Sonnabend’s actual desk and study have been salvaged and painstakingly re-created. There’s a wall of photos detailing the stages of his life and his parents’ lives and a whole documentary embolism, as it were, devoted to the career of one Charles Gunther, an eccentric Chicago millionaire confectioner, who happened to be visiting Iguazú at the time of Wilhelm’s debacle and who became the young engineer’s patron in the years thereafter, bringing him back with him to Chicago and securing him employment as director of the reconstruction of the Chicago bridge system in the wake of that city’s Great Fire. Gunther himself, it appears, was quite a character in his own right, an inveterate collector of historical arcana and natural curiosa who even had an entire Confederate prison—the Libby, in Richmond, Virginia—dismantled, brick by brick, and reassembled in Chicago, so as to house his prodigious hoard, which included the very tables upon which the Emancipation Proclamation and the Appomattox Surrender were signed, as well as a swath of dried skin sloughed off by the serpent who first seduced Woman in the Garden of Eden—all properly certified with the requisite letters of authentication—a bounteous trove which, upon his death, came to constitute a cornerstone of the Chicago Historical Society, under whose auspices large portions of it can be seen to this day. Or, anyway, so the sequence of phone receivers at the museum allege as they guide you through the tale.
The Sonnabend Model of Obliscence
You can sit on a bench, pick up another receiver, and have Sonnabend’s whole theory laid out for you through a series of haunting, sequentially lit dioramas of variously intersecting (and compoundingly complexifying) cones and planes, complete with a representation of such technical subtleties as the perverse and obverse experience boundaries, the Spelean Ring Disparity, the Hollows, and, perhaps most provocatively, the Cone of Confabulation. (The voice in the receiver, the same voice as in all the other receivers, it may occur to you, is in fact the same bland, slightly unctuous voice you’ve heard in every museum slide show or Acoustiguide tour or PBS nature special you’ve ever endured: the reassuringly measured voice of unassailable institutional authority.)
Over to the side there’s a whole dark room devoted exclusively to Madalena Delani. By entering it you trigger an elaborate son et lumière presentation, back-lit slides along the walls rising up and fading in time with the narration. In the middle of the room, a glass-case table offers up jewelry, a feathered boa, musical scores, and other memorabilia; at the back of the room, a headless mannequin, swathed in one of the diva’s last dresses, oversees the séance. As you leave these halls, you may notice a tangent exhibit that evokes the contrasting memory theories of a turn-of-the-century French novelist named Marcel Proust: the vitrine contains a plate of madeleines, a single bite having been taken out of one of them (“Madeleines, madeleines,” you may find your mind thrumming, “Madalena Delani …”).
Around the corner you come upon another bench and another phone receiver and another elaborate display, this one detailing the bizarrely intersecting careers of Maston and Griffith. Once again, narrow-beam spotlights rise up and fade away, guiding you through the narrative—including a detailed exposition of how echolocation works in bats, complete with charts and graphs—culminating with a view of a solid tranche from the lead wall itself, one which presently becomes illumined, as if from within, so that you can actually see the bat embedded there, arrested in midflight.
Through much of these explorations, you may well be the only person inside the museum, aside from Wilson, and he’s a bit of a piercing devil himself. He pads about silently as you lose yourself in the various exhibits. One moment he’s at his desk; the next he’s gone, though who knows where?—perhaps to a workroom secreted at the rear of the store; a few moments later, however, he’s back reading at his desk, as if he was never gone at all. You continue to poke about—there are a good dozen other exhibits up at any given time—and presently, eerily, you become aware of strains of Bach being played on … on … could it be an accordion? The desk chair is empty, the front door has been left slightly ajar: Wilson is on the sidewalk, blithely serenading the passing traffic.
