Download - Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un ...Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un)history Weschler, Lawrence Harper's Magazine; Sep 1994; 289,

INHALINGTHE SPORE

Field trip to a museum ofnatural (un)historyBy Lawrence Weschler

1... in the Cameroo-nian rain forests of West Africa there lives afloor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponerafoetens,or, more commonly, the stink ant. This large

ant—indeed,it’s one of the very few capable ofemitting a cry audible to the human ear—survivesby foraging for food amongthefallen leaves andundergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these

ants will become infected by inhaling the mi-croscopic spore of a fungus from the genus To-mentella, one of millions of such spores rainingdown upontheforest floor from somewhere in thecanopy above. Upon being inhaled, the sporelodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and im-mediately begins to grow, quickly fomentingbizarre behavioral changesin its host. The crea-ture appears troubled and confused, and now,for thefirst time inits life, it leaves the forest floorand begins an arduous climb up the stalk of a vineor fern.

Driven on bythestill-growing fungus, the antfinally achieves a seemingly prescribed height,whereupon,utterly spent,it attaches its mandiblesto the plant it has been climbing and, thus af-fixed, waits to die. Ants that have met theirdoom in this fashion are quite a commonsightin certain sections of the rain forest.

Thefungus,for its part, lives on: it continues

Lawrence Weschler is the author of Seeing Is Forgettingthe Name of the Thing OneSees, a biography of theartist Robert Irwin, and A Miracle, a Universe: SettlingAccounts With Torturers.

to consumetheant’s brain, moving through therest of the nervous system and presently throughall the soft tissue that remainsof the ant. Afterapproximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusionerupts from whatwas oncethe ant’s head. Grow-ing to a length of about an inch and half, thespike features a bright-orange tip heavily ladenwith spores, which now begin to rain down on-

to the forest floor for other unsus-pecting ants to inhale.

T. great mid-century American neuro-physiologist Geoffrey Sonnabend inhaled hisspore, as it were, one insomniac night in 1936while convalescing from a combined physicaland nervous breakdown at a small resort near themajestic Iguassu Falls, in the so-called Meso-potamian region at the Argentinean-Brazilian-

Paraguayan frontier. Earlier that evening, hehad attended a recital of German Romanticlieder given by the great Romanian-Americanvocalist Madelena Delani. Delani, one of theleading soloists on the international concertcircuit of her day, was known to suffer from a rareform of Korsakov’s syndrome,withits attendantobliteration of virtually all short- and interme-diate-term memory, with the exception, in hercase, of the memory of musicitself.Although Sonnabendleft the concert hall

that evening without ever meeting Delani, theconcert hadelectrified him, and througha sleep-less night he conceived,asif in a single blast ofinspiration, a radical new theory of memory, atheory he’d spend the next decade painstaking-

CRITICISM 47

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Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un)historyWeschler, LawrenceHarper's Magazine; Sep 1994; 289, 1732; Canadian Business & Current Affairs Databasepg. 47

ETHNOGRAPHER BERNARD MASTON REPORTED ACCOUNTSOFTHE

DEPRONG MORI, “A SMALL DEMON WHICH THE LOCAL SAVAGES

BELIEVE ABLE TO PENETRATE SOLID OBJECTS”

ly elaborating in his three-volume Obliscence:Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter,published by Northwestern University Press in1946. Memory, for Sonnabend, was anillusion.Forgetting, not remembering, was the inevitableoutcomeofall experience. From this perspec-tive, as he explained in the introduction to histurgid masterwork, “we, amnesiacsall, con-demnedtolive in an eternally fleeting present,havecreated the most elaborate of human con-structions, memory, to buffer ourselves against theintolerable knowledgeof the irreversible passageof time andirretrievability of its moments andevents.” (page 16) He continued to expand onthis doctrine through the explication of an in-creasingly intricate model in which a so-calledConeof Obliscenceis bisected by Planes of Ex-

perience, which continually slice the cone atchanging though precise angles. The theory was

perhapsat its most suggestive when it broachedsuch uncanny shadow phenomenaas the expe-riences of premonition, déja vu, and foreboding.But oncetheplane ofany particular experiencehadpassed through the cone, the experience wasirretrievably forgotten, andall else was illusion—aparticularly haunting conclusion, in thatno sooner had Sonnabendpublished his mag-num opus than both heandit fell largely in-to oblivion.

‘ As for Delani, ironically, and utterly unbe-knownst to Sonnabend, she had perished in a

freak automobile accident within afew days ofher concert at IguassuFalls.

Khis part, Donald R. Griffith, RockefellerUniversity’s eminent chiroptologist (and authorof Listening in the Dark: Echolocation in Bats andMen), appearsto have inhaled something suspi-ciously sporelike back in 1952, while readingthe field reports of an obscure late-nineteenth-century American ethnographer named BernardMaston. While doing fieldwork in 1872 amongthe Dozo of the Tripsicum Plateau of the cir-cum-Caribbean region of northern South Amer-ica, Maston reported having heard severalaccounts of the deprong mori, or piercing devil,which he described as “a small demon whichthe local savages believe able to penetratesolidobjects,” such as the walls of their thatch hutsand, in one instance, even a child’s outstretchedarm.Almost eighty years later, while reviewing

some of Maston’s notesin the archive, Griffith,

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER1994

1

for some reason,as he later recounted, “smelleda bat.” He and a bandofassistants undertookan arduous eight-month expeditionto the Trip-sicum Plateau, where Griffith grew increasinglyconvinced that he was dealing not with just anybat but with a very special bat indeed,and specif-ically the tiny Myotis lucifugus, which thoughpreviously documented had never before beenstudiedin detail. It became Griffith’s hypothesisthat whereas mostbats deploy frequencies in theultrasonic rangeto assist them in the echoloca-tion that enables them tofly in the dark, Myotislucifugus had evolved a highly specialized form ofecholocation based on ultraviolet wavelengths,which even,in some instances, verged into theneighboring X-ray band of the wave spectrum.Furthermore, these particular bats had evolvedhighly elaborate nose leaves, or horns, whichal-lowed them to focus their echowave transmissions

in a narrow beam. All ofwhich would accountfor thewide range ofbizarre effectsdescribed by Maston’s infor-mants.

