer so much about what’s going on “inside” David as about what’s going on “between” him and the world.3

  That it continues to persist at all from month to month is by no means the least of its marvels. “The museum exists against all odds,” David once commented to me. “Nothing supports this venture—it is woven from thin air. We apply for grants, and we’ve gotten a few, but most grants-dispensing agencies frankly don’t know what to make of us. We don’t fit into the traditional categories.” (I’ve seen some of those applications and I’m not sure I’d know what to make of them either: as I say, David never breaks irony, and in these applications he always presents the museum as a straightforward public-educational institution much like any other—only, with some really odd enthusiasms and a penchant, shall we say, as one of its reviewers once parsed the matter with exquisite delicacy, for presenting “phenomena known to science, if known at all, because of their appearance in the museum itself.”) The museum’s annual budget currently hovers around $50,000 (rent is $1,800 a month, and no one receives a salary), and though David originally poured a significant portion of his own outside income into the museum, there’s been less and less of that, in part because as the years passed he spent more and more time on the museum itself, and in part because his exquisitely sophisticated battery of specializations has now largely been superseded by the film industry’s relentless computerization. Have there been moments, I recently asked him, when he and his family have actually been at the poorhouse door? “Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Moments like now.”

  “I have no idea how we got this far or how we can possibly go on,” Diana told me one day. Technically she’s the museum’s treasurer and keeper of accounts, though she admits that in that official capacity she’s often reduced to giggling fits. “I’ve just developed this faery-faith in last-minute providence. At the outset of each month, there’s no way we’re going to make it through, but something always comes up—a small bequest, a grant unexpectedly approved, a slight uptick in admissions. Actually, we’re just about reaching the point where admissions may soon be covering the rent. But David keeps pushing the limit. Last year he took his other company into bankruptcy and doubled the size of the museum on the same day—and the crazy thing is, I wanted him to do it! He was right to do it. And we got lucky, because almost immediately after that my car got stolen, so we were able to pour the $6,750 settlement from that into the museum.”

  She was silent for a moment. “But it’s strange, because less than a decade ago we were on the cusp of the upper middle class. The other day our daughter DanRae asked me, ‘Mommy, are we poor?’ I told her, ‘Yes, but not without hope.’ ”

  DanRae, incidentally, seems far from anxious. Nine years old, she’s as blithely self-confident and unabashed as her parents are tortuously shy and deferential. She’s also big. “Beats me,” David laughs when asked about the disparity. “Sometimes, maybe, it’s just that two negatives make a positive.” (Her given name is Daniela Rae. “The ‘Rae’ is after Diana’s dad, Raymond, who died when she was still a young girl,” David explains. “The ‘Daniela’ is for Joseph McDaniels, the gynecologist who told Diane she’d never be able to bear children. Wonderful man. Just proved to be wrong in that one particular instance.”) I’ve heard stories about how five years ago DanRae used to curl up for long naps on the floor of the museum’s darkened back alcoves. Nowadays she bounds around like she owns the place. When asked at school what her father does, she simply replies, “Oh, he’s got a museum.” And she often brings classmates over for tours. One day she escorted me around, pointing out which exhibits were really cool and which other ones were, frankly, pretty boring. She squeezed through the glass partition and into the deprong mori showcase to show me a particularly nifty bug from out of a drawer in Bernard Maston’s portable study desk. In the Madalena Delani room, she pointed into the glass case at one of the diva’s pearl bracelets and confided, “That was my necklace when I was a baby.” For her, the museum is the most natural thing in the world.

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE EXHIBITS at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the “FRUIT-STONE CARVING,” consists of a simple glass box hanging from the wall at eye level. Inside, atop a thin spike pedestal and under perfect illumination, is displayed—well, some kind of fruit pit, I guess. It’s about the size of a dime, and it seems like it’s been somewhat haphazardly gouged out. It’s hard to tell: there’s no magnifying device. There is a tiny square mirror attached to the tip of another thin spindle, this one jutting out from the wall, and it affords a view of the back of the hollowed pit. The nearby wall caption reads as follows:

  Fruit-stone carving at the MJT (illustration credit 1.3)

  Almond stone (?): the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic of classical character, and thicksoled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings. In the distance are representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat, a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel.

  On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance; the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI. Imbricated ground.

  Dimensions: Length 13 mm.

