Curiously, this spirit of wonder—of the astonishment of the world—persisted much longer in Latin America than it did in the North (perhaps, in part, because the native peoples themselves persisted much longer, both as distinct races and through intermarriage). Surely this accounts in part for the continuing Latin American literary penchant for magic realism. Not for nothing is Borges an Argentinean. Or consider, in this context, the discovery of ice at the end of the first chapter of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Tears of Solitude (trans., Gregory Rabassa; New York: Harper & Row, 1970; p. 26):
Little José Arcadio refused to touch it. Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately. “It’s boiling,” he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no attention to him. Intoxicated by the evidence of the miracle, he forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and Melquíades’ body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids. He paid another five reales and with his hand on the cake, as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures, he exclaimed:
“This is the greatest invention of our time.”
9. “… my heart trembles.”
“Once ashore, I ambled along the Avenida Rio Branco, where once the Tupinamba villages stood; in my pocket was that breviary of the anthropologist, Jean de Léry. He had arrived in Rio three hundred and seventy-eight years previously, almost to the day.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, recalling his 1934 arrival in Rio in Tristes Tropiques (trans., John Russell; New York: Atheneum, 1961; p. 85). A few pages later, Lévi-Strauss refers to Léry’s book as “that masterpiece of anthropological literature” (p. 88).
10. “… emotional center of witness.”
This line of speculation leads toward some of the most engrossing analysis in Greenblatt’s book, for he goes on to ask about the function of all this marveling. Yes, Columbus was overwhelmed with all the wonder he was experiencing—the word itself recurs in his journals and dispatches so often that the King of Spain himself at one point suggested that Columbus should be called not Almirante, the admiral, but rather Admirans, the one who wonders (p. 83). But so much wonder was also a useful screen (I’m greatly oversimplifying Greenblatt’s argument here) for in his writings “Columbus tries to draw the reader toward wonder, a sense of the marvelous that in effect fills up the emptiness at the center of the maimed rite of possession.” Greenblatt is referring to that moment, repeated time and again, when, following an exchange of trinkets, Columbus claims title to the respective islands in the name of the King of Spain, and none of the native inhabitants contradict him, which he in turn takes for assent. “But that ritual had at its center … a defect, an absurdity, a tragicomic invocation of the possibility of a refusal that could not in fact possibly occur [if for no other reason than that the two parties didn’t even speak each other’s language, let alone comprehend each other’s conception of property, etc.]: y no me fué contradicho” (p. 80).
Admirans (the one who wonders) (illustration credit nts.4)
In the years after Columbus, the European sensibility’s virtual debauch in the wonder of the New World allowed it to disguise, from itself, the unprecedented human decimation that was taking place over there, on the ground, at that very moment. Wonder-besotted Europeans were so bedazzled that they could simply fail to notice the carnage transpiring under their very eyes, in their very name. We might say, to borrow Sartre’s phrase, that this continent was in bad faith.
In such matters it might also be wise to follow the lead of Walter Benjamin—and if ever there was an intellectual heir to the spirit of the Wunderkammer in our own time, it was he—who famously noted, in an essay reproduced in his Illuminations (trans., Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 1969) that “a historical materialist views [cultural treasures] with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.… There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another.” This is the passage which culminates with his urging the student of culture “to brush history against the grain” (pp. 256–57).
11. … the profusion of Wunderkammern.
And, of course, not just of Wunderkammern: European culture across the board was similarly besotted. John Donne, on “Going to Bed” with his mistress (his “Elegy 19,” composed during the same 1590s as Platter’s inventory of Cope’s collection):
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in discovering thee!
12. … not quite so easily debunkable after all.
Two years ago my then five-year-old daughter Sara fervently believed in Santa Claus. Last year she knew he was make-believe. But this year her belief in him was more passionate, and more ornately buttressed, than ever before.
13. … must travel to St. Petersburg.
Rosamond Wolff Purcell did precisely that as part of her marvelous photographic collaboration with Stephen Jay Gould in their book Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History (New York: Norton, 1992). The first chapter concerns itself entirely with the remarkable relationship between Frederik Ruysch and Peter the Great. The two had in fact first met some twenty years before Peter purchased the collection when, as a teenager, the future tsar had been traveling through Europe, working incognito in shipyards in England and Holland, systematically amassing the hands-on experience he would soon be deploying in his headlong drive to modernize Russia. The purchase of Ruysch’s emporium, in 1717, was part of a massive campaign on Peter’s part to build up, from virtual scratch, one of the greatest Wunderkammern on the continent, an effort in which he was arguably successful, though he died not long after, in 1725. Ruysch outlived him by another six years. (See also Robert Massie’s Peter the Great: His Life and World; New York: Knopf, 1980; pp. 187, 814.)
Simon Schama’s book on Dutch culture of the Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987), includes a startling 1683 painting by Jan van Neck entitled The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch in which “a dead infant is the object of the surgeon’s dissection while the anatomist’s own son, shown at right, ponders simultaneously the mysteries of mortal flesh and immortal science” (p. 526). That may be Ruysch’s son, but it could just as well have been his daughter, Rachel, who also assisted her father from an early age (not only attending his anatomical dissections but also sewing the lace cuffs, for example, for some of his most famous infant preparations) and who grew into one of the foremost painters of her own age, a specialist in exactingly observed still lifes, particularly floral arrangements, which were enormously prized and even outsold the works of Rembrandt. Her painting career spanned seven decades; she died at age eighty-six, in 1750.
Jan van Neck, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch (1683) (illustration credit nts.5)
14. … advances in positivist certainty.
There were, of course, exceptions—a counterflow to the undertow. The Ashmolean’s Arthur MacGregor gives us the English polymath Henry Peacham complaining, as early as 1611, with regard to the sudden profusion of wonder-cabinets: “Why does the rude vulgar so hastily post in madnesse to gaze at trifles and toyes not worth viewing?” (Tradescant’s Rarities, p. 17). By this time England was already teeming with enough private collections to attract, as MacGregor goes on, “the attention of less scrupulous dealers and the irony of the skeptical.” He quotes the satirist Thomas Nashe as writing of these gullible magpies that “a thousand guegawes and toyes have they in their chambers, which they heape up together, with infinite expence, and are made beleeve of them that sell them, that they are rare and pretious thinges, when they have gathered them upon some dunghill” (p
. 71). Shakespeare, in The Tempest (1611), has Trinculo salivating at the prospect of getting the savage Caliban back to England. He is certain he can bring the “holiday fools” out in force to pay for the opportunity to gawk at the monster. “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (II, ii, 30–32).
And for that matter, as we shall presently see, there were a spate of other objections, as well, grounded in the resurgent spirit of a regrouping positivist science. Galileo, for instance, had little use for those “curious little men” who could amuse themselves, like children, in collecting small and insignificant things, “a petrified crab, a desiccated chameleon, a fly or spider in gelatin or amber, those small clay figurines, supposedly found in ancient Egyptian burial chambers.” His contempt extended to the whole hoarding sensibility, whatever its medium of expression: “Our poet errs as much as would a painter who, purposing to depict a particular hunting scene, were to clutter his canvas with conies, hares, foxes, goats, deer, wolves, bears, lions, tigers, boars, hounds, greyhounds, leopards, and all manner of wild beasts”—a list that sounds uncannily like the almond stone at the MJT—“clustering at will animals of the hunt with every sort of game such as to liken his painting more unto a representation of the entry into the Ark of Noah than unto a natural hunting scene.” (quoted in Lugli, “Inquiry as Collection”; Res; autumn 1986; pp. 109–11).
And yet, withal … William Schupbach, after cataloguing a raft of similar such objections in his erudite contribution to the Origins volume, concludes that “Against these negative judgments must be set the actions of creators of cabinets such as Casabona, van Heurn, du-Molinet and Francke, whose desire for certain knowledge was not so consuming as to kill their appreciation of the old, the fragmentary, and the enigmatic” (p. 178).
15. “… as the essence of knowing.”
Or, in a similar vein, consider Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed” (Einstein, Ideas and Opinions; New York: Crown, 1954; p. 11).
Incidentally, the name of Feynman’s son Carl is to be found among those gracing the list of patrons of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
16. … premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.
In his book Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium (Kingston: McPherson & Co., 1991), the art critic Thomas McEvilley develops the notion of the periodic recurrence of the postmodern, or rather the theory that modernist and postmodernist tendencies have actually been following one upon the other throughout history. In this context, for example, he uncovers a striking set of affinities between our own postmodernist ethos and that of the Alexandrian/Hellenistic age (see pp. 98 ff.).
I suppose, in thinking about the MJT, we might similarly speak of the periodic recurrence of the premodern. Or are the two types of recurrences (of the postmodern and the premodern) in fact the same thing? (One might note, in this context, the way in which so much of the premodern thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries likewise derived, as we will presently be seeing, from hermetic and occult traditions first codified in the Alexandrian/Hellenistic and early Christian periods.)
17. … drowned in her own pond.
The account of the affair by Martin Welch, included in the Tradescant’s Rarities volume, goes to considerable lengths to cast Ashmole himself as the aggrieved party, with Hester supposedly being the one who behaved erratically and dishonorably. To hear Welch tell it (with almost overheated rhetorical intensity), any other version would “stretch our credulity to its limits.”
18. … for that wonder’s domestication and standardization.)
Astrology, alchemy, witchcraft trials, the occult, and the hermetic in general … The appearance of Mr. Ashmole in our brief survey highlights another source, besides the discovery of the New World, feeding the wonder sensibility that animated so much of the intellectual life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and particularly its profusion of wonder-cabinets. The awakening of wonder also drew on a recovery, as it were, of the Old World, and in particular the resurrection of various Alexandrine/Hellenistic and early Christian doctrines regarding the nature of the universe and the human capacity for free agency within that universe that had been banished as rabidly heretical ever since the time of Augustine. Frances Yates famously traced the sixteenth-century upwelling of such long-suppressed motifs in her seminal Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964). In particular she analyzed the impact upon all sorts of humanist masters during this period of the rediscovery of the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, a second-century-A.D. compendium of treatises codifying several convergent strains of Neoplatonist and Gnostic numerological and astral magics that these sixteenth-century masters initially mistook to be the work of a single, primordial Egyptian magus, a contemporary of Abraham’s, named Hermes Trismegistus (or Hermes the Thrice-Great), who in turn was in some mysterious way identified with the Greek god Hermes himself. It’s easy to see how such humanists as Giordano Bruno would have been drawn to a set of doctrines that seemed to predate all the religious schisms that had in the meantime so bloodily erupted everywhere around them. (For refusing to renounce his allegiance to such open-ended investigations, Bruno was himself burned at the stake in 1600.)
And then, of course, there was the parallel resurgence, during this same period and among many of the same people, of interest in the twinned disciplines of astrology and alchemy. The first chapter in William Brock’s recent Norton History of Chemistry (New York: Norton, 1992) is entitled “On the Nature of the Universe and the Hermetic Museum.” (Not coincidentally, one of the main elements deployed in alchemical practice, quicksilver, had since late Hellenistic times been known as Mercury—the Roman name for the Greek god Hermes, and the same name astrologists had affixed to the planet at a similarly early date.) In fact, chemistry as we now know it gradually began to emerge from out of the strange obsessive labors of the alchemical magi.
Time and again, students of seventeenth-century intellectual history (who have to be having some of the most fun of anyone in Academe) find themselves wending their way back into this strange material (their entire field is one vast cabinet of curiosities). Allison Coudert, for example, recounts the story of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698), whose father, the Belgian Jan Baptista van Helmont, was one of the most significant figures in the early history of modern chemistry (he rates five full pages in Brock’s book). The son’s birth “occurred shortly after his father, a very good chemist and not one to be easily fooled, claims to have transmuted eight ounces of base metal into gold. This unusual event may explain the infant’s unusual name, Mercury, redolent as it was with alchemical associations.” (See Coudert’s essay in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment [ed. Ronald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin; Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991; p. 84].) Mercury van Helmont in turn grew into one of the foremost Christian popularizers of such Hebrew Kabbalistic texts as the Zohar. He also happened to be close friends with Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Coudert makes a strong case for the Kabbalistic roots of both Leibniz’s monadology and his calculus (his explorations, that is, of the infinite and the infinitesimal).
In a similar vein, John Maynard Keynes, of all people, startled a Cambridge audience in 1946 with his contention that “Newton [1642–1727] was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance less than 10,000 years ago.” Keynes went on to note how, in terms of alchemy and other such esoteric practices, during the first phase of his intellectual life, “Newton was clearly an unbridled addict,” and this “during the very y
ears when he was composing the Principia!” Keynes, who had examined hundreds of pages of Newton’s own records on his esoteric investigations (preserved in the Cambridge archives), concluded: “It is utterly impossible to deny that [they are] wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to [them]” (from “Newton, the Man” in Keynes, Essays in Biography [New York: Norton, 1963; pp. 311, 318–19]). Of course, in his later years Newton left such divagations behind, turning to posterity the rigorously scientific face by which he is so much better known; he never allowed those alchemical papers to be published or even reviewed during his lifetime. But nor did he ever order them destroyed.
The alchemist of Cambridge (illustration credit nts.6)
All of these various arcane doctrines and practices shared certain premises of relevance to the Wunderkammer sensibility, to begin with an innate (and distinctly new—or, anyway, renewed) belief in the fundamental perfectibility of man, his ability to transcend Adam’s fallen destiny on his own (without necessarily having to rely on Christ’s intervention), or at any rate the ability of the individual initiate, the particular magus, to do so. Yes, to be sure, the alchemist, for instance, was trying to transmute base metals into gold, but this was always seen as occurring in tandem with, and metaphorical of, transformations he was attempting to enact on his own person. In working on these material elements, he was working on the spiritual elements within himself as well, work that in turn might eventually have stupendous implications for the world at large. (Think of David Wilson’s own experience of revelation and mission in this context.) All of these labors transpired within the context of a Neoplatonist view of the universe (in Coudert’s characterization) “as a great chain of being in which planets, men, animals, vegetables, minerals, and metals are linked together in complex hierarchies of correspondences,” a view which “encouraged the belief that every existing thing is in some measure a symbol, or reflection, of something else,” with each of them in turn containing to some degree an emanation of the divine unity which overarched them all (p. 92).
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 10
