February 2009

Many people have concocted theories about what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is all about.  Yesterday, I overheard a new one in the museum’s tea room by none other than the actor James Cromwell.

When I first saw Cromwell, I’m afraid I did a rather obvious double-take.  I was sitting at a table in the tea room, a couple of impenetrable essays on geology in front of me, while my stepfather, Peter, who was visiting from Sacramento and had never seen the Museum, explored the galleries downstairs.  The MJT is a must-see for my out-of-town guests.

When Cromwell walked in, he had to duck to get through the doorway.

As usually happens when I notice a celebrity in Los Angeles, I recognized the  face, but not the fame.  This man, kindly and professorial, looked like someone I knew, and I seemed to remember having had a conversation with him sometime in the past.  I opened my mouth to ask him whether he’d taught a creative writing class at the University of Alabama, and then shut my mouth when I realized I was ogling a movie star.  Hastily, I went back to my reading.

Cromwell left, and Peter returned.  My intrepid stepfather had only been gone half an hour or so, but already he looked like he’d had enough of the place.  He explained that he’d been lost in the Delani/Sonnabend exhibit on memory and the cone of obliscence.  I could relate; I’ve been lost in that exhibit too, and it’s a lot like slogging through a geologist’s paper on anorthosite-syenite intrusions and igneous bodies of the gabbro-granite series.  “What did the opera singer have to do with the collapsing bridge?” muttered Peter.  “I mean, is this stuff for real?”

Fortunately, most of the other exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology are not so mind-numbing.  I asked him if he’d seen the miniature compositions made out of the scales from insect wings.  “No,” said Peter, brightening a little. What about the mobile home exhibit, or the rotten luck dice, or the letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, or the halls of folk remedies?  Enthusiasm rekindled, Peter got to his feet.  Before I could mention Napoleon in the eye of a needle, he was already on his way back to the galleries.

I had another cup of tea from the Russian samovar, and as the semi-functional fountain in the tea room gurgled, I read about geological provinces and strike slip fault zones.  It struck me that trying to understand how each chunk of rock came to land in its current home after eons of colliding and pulling apart and running up against molten lava, was a lot like staring into a bowl of cake batter and trying to deduce exactly where each grain of sugar had originated, and which movements of the spoon had resulted in its current position.

This is what geologists do.  But what for?  To predict earthquakes, I suppose.  To give us a head-start on the next Big One, hopefully in time to get out of the way.  Makes sense, but safety seems like a lackluster reason for all this exhaustive investigation.

Cromwell came back to the tea room, this time with two boys and a girl in their late teens or early twenties, presumably his kids.  They sat at the table right behind me.  (There are only a few tables in the tea room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)  I tried hard to mind my own business, but I couldn’t help listening in as Cromwell tried to explain the museum to his confused companions.

In our culture, he said, in science, we delve into our subjects with ever greater specificity, trying to get a handle on the universe.  We analyze data and invent microscopes and follow our theories further and further into the far reaches of complexity.  Native cultures, on the other hand, don’t do that.  They reduce things to their essence, to simple stories, and that’s how they find meaning in the world.

“Which is better?” Cromwell asked his kids.  Silence.

“The Museum of Jurassic Technology demonstrates just how little you know when you know too much,” enthused Cromwell.  “Our way of shaving the onion leads to this hilarious bizarreness, these endless details, but does it give us a greater understanding of the universe?  Isn’t it best to embrace the mystery?”

“Okay,” said one of the boys.  “But how much of that story about the bat is really true?”

He was referring to an exhibit detailing the discovery of Myotis lucifugus, a species of bat that had supposedly fine-tuned its echo-location so exactly that it could fly, unharmed, right through the flesh of the tribes people in the jungles of South America.  The temptation to explain that Myotis lucifugus is actually the Latin name for the Little Brown Bat, the most widespread species of bat in North America, was great.  But I resisted.

I went back to my studies.  Even though the lexicon of geology is a pain, there’s a beauty in all the compulsive detail, something sublime in following fault lines to the edge of sense, just as the disintegrating dice lovingly arranged in their lit display boxes, and the roomful of dizzying logic alphabet diagrams, and the paintings done with the scales from insect wings that you squint at through a microscope in the Museum of Jurassic Technology are chillingly beautiful and strange. Funding for studies in plate tectonics may be given for some logical purpose like predicting the next big earthquake, but I’m pretty sure that geologists do it because it’s fascinating.

Peter came back to the tea room.  He sat down and then saw the celebrity behind me.  “Hey, did you see…?”  I made frantic shushing gestures, not wanting to make a second scene.

Peter sat back in his chair.  “Well,” he said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that everything in here is real and true after all.”

“Did you see the exhibit on the bat that can fly through solid objects?” I asked.

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