  Width 11 mm.

  Maybe. As I say, it’s hard to tell: it looks like an ordinary pit. It would be nice if there were a magnifying device, though, what with the Iguazú Falls eyepiece around the corner, with
its phantom catoptric bridge, I’m not sure that even then one would credit the evidence of one’s own eyes.

  That was certainly the case with another recent show at the museum, consisting of thirty cylindrical acrylic display cases each of which contained a single needle mounted beneath a twenty-five-power magnifying device. The wall captions alleged that suspended within or alongside the eyes of each of the needles were thirty microminiature sculptures. And sure enough, gazing through the eyepieces, one could spy variously: Little Red Riding Hood; a determined-looking Napoleon; Donald Duck (with orange bill, blue jacket, and yellow-webbed feet); a waving John Paul II in full papal regalia; Snow White and all seven of her dwarfs (microminiature dwarfs, that is). There was even one of Christ himself stretched out upon a golden cross. One of the displays gave its name to the entire show. It was titled “A Wish upon a Piece of Hair,” and the accompanying caption claimed that the artist had etched the wish onto a strand of his own hair. A hair was there, and it distinctly read, “May all your dreams come true.”

  Drawing of Hagop Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Pope John Paul II (illustration credit 1.4)

  According to the wall legends, these were all the work of a single Soviet-Armenian émigré violin instructor, by the improbable name of Hagop Sandaldjian, who’d painstakingly crafted them under a microscope out of motes of dust, specks of lint, and wisps of hair, using tools he’d fashioned himself (mostly exquisitely sharpened needles tipped with abrasive ruby and diamond dusts), and then colored them by applying minute amounts of paint in microscopic suspension with paintbrushes consisting of a single hair. When I asked David about Sandaldjian, he assured me that he must have been “a very calm man.” In fact he claimed to have known him briefly, having first heard of his existence from a visitor to the museum. He explained how he’d thereupon taken to visiting Sandaldjian at his home in the Montebello section of East L.A., but how, no sooner had he contrived a plan for showing the sculptures at the Jurassic than, calling Sandaldjian to tell him so, he received word from his son that the master had died not ten days prior. Of course, they went ahead with the show anyway.

  That show was no longer up but it had been replaced, as it were, by another equally mind-boggling display, this one supposedly documenting recent achievements in microtechnology. “NANOTECHNOLOGY,” announced the wall panel, “Machines in the Microscopic Realm”—and an array of microscopes mounted along a long table proceeded to afford visitors glimpses of what indeed appeared to be precisely what their captions alleged: a wobble motor, a microspring, micro-machined intermeshing gears (“gear tooth approx. the size of a red blood cell”), an electrostatic motor, and even a micro wind tunnel. The captions credited these achievements to various inventors with names like “Yu Chong Tai, California Institute of Technology,” and “A. Bruno Frazier, Georgia Institute of Technology”—but, as I say, you could never be sure.

  An instance of nanotechnology: pressure sensors on the head of a pin (illustration credit 1.5)

  Or anyway, I couldn’t. So I called the California Institute of Technology and asked the campus operator for Yu Chong Tai, and sure enough, she put me through, and a voice answering to that name proceeded to confirm everything my eyes had seen. “And more’s coming!” it assured me.4 That conversation in turn made me doubt my earlier doubts about the dubious Sandaldjian. I called information in Montebello, where it turned out such a family did indeed reside. And I ended up speaking with the master’s son, Levon, who explained that there was in fact something of a tradition of such microminiature art back in Armenia (he knew of two or three other such instances), although, as far as he knew, his father had been the world’s only microminiature sculptor. “He would wait until late at night,” Levon said, “when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications between heartbeats—he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirrings of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.”

  THOSE EARLIEST MUSEUMS, the ur-collections back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were sometimes called Wunderkammern, wonder-cabinets, and it occurs to me that the Museum of Jurassic Technology truly is their worthy heir in as much as wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,” David once told me, “is to reintegrate people to wonder.”) But it’s a special kind of wonder, and it’s metastable. The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.

