Thus, the preposterously unlikely saga of the Thums and Gerard Billius turns out to be the very foundation tale behind one of the foremost collections in England today. Ashmole, for his part, deeded the collection to Oxford University, where he had briefly studied, with a stipulation that the building containing the collection become the site, as well, for a “school” for the study of natural history, or “philosophical history,” as it was then known—England’s first. (Like his contemporary Frederik Ruysch—or, for that matter, countless other contemporaries, including Isaac Newton himself—Ashmole was a man with one leg planted in the prior world of shaggy superstition and the other striding confidently toward the new era of systematic science; and indeed, the seat of the Tradescant collection, itself so emblematic of that earlier era of indiscriminate wonder, thus became a principal locus, over the next several centuries, for that wonder’s domestication and standardization.)18
The story of the Tradescants, for that matter, bore out many of Stephen Greenblatt’s assertions as well. As gardeners and botanists, both father and son were farflung fieldworkers—the father traveling as far as Muscovy and Algiers, the son to Virginie itself, in their ongoing efforts to bring back and introduce novel plant species to the English countryside. It was in the very course of these travels that they first began compiling their own cabinet of wonders, and it was the fame of that cabinet (and of their gardens) which in turn garnered them the contacts necessary to enlist other travelers in their collecting efforts. A wonderful letter, dated 1625, from Tradescant the Elder (writing on behalf of his new patron, the Duke of Buckingham), to Edward Nichols, the then-Secretary of the Navy, begins: “Noble Sir,”
I have Bin Comanded By My Lord to Let Yr Worshipe Understand that It Is H Graces Plesure that you should In His Name Deall withe All Merchants from All Places But Espetially the Virgine & Bermewde & Newfownd Land Men that when they Into those Parts that they will take Care to furnishe His Grace Withe All maner of Beasts & fowells and Birds Alyve or If Not Withe Heads Horns Beaks Clawes Skins Fethers …
and so on and so forth, culminating in a list of more specifically desired items, which included, among others:
on Ellophants head with the teeth In it very large
on River horsses head of the Bigest kind that can be gotton
on Seabulles head withe horns
All sorts of Serpents and Snakes Skines & Espetially of that sort that hathe a Combe on his head Lyke a Cock
All sorts of Shining Stones or of Any Strange Shapes
finally concluding, succinctly:
Any thing that Is Strang.
And as MacGregor’s various ensuing citations from letters written by various contemporary visitors to the Ark attest, the Tradescants had indeed collated a whole bunch of things that were “strang.”19 There are frequent references to human horns, for example, though all such supposed horns (including that of Mary Davis of Saughall) have in the meantime unaccountably, though perhaps not surprisingly, disappeared.
MacGregor quotes a Georg Christoph Stirn who, in describing the collection, as he observed it in 1638, noted, among other items: two huge ribs from a whale (out in the courtyard); “a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree”; “a number of things changed into stone” (in other words, fossils, which in other such collections often get referred to as “picture stones”); the hand of a mermaid; the hand of a mummy; a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ; “pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book”; “a bat as large as a pigeon”; an instrument “used by Jews in circumcision”; the robe “of the King of Virginia”; a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem; “the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone” …
That last reference, to the crucifixion of Christ daintily carved on a plum stone, brought me up short as I sat there hunched over Stirn’s letter amidst the field of worktables at the New York Public Library. It set me to riffling through the back pages of MacGregor’s catalogue, with its detailed inventory of all the rarities from among the Tradescants’ collections that have survived among the Ashmolean’s holdings to this day. (Along the way I came upon a map of the Siege of Pavia, the very same one that graces Wilson’s wall at the museum, followed by no less than fourteen columns of scrupulous scholarship explicating the tiniest details of a painting depicting the 1534 siege that had gotten included in Tradescant’s collection—Fig. 74, Cat. no. 263.) Eventually, to my astonishment, I came upon the following:
181. FRUIT STONE CARVING (PL. LXXXVI)
Almond stone (?): the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta over long hair, a long tunic of classical character, and thick-soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings, framed by the branches of a tree. The back is filled in with 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.
Dimensions: Height 25 mm; Width 22 mm.
182. FRUIT STONE CARVING (PL. LXXXVI)
Plum-stone (?) relief. On the front is shown the Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, and other mounted horsemen behind; to either side of the cross, surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI, stand the Virgin and St. John, and a skull lies below. Imbricated ground.
Dimensions: Height 23 mm; Width 19 mm.
