Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (3 page)

M
EGALOPONERA
FOETENS
,
M
YOTIS
LUCIFUGUS
, Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani, the Dozo and the
deprong mori
, Bernard Maston
and Donald R. Griffith—these and countless other spores rain down and down upon a small nondescript storefront operation located along the main commercial drag of downtown Culver City in the middle of West Los Angeles's endless pseudo-urban sprawl: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, according to a fading blue banner facing the street.

Myotis lucifugus, “
eternally frozen in a mass of solid lead”

Flanked on one side by a carpet store and a derelict (seemingly long-abandoned) real estate office, and on the other by a forensics lab and a Thai restaurant (and on the first side, a bit further along, by a PIP printing outlet, an India Sweets and Spices mart, and a Hare Krishna
temple; while on the other, further on up the block, by Manuel's. Auto Body Shop, In-and-Out Burger, and a Blockbuster Video franchise), the museum presents precisely the sort of anonymous-looking facade one might easily pass right by. Which most days would be just as well, since most days it's closed.

The 9300 block of Venice Boulevard, Culver City, California; at center, the Museum of Jurassic Technology
(
illustration credit 1.1
)

But if you'd happened to have heard of it, as I began hearing of it a couple of years ago on my occasional visits to L.A. (it's been at its present site for a bit over seven years now) and thus actively sought it out; or else, if you just happened to be dallying at the bus stop right outside its portals on one of those occasions when it actually was
open (Thursday evenings, and Saturdays and Sundays noon to six)—and bus waits in L.A. tend to be endless at
all
times—well, then, your curiosity piqued, you might just find yourself going up and tentatively pressing its door buzzer. While waiting for an answer, you might study, for example, the curious little diorama slotted into the wall off to the side of the entry (a diminutive white urn surrounded by floating pearlescent moths) or another equally perplexing diorama off to the other side of the entry (three chemistry-set bottles arrayed in a curiously loving display: oxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumina, according to their labels); or, still waiting, your gaze might float up to another banner rippling above the entryway (this one featuring the image of a strangely generic archaic sculpted head—part Minoan, part Easter Island—with, above it, the letters A, E, and N, each capped by a long macron) …

At length the door is likely to open, and usually it will be David Hildebrand Wilson himself, the museum's founder and director, a small and unassuming man, perhaps in his mid-forties, who will be smiling there solicitously (as if it were specifically you he'd been expecting all along) and happily bidding you to enter.

It's dark in there. As your eyes adjust, you take in an old wooden desk, on top of which a small sign proposes an admissions donation of $2.50, though Wilson quickly assures you that this is a neighborhood museum and hence free to anybody from the neighborhood, and that, furthermore, he considers the bus-stop bench to be an integral part of the neighborhood. He leaves it to you to decide what that means, and for that matter, he leaves it
all to you. He has returned to his seat behind the desk and to his reading (two dusty, antiquated books, the last time I was there, one entitled
Mental Hospitals
, the other
The Elements of Folk Psychology
). The foyer, as it were, features a kind of half-hearted attempt at a gift shop, but probably you won't tarry long as your curiosity is already being drawn toward the museum proper.

And it's here that you'll encounter, across a maze of discrete alcoves, in meticulous displays exactingly laid out, the ant, the bat, the falls, the diva, the insomniac … A preserved sample of the stink ant, for example, has its mandibles embedded into the stalk of a plastic fern in a standard natural-history-museum-style diorama. Sure enough, a thin spike is erupting out of its head. There's a telephone receiver beside the vitrine, and if you pick it up you'll hear the entire history of
Megaloponera foetens
, largely as I conveyed it at the outset of this account.

A whole wing of the museum has been given over to the so-called Sonnabend-Delani Halls, where, among other things, you'll find an astonishingly well-realized aquarium-sized diorama of Iguazú Falls, complete with gushing, recirculating water. It turns out, or so the nearby phone receiver informs you, that the Falls were doubly significant in Sonnabend's life, for they were also the place where, fifty years earlier, his parents had first met. His father, Wilhelm, a young German structural engineer, had been trying to span the Falls with a vast suspension bridge, but the project came to naught, his dream collapsing irrevocably into the abyss a mere day short of completion. From either side of the diorama at the museum, you can see where Wilhelm's bridge would have
gone: from head on, you can peer through an eyepiece and, miraculously, see the bridge itself, hovering serenely over the cataract. The effect is so vividly realized that you'll look again from the sides—your eyes, or something, must be playing tricks on you—but nothing is there except falling water.

