Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (20 page)

Along the way, as I myself was increasingly drawn into their museum's fascinational field, I was abetted by some wonderful fellow travelers—particularly John Walsh of the Getty Museum and Tom Eisner at Cornell. Ralph Rugoff, Rosamond Purcell, Ricky Jay, Allison Coudert, and Norman O. Brown were also improbably generous with their time and insights. Loisann Dowd
White at the Getty Center's library in Santa Monica; Gretchen Worden of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and Laura Lindgren, founder of the Museum's awesome annual calendar; Russell Lewis of the Chicago Historical Society; Beauvais Lyons and perhaps Vera Octavia of the Hokes Archives in Tennessee; William Willers and Walter Hamady of Wisconsin; Michael Fehr of the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany (where a European outpost of the MJT has recently opened); and Arthur MacGregor and Oliver Impey of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford were all indefatigably indulgent and marvelously helpful, as were Robin Palanker, Susie Einstein, and Piotr Bikont.

Lewis Lapham, Ilena Silverman, and Ben Metcalf at
Harper's
magazine sheltered an early version of this project when no one else could quite make heads or tails of it. Dan Frank at Pantheon then apparently saw something there and seemed to have a good time prodding it into book form, as did the book's unflappable designer, Kristen Bearse (or, anyway, I had a good time being thus prodded). My agent, Deborah Karl, both “got it” and stuck with it.

Finally, yet again, there's my own wondrous consort, Joasia. As David says of Diana—only more so—I really don't know how she puts up with all of this. But, as ever, and more and more, I cherish her for doing so.

As for more conventionally citable sources:

The information on the Cameroonian stink ant, the
deprong mori
and the
Myotis lucifugus
bat, and Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani all derive from exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California (9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90212). The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information, in conjunction with the Visitors to the Museum, has published two useful monographs:
Geoffrey Sonnabend: Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
(1991), an “encapsulation” by Valentine Worth with diagrammatic illustrations by Sona Dora; and
Bernard Maston, Donald Griffith and the Deprong Mori of the Tripsicum Plateau
(1964[
sic
]), also by Worth and Dora; both monographs are available from the museum. The Society and the Visitors have also published a booklet entitled
No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory (1915–1935
) (1993), edited and transcribed by Sarah Simons (with complete photoreproductions of the letters themselves); this volume is likewise available from the museum, as is the pamphlet “The Museum of Jurassic Technology—and You,” which features a full transcript of the museum's introductory audiovisual slide presentation. The early history of the Thums is detailed in a monograph entitled
On the Foundations of the Museum: The Thums, Gardeners and Botanists
(1993), by Illera Edoh, Keeper of the Foundation Collections—the first in what is slated to be a series of such “Foundations” monographs, available, again, through the MJT.

Donald Griffin's
Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men
was published by the Yale University Press in 1958. Clement Silvestro's account of Charles Gunther's exploits, “The Candy Man's Mixed Bag,” appeared in the fall 1972 issue (Vol. 2, no. 2) of
Chicago History
magazine. For more on Richard Whitten's Joyas del Trópico Húmedo museum, see Cathryn Domrose's article “A Romantic Evening with the Anthropods” in the
Tico Times
(San José, Costa Rica) of July 23, 1993.

Ralph Rugoff's lecture on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, “Beyond Belief: Museum as Metaphor,” was delivered at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City at a May 1993 symposium on
Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances
, all of the papers from which are being published, under that title, by the Seattle Bay Press (1995). Other accounts of the museum include: Maria Porges's “A Fictional Museum of Imaginary Truths” (
Artweek
, October 14, 1989); David Wharton's “Weird Science” (
Los Angeles Times
, December 13, 1989); and Frederick Rose's “Next Thing You Know, They'll Show Us a Slithy Tove” (
Wall Street Journal
, July 19, 1989).

The film
Stasis
, along with other film work by David Wilson, can be tracked down by way of Mr. Wilson himself, care of the museum.

