~
Hard Shells
I’ve lived three minutes away from The Museum of Jurassic Technology for my entire life, but visited for the first time with Isaac a year and a half ago.
It makes sense that he took me here on our first date. By senior year, I’d developed a habit of canceling plans with friends (we’d probably run out of things to talk about and would end up staring past one another in silence), but with Isaac, this was never a worry. We had too much to say to one another, eventually squeezing potential conversation topics into a series of lists that never actually got shorter. We bonded over our shared love for books, desire to learn useless information, and need to discuss death and burial practices at parties (which tends to fall flat in most social scenes). I found it endearing that he refused to use Y’s (they weren’t aesthetically pleasing) and that he had a tortoise named Nellie (notice the lack of Y).
The museum is relatively small, hidden between a yoga center and Thai restaurant in the Los Angeles neighborhood Palms. It is marked only by an unassuming steel door and wall-mounted fountain (which has always been dry, at least in the times I’ve visited). Visitors discover fairly quickly that its name is misleading for two reasons. The first being that museum feels like a strong word for what could more accurately be described as a curiosity cabinet,1 and the second being that Jurassic Technology implies a focus on both the Jurassic period and technology itself, neither of which the place really involves. Rather, all two floors and 1,200 square feet of the building are crammed with exhibits like Tell the Bees (a collection of obscure folk remedies) and Fruit-Stone Carvings (the name is literal). The second floor leads visitors to a functional tea room and outdoor garden populated by white doves.
On the day of our visit, I drove past the museum three times before I located it, only because I saw Isaac sitting out front below the empty fountain.
Like the rest of the museum, the lobby is dimly lit and crowded with seemingly-unrelated objects and documents. We both had to blink a few times as we walked through the door. An agoraphobe’s nightmare, the term “cabinet” really does feel fitting for the tightly-packed space. It gives off the impression that nothing has changed since David Wilson opened it in 1988, though the cost of admission rose from the original $2.50 to $5 by the day of our visit.
Upon entering the space, visitors are silently asked to suspend disbelief. This is not a typical museum, where curators play the role of Virgil, guiding others on paths toward knowledge and understanding. Fiction clings to fact; confusion is encouraged. The planning of the museum itself reflects this uncertainty, with no recognizable paths or obvious direction for its layout. It at once manages to feel large and unknowable, and tiny. Each corner seems to lead to another, and then another, until the visitor ends up either completely lost, or exactly where they started.
Isaac and I separately wandered around the structure for awhile, until we met again in front of an exhibit on a man named Athanasius Kircher, called The World is Bound with Secret Knots. We sat down on a wooden bench just wide enough to match the width of the TV screen less than a foot away from our faces. First we heard Greek… or German… or… English… and then a mix of all three competing for attention over a video. The obnoxious combination of sounds seemed to kill the potential of absorbing information about this man’s life, along with whatever focus my overwhelmed brain tried to give him. Amidst the chaos, Isaac put his arm around me for the first time, and I noticed my breathing slow as I felt his fleece on my shoulder. I let myself forget about Athanasius Kircher for the time being.
I was confused by the exhibit, but I’m guessing this was the point. Wilson’s employees have been instructed not to answer visitors’ most frequently asked questions about the museum, like what is this? and broadly, why? No matter how many times I visited the museum after this first time, I always left the building more confused than when I’d arrived, unsure of what I’d learned, or if I’d learned at all. Only in researching Kircher later that night did I learn that he was German, but lived in Rome for most of his life. With 760+ correspondents across the world, including scientists, Jesuit missionaries, and international rulers, he seemed to be representative of learning, curiosity, and intellectual connection itself in the 17th century.
The hard shell of certainty can be shattered, and once that certainty is shattered, then I feel people are more open to broader influences.
–David Wilson
Kircher doesn’t seem so different from founder David Wilson himself, who believes that confusion in learning leads to curiosity and creativity. Knowing this about Wilson now, I envision him smiling to himself as I sat down at my desk that night to research Kircher. I imagine that this was precisely his goal for visitors: to engage us in our own learning, to overload us with information and provide a foundation for personal inquiry, and allow us to see what sticks after our visits are over. Even more significantly to me at the time, he provided Isaac and me with the platform on which we developed the rest of our relationship: one that was built on shared knowledge and curiosity.
I think the MacArthur Foundation understood the significance of this feeling when they awarded Wilson a Fellowship (a.k.a. a genius grant) in 2001. Upon granting Wilson the award, the Foundation commented on his ability to simultaneously bring out the fragility of our beliefs and the remarkable potential of the human imagination.
We imagined how furious Napoleon Bonaparte would be at an exhibit in which his body was the size of a needle head, and watched a 3D video of the moon in a theater with 4×5 ft. framed paintings of the Dogs of the Soviet Space Program. Isaac attempted to kiss me in that room, but quickly realized that 3D glasses are impractical, and the bizarre barking sounds of Laika the Russian space dog don’t scream romance.