  I RECENTLY HAD OCCASION to raise this point with John Walsh, the director of the Getty Museum and another fan of the MJT. We were talking about Wunderkammern and some of the museum’s other antecedents. “Most of the institutional-historical allusions at Wilson’s museum turn out to be true,” Walsh told me. “There was a Musaeum Tradescantianum and a John Tradescant—in fact two of them, an Elder and a Younger—who during the 1600s built up a famously eclectic cabinet known as ‘The Ark’ in Lambeth on the South Bank, in London, most of the contents of which devolved to Elias Ashmole, who expanded upon them and then donated the whole collection to Oxford University, where it became the basis for the Ashmolean. There was a Swammerdam in Holland, and there was an Ole Worm with his Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen; and Charles Willson Peale did have his museum in Philadelphia, to which Benjamin Franklin donated the carcass of his angora cat and where you could also see the huge skeleton of a recently unearthed mastodon, and mechanical devices like the Eidophusikon, which showed primitive movies.

  “Ever since the late Renaissance,” Walsh continued, “these sorts of collections got referred to as Kunst- und Wunderkammern. Technically, the term describes a collection of a type that’s pretty much disappeared today—with the exception, perhaps, of the Jurassic—where natural wonders were displayed alongside works of art and various man-made feats of ingenuity. It’s only much later, in the nineteenth century, that you see the breakup into separate art, natural history, and technology museums. But in the earlier collections, you had the wonders of God spread out there cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing, which is to say, the Wonder of God.”

  I asked Walsh about some of the relics and bizarre curiosa that used to make it into those collections right alongside the legitimate stuff: the hair from the beard of Noah, the plank from the Ark, the women’s horns. I mentioned how I always figured some of those early museum men must have been being ironical in including them.

  “Well,” Walsh said, “there’s a whole big side industry in twentieth-century criticism that consists primarily in the imputing of irony to prior ages. But no, no, I don’t think they were being ironical at all. They were in dead earnest.”

  I WAS TALKING with David in the back room of the museum one afternoon on one of my most recent visits out to L.A. It was a weekday and the museum was closed, and he’d been showing me slides of some utterly unknown, never previously shown paintings by a complete recluse who, he told me, was suffering the ravages of multiple sclerosis—protean, fantastical vistas of astonishing intricacy. He was thinking about giving them an exhibition. Our conversation turned to Sandaldjian. Free-associating, I mentioned the Talmudic story of the Thirty-six Just Men—how at any given moment there are thirty-six ethically just men in the world, unknown perhaps even to themselves, but for whose sake God desists from utterly destroying the shambles we have made of His creation. Maybe, I suggested, there are thirty-six aesthetically just men, as well.

  David looked at me, authentically noncomprehending. “I don’t understand the difference,” he said.

  He was quiet a few moments, and once again the ironylessness seemed momentarily to crack. “You know, certain aspects of this museum
you can peel away very easily, but the reality behind, once you peel away those relatively easy layers, is more amazing still than anything those initial layers purport to be. The first layers are just a filter …”5

  He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.

  I mentioned the stink ant.

  “See,” he said, “that’s an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as pure information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself—could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.

  “But at another level,” David continued, “we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That’s another one of our mottoes here at the museum: ‘Ut Translatio Natura’—Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there’ve been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant—impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn’t have summed up my own life better if I’d made him up all by myself.”

  “But, David,” I wanted to say (and didn’t), “you did make him up all by yourself!”

  SHORTLY AFTER, back home in my office, I was in a phone conversation about something entirely different with Tom Eisner, the eminent biologist up at Cornell. At one point, in passing, he told me about a trip he’d taken to Italy, many years ago, and how, while in Pavia, a colleague had given him a tour of the ancient university’s old museum. At one point, as they foraged among the back rooms, the colleague pulled out a glass jug containing some organs bobbing in a dusky fluid solution. “ ‘You’ll never guess what this is,’ my friend challenged me,” Eisner related, “and I didn’t even try. ‘Lazzaro Spallanzani’s cock and balls!’ ” I’m not sure whether Eisner took my silence on the other end of the line for scandalized astonishment or tongue-tied ignorance, probably (more correctly) the latter. “Spallanzani was one of the great early modern naturalists,” he offered helpfully. “Eighteenth century. He was the first, for instance, to isolate spermatozoa in semen, did some wonderful experiments on gastric digestion (feeding bits of meat tied to string to various birds of prey, letting the string descend only so far, and then yanking the string back out with the meat completely liquified and gone, thereby proving that large portions of digestion take place in the stomach and not in the bowels, as had previously been assumed), all sorts of splendid things.