So. The game is hide-and-seek, and the afternoon is on the wane. We scatter and I run into a vacant lecture hall — which is surely cheating — and up three flights of stairs. At the end of a dim corridor is an unlocked door, and suddenly I find myself standing in a beautiful room, spacious, its ceiling impossibly high — so high it seems the room has its own atmosphere. In fact, the air in that room smells strange, not familiar at all; not quite terrestrial. Recently I came upon an obscure reference to a room where the angels — and I don’t believe in angels — were said to receive their instructions. In my memory, this room seems a likely place. Because I am about to find what I have, unaware, been seeking. It is the one thing each child — the child who has only recently left her tail, her gills behind — seeks. The human child who is always as eager to encounter a turtle as she is a tiger or a triceratops — because she knows (and her knowledge is innate and intimate) that they are all her tribe.
Imagine a vast rectangular room, its west wall taken up with vertiginous windows. In the east the sun hangs high above the roof, and the room is heavy with shadows. The entire east wall is taken up with cabinets fronted with glass; glass spills to the floor like heavy water. The cabinets are old and pocked with bubbles; the glass is of uneven thickness. Like the restless objects of desire that elude Alice’s eyes in the sheep’s shop in Wonderland, the things in the cabinet are both appealing and enigmatic.
The sun slides down a notch and then another. And like an animated ink, the shadows within the cabinet begin to leak; they recede. The sun slides down another notch. Light floods the room and in that white air the objects within the cabinet catch fire. They twinkle.
Now imagine that you see sideral space clearly chartered. It is as if peering down a black hole you see your own face reflected in a pool. The most essential knowledge, until then glimpsed within the candled egg and the jelly jar, perceived but never before truly considered, hangs suspended in an ordered sequence — star after luminous star.
Look: here is the modular chicken, the entire progress of its gestation bared to the eye, and here: a fetal cat in levitation. To the left a single natal lizard, and above, one preliminary lamb. All this announces the greatest treasure of alclass="underline" the dizzying itinerary of the human fetus; it rides the afternoon across an entire shelf. Each and every one of its gestures is expressive and luminous. And we are privileged; we are looking at the alphabet of sparks that spell the world. Some are as mute as water, some hiss like fire, some respire: this is the breath that reconciles water and fire. Here are all the points of departure: an alphabet of eyes, of the organs of speech, the five places of the human mouth, the 231 formations made tangible out of the intangible air. The one name, the one flame that cannot stand still; clairvoyance, the small intestines like seaweed floating toward the beach; the child’s face cut from fresh clay with a knife of green leaves; the lotus flower upon which Buddha sits; a serpent at the world’s edge, the embodiment of time’s passage, the twelve constellations, the twelve organs of the body. All that had been baffling, hermetic, unfolds, exquisitely palpable. And we know, without a doubt, that the ark is contained within each of us.
Like the things in the cabinet, the experience of that afternoon is not static but mutable. It is active and provides for infinite permutations. Effortless, it propels itself into the future, informing, precipitating what is to come. It is a potency that, ever after, heightens a certain kind of experience, a way of seeing and so of being. The lucent cabinet of wonders is emblematic of all optical delight — the cinema, for example, where, if the film is a good one, one shares an experience of profound intimacy in the dark with perfect strangers. And those antique pleasures that — should one be of a certain temperament — persist: the wistful stereopticon with its sepia views of vanished cities, the magic lantern, whose evening projections on the kitchen wall offer recollections of a planet as green as a freshly hatched garden snake. Need I mention objective hazards: the anamorphoses that suddenly ignite a shop window in the rain, and this just after one has been introduced to them in Baltrušaitis’s magical book. And I recall one unforgettable and consummately Parisian day in which four museums offered a seemingly inexhaustible bouquet of consecutive hasards objectifs: first, at the Jardin botanique, plants that look like minerals; then in the Galerie de Minéralogie, minerals behaving like trees; after, across the street, in the Galerie de Zoologie, animals imitating flowers; and finally, in the Louvre, a pharaonic planter in the shape of Osiris, in which the god, greening, is made eternal.
Recently I returned to the Natural History Museum in New York City to roam through the halls I have loved since infancy. The museum’s theaters of nature are famous for their rigorous beauty and because they conjure the dynamic and even thoughtful intimacy of creatures within their worlds. Carefully assembled, they convey a palpable tenderness for their subjects and offer, as if seized in clear ice, a glimpse of Eden, that rich domain. They remind us that our supposed separateness from nature is the most impoverished of illusions. These days, the visit evokes the morgue because so many of these marvelous creatures have been pushed over the edge into oblivion. And even if we manage to clone them and bring their bodies back, still they will be nothing more than the living dead, burglarized out of context, of substance, of meaning.
One could say that it is a human practice to obscure the things one loves. Consider the Dutchman Van Heurnis, who depleted entire countries of moles. He was — and the words belong to Stephen Jay Gould—“a hyperacquisitive finder” and “a meticulous keeper.” His collections of small mammals could be mistaken for stashes of rundown bedroom slippers, but apparently they satisfied Van Heurnis’s unbridled curiosity — which was admirable, his very human delight in order, the mammal’s need for satiety; in other words: a full larder.
There is another aspect to this collection: those things Van Heurnis had no time to catalog, like this uncurated jar. Here the photographer has prodded the anomalous apple so that it bobs besides the serpent’s ravening mouth. The ravening mouth is essential. After all, the salutary serpent will not allow us to settle into the dotage of complacency and demands that we question the necessity of our proliferating body bags and bloody chambers. In other words, he continues to infect us with the salutary venom of disobedience.
In Rosamond Purcell’s photograph, each element is the child of shadow and light; the jar offers a glimpse of the terrestrial stew, an emblematic and cosmological cookery: a fetal pig, moles, mice, a snake, a doubled apple, cat guts, a slug, a frog, a toad. . The jar is a celebration not only of subversion, but its snake and its apple have all to do with domesticity. For if Eve broke the rules, her other intention was to keep a garden. And if the apple is the one she bakes into a pie, it is also the one that poisons Snow White and renders her comatose. Here in this jar, roiling with things and the shadows of things, is the theater of our private dilemma: how to sip the salutary venom that inspires an unfettered individuality, a fearless vitality and sexuality, yet aspire to domestic bliss, the larder replete with bread and beasts, the bedroom secure?
The household? Or the dance of light and shade? The apple not for cookery but witchery? Purcell’s doubled apple mirrors our inherent duality; the light and shadow within us is as closely joined as this kitchen monster in its keeping medium is twinned.