Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (10 page)

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
)

A
fter 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.

M
EANWHILE
, 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.