LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES
by Linda Sandoval
In which Linda, a humble pilgrim, praises the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
If you visit Los Angeles, skip the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Rodeo Drive and head straight for Venice and Bagley and explore this museum of marvel. If you already live in Los Angeles thank the painted stars on its’ ceiling and keep it close as a private refuge and shared “Wunderkabinet”.
****
THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY, A NON -CARTESIAN SPACE
“No one may ever have the same knowledge again.”
So writes Alice May Williams. She pleads for an audience with like minds of science in a letter to the Mount Wilson Observatory sometime after 1915 and by now to David Wilson himself, the wizard of this museum. Alice knows things and she needs to write them down and have them read before she dies and all of her knowledge is lost forever. Here in the museum, Alice’s conversation is with the caterpillar and Mr. Wilson blows his smoke rings of wisdom while I understand that any attempt to de-code is beside the point. She writes to Mount Wilson:
“The Sun comes out by day and doses his work by day. He draws in the clouds and the sunspots you can see on the sun are that very black cloud, which is called a verandah, at certain seasons it is thrown out & spread over the sky for certain work going on underneath so it won’t be seen, & to keep people from harm, on a very fine day it is drawn inside of one of those moonhouses to give a very fine day, so that is what a sun spot is. Black Clouds.
Some of those Planets you can see are like stations to do god’s work. Venus is thickly blanketed with clouds, that is a place that stores the clouds. Jupiter be I suppose a storeplace for rain snow & hail. Others to keep air, wind, sunfire, wild fire, star fire, moisture, electricity, gases. It is worked by a human spirit world of human spirits that run over the top of the world and wind…they are somethink people of this earth have never seen. They are kept to do work overhead. They also work our wireless gramphones, machinery, Moving Pictures Talking Pictures and all that sort of thing. All that sky is worked spiritual. But all is gods workings of this world…
So I have been told and seen in half sleep trance.”
I am in Mr. Wilson’s museum and like Alice I am in a half sleep trance. I have been trained to view museums as repositories of facts, lessons, art, plunder, collections. This museum is a quicksilver shimmering invitation to become unsettled, off kilter, juxtaposed and rattled.
“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.”
General Statement from the Museum of Jurassic Technology
But then, there was no technology in the Lower Jurassic. Was there? It was quite a long time ago. Millions and millions of years. And, if this mysterious technology existed, we might never have that knowledge again. Are all museums then, dreamscapes? Have we been fooled all along? Manipulated into a smug and false “knowing”? Does the pendulum suspended in front of Alice’s desperate and poetic letters really demonstrate the rotation of the earth? If so, who says so? Mr. Wilson only promises that we are to be “…guided along, is it were, like a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.”
****
The beautiful woman in the gift shop smiles wryly. I am asking directions to the Tula Tea Room, which is rumored to be on the upper floors of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. But, even though she works at the front desk she claims she does not know how to get to the tearoom.
“This is a non-Cartesian space”, she explains.
****
But, she does go on to offer that the tearoom is somewhere towards the back, around the corner, a hallway, then stairs. For sure it’s not on the lower floor. I make my way through, twisting into rooms, coming to sudden dead ends. And it is so dark in here. Velvet black with a complex warren of dimly glowing panoramas. Glass cases. Difficult to read cards of explanation that offer no conclusions or resting points. I am forced to gather information differently. It’s all a kind of poetry. It’s illuminating but in a dreamy, literary kind of way. I have to keep blending the known with the unknown. I cannot ever just think and therefore be. The glass rectangles buried by Mr. Wilson keep luring me like the doors at the far reaches of the rabbit hole.
For example, if I study the fruit pit I must, according to the descriptive card below, see that it is marvelously and skillfully carved with,
“…a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic of classical character, and thick soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings. In the distance are representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat, a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a bench on which sits an owl, another bird and a squirrel.
On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance; the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI.”
What I see is a plain, gnarly, old pit. I seem to remember, though, that somewhere in some other museum there is such a fruit stone, which does contain such carvings. So if not this one then that one? And, since I have vague knowledge of the existence of said fabulous fruit stone, this present and un-carved fruit stone blurs the boundaries between its homely existence and the supposed reality of the other. I look and look. Could those carvings be there? Unlike many of the displays in this museum, which delves heavily into the world of the miniature, there is no magnification for the fruit pit. Still, even with magnification I do not think I would ever actually see the bearded man playing the viol. And what about the crucifixion on the back? There is a mirror in this hall of mirrors, but the pit, front and back, looks more like a brain and quite smartly mirrors the confused gnarly grey peach pit in my skull.
A dead woman who apparently never existed sings to me as I walk by. But then maybe she did exist. If she did she would not remember her existence because she was stricken with a disease of memory and only could remember music, which gave her voice a haunting plaintiveness as the sound would disappear from reality as soon as it pierced our ears. Her clothes are there, her photograph, her history is recorded, but there is/was no her there. I pass the cones of memory and the theory of forgetting, which shares a kind of holographic time and place with the opera singer via a tumbling waterfall in the Brazilian rain forest. I pass homunculi floating in jars, and the picture of a mermaid giving birth. In the seventeenth century Athanasuis Kircher discovered that the “World is Bound With Secret Knots”. He knew about magnets and perpetual motion and magic lanterns and I can see them now and listen to the constant music of bells wheeling over my head. I pass the exhibition of vulgar remedies where the bees must be told of important family events, as “bees are the muse’s birds”. The ducks breath will cure the child of thrush, the grandmother’s urine must be sprinkled, the small boys must be dressed as girls and the small girls must be dressed as boys as this will protect them, and the naughty children must eat a whole and still furry mouse on a piece of toast so that they will no longer wet the bed. Then there is the sad room of trailer dioramas where deserted dwellings have become a chrysalis, its inhabitants having escaped to some brighter future. They carried their house on their backs through the Depression, through the stifling conformity of the 1950s and now through the confused and endless mobility of retirement. Inside these dwellings? There are touching displays of china collections and pincushions and baby clothes. I pass the eye of a needle where I can see an exquisitely rendered miniature sculpture of Pope John Paul II. Does that mean he is getting into heaven? I am informed that the sculptor carved on a human hair and waited to work between the beats of his heart. These needles are really here. Unlike the peach pit, I can actually see Daffy Duck and Mickey Mouse and the Pope. I hear the wolf howling with a human enclosed within its skull. And when I look into the eye of the wolf I see the moving image of a man holding a paper and performing those scripted howls and yelps. He’s trapped in there, but he doesn’t seem too unhappy. He has his purpose.
“All aggression whether it comes from man or from the world is of animal origin and is marked with an animal cry.”
Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space.”
The howling wolf stays with me and blends with the opera singer’s forgetful aria. Bats fly through solid lead. Stink ants inhale deadly spores. On and on, the grey peach pit in my head is twisted and carved and polished until it glows in the darkness of my animal skull.
By this time I am truly in need of the Tula Tea Room. Here, I think is the hallway. Miniature stage sets change from light to stormy. A pleasant piazza turns the panels and is engulfed in flames. And here is the staircase and then another hallway with doors. I heed the “No Entrance sign” but, another sign on the same door, which says I might pass in “probable safety”, confuses me. This must not be the tearoom. I walk on.
The hallway opens into an elegant formal room, which holds ten oil paintings of the ten Soviet space dogs. The walls proclaim:
“All of the universe is full of the lives of perfect creatures.”
Konstantin Tsilokovski
This is also not the tearoom but it does have more light and places to sit. It’s a lovely room, partly like a church and partly like a museum salon from the old school. I sit on a comfortable circular couch that facilitates the viewing of the portraits. The ceiling is graced with painted stars. Stiff upholstered chairs sit properly in the corners. The sweet dogs are all around me. They were taken off the streets of Moscow and shot into space.
At one end of the dog salon is an archway with heavy velvet drapes beyond which is a jewel box of a theatre called The Borzoi Kabinet Theatre. This theatre plays two different films on the hour on alternating days or, if you want, on any day in any sequence. One film is a charming comedy about a diamond box and a steel flea and a cross-eyed man from (Ahah!) Tula. It is in Russian. The other film is called Obshee Delo (The Common Task):
“Which interweaves tales of an impoverished, yet influential philosopher-librarian Nicolai Federov, the accomplishments and tribulations of Russian historic Pulkovo Observatory and the life and work of Constantine Tsilokovski, whose inspired vision of human space travel and habitation changed the course of humanity.”
Right now Obshee Delo is playing. I hear a sad, turgid voice narrating. I look inside and the audience, a lone young man, is sprawled before the film, sleeping. He is sleeping so heavily and peacefully. The depth of his sleep is intoxicating. The film comes to an end. The theatre is completely dark. He still sleeps. I step in to the darkness and look behind the screen. There is a beautiful little stage back there with its own perfect proscenium, a real space version of the periaktoi downstairs. I would like to create something on this stage. Something in miniature. Perhaps a small opera with one character. A mezzo-soprano balanced on the cusp of the moon. A bed -time story sung in Catalan with only a tiny edge of threat. The audience would be welcome to fall asleep. Soporific theatre. Cheap at twice the price.
Why do people make art? Because it isn’t there. Out of the darkness the Museum of Jurassic Technology constantly and tirelessly erases the line between art and science.
