Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler Page A

classical character, and thick-soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings, framed by the branches of a tree. The back is filled in with representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat, a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel.
    Dimensions
: Height 25 mm; Width 22 mm.
    182. FRUIT STONE CARVING (PL. LXXXVI)
Plum-stone (?) relief. On the front is shown the Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, and other mounted horsemen behind; to either side of the cross, surmounted by a titulus inscribed
INRI
, stand the Virgin and St. John, and a skull lies below. Imbricated ground.
    Dimensions
: Height 23 mm; Width 19 mm.
    And indeed, Plate LXXXVI showed the very same. Not only had such wonders been perpetrated (and as early as the 1600s!), but in Oxford, today, they still exist, open to inspection, at any time, byany stray pilgrims from the Jurassic. 20

    Tradescant fruit-stone carvings, actual size

    D URING MY MOST RECENT visit to L.A., David Wilson and I agreed to rendezvous for lunch at the little India Sweets and Spices mart, with its deli-style take-out counter, a few doors down the block from his museum. Walking in, I was greeted by the familiar blast of sinuous aromas—David and I had repaired to this place several times before—only, this time, it was as if my recent investigations had hypersensitized me to its special qualities. I took in the prodigious bounty of its exotic offerings—such fresh vegetables as the eggplant-like brinjal, spiny kantola, beany valor, green tuver, tindora, lotus root, and chholia (easily the oddest looking of them all); all manner of teas and fragrant herbs (from coriander and cardamom through the curry powders); packaged ajwan seeds and Vicco brand vajradanti paste; curried arvi leaves, stuffed brinjal, karela in brine; enticing trapezoidal wedges of dessert cakes like the gold-and-silver-foil-laced almond barfis … I had this sudden sense of what it must have been like to have been sitting there, all closed in, in the cold, damp, monotone, monobland Europe of the 1400s, as little by little all this wild, wonderful stuff began pouring in (initially, at least, by way of overland caravans), how easy it would have been to be overwhelmed by such exquisite new delicacies:
We’ve got to get more of this stuff! We’ve got to find an easier way of getting it! We’ve got to get ourselves over there!
Standing there, waiting for David, for a moment I felt like I was planted in the very engine room of history.
    David eventually showed up and we ordered our marsala dozas, pekoras, and cardamom teas and tookthem out to the little picnic tables out front, facing the boulevard. We spoke about India and the fantasy of the Indies and the impulse, the
orientation
toward wonder. One thought led to another. I’d been about to comment on how incongruous it was to find a sixteenth-century
Wunderkammer
like his in the middle of Los Angeles, California, when suddenly it dawned on me—why not? In fact, Los Angeles was one of the most appropriate places in the world for such an enterprise.
    After all, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, California was awash with Europeans agog for wonder—and plunder. The name itself, as I subsequently discovered, appears to have derived from an old Spanish novel,
Las Sergas de Esplandián
(The Exploits of Esplandián), written in about 1510 by Rodríguez de Montalvo. The book itself was apparently nothing much to write home about, but there’s considerable evidence that many of the conquistadors of the time were familiar with its story, in which Esplandián, a kind of late-medieval ideal knight, is helping defend Constantinople from a motley