Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (9 page)

An instance of nanotechnology: pressure sensors on the head of a pin
(
illustration credit 1.5
)

Or anyway, I couldn't. So I called the California Institute of Technology and asked the campus operator for Yu Chong Tai, and sure enough, she put me through, and a voice answering to that name proceeded to confirm everything my eyes had seen.
“And more's coming!” it assured me.
⁴
That conversation in turn made me doubt my earlier doubts about the dubious Sandaldjian. I called information in Montebello, where it turned out such a family did indeed reside. And I ended up speaking with the master's son, Levon, who explained that there was in fact something of a tradition of such microminiature art back in Armenia (he knew of two or three other such instances), although, as far as he knew, his father had been the world's only microminiature
sculptor.
“He would wait until late at night,” Levon said, “when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications
between heartbeats
—he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirrings
of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.”

T
HOSE
EARLIEST
MUSEUMS
, the ur-collections back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were sometimes called
Wunderkammern
, wonder-cabinets, and it occurs to me that the Museum of Jurassic Technology truly is their worthy heir in as much as wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,” David once told me, “is to reintegrate people to wonder.”) But it's a special kind of wonder, and it's metastable. The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering
at
(the marvels of nature) and wondering
whether
(any of this could possibly be true). And it's that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.

I
RECENTLY
HAD
OCCASION
to raise this point with John Walsh, the director of the Getty Museum and another fan of the MJT. We were talking about
Wunderkammern
and some of the museum's other antecedents. “Most of the institutional-historical allusions at Wilson's museum turn out to be true,” Walsh told me. “There
was
a Musaeum Tradescantianum and a John Tradescant—in fact two of them, an Elder and a Younger—who during the 1600s built up a famously eclectic cabinet known as ‘The Ark' in Lambeth on the South Bank, in London, most of
the contents of which devolved to Elias Ashmole, who expanded upon them and then donated the whole collection to Oxford University, where it became the basis for the Ashmolean. There was a Swammerdam in Holland, and there was an Ole Worm with his Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen; and Charles Willson Peale did have his museum in Philadelphia, to which Benjamin Franklin donated the carcass of his angora cat and where you could also see the huge skeleton of a recently unearthed mastodon, and mechanical devices like the Eidophusikon, which showed primitive movies.

“Ever since the late Renaissance,” Walsh continued, “these sorts of collections got referred to as
Kunst- und Wunderkammern.
Technically, the term describes a collection of a type that's pretty much disappeared today—with the exception, perhaps, of the Jurassic—where natural wonders were displayed alongside works of art and various man-made feats of ingenuity. It's only much later, in the nineteenth century, that you see the breakup into separate art, natural history, and technology museums. But in the earlier collections, you had the wonders of God spread out there cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing, which is to say, the Wonder of God.”

I asked Walsh about some of the relics and bizarre curiosa that used to make it into those collections right alongside the legitimate stuff: the hair from the beard of Noah, the plank from the Ark, the women's horns. I mentioned how I always figured some of those early museum men must have been being ironical in including them.

“Well,” Walsh said, “there's a whole big side industry in twentieth-century criticism that consists primarily in the imputing of irony to prior ages. But no, no, I don't think they were being ironical at all. They were in dead earnest.”

I
WAS
TALKING
with David in the back room of the museum one afternoon on one of my most recent visits out to L.A. It was a weekday and the museum was closed, and he'd been showing me slides of some utterly unknown, never previously shown paintings by a complete recluse who, he told me, was suffering the ravages of multiple sclerosis—protean, fantastical vistas of astonishing intricacy. He was thinking about giving them an exhibition. Our conversation turned to Sandaldjian. Free-associating, I mentioned the Talmudic story of the Thirty-six Just Men—how at any given moment there are thirty-six ethically just men in the world, unknown perhaps even to themselves, but for whose sake God desists from utterly destroying the shambles we have made of His creation. Maybe, I suggested, there are thirty-six
aesthetically
just men, as well.

David looked at me, authentically noncomprehending. “I don't understand the difference,” he said.

He was quiet a few moments, and once again the ironylessness seemed momentarily to crack. “You know, certain aspects of this museum you can peel away very easily, but the reality behind, once you peel away those relatively easy layers, is more amazing still than anything those initial layers purport to be.
The first layers are just a filter …”
⁵

He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.

I mentioned the stink ant.

“See,” he said, “that's an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as pure information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself—could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.

“But at another level,” David continued, “we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That's another one of our mottoes here at the museum:
‘Ut Translatio Natura'
—Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant—impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn't have summed up my own life better if I'd made him up all by myself.”

“But, David,” I wanted to say (and didn't),
“you did make him up all by yourself!”

S
HORTLY
AFTER
, back home in my office, I was in a phone conversation about something entirely different with Tom Eisner, the eminent biologist up at Cornell. At one point, in passing, he told me about a trip he'd taken to Italy, many years ago, and how, while in Pavia, a colleague
had given him a tour of the ancient university's old museum. At one point, as they foraged among the back rooms, the colleague pulled out a glass jug containing some organs bobbing in a dusky fluid solution. “ ‘You'll never guess what this is,' my friend challenged me,” Eisner related, “and I didn't even try.
‘Lazzaro Spallanzani's cock and balls!' 
” I'm not sure whether Eisner took my silence on the other end of the line for scandalized astonishment or tongue-tied ignorance, probably (more correctly) the latter. “Spallanzani was one of the great early modern naturalists,” he offered helpfully. “Eighteenth century. He was the first, for instance, to isolate spermatozoa in semen, did some wonderful experiments on gastric digestion (feeding bits of meat tied to string to various birds of prey, letting the string descend only so far, and then yanking the string back out with the meat completely liquified and gone, thereby proving that large portions of digestion take place in the stomach and not in the bowels, as had previously been assumed), all sorts of splendid things.

“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 Griff
in
,” 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?”