And indeed, Plate LXXXVI showed the very same. Not only had such wonders been perpetrated (and as early as the 1600s!), but in Oxford, today, they still exist, open to inspection, at any time, by any stray pilgrims from the Jurassic.20
Tradescant fruit-stone carvings, actual size
DURING MY MOST RECENT visit to L.A., David Wilson and I agreed to rendezvous for lunch at the little India Sweets and Spices mart, with its deli-style take-out counter, a few doors down the block from his museum. Walking in, I was greeted by the familiar blast of sinuous aromas—David and I had repaired to this place several times before—only, this time, it was as if my recent investigations had hypersensitized me to its special qualities. I took in the prodigious bounty of its exotic offerings—such fresh vegetables as the eggplant-like brinjal, spiny kantola, beany valor, green tuver, tindora, lotus root, and chholia (easily the oddest looking of them all); all manner of teas and fragrant herbs (from coriander and cardamom through the curry powders); packaged ajwan seeds and Vicco brand vajradanti paste; curried arvi leaves, stuffed brinjal, karela in brine; enticing trapezoidal wedges of dessert cakes like the gold-and-silver-foil-laced almond barfis … I had this sudden sense of what it must have been like to have been sitting there, all closed in, in the cold, damp, monotone, monobland Europe of the 1400s, as little by little all this wild, wonderful stuff began pouring in (initially, at least, by way of overland caravans), how easy it would have been to be overwhelmed by such exquisite new delicacies: We’ve got to get more of this stuff! We’ve got to find an easier way of getting it! We’ve got to get ourselves over there! Standing there, waiting for David, for a moment I felt like I was planted in the very engine room of history.
David eventually showed up and we ordered our marsala dozas, pekoras, and cardamom teas and took them out to the little picnic tables out front, facing the boulevard. We spoke about India and the fantasy of the Indies and the impulse, the orientation toward wonder. One thought led to another. I’d been about to comment on how incongruous it was to find a sixteenth-century Wunderkammer like his in the middle of Los Angeles, California, when suddenly it dawned on me—why not? In fact, Los Angeles was one of the most appropriate places in the world for such an enterprise.
After all, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, California was awash with Europeans agog for wonder—and plunder. The name itself, as I subsequently discovered, appears to have derived from an old Spanish novel, Las Sergas de E
splandián (The Exploits of Esplandián), written in about 1510 by Rodríguez de Montalvo. The book itself was apparently nothing much to write home about, but there’s considerable evidence that many of the conquistadors of the time were familiar with its story, in which Esplandián, a kind of late-medieval ideal knight, is helping defend Constantinople from a motley crew of pagan invaders when suddenly there appears amongst the besieging horde: Calafía, Queen of California. California, for its part, turns out to be an island “on the right hand of the Indies” and “very near the terrestrial paradise,” inhabited by a race of Amazonian warriors whose weapons are of purest gold, “for in all the island there is no other metal”—all of which must have sounded pretty intriguing from the conquistadorial point of view. On the other hand, in California, according to Rodríguez, there were also “many griffins on account of the great ruggedness of the country”; when the griffins were small, “the women went out with traps to take them to their caves, and brought them up there. And being themselves quite a match for the griffins, they fed them with the men whom they took prisoners, and with the boys to whom they gave birth.” So it was a mixed bag.
In 1542, exactly fifty years after Columbus’s first landfall in the Caribbean, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led a fairly ragtag band aboard two small, leaky vessels well up the coast of Alta California, anchoring variously at San Diego, Catalina Island, San Pedro Harbor, which he called the Bay of Smokes (Bahía de los Fumos) on account of the many Indian campfires along its shore, and then in Santa Monica—not half a dozen miles from where David and I now sat wolfing down our pekoras and sweet lahsis—before heading up the coast toward Santa Barbara and San Miguel Island. A bit over thirty-five years later, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake came streaking by in his Golden Hind from the other direction, out of Point Reyes up north, heading down toward Cape Horn and then home, leading only the second expedition ever to circumnavigate the globe (and becoming the first captain of such an expedition to make it home alive, Magellan having died in the attempt). Once back in England, Drake lived on until 1596, when the Elder Tradescant would have been about twenty years old and certainly familiar with the legendary privateer’s exploits. Years later, Tradescant’s collection would include not only a portrait of Drake but also a “Trunion” from his ship.
Sitting there at the picnic table outside the Indian market, gazing west down Venice Boulevard, David and I fancied how, but for the smog, we could almost have made out the galleon traffic coursing by. At length we returned our trays and headed back to the museum, though entering this time from the rear, into David’s workroom, which was brimming over with the half-completed vitrines of his next show, set to open in just a few weeks.