You leave him to it. You continue to explore. Depending on what happens to be up at the time you’re visiting, you may, for example, come upon the luminous white skeleton of some kind of rodent elegantly mounted on plush velvet beneath a glass bell. (“EUROPEAN MOLE—Talpa europea,” explains the wall caption. “Occurs in all European countries south of 59 north latitude except Ireland. Varies in size between large house mice and smallish black rats. The eyes are minute and degenerate; the eyelids are fused and completely hidden beneath the skin.…” And so forth, concluding: “A number of mammals and rapacious birds that are not offended by the mole’s musky odor prey upon them.”) In another glass case you can study “The Rose Collection of Now-Extinct Nineteenth-Century French Moths.” (“There’s a slight misnomer there,” Wilson informed me solicitously the first time I peered into that case. He happened to be passing silently by. “Most of those particular moths are indeed French, but a few are actually Flemish—although with some it’s hard to tell.”)
A spotlight shines down on an otherwise darkened wall, highlighting a complicated and almost indecipherable map. The nearby caption is headlined, “THE SIEGE AND BATTLE OF PAVIA, Fig. 74, Cat. no. 263” and goes on to ventilate, in bewildering detail, the conflicting estimations of several long-dead chroniclers, none of whom, clearly, was ever there—wherever there is or was (this minor detail, for some reason, has been occluded).
“We see the subtlest forces, obeying the most capricious behests of the human mind,” declares another wall caption—otherwise untethered—citing as its source simply: “Buckle (3): 03.” Inside one vitrine there’s a scrupulously wrought scale model of Noah’s Ark, with a cutaway revealing the stalls below deck. “1 inch = 12.5 cubits,” advises the caption. The model itself, propped up upon two silently pumping pistons, bobs languorously.
The Ark (scale, 1 inch: 12.5 cubits)
Along a nearby wall (just off to the side, actually, from the vitrine containing the spike-sprouting ant), there’s a pretty standard natural-history-museum-style array of mounted horns and antlers—standard, that is, with the exception of one, the smallest of the lot: a solitary hairy protrusion. (A nearby caption cites the testimony, inside quotation marks, of an “Early visitor to the Musaeum Tradescantianum, The Ark” to the effect that “We were shown an extraordinarily curious horn which had grown on the back of a woman’s head.… It is somewhat of a curiosity [for] it appears that men-folk bear their horns in front and such women theirs behind. It was noted on a label that it originated from a Mary Davis of Saughall in Cheshire an aet 71 an. Dn. 1688. No doubt it will have been mentioned in the Transactiones Angl., or in the Hist. nat. of Cheshire. The horn was blackish in color, not very thick or hard, but well proportioned.” As, indeed, this specimen is.)
The Antler Wall at the MJT
The horn of Mary Davis of Saughall
Another display, entitled “Protective Auditory Mimicry” allows you to compare, by pushing the requisite buttons, the sounds made by certain small, iridescent beetles, when threatened, with those made by certain similarly sized and hued pebbles “while at rest.” Another glass case contains, according to its caption, a “Zincinlaid black onyx box used for holding sacrificial human hearts. For as yet unknown reasons, the remains of dried sacrificial blood appear phosphorescent when viewed through polarizing material like that at the front of the case.” At the front of the case, a ponderous viewing apparatus hovers expectantly atop an empty display stand. “Specimen Temporarily Removed for Study,” a small sign apologizes.
There is an entire closet-sized alcove given over to a special exhibition entitled “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915–1935,” wherein are lovingly displayed twenty-two framed holograph communiqués from a purported file of forty-three such missives originally received by the astronomers at the famous observatory, located in t
he mountains above Pasadena, California. An introductory caption to the entire exhibit explains how “Letters of this kind began arriving at the Observatory as early as 1911 [the institution was founded in 1905] and continue to arrive even today.” The astronomers dutifully filed them away. “The information contained in this class of letter,” the legend goes on, “was typically of astronomical or cosmological concern. These individuals had gleaned the information they wished to communicate either by experimentation, observation, or intuition and invariably felt a strong sense of urgency in their need to communicate their observations to the observers at Mount Wilson.”
