Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

by Lawrence Weschler

  SCISSORS AT THE WEDDING PARTY

  One wishing ill to the bridegroom stands behind the happy man and, holding an open pair of scissors, calls his name. If the groom turns to answer the scissors are snapped shut whereupon the groom is rendered incapable of consummating the marriage.

  And there were a good couple dozen other displays as well, each lovingly and meticulously rendered: uncertain and unsettling, and very funny—and then not.

  As I was getting set to leave, I noticed a deliriously browned single-portion pie mounted alongside a burnt piece of toast. There were two dead mice on the toast. MOUSE CURES read the pieces’ joint caption, although each of the dishes had its own legend as well. The caption under the first read: “Mouse Pie, when eaten with regularity, serves as a remedy for children who stammer.” The label under the burnt toast read: “Bed wetting or general incontinence of urine can be controlled by eating mice on toast, fur and all.”

  Mice on toast and mouse pie

  After which, there followed an italicized citation:

  A flayne Mouse, or made in powder and drunk at one tyrne, doeth perfectly helpe such as cannot holde or keepe their water: especially, if it be used three days in this order. This is verie trye and often puruved.

  1579 Lupton

  Thousand Notable Things I /40

  Right then and there I made myself a promise; and I’ve kept it: I have not gone to the library to track down that Lupton reference. There has to be an end to all this.

  No, really.

  IT WAS GETTING LATE—in fact, this time I was late for a plane—so I bid David a quick goodbye, and let myself out through a passageway leading from the workroom into the museum proper. The space immediately on the other side of the workroom wall, which would soon be housing “Tell the Bees,” was in the meantime filled with a wonderful traveling exhibition on loan from the Mütter Museum. Now, I’d heard of the Mütter Museum, and I knew that it actually does exist. It was founded in 1858 when Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter presented his unique (and unquestionably bizarre) teaching collection of anatomical and pathological curiosa to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where it resides (having been steadily augmented) to this day. It’s the sort of place where you can find the skeleton of a giant (7′6″) looming over the skeleton of a dwarf (3′6″), or the skeleton (skeletons?) of Siamese twins, or wax casts of all manner of malignancies, or the actual tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland’s jaw during a secret operation in 1893.21

  The Mütter’s show at the Jurassic featured an array of arcane and vaguely threatening antique surgical instruments, the plaster cast of a trephined skull from Peru, various gallstones, some astonishing photographs of sliced heads and haunting (haunted) bell jars, wax models of syphilitic tongues … There was a heartrendingly luminous display, across a flat expanse of black velvet, lovingly lit, of the 206 minute incipient bones extracted from a miscarried three-month fetus, each bone separated out and gleaming: the rib cage like a delicate array of filleted fishbones, the fingertips like so many flakes of stray dandruff.

  Disarticulated skeleton of a three-month-old fetus from the Mütter Museum collection, Philadelphia (illustration credit 2.8)

  Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s drawer of inhaled objects

  There was a teeming little chest of drawers, compiled by a punctilious physician named Chevalier Jackson during the early decades of this century, and containing, across a splay of neatly divided interior compartments, highlights from the collection of miscellaneous foreign bodies the good doctor had managed to extract over the years from the windpipes and digestive tracts of various choking victims (jacks, rings, chains, crucifixes, marbles, doll arms, a toy battleship), complete with documentation as to the age, identity, and fate of the various inhalers.

  Everything was actual, everything was real, including …

  It was getting very late now, and, really, I had to be going, but just as I was heading out the door I happened to gaze into one final display case, over to the side, and there, tellingly spotlit, lay the actual solitary remains of a real human horn, an incurled protrusion (“20 cm long and between 1 and 3 cm in diameter”) sawed off the skull of an unnamed seventy-year-old woman in the middle of the last century by one S. Beaus, M.D.

  So, go figure.22

  A woman’s horn (nineteenth century) from the Mütter Museum collection, Philadelphia

  Notes

  David Wilson: the director outside his museum (illustration credit nts.1)

  PART I: INHALING THE SPORE

  1. “… how she puts up with all this.”

  Diana’s father, I learned in a subsequent conversation, came from Terre Haute, Indiana, though he died when she was still a young girl. David’s own father hailed from Lincoln, Nebraska. His mother’s family tapped back into Ireland, specifically to Ulster. Such details would emerge in our conversations from time to time—a mention of Socorro, New Mexico, with its vast array of radio telescopes deployed atop coursing railroad cars; or of Düsseldorf, the hometown of the artist and latter-day shaman Joseph Beuys—but always, and only, tangentially. Whenever I endeavored to get David to divulge the specific meanings behind the mysteriously evocative sequence of place names on the copyright pages of his various museum publications more directly, he’d turn especially vague and elusive, squirming evasively and then blandly shifting the subject. Mal en Beg and Mal en Mor, it eventually turned out, are small villages in County Donegal, Ireland, on the republican side of the Ulster border. Bhopal, Beirut, Pretoria, Teheran? “Several places where a great deal of suffering was taking place at the time,” David indicated mildly one morning before catching himself up short and quickly going all blank again.

