Cynthia Cruz

Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz

Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935536-47-5
Perfect bound, 72 pp., $15.95
Review by Dana Henry Martin (aka M Ross Henry)

The wonder chamber, or cabinet of curiosities, occupies a unique space in history. These rooms emerged in the sixteenth century and functioned as encyclopedic collections of objects belonging to three classes: “naturalia (products of nature), arteficialia (or artefacta, the products of man), and scientifica (the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature, such as astrolabes, clocks, automatons, and scientific instruments).”1 Wonder chambers were regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and as a memory theater.2,3 Also known as wunderkammern, these rooms grew out of an age of unprecedented European discovery whose essence was only partially captured by returning ships full of objects from uncharted lands. Noblemen, scholars, and merchants were eager to add these objects to their personal wonder chambers so they could have a miniature representation of the world located within the walls of their own homes.3

The Tate describes Renaissance wunderkammern as:

… private spaces, created and formed around a deeply held belief that all things were linked to one another through either visible or invisible similarities. People believed that by detecting those visible and invisible signs and by recognizing the similarities between objects, they would be brought to an understanding of how the world functioned, and what humanity’s place in it was.4

It is this context that we must bring to a reading of Cynthia Cruz’s third collection, Wunderkammer. In this work, the poet continually defines and redefines the concept of a wonder chamber and, in doing so, suggests a new group of visible and invisible lines that connects all things to one another. People and places, health and illness, dream and reality, and time itself (past, present, and future) weave and unweave in the creation and subversion of order and meaning. In Wunderkammer, Cruz explores the dark side of wonder and the implications of believing that by cataloging the world we can at once understand and control it.

Throughout the collection, we encounter a series of wonder chambers (wunderkammern), side worlds (nebenwelts), self-portraits, and poems set in all manner of locations, including gardens, hospitals, hotels, passageways, and sanitariums. Taken together, these poems transmogrify the wonder chamber into a phenomenon both tethered to and unmoored from history, myth, geography, culture, and cultural artifacts. A bombed Berlin meets ancient Greece meets a Greyhound station bathroom. Hades meets Eden. Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood meets South America’s Orinoco River meets an unnamed airport city. Swarovski meets Warhol meets a boombox meets the Bathysphere. The products of nature, the products of man, and the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature glimmer and whir inside the rooms Cruz constructs, each poem another cubby or display case spilling over with necrotic, narcotic-laced secrets.

The collection opens with the first of several poems titled “Nebenwelt.” In this piece, we find a speaker “drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city” who vanishes into a “… silvery paste of vapor on the ice.” The poem concludes with a sweeping gesture away from the speaker to the greater, fetid world:

              A row of pretty blonde dummies in the Dutch death

              Museum, death dressed in Chanel and Maharaja

              Paste jewels, a vibrant green bacteria of sea and decay.

This side world sets up the collection as a whole, moving from the personal to the larger, and largely human, forces that shape and limit identity. The dummies in the museum speak to a cultural representation of women in life and after death, as well as referencing the historical role of wunderkammern as precursors to museums. In the last line, the sea is invoked—that body of water humans have crossed time and again on quests for discovery and domination, the same body Renaissance ships traversed in search of artifacts, relics, and natural objects with which to build miniature worlds.

“Wunderkammer,” the second poem in the collection, turns to ancient times—“A Greek crime mars the pastoral. / Charts and maps, an atlas of anesthesia- / Laced nostalgia.” The preoccupation with memory that wonder chambers embody seems to have grown out of their precursor, Italian scholar Giulio Camillo’s “theater of memory.” Its architecture was similar to an amphitheater, and its function was to allow its users to memorize all the world’s knowledge.5 Camillo’s work was informed by mnemonic techniques adopted by ancient Romans and Greeks in which visualization was used to organize and recall information. Cicero described this technique as the method of loci (also called the memory palace).5,6 By taking us back to ancient Greece at the beginning of Wunderkammer, Cruz both situates her collection within a larger historical context and also sets up one of the work’s main themes, which is memory—from its “incessant rush” early in the collection to its effacement near the collection’s close:

              This is not meant to be a koan
              Or a fable.

