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

People” (their fastidiously layered walls fashioned out of red clay bricks only millimeters long) amidst the crumbling hollows of various tenements in Lower Manhattan—this was during the early seventies (Simonds’s work has in the meantime graduated off the streets and into some of the world’s premier galleries, from Seoul to Barcelona, from the Guggenheim to the Jeu de Paume). Back in the early seventies, Norman Daly, a professor emeritus at Cornell, elaborated an entire fictional civilization, known as “Llhuros,” from which he was even able to exhibit more than 150 artifacts.
    One of the most energetic of such enterprises currently under way, to which I was likewise alerted by several correspondents, is the Hokes Archives at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, originally founded in London by Everett Ormsby Hokes (1864–1939) but currently under the directorship of Beauvais Lyons, an associate professor of art at the university and himself the explicator of no less than three previously unheard-of civilizations: the Arenot of North Central Turkey, the Apasht from the Hindoo Kush of Afghanistan, and the Aazud of Mesopotamia. (The Arenot, for example, were “a dystopian society” with “an extremely dualistic cosmology.” According to one interpretation, they believed that “because copulation is necessary to the creation of a life, ritual necrophilia is the only means to create the afterlife.” Prevalent among the imagery one is able to spot among the Arenots’ surviving pottery shards is the so-called dog-eat-dog motif, a canine-cannibalistic daisy chain, as it were.)
    Among other documents accompanying a letter from the Hokes Archive’s own assistant director was a Selected Bibliography, which featured, among other things, a reference to Norman Daly’s seminal text “Possible Aazudian Origins of Llhuroscian Culture” from Vol. 118, no. 2, 121–32 of the
Bulletin of Llhuroscian Studies
(London, 1962). The letter itself, meanwhile, also noted how “a literary paradigm for the Hokes Archive” can be found in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, and specifically in his 1941 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (included in his book
Ficciones
), in which a secret society is discovered to be painstakingly confabulating an entire encyclopedia documenting the physical and intellectual legacy of an otherwise long-lost culture, though reference to this civilization also appears to have seeped into at least one copy (Borges’s own) of Volume XLVI of the
Anglo-American Cyclopedia.
Borges further claims that he has in the meantime also been able to secure a single volume—
XI: Hlaer to Jangr
—fromthe secret society’s
First Encyclopedia of Tlön. 6
    The letter went on to note how Mr. Lyons was by no means alone in this pursuit and how indeed last year he’d organized a symposium bringing together several other such like-minded academic visionaries, a sort of “conference paper version of
Zelig
,” the letter said. It concluded by referring to my original
Harper’s
piece and noting how I’d managed to “touch on the central issue regarding parody, how irony is signaled. David Wilson, Beauvais Lyons and many others working in this genre cultivate a deadpan sensibility in presenting this work. The tension between what is real and imaginary is asource of its aesthetic tension as well as its subversive implications. Additionally, the work is ultimately playful. One could wax on about this, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
    I liked that last formulation and decided to telephone the letter-writer so as to further pursue its implications (the letter had been written on the archive’s stationery, which provides both phone and fax numbers); in fact, I’d even begun dialing before I did a double take on the assistant director’s name—Vera Octavia (not bloody