Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.
Title: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology.
Author: Lawrence Weschler.
Genre: Non-fiction, museums.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1995.
Summary: An African stink ant with a horn sprouting from its tiny head. A microminiature sculpture of Pope John Paul II, painstakingly carved from human hair and mounted inside the eye of a needle. A rare specimen of the bat known as the "piercing devil," embedded in a wall of solid lead. These are some of the things you'll find at David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology, a storefront operation on the West Side of Los Angeles that seeks to reacquaint patrons with their innate sense of wonder-not least of all by making them without question which of its exhibits is in fact real. The same juxtaposition of the genuine and the fantastic informs every page of this book. For in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the author sees echoes of the "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums, as well as clues to the imaginative origins of both art and science in the human capacity for amazement.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ Inside, the pamphlet opened with a General Statement:
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California, is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic. Like a coat of two colors, the museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the museum serves the general public by providing the visitor with a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic."
There immediately followed a small map, captioned "JURASSIC," which in every other respect looked exactly like a map of what the rest of us might refer to as Egypt. An arrow identified what in any other rendition would get called the Nile River Delta as "Lower Jurassic."
♥ Ralph Rugoff, an L.A. art critic, has spent a lot of time thinking about the MJT. And one of the things he most likes about the place is the way it deploys all the traditional signs of a museum's institutional authority-meticulous presentation, exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-of-the-art technical armature-all to subvert the very notion of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum. The Jurassic infects its visitor with doubts-little curlicues of misgiving-that proceed to infest all his other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct. (Thus, for example, another critic, Maria Porges, once noted how "Wilson satirizes perfectly the tiresome, pedantic qualities of 'authenticating' scholarship. The copious footnotes and references and didactic panels are certainly fictitious, something I've long suspected of the citations in academic journals anyway.") "It's all very smart," Rugoff insists, "and very knowing."
Very knowing, and yet at the same time utterly sincere. Rugoff told me how one day he was sitting beside David's wife, Diana, at a lecture Wilson was giving to a class at the California State University, Los Angeles. It was an early version of his Sonnabend spiel, which in fact for a long time existed solely as a lecture, only relatively recently having taken on its exhibitional form. "And he did it completely straight," Rugoff recalls. "Everybody there was taking notes furiously, as if this were all on the level and was likely to be on the test-the Falls, the cones, the planes, the whole thing. It was amazing. And at one point I leaned over to Diana and whispered, 'This is the most incredible piece of performance art I've ever seen.' And she replied, 'What makes you think it's a performance? David believes all this stuff."
♥ Passersby, on occasion, would wander in. Many would wander right back out. But some would stay and linger. David tells the story of one fellow who spent a long time in the back amidst the exhibits and then, emerging, spent almost as long a time studying the pencil sharpener on his desk. "It was just a regular pencil sharpener," David assured me, "it wasn't meant to be an exhibit. But he couldn't get enough of it." And he tells another story about an old Jamaican gentleman named John Thomas who also spent a long time in the back and then came out crying. "He said, 'I realize this is a museum but to me it's more like a church.'" David seems equally-and almost equivalently-moved by both stories. (In a way, they're the same story.)
♥ (Her given name is Daniela Rae. "The 'Rae' is after Diana's dad, Raymond, who died when she was still a young girl," David explains. "The 'Daniela' is for Joseph McDaniels, the gynecologist who told Diane she'd never be able to bear children. Wonderful man. Just proved to be wrong in that one particular instance.")
♥ In his talk, Feynman sketched out the possibility of a progressively cascading technological miniaturization (one method, he suggested, would be to create a root programmed to replicate a half-size version of itself, which would in turn replicate a half-size version of itself, etc., ad diminutandum). Hypothesizing a day when the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica might be inscribed onto the head of a pin, Feynman went on to offer a $1,000 reward "to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such a manner that it can be read by an electron microscope."