              I am telling you everything.

              One day they’ll remove
              The memory out of me.

              — “Hotel Feral”

Rather than facilitating memory, Cruz’s vision of the wonder chamber is one in which memory is haunting, failing, or entirely absent. The wunderkammeris not a means for sharpening memory. Instead, it has the capacity to preserve trauma, promote amnesia, and dissolve identity.

In “Self Portrait in Fox Furs, with Magic,” Cruz draws on the concept of the “memory palace” while subverting the idea that a microcosm of the world can be representative of the world at large. “In the city / Of palaces,” she writes, “I lived / Inside a doll house.” Other types of chambers appear in the collection. These include cages, jewelry boxes, mansions, palanquins, wards, a music box, and a locked motel room. These chambers fit together like a set of nesting dolls—some smaller, some larger, but all of them conscribed the way the wonder chamber itself is conscribed.

Throughout the collection, the wunderkammeris imposed as well as self-imposed. The imposition is evident in the poems “Junk Garden” and “Hotel Oblivion,” respectively: “I move my body / But I never leave this room” and “We are promiscuous / In our thinness, don’t leave the green mansion, / Are trapped inside the snow box, noiselessly / Splendoring.” But self-imposition is also articulated. In “Atlas of the Molecular Kingdom of Girl Orphans,” Cruz writes: “In the end, I made my way through the never-ending / Atlas of my own making.” The imposed and self-imposed seem to converge in the poem “Kingdom of Cluttering Sorrow,” in which Cruz writes: “I am frozen forever in this wonder / Room, this zoo of one million / Diamond machines.”

The closing poem, “Some Velvet Morning,” comes back to the marred pastoral introduced at the beginning of the collection. The poem is set in an undetermined point in the future, in a “Garden with its brilliant white / Hives of memory, its mausoleums / Of locked, oblong boxes jam- / Packed with history.” No longer just a chamber, a memory theater, or a museum, the wunderkammer has undergone a transition. It is now a mausoleum whose locked, oblong boxes are reminiscent of the neatly housed and organized specimens of the wonder chamber. Rather than reflecting the world of the living, the wunderkammer houses the world of the dead.

Wunderkammer starts in death and ends in death, but its central question seems to be whether we can come to know the self, to develop an identity, when the impulse to see the world through the lens of the wunderkammerhasprevailed, when an entire sea and its suffering has been compressed into “Spots of water on crystal.” Perhaps we can’t. In the collection’s third poem with the title “Nebenwelt,” Cruz writes: “Like you, I am / Incapable of interpreting my own body, / Its soulless and mollusk iterations.” Though the speaker is addressing a specific “you,” the lines feel as if they are being directed at the reader. With this utterance, we become more than visitors at the wunderkammer. We leave the chamber-turned-museum-turned-mausoleum to reckon with our own sense of terror, knowing that the wunderkammer has been handed down to us, too, and that it informs our perception of ourselves, each other, and all that is. What have we tucked away in our own memory theaters and what shadow puppetry is enacted on the scrim? In a world where even language is implicated, we are left wondering what part we have played in what Cruz describes as, “These words, this terrible song.”

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Sources

  1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Collecting for the Kunstkammer.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm (accessed February 25, 2015).
  2. Mendoza, Bernardo Uribe, Rodolfo Ramirez, Neslson Cruz, Manuel Guillermo Forero, and Patricia Cervantes. 2000. “A ‘Virtual Worlds’ Theatre of Memory (Scheme for a Contemporary Museum).” In Virtual Worlds, ed. Jean-Claude Heudin, 205–213. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45016-5_19 (accessed February 25, 2015).
  3. Funston Antiques. “Wunderkammer: An Introduction and Preface.” http://www.funstonantiques.com/2009/05/09/wunderkammer-an-introduction-preface (accessed February 25, 2015).
  4. Tate Britain. “History of the Wunderkammern (Cabinet of Curiosities).” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/mark-dion-tate-thames-dig/wunderkammen (accessed February 25, 2015).
  5. Neault, Michael. “The Museum as Memory Palace.” http://blog.art21.org/2012/08/30/the-museum-as-memory-palace/#.VO9Io_nF_uM (accessed February 25, 2015).
  6. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Mental Imagery > Ancient Imagery Mnemonics.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/ancient-imagery-mnemonics.html (accessed February 25, 2015).

