“Anyway, my colleague recounted for me how during one of the sieges of Pavia—Pavia always seemed to be coming under siege in those days—Spallanzani realized that he was dying of some urinary-tract infection; he kept careful notes on the progress of the disease and authorized an autopsy after his death so that his colleagues could study the bladder and kidneys themselves. Only, his corpse fell into the hands of his sworn enemy and fiercest rival, I forget the guy’s name, an anatomist—in my own mind I always think of him as Scarpia, as in Tosca. So anyway, this Scarpia extracted not only Spallanzani’s bladder and kidneys but his entire reproductive apparatus as well, which he thereupon proceeded to display with considerable glee. Remember: this is Italy, and such public emasculation was just about the worst affront to a man’s honor that could be imagined. So that years later, after Scarpia died, Spallanzani’s old students got ahold of his corpse, decapitated it, and preserved the head in a jar of its own, which to this day rests on a shelf in the museum right nearby Spallanzani’s.”
Eisner laughed and then fell silent for a few moments, perhaps marveling at the sheer passion of his forebears. “But Spallanzani was great,” he resumed, “had all kinds of great intuitions. Some of his work refuting the idea of spontaneous generation was a good half of the way toward Pasteur. He bred eels. He was into bats: poured wax in their ears to see if that would affect their navigational abilities …”
At this point the coincidences were becoming just too bizarre. I mentioned Wilson’s museum (Eisner had never heard of it) and in particular its exhibit about Bernard Maston, the deprong mori, and Donald Griffith—“That’s Griffin,” Eisner interrupted, “with an i-n, not a t-h.” I know, I said, I know. “Funny about Griffin,” Eisner continued. “He’s a great scientist too, and a dear friend of mine. In fact, years ago, as a graduate student at Harvard, I inherited my first lab from him. There was still this wonderful weird grid of holes drilled into the walls, holes which had once held the anchors onto which he’d attached the maze of wires crisscrossing the room which formed the basis for his original research proving that bats could navigate in the dark. That lab had a marvelous history. Immediately before Griffin it had been occupied by the Alfred Kinsey who did such terrific groundbreaking work on reproduction among the cynipid wasps—that is, before he abandoned the field entirely to concentrate on human sexuality instead.”
I read Eisner some passages from the deprong mori brochure and he laughed and seemed to love them. “That’s wonderful,” he said, not the least bit miffed. “That’s exactly what it’s like when you’re out there in the field and you’re first encountering some of those marvelously strange natural adaptations. At first all you’ve got is a few disconnected pieces of raw observation, the sheerest glimpses, but you let your mind go, fantasizing the possible connections, projecting the most fanciful life cycles. In a way it’s my favorite part of being a scientist—later on, sure, you have to batten things down, contrive more rigorous hypotheses and the experiments through which to check them out, everything all clean and careful. But that first take—those first fantasies. Those are the best.”
I decided to try the stink ant out on Eisner. Wait until you hear this, I told him, this one is even funnier. Where-upon I proceeded to read him the first few paragraphs of this very piece right off my computer screen. He listened attentively, audibly harumphing his concurrence every few sentences. “Yup,” he said. “Yup … yup.” When I’d finished, he said, “So, where’s the joke? All of that stuff is basically true.”
I was struck almost speechless. Really? I stammered.
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know the names exactly—they’re not precisely my field, so I’m a little rusty on those ants. But let’s see: Megaloponera foetens, you say? I don’t think Megaloponera exists, but there is a genus that used to go by the name Megaponera, although—it gets a little complicated—lately I’m told it’s been folded into another category called Pachycondyla. And there is an African ant called Pachycondyla analis. ‘Foetens’ is smelly, but ‘analis’—well, let’s just say that’s even more smelly. And I believe that that ant does stridulate—it’s not a cry exactly, but it does produce this faint chirping sound. As for whether Pachycondyla ingests the spore that way, I’m not sure. But there are several other species that do, some of them right here in the United States. For instance, down in Florida there’s an ant, Camponotus floridanus, which inhales or anyway somehow takes in spores of the Cordyceps fungus, and occasionally you will indeed come upon those ants, far from home, high up the stalk of some tall blade of grass, for instance. Their mandibles will be clamped onto the blade and they’ll be quite dead, a long, thin, curved pink candlestick-like protrusion growing out from their head. And that’s the fungus, getting set to shed spores. No, no,” Eisner laughed, delighted. “That’s all true. Just goes to show: nature is incredible. No way—no way—this could all have been created in just six days.” (That was great: every bit as wonderstruck as Wilson, Eisner had derived exactly the opposite evolutionary conclusion from the likes of the stink ant.) “In fact,” he continued, “wait a second, I think—yeah—my wife, Maria, and I photographed one of those a while back down in Florida. You got a fax?”
I gave him the number.
“Just a second,” he said, and rang off.
And sure enough, a few moments later, a photo of a dead Camponotus floridanus, his forehead gloriously rampant, came coursing up from out of my machine.