That prize in turn went unclaimed until November 1985, when Tom Newman, a Stanford electrical engineering grad student, mobilized a team of adepts in the nascent technology of electron-beam lithography to transcribe the first page of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities ("It was the best of timer, it was the worst of times...") onto a square 1/160th of a millimeter on each side planted neatly astride the head of a pin. As Regis reports, Newman's main technical difficulty in writing anything that small turned out to be "physically locating the text again once he'd actually written it on the surface. At the scale of 1/25,000, a pinhead was an immense area." Regis then goes on to quote Newman himself to the effect that "Finding the page of a text turned out to be a challenge because it was so small, compared to the area we were writing on. When you're at low magnification it's hard to see things in the electron microscope. But if you zoom in you're looking too close, and it takes forever to look around. So we needed to make a little road map of each sample: there's a speck of dirt here, a little chip here, and we'd use that to home in on it. But then once you saw it on the screen, it was fairly legible."
..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."
♥ Those 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 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 on 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!"
♥ 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." 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." 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.)
As Greenblatt goes on to observe, "The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of experience."
♥ The point is that for a good century and a half after the discovery of the Americas, Europe's mind was blown. That was the animating spirit behind, and the enduring significance of, the profusion of Wunderkammern. It wasn't just the American (or, alternatively, African, Far Eastern, Greenlandian, etc.) artifacts that they displayed (phosphorescent feathers, shrunken heads, rhinoceros horns). It was how the palpable reality of such artifacts so vastly expanded the territory of the now readily conceivable. Horns, for example, were suddenly all the rage-rhinoceros horns, unicorn horns, sea unicorn horns... human horns, dainty round horns coming sprouting out of proper Englishwomen's foreheads, for God's sake! But rhinoceros horns were real; and sea unicorns did exist (in the form, anyway, of narwhals, with those uncannily spiraling unitary tusks seemingly protruding from out of their foreheads)-so why couldn't unicorn horns or even human horns exist as well? Our great-grandfathers' certainties, debunked by our grandfathers, were suddenly turning out to be not quite so easily debunkable after all.
Obviously the mathematical and navigational sophistication necessary for Columbus to have been able to mount an expedition to America-and then make it back, and not once, but four times!-was of a considerable level, and was indicative of a steadily rising curve of such certain, positive knowledge (the earth wasn't flat, and there clearly weren't any sea monsters lurking along its edge to swallow up any stray doubters). But the stuff he found in America, and the stuff he brought back, was so strange and so new as to seem to sanction belief in all manner of wondrous prospects and phantasms for years thereafter.
♥ This moralizing tenor persisted throughout the seventeenth century in Holland, reaching an astonishing crescendo in the Baroque labors of the great Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch, whose collection of over two thousand meticulous presentations eventually filled up more than five rooms in his home. Some of his tableaux were relatively straightforward: the skull of a prostitute, for instance, being kicked by the leg bones of a baby. Some were heartrending: Ruysch had perfected ways of preserving the entire bodies of dead infants in large glass jugs in presentations that were often lavished with extraordinary and loving care (the serene, stilled faces swathed in delicate lace, the limbs banded with prim beaded bracelets). Some were peculiar: Ruysch proudly exhibited a box of fly eggs taken from the anus of "a distinguished gentleman who sat too long in the privy" (Ruysch's own description from his catalogue).
