This much seems certain: on the fateful day four or five years ago when New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler ventured to the prosaic environs of Culver City on the west side of Los Angeles and pressed his finger to the door buzzer of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, he was ripe for the spore that would find him there, settle in his brain, multiply, and take over his life. Like the African stink ant (coincidentally on exhibit at this very museum), which when colonized by an ingested fungus undertakes a bizarre pilgrimage, leaving its home on the forest floor to climb skyward to the top of a fern or blade of grass, where it dies and then sprouts a brilliantly colored fungal horn, Weschler was fertile ground.
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Admitted to the storefront museum by its founder and director, David Wilson, an accordion-playing imp with the face and body of a pubescent Neanderthal, Weschler quickly found his fancy taken by a display on the Sonnabend Model of Obliscence. This memory theory, consisting of intersecting cones and planes, was devised by one Geoffrey Sonnabend and ostensibly published by Northwestern University Press in 1946. Sonnabend, whose father, a German engineer named Wilhelm, was brought to Chicago by candy millionaire Charles Gunther and wound up directing reconstruction of our city’s bridges after the Great Fire, was inspired upon hearing a single concert by Madalena Delani, a Romanian-American diva afflicted with a rare form of memory loss that left her only in possession of her music. The display included an “astonishingly well-realized aquarium-sized diorama of Iguazu Falls,” where the concert took place. Did I neglect to mention that Sonnabend was recuperating from a nervous breakdown?
In the days and weeks after that first visit, Weschler found himself interrupting his work to track down MJT references–searching the UCLA library computer for obscure volumes; ringing up Northwestern University Press and the Chicago Historical Society to see if anyone knew of Geoffrey Sonnabend; ferreting out the retirement hideaway of Donald R. Griffin, whose name and research seemed tantalizingly similar to the MJT bat hunter’s. “I don’t know why, I just couldn’t let the story go,” Weschler would later write, by way of explaining that he returned to the museum as often as he could, continuing to track its sources, always coming up with a maddening mixture of truth and the unverifiable that drew him further and further into uncharted territory. Before long, clearly obsessed, Weschler gave up doing anything else and made this puzzle his work.