  2. … who either was or wasn’t Gerard Billius’s granddaughter.

  Wilson’s exhalation of foggy indeterminacy, for that matter, often seems to insinuate itself into the world itself. I was able, somewhat later, to track down a Mary Rose Cannon in Pasadena, and she did indeed hail from Texas; she knew Wilson, and she had in fact contributed several early collections to the museum (“the butterflies, for instance”); she had, she told me, all sorts of other collections salted away in her garage (including bird feathers, rattlesnake paperweights, piranha paperweights, and old nineteenth-century glass chemists’ beakers used in the manufacture of perfume); but when I asked her whether she was in fact the granddaughter of a lawyer named Gerard Billius, she grew quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said at length, “could be. I mean, I was adopted, you see, so I never really knew my grandparents. In fact I came very near to being adopted by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. They came to the orphanage, he dandled me on his knee, and they were just about set to take me, only it turned out that they wanted a girl alone and I came with my brother—we were a kind of package deal—and so they passed and we were eventually adopted by somebody else. They changed our name, and we never really knew our grandparents. Though we did get some stuff from them after they died.”

  3. … “between” him and the world.

  In particular, David wanted to make sure that I at very least credit the “absolutely invaluable contributions” of such museum colleagues as Mark Francis Rossi (Chief Keeper), Sarah Simons (Administrative Director/Librarian), Harold Chambers (Head of Research), Rex Ravenelle (Head of Exhibitions), Kristina Marrin (Curator), and Bridget Marrin (Curatorial Assistant).

  4. “And more’s coming,” it assured me.

  As, indeed, more has been. For the latest on this field that has been growing by leaps and bounds (can a technology be said to be shrinking by leaps and bounds?), see Ed Regis’s Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology: Remaking the World—Molecule by Molecule (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1995), which focuses on the astonishing career of the nanotheorist and engineer K. Eric Drexler, who seems to be getting closer and closer to his ambition of fashioning functioning nanorobots out of mere strands of individual atoms, robots which in turn could go on to fashion virtually anything at all (vaccines, beefsteaks, automobiles, space stations) from t
he molecular bottom up!

  The current explosion of interest in this field was anticipated (as most things usually turn out to have been), over thirty-five years ago, by the Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman, who in December 1959 gave an after-dinner talk at a meeting of the American Physical Society, under the disarmingly impish title of “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” In his talk, Feynman sketched out the possibility of a progressively cascading technological miniaturization (one method, he suggested, would be to create a robot programmed to replicate a half-size version of itself, which would in turn replicate a half-size version of itself, etc., ad diminutandum). Hypothesizing a day when the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica might be inscribed onto the head of a pin, Feynman went on to offer a $1,000 reward “to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such a manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.” (Regis, p. 69)

  That prize in turn went unclaimed until November 1985, when Tom Newman, a Stanford electrical engineering grad student, mobilized a team of adepts in the nascent technology of electron-beam lithography to transcribe the first page of Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”) onto a square 1/160th of a millimeter on each side planted neatly astride the head of a pin. As Regis reports, Newman’s main technical difficulty in writing anything that small turned out to be “physically locating the text again once he’d actually written it on the surface. At the scale of 1/25,000, a pin-head was an immense area.” Regis then goes on to quote Newman himself to the effect that “Finding the page of a text turned out to be a challenge because it was so small, compared to the area we were writing on. When you’re at low magnification it’s hard to see things in the electron microscope. But if you zoom in you’re looking too close, and it takes forever to look around. So we needed to make a little road map of each sample: there’s a speck of dirt here, a little chip here, and we’d use that to home in on it. But then once you saw it on the screen, it was fairly legible.” (p. 146)

  First paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, inscribed onto the head of a pin. (illustration credit nts.2)

  5. “The first layers are just a filter …”

  I was momentarily reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s epistolary advice to a young poet:

  “Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things: thither irony never descends—and when you come thus close to the edge of greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitude springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the influence of serious things either it will fall from you (if it is something fortuitous), or else it will (if it really innately belongs to you) strengthen into a stern instrument and take its place in the series of tools with which you will have to shape your art.” (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet; trans., M. D. Herter; New York: Norton, 1993; p. 24.)

  PART II: CEREBRAL GROWTH

  6. … the secret society’s First Encyclopedia of Tlön.