Griffith and his team onlylacked for proof. Time after

time, thelittle devils, on the very verge of cap-ture, would fly seamlessly through their nets. SoGriffith devised a brilliant snaring device con-sisting of five solid-lead walls, each one eightinchesthick, twenty feet high, and two hundredfeet long—all of them arrayedin a radial pattern,like spokes of a giant wheel, along the forestfloor. The team affixed seismic sensors all alongthe walls in an intricate gridlike pattern, andproceeded to wait.

For two months, the monitors recorded not athing—surely the bats were simply avoiding themassive, and massively incongruous, lead walls—and Griffith began to despair of ever confirminghis hypothesis. Finally, however, early on themorning of August 18, at 4:13 A.M., the sensorsrecorded a pock. The number-three wall had re-ceived an impact of magnitude 103 ergs twelvefeet above theforest floor, 193 feet out from thecenter of the wheel. The team members cartedan X-ray-viewing device out to the indicatedspot, and sure enough,at a depth of7 1/8 inches,they located the first Myotis lucifugus ever con-

tained by man,“eternally frozen in amassof solid lead.”

MAcooper: foetens, Myotis lucifugus,Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madelena Delani, theDozo and the deprong mori, Bernard Mastonand Donald R. Griffith—these and countlessother spores rain down upon a small, nonde-script storefront operation located along themain commercial drag of downtown CulverCity in the middle of West Los Angeles’s end-


less pseudo-urban sprawl: the Museum ofJuras-sic Technology (according to a fading blue ban-ner hanging outside), an institution thatpresentsprecisely the sert of anonymous-look-ing facade one mighteasily pass right by. Whichmost days would be just as well, since most daysit’s closed.

Butif you happenedto hearofit, as I beganhearingofit a couple years ago on my occasion-al visits to L.A.(it’s been at thatsite for aboutsix years now), and thus actively soughtit out;orelse,if you just happened to bedallyingat the bus stop right out-side its portals on one of thoseoccasions when it actually wasopen—well then, your curiositypiqued, you mightjust find your-self going up andtentatively press-ing its door buzzer. While waitingfor an answer, you might studythe curiouslittle diorama slottedinto thewall off to theside of theentry (a diminutive white urn sur-rounded by floating pearlescentmoths) or another equally per-plexing diorama off to the otherside of the entry (three chemistry-set bottles arrayed in a curiouslyloving display: oxide of titanium,oxide of iron, and alumina, ac-cording to their labels).

Atlength the dooris likely toopen,andusually it will be DavidHildebrand Wilson himself, themuseum’s founderand director, asmall and unassuming man,per-haps in his mid-forties, who willbe smiling there solicitously (asif it were specifically you he’dbeen expecting all along) andhappily bidding you to enter.

It’s dark in there. As your eyesadjust, you take in an old wood-en desk, on top of which a smallsign proposes an admissions do-

nation of $3, though Wilson quickly assures youthatthis is a neighborhood museum and hencefree to anybody from the neighborhood, andthat, furthermore, he considers the bus-stopbench to be an integral part of the neighbor-hood. Heleaves it to you to decide what thatmeans, and for that matter, he leavesit all toyou. He returnsto his seat behind the desk andto his reading (two dusty antiquated books, thelast timeI was there: one entitled Mental Hospi-tals; the other, The Elements of Folk Psychology).The foyer, as it were, features a shabby, kind ofhalfhearted attemptata gift shop, but probablyyou won’t tarry long because yourcuriosityis al-ready being drawn toward the museum proper.

Photographs by Gary Moss

Andit’s here that you’ll encounter, across amazeofdiscrete alcoves, in meticulousdisplaysexactingly laid out, the ant, the bat, thefalls, thediva, the insomniac ... A preserved sample ofthe stink ant, for example, has its mandiblesembedded into the stalk of a plastic fern be-hind glass in a standard natural-history-muse-um-style diorama. Sure enough,a thin spike iserupting out of its head. There’s a phone re-ceiver beside the vitrine, and when you pick itup you'll hear the entire history of Megalopon-

era foetens, largely as I conveyed it above.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 as-tonishingly well-realized aquarium-size dioramaof Iguassu Falls, where Sonnabend heard Delaniperform, complete with gushing, recirculatingwater. It turns out, or so the nearby phonere-ceiver will inform you,that the falls were doublysignificant in Sonnabend’slife, for they wereal-so the place where his parents had first met. Hisfather, Wilhelm, a young Germanstructural en-gineer, had been attempting to span thefallswitha daring suspension bridge, but the projecthad cometo naught, his dream collapsing irre-

DRESS AND CAPE WORN

BY MADELENA DELANI

CRITICISM 49


BELOW MOOSE AND

DEER ANTLERS, THE

“HORN OF MARY DAVIS

OF SAUGHALL”

vocably into the abyss a mere day short of com-pletion. From either side of the diorama at themuseum, you can see where Wilhelm’s bridgewould have gone: from head on, you can peerthrough an eyepiéce and, miraculously, see thebridge itself, hovering serenely overthe cataract.Theeffect is so vividly realized that you'll lookagain from the sides—youreyes, or something,must beplaying tricks on you—but, no, nothingis there except falling water.

Sonnabend’sactual desk and study have beensalvaged and painstakingly re-created. There’s awall of photos detailing the stages ofhis life andhis parents’lives, and a whole documentary em-bolism, as it were, devoted to the career of oneCharles F Gunther, an eccentric Chicago mil-

lionaire confectioner, who was somehowre-sponsiblefor bringing Wilhelm to Chicago afterhis Iguassu debacle and who,incidentally, was aninveterate collector in his own right. In fact,Gunther’s awe-inspiring trove (with items rang-ing from the very desk upon which the Appo-mattox Surrender was signed to a swatchofdriedskin sloughed off by the Serpent that first se-duced Woman in Eden) came to constitute acornerstone of the Chicago Historical Society,under whoseauspices large portionsof it can beseen to this day. Or, anyway, so the sequentialphone receivers at the museum allege as theyguide you throughthetale.You can sit on a bench, pick up anotherre-

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 1994

ceiver, and have Sonnabend’s whole theory laidoutfor you through series of haunting dioramasof variously intersecting (and compoundinglycomplexifying) cones and planes, complete witha representation of such technical subtleties as theperverse and obverse experience boundaries, theSpelean Ring Disparity, “the Hollows,” and, per-haps most provocatively, the Cone of Confabu-lation. (Thevoice in the receiver, the same voiceas in all the otherreceivers, you may suddenly re-alize, is the same bland,slightly unctuous voiceyou’ve heard in every museum slide show oracoustiguide tour or PBS nature special you've ev-er endured: the reassuringly measured voice ofunassailable institutional authority.)