And some were downright bizarre: his masterworks, perhaps, were a series of vanitas mundi tableaux, exquisite skeleto-anatomical variations on traditional flower arrangements grouped around the theme of life's inevitable transience. For their base, Ruysch would contrive a mound of kidney stones and other diseased organs-this in itself was not that unusual since dried kidney and gallstones (the bigger, the better) were regularly featured in wonder-cabinets all over the continent. But then, on top of those... well, consider the contemporary engraving by C. Huyberts, as explicated more recently by Dr. Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout of the University of Leiden, based on Ruysch's own notes:
With eye sockets turned heavenward the central skeleton-a foetus of about four months-chants a lament on the misery of life. "Ah Fate, ah bitter Fate!" it sings, accompanying itself on a violin, made of osteomyelitic sequester with a dried artery for a bow. At its right, a tiny skeleton conducts the music with a baton, set with minute kidney stones. In the right foreground a stiff little skeleton girdles its hips with injected sheep intestines, its right hand grasping a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult man, grimly conveying the message that its first hour was also its last. On the left, behind a handsome vase made of the inflated tunica albuginea of the testis, poses an elegant little skeleton with a feather on its skull and a stone coughed up from the lungs hanging from its hand. In all likelihood the feather is intended to draw attention to the ossification of the cranium. For the little horizontal skeleton in the foreground with the familiar mayfly on its delicate hand, Ruysch chose a quotation from the Roman poet Plautus, one of the favorite authors of this period, to the effect that its lifespan had been as brief as that of the young grass felled by the scythe so soon after sprouting.
Sadly (I guess), none of Ruysch's vanitas mundi tableaux appear themselves to have survived the ravages of time, though many of his other preparations have-although, curiously, for the most part, not in Holland. Ruysch (who, incidentally, for all his preoccupation with frail mortality, himself managed to survive into his ninety-third year, in 1731) fairly late in his life sold virtually his entire collection to the Russian tsar Peter the Great, which is why students wishing to survey Ruysch's superb craftsmanship in person today must travel to St. Petersburg.
♥ In her essay "Inquiry as Collection," Adalgisa Lugli details many of the contemporary neopositivist objections to the Wunderkammer sensibility but then goes on to assert that such Wunderkammer-men as "Della Porta, Cardano and Kircher were not alone among men of science [of their time] in looking upon wonder or marvel as upon one of the essential components of the study of nature and the unraveling of its secrets... wonder defined [as it was up to the end of the eighteenth century] as a form of learning-an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing."
Over two centuries later (on the far side of Heisenberg's new dispensation), according to James Gleick in his introduction to Richard Feynman's recently reissued Character of Physical Law, "Physicists had hands-on experience with uncertainty and they learned how to manage it. And to treasure it-for the alternative to doubt is authority, against which science fought for centuries. 'Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance," Feynman jotted on a piece of notepaper one day, 'teach how doubt is not to be feared by welcomed.' This became his credo: he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing."
David Wilson has thus pitched his museum at the very intersection of the premodern and the postmodern-or rather, perhaps what he has done is to tap into the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.
♥ (Like his contemporary Frederik Ruysch-or, for that matter, countless other contemporaries, including Isaac Newton himself-Ashmole was a man with one leg planted in the prior world of shaggy superstition and the other striding confidently toward the new era of systematic science..)
♥ During 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 hyper-sensitized 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.
♥ As I was getting set to leave, I noticed a deliciously browned single-portion pie mounted alongside a burnt piece of toast. There were two dead mice on the toast. MOUSE CURES read the pieces' joint caption, although each of the dishes had its own legend as well. The caption under the first read: "Mouse Pie, when eaten with regularity, serves as a remedy for children who stammer." The label under the burnt toast read: "Bed wetting or general incontinence of urine can be controlled by eating mice on toast, fur and all."
After which, there followed an italicized citation:
A flayne Mouse, or made in powder and drunk at one tyme, doeth perfectly helpe such as cannot holde or keepe their water: especially, if it be used three days in this order. This is verie trye and often puruved.
1579 Lupton
Thousand Notable Things I/40
Right then and there I made myself a promise, and I've kept it: I have not gone to the library to track down that Lupton reference. There has to be an end to all this.
No, really.
♥ The Mütter's show at the Jurassic features an array of arcane and vaguely threatening antique surgical instruments, the plaster cast of a trephined skull from Peru, various gallstones, some astonishing photographs of sliced heads and haunting (haunted) bell jars, wax models of syphilitic tongues...
There was a heartrendingly luminous display, across a flat expanse of black velvet, lovingly lit, of the 206 minute incipient bones extracted from a miscarried three-month fetus, each bone separated out and gleaming: the rib cage like a delicate array of filleted fishbones, the fingertips like so many flakes of stray dandruff.