Camponotus floridanus with Cordyceps fungus as photographed by Tom and Maria Eisner (illustration credit 1.6)
PART II
Cerebral Growth
Centaur recently excavated near Volos, Greece (illustration credit 2.1)
After an earlier, abridged version of the foregoing essay appeared in the September 1994 issue of Harper’s, the magazine got some wonderful letters. One fellow from Chicago saw fit to alert the editors to a possible fraud, noting that “The weight of five solid lead walls, eight inches thick, twenty feet high and two hundred feet long calculates out at 9,154,000 pounds. If each person on [Griffith’s] eight-month expedition to the Tripsicum Plateau in South America carried fifty pounds of lead (plus sensors, etc.), that equates to 190,280 assistants.”
To which the only proper response would have to have been: “So? Still doesn’t prove it couldn’t’ve happened.”
Other correspondents, meanwhile, offered observations and clippings about parallel sorts of enterprises to David Wilson’s. For example, I was sent an article about an exhibition of “The Centaur Excavations at Volos,” according to which three centaur skeletons with bones dating to “1300 B.C. plus or minus three hundred years” were unearthed in 1980 “at Argos Orestiko, eight kilometers northeast of Volos, Greece.” One of these skeletons forms the centerpiece of the exhibit, still embedded in a slab of Greek sandstone displayed under glass along a long wooden flatbed table: eerie the way the horse’s spinal column courses seamlessly into the arched vertebrae of the human torso. Looking closely, you can even make out the rusted barb of the arrow that pierced the monster’s human heart. The show’s curator, William Willers, an artist and biology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, is quoted as explaining how “Such centaurs roamed the Thessalian woods until they met men’s arrows and spears, then fled into the hills, where cold and hunger did the rest.”
(But is there even a University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh?)
Other letters reminded me, for example, of Donald Evans’s epic project, an enchantingly evocative and spectacularly executed philately of an entirely imaginary alternative world. The American artist (b. 1945) collated hundreds of these sublime (and exceedingly rare, if not downright unique) postage stamps, from such countries as the Isle des Sourds, Antiqua, Domino, Amis and Amants, Lo Stato di Mangiane, My Bonnie, Nadorp, Pasta, and the Republica de Banana, before his own untimely passing in 1977 as the result of a fire in his Amsterdam flat. Others mentioned Charles Simonds, the urban archeologist who first began uncovering (or discovering
, or deploying—it was never quite clear) the exquisite diminutive ruins left behind by various wandering tribes of “Little People” (their fastidiously layered walls fashioned out of red clay bricks only millimeters long) amidst the crumbling hollows of various tenements in Lower Manhattan—this was during the early seventies (Simonds’s work has in the meantime graduated off the streets and into some of the world’s premier galleries, from Seoul to Barcelona, from the Guggenheim to the Jeu de Paume). Back in the early seventies, Norman Daly, a professor emeritus at Cornell, elaborated an entire fictional civilization, known as “Llhuros,” from which he was even able to exhibit more than 150 artifacts.
One of the most energetic of such enterprises currently under way, to which I was likewise alerted by several correspondents, is the Hokes Archives at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, originally founded in London by Everett Ormsby Hokes (1864–1939) but currently under the directorship of Beauvais Lyons, an associate professor of art at the university and himself the explicator of no less than three previously unheard-of civilizations: the Arenot of North Central Turkey, the Apasht from the Hindoo Kush of Afghanistan, and the Aazud of Mesopotamia. (The Arenot, for example, were “a dystopian society” with “an extremely dualistic cosmology.” According to one interpretation, they believed that “because copulation is necessary to the creation of a life, ritual necrophilia is the only means to create the afterlife.” Prevalent among the imagery one is able to spot among the Arenots’ surviving pottery shards is the so-called dog-eat-dog motif, a canine-cannibalistic daisy chain, as it were.)
Among other documents accompanying a letter from the Hokes Archive’s own assistant director was a Selected Bibliography, which featured, among other things, a reference to Norman Daly’s seminal text “Possible Aazudian Origins of Llhuroscian Culture” from Vol. 118, no. 2, 121–32 of the Bulletin of Llhuroscian Studies (London, 1962). The letter itself, meanwhile, also noted how “a literary paradigm for the Hokes Archive” can be found in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, and specifically in his 1941 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (included in his book Ficciones), in which a secret society is discovered to be painstakingly confabulating an entire encyclopedia documenting the physical and intellectual legacy of an otherwise long-lost culture, though reference to this civilization also appears to have seeped into at least one copy (Borges’s own) of Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopedia. Borges further claims that he has in the meantime also been able to secure a single volume—XI: Hlaer to Jangr—from the secret society’s First Encyclopedia of Tlön.6
The letter went on to note how Mr. Lyons was by no means alone in this pursuit and how indeed last year he’d organized a symposium bringing together several other such like-minded academic visionaries, a sort of “conference paper version of Zelig,” the letter said. It concluded by referring to my original Harper’s piece and noting how I’d managed to “touch on the central issue regarding parody, how irony is signaled. David Wilson, Beauvais Lyons and many others working in this genre cultivate a deadpan sensibility in presenting this work. The tension between what is real and imaginary is a source of its aesthetic tension as well as its subversive implications. Additionally, the work is ultimately playful. One could wax on about this, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
I liked that last formulation and decided to telephone the letter-writer so as to further pursue its implications (the letter had been written on the archive’s stationery, which provides both phone and fax numbers); in fact, I’d even begun dialing before I did a double take on the assistant director’s name—Vera Octavia (not bloody likely)—and at long last grogged the resonances of the archive’s own name as well. (Hokes!?) Thinking better of my initial impulse, I hung up without completing the call.
