Thou shalt not touch.

“This Space is Still Evolving” exhibition plaque at the Creation Museum. Wait a minute. Shouldn’t it be “This Space is Still Being Intelligently Designed?”

According to the Creation Museum which opened in northeast Kentucky close to Cincinnati in late May,

• a fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming (”Last Supper of a Perch”…) offers “silent testimony to God’s judgement” - because the two fish perished during Noah’s flood, somehow getting preserved in stone. In fact, all fossils are relics of that divine retribution.
• the waters of Noah’s flood carved the Grand Canyon within days.
• the reason why chameleons change colours is “to talk to other chameleons and to show off their mood.”
• before the fall, Adam and Eve lived happily with dinosaurs and lions in paradise - all animals were herbivores and only became predators in answer to primal sin. “In a sin-cursed world, most sharks consume swimming creatures, so their teeth are designed to prevent captured animals from escaping.”
• the reason why the Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs is that they really are dragons, renamed only 130 years ago. Dragons and dinosaurs are but one.

It’s obvious, isn’t it.

What I find really worrying is that apparently the exhibition design must be spectacular, leaving even the biggest sceptics utterly impressed and making institutions such as the Natural History Museum London look rather dull. It was created by Patrick Marsh who also designed the Jaws and King Kong attractions at Universal Studios in Florida (though personally, the Jaws sharks are far too obviously papier-maché to make me jump…). Furthermore, one cannot help admiring the fundraising politics, leaving the $27m project completely debt-free upon opening.

On the other hand it’s somewhat reassuring to see that founder Ken Ham’s claims that the museum considers both sides, intelligent design and evolution, prove untenable even upon superficial examination. The fact that the website section What people are saying gives exactly one viewpoint, unsurprisingly that of a hard-core creationist, speaks volumes.

An attractive place? Maybe.
A place that presents the truth? No comment. Don’t get me started.
A place that welcomes debate? Definitely not.

See here for a well-researched review and here for a funny photo set.

Enjoy uncertainty.

“Enjoy uncertainty.”
iPod shuffle banner on John Rylands Library Deansgate, Manchester, during construction work.

I came across this photograph today and couldn’t help overinterpreting: the iPod as a collection of songs mirroring the collection of books that is the library, whereby the randomness of the shuffle mode, its undermining of taxonomy and order, corresponds with the precariousness of a collection that is being re-organised (see the scaffolding).

I also thought, while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius. It succinctly captures the nature of random song choice: unpredictability and the pleasure afforded by the element of chance and surprise. I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterised by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.

Passing the threshold.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, sans titre
(photograph from André Breton’s collection).

You’re leaving your house every morning, light-hearted, untroubled, unaware that the small step across the threshold might entail any hazards. If you don’t want this to change, stop reading.

Stop right here, right now.

[...] the most dangerous moment of the day is when you open the door in the morning. Indeed, the house was closed off all night; it was isolated from the rest of the world, from the free-floating air, from the cold, from light. The door was like a watertight lock sealing the threshold. You should therefore open it with infinite care, slowly, inching your way forward, avoiding to cause the slightest current of air. As soon as it stands wide open, you should spit onto the gaping aperture, constantly murmuring soothing words, and eventually, with the greatest ease, pass the threshold while firmly looking ahead.

Passage from a dictionary entry on threshold, composed by French anthropologist Marcel Griaule and published in Documents, the journal run by “dissident” Surrealist Georges Bataille in 1929/30.

Don’t say no one has warned you. Reading this, you just passed the threshold. Congratulations, you’re brave and your curiosity led you to increasing your knowledge. You might even smile or shake your head in disbelief. But you’ll pay the price. Tomorrow I’ll catch you carefully sneaking out your front door, holding your breath, surreptitiously glancing around.

Calke Abbey

The owners of Calke Abbey in Derbyshire (visited with A. and I. yesterday) were hoarders. The male members of the Harpur Crewe family, who moved into the country house in 1622 and stayed for nearly 350 years before donating it to the National Trust, were avid collectors who obviously loathed throwing anything away. The National Trust decided to preserve the property and the collection of curiosites it houses in its original state, thus allowing fascinating insights into both life in the Victorian period and a collector’s mindset.

It might have been the rain and cold intensifying the sombre atmosphere of an era, a house and a family in decline, but if you’ve got a penchant for places soaked with melancholy and nostalgia, you should definitely visit.

Royal Worcester figure of a pug dog in the Entrance Hall, its broken leg propped up with a matchbox.

