Cabinets of Wonder, Curiosity, and the Fulcrum

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the Mysterious.  Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”

- Albert Einstein

History bobs around in the most chaotic and unpredictable fashion.  No one quite knows where roads may lead or for that matter where they have begun.  Sometime during the 15^th Century history took a wild swerving detour that lasted some 400 years and established the world of today.  During that time a confluence of technology, stable political entities, and an emerging middle class eager to make money encouraged a few Europeans to brave the oceans in search of opportunity.  As the European began to emerge from the stifling times of the Middle Ages in which much of the globe seemed as remote as the stars, he found a world populated with the incredulous.  New fauna, new flora, new rocks, new peoples, new religions, new stories of wealth and power were found at every turn.  This ‘newly discovered’ world became the fashion of the rich and the intellectual.  Everything under the sun found it’s way back onto European soil, and so began a resurgent fascination with the natural world.


(It stands to notes that these explorations also brought to Europe a wide range of new foods: the potato, the tomato, the chili pepper, maize from the new world and abundant spices for the far East, thus setting the stage for our modern culinary arts.  That is another story.)

During the 16^th and 17^th Centuries collections of natural history became as common as collections of art or religious artifacts and often these were one and the same and often a shard of the Holy Cross would be kept beside a stuffed Pelican.  Exhibits boasted phosphorescent feathers, shrunken heads, rhinoceros horns, fetal skeletons, a chain made of monkey teeth, elephant ears (not the edible variety), a unicorn’s horn,  two-tailed lizards,  a two headed cat, feathers from the crown of a South American queen, and on and on and on the list unfolds.  Imagine it, and it was collected somewhere.  These collections became known as Cabinets of Wonder or Cabinets of Curiosities or Art Cabinets or Wunderkammen.  Take your pick.

Amassed for all sorts of reasons: economic benefit, personal prestige, and intellectual stimulation, they existed in the centers of the European power and money:  Paris, Vienna, Oxford, Basel, etc.  Essentially, any man worth his salt would want a Cabinet that included the rarities of manmade ingenuity alongside Nature’s bountiful wonders and God’s miracles.  They were after all one and the same.

Held in the hands of the aristocracy and merchants class, the Cabinets became the basis for today’s great museums when in the 19^th Century it became vogue to clean out one’s mansions and turn these cluttered attics over to the public for cataloguing.

Those are the facts as we know them.  But, what, we must ask, actually happened that changed the world into our Modern one?  The answer is ‘Wonder’.  Discovery blew open the doors of the mind, and the immense variety of the world literally stunned the European sensibilities right out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.  All the old assumptions of intellectual thought were challenged.  Religious and political authority were simultaneously shaken by the new attitudes of the time.  Take the Reformation.  A wholesale reorganization of the European world was in progress. 

These Cabinets stand at that intersection in the history of the world.  On the one side we have the world classified through the eyes of religion and magic, a world of humors and ethers, of anthropomorphic gods and one god in a kingdom of gold looking down.  On the other side we have a world that develops over eons according to a series of natural laws and a systematic classification through observation called science.  On this side of the intersection we’ve drawn hard lines and labeled boxes, laid a grid over the world, and established nomenclature that we can all agree on as right and wrong, or at least plant, mineral, and animal.  On this side, we have classified the world.

But let's pause in our progress and walk back into one of these Cabinets.  Imagine ourselves awash in the whimsy of creation, awestruck at the complexity with no single understanding of it all.  Each item in the Cabinet has multiple stories to tell.  And these stories draw lines that branch out in every direction linking one part of the world to another in a new fashion.  This web of connections between disparate worlds, a carving of the Crucifixion beside a model of the Tower of London beside a mounted sample of coral, instills the Cabinets with the otherworld and keeps it timeless.  Something raw and young inhabits the Cabinets of Curiosities.


We still live with these Cabinets.  They hide in unexpected places right under our nose. 

Open the door and enter our Cabinet. 

The Modern Museum

Around the world the museum is a monument, an institution like the library and the postal system, denoting a level of societal achievement.  It can lend a small town in Nebraska a place in a travel guide.  It can elevate a nation into history.  A museum-goer may carry a small ball of pride and harbor a pinch of superiority at the time well spent.

The museum is a collection of objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical interest arranged and displayed in accordance with a logical method and made available for public viewing through exhibits. The word ‘museum’ is of Greek origin, and meant a space dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs."  (Abridged definition taken from both Wikipedia and Dr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders)  To that end it was a place to mediate upon the world and practice the arts.  The first museum may have been an Athenian institute created by Plato or merely a hill in Athens upon which an old man sat and sang until there he died, was buried, and thus created a sanctuary.  And in that dual origin story we find both the beauty and the problem with the museum.  What is a museum meant to do?

Consider the museums of your lifetime.  Though they may preserve beautiful paintings or historic carvings or awe inspiring fossils the museum can be a drool, potentially depressing archive of the past ensconced in a pristine and grand manner.  Like a mortuary of human and natural spectacles, some sort of continual funeral without a burial in sight, the museum preserves the past in an antiseptic manner.   Perhaps inevitably so.  Perhaps there is no other way.

Walking the halls we hover somewhere out of time, induced to drowsiness by the atmosphere, as if a magical spell poured in through the vents, a potion that frays the fabric of time until we stumble about in a waking dream state.   Like Rip Van Winkle we doze off and awake to find years have passed except in the case of the museum the years roll backward upon the rails not forward.

In this state we are not taken away on flights of fancy, but instead we are led down a road of rigorous delineation of the world as if everything has its proper place.  Here the world is separated and catalogued.  The museum portrays a world of progress from age to age and culture to culture that ticks along like clockwork.  All the chaos and uncertainty and ambiguity of the world becomes domesticated in these halls.  It’s as if we wish to enclose Nature and History in a series of labelled Ziplock bags, as if we believe a stately institutionalized palace could hold them in all their wonder.

All this certainty lends authenticity and authority.  Who can argue with the art masters,  the scientific pioneers, and the world explorers when all in one place?  Who can question the answers of learned experts, recorded voice-overs, brochures, and captions neatly printed on foam core and mounted with the utmost attention to tidiness?

Somehow this is the world we are more at home in though it is something fabricated, only a model of the world as it is.  We can lounge in the well ordered and catalogued room with sharp distinctions.  We breath easily in the home that works along well governed laws with no alternate answers.

The question is:  Is it Real?

Next up:  The Cabinets of Curiosity, the original manifestation of the museum.  And don’t worry this is going somewhere culinary and delicious.

In the Search of Wonder

This year We are about to embark upon a long tale.  It has many twists to it, and at times will appear confusing and even ridiculous, but the terminus will warrant the journey.  It must begin somewhere which is here for lack of a better starting point.

“Whenever we encounter some truly novel phenomenon, one that reinvents the margins of our world, an old hankering is awakened. At such moments we are like explorers of an unknown dimension: everything appears fresh to our eyes, each idea seems unprecedented, virgin, strange. In the face of this newly made universe, we may be tempted to exclaim, ‘It cannot be!,’ yet our protests soon lie buried under an avalanche of wonder.”

-       Dr. Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology

There are things we do not understand in the World.  We approach them with anxiety unaware of what will happen.  We prepare ourselves for the Unknown and that ‘avalanche of wonder’.

There are those who seek this ‘Wonder’.  In their adventures they blaze a trail for others to follow.  This may result in an epic tale such as The World Travels of Marco Polo or a universal theory of relativity as with Albert Einstein.  Or as in the case of Auguste Escoffier it may be an enduring approach to all things culinary: recipes, kitchen organization, the creation of the chef profession.  All of which have transformed our world today.  Whatever our specialty may be, we adore those who embark upon the ‘margins of our world’ and elicit that state when ‘everything appears fresh to our eyes’.  It may be said that Chef Nordo Lefesczki, despite his crank and quack, is one such pioneer currently blazing his trail with the Carnal Food Movement.

There are those who record the Wonder.  When such Luminaries exist there must be a way to record and share the achievements.  It may be as simple as a university physics book or a painting that now hangs in the Louvre, an index of World Records or an urban myth that travels the globe on the lips.  In the case of Chef Nordo it is a Cabinet of Curiosities set to appear in Seattle in May of 2012.  For a few short weeks a selection of the Cabinet’s exhibits will be open to the public.  This is an extremely rare opportunity, one that people wait for, a once in a lifetime affair.

As we all know, food is a precious and overlooked necessity to life.  And it is Chef Nordo’s goal to rekindle the wonder of the world of food in everyone through his crafts of cooking and storytelling.  It could be said this Cabinet includes every idea, fact, myth, and imaginative spark ever to be inspired by our food.  Café Nordo is the stage for Chef Nordo’s stories.  The Cabinet of Curiosities is the repository of all that knowledge.

Someone must keep this knowledge alive.  Here, it is stored.

Down a rabbit hole.  Swept away by a tornado.  Tumbled into Slumberland. 

Visited by the spirits of Past, Present, and Future.

This is the only way to describe what Nordo has in store for us in his next and most outlandish endeavor yet.  Stay tuned as we explore this Cabinet of Curiosities in anticipation of its Grand Opening in Seattle 2012.

Part 3- Tomorrow's New World Order

And here, before we launch into the New Year, the final chapter of the Petra Proudhurst papers. 

What are we to do with this knowledge of the Space Age?  Do we waste it letting it rot in the laboratories of the world?  Or do we step boldly forward with this knowledge and ensure a better future?  The choice is obvious.

As the leaders of the world it is our responsibility to respond to the challenges of the future and focus our resources and imagination on solutions.  I say let our imaginations shine.  We cannot stand idly by and expect our dreams to come true under their own power.  The future is not a gift but an achievement.

I look into the laboratory and see a future in which struggle for sustenance has vanished.

I envision supermarkets overflowing with the foods of the world.  Piles of fruits and vegetables in the heart of winter.  Aisles of canned soups and packaged dinners.  I see jars of cured meats for .45 and cans of tropical fruit 5 for a $1 from Kansas City to Singapore.  A fully nutritious meal for a family of 4 will be prepared in under 15 minutes.  And for desert, individually wrapped pies for the whole family.  Now you can have your cake and eat it too.

In the future, supplements will counter deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.  Artificial flavors will provide the spice of life to any dish.  With advances in food preservation the daily trip to the grocery store will not exist.  The pantry will be the breadbox of the home.

As this new technology expands around the globe there will be the inevitable excess of grain.  Imagine cheap breads for every child.  A limitless food source for our livestock.  Meat prices will plummet and the food of kings will be for every man. With new food resources social equality will simply grow on the tide of abundance.  It is simply a matter of vision and willpower.

Man has worked with nature from its beginnings to create a more hospitable world.  It is our magic touch to use our imagination to improve our world.  It is not a utopia but it is a step in that direction.  Now is the time to act.  Do not hesitate. 

I am confident in the engineering of today for a better tomorrow.

The struggle against Convenience Food continues.