MEANWHILE, it was to other, much earlier, incarnations of David Wilson’s museum that I began to turn my own increasingly obsessive attentions. John Walsh’s allusions to Wunderkammern lodged in my brain like a spore and increasingly, in the midst of various other sorts of research forays, I found myself drifting over to those sections of the library that documented the early history of what would subsequently become museums. Walsh himself helped exacerbate these tendencies by sending me a marvelously daffy volume from the Oxford University Press entitled The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, a compendium of almost insanely recondite scholarly papers delivered at a 1983 conference called to celebrate the tercentenary of the opening to the public of Oxford’s own Ashmolean Museum by the then Duke of York (subsequently King James II). It was in its pages, for instance, that I first came upon Francis Bacon’s prescription for the essential apparatus of the compleat “learned gentleman” (from his Gesta Grayorum of 1594), and particularly his suggestion that in attempting to achieve within “a small compass a model of the universal made private,” any such would-be magus would almost certainly want to compile “a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included.”
That formulation—I especially liked the “singularity, chance and the shuffle of things” part—neatly anticipated the sorts of lists one comes upon everywhere in this vein of research. The Origins book, for example, cites the case of Bacon’s contemporary, Sir Walter Cope (d. 1614), a politician and member of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries, whose Kensington castle featured, according to the 1599 diary of a Swiss visitor named Thomas Platter, “an appartment stuffed with queer foreign objects in every corner,” including, among other things: holy relics from a Spanish ship Cope had helped to capture; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, a back-scratcher, and a canoe with paddles, all from “India”; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwoman’s forehead, a unicorn’s tail; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII’s fool, the Turkish emperor’s golden seal … (Another diarist, a few years later, noted the addition of such recent acquisitions as “a passport given by the King of Peru to the English, neatly written upon wood,” and a little Indian bird, phosphorescent by night.)7
By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this sort of hoard (the chamber of wonders, in which the word wonder referred both to the objects displayed and the subjective state those objects inevitably induced in their respective viewers) was rampant all over Europe, and the question arises: Why? Or rather, why then? To say that such wonder was an essential aspect of early Renaissance experience merely begs the question: What was it about the early Renaissance that provoked such an avalanche of wonder? And of course the answer, as Platter’s awestruck inventory of Cope’s treasure trove itself suggests, lies in the avalanche of marvelous new stuff that had suddenly begun pouring over the transom into a previously parochial, hidebound, closed-in European subcontinent. In particular, the stuff of the New World.
That, in turn, is the theme of Stephen Greenblatt’s masterfully evocative study Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991). “Wonder,” Greenblatt argues, was “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.” And this was something new. “Nil admirari, the ancient maxim taught,” as Greenblatt continues. “But in the presence of the New World the classical model of mature, balanced detachment seemed at once inappropriate and impossible. Columbus’s voyage initiated a century of intense wonder.… European culture experienced something like the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole body momentarily convulsed.”8
America in the marveling eye of Europe: Theodor de Bry’s depiction of Indian hunting stealth (Frankfurt,
1590) (illustration credit 2.2)
At one point Greenblatt scrutinizes a passage from the French Huguenot pastor Jean de Léry’s great History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578, but based on travels of two decades earlier) in which Léry recalls a particularly unsettling and exotic evening among the Tupinamba natives in the Bay of Rio, concluding, “Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles.”9 This trembling, Greenblatt glosses, “is the authentic sign of wonder,” for “wonder, as Albertus Magnus wrote, is like ‘a systole in the heart.’ … Someone witnesses something amazing, but what matters most is not ‘out there’ … but deep within, at the vital emotional center of witness.”10 The fact that Léry doesn’t have a clue as to what the Tupinambas’ rituals actually signify for them renders his own experience of that evening, and its subsequent recollection, all the more powerful, for himself. As the historian Michel de Certeau has written, “An absence of meaning opens a rift in time.” And that experience—of the ground opening before one’s feet—was at the heart of the sensation of wonder ideally afforded by (or at any rate striven toward in) many of the cabinets of the time. That was the spirit, the taste of the age. (And the fault line runs clear through, from there to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 6
