Museum Appetite 6: Getting To Know You

Last weekend, I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology again.   I live only a few miles from the museum, and I absolutely love it, so I usually end up visiting once a month.   My first visit lasted three hours (I wrote about it here) and I’ve stayed that long again, but most of my visits are brief, 45 minutes to an hour.   This is how I get to know a museum.

Getting to know a museum is like becoming romantically involved with someone.   You spend time learning everything about them; you investigate their nooks and crannies.   The first date will give you a general idea of who they are, but it’s the subsequent dates — the conversations not just about growing up in New Jersey but about the bowling alley they frequented during high school — during which you actually learn who they are.   Visiting once allows the museum-goer to see an exhibit, but it takes a bit longer to actually get to know the museum   behind that exhibit.

When I visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I always head straight towards the back, to a half-hidden dark hallway that leads to an exhibit called “The World is Bound With Secret Knots: The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher.”   During my first visit, I wandered into the darkened Kircher wing while it was otherwise empty.   I passes a piece called “A Magnetic Oracle” that replicates Kircher’s device for “magnetic hyrdomancy” “in which small wax figures, embedded with magents and suspected in water filled globes, could be made to spell out specific messages or forecasts from symbols and letters printed on the surface of their vessels.”   After peering into the creepy water-filled globes, I walked down a short and still very dark hallway to the largest of the Kircher rooms.   I was surrounded by strange pieces presented with non-traditional viewing apparatuses, and directly above me was a wheel of bells suspended from the ceiling.   The sound of the tinkling bells filled the room as the wheel rotatated, moving slower and slower with each rotation, until it stopped.   A few moments passed and the bells stilled.   Then, with a sudden lurch, the wheel jerked forwarded, rotating again, the bells clanging loudly.   It doesn’t sound scary now, but the first time I stepped into the dark Kircher room alone, I was creepied out.   When the wheel started again, I jumped.   I’ve never felt the sense of uncanny mixed with wonder in that room again, but I love the Kircher wing and I go there first during each visit, trying to recapture or relive some of the room’s magic.

Last weekend, I also got the chance to delve deeply into the exhibit called “Bernard Maston, Donald R. Griffith and the Deprong Mori of the Tripiscum Plateau” that may or may not describe actual people, actual events, and an actual bat captured in a block of lead.   I’d passed by the exhibit and lingered with it briefly on past visits, but never got the chance to read all the information on the plaques or listen to the exhibit’s narration.

Most museums have far too much art and information to take in on even a very long visit.   Major museums with hundreds of rooms and galleries and exhibits can’t even be conquered in full day if you stay from opening to closing.   I don’t have the desire to get to know every museum I come across, but the ones I love, I want to go back to. Each visit feels different from the rest, so there is no danger in feeling like I’m repeating myself unless I stay too long in an exhibit I’ve already fully taken in.   Once a museum draws me in, I have to return.

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Catie Disabato lives 2.3 miles from the Museum of Jurassic Technology.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.