Overto theside there’s a whole room devot-ed exclusively to Madelena Delani, and aroundthe corner you come upon another bench and an-other phonereceiver and anotherelaborate dis-play, this one detailing the bizarrely intersectingcareers of Maston and Griffith. Once again, nar-tow-beam spotlights rise up and fade away, guid-ing you through the narrative—including adetailed exposition of how echolocation worksinbats, complete with charts and graphs—culmi-nating with a re-creation ofa solid tranche fromthe lead wall, which presently becomesillu-mined,asif from inside, in such a way that youcan actually see the bat embedded there in mid-flight.Through muchof these explorations, you may

well be the only person inside the museum,asidefrom Wilson, and he’s a bit of a piercing devilhimself. He pads aboutsilently as you lose your-self in the various exhibits. One momenthe’s athis desk, the next he’s gone, though who knowswhere—perhaps to a workroom secreted at theback of the store; a few momentslater, howev-er, he’s back readingat his desk, as if he’d neverbeen goneat all. You continue to poke about—there are a good dozen other exhibits up at anygiven time—andpresently, eerily, you becomeaware ofstrains of Bach being played on ...on... could it be an accordion? The desk chair isempty, the front doorhasbeenleft slightly ajar:Wilsonis on the sidewalk, blithely serenading thepassingtraffic.

You leave him to it. You continue to explore.Depending on what happensto be upat the timeyou’re visiting, you may, for example, come up-on the luminous white skeleton of some kind ofrodent elegantly mounted on plush velvet be-neath a glass bell. (“EUROPEAN MOLE—Talpa eu-ropea,” explains the wall caption. “Occursin allEuropean countries south of 59 northlatitudeexcept Ireland. . . .”) Beneath anotherglass caseyou can study “The Mary Rose Collection ofNow-Extinct Nineteenth-Century FrenchMoths.” (“There’s a slight misnomer there,” Wil-son informed mesolicitously thefirst time I peered


into that case. He happened to bepassing silent-ly by. “Most of those particular mothsare indeedFrench,buta few are actually Flemish—althoughwith someit’s hard totell.”)Along a nearby wall (just off to the side, ac-

tually, from the vitrine containing the spike-sprouting ant) there’s another standard museum-style array, of mounted horns and antlers—stan-dard, that is, with the exception of one, thesmallest of the lot: a solitary hairy protrusion.A nearbycaptioncites thetes-timony, inside quotationmarks, of an “Early visitor tothe Musaeum Tradescant-ianum, The Ark”to the effectthat “we were shown an ex-traordinarily curious horn

which had grown on the back of a woman’s head.... The horn wasblackish in color, not verythick or hard, but well proportioned.” As, in-deed, this specimenis.

Anotherdisplay, entitled “Protective Audito-ty Mimicry,” allows you to compare, by pushingthe requisite buttons, the sounds made by certainsmall, iridescent beetles, “when threatened,” withthose made bycertain similarly sized and huedpebbles, “while at rest.” By this time, you, too, maybe starting to feel a little bit threatened,a bitiri-descent. You head back to the foyer where Wil-son is back behindhis desk, once again absorbedin his reading, the accordion resting along the wallby his side like a snoozing pet. You putter amongthe giftware, confused, hesitant.“Um, excuse me,” you may at length

hazard. “Ahm, what exactly is this“he place?”

xcuse me,” I asked several months backtoward the end ofmyfirst visit. “Ahm, what ex-actly is this place?” Wilson looked up from hisreading: beatific deadpan.

I suppose I should say something here aboutWilson’s own presence, his own look,forit is ofa piece with his museum.I have described himas diminutive, though a better word might be“simian.” His features are soft and yet precise, abroad forehead, short black hair graying at thesides, a close-cropped version of an Amish beard,sans mustache,fringinghis face andfilling intohis cheeks. He wears circular glasses, which some-how accentuate the elfin effect. He’s been de-scribed as Ahab inhabiting the body of Puck (apixie Ahab, a monomaniacal Puck), but the bestdescription I ever heard came from his wife oftwenty-five years, Diana (an anthropology grad-uate student and noparticular giant herself; theirfriends sometimes refer to the two of them as“the little Wilsons”), who one day characterizedhis looks for me as those of “a pubescent Nean-derthal.”

“Well,” Wilson replied coolly thatfirst after-noon, unfazed, from behind his wooden desk(obviously he gets asked this sort of question allthe time), “as you can see, we’re a small natural-

history museum with an emphasis on curiositiesand technological innovation.” He paused beforegoing on: “We’re definitely interested in pre-senting phenomenathat other natural-historymuseums seem unwilling to present.” Appar-ently he could sense that I remained a bit be-

wildered. “The name lends a sense of what’sinside but doesn’t refer to a specific geologictime,” heoffered, helpfully. He then reached in-to his drawer and pulled out a pamphlet. “Here,this might be useful.”

“THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY,”the pamphlet’s cover announced portentously,“ANDYOU.”Inside, the pamphlet opened witha “GENERAL STATEMENT”:

The Museum ofJurassic Technology in Los An-geles, California, is an educational institution dedi-cated to the advancement of knowledge and thepublic appreciation of the LowerJurassic. Like a coatoftwo colors, the museum servesdualfunctions. Onthe one hand, the museum provides the academiccommunity with a specialized repository ofrelics andartifacts from the LowerJurassic, with an emphasis onthose that demonstrate unusual or curious techno-logical qualities. On the other hand, the museumserves the general public by providing the visitorwith a hands-on experience of“life in the Jurassic.”

