Report from Santa Fe; Lawrence Weschler

You You You You

Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico An organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills, and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is author a extraordinary Lawrence Wessler. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Well, you're here. You are the keynote speaker for art Santa Fe. You are a very brilliant and gifted writer. You were with the New Yorker for 20 years. You've written for the New York Review of Books, many other magazines, but also tell us a little some of your other more administrative projects. Well, I was indeed at the New Yorker for 20 years. I quit about 10 years ago to become the head of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. And at the same time for the last five years, I've been running the Chicago Humanities Festival. I've been the artistic director there.

I'm just retiring from that. But anyway, I'm also a contributing editor at McSweeney's. I'm a curator at their DVD Quarterly Wolf on. I'm a contributing editor at three penny review, Virginia Quarterly Review, various places. But so I have different hats and different mischief. And under those hats is quite the brain who has received many, many awards. You've got two poke awards for cultural reporting and magazine reporting the Lan and Literary Award. And your books have gotten wonderful awards. But I'd like to say that the Atlantic in describing you said that your entire body of work contains the disquieting strangeness that lurks at the heart of human experience. Yeah. So your books, my friend Ian Frazier said the wonder of everything that can't be known for sure. That is wonderful.

Your books cannot be categorized. You call them creative nonfiction. But let's just, let's just go through our audience to see some of these. I love this book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Absolutely delightful. We'll talk about it more later. Secondly, and it, by the way, got the, you are a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. And also you were shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for that. This one also everything that rises a book of convergences, national critics award finalists. Look at the title of this seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. This is based on 30 years of conversations with the artist Robert Irwin. And then 25 years of conversations with David Hockney. This one is called True to Life. And soon we'll be celebrating the release of a new book that's not out yet called Uncanny Valley Adventures in the Narrative. So you've been busy. But when you say you go to books or to find your books and and what you found Mr. Wilson in psychedelia.

Well, what's what happens with my books is interesting and it's an issue palm I have with bookstores. I think of my writing when I teach a course in doing this kind of writing I call it writerly nonfiction, which is to say nonfiction in which you write as though the reading matter and you read as if the writing matter. And there's a bunch of us who do that. And it seems to me that the proper place to put us is under literature. I mean where they put other pieces of writing. But instead in most bookstores in nonfiction they do it by topic or they spread it out. And and and a lot of my stuff precisely nobody knows where to put. So that Mr. Wilson's cabinet of wonder which was a portrait of the museum of Jurassic technology in Los Angeles, which is a real place. My favorite description of it somebody reviewed it as a work of magic realist nonfiction.

Oh, isn't that one because you don't really know where you stand with it as you're as you're reading it, which is much of what happens when you go to the museum in Culver City. But the result is that it ends up being a meditation on or there's a series of trap doors in the text. And and I like that feeling of vertigo where suddenly everything falls away and you don't know quite where you are. But but it ends up being a meditation on museum ship on the history museums on what museums mean where they came from and it goes all the way back to the origins of museums and wonder cabinets. But try to explain that to a bookseller and it ends up in new age. And it was frustrating me is that for example that is very consciously a book that is paired with another book called Boggs, a comedy of values, which does for money what that book does for museums. The typeface is the same, the design is the same, but they're never side by side. The Boggs book, which is about an artist who spends his drawings. And anyway, he that book is usually under economics if you if you anywhere. And so what happens is that the kind of connections, which is all about what my work is about gets lost.

I once had a discussion with a with an independent bookstore and I said, you know, there is a book store that knows how to do this alas in its Amazon. And there's all all the stuff is in one place under your name, which is but but but they say, well, how are we supposed to do this? Well, you know, it's hard, but that's what you do. That's why you have a new inventor book store inside, you know, what is what is worth it should be. Well, you talk about the trap doors, but in in there's another way of saying it that that in Mr. Wilson's cabinet of wonders, we must be led from familiar objects toward unfamiliar objects, guided along a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life. Maybe that's a little easier than the trap doors, but it is truly trap doors. That comes from the characterization that David Wilson, the founder of the museum technology himself has. You can be walking down the street in Culver City in Los Angeles, and I urge you to do so the next time you're there, and you'll see a pip printing and a carpet store and abandoned real estate office in the museum of Jurassic technology and a Thai restaurant and a and an auto loop place and an in an out burger and then you say, what, what's that you go back and there is a storefront museum that you walk in.

