Course:The Museum of Jurassic Technology
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a museum in Los Angeles. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, but it’s challenging to describe.
If a museum normally conveys knowledge, MJT is a poem about knowledge: it’s like our (Western) systems of categorizing, labeling, fact-checking, and believing have been run through a dream machine and reconfigured into something new.
When I was a freshman in college, I met my best friend Mars. We gravitated toward each other instantly, for reasons both obvious and not. I call her my evil twin sister, and our lives have a lot of eerie parallels: we both grew up as oddball mixed-race Asian kids on opposite sides of the state, we taught ourselves how to be two different kind of musicians (she is a genius electronic producer; I play a lot of guitar), and we’re both trans–although, in 2015, we didn’t know about that last one yet.
I first went to MJT with Mars, and we’ve been back dozens of times since, both together and separately. The feeling of walking open-eyed into something neither of us really understood, and then walking, together, through the stages of confusion, disbelief, and delight that often come with a first visit to the museum–when I look back on this, I see it as a metaphor for the creative process, especially undertaken collaboratively. Mars is the person who taught me I don’t have to make art alone. She was the first person I ever wrote a song with; we made two full albums together during college (about identity, the self, knowledge, and archives) and plan to do more one of these days. She taught me, and still teaches me, that there is nothing more bewildering and hard and joyful and rewarding than making art with someone you love.
When you are a kid, and you are both a weird, intense brainiac and a marginalized person, and you’re strongly aware of the first thing but only dimly aware of the second, there’s a lag between you becoming invested in the systems that organize knowledge in your world and you realizing that those systems don’t see you as human. Did you know that the 1904 World’s Fair involved kidnapping Filipino people and displaying them like zoo animals? Did you know that homosexuality was in the DSM until 1987? (obvious CWs for racism and homophobia at these links) When people talk about “the archive” having gaps and ghosts or libraries being organized “problematically,” I often wish they’d get specific. I worry sometimes that it’s too sanitary to just say these systems are old or broken or in need of decolonization. The truth is gory. I don’t want us to be scared of it.
MJT appears invested in these systems because it appears to be a normal, serious museum where everything is true and real. But then it turns out to be something else. I think it’s a great joke about how museums (fail to) organize and categorize knowledge, but it’s also a wonderful poem about our desire and failure to truly know the world. Going there with Mars was strangely healing for me. It showed me that, if the systems of knowledge around me weren’t made to fit me, I could gnaw at them until they did. If systems of knowledge didn’t take me seriously, I didn’t have to take them seriously either, but I also didn’t have to abandon my genuine love of learning.
The original “wonder cabinets” were about demonstrating dominion over the world. It’s not too late to make something that connects with the world instead, and that celebrates the unknowable. When I write, especially collaboratively–which, I know now, is always–this is what I want. This is the museum of my dreams.