Sonnabend's actual desk and study have been salvaged and painstakingly re-created. There's a wall of photos detailing the stages of his life and his parents' lives and a whole documentary embolism, as it were, devoted to the career of one Charles Gunther, an eccentric Chicago millionaire confectioner, who happened to be visiting Iguazú at the time of Wilhelm's debacle and who became the young engineer's patron in the years thereafter, bringing him back with him to Chicago and securing him employment as director of the reconstruction of the Chicago bridge system in the wake of that city's Great Fire. Gunther himself, it appears, was quite a character in his own right, an inveterate collector of historical arcana and natural curiosa who even had an entire Confederate prison—the Libby, in Richmond, Virginia—dismantled, brick by brick, and reassembled in Chicago, so as to house his prodigious hoard, which included the very tables upon which the Emancipation Proclamation and the Appomattox Surrender were signed, as well as a swath of dried skin sloughed off by the serpent who first seduced Woman in the Garden of Eden—all properly certified with the requisite letters of authentication—a bounteous trove which, upon his death, came to constitute a cornerstone of the Chicago Historical Society, under whose auspices large portions
of it can be seen to this day. Or, anyway, so the sequence of phone receivers at the museum allege as they guide you through the tale.

The Sonnabend Model of Obliscence

You can sit on a bench, pick up another receiver, and have Sonnabend's whole theory laid out for you through a series of haunting, sequentially lit dioramas of variously intersecting (and compoundingly complexifying) cones and planes, complete with a representation of such technical subtleties as the perverse and obverse experience boundaries, the Spelean Ring Disparity, the Hollows, and, perhaps most provocatively, the Cone of Confabulation. (The voice in the receiver, the same voice
as in all the other receivers, it may occur to you, is in fact the same bland, slightly unctuous voice you've heard in every museum slide show or Acoustiguide tour or PBS nature special you've ever endured: the reassuringly measured voice of unassailable institutional authority.)

Over to the side there's a whole dark room devoted exclusively to Madalena Delani. By entering it you trigger an elaborate
son et lumière
presentation, back-lit slides along the walls rising up and fading in time with the narration. In the middle of the room, a glass-case table offers up jewelry, a feathered boa, musical scores, and other memorabilia; at the back of the room, a headless mannequin, swathed in one of the diva's last dresses, oversees the séance. As you leave these halls, you may notice a tangent exhibit that evokes the contrasting memory theories of a turn-of-the-century French novelist named Marcel Proust: the vitrine contains a plate of madeleines, a single bite having been taken out of one of them (“Madeleines, madeleines,” you may find your mind thrumming, “Madalena Delani …”).

Around the corner you come upon another bench and another phone receiver and another elaborate display, this one detailing the bizarrely intersecting careers of Maston and Griffith. Once again, narrow-beam spotlights rise up and fade away, guiding you through the narrative—including a detailed exposition of how echolocation works in bats, complete with charts and graphs—culminating with a view of a solid tranche from the lead wall itself, one which presently becomes illumined, as if from within, so that you can actually see the bat embedded there, arrested in midflight.

Through much of these explorations, you may well be the only person inside the museum, aside from Wilson, and he's a bit of a piercing devil himself. He pads about silently as you lose yourself in the various exhibits. One moment he's at his desk; the next he's gone, though who knows where?—perhaps to a workroom secreted at the rear of the store; a few moments later, however, he's back reading at his desk, as if he was never gone at all. You continue to poke about—there are a good dozen other exhibits up at any given time—and presently, eerily, you become aware of strains of Bach being played on … on … could it be an accordion? The desk chair is empty, the front door has been left slightly ajar: Wilson is on the sidewalk, blithely serenading the passing traffic.

You leave him to it. You continue to explore. Depending on what happens to be up at the time you're visiting, you may, for example, come upon the luminous white skeleton of some kind of rodent elegantly mounted on plush velvet beneath a glass bell. (“
EUROPEAN
MOLE
—
Talpa europea
,” explains the wall caption. “Occurs in all European countries south of 59 north latitude except Ireland. Varies in size between large house mice and smallish black rats. The eyes are minute and degenerate; the eyelids are fused and completely hidden beneath the skin.…” And so forth, concluding: “A number of mammals and rapacious birds that
are not offended by the mole's musky odor prey upon them.”) In another glass case you can study “The Rose Collection of Now-Extinct Nineteenth-Century French Moths.” (“There's a slight misnomer there,” Wilson informed me solicitously the first time I peered into that case. He happened to be passing silently by. “Most of those particular moths are indeed French, but a few are actually Flemish—although with some it's hard to tell.”)