Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (13 page)

and so on and so forth, culminating in a list of more specifically desired items, which included, among others:

finally concluding, succinctly:

And as MacGregor's various ensuing citations from letters written by various contemporary visitors to the Ark attest, the Tradescants had indeed collated a whole bunch
of things that were “strang.”
¹⁹
There are frequent references to human horns, for example, though all such supposed horns (including that of Mary Davis of Saughall) have in the meantime unaccountably, though perhaps not surprisingly, disappeared.

MacGregor quotes a Georg Christoph Stirn who, in describing the collection, as he observed it in 1638,
noted, among other items: two huge ribs from a whale (out in the courtyard); “a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree”; “a number of things changed into stone” (in other words, fossils, which in other such collections often get referred to as “picture stones”); the hand of a mermaid; the hand of a mummy; a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ; “pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book”; “a bat as large as a pigeon”; an instrument “used by Jews in circumcision”; the robe “of the King of Virginia”; a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem; “the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone” …

That last reference, to the crucifixion of Christ daintily carved on a plum stone, brought me up short as I sat there hunched over Stirn's letter amidst the field of worktables at the New York Public Library. It set me to riffling through the back pages of MacGregor's catalogue, with its detailed inventory of all the rarities from among the Tradescants' collections that have survived among the Ashmolean's holdings to this day. (Along the way I came upon a map of the Siege of Pavia, the very same one that graces Wilson's wall at the museum, followed by no less than
fourteen columns
of scrupulous scholarship explicating the tiniest details of a painting depicting the 1534 siege that had gotten included in Tradescant's collection—Fig. 74, Cat. no. 263.) Eventually, to my astonishment, I came upon the following:

And indeed, Plate LXXXVI showed the very same. Not only had such wonders been perpetrated (and as early as the 1600s!), but in Oxford, today, they still exist, open to inspection, at any time, by
any stray pilgrims from the Jurassic.
²⁰

Tradescant fruit-stone carvings, actual size

D
URING
MY
MOST
RECENT
visit to L.A., David Wilson and I agreed to rendezvous for lunch at the little India Sweets and Spices mart, with its deli-style take-out counter, a few doors down the block from his museum. Walking in, I was greeted by the familiar blast of sinuous aromas—David and I had repaired to this place several times before—only, this time, it was as if my recent investigations had hypersensitized me to its special qualities. I took in the prodigious bounty of its exotic offerings—such fresh vegetables as the eggplant-like brinjal, spiny kantola, beany valor, green tuver, tindora, lotus root, and chholia (easily the oddest looking of them all); all manner of teas and fragrant herbs (from coriander and cardamom through the curry powders); packaged ajwan seeds and Vicco brand vajradanti paste; curried arvi leaves, stuffed brinjal, karela in brine; enticing trapezoidal wedges of dessert cakes like the gold-and-silver-foil-laced almond barfis … I had this sudden sense of what it must have been like to have been sitting there, all closed in, in the cold, damp, monotone, monobland Europe of the 1400s, as little by little all this wild, wonderful stuff began pouring in (initially, at least, by way of overland caravans), how easy it would have been to be overwhelmed by such exquisite new delicacies:
We've got to get more of this stuff! We've got to find an easier way of getting it! We've got to get ourselves over there!
Standing there, waiting for David, for a moment I felt like I was planted in the very engine room of history.

David eventually showed up and we ordered our marsala dozas, pekoras, and cardamom teas and took
them out to the little picnic tables out front, facing the boulevard. We spoke about India and the fantasy of the Indies and the impulse, the
orientation
toward wonder. One thought led to another. I'd been about to comment on how incongruous it was to find a sixteenth-century
Wunderkammer
like his in the middle of Los Angeles, California, when suddenly it dawned on me—why not? In fact, Los Angeles was one of the most appropriate places in the world for such an enterprise.