There immediately follows a small map, cap-tioned “Jurassic,” which in every other way looksexactly like a small map ofwhattherest of us might re-fer to as “Egypt.” An arrowidentifies what in any otherrendition would get cailedthe Nile River delta as “Low-er Jurassic.”The text—which turnsout

to be the transcriptofa visitor-activated slide show thator-dinarily runs, accompanied bythat same echt-institutionalvoice, in a small alcove to theside of the entry; it just hap-penedto beoutoforder that afternoon—goes onto offer a treatise on museumsin general. It tracesthe lineage of the currentinstitution back to suchprogenitors as the Ptolemys’ Library at Alexan-dria, founded in the third century B.C., through theDark Ages (when the museological impulse sput-

“WERE A SMALL NATURAL-HISTORY MUSEUM,” DAVID WILSON

SAYS. “WERE INTERESTED IN PRESENTING PHENOMENA THAT OTHER

NATURAL-HISTORY MUSEUMS SEEM UNWILLING TO PRESENT”

GEOFFREY SONNABEND’S

“MODEL OF OBLISCENCE”

CRITICISM 51


AN EXHIBIT ENTITLED

“VOICE OF THE

AMERICAN GRAY FOX”

tered amid relic-preserving convents and monas-teries), and then through the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, when the impulse floweredonce again throughsuchelite-serving collectionsas those ofJohn James Swammerdam, Dr. MatthewMaty, Olaus Worm with his “Museum Wormi-anum,” and Elias Ashmole, until finally, in late-eighteenth-century America, the painter CharlesWillson Peale virtually invented the museum as apublic institution. The pamphlet goes on to tracethe origins of the Museum ofJurassic Technology

itself to “this period when manyof the importantcollections oftoday were beginning to take shape.”In fact, many ofthe exhibits in the MJT, accord-ing to the pamphlet, wereoriginally part of small-er and less-well-known collections, such as theDevonian and Eocene. In the slide-show version,inspirational music of a certain generic oleaginous

consistency now swells up as the narrative buildstowardits climax:

Althoughthe path has not always been smooth,over the years the Museum ofJurassic Technology hasadapted and evolved until today it stands in a uniqueposition amongtheinstitutionsof the country.Still,

even today, the museum preserves somethingoftheflavorofits roots in the early days of the natural-his-

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER1994

tory museum—aflavor that has been described as “in-congruity born ofan overzealousspirit in the face ofunfathomable phenomena.”

Glory to Him, who endureth forever, and in

whose handare the keys of unlimited Pardon andunending Punishment.

All of which helped, and didn’t.“Um,”I tried again, after having finished the

pamphlet,“but I mean, how,specifically, did thisplace get started?”

“You mean this museum?” Wilson asked.Well, yeah.“Oh,” he said. “Well, the seed

material, | guess you could callit, forthe current collection—the Flem-ish moths, for instance—camedown to us through the collectionof curiosities originally gathered to-gether by the Thums—that’s OwenThum and his son, Owen Thumthe Younger, who were botanists,or I guess really just gardeners, insouthwestern Nebraska, in SouthPlatte.”

Whenwasthis?

“Oh,in thefirst half of this cen-tury——-say, the Twenties for the fa-ther and on into the Fifties withOwen the Younger.” Wilson thenspun out an elaborately unlikelysaga involving the Thums andThum the Younger’s widow, wholost the collection to an unsavorylawyer named Gerald Billius, whomay even have murderedherto getit but who then gradually grewbored with his acquisition, even-tually allowing it to lapse into thehands of his granddaughter, a curi-ous Texas matron named MaryRose Cannon, whom Wilson him-self subsequently happened to meetone day in Pasadena. It wasall, asI would subsequently come to rec-ognize, a quintessentially Wilsoni-

an narrative: ornate, almost profuse, in some ofits details but then suddenly fogging over, par-ticularly as one gets closer to the present. Suchstories usually both perform and require a kindofleap.

Andhow,for instance—I’d started choosingmy words carefully—had Geoffrey Sonnabend _and Madelena Delani, um, entered his life?

“Well, I first came upon Sonnabend whenwe were trying to expand an exhibit we used tohave on memory. I myself tend to bepretty for-getful, so that memory’s always been an interestof mine, and | was exploring the theories ofHermann Ebbinghaus, whowasa great turn-of-the-century German memory researcher,in fact


revitalized the wholefield. I was at the Univer-sity Research Library over at UCLA oneday,leafing through their Ebbinghaus books, whenI just happened to come upon Sonnabend’sthree-volume Obliscence the next call letter over.It seemed like nobody had looked into thosebooks in ages—they hadn’t been checked out inyears—butI started reading. Sonnabend himselftells the story about the theory’s genesis, aboutMadelena Delani and Iguassu Falls in the pref-ace, and I was completely bowled over.In part,I suppose, it was the romanceofthis theory thatseemedto foretell its own oblivion. And then,just a few days later, 1 happenedto be listeningto Jim Svejda’s Record Shelf program on KUSC,and he was doing a whole hour show devoted ex-clusively to Madelena Delani—that, for in-stance, is how I first found out about how shedied. It was an incredible coincidence—infact,everything associated withthestory is like a tis-sue of improbable coincidences—how theyal-most met, how they didn’t, what either of themwas doing there at the falls. And those kinds ofcoincidencesare also a specialinterest of ours here at the mu-seum. We contacted theChicago Historical Society,anda fellow there named RustyLewis helped us enormously,particularly with the Guntherconnection. The whole thing just grew and grew.”

It was getting late—time to be gone and gone.As I was openingthe doorto leave, | once againnoticed the dioramaof the urn and the moths.Whatabout that?

“Oh,that’s a little urn surrounded by Frenchmoths—or, no, maybe Flemish, I’m notsure.”

Andwhatwasthesignificance of the urn?“Tt’s just an urn. | don’t think it means any-

thing.”Andthat other diorama-—the chemistry-set

bottles?“Oxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumi-

na,” Wilson recited solemnly. “Those are thethree chemical constituents of corundum, whichformsthe basis for all sapphires and rubies. Ac-tually, we have the bottles out there because ofthe link to sapphires, which, as you may know,

have long beenassociated with qual-ities of faithfulness and endurance.”

Z . few days later I happened to be at theUCLAlibrary researching another project, andhalf on a lark,I started rifling through the com-puterized card catalogue. “Ebbinghaus, Her-mann,”I typed in, and sure enough there roseup a slew of references (“Memory: A Contri-bution to Experimental Psychology,” 1913, etc.).Then I typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” andthe screen churned for a while before finally

clocking in: “no record found.” | subsequentlycalled Northwestern University Press,Sonnabend’s supposed publisher, but they’dnever heard of him either. | called KUSC andasked for Jim Svejda; when he came on,I ex-plained the situation, told him about the ex-hibit, and asked if he’d ever done a show aboutthe singer Madelena Delani. He just laughed andlaughed: never heard ofher. I called informationin Chicago and got the numberfor the Chica-go Historical Society. Once I got through tothem, I asked dubiously for Rusty Lewis, who,however, did turn out to exist. Had he everheard of Charles Gunther? “You mean the can-dy tycoon?” he shot back, without missing abeat. He went on to confirm every single one ofthe exhibit’s details about Gunther—hiscol-lection, the Appomattox Surrender’s historic

table, even the snake skin, which remains in theHistoric Society’s collections to this day.Back at the library I looked up the ethnog-

rapher Bernard Maston: no record found.|typed in “Donald R. Griffith”: no record found.

HE LAUGHS HARDER AND HARDER

For somereason,I tried that referenceby titletoo—Listening in the Dark—and that time Ihit pay dirt, except that the book had a dif-ferent subtitle and its author was Donald R.Griffin, not Griffith. | went upstairs to lookover the book’s index but found noreferencesto Maston, the Dozo, or any deprong mori. Iwent back downstairs, tracked down Griffin’smost recent whereabouts, and called him.When I reached him, I| started out by ex-plaining about the museum (he’d never heardof it) and its exhibit about Donald R. Grif-fith—“Oh no,” he interrupted. “My nameisGriffin, with an n, not Griffith.” I know, Isaid, I know. J went on to ask him if he’d ev-er heard of a bat named Myotis lucifugus. “Ofcourse.” he said, “That’s the most common,abundant species in North America. That’swhy weused it on all the early research onecholocation.” Did its range extend to SouthAmerica? Not as far as he knew, why? As |proceededto tell him about the piercing dev-ils and the thatch roofs, the lead walls and the

X-ray emanations, he was laughing harder andharder. Finally, calming down,hesaid,“No,no,noneof that is me, it’s all nonsense—onsec-ond thought you’d better leave the spelling ofthe name Griffith the way it is.” He was qui-et for a moment, then continued, almost wist-fully, “Still, you know,it’s funny. Fifty years

As 1 TELL DONALD GRIFFIN ABOUT THE PIERCING DEVILS AND

THE THATCH ROOFS, THE LEAD WALLS AND THE X-RAY EMANATIONS,

CRITICISM 53


“VisITING THE JURASSIC IS A BIT LIKE BEING IN PSYCHOANALYSIS,”

SAYS ANOTHER MUSEUM DIRECTOR.“IT’S A MARVELOUSFIELD FOR

ago when we werefirst proposing the exis-tence of something like sonar in bats, most

people thoughtthat idea noless pre-“Hposterous.”

e never ever breaks irony—that’s oneof the incredible things about him.” I was talk-ing with Marcia Tucker, the director of NewYork City’s New Museum, about David Wilson.It turns out there’s a growing cult amongart andmuseum people who can’t seem to get enough ofthe MJT—Iseemed to encounterit everywhereI turned: the L.A. County Museum, the Muse-um of Contemporary Art, the Getty. “Whenyoure in there with him,” Tucker wenton, “ev-erythinginitially just seemsself-evidently whatit is. There’s this fine line, though, betweenknowing you’re experiencing something and

sensing that something is wrong. There’s thisslight slippage, which is the very essence of theplace. And Wilson’s own presence there behindthe desk, the literal-minded way in which heearnestly and seemingly openly answersall yourquestions—it all contributes seamlessly to thatsense ofslippage. Visiting the Jurassic is a bitlike being in psychoanalysis. The place affordsthis marvelousfield for projection and transfer-ence.It’s like a museum,a critique of museums,and a celebration of museums—all rolled intoone.”

Oneof the things L.A.art critic Ralph Rugoffsays he mostlikes about the MJTis the wayit de-ploys all the traditional signs of a museum’s in-stitutional authority—meticulous presentation,exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-

PROJECTION AND TRANSFERENCE”

of-the-art technical armature—all to subvert thevery notion of the authoritative as it applies notonly to itself but to any museum. TheJurassicinfects its visitor with doubts—little curlicues ofmisgiving—that proceed to infest all his otherdealings with the culturally sacrosanct.“It’s allvery smart,” Rugoff insists, “and very knowing.”Very knowing, and yet at the same time utterlysincere. Rugoff told me how oneday hesat along-side David’s wife, Diana, at a lecture Wilson wasgiving at California State University at Los An-geles. This wasan early version of his Sonnabendspiel, which,in fact, for a long time existed sole-ly as a lecture, only relatively recently havingtaken on its exhibitional form. “And he did itcompletely straight,” Rugoff recalls. “Everybodythere wastaking notesfuriously, as if this were allon the level—thefalls, the cones, the planes,


To

the whole thing. It was amazing. And at onepointI leaned over to Diana and whispered,‘Thisis the most incredible piece ofperformanceart I’veever seen.’ And she replied, ‘What makes you

think it’s a performance? Davidbelievesall this stuff.’ ”

Z , I say, I began makingit a point to visitthe museum onall ofmy trips to Los Angeles, andeach time David would be there manning thedesk, so that after a while I got to know him pret-ty well—whichisto say,it felt like I got past thefirst layer of ironylessness to, well, maybe a sec-ond layer of ironylessness. | don’t know. Occa-sionally we'd talk about his own life, and it’s myimpression that everything he told me was moreorless true-as-stated (or, anyway, whatever I couldcheck did check out), although, as with some ofthe displays, a wealth ofsolid detail early on be-gan to fog over, somewhat, as one approachedthe present.