Bird display in the Drawing Room.

Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe’s Bedroom, left in the state in which it was found by the National Trust in 1985, complete with hunting trophies and collections of shells and fossils.

The Saloon served as a private museum of souvenirs and natural curiosities such as a crocodile’s skull (brought back from Egypt in 1870) and display cases crammed with stones, fossils, sea shells and stuffed animals.

Dome of taxidermied mice.

Ostrich egg, silver-mounted and decorated with boar’s tusks, given to Richard Fynderne Harpur Crewe by his Great Uncle Richard as a christening present in 1880 - instead of the traditional silver spoon or teething ring.

Hôtel des étincelles

“It is the hour when the polar bear with the highly intelligent look Stretches himself and counts a day”
Mark Dion, Ursus Maritimus Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa.

Hotel of Sparks
by André Breton

The philosophical butterfly
Alights on the rosy star
And that makes a window in hell
The masked man is still standing in front of the naked woman
Whose hair glides like in the morning the light on a streetlamp that has not been extinguished
The learned furniture urges on the room that juggles
With its rose-windows
Its circular sunbeams
Its glass mouldings
Within which a geometric sky is turning blue
In memory of the inimitable breast
Now the cloud of a garden passes over the head of the man who has just sat down
And is cutting in two the woman with the bust of magic and the Parma eyes
It is the hour when the polar bear with the highly intelligent look
Stretches himself and counts a day
On the other side the rain rears up on the boulevards of a big city
Rain in fog with trails of sunlight on red flowers
Rain and the diabolo of bygone times
The legs under the cloud of fruit take a turn round the glasshouse
All you can see now is a very white hand its pulse marked by two tiny wings
The pendulum of absence swings between the four walls
Cleaving heads
From which escape bands of kings who immediately make war on one another
Until turquoise at the bottom of the cups
The oriental eclipse
Reveals the equilateral bed whose sheets are the color of guelder-roses
The charming side table the torn curtains
Close to a little book scrawled with these words No Tomorrow
Whose author bears a curious name
In the obscure codes of the earth

From André Breton, Selected Poems, trans. Kenneth White, Jonathan Cape: London, 1969.

Codex Seraphinianus

Eye-fish. Or fish-eyes? From Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.

Names that keep cropping up when it comes to alternative modes of classification and encyclopaedic thinking include Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and, above all, Jorge Luis Borges. A strong contender for breaking up this triumvirate could be Roman architect and graphic artist Luigi Serafini, author of a very rare and mysterious book with the title Codex Seraphinianus, first published in 1981. Serafini created an encyclopaedia of an imaginary universe in the style of Borges’s Encyclopaedia of Tlön, complete with drawings, charts and graphs as well as undecipherable lists, explanations and captions in fictive lettering.

My first reactions to reading about it in this online article were:

1. It’s definitely intriguing. Wonder is just one click away. But although googling it up may be quick and convenient, it can only be an unsatisfactory substitute for holding a real copy in your hands, leafing through it, throwing it on a dusty pile of books, picking it up again, earmarking your favourite passages and passing it around.

2. Since existing editions and re-editions are extremely limited (amazon sells copies starting from $550), how much of the book’s fascination is due to its rarity, and how does its availability on the Internet (or access to information on it) change this?

3. The cover image of a couple that makes love and successively metamorphoses into an alligator sends shivers down my spine - but of the very unpleasant kind. Wonder might be a mixture of awe and uneasiness, but sometimes the uneasiness gets the better of you.

4. “Discover for yourself, reader, such wonders as the purple-caged citrus, the spider-web flower, the parfait protea, and the ladder weed. This is a world inhabited by weird half-sentient flora such as the tadpole tree and the meteor-fruit, by the lacy flying-saucer fish, the wheeled caterpillar-rumped horse, and the metamorphic bicranial rhino.” Excuse me, but the first thing that comes to my mind is a Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures class at Hogwarts.

Shuffle and Reshuffle

I don’t know yet what to make of it, but a tiny piece of information on one of the Mark Dion exhibition wall panels caught my attention: Linnaeus was the first botanist to use herbarium sheets. Before, the dried plants destined to become type specimens were glued to a sheet of stiff card - often different specimens on a single sheet - and then bound into a book. Introducing loose sheets, however, allowed Linnaeus to gradually reorganise, reclassify and add to the collection as new species or new information about existing species were discovered.

Picture: Herbarium sheet that Carolus Linnaeus used to describe the plant Hyoscyamus physalodes (Species Plantarum, 1753).