I too am very, very sleepy. I turn back to the room full of dogs and, making no apology, lie down on the circular couch. The Wunderkabinet. Cabinets of darkness. Midday melatonin. I fall into harmony with the young man dreaming in the theatre. I am in danger of dreaming too. I am exhausted with reading signs and peering into the blackness, asking myself if it’s real or a mirror of reality or a memory of a story or a real letter or a memory of a letter. Cabinets come to me. Drawers. Closets. They are always dark until we pull them open. Compartments of memory and song which blur into forgetfulness. Velvet curtains closed or open. Boundaries of wonder and Mr. Wilson says he wants to “reintegrate people to wonder”, and his museum shoves us gently across those thresholds like “flowers into the mysteries of life”. Like the buzzing of the I Ching which is always turning into its opposite and where advice is liquid and in motion. Nine in the first line means…the opposite of peace is stagnation. Male is in the process of becoming female. Don’t get comfortable. Pull open a drawer, a drawer that was, until now, lost to everything, windows stretched out in iced sheets, draperies stubborn and quiet, small pink wet feet covered in gelatin or rain from pink light bulbs pink beneath shelves and drawers lined in still satin under the wind and broken cigarette stubs twisting in drowned handkerchiefs, the unshakable sweetness of Shalimar perfume, incense of dead bridge parties, the Benson and Hedges, the powder of crumbling newspaper, the open bottle of scotch, the burnt sugar of cut grass, the Polaroid fixative, the ash from the cold fire place, the black stale water beneath the gutters, the peppermints melting into candle wax from those stone fisted dinners and the dampness left by long days of rain….. It’s present to me now in my reverie and it’s then and there as well.
No Cartesian knowledge here because now I cannot be proved. I dream, therefore I am not.
“And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so…space identified with solitude is creative; that even when it’s forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future…these retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human in this case approaching the immemorial.”
Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space.”
Alice has a lot to say about those painted stars. She can go on and on.
The Tula Tea Room has a fountain and a samovar. There are free cookies. And, yes they are Madelines. There is a real dog, named Tula, who appears to be sleeping. My I pet the dog? Tula the dog is both real and alive and looks at me when I call her name. Some kind of silken, slender Russian wolfhound.
“She is so elegant,” I say.
A beautiful Slavic woman, appearing a bit like Alice’s practical, above ground sister, serves the tea and says:
“Yes. Very ladylike. But Tula is a male.”
The room is light, though curtained in pale green silk. It is a relief, this light. In the poetics of space the airy attic is where we can think and judge and reason and the lower floors are compartments of our proscribed daily behavior but with drawers and closets full of secrets and memories and the basement throws us into the id where we are the victim of instinct and howling wolves. I eat the Madelines but I don’t remember anything, past or present, no flavors or fragrances or friends or family or haunted spaces. I find myself resting from having a single thought of any kind and this is a relief as well. The tea is strong and clear and mixed with boiling water from the samovar. The Russian woman talks on her cell phone in some language I can’t understand or even recognize and it’s all more than fine with me.
****
“I mean, I see running this museum as a service job, and that service consists …in fostering an environment in which people can change. And it happens. I’ve seen it happen.”
Mr. Wilson, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder” by Lawrence Weschler
****
When I finally wake up and leave the museum, the harsh Los Angeles sun and whizzing traffic are not powerful enough to break the spell. The museum makes everything into a museum. And even though the light is blazing, the dislocation from those dark inside spaces stays with me. The outside streets, Tula the dog and Tula the tea room and Tula the place with a cross eyed man in Russia, are blended and merged with one another. The museum is the muse and calls forth dreams and demons and the irrational takes hold, but I am comforted by the perfection of the universe, which is all around me, even on Venice Boulevard. Cars and pedestrians seem to be organized into a formal and balanced dance by the rhythm of a distant jackhammer and the enforced restraint of stoplights. In my mind it is a ballet as beautiful as any postmodern offering by Yvonne Rainer. My perception of the moment has put it together and made it so. But it is not real. It is an experience of the senses and also of memory. There is music from the Hare Krishna temple down the street. The temple could be a large version of one of those tiny, fanciful dioramas. It could be, for a moment, both itself and an idea of itself. A collection of high school kids laughing and gossiping function as contemporary chorus for day to day teenage tragedy:
“ Ohmygod! Max like so deserved it. He’s like such a liar and everything.
Like he told her he would show up and she waited for him and everything and then he blew her off and then she said fuck off and he like acted like it was all her fault and didn’t say anything ‘cause he’s such an asshole and then she walked away.”
I’m pretty sure I know this Max character. I’ve seen him lots of times, for decades even. And this knowledge/memory of mine has been pinned like a moth on velvet by these curators with their short skirts and nose piercings.
The museum is a miniature of the universe. Mickey Mouse in the eye of a needle. It’s belief and not fact. Though the needle is really there. You can see it for yourself.