After all, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, California was awash with Europeans agog for wonder—and plunder. The name itself, as I subsequently discovered, appears to have derived from an old Spanish novel,
Las Sergas de Esplandián
(The Exploits of Esplandián), written in about 1510 by Rodríguez de Montalvo. The book itself was apparently nothing much to write home about, but there's considerable evidence that many of the conquistadors of the time were familiar with its story, in which Esplandián, a kind of late-medieval ideal knight, is helping defend Constantinople from a motley crew of pagan invaders when suddenly there appears amongst the besieging horde: Calafía, Queen of California. California, for its part, turns out to be an island “on the right hand of the Indies” and “very near the terrestrial paradise,” inhabited by a race of Amazonian warriors whose weapons are of purest gold, “for in all the island there is no other metal”—all of which must have sounded pretty intriguing from the conquistadorial point of view. On the other hand, in California, according to Rodríguez, there were also “many griffins on account of the great ruggedness of the country”; when the griffins were
small, “the women went out with traps to take them to their caves, and brought them up there. And being themselves quite a match for the griffins, they fed them with the men whom they took prisoners, and with the boys to whom they gave birth.” So it was a mixed bag.

In 1542, exactly fifty years after Columbus's first landfall in the Caribbean, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led a fairly ragtag band aboard two small, leaky vessels well up the coast of Alta California, anchoring variously at San Diego, Catalina Island, San Pedro Harbor, which he called the Bay of Smokes (
Bahía de los Fumos
) on account of the many Indian campfires along its shore, and then in Santa Monica—not half a dozen miles from where David and I now sat wolfing down our pekoras and sweet lahsis—before heading up the coast toward Santa Barbara and San Miguel Island. A bit over thirty-five years later, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake came streaking by in his
Golden Hind
from the other direction, out of Point Reyes up north, heading down toward Cape Horn and then home, leading only the second expedition ever to circumnavigate the globe (and becoming the first captain of such an expedition to make it home alive, Magellan having died in the attempt). Once back in England, Drake lived on until 1596, when the Elder Tradescant would have been about twenty years old and certainly familiar with the legendary privateer's exploits. Years later, Tradescant's collection would include not only a portrait of Drake but also a “Trunion” from his ship.

Sitting there at the picnic table outside the Indian market, gazing west down Venice Boulevard, David and I
fancied how, but for the smog, we could almost have made out the galleon traffic coursing by. At length we returned our trays and headed back to the museum, though entering this time from the rear, into David's workroom, which was brimming over with the half-completed vitrines of his next show, set to open in just a few weeks.

“Tell the Bees …: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition,” a coproduction, according to its advance literature, of the MJT and the Society for the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, had been in the works for years and was clearly going to be one of Wilson's most elaborate ventures to date. By way of introduction he suggested I don a pair of earphones and listen to the audio portion of the slide show that was going to accompany the exhibit while he continued to tinker with some of the vitrines. Once again, the production qualities of the tape were first-rate, blending subtle music, crisp sound effects, and a solid-seeming narration. The Voice of Institutional Authority started out by recounting the tale behind Alexander Fleming's 1929 discovery of penicillin; presently we were given what purported to be Fleming's own voice, or anyway a Scottish voice of raspy, wire-recorder quality, recalling how at the climactic moment of the accidental experiment, “It was found that broth in which the mold had been grown, like the mold-broth remedies commonly applied to infections by the country people, had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal, and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria.” The wire was rewound and the phrase “like the mold-broth remedies commonly applied to infections by country people” repeated, whereupon
Institutional Authority noted how in making his epic discovery, “Fleming was drawing on countless years of collective experience which had been handed down as a part of the oral tradition … commonly known as vulgar remedies.” There was more on Fleming (how his familiarity with the vulgar remedy of spitting on a wound had earlier in his career led to his isolation of lysozyme, “an enzyme found in tears and saliva that exhibits antibiotic activity”), after which the narration turned to digitalis, the cardiac stimulant derived from a plant of the figwort family known as purple foxglove, which had already been deployed as a vulgar remedy for dropsy for centuries before it was “discovered” by William Withering, an eighteenth-century English physician, acting “on a tip from a wise woman from Shropshire.” There were similar revelations about the vulgar etiologies of lithium and aspirin. “Belladonna, Madagascar periwinkle, and ipecac, to name just a few, are all vulgar remedies that have been recognized and developed by modern pharmacology.”

At which point, the Voice of Institutional Authority darkened as it related how this once honored form of knowledge presently came to be denigrated, particularly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical academies, where “Folk remedies were viewed as baneful influences, irrational relics from the past to be purged,” so much so that much irreplaceable wisdom, “ghettoized, so to speak, under the spurious classification of superstition,” has already been irretrievably lost. Hence the urgency animating the current exhibition, which was casting itself—although it would never have come right out and made such claims on its own behalf—as nothing
less than a clarion call to the heroic enterprise of reclamation.