Such was certainly the case with one Mrs. Alice May Williams, of Auckland, New Zealand, lines from one of whose letters provide this exhibit with its title: “I am not after money & I am not a fraud,” she assures the astronomers, going on to explain how
I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again. Because if people hear talking they want stick, they go & do away with their selves. I have gone through frightful things still I go through it & I am beginning to get knowledge.
That letter is presently followed by several others in which Mrs. Williams goes on to lay out her various discoveries regarding the types of beings living on other planets, their flight machines, their intentions and capabilities (“I believe the people of the other world have glasses they can see you with. They can draw you to them”). And in so doing, as the other yellowing pages in the exhibit make clear, she is joining an entire world community of like-visited visionaries.
May Wiltse, of Venice, California, for instance, writes the observatory’s founder, Dr. George Hale, how “In 1916 I went to Washington, D.C., and transmuted silver into gold for the United States government and I have their reports. BUT IT WAS HUSHED up for reasons I cannot explain.” A few pages later she goes on to quote from a letter she’d managed to elicit from another scientist she’d apparently been hounding for some time to the effect that “I am glad to know you long ago discovered ALL the wonderful things modern science is daily discovering.” She reiterates the phrase—“ ‘ALL the secrets of nature,’ not one BUT ALL”—and modestly accepts the characterization. Bobbie Merlino of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a note dated December 4, 1932, offers his (her?) services for an eventual flight to Mars: “I readily understand that is a very dangerous expedition that we may never return but as long as I just take one glimpse at it I am satisfy if I die on the Planet I’ve always planned to visit. I am not out of my mind. I am as sane as anyone and I am very serious about this matter.…” In 1920 an unknown person who simply signed his meticulously calligraphed note “Historian, Boston, Mass.” offered an elaborate proof to the effect that “THE EARTH is FLAT and STANDS FAST.” John Rounds of Boscobel, Wisconsin, a few years later offered an even more convoluted—indeed, positively loopy—proof that “the Earth is not flat” and that, in fact, “it turns around the sun,” as if he were the first person ever to have hazarded such a daring hypothesis. The passion emanating from such pages seems authentically heartfelt, and the pages themselves, appropriately aged, seem like they must be genuine.
Just a few feet away from the alcove containing the Mount Wilson letters exhibit, there’s another aquarium-sized vitrine containing another large piece of serious-looking scientific apparatus, this one hovering above a black turntable along which are evenly spaced five small concave glass dishes, each harboring a tiny mound of powder. The five dishes are labeled “POSSESSION,” “DELUSION,” “PARANOIA,” “SCHIZOPHRENIA,” and “REASON.” There is no other caption. But on closer examination, it appears some kind of mishap must recently have occurred: the heavily barreled measuring apparatus has descended too far into the dish labeled “REASON” and the dish has shattered, spilling shards and powder onto the turntable. “Out of order,” advises a tiny sign taped to the face of the glass case.
By this time, you too may be starting to feel a bit out of order, all shards and powder. You head back to the foyer, where Wilson is again ensconced behind his desk, absorbed in his reading, the accordion resting along the wall by his side like a snoozing pet. You putter among the giftware, confused, hesitant. You poke among the monographs: perhaps they can help. Three little booklets are in fact being offered for sale, exemplars from an apparent series entitled “Contributions from the Museum of Jurassic Technology,” which in turn appear to have been excerpted—or so the title apparatus on their covers would lead one to believe—from a multivolume Supplement to a Chain of Flowers. The monograph on Geoffrey Sonnabend is thus An Encapsulation by Valentine Worth, excerpted from “Volume V, no. 5 (First edition, abridged)” of the Supplement to a Chain (its text closely parallels the museum’s own slide presentation, or maybe it’s vice versa). The monograph on Maston, Griffith, and the deprong mori is actually a “Second edition, revised” from “Volume IV, no. 7.” And then, as well, there’s a curious monograph On the Foundations of the Museum: The Thums, Gardeners and Botanists (Third edition, revised) with a text attributed to Illera Edoh, Keeper of the Foundations Collections, whose magisterial account is liberally festooned with maniacally niggling footnotes, along such lines as: “Bird, 132, vol. 4, 337. The reference is absent from the first edition (1933) of Athen Orientalis, but appears in the second edition, ‘very much Corrected and Enlarged; with the Addition of above 500 new lives from the Author’s original Manuscript’ (1933, vol. 2, col. 888) … although Bird’s testimony would seem to be of very dubious value.”