Hagop Sandaldjian's microminiature oeuvre is slated to be the subject of a forthcoming museum publication,
Through the Eye of the Needle: The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian
, with an introductory essay by Ralph Rugoff. (Other articles on Mr. Sandaldjian include: Alan Burdick's “Pope by a Hair” in the September
19, 1993,
New York Times Magazine;
and Lynn Andreoli Woods's “The Microminiaturist's Art between Heartbeats” in the December 28, 1990,
L.A. Reader
). Photographs from the MJT's Nanotechnology show were included in an article in the spring 1995 issue of
Felix.

The photograph of
Camponotus floridanus
with his forehead rampant is courtesy of Tom and Maria Eisner.

The centaur excavations at Volos, as rendered by William Willers of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, were featured in a piece entitled “Do You Believe in Centaurs?” by Don Williams in the October 11, 1994, issue of the
Knoxville News Sentinel
on the occasion of the centaur exhibit at the University of Tennessee (which has in the meantime procured the exhibit for its permanent collection).

Donald Evans's imaginary philately was documented in Willy Eisenhart's
The World of Donald Evans
(New York: Abbeville, 1980, 1994). Charles Simonds's work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives (see, for instance, the catalogue to his 1982 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago). Norman Daly's groundbreaking efforts were documented, many years after the fact, in “
The Civilization of Llhuros
: The First Multimedia Exhibition in the Genre of Archeological Fiction,” by Mr. Daly himself with Beauvais Lyons, in
Leonardo
magazine, Vol. 24, no. 3, 1991 (London: Pergamon
Press). (For an entertaining variant, consider David Macaulay's wittily turned and exquisitely illustrated
Motel of the Mysteries
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979], in which Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist in the year 4022, excavates the long-buried remains of an edifice dating back to the ancient civilization of Usa, a tacky motel which he proceeds to entirely misconstrue as a solemn place of worship.)

The Hokes Archives at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (Beauvais Lyons, director; Vera Octavia, assistant director) have been the subject of numerous pamphlets and articles, including Vol. XII, no. 3 of the Cheekwood Fine Arts Center Monographs Series (Nashville, Tenn., spring 1990); Mr. Lyons's “The Excavation of the Apasht: Artifacts from an Imaginary Past” (
Leonardo
magazine, Vol. 18, no. 2, 1985); and a chapter in Linda Hutcheon's recent book
Irony's Edge: The Theory and Practice of Irony
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” appeared in his 1956 volume
Ficciones
(English translation by Alastair Reid in the 1962 Grove Press edition).

The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe
(hereafter:
Origins
), edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor and published by the Clarendon Press division of the Oxford University Press in 1985, includes over thirty detailed studies by specialists in all aspects of this field, as well as over one hundred figures. A sort of companion volume,
Tradescant's Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean
Museum,
1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections
(hereafter:
Tradescant's
), edited by Mr. MacGregor, was actually published two years earlier, in 1983, on the occasion of the museum's tercentenary, and includes almost two hundred plates. The Bacon citation derives from p. 1 of the
Origins
book. The Cope material is drawn from pp. 17ff. of
Tradescant's.

(Also of interest in this context is the massive yet exquisitely turned catalogue to the 1991 “Age of the Marvelous” show at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire [distributed by the University of Chicago Press]; the introductory essay, by the volume's editor, Joy Kenseth, includes sections on Novelty and Rarity, the Foreign and the Exotic, the Strange and the Bizarre, the Unusually Large and the Unusually Small, the Transcendent and the Sublime, the Surprising and the Unexpected … and the Waning of the Marvelous [which Kenseth dates at about 1700]. One might also want to look at the catalogue to the Danish National Museum's 1993 “Museum Europa: An Exhibition about the European Museum from the Renaissance to Our Time,” with its chapters on “The Curious Eye,” “The Reflecting Eye,” “The Panoramic Eye,” and “The Surreal Eye.” Richard Ross's book of photographs
Museology
, published by Aperture in 1989, with an essay by David Mellor, is similarly compelling.)