There was a teeming little chest of drawers, compiled by a punctilious physician named Chevalier Jackson during he early decades of this century, and containing, across a splay of neatly divided interior compartments, highlights from the collection of miscellaneous foreign bodied the good doctor had managed to extract over the years from the windpipes and digestive tracts of various choking victims (jacks, rings, chains, crucifixes, marbles, doll arms, a toy battleship), complete with documentation as to the age, identity, and fate of the various inhalers.
Everything was actual, everything was real, including...
It was getting very late now, and, really, I had to be going, but just as I was heading out the door I happened to gaze into one final display case, over to the side, and there, tellingly spotlit, lay the actual solitary remains of a real human horn, an incurled protrusion ("20 cm long and between 1 and 3 cm in diameter") sawed off the skull of an unnamed seventy-year-old woman in the middle of the last century by one S. Beaus, M.D.
So, go figure.
♥ Curiously, the 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.
♥ 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 Water 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".
♥
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". 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.
♥ In a similar vein, John Maynard Keynes, of all people, startled a Cambridge audience in 1946 wit 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 years when he was composing the Principia!" Keynes, who had examined hundred 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.
♥ In fact, it turns out there was a veritable craze for the microminiature during the sixteenth century, so much so that many of the Wunderkammer cognoscenti of our own day, such as several of the contributors to the Origins volume, are given to ho-humming the occasional "obligatory cherry stone" they're forced to include among their own various inventories (p.154).
The Tradescants' collection alone included such other feats as "a nest of 52 wooden cups turned within each other as thin as paper," a cherrystone containing a dozen wooden spoons and another inscribed with the faces of the "88 emperors," and a "Halfe a Hasle-nut with 70 pieces of householdstuffe in it" (Transcant's Rarities, p.93).
In part, this fascination was but a microminitiature rendition of the Wunderkammer passion itself-the world in a cabinet as recalibrated in terms of the roomful in a nutshell. Such an analogy was rendered virtually explicit on the Trandescants' own family tombstone, upon which a poet celebrated, inter alia,
Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut)
A world of wonders in one cabinet shut.
(Tradescant's Rarities. p.15)
But the taste for microminiatursism was as much a celebration of the sudden advances in the new technologies, both of the lathe and the lens, that made such efforts possible (technological advances just as portentous as those that were suddenly allowing the circumnavigation of the globe), as it was of any individual craftsman's specific virtuosity. In Dresden, according to MacGregor, the lathes, tools, and magnifying glasses were every bit as venerated as the objects they produced (including, for instance, one cherrystone carved with 180 faces!) and were frequently exhibited right alongside those objects on their own elaborate mounts (Tradescant's Rarities, p.75).
♥ The problem of reproducing microminitature details has also lately been confounding computer technologists who've been trying to digitalize the contents of major art museums. According to a recent article by Phil Patton in the New York Times (August 7, 1994), technicians at the National Gallery in Washington have been having a particularly difficult time scanning the fifteenth-century Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden's painting St. George and the Dragon into their computer files: "On the painting's background, behind the knight and the monster, is a walled city. So finely rendered is the detailed landscape that [when scanned,] the image 'dithered,' or began to 'pixilate' into a gridlike pattern not unlike what one would expect if a snapshot were taken through a screen door... The dithering of 'St. George' lent new meaning to an inscription in rather shaky Latin on the back of the painting: Videatur et ponderetur. Ab arte reperitis. (Look and ponder. One discovers things from art.) Seen close up, through a photomicrograph, the background of the picture shows street scenes in the walled city, people passing on the streets, even an open window on whose sill sits a microscopic waterjug-all virtually as invisible to the human eye as to the scanners. Trying to put 'St. George' on the computer inspired wonder at how the painting was done in the first place. With a single-hair brush, under a magnifying glass? 'That detail was there all along,' said Ms. Vicki Porter, the computerized Visitor Center's director, 'just waiting to be discovered.'"