And it's dark inside and it is like a you fall through a trap door into like the old museum with glass fee trains and and panels and so forth beautifully maintained. Filled with stuff that's just absolutely incredible, unbelievable things, human horns, and also sorts of things where you aren't quite sure this is true. I mean, one of my favorite exhibits very early on is of protective auditory mimicry and it shows a iridescent beetle and iridescent stone. And the caption says the beetle has learned to make the same sound when threatened with the stone makes at rest. What is that? That I know one of your favorite things. You find a display of each train of a diorama of the jungle, a little short diorama of leaves and there's an ant with a spike coming out of its head and this is and you pick up the sound, there's a little phone jack and it's the voice of institutional authority.

That voice you recognize from every museum acoustic guide and the voice says that you're looking at the Camerunian sting can to one of the few ants whose who scream is audible to the human here. And that these ants are very industrious in West Africa and every once in a while one of these ants will inadvertently inhale a spore of a fungus that's ringing down from somewhere in the canopy above. So they are naturally floored wellers? Well, I mean, well, we don't know what we do. If you happen to be at antilevel when this happened, you'd see a look of stupa faction come over the ant's face because indeed the spore has already lodged in its brain and begins to foment bizarre behavioral changes. For the first time in its life, the ant leaves its industrious work and starts climbing the hanging tendrils of vines and reach the prescribed height and and and impales its mandibles on the vine and waits to die because indeed the spore is eating up his entire nervous system.

Two weeks after it dies, a prong erupts from out of its forehead, heavy laden with spores which now rain down on the forest floor for other ants to inhale. So you're listening to this and you go, okay, you put that down and I once asked David the founder of the museum, you know, is this true? I mean, where'd you hear about this? He says, oh, yes, yes, I heard about it on a nature special. I said, do you have that? He said, no, we lost that and so everything is going to loss. You don't quite know whether it's true or not. It turns out in this case, by the way, that's entirely true. The thing about the museum address technology is that everything in it, no matter how unbelievable is true, sorta. Kind of. I mean, there's the slippage happening everywhere. Well, you even quote Mr. Wilson himself, he says his task is to reintegrate people to wonder.

And you're wondering, you go from wondering at the marvels of nature to wondering whether this is even true, but that's the fundamental of all discovery. And that creates a shimmer, that resonance, a shimmer and a shiver between, is it the wonder of the mysteries of life and the wonder is could this possibly? And that's, by the way, at the heart of all science. I mean, that moment when you're doing, when you discover weird or one of the things and come up with strange hypotheses about it, and then the boring part is you have to nail it down and so forth and then duplicate it. Right, but that first moment is at the core of human experience. Yeah. And David gets at that wonderfully. Well, we don't get enough of that. I would like, you know, really that we could all be reintegrated to wonder. I think your daughter referred to your kind of associative thinking as loose synapses? Yeah, she, I think I was telling the other day, I tell you a story about how when I graduated from college, we had a family friend who was a shrink and he gave me a battery of tests to figure out what I should do with my life.

Including the Rorschach test and he subsequently told me that they grade that on different things, but on erotic imagery and assertiveness and shyness and so forth. But one of the things they graded on is general free associative tendencies. And he afterwards, two weeks later, told me that I was so far off the charts, none of his colleagues had never seen a number like this. And this was not going to be good for me. And my daughter to this day regularly will be heard from the other room saying, oh, Daddy's going into another one of his loose synapse moments. Or she calls it a neurological virtue. Oh, it is. It is. Yeah, Daddy. It is one of your neurological virtues. She rolls her eyes. Did she inherit that from you? She has a bit of it.

You have said that what unites you writing is that it is about people in places that catch fire that you are talking about. People who are people or places that were just buzzing along in the everydayness of their lives. And suddenly from one minute to the next caught fire. And then some were all together different than they thought. I mean, when you see this, a lot of my writings are political. We can talk about that at all. I've written about Paul one and about Torch and about America and South Africa and Iraq and Bosnia and so forth. But what a lot of those places have in common is that suddenly the places caught fire. And people took off and people became very active. When I was covering solidarity, they used to speak of solidarity as an expression of the subjectivity of the Polish nation. Which meant it's capacity to act as the subject of history instead of the object of history. That Poland had always been the object of other people's histories. And now suddenly they were in the subject of their own history. It's a grammatical transformation. And that's true all over the place in the Middle East right now, the Egyptian Spring and so forth. What happens when repression happens is you're taking people who have started acting like subjects and trying to turn them back into objects.

And resistance is the refusal to have that happen. So that's on the political side. But it can also happen in individuals' lives. And when it happens in individual lives, David Wilson or some of the other people I profile, bogs this money artist who suddenly starts completely goes off the rails. That by the way is the origin of the word delirium is to go off the road. Delirium to today and people who become in a certain sense off the rails. It can be very funny and also very profound. And so my work goes back and forth between those kinds of things. But the theme that they have in common is indeed people catching fire. Well, I'd like to go on, you talked about the resonances that come up with the, by the way, what does it mean, the Museum of Jurassic Technology? Yeah, what does it mean?

Yeah, okay. But well, you go there, you find out. This other award-winning and very popular fascinating book is called Everything That Rises, a Book of Convergences. I know Flannery O'Connor had the short story called Everything That Rises Much Must Converge. And I've heard that that is actually a resonance of TRD shared in. Exactly, exactly. She got that from him. And in my case, what I'd been doing, there's a whole part of my work, which is where I, from that free associate of craziness, my loose synapses. I tend to often see things matching up that you wouldn't otherwise necessarily see. Think of, you know, I had one point, for example, Jackson Pollock Paintings from 1952, and then you look at Time Life Books of Galaxies and Collision. And it's exactly the same imagery from 1952, or for example, well, the origin of this for me in some sense, or the thing that gave me permission to do it is that John Berger, the great, great grandfather of Saul, the man who did the film, ways of seeing in response to kind of clock civilization series. And he's my great master, but, but he years ago at the time that Shay was killed.

You remember that incredible photograph of Shay? Well, let's just actually take a moment to look at it. So that, that when people first saw that photograph of Shay, many pictures were taken that day of Shay's corpse laid out in front of the generals who captured him. And, but that was the picture that every newspaper used. And John Berger shortly after wrote a piece where he said, we all know what this photograph is based on. The image that was hot-wired in people's brains that taught the generals where to stand and taught the photographer where to take the picture from. This is obviously based on Rembrandt's anatomy lesson. And so we look at Rembrandt's anatomy lesson. And I remember reading that and saying to myself, this guy looks at the newspaper differently than I look at the newspaper. This is a very interesting way to look at the newspaper. And it becomes extremely interesting because in turn, Rembrandt's anatomy lesson clearly is referring to many images of the deposition of Christ, such as Montenna's famous image where you see the feet and up front. And, and, and, and that in turn helps, helps you understand why you see those Shay pictures all over the, the Shay t-shirts.

This has nothing to do with the politics. This is just the way in which pictures prepare the way for other pictures that we, that, that we see the world constantly in terms of all the things we've already seen. So that when you see that picture of Shay, you have that association even subliminally to Rembrandt and through Rembrandt back to the Christ story. And then suddenly Shay becomes martyred in a particular way and there's a resurrection in the life and you suddenly see those t-shirts all over the place. I, I talk about the way that a Shay had been, had been clean shaven that day and I have a show of photograph of a guy who's clean shaven. None of this would have happened. It would have, you wouldn't have had that resonance and that photograph turns out to be a picture of Shay himself in disguise as an Argentinian businessman on his way to the, for his passport photo on the way to the Africa. But, but it's absolutely clear to me that it is of the essence of the cult of Shay that he is a Christian figure because of the way he was photographed and so forth.

And that happens over and over again and it's something I just like to think about a lot. Let's look at the trains. Oh yeah, you like that one. I do, I really do. So I'm going to hold up the pictures and one is by McGreet and one is a photograph from, from about when. Well, okay, so what, what the, the painting by McGreet I think is 1938 called the, the painting is called L'Ital Dure, time duration of time. And the other is a photograph which I'm sure McGreet was aware of of a very famous incident in 1895. I think it's 1895 when, when, when a train overshot the station in Paris. And so what happens is you look at those two and I say to myself, I'm sure that McGreet must have been aware of that. But then you can take it further because all kinds of things begin to happen. With McGreet, the, the, the, the idea of doing a picture of a train and calling it L'Ital Dure means that he's referring back to Einstein, who in the theory of relativity, all, in 1906. All of his examples are about train, trains that like a train track and, and what does it mean to be simultaneous and so forth.

But that in turn goes back to 1886 when Einstein would have been six years old. And all anybody was talking about in 1886 was simultaneity for the following reason. It used to be that time was real, that every, that Santa Fe in Albuquerque and so forth kept real time. And that was fine, which is to say that, that time in Santa Fe might have been 18 minutes different from time in Las Vegas based on when noon was, when actual noon happened. But that was no problem until you had trains going transcontinently. It is absolutely the case that trains in 1870 going from New York to Chicago had to have 17 clocks on board. Because the clock for every town they stopped in, it was all different. And so that world conference was held in 1886, or excuse me, 1884, to establish time zones. That's when you have time zones, and that's why it's only matters, because you have trains to get things so you don't have this complete chaos.

And the vote was 42 to 1. It was the Treaty of Washington. One country to murder. The Treaty of Washington said that Greenwich would be zero degrees. Greenwich, London, yeah. Paris refused to be part of that. Paris insisted on being, that zero degrees went through the astronomical zero-grain Paris. And the result was that Paris kept different time than London did. And I like to think that the trouble of that train was it was following the wrong clock and just overshot the thing. But the thing is, think about a six-year-old prodigy who's hearing all this discussion about what time is in London, what time is in Paris. It's relative to each other. Is it simultaneous? And you can see, well, some years later, he would invent the theory, or he would come upon the theory of relativity. And could you translate the title of my greets painting? The timing of it is the duration of time, or the ongoingness of time. There's a very Sony and quality to it, but in any case, the idea of linking time to a train is completely Einsteinian, which in turn is at some level why that train crashed in the first place.

Yes. In this book, you talk about the range of things. You know, when you see things that look like what's going on, you have an incredible vocabulary, one apophenia, the tendency of humans to see patterns, whether they're really there or not. That's a wonderful word, isn't that? Isn't apophenia? I think about a typology. When you see things that look alike that rhyme with each other, you see a painting by Eric Fischel that looks like a painting by Ocello. I should say that when we published that book at McSweeney's, published it four years ago. Now, we started a contest online, and your people can go online. If you look up convergence contest, and you'll see 70 entries that I've been judging for the last three or four years, where people said in their own examples. But when you see things that are side by side, and in this case, this one guy had shown me an Eric Fischel painting, and he was convinced that it was based on a painting by Ocello from early Renaissance. Indeed, they looked alike, but I began to start to think I should put some order to all this.

So I created a typology. I'm kind of in the mode of a British Victorian butterfly collector. There are different kinds of butterflies and different drawers, and I show you different kinds of converges, different kinds of matches. At one extreme, indeed, you have apophenia, which is the tendency of human beings to see patterns or there are no patterns. Isn't that a great word? Yeah. And you go from that through just coincidence, to things that are cause, cocazation, fractalization, simultaneous, identity things look alike, because they are the same things seen from different points of view. And then you eventually get into influence, that there's backward and forward influence, that, for example, Dante was obviously very influenced by Virgil. But it's also the case that when we read Virgil today, it's influenced by Dante. And then you get conscious, unconscious. Well, one of them that really struck my mind, and we're running out of time at that time, and I really want to get this in, you had told me that plagiarism is one of the links in that chain. And that Helen Keller was actually sued for plagiarism.

So what happened, just continuing that line all the way across, you can get illusion quotation, but at the far end, you get counterfeiture where the reason they look like is because somebody's actually doing it. And you get plagiarism, where you get, by the way, kryptomnesia, which is where people appropriate each other's writings without realizing they're doing it. This happens all the time. You get all these scandals, but often in complete good faith people say, I had no idea I was doing it. It was so powerful that they, so far, but in case, at the far extremist plagiarism. And you have the remarkable story of Helen Keller, who publishes a story of my life, this wonderful autobiography. I think it's 1903 something like that. And a few years, a few months later, it gets accused of plagiarism. But let me repeat that, Helen Keller gets accused of plagiarism. But if you think about it, it actually makes sense because all of Helen Keller's experience of the world she was blind and deaf had been mediated through words, either in hand gestures or in braille. So that would, for example, if she went to the Matterhorn and saw all the Matterhorn, her experience would have been the braille version of the Bidaker that would have been pedagraph describing.

And that would have been her actual experience. So that years later, when she recalled her experience, she might well have paragraphs, she had wonderful memory, that were quote plagiarized. Anyway, she was devastated by this. And the wonderful thing is that Mark Twain blesses his heart, central letter, just this exquisite letter. And I urge your listeners to just go on Google and look up Helen Keller, Mark Twain, plagiarism. And he basically said, oh, how oullishly idiotic was this whole plagiarism far as if there was ever any human utterance except plagiarism. Every human utterance is based on things that were said before. And he gives this great, great thing. And in a way is how culture works, that we are in a bath of prior references. And what the Book of Convergences ends up being is a kind of theory of cultural transition, how everything we experience takes place in the context of stuff we've already experienced. A friend of mine has this great line, and she told me one day that she couldn't remember who said it. She thought it might be Ezra Pound, but that culture begins when we forget our sources.

Oh, that's wonderful. We have a minute left. You say that we're narrative seeking creatures and that our brains to create stories. You also talk about how you can work and work and work at writing a story or finding Convergences, but there's an element of grace. Let's close on that note of grace. What does grace mean to you? Well, I just say that every writer has had this experience, but every creative person has it. And for that matter, anybody in the middle of their day has it, which is that you work and you work and you work at something that then happens by itself. It wouldn't have happened without all that prior work, which is preparation, preparation for receptivity in a way. But the work doesn't cause it to happen. It doesn't hit. There's all that work and there's something more, which is for free.

And grace, the word grace comes from gratis for free. And that experience of grace, and this is completely independent of any religious context, although religion has a lot to do with it also. Is this experience that creative people have all the time that all of us have? That a certain point is just right. There's a rightness that descends for free. And on the religion side, I like to think that God created man because he loves stories. We created God, because we love stories, but they return the favor. And of the essence, as you indicated, is this thing. And in the same way that our Bible secretes, what is this? Our gallbladder secretes. Bial, our pancreas secretes insulin, our brains secret narrative, secret stories.

Well, we've come to the end of our time, and I have to thank you for sharing your narrative through all of these wonderful books quickly. Everything that rises must converge. And Mr. Wilson's cabinet of wonders. I want to thank your guests, Lawrence Wessler, for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. And I want to thank your audience for sharing our narrative today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Thank you.