“Tell the Bees …: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition,” a coproduction, according to its advance literature, of the MJT and the Society for the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, had been in the works for years and was clearly going to be one of Wilson’s most elaborate ventures to date. By way of introduction he suggested I don a pair of earphones and listen to the audio portion of the slide show that was going to accompany the exhibit while he continued to tinker with some of the vitrines. Once again, the production qualities of the tape were first-rate, blending subtle music, crisp sound effects, and a solid-seeming narration. The Voice of Institutional Authority started out by recounting the tale behind Alexander Fleming’s 1929 discovery of penicillin; presently we were given what purported to be Fleming’s own voice, or anyway a Scottish voice of raspy, wire-recorder quality, recalling how at the climactic moment of the accidental experiment, “It was found that broth in which the mold had been grown, like the mold-broth remedies commonly applied to infections by the country people, had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal, and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria.” The wire was rewound and the phrase “like the mold-broth remedies commonly applied to infections by country people” repeated, whereupon Institutional Authority noted how in making his epic discovery, “Fleming was drawing on countless years of collective experience which had been handed down as a part of the oral tradition … commonly known as vulgar remedies.” There was more on Fleming (how his familiarity with the vulgar remedy of spitting on a wound had earlier in his career led to his isolation of lysozyme, “an enzyme found in tears and saliva that exhibits antibiotic activity”), after which the narration turned to digitalis, the cardiac stimulant derived from a plant of the figwort family known as purple foxglove, which had already been deployed as a vulgar remedy for dropsy for centuries before it was “discovered” by William Withering, an eighteenth-century English physician, acting “on a tip from a wise woman from Shropshire.” There were similar revelations about the vulgar etiologies of lithium and aspirin. “Belladonna, Madagascar periwinkle, and ipecac, to name just a few, are all vulgar remedies that have been recognized and developed by modern pharmacology.”
At which point, the Voice of Institutional Authority darkened as it related how this once honored form of knowledge presently came to be denigrated, particularly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical academies, where “Folk remedies were viewed as baneful influences, irrational relics from the past to be purged,” so much so that much irreplaceable wisdom, “ghettoized, so to speak, under the spurious classification of superstition,” has already been irretrievably lost. Hence the urgency animating the current exhibition, which was casting itself—although it would never have come right out and made such claims on its own behalf—as nothing less than a clarion call to the heroic enterprise of reclamation.
Amidst the sounds of waves and a distant foghorn, the narrative voice advised that “In order not to be set hopelessly adrift in this seemingly endless sea of complex and interrelating beliefs, this exhibition has limited its discussion to five areas of inquiry: Pins and Needles; Shoes and Stockings; Body Parts and Secretions; Thunder and Lightning; Insects and Other Living Things.”
Thus we were once again tending into quintessentially Jurassic territory, having launched out on manifestly solid ground only to find ourselves … well, not really having any idea where the hell we were finding ourselves. The Voice was now explaining the title of the show, which drew on funeral practices dating back to Hellenistic Greece, when bees were understood to be “the muse’s bird” and hence needed to be apprised of all major family events. There were elaborate rituals involving youngsters and beehives; and “there are a great many other practices that are observed concerning bees,” the Voice continued. “Among those who know them well, bees are understood to be quiet and sober beings that disapprove of lying, cheating, and menstruous women. Bees do not thrive in a quarrelsome family, dislike bad language, and should never be bought or sold.” And so on.
Finally, with the chorus of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater swelling in the background, the Voice concluded: “Like the bees, from which this exhibition draws its name, we are individuals, yet we are surely, like the bees, a group, and as a group we have, over the millennia, built ourselves a hive, our home. We would be foolish, to say the least, to turn our backs on this carefully and beautifully constructed home, especially now, in these uncertain and unsettling times.”
Uncertain and unsettling, it occurred to me, were two good and apt words. I put down the earphones and quietly began drifting among the half-finished display cases. (Wilson, over in the corner at his workbench, completely involved in his labors, seemed to have become entirely oblivious of my presence.)
One apparently finished case contained a vial of an exquisite amber liquid alongside a curious little brush, like a toothbrush, only with metal bristles. Its caption read:
URINE
Like spittle, urine has beneficial or protective qualities, and clearly one of the most efficacious and widely practiced counter-charms involves the combination created by the practice of spitting into one’s urine.
On New Year’s Day it is a common practice for the oldest woman in the family, employing a small brush, to sprinkle with urine the household anima
ls and then, individually, the members of the family as they are getting out of bed.
Another vitrine featured a wax face into whose mouth the bill of a stuffed duck’s head protruded:
DUCK’S BREATH
Children afflicted with thrush and other fungous mouth or throat disorders can be cured by placing the bill of a duck or goose in the mouth of the afflicted child for a period of time. The cold breath of the fowl will be inhaled by the child and the complaint will disappear.
The duck’s breath cure (illustration credit 2.7)
David subsequently explained to me how he wasn’t quite happy with that exhibit yet. The wax face looked too old and he was intending to cast his daughter DanRae’s face in its stead—he just hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet. (Didn’t there use to be a surrealist comedy troupe named The Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater? I decided not to ask.)
There was a large, ominously elegant-looking pair of scissors (actually a pair of old-fashioned sheep shears, I subsequently learned), mounted upright, and David was apparently trying to rig a mechanism inside the display’s chassis that would allow the blades to open and close in a gently lulling motion. The caption read:
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 8