Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (2 page)

Megaloponera foetens (
the Cameroonian
stink ant) with forehead rampant

D
eep in the Cameroonian rain forests of west-central Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as
Megaloponera foetens
, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant—indeed, one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear—survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.

On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus
Tomentella
, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant's tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.

Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.

The fungus, for its part, lives on: it continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant's head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

T
HE
GREAT
MIDCENTURY
American neurophysiologist Geoffrey Sonnabend inhaled his spore, as it were, one insomniac
night in 1936 while convalescing from a combined physical and nervous breakdown (brought on, in part, by the collapse of his earlier investigation into memory pathways in carp) at a small resort near the majestic Iguazú Falls, in the so-called Mesopotamian region along the Argentinean-Brazilian-Paraguayan frontier. Earlier that evening, he had attended a recital of German Romantic lieder given by the great Romanian-American vocalist, Madalena Delani. Delani, one of the leading soloists on the international concert circuit of her day, had won frequent praise from the likes of the
New York Times
's Sidney Soledon, who once surmised that the uniquely plaintive quality of her vocal instrument—its texture, as he described it, of being “steeped in a sense of loss”—might have derived from the fact that the singer suffered from a form of Korsakov's syndrome, with its attendant obliteration of virtually all short- and intermediate-term memory, with the exception, in her case, of the memory of music itself.

Madalena Delani and Geoffrey Sonnabend at Iguazú Falls (1936
)

Although Geoffrey left the concert hall that evening without ever meeting Delani, the concert had electrified him, and through a sleepless night he conceived, as if in a single blast of inspiration, the entire model of intersecting plane and cone that was to constitute the basis for his radical new theory of memory, a theory he'd spend the next decade painstakingly elaborating in his three-volume
Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
(Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1946). Memory, for Sonnabend, was an illusion. Forgetting, not remembering, was the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective, as he explained in the introduction
to his turgid masterwork, “We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and irretrievability of its moments and events” (p. 16). He himself went on to expand on this doctrine through the explication of an increasingly intricate model in which a so-called Cone of Obliscence is bisected by Planes of Experience, which are continually slicing through the cone at changing though precise angles. The theory was perhaps at its most suggestive as it broached such uncanny shadow phenomena as the experiences of premonition, déjà vu, and foreboding. But once the plane of any particular experience had passed through the cone, the experience was irretrievably forgotten—and all else was illusion. A particularly haunting conclusion, in that no sooner had Sonnabend published his magnum opus than both he and it fell largely into oblivion.

As for Delani, ironically, utterly unbeknownst to Sonnabend, she herself had perished in a freak automobile accident within a few days of her concert at Iguazú Falls.

Plane of Experience bisecting Cone of Obliscence

Dozo dwelling pierced by
deprong mori

F
OR
HIS
PART
, Donald R. Griffith, Rockefeller University's eminent chiroptologist (and author of
Listening in the Dark: Echolocation in Bats and Men
), appears to have inhaled something suspiciously sporelike back in 1952, while reading the field reports of an obscure late-nineteenth-century American ethnographer named Bernard Maston. While doing field work, in 1872, among the Dozo of the Tripsicum Plateau of the circum-Caribbean region of northern South America, Maston reported having heard several accounts of the
deprong mori
, or piercing devil, which he described as “a small demon which the local savages believe able to penetrate solid objects,” such as the walls of their thatch huts and, in one instance, even a child's outstretched arm.

Almost eighty years later, while reviewing some of Maston's notes in the Archive, Donald R. Griffith, for some reason, as he later recounted, “smelled a bat.” He and a band of assistants undertook an arduous eight-month expedition to the Tripsicum Plateau, where Griffith grew increasingly convinced that he was dealing not with just any bat but with a very special bat indeed: specifically, the tiny
Myotis lucifugus
, which though previously documented had never before been studied in detail. It became Griffith's hypothesis that while most bats deploy frequencies in the ultrasonic range to assist them in
the echolocation that enables them to fly in the dark,
Myotis lucifugus
had evolved a highly specialized form of echolocation based upon ultraviolet wavelengths, which even, in some instances, verged into the neighboring X-ray band of the wave spectrum. Furthermore, these particular bats had evolved highly elaborate nose leaves, or horns, which allowed them to focus their echo-wave transmissions in a narrow beam. All of which would account for the wide range of bizarre effects described by Maston's informants.

Echolocation in bats

Griffith and his team lacked only proof. Time after time, the little devils, on the very verge of capture, would fly seamlessly through their nets. So Griffith devised a brilliant snaring device, consisting of five solid-lead walls, each one eight inches thick, twenty feet high, and two hundred feet long—all of them arrayed in a radial pattern, like spokes of a giant wheel, along the forest floor. The team affixed seismic sensors all along the walls in an intricate gridlike pattern, and proceeded to wait.

Electromagnetic spectrum

Elaborate nose leaves

For two months, the monitors recorded not a thing—surely the bats were simply avoiding the massive, and massively incongruous, lead walls—and Griffith began to despair of ever confirming his hypothesis. Finally, however, early on the morning of August 18th at 4:13
A.M.
, the sensors recorded a pock. The number-three wall had received an impact of magnitude 10×3 ergs twelve feet above the forest floor and 193 feet out from the center of the wheel. The team members carted an X-ray viewing device out to the indicated spot, and sure enough, at a depth of 7⅛ inches, they located the first
Myotis lucifugus
ever contained by man, “eternally frozen in a mass of solid lead.”