Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (15 page)

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

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 the 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.)

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
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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: