A Postmodernist of the 1600's Is Back in Fashion

[Dave Monroe]

>From Sarah Boxer, "A Postmodernist of th 1600's Is
Back in Fashion," NY Times, Saturday, May 25th, 2002
...

A puckish question was raised on Thursday night at New
York University: "Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest
guy ever, or what?" For those who have no idea who
Kircher was, let's begin with the "or what."

The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a
rough contemporary of Descartes and Galileo, was no
ordinary man. He studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and
helped Bernini with his fountain in the Piazza Navona.
He made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues.
He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about
musicology (still used today). He taught Nicolas
Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to
drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide
projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of
Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He
proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel and
made a model of how the animals were arranged in
Noah's Ark. And he collected the objects that filled
the Museo Kircheriano, Rome's first wunderkammer or
collection of curiosities.

Kircher's body is buried in Rome. His heart is buried
three hours away, at a shrine for St. Eustace (which
he founded). And his star is on the rise. There have
been recent conferences on Kircher at Stanford
University, the University of Chicago and in Rome.
There was an exhibition of Kircheriana, put on by
David Wilson at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in
Los Angeles. On Thursday, the New York Institute for
the Humanities at New York University threw a
symposium for Kircher's 400th birthday. 

Why the revival? Lawrence Weschler, the head of the
institute and the author of "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of
Wonders" (a book about the Museum of Jurassic
Technology), thinks it is because Kircher is the
premodern root of postmodern thinking. With his
labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before
Borges. In the years before Kircher's death and for
300 years afterward, he was derided as a dilettante
and crackpot. The rationalism and specialization of
Descartes had taken over. But now Kircher's taste for
trivia, deception and wonder is back.

Wonder cabinets have become trendy. The J. Paul Getty
Museum recently had a show about wonder cabinets
called "Devices of Wonder" and the New York Public
Library is opening "A Cabinet of Curiosities" in two
weeks. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is
itself a modern-day wunderkammer that includes
replicas of Kircher's inventions, now has a small but
fervent following.

At Thursday's symposium, Kircher's postmodern
qualities were evoked: his subversiveness, his
celebrity, his technomania and his bizarre
eclecticism. "In an age of polymaths," said Anthony
Grafton, a professor at Princeton University, "Kircher
was perhaps the most polymathic of them all." Like
other Jesuits, Kircher was a religious man and a world
scholar trying to prove that Aristotle and the Bible
were right. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic Coptic, Persian,
Latin and Greek. But Kircher was also "a wild man,"
Mr. Grafton argued. He got away with all-out heresy.

One of Kircher's most daring acts was to write out a
long list of Egyptian kings, proving that Egypt
existed long before the world was even supposed to
have been created. In a dry and sneaky way, Kircher
planted the idea that the Bible was wrong. "Kircher
found himself imagining deep time," Mr. Grafton said.
And that was just the kind of thing that Giordano
Bruno, the dogma-hating metaphysician, was executed
for.

Somehow Kircher not only survived but continued to
tweak authority in the open air of Rome during the
Counter-Reformation. He made translations of Egyptian
hieroglyphs (later discovered to be completely
fanciful). He guided Bernini in erecting an Egyptian
obelisk at the Piazza Navona and may even have helped
him with the hydraulics for his fountain, which
alluded subversively to Kircher's own ideas about the
earth's underground rivers.

All that may not sound so radical, but in 17th-century
Rome it was an "in your face" thing to do, Mr. Grafton
said. "I used to think he was a fool," he added. "And
then I stood in the Piazza Navona."

The folks in Rome weren't the only ones Kircher's
magic worked on. He had readers all over the world.
Paula Findlen, a professor at Stanford University,
says Kircher was a celebrity in his own time, with a
crazy fan club that extended all the way to the
Americas. Kircher wrote some 60 volumes on astronomy,
geology, magnetism, music and philology, in which he
cited himself over and over again.

Kircher's books were the first "great coffee-table
books," she said. People bought them to prove they
were learned, to show that they were part of the
international network of reading and writing. They
didn't read so much as look at the pictures. One fan
cut Kircher's picture out of a book and meditated on
it to calm himself. Another fan kept sending Kircher
chocolate in order to remain friends with him.
Kircher's most ardent fan, a nun in Mexico City,
decided to try to make herself over in the mold of
Kircher's favorite goddess, Isis, the mother of gods,
the ruler of heaven and earth. She also transformed
Kircher's name into a verb. Kircherizing, she
declared, is making connections among things.

Could such an astonishing man really have existed? D.
Graham Burnett of Princeton University demanded to
know why no one in the audience was asking whether
Athanasius Kircher, a master of deception, theatrics
and play, was himself a fantasy. He got an answer.

Kircher would be nearly impossible to create, said
Michael John Gorman, who is making an Internet archive
of Kircher's correspondence at Stanford University. If
you wanted to make up Kircher's correspondence out of
thin air, he suggested, you would have to write
thousands of letters on 17th-century paper in suitable
inks. The letters would be from 800 correspondents
around the world writing in 30 different languages,
including the universal language invented by Kircher
himself. And who else, Mr. Gorman asked, would think
up such crazy machines as an organ driven by a drum
that reproduces bird song, a fountain that lifts up a
genie, a vomiting lobster, and a statue that
pronounces Delphic oracles?

What do these puzzling inventions have in common? Mr.
Gorman says Kircher used them to explore and explode
boundaries.

Take Kircher's talking statue, which is even trickier
than it seems. It has a hidden intercom system. By
standing in another room and speaking through a tube
connected to the statue, you can make it appear to
speak. Or by putting your ear to the tube, you can
overhear what the people in the other room with the
statue are saying. Kircher, Mr. Gorman said, was
playing with "deception and demonology," which was "no
laughing matter in the 17th century."

Kircher also played on the boundary of decency. He
made a magnetic Jesus that would walk on water and
embrace an image of Peter. And a startling number of
his machines do nothing but wretch and vomit. Kircher
was not beyond tormenting animals either. He planned a
cat piano. If you struck a single key on this piano, a
sharp spike would be driven into a cat's tail, causing
it to yowl. By arranging many cats according to the
pitch of their yowls, Kircher could make music. He
produced a donkey choir on similar principles.

One of Kircher's most cunning inventions was a
catoptric box or chamber of mirrors, which could be
used in a number of ways. If you put a coin in, you
could watch people grab for the illusionary riches. Or
if you put a cat in, you could watch it chase the many
reflections of itself until it would finally give up
in a state of rage and indignation. Kircher, Mr.
Gorman said, "made a spectacle of incivility," hoping
that "this theater of passions would reveal true
natures."

The last speaker of the evening was Mr. Wilson, the
founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He
credited Kircher with inspiring a new kind of museum,
one that evokes both wonder and skepticism. But isn't
it possible that the ghost of Kircher has seeped out
of the museum's walls? Mr. Burnett says Kircher did
nothing less than set the terms for a new theory of
knowledge, an epistemology based on deception and
play. Imagine that kind of approach to science. It is,
Mr. Burnett said, "a liberating way of thinking." Or
as the postmodern Kirchenistas might put it, "cool."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/arts/25KIRC.html


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