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“Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz” first appeared in Prick of the Spindle.

Cage-Cummings

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience. — John Cage, from Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. III, 1979.

We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we’re alive to use them. — John Cage

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage

I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo

Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible—that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus

Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson

Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me. — Anne Carson

There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson

Trust me. The trotting animal can restore / red hearts to red. — Anne Carson

Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson

So sweet / are we / to know / earth’s calloused / verses — Camille Carter

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. — C. P. Cavafy

After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa

I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Certa

we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Certa

how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty

What I can see is that saving public land is saving ourselves. — Cody Chamberlain

The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney

Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you “I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon.” — Dan Chelotti

The world seems to be a certain thing / until a moment illuminates the text / so brightly it becomes unreadable. — Allisa Cherry

Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön

The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön

Someday we’ll lie in dirt. / With mouths and mushrooms, the earth / will accept our apology. — Franny Choi

Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. — Hélène Cixous

I tell myself in my more curmudgeonly moods that relationships with animals are preferable to those with people. I keep forgetting that people are in fact animals: complicated, conflicted, gloriously noble and hilarious animals. — Chris Clarke

Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark

To write in your own voice means taking a risk. — Kevin Clark

We carry different authentic voices within ourselves. — Kevin Clark

You have to risk embarrassment to write in a voice that is yours. — Kevin Clark

I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark

I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud

Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork. — Jean Cocteau

a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen

Feels like I’m drifting off / to some great mistake—here, to a nameless / atoll somewhere in the Pacific, / seeking—what? — Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam

i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted. — John Compton

those poems, / like mottled wings, / are my soul. — John Compton

If you haven’t been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. — CAConrad

Poetry has NEVER BEEN MORE ALIVE AND I FILL MY TANK WITH IT EVERY MORNING ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE! — CAConrad

The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad

We need to treat our creative organs like they are vital organs, and we need to protect them. — CA Conrad

Instead of writing a book review, / I write another review of my own / pair of socks. What makes someone else / a perfect judge of my legs? I’m my own / tiny branch in a series of broken / poetry books that I made myself. — Juliet Cook

Poetry is not all that popular; nor is my vagina. — Juliet Cook

Oh and let’s not forget / the heartbreak, / the heartbreak of newly-mown grass, / of any and every awful beauty. — Kay McKenzie Cook

We have homeostatic biological systems. Disease results because of an imbalance of homeostasis. — Dr. Ryan Cooley

how do you come / to be when there are no others, except / science fiction? I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, / is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction — Rio Cortez

In one story I come from a sea god / with the forest as my mother, and in / the other, I have no mother at all. — Rio Cortez

he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. — Caleb Crain, from “Twilight of the Books”

The third and the last— / he died with / and gave up loving / and lived with her. — Robert Creeley

One eye goes laughing / One eye goes crying / Through the trials / And trying of one life — King Crimson

A California of snow and the surprise / Of illness. I throned myself in the white / Noise of its silence and watched as the world / Fell away. — Cynthia Cruz

An IV drip of consumption, whether or not / I want it. Fashion and excess. / Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warn doom and contagion. — Cynthia Cruz

Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz

There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz

This is not meant to be a koan / Or a fable. / I am telling you everything. / One day they’ll remove / The memory out of me. — Cynthia Cruz

The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate / until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her / paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed / to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one. — Jessica Cuello

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings