Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

by Lawrence Weschler

  The image on the pamphlet’s cover was of the same archaic head as on the banner outside. “THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY—AND YOU,” the headline around the head announced portentously. Inside, the pamphlet opened with a General Statement:

  The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California, is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic. Like a coat of two colors, the museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the museum serves the general public by providing the visitor with a hands-on experience of “life in the Jurassic.”

  There immediately followed a small map, captioned “JURASSIC,” which in every other respect looked exactly like a map of what the rest of us might refer to as Egypt. An arrow identified what in any other rendition would get called the Nile River Delta as “Lower Jurassic.”

  The text (which turned out to be the transcript of a visitor-activated slide show that ordinarily runs, accompanied by that same echt-institutional voice, in a small alcove over to the side of the entry—it just happened to be out of order that afternoon) went on to offer a treatise on museums in general:

  In its original sense, the term “museum” meant a spot dedicated to the Muses—“a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.” By far, the most important museum of antiquity was the great institution at Alexandria founded by Ptolemy Philadelphius in the third century before Christ (an endeavor supported by a grant from the Treasury). And no treatment of the museum would be complete without mention of Noah’s Ark in which we find the most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen.

  And so forth. At times stupefyingly specific, at other times maddeningly vague, the text went on to trace the museological impulse through its dark oblivion in the Middle Ages on into its subsequent regeneration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when

  collections of natural objects became as common as collections of works of art and often both such collections were housed in the same repository. One of the earliest printed catalogues of a collection is that “of all the chiefest Rarities in the Publick Theater and Anatomie-Hall of the University of Leyden” which appears to have been published in 1591, but the date seems to be a mistake for 1691.

  Highlighting the singular collections of John James Swammerdam, Dr. Matthew Maty, Ole Worm (and his “Museum Wormianum”), and Elias Ashmole, the pamphlet went on to note how in the early days such treasure troves were the exclusive preserve of various social elites. For this reason, the pamphlet seemed to hold the late-eighteenth-century American painter Charles Willson Peale in particularly high esteem. His remarkable emporium in Philadelphia

  was open to all peoples (including children and the fair sex).… Peale fervently believed that teaching is a sublime ministry inseparable from human happiness, and that the learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar—guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.

  “Rational amusement,” the pamphlet explained, was the Peale Museum’s intent, but also, by a curious irony, its undoing:

  Imitators sprang up almost at once. A collection of oddities, unencumbered by scientific purpose, was found to be good business. Tawdry and specious museums soon appeared in almost every American city and town. This unsavory tendency finally reached its peak with Barnum, who in the end obtained and scattered the Peale collections.

  The Museum of Jurassic Technology itself, the pamphlet went on to explain, traces its origins to “this period when many of the important collections of today were beginning to take shape.” In fact, many of the exhibits in the MJT, according to the pamphlet, were originally part of smaller and less well-known collections, such as the Devonian and Eocene. In the slide-show version, inspirational music of a certain generic, oleaginous consistency would now swell up as the narrative built toward its close:

  Although the path has not always been smooth, over the years the Museum of Jurassic Technology has adapted and evolved until today it stands in a unique position among the major institutions of the country. Still, even today, the museum preserves something of the flavor of its roots in the early days of the natural history museum—days which have been described as “incongruity born of an overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena.”

  Glory to Him, who endureth forever, and in whose hand are the keys of unlimited Pardon and unending Punishment.

  All of which helped, and didn’t.

  “Um,” I tried again, after having finished the pamphlet, “but I mean, how specifically did this museum get started?”

  “You mean this museum?” Wilson begged clarification.

  Well, yeah.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, the seed material, I guess you could call it, for the current collection—the Flemish moths, for instance, the ringnot sloth—that exhibit’s not up right now—a few of the others—came down to us through the collection of curiosities originally gathered together by the Thums—that’s Owen Thum and his son, Owen Thum the Younger, who were botanists, or I guess really just gardeners in southwestern Nebraska, in South Platte. In some ways their collection was like those of the old European nobility, only on a kind of homespun Midwestern scale.”

  Owen Thum, Owen Thum the Younger, and Hester Boxbutte Thum

  When was this?

  “Oh, in the first half of this century—say, the twenties for the father, and on into the fifties with Owen the Younger. But then a man named Gerard Billius essentially stole the material. It’s a complicated story, but Billius was a man with money, also from Nebraska—in fact I think also from South Platte. I’m not positive, I could look it up. Anyway, he saw some value in the collection and he befriended Owen the Younger—who, let’s face it, was a kind of bumpkin, not very sophisticated—and he got Owen the Younger to write a deed of gift to him, Billius, into his will. Billius was a lawyer. As the years passed, Owen the Younger and his wife, Hester, began to sense Billius’s true nature and they tried to retract the deed but it had been written in such a way as to be unrevocable. After Owen the Younger’s death, his wife, Hester, got into a terrible confrontation with Billius—she was trying to deed the collection over to the Nebraska Historical Society instead—and it all ended up with her drowned in her backyard pool under highly suspicious circumstances.”

  When did he say this was?

  “Oh, this would have been in the late fifties. Anyway, so the collection went to Billius. Only, he quickly lost interest in it—I guess it turned out not to have the importance, or anyway the financial potential, he first saw in it. So then—well, I get a little hazy here, I’ve never been quite sure how it got from Billius to Mary Rose Cannon, or anyway to her family. I think maybe she was his granddaughter or something—she’s from Nebraska too, or maybe Texas. Anyway, though, she was a person whom we’d known indirectly for some time, and then about ten years ago she sort of gave the material over to us. A nice woman, although we’ve kind of lost touch. But anyway, that was the start.”

  It was also, as I would subsequently come to recognize, a quintessentially Wilsonian narrative: ornate, almost profuse, in some of its details, but then suddenly fogging over, particularly as one gets closer to the present. Such stories usually both perform and require a kind of leap.

  What about the stink ants?

  “Well, those we first heard about, let me see, I think it was on a PBS special actually, and we immediately realized we wanted to include a specimen in our collection. However, tracking one down proved incredibly difficult. None of the usual outlets had ever heard of them or could lay their hands on one. Finally we tried the Carolina Biological Supply Company in Portland, Oregon.”

  Carolina Biological Supply … in Portland, Oregon?

  �
�Yeah,” Wilson assured me. “And that’s where we ran into Richard Whitten.” He thereupon launched into another byzantine saga, this one about a certain phenomenally gifted bug amateur who had his own spectacular collections of beetles and butterflies but had all kinds of other qualities as well (he was a great lover of song and singing and had had a lifelong ambition to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and one day just piled his family into a van and headed to Salt Lake City, where he rented a tux and then secretly insinuated himself into the choir during one of their concerts—all kinds of other stories), and he was the only one anywhere who proved capable of laying his hands on any stink ant samples, and he kept the museum regularly supplied.

  And how, for instance (by now I’d started choosing my words carefully) had Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani, um, entered his life?

  “Well, I first came upon Sonnabend when we were trying to expand an exhibit we used to have on memory. Those three empty portholes in the back of the museum—I don’t know if you noticed them. Well, they used to contain an exhibit contrasting the memory theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. I myself tend to be pretty forgetful, so memory’s always been an interest of mine. For instance, Plato suggests somewhere that memory is like an aviary inside your head, with all these birds flying around, such that you might reach in for a ringdove and accidentally pull out a turtledove instead. And we represented that through a wax hand holding a stuffed bird. Anyway, we were planning to expand that exhibit with a fourth porthole, evoking the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, who was a great turn-of-the-century German researcher—in fact revitalized the whole field. He’d generate thousands of nonsense syllables, have people memorize series of them, and then chart the decay in their retention of the series, ending up with this kind of storehouse model. Fascinating work.

  The Platonic conception of memory

  “So, anyway, I was at the University Research Library over at UCLA one day, leafing through their Ebbinghaus books, when I just happened to come upon Sonnabend’s three-volume Obliscence the next call letter over. It seemed like nobody had looked into those books in ages, they hadn’t been checked out in years, but I started reading—Sonnabend himself tells the story about the theory’s genesis, about Madalena Delani and Iguazú Falls in the preface—and I was completely bowled over. In part, I suppose, it was the romance of this theory that seemed to foretell its own oblivion. And then, just a few days later, I happened to be listening to Jim Svejda’s ‘Record Shelf program on KUSC, the local classical-music station, and he was doing a whole hour show devoted exclusively to Madalena Delani—that, for instance, is how I first found out about how she died. It was an incredible coincidence—in fact, everything associated with the story is like a tissue of improbable coincidences—how they almost met, how they didn’t, what either of them were doing there at the Falls in the first place. And those kinds of coincidences are also a special interest of ours here at the museum. We contacted the Chicago Historical Society and a fellow there named Rusty Lewis helped us enormously, particularly with the Gunther connection. The whole thing just grew and grew.”

  It was getting late, time to be going and gone. I looked down at the pamphlet again, at the archaic head. What was the story with him?

  “Oh, Mr. J? That’s what my daughter calls him. He’s sort of like our mascot, I guess.”

  And the “A, E, N” on the banner outside?

  “Well, you may have noticed the line on top of the letters: that signifies negation or cancellation. So that the A, E, N’ means non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian. Sort of one of our mottoes.”

  As I was opening the door to leave, I once again noticed the diorama of the urn and the moths. What about that?

  “Oh, that’s a little urn surrounded by French moths—or, no, maybe Flemish, I’m not sure.”

  And what was the significance of the urn?

  “It’s just an urn. I don’t think it means anything.”

  And that other diorama—the chemistry-set bottles?

  “Oxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumina—those are the three chemical constituents of corundum, which forms the basis for all sapphires and rubies. Actually, we have the bottles out there because of the link to sapphires, which as you may know, have long been associated with qualities of faithfulness and endurance.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER I happened to be at the UCLA Library on another project when, half on a lark, I started riffling through the computerized card catalogue. “Ebbinghaus, Hermann,” I typed in, and sure enough there rose up a slew of references (“Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, 1913,” etc.). Then I typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” and the screen churned for a while, before finally clocking in: “No record found.” I went up to the reference librarian and asked whether there wasn’t perhaps some more complete catalogue, one covering all the libraries in the system; and he gestured over toward the OCLC computerized database on his own desk, which covers not only all the libraries in the UC system but pretty much all the collections of any consequence in the entire country. He typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” but once again the answer came back: “No record found.” I subsequently called information in Chicago and asked for the Northwestern University Press, only to be told there was no listing for that either—which seemed odd until the operator pointed out that if it did exist, the press, like the university itself, probably would be listed under Evanston, not Chicago, and, sure enough, it was. But when I called them, they’d never heard of Sonnabend either. I called KUSC and asked for Jim Svejda; when he came on, I explained the situation, told him about the exhibit, and asked if he’d ever done a show about the singer Madalena Delani. He just laughed and laughed: never heard of her. I called information in Chicago once again and got the number for the Chicago Historical Society. Once I got through to them, I asked dubiously for Rusty Lewis, who, however, did turn out to exist. Had he ever heard of Charles Gunther? “You mean the candy tycoon?” he shot back, without missing a beat. He went on to confirm every single one of the exhibit’s details about Gunther—his collection, the transplantation of the Libby Prison, the historic tables, even the snakeskin, which remains in the Historical Society’s collection to this day.

  Back at the library I asked about the ethnographer Bernard Maston: “No record found.” I asked about Donald R. Griffith: “No record found.” For some reason, I tried that reference out by title too—Listening in the Dark—and this time I hit paydirt, except that the book had a different subtitle and its author was Donald R. Griffin, not Griffith. I went upstairs to look over the book’s index but found no references to Maston, the Dozo, or any deprong mori. I went back downstairs and tracked down Griffin’s most recent whereabouts; he appeared to have retired to Lexington, Massachusetts, where I in turn located his number and called him up. When I reached him I started out by explaining about the museum (he’d never heard of it) and its exhibit about Donald R. Griffith—“Oh no,” he interrupted, “my name is Griffin, with an n, not Griffith.” I know, I said, I know. I went on to ask him if he’d ever heard of a bat named Myotis lucifugus. “Of course,” he said, “that’s the most common, abundant species in North America. That’s why we used it on all the early research on echolocation.” Did its range extend to South America? Not as far as he knew—why? As I proceeded to tell him about the piercing devils and the thatch roofs, the lead walls and the X-ray emanations, he took to laughing harder and harder. Finally, calming down, he said, “No, no, none of that is me, it’s all nonsense—on second thought you’d better leave the spelling of the name Griffith the way it is.” He was quiet for a moment, before continuing, almost wistfully, “Still, you know, it’s funny. Fifty years ago, when we were first proposing the existence of something like sonar in bats, most people thought that idea no less preposterous.”

  I don’t know why, I just couldn’t let the story go. I called information in Portland, Oregon, and asked doubtfully whether they had any listings for a Carolina Biological Supply. They did. I called the
number and asked for Richard Whitten. The woman who answered said he no longer worked there, which was really too bad, because he was such a wonderful character, bless his heart. She went on to regale me, completely unbidden, with tales of his incredible beetle and butterfly collections and of his other passions, how he’d even managed to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—the whole thing. A couple of years ago, though, she explained, he and his wife had pulled up stakes and headed down to San José, Costa Rica, where they’d finally launched their dream project—a little museum entirely given over to displaying their marvelous collections. Whitten didn’t have a phone down there, but he had sent up some clippings—did I have a fax machine? It happened that there was one where I was staying. I gave her the number, and a few minutes later, the clippings started coming through: rapturous reviews of the Whittens and their new Joyas del Trópico Húmedo (Jewels of the Rain Forest) museum. The pages kept eking out of the machine for some time, until the last one, at the bottom of which there emerged a photo of Richard Whitten himself, beaming contentedly amidst his butterflies.

  He was playing an accordion.

  “HE NEVER EVER BREAKS IRONY—that’s one of the incredible things about him.” I was talking with Marcia Tucker, the director of New York’s New Museum, about David Wilson. It turns out there’s a growing cult among art and museum people who can’t seem to get enough of the MJT. I seemed to encounter it everywhere I turned: the L.A. County Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Getty … “When you’re in there with him,” Tucker went on, “everything initially just seems self-evidently what it is. There’s this fine line, though, between knowing you’re experiencing something and sensing that something is wrong. There’s this slight slippage, which is the very essence of the place. And his own presence there behind the desk, the literal-minded way in which he earnestly and seemingly openly answers all your questions, his never ever cracking or letting you know that, or even whether, he’s in on the joke—it all contributes seamlessly to that sense of slippage.