Space dogs as my witnesses, he turned to me. It’s funny, because all my other friends in relationships never have anything to do… but we almost have too much to do.
I thought about that statement far past that day, for a much longer time than I want to admit. I simultaneously hoped it meant something to him and wondered what that something might be. Now I wish I had said anything then – even simply asked what he meant by relationship – but I didn’t, because I was afraid to ask for too much, to lock myself into the folder labeled burden, to read into what I assumed was a throwaway statement, or worse, allow him to think it mattered.
Instead, I pointed to the pin-sized dog to my left and said, This place is a “Black Mirror” episode. Or, like… Narnia. He laughed, but I wasn’t that far-off.
As we walked out into the real word on the day of our first date, I silently commended Isaac for his choice, and marveled at how quickly time had passed (indicated by the parking ticket on my windshield). No matter where else we went, I always compared it to the museum. I’d hoped we’d go back at some point, and we did, though not in the way I had imagined.
Visitors often find it hard to determine where they are supposed to go next; at the same time, as they trace their unique, convoluted paths through the museum, they lose track of where they have been (Jansen 132).
The next time we visited was almost seven months later, and we had only just started talking again. This came after months of one-sided silence, and hours spent waiting for him to explain why he’d suddenly fallen out of touch in the middle of what I’d thought was a relationship (though I got pretty good at second-guessing myself around him). I laughed off my friends’ concerns, simultaneously ashamed of my inability to confront him and proud to stick out the shattering of my own shell of certainty. I knew David Wilson would laugh at my wish for simplicity, so I ignored it. The museum had taught me well.
On that second visit, we discovered an exhibit on the history of cat’s cradles on the second floor. I read a description of the International String Figure Association and its myriad of members. I noticed someone had laid out loops of string for visitors to manipulate, and when I looked around, saw that the walls were covered in detailed diagrams of potential figures.
The game is one of sequence, and I read that partners were supposed to take turns building on one another’s constructions. I hoped we would capitalize on this partner aspect, but the thought of asking to do it together seemed like an unnecessary profession of need. We ended up with a few feet between us, each focused on moving our own hands through individual infinite strings. Each diagram I followed led to the next like a rabbit hole of linked Wikipedia pages, but seemed one or two details short of actually guiding me in my game.
I eventually ended up glaring at the knotted clump of string in front of me, but looked to my right to find Isaac seven diagrams ahead of where I’d given up, entrenched in his own cradle.
When he untangled himself and we went downstairs, we stood next to one another, reading an information plaque on the wall in a room full of “Letters to Santa Claus.” He was close enough to me that the fleece of the same red and blue sweatshirt from our first date would get in the way of the words, and I had to reach over and pull his arm away so I could read them. Each time he leaned over, I closed my eyes to breathe in the calming, familiar smell of his fleece, until a voice in my head appeared, as if to say, remember how much you’ll hate yourself for this.
Surrounded by the museum’s dim chaos, we never had to talk about things like why he’d occasionally stop talking to me for months at a time, why any conversation about us left me with more confusion than clarity, why I never knew how he might feel about me on a given day, and why it was my responsibility to guess. Even when I wanted to talk about those things, there wasn’t time amidst the all-consuming overload of information with which we were presented.
Each time we re-entered the world as the cabinet doors closed behind us, I got the sense that our allotted time was up. I had never quite said what I’d wanted to, but would have to try again some
other time.
*Thought I should note that I changed the name of the other person for privacy.
1. A pre-museum format for people to display their collections of artifacts in the 16th-18th centuries.
(editor’s note, if you clicked the link in the text to get here, clicking ‘back’ will return you to where you were in the story when you clicked the superscript 1)
Sources
Blitz, Matt. “Inside Los Angeles’s Strangest Museum.” Smithsonian.com , Smithsonian
Institution, 31 Mar. 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/inside-las-strangest-museum-180954803/.
“David Wilson.” RSS , 1 Oct. 2001, www.macfound.org/fellows/678/.
Isay, David. “Museum of Jurassic Technology.” All Things Considered , 6 Dec. 1996.
Wharton, David. “Weird Science : Palms’ Quirky Museum of Jurassic Technology Offers
Curioser and Curioser Displays, Likely to Prompt More Questions than They Answer.”
Los Angeles Times , Los Angeles Times, 31 Dec. 1989 www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-31-ca-109-story.html.
Jansen, Robert S. “Jurassic Technology? Sustaining Presumptions of Intersubjectivity in a Disruptive Environment.” Theory and Society , vol. 37, no. 2, 2008, pp. 127–159. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40211031. Accessed 6 Mar. 2020.
~
Rachel Carlson
Rachel Carlson is a third-year student at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. She studies English and Cognitive Neuroscience, with a focus on how writing and audio storytelling can help us understand the ways in which our brains and inner lives shape the outer world, and vice versa. You can find her on Twitter @_rachelcarlson .