Born in Denverin 1946, the middle of threewell-loved sons of a doctor and his wife, Davidstarted frequenting the city’s various museumsfrom a very early age. I once asked him what hadfirst attracted him to museums, andhereplied,“Well, their museumness. How dark and hushedthey were inside, the oak-and-glass cases, thesense of being in these repositories amongallthose old things.” But he was hardly a recluse.In fact, his mother recalls how in his early yearshe was enormously gregarious, extroverted, andsocial—a regular party animal.Then something happened,although Wilson

is loath to talk about it—hegets all shy and hes-itant (as opposed to rhetori-cally opaque)at the prospect.“] really don’t knowif ] wanttoget intothis,” hesays. “It’s em-barrassing, andit’s hard to putinto words without soundinginsipid or grandiose. But since

you ask ... Sometimelate in high school—I wasmaybe seventeen or eighteen—my parents andbrothers were away for a week and I was home bymyself, when outofthe blue, for no reason, | un-derwentthis incredibly intense—well, like a con-version experience. It’s just that | came tounderstand the course of my life and the mean-ing oflife in general. Like that: asif in a flash. Forinstance, I knew that there would be no purposefor me in pursuing the world of acquisition. Theexperience hadreligious overtonesto it, but notin any specific way. It was the most intense ex-perience I’ve ever had—an entire week in awe andeuphoria.It was asif 1 was receiving instructions.God,do I wantto betalking like this? It’s not somuchthatit’s embarrassing—Ijust don’t want tobe doing the forces behindit a disservice. And Idefinitely don’t want to claim any specialness. It


was like something was being given to me—somewhere between gift and an assignment—and one wantsto be incredibly careful how onetreats such things.

“All at once it was made completely apparentto me, though without any detail, how mylifewould haveto follow the course that has led to...well”—he gestured to the walls around him—“to this. I mean, I see running this museum as aservice job, and that service consists in—God,Ican’t believe I’m saying these things—in pro-viding people a situation .. . in fostering an en-vironmentin which people can change. Andithappens. I’ve seen it happen.

“But without a doubt, that task was laid outformein those days. The generalstructure wasclear,evenif it then took an extremely long time formeto be ableto realize it, and that whole whileI sensed myself waiting, stumbling around onthe forest floor, confused—like that ant.”

His mother confirms how somewherelate inhis high-school years David changed, becamemore serious—andshe evenlets on how, thoughshe of course loves him both ways, maybe sheslightly preferred his earlier incarnation: “Hewas a lot more fun as a party boy than as a Chi-nese philosopher.”Soon thereafter he enrolled at Michigan’s

Kalamazoo College—a small, independent schoolpatterned along thelines of Oberlin or Reed—where he ended up majoring in urban entomol-ogy with a minorinart. His first night there hemet Diana at a square-dance mixer. They be-cameinseparable and were weda few years lat-er, in 1969, during thelast weeks before theirgraduation. “Yeah,” David acknowledges. “We'vebeen married for twenty-five years. It’s amaz-ing—andbelieve me, every bit as amazing to us.Weoughtto be in oneofourvitrines. But she’sincredible,” he continues, the ironylessness crack-ing just the slightest bit. “I can’t believe howshe puts up withall this.”

After college, David and Diana moved toChicago, where almost immediately David wascalled up by his draft board. He applied for con-scientious-objector status, which, he says, “wasgranted in record time. They just looked at meand—noquestions asked—I waslike the dictio-nary definition.” Followingstints performing al-ternative service as an orderly in various hospitals’mental and emergency wards, and then a fewyears with Diana in a remote Colorado mountaincabin, David was accepted into thefilm programat the then newly opened California Instituteof the Arts.

Cal Arts at the time was a hotbed for thecoolest and most austere in formalist, avant-gardefilmmaking, and David Wilson soon earned areputation as one of the coolest, most austerefilmmakers there. “Well,” David admits today,

looking back on that phase of his work,“it was thesort of thing that was moderately meaningful toa microscopically small percentage of the popu-lation at a particular moment.Butclearly, in theend, it wasn’t fulfilling the mandate I'd received.”Dianasaysflatly, “Those films were not David.”

David continued making his formalist filmsthrough the Seventies and into the early Eight-ies, and though he wasn’t making any moneyoffof them, he and Dianawere nevertheless ableto enjoy a very comfort-able lifestyle becausethey were making somuch moneyonthesidedoing highly sophisti-cated robotic special-ef-fects camera work on theperiphery ofthe film in-dustry. “It was the sort ofwork you could do sixmonths a year and easi-ly coast the rest of thetime,” David says. “Ieven enjoyed it. Techni-cally, it was quite chal-lenging and interesting.But it wasn’t the kind of work where you wereadding beansto theright side ofthescale.”

His otherlife, however, was opening out. Af-ter 1980 he began makingstrangelittle dioramason theside, exquisitely evocative miniature sen-

soriums, several of them featuring the samestereoscopic viewing device modeled on thecatoptric (or so-called beam-splitting) camerathat he’d subsequently deployin his Iguassu Fallsdisplay. This was muchcloser to the mandate, asDavid quickly realized, and increasingly he be-gan farming these cabinet-splendors outto var-ious odd andfar-flung venues.

Andit’s here that David's account begins to fogover. His own biography intermeshes with themuseum’s. The Thums make their appearance,via Mary Rose Cannon—andit’s a bitdifficult toachieve strictly accurate chronological account,at least from him.

Diana,for herpart, tells the story of how oneday in 1984 she’d just finished a tai chiclasswhenDavid drove over to get her. Pulling up, hewaited for her to get in the car, at which pointhe passed her a slip of paper on which he’dscrawled the simple phrase “Museum ofJurassicTechnology.”

“What's this?” Diana asked him. “Yourlife’s work?” And hejust smiled.

E, its first several years, the Museum ofJuras-sic Technology had no physical base of its own;it existed in the form of “loans from the Collec-tion” extendedto scattered galleries, museums,

CUP AND SAUCER AND

A PLATE OF MADELEINES,

IN THE PROUST EXHIBIT

CRITICISM 55


A RE-CREATION OF

GEOFFREY SONNABEND’S

ATTIC STUDYIN ILLINOIS

and community centers. Then one day, aboutseven years ago, while driving home from hisother life’s professional studio in Culver City,David noticed how a nearby storefront that he’dhad his eye on for some time had suddenly be-come vacant. David signed a lease on the spot,taking over the 1,600 square feet. Within a yearhe’d reunited his museum’s traveling diaspora,mountedhis first exhibition, and, without theslightest flash or ceremony, simply hunghis ban-ner out and openedfor business.

Passersby, on occasion, would wander in. Manywould wander right back out. But some wouldstay and linger. David tells the story of one fellowwhospent a long time in the back amid the ex-hibits and then, emerging, spent almost as long

a time studying the pencil sharpeneron his desk.“It was just a regular pencil sharpener,” Davidassures me. “It wasn’t meant to be an exhibit.

But he couldn’t seem to get enough ofit.” Andhetells another story about an old Jamaican gen-tleman named John Thomas whoalso spent along time in the back and then cameoutliteral-ly crying. “Hesaid,‘I realize this is a museum, butto me it’s more like a church.’” David seemsequally—and almost equivalently—moved byboth stories. (In a way, they’re the samestory.)

Occasionally visitors are moved to offer moresubstantial financial contributions to the muse-um, and alonga wallin the foyer there’s an en-


graved honorroll acknowledging the support ofthese “patrons” in much the samespirit of par-ody mingled with reverence that.characterizesmost everything else about the museum. Othervisitors began volunteeringtheir servicesto sit atthe desk or else to help fabricate the new in-stallations. In talking about the museum, Davidcontinually defers authorship:he is always talk-ing about“our” goals and what “we”are planningto do next.In part, this is one of his typical self-effacing gambits; but it’s also true that the mu-seum has generated a community—or anyway,that the museum is no longer just about what'sgoing on “inside” David but about what’s goingon “between” him and the world.

Thatit continuesto persist at all from monthto month is by no meanstheleast of its mar-vels. “The museum exists againstall odds,” Davidonce commentedto me. “Nothing supports thisventure—it is woven from thin air. We applyfor grants, and we’ve gotten a few, but mostgrants-dispensing agencies frankly don’t knowwhat to make of us—we don’tfit into the tradi-tional categories.” The museum’s annual budgetcurrently hovers around $50,000 (rent is $1,800a month, and no onereceives a salary), and

though David originally poured a significant por-tion of his own outside income into the museum,there’s been less andless of that, in part becauseas the years passed he spent more and mote timeon the museum itself and in part because hisexquisitely sophisticated battery of specializa-tions has now largely been superseded by thefilm industry’s relentless computerization. Havethere been moments,I recently asked him, whenhe and his family have actually been at the poor-house door? “Oh,yeah,” he laughed. “Momentslike now.”

“T have no idea how wegotthis far or how wecan possibly go on,” Diana told me one day. Tech-nically, she’s the museum’s treasurer and keeperof accounts, though she admitsthatin thatoffi-cial capacity she’s often reduced to gigglingfits.“T’ve just developed thisfairy faith in last-minuteprovidence. Atthe outset of each month,there’sno way we're going to makeit through, but some-thing always comes up——a small bequest, a grantunexpectedly approved, a slight uptick in ad-missions. But David keeps pushingthelimit. Lastyear he took his other companyinto bankruptcyand doubled the size of the museum on the sameday—andthecrazythingis, I wanted him to do it!Hewasright to do it. And we got lucky, becausealmost immediately after that my cargot stolen,

so we were able to pour the $6,750settlementfrom thatinto the museum.”

ne day as I was reading aboutthe earliestmuseums, those ur-collections back in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries—which were


sometimes called Wunderkammern, wonder-cab-inets—it occurred to me how the Museum ofJurassic Technology truly is their worthy heirinasmuch as wonder, broadly conceived,is itsunifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,”David oncetold me, “is to reintegrate people towonder.”) Butit’s a special kind of wonder, andit’s metastable. The visitor to the Museum ofJurassic Technology continually finds himselfshimmering between wondering-at(the marvelsof nature) and wondering-whether(any ofthiscould possibly be true). Andit’s that very shim-mer, the capacity for such delicious confusion,Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that mayconstitute the most blessedly wonderful thingabout being human.

I recently had occasion to raise the point withJohn Walsh,the director ofthe Getty Museum andanother fan of the MJT. We were talking aboutWunderkammem and some of the museum’s oth-er antecedents. “Mostof the institutional-histor-ical allusions at Wilson’s museum turn out to betrue,” Walsh told me. “There was a MusaeumTradescantianum and a John Tradescant—infacttwo of them, an Elder and a Younger—who dur-ing the 1600sbuilt up a famously eclectic cabinetknown as ‘The Ark’ in Lambeth on the SouthBank, in London, most of the contents of whichdevolved to Elias Ashmole, who expanded uponthem and then donated thewhole collection to OxfordUniversity, where it becamethe basis for the Ashmolean.There was a Swammerdam,and there was an Olaus Wormwith his Museum Wormianum;and Charles Willson Peale did have his museumin Philadelphia, to which Benjamin Franklin do-nated the carcass of an Angora cat and where youcould also see a mastadon and mechanical de-vices like the Eidophusikon, which showed prim-

itive movies. Ever since the late Renaissance,these sorts of collections got referred to as Kunst-und-Wunderkammern. Technically, the term de-scribes a collection of a type that has pretty muchdisappeared today—with the exception, perhaps,of the Jurassic—where natural wonders weredis-played alongside works of art and various man-madefeats of ingenuity. It’s only muchlater, in thenineteenth century, that you see the breakup in-to separate art, natural-history, and technologymuseums. Butin theearlier collections, you hadthe wonders of God spread out there cheek byjowl with the wonders of man, both presented asaspects of the same thing, whichis to say, theWonder of God.”

I asked Walsh about some ofthe relics andbizarre curiosa that used to makeit into those col-lections right alongside the legitimate stuff: thehair from the beard ofNoah,the plank from the

—— 4p Oe

Ark, the woman’s horn. ] mentioned how I alwaysfigured some of those early museum men musthave been being ironical in including them.

“Well,” Walsh said, “there’s a whole big sideindustry in twentieth-century criticism that con-sists primarily of imputing irony to prior ages.

But no, no,I don’t think they were being ironi-cal at all. They were in dead earnest.”

I tried out on Walsh my notion about themetastability of wonder at the Jurassic, with itscorollary about the deliciousness of that frissonbetween wondering-at and wondering-whether,and Walsh interrupted, “All that’s true, thatseems right to me, but you have to understandthatthatdeliciousnessis a distinctly contempo-rary taste. That’s not even modern. NeitherCézanne nor Picasso would haverelatedtoit.

That’s 1980s, maybe even just theNineties.”

Iwas talking with David in the back room ofthemuseum one afternoon on my mostrecentvisit toL.A.It was a weekday—the museum was closed—and our conversation had turned to the subjectofHagop Sandaldjian, a Soviet-Armenian micro-miniaturist sculptor (who'd apparently actuallyexisted, though he’d recently passed away) whoseastonishing lifework, consisting of miniature ren-ditionsof subjects ranging from Snow White and

OF THIS COULD POSSIBLY BE TRUE)

the Seven Dwarfs to Pope John PaulII painstak-ingly suspended in the eye of a needle, had beenthe subject of a recent retrospective at the Juras-sic. Free-associating, | mentioned the cabalisticdoctrine ofthe Thirty-Six Just Men—howat anygiven momentthereare thirty-six ethically justmen in the world, unknown, perhaps, even tothemselves, without whose pillarlike solidity allof Creation could crumble. Maybe, | suggested,there are thirty-six aesthetically just men as well.

David looked at me, authentically noncom-

prehending. “I don’t understandthedifference,”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 canpeel awayvery easily, but the reality behind, onceyou peel away thoserelatively easy layers, is moreamazingstill than anything those initial layers pur-port to be. Thefirst layers are just a filter.”

Hewas quiet another few moments,andjustas surely I could sense thatthe crack wasclosingup once again, the facade of ironylessness re-assertingitself inviolate.

THE VISITOR TO THE MUSEUM SHIMMERS BETWEEN WONDERING-AT

(THE MARVELS OF NATURE) AND WONDERING-WHETHER (ANY

CRITICISM 57


I mentionedthestink ant.“See,” he said, “that’s an example of the thing

aboutlayers. Because at one level, that displayworksas pure information,asjust this incrediblyinteresting case study in symbiosis, one of thoseadaptations so curious and ingenious and won-derful that they almost lead you to question theprinciple of natural selectionitself. Could randommutation through geologic time be enough toaccountfor that and so manysimilar splendors?Nature is more incredible than anything onecan imagine.

“But at another level,” David continued, “wewere drawn to that particular instance because itseemed so metaphorical. That’s one ofour mottoeshere at the museum: UT TRANSLATIO NATURA—

NATURE AS METAPHOR. I mean, there’ve beentimes in my ownlife whenI felt exactly like thatant—impelled,asif possessed, to do things thatdefy all commonsense. Thatantis me. ] couldn’thave summedup my ownlife better if I’d madehim upall by myself.”

“But David,” I wanted to say (and didn’t).“You did make him up all by your-self.”

S..3 after, back homein myoffice, ] had aphone conversation about something entirely dif-ferent with Tom Eisner, the eminent Cornell Uni-versity biologist. In passing I mentioned BernardMaston,the deprong mori, and Donald Griffith—“That’s Griffin,” Eisner interrupted, with an i-n,

not a t-h.” I know,I said, | know. “Funny aboutGriffin,” Eisner continued. “He’s a great scientistand a dearfriend of mine. In fact, years ago, as agraduate student at Harvard, | inherited myfirstlab from him. There was still this wonderful weirdgrid of holes drilled into the walls, holes that hadonce held the anchors onto which he’d attachedthe maze ofwires crisscrossing the room whichformedthe basis for his original research provingthatbats could navigate in the dark. That lab hada marveloushistory. Immediately before Griffin ithad been occupied by Alfred Kinsey, the ento-mologist who did suchterrific groundbreakingwork on reproduction amongthe cynipid wasps—that is, before he abandonedthefield entirely toconcentrate on human sexuality instead.”

I read Eisner some passages from the deprongmori brochure, and he laughed and seemed tolove them. “That’s wonderful,”he said, not theleast bit miffed. “That’s exactly whatit’s likewhen you’re out there in the field and you’refirst encountering some of those marvelouslystrange natural adaptations.Atfirst all you’ve gotis a few disconnected pieces of raw observation,the sheerest glimpses, but you let your mind go,fantasizing the possible connections, projectingthe mostfanciful life cycles. In a way it’s my fa-vorite part ofbeing a scientist—later on, sure, you

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1994

| 1

have to batten things down, contrive morerig-orous hypotheses and the experiments throughwhich to check them out, everything all cleanand careful. But that first take—thosefirst fan-

tasies. Those are the best. And that’s the very spir-it your museum man appears to have captured.Good for him.”

I decided to try the stink ant out on Eisner.

Wait until you hear this, I told him, this one iseven funnier. Whereupon I proceeded to readhim thefirst few paragraphs of this very pieceright off my computer screen. Helistened at-tentively, audibly harrumphing his concurrenceevery few sentences. “Yup,” he said. “Yup. Yup.”

WhenI'dfinished,he said, “So, where’s the joke?All of that stuff is basically true.”

I wasstruck almost speechless. Really?I stam-mered.

“Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know thenames exactly—they’re not precisely myfield,so I’m a little rusty on those ants. But let’s see:Megaloponera foetens, you say? I don’t think Mega-loponera exists, but there is a genus that used togo by the name Megaponera, although—itgets alittle complicated—iately I’m told it’s been fold-ed into another category called Pachycondyla.Andthere is an African ant called Pachycondylaanalis. Foetens is smelly, but analis is even moresmelly. And I believe that that ant does stridu-late—it’s not a cry exactly, but it does produce thisfaint chirping sound. As for whether a Pachy-condyla ingests the spore that way, I’m notsure.But there are several other species that do, someof them right here in the United States. For in-stance, down in Florida there’s an ant—Cam-

ponotus floridanus—that inhales or anywaysomehowtakes in spores of the Cordyceps fungus,and occasionally you will indeed come upon thoseants,far from home,high up the stalk of sometall

blade ofgrass, for instance. Their mandibles willbe clamped onto the blade and they'll be quitedead, a long, thin, curved, pink candlesticklikeprotrusion growing out from their head. Andthat’s the fungus, getting set to shed spores. No,no,”Eisner laughed,delighted. “That’s all true. Justgoes to show: natureis incredible—no way,no waythis couldall have been created in just six days.”(That was great: every bit as wonder-struck asWilson, Eisner had derived exactly the oppositeevolutionary conclusion from the likes of thestink ant.) “In fact,” he continued, “wait a second,I think—yeah—my wife, Maria, and I pho-tographed one of those a while back down inFlorida. You gota fax?”

I gave him the number.“Just a second,” hesaid, and rangoff.Andsure enough,just a few momentslater, a

photo of a dead Camponotus floridanus, his fore-head gloriously rampant, came coursing up from

out of my machine. .