Stephen Greenblatt's
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991. The material on wonder as the quintessential European response to the discovery of the New World and on the startle reflex is drawn from
pp. 14–16. The Léry, Albertus Magnus, and de Certeau material is drawn from pp. 16–19. (Janet Whatley's translation of Jean de Léry's
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America
was published by the University of California Press in 1990.) The discussion of the new credibility of the previously unbelievable in Léry, Díaz, and Raleigh also draws on Greenblatt (pp. 21–22, 163).

Adalgisa Lugli's essay “Inquiry as Collection” in the autumn 1986 issue of
Res
focuses, as its subtitle implies, on “The Athanasius Kircher Museum in Rome.” Lugli's riff on “the problem of continuity” comes from p. 116. MacGregor on Rudolf II of Prague is from
Tradescant's
(p. 74).

The photographer and latter-day cabinetperson Rosamond Purcell curated a marvelous show at the temporary quarters of the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California, at the end of 1994, entitled “Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters.” The description of the Leiden cabinet ordered by type of defect comes from that show (as, incidentally, does the quotation from Edward Brown's 1673
Brief Account of Some Travels in divers Parts of Europe
in the note on pp. 116–17 of this book). The pelican in Imperato's collection is explicated in Giuseppe Olmi's essay in
Origins
(p. 10), as well as in MacGregor's essay in the same volume (p. 148), although Purcell herself passionately demurs, insisting that the bird in question is in fact a spoonbill and not a pelican (everyone else's clever explications notwithstanding).

The moralizing skeletons at the Theatrum Anatomicum in Leiden were detailed in MacGregor's essay on “Collectors and Collections of Rarities in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries” in
Tradescant's
(p. 78). Dr. Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout's account of Frederik Ruysch's
vanitas mundi
, drawn from her article “Death Enlightened” in the April 6, 1970, issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, was cited in Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer's essay in
Origins
(p. 119). Rosamond Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould also relied heavily on Luyendijk-Elshout in the absorbing account “Dutch Treat: Peter the Great and Frederik Ruysch” in their spectacularly illustrated
Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History
(the account was enriched, as well, by a good deal of groundbreaking research by Ms. Purcell herself), and I, in turn, relied heavily upon them in my discussion of Ruysch (as well as upon Robert Massie's
Peter the Great: His Life and World
[New York: Knopf, 1980] and Simon Schama's
The Embarrassment of Riches
[New York: Knopf, 1987], and, regarding Rachel Ruysch, Germaine Greer's
The Obstacle Race
[New York: Farrar Straus, 1979]).

Descartes's misgivings about the
Wunderkammer
sensibility are aired in Greenblatt (pp. 19–20) and amplified upon (along with similar misgivings by other contemporaries) in William Schupbach's piece in
Origins
(pp. 177–78). Lugli's discussion of Delia Porta
et al.
's position on wonder is from p. 123 of the
Res
article; James Gleick's delineation of Richard Feynman's position on doubt comes from his introduction to the 1994 Modern Library edition of Feynman's 1965
The Character of Physical Law
(pp. ix–x).

The history of the Tradescants and Elias Ashmole is drawn from
Tradescant's.
The legal tangle regarding the
bequest, for example, is covered on pp. 41–43 (with Hester's pond drowning on p. 43); the visit to the witchcraft trial is from p. 14; the travels of the elder Tradescant to Muscovy and the younger to Virginie are found on pp. 18 and 13, respectively; Tradescant the Elder's letter to the Secretary of the Navy is from pp. 19–20; the Stirn letter describing the collection and the “daintily” carved crucifixion is from pp. 20–21; the discussion of the Siege of Pavia, with map, is from pp. 318–26; and the catalogue entries on the fruit-stone carvings are from pp. 245–46. (Additional details were drawn from pp. 149–52 of
Origins.
)