  Borges’s story is in fact immensely evocative of Wilson’s project as well. “The metaphysicians of Tlön,” Borges notes, “are not looking for truth, not even an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.” Elsewhere he records how “One of the schools of Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process” (p. 25). Readers will of course have noted how the Iguazú Falls, where Geoffrey Sonnabend spent his long night of revelation in 1936, is just a few hundred miles north of Buenos Aires, where Borges was at the same time holding sway as a senior librarian. As for Wilson’s own knowledge of the Borges story, he turned all coy on the subject when I asked him directly, though when I asked whether the “Buenos Aires” reference in his litany of place names on the copyright page of the various museum publications in fact constituted an allusion to Borges, the way “Düsseldorf” seems to allude to Beuys, he smiled and did not contradict me.

  The librarian of Buenos Aires (illustration credit nts.3)

  As for this last bit of conjecture, however, one might consider a passage from Volume 1, number 1 of Ricky Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (Los Angeles, spring 1994). (Jay, incidentally, is also a fan of the MJT.) After describing a famous calculating-dog act from nineteenth-century London, Jay notes how Charles Dickens himself somewhere records having attended this dog’s performance twice before going backstage to confront the dog’s owner with his own clever theory about how the man had gotten the dog to choose precisely the right card. “And he did not deny my discovery of his principle,” Dickens reports smugly.

  To which Jay adds: “This scenario has a surprisingly modern ring, not in the performance of the dog but rather in the interchange between the amateur and professional conjurer. In the time-honored tradition, the amateur, thoroughly fooled, returns to scrutinize the show. He intuits a method which, although almost certainly incorrect (or at best providing only a partial explanation), satisfies him. He now confronts the conjurer (unlike many of his present-day counterparts, Dickens had the courtesy to wait for the room to clear) and proudly announces his theory. The performer smiles and says nothing. This the amateur interprets as a sign of assent. Convinced of his remarkable powers of observation and analysis, the tyro departs, basking in the glow of self-congratulation.”

  7. … phosphorescent by night.)

  Or, to give another example, consider the testimony of Edward Brown, from his 1673 monograph A Brief Account of Some Travels in divers Parts of Europe … (I’ll spare you the full title, which goes on for another whole paragraph), who records that while in Leipzig he visited the Burgomeister, one Herr von Adlershelme, “a courteous Learned Person, and great virtuoso, who has collected and observed many things,” and who had gathered together in his “Chamber of Rarities” many things that were—the word Brown uses is: “considerable.” Promising to confine his own list to “but a few,” Brown then goes on to enumerate:

  An Elephant’s Head with the denies molares in it. An Animal like an Armadillo, but the scales are much larger and the Tail broader. Very large flying Fishes. A Seahorse. Bread of Mount Libanus. A Cedarbranch with the Fruit upon it. Large Granates as they grow in the Mine. A Siren’s hand. A Chameleon. A piece of Iron, which seems to be the head of a Spear, found in the Tooth of an Elephant, the Tooth being grown about it. The Isle of Jersey drawn by our King Charles the Second. A piece of wood with the Blood of King Charles the First upon it. A Greenland Lance with a large Bell at the end of it. Much Japan painting, wherein their manner of hunting and working may be observed. A Picture of our Saviour [upon] the Hatches [of] which are … written … the story of his Passion. Bevers taken in the River Elbe. A Picture of the murther of the Innocents, done by Albrecht Durer. Pictures of divers strange Fowls. A Greenland Boat. The skins of white Bears, Tigres, Wolves, and other Beasts. And I must not omit the Garter of an English Bride, with the story of it; of the Fashion in England for the Bridemen to take it off and wear it in their Hat, which seemed so strange to the Germans, that I was obliged to confirm it to them, by assuring them that I had divers times wore such a Garter my self.

  A bloody piece of wood, a stuffed beaver, an elephant’s tusk, a siren’s hand, a bridal garter, and a painting by Dürer—not an untypical trove. Nor is it untypical for the provenance of many of what we today consider Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to wend their way back through hodgepodge collections such a
s these.

  8. “… the whole body momentarily convulsed.”

  Of course the Americans whom the Europeans were suddenly encountering could have been, for their part, no less startled. In a journal entry describing one of his first landfalls, off the island of Tortuga on December 18, 1492, Columbus describes how a native “king” and several of his “counsellors” canoed out to his boat and participated in an exchange of gifts: “Many [of the] things that passed between them I did not understand,” Columbus confesses, “except that I saw well that they took everything as a great wonder” (quoted in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; p. 13). And even though such an estimation may in part be laid to projection, still, the sense of awe can well be imagined—and has been, repeatedly, for instance in the first volume of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy (Vol. I: Genesis; trans., Cedric Belfrage; New York: Pantheon, 1985), wherein several such moments are rekindled. For example, when the Molucca Indians first saw the small landing craft being launched from Magellan’s galleons, “they thought those boats were small daughters of the ships, that the ships gave them birth and suckled them” (pp. 73–74). Other natives elsewhere suddenly awoke, uncomprehending, barely believing, to the sight of whole floating islands with downy cloudbanks flapping in the breeze, newly bobbing off their shores. And the Aztecs famously took Cortés’s men atop their horses for gods.