Each of the monographs is described, on its copyright page, as having been “Published in the United States by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information … in cooperation with the Visitors to the Museum by the Delegates of the Press.” The press in question is, of course, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, and its address is given as “9091 Divide Place, West Covina, California OX2 6DP” (bizarre zip!), though it appears to have other outposts as well, and they in turn are fastidiously laid out:
Billings Bogata Bhopal Beirut
Bowling Green Buenos Aires Campion
Dayton Dar es Salaam Düsseldorf
Fort Wayne Indianapolis Lincoln
Mar en Beg Mar en Mor
Nannin Pretoria Teheran
Socorro Terra Haute Ulster
So, obviously the monographs will not have helped at all, and by now you are completely at sea. “Um, excuse me,” you may at length hazard, approaching Wilson at his desk. “Um, what exactly is this place?”
“EXCUSE ME,” I asked at just such a moment somewhere toward the end of my first visit. “Um, what kind of place is this exactly?” Wilson looked up from his reading: beatific deadpan.
I suppose I should say something here about Wilson’s own presence, his own look, for it is of a piece with his museum. I have described him as diminutive, though a better word might be simian. His features are soft and yet precise, a broad forehead, short black hair graying at the sides, a close-cropped version of an Amish beard fringing his face and filling into his cheeks (though with no mustache, and the space between the bottom of his nose and upper lip is notably broad). He wears circular glasses which somehow accentuate the elfin effect. He’s been described as Ahab inhabiting the body of Puck (a pixie Ahab, a monomaniacal Puck), but the best description I ever heard came from his wife, Diana (no particular giant herself—their friends sometimes refer to the two of them together as “the little Wilsons”), who one day characterized his looks for me as neanderthal. “I’m serious,” she laughed. “There’s all this physical evidence.” (As a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UCLA, she ought to know.) “His browridge, for instance. With the rest of us it’s smooth, but his definitely juts out. He has a little bun at the back of his skull—it’s not flat like the rest of ours. The Neanderthals had enormous jaws, and David’s dentist once told him in amazement that there was room enough for a whole extra set of molars at the back of his. If you look closely at his arms and
legs, the lower bones seem proportionally longer and the upper ones shorter than with the rest of us—exactly as with them. Once we were at the Field Museum in Chicago, looking at a display about cavemen, and noticing all these similarities, we were almost rolling in the aisles. Everything the same, except, of course, that they were heavier, and he’s light—so that, actually, he’s more like a pubescent Neanderthal. He has this ridge, too, running down the middle of the top of his skull. That’s pre-Neanderthal, actually—it served as a kind of attachment for those big jaw muscles. I mentioned that once to one of my professors and he said, ‘Oh yeah, Eskimos have those too.’ But I mean—‘My husband is not an Eskimo,’ I had to remind him.”
“Well,” Wilson replied coolly that first afternoon, unfazed, from behind his wooden desk (obviously he gets asked this sort of question all the time). “As you can see, we’re a small natural history museum with an emphasis on curiosities and technological innovation.” He paused, and then went on: “We’re definitely interested in presenting phenomena that other natural history museums seem unwilling to present.” He could apparently sense that I was still a bit bewildered. “The name lends a sense of what’s inside but doesn’t refer to a specific geologic time,” he offered, helpfully. He then reached into his drawer and pulled out a pamphlet. “Here, this might be useful.”
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 2