♥ The Mütter Museum recently earned the top ranking on a "one-of-a-kind museums" list compiled by Weissman Travel Reports, an information service for travel agents (according to an item in the February 12, 1995, Philadelphia Inquirer.) Runners-up, in descending order, included the Barbie Museum in Palo Alto, California; the International Friendship Exhibition in Myoyangsan, North Korea (gits to the country's leaders); the Museum of Two-Headed Animals, Bamberg, Germany; the City Museum, Iquitos, Peru (decaying bodies); the U.S.-Chiang Kai-shek Criminal Acts Exhibition Hall, Chongqing, China; and the Museum of the Inquisition, Lima, Peru. The Museum of Menstruation in New Carrollton, Maryland, just missed making the list. The compilers of the list appeared never to have heard of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
♥ "Many ancient peoples believed that strength and fertility were concentrated in horns," Monestier points out, "hence the numerous cults worshipping bulls and rams. ...Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, was depicted with horns, as was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. When Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter [or, actually, of Zeus], he ordered that all coins bearing his likeness should henceforth show him with horns. Moses was sometimes depicted with horns, as was Christ Himself. Many rulers had horns affixed to their helmets, as a symbol of power" (p.110).
Monestier suggests that the association of horns with adultery and cuckoldry dates to Roman times, but in fact a primordial sense of the interrelationship between horns and sexuality-an understanding of the "horny," as it were-is embedded deep in the linguistic roots of our civilizations. The master text in this regard is R.B. Onian's seminal, and in fact mind-boggling, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge University Press, 1951).
♥ By this reading, Freud's entire theory of sublimation is merely an unpacking of the possibilities already latent in the language itself. But it goes further than that, as Brown himself brought out in his most recent book, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis University of California Press, 1991), for
English horn is Latin cornu, therefore English corn. Greek keras ("horn") is English kern and kernel; also... Cornucopia, horn of plenty.
But also cornu ("horn") is corona ("crown")....And Greek keras ("horn") is Greek kras, English cranium, a head. Greek kratos, a head of power, an authority (aristocracy, demo-cracy); krainein, "authorize."
Herne the horny hunter [Falstaff's name in The Merry Wives of Windsor when he cavorts in the forest, horns on his brow] is German Hirn ("brain"). Herne was brainy; like the horned Moses, crescent, cresting....A swollen or horny head; insane. Cerebrosus (cerritus), which ought to mean "brainy," means "mad." Greek keras and keraunos, "horn" and "thunder," horn-made and thunderstruck. (p.38)
♥ Of course, in our context, we will understand the story of Actaeon's fate for what it is-a wonder narrative and a cautionary tale. (Fifteen years before his martyrdom, Giordano Bruno made repeated references to the Actaeon myth in his sequence of allegorical love poems, De gli Eroici Furori, published in England in 1585 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. See Yates, pp. 275-84). A story of possession: Watch out for what you see. (No sooner had Ovid himself completed his Metamorphoses, in A.D. 8, than he himself appears to have inadvertently witnessed something untoward-something sexual? something political? he doesn't say and we will never know-a calamitous misprision for which the great Augustus Caesar condemned him to eke out the remainder of his days in terrible exile along the farthest reaches of the Empire. "O why did I see what I saw?" the poet would be decrying his uncanny fate, a few years later, in Book II of his Tristia. "Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked/but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.") Antlers: from the French antoeil ("in the place of eyes") or the German Augensprosse ("eye-sprouts"). And recall, in this context, both the alchemical and the astrological symbols for Mercury, still in use today in both chemistry and astronomy: ☿.
When Chaucer's friend John Gower sang his version of the story, in his Confessio Amantis (also based on Ovid, though two hundred years before Golding), he cast Actaeon's fate as "an ensample touchende of mislok"-a truly wonderful three-way pun, for, of course, Actaeon had the bad luck to mislook upon Lady Luck. As might anyone risk to do, gazing too long, too helplessly, at Wonder. Not that it wouldn't necessarily be worth it.
Just ask the ant.