III

Here I sit, forming humans
In my image;
A people to be like me
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and delight themselves
And not to attend to you
As I.

Goethe, Prometheus

In our confusion, we moved on to the Sanford Hall of North American Birds.  As one enters the room, immediately one's the left hangs a giant oil painting of the La Brea tar pits as they might have looked several million years ago.

The picture is dominated by a giant and obviously malevolent animal, which, it is explained, is a teratorn, a type of enormous and fortunately extinct creature of the air whose fearsome remains have been discovered in the pits.  As I stood transfixed by this monster the French children wandered off, presumably to further confirm their antipathy towards the avian world, or perhaps to search, (in vain, they likely suspected,) for something redeeming among the stiff loons, cranes, ducks, geese, hawks, kites, and eagles which lined the walls behind me.

The dioramas of this Hall were smaller than those of the one I had left, but similarly themed.  Salient differences in behavior were faithfully represented, specifically the practice, widespread among birds, of feeding their young by regurgitation.  Almost every diorama contained an animal frozen in the performance of this act of self-sacrifice, with its chick's head halfway down its distended gullet, which gave me the disagreeable impression of being the sole, unsuspected witness to an orgy of infanticide and cannibalism.  I imagined the teratorn disgorging whole human bodies, their lacerated limbs slipping over the sides of its enormous erie as the blind, featherless chicks, already the size of large cats, shrieked and clacked their beaks and tore at unseen flesh amidst a forest of reeking bones.  I thought of a film I had seen, I think, in the British Museum, although this now seems implausible because it was so horrifying, of a Tibetan sky-burial.

As I remember it, the filmmaker followed a group of men in a Land Rover onto a desolate hillside.  Flocks of huge griffon vultures, apparently recognizing certain signs, poured down from the sky and surrounded them, kept at bay by a boy with a stick, their bald heads bobbing on thick, muscular necks which undulated like serpents.  The men unwrapped a stiff bundle, revealing the corpse of an elderly man who had recently died, we were reassured, of natural causes.  Using heavy cleavers, they cut the body into pieces small enough for the maned birds to swallow, and as they retreated the vultures rushed in, squawking and pecking one another.  Nothing of the body could be seen amidst the mass of seething feathers, and at length they retreated, leaving only a crimson skeleton.  The coroners then returned to pound the bones into a wet powder, which they mixed with an enticing substance I cannot recall and fed to the crows and other, smaller carrion birds which had been straining at the periphery against the seething bulk of their betters.  I was so affected that I cannot recall anything else about seeing the film; the reactions of the other audience members, who I was with, or even the year in which I saw it.  My only memory of environing events is emerging into the great central hall of the Museum, blinded by the diffused light streaming through the round glass canopy over the Reading Room, and even this may be confabulation.

The practice of sky burial in Tibet has led some to conjecture ancient cultural connections with the analogous Zoroastrian practice of exposing the dead on what a British Orientalist once called "towers of silence" for the same purpose.  These were circular edifices, of which many ancient examples remain in central Iran, surmounted by a round, walled platform on which corpses were placed (but not dismembered, as in Tibet) by a specialist who lived in a nearby outbuilding.  The platform incorporated a central well, and the dessicated remnants disdained by the lowland vultures were periodically swept into it to make room for new occupants.   I remember being shocked, on several levels, when I read several years ago that this practice is still current in parts of India, but that it is becoming untenable because the local carrion birds have been all but exterminated due to the widespread use of the analgesic compound diclofenac, which is apparently poisonous to them, by veterinarians and farmers eager to assuage the mortal sufferings of the livestock on whose corpses they commonly feed.

Ruminating on the themes of dismemberment and extinction, I was suprised to see, clinging to a dead tree in a small, neglected vitrine, a complete example of the bird whose forlorn and mysteriously solitary head Rachel had noticed in the gutter the day before.

It had been, I learned, a yellow-bellied sapsucker; but the label said nothing else, and so if its identity made intelligible or, perhaps, necessary, the fact of its recent decapitation, the import was lost on me.

I passed out of the Sanford Hall of North American Birds, and was momentarily confused to find myself in an exhibit dedicated to the indigenous peoples of the American Northeast; I had not appreciated thusfar that for the museum's architects and curators anthropology remained a province of natural history.  I wandered through this exhibit and into an impressive collection of artifacts from the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.  I stood for several minutes before a colossal Olmec granite head before reading its label, which informed me that it had been found vandalized and buried in the ground and that archaeologists believe that this was done by the very people who created it.  I could not decide whether, given this, I should view it as an object of unspeakable malignity, or a pitiable victim, or both.  Confused, I wandered on, unaware of my surroundings, and when I regained  my equilibrium I found myself in the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples.

The symmetry of this exhibit's name with that of those I had previously passed through was striking, and the impression of the continuity of Asian peoples with with African mammals and North American birds was born out as I moved through the exhibit.  It consisted of a series of dioramas strikingly reminiscent of those in the Akeley African hall, in that they depicted type specimens in what were allegedly characteristic poses, set against luxuriant background paintings of their natural environment; the salient difference was that the specimens on display in the Stout Hall were mannequins rather than mounted skins.  Whether this was simply because of conventions surrounding the appropriate disposal of human remains, or, rather, a positive choice made because sculpture is a more plastic medium than taxidermy and allows the naturalist a freer hand in the representation of ideal types, was not explicitly addressed.  However, it is possibly relevant to recall that in later life Carl Akeley turned to sculpture to represent men and anthropomorphized apes, since it is known that in many instances ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The dioramas also attempted to convey important particulars respecting the environment and behavior of the specimens depicted, in much the same tone as the one I had seen earlier which dispassionately described the trials of the warthog.  I was told, for instance, that

The Ainu may once have been spread over the Japanese islands but were dispossessed byt the japanese and now occupy only part of the island of Hokkaido.  They differ from neighboring Asians physically and in language.  Their economy has centered on hunting deer, seals, whales and fishing carried on by the men, while the women maintain gardens of barley, millet, peas and beans.  Ainu women have their lips tattooed blue at 17 to show their eligibility for marriage and to protect the mouth from being entered by evil spirits.  The Ainu organize their society around elected chiefs, who keep their posts into old age.

Another diorama depicted a Korean scholar, seated in his study laboring over a Confucian text, while his wife amuses herself with womanly pursuits in her "sanctum."  The description shared the odd, atemporal register of that of the Ainu, as though its subjects could be reasonably expected to remain basically the same for the duration of the present geological epoch.  I noticed throughout that when historical developments were referred to, such as the displacement of the Ainu by the Japanese or the integration of aspects of Chinese culture by Koreans, they invariably referred to past interactions between Oriental peoples, never to their current relation to other cultures in the East, or, for that matter, with the West.  The overall impression conveyed was of a world divided, or own realm of diachrony limned by a pleasingly exotic and unchanging archipelago populated by fascinating beings superficially resembling humans.

The teaching script offered by the Museum to educators bringing classes to view the Stout Hall offers some points of reference, reminding us that "there is no one 'Asian' country,"  and suggesting that prior to visiting teachers "familiarize students with the vocabulary."

The terms defined, for easy reference, are: ancestor veneration; Buddhism; caste system; Confucianism; divination; dowry; dynasty; extended family; Hinduism; Islam; matchmaker; monsoon; nomad; Shamanism; Shinto; Taoism; terracing; and wet-rice cultivation.  I had the impression that I was viewing some kind of forgotten outpost of the 1950s.  This place, I thought, must have been constructed long ago, and curiously neglected by the Museum's modern creators; perhaps out of nostalgic reverence for the enormous amount of work which had obviously gone into it, or perhaps because they were more concerned with the magisterial fossil exhibits I was to visit later that afternoon, as being of greater relevance to Natural History than whatever it was that was going on here.

Later, I learned from a back issue of the Christian Science Monitor that the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples had opened to public acclaim, and at a cost of $2.8 million, only a few months before the Sheep Meadow was restored to pristine splendor, in the fall of 1980.  The article's title was "Hall of Asian Peoples; Orienting the Americans." It began with an anecdote about the archaeologist and anthropologist, Walter Ashlin Fairservis, who had led the Hall's design over most of the preceding decade.

Little account of Fairservis' life survives beyond his work and his many obituaries.  I was able to learn that he began his peregrinations in Asia in 1945, as an Army Intelligence Officer assigned to General MacArthur's staff after the Japanese surrender.  In 1949 he led the First American Expedition to Afghanistan under the auspices, and with the funding of the American Museum of Natural History, which consisted of himself, Louis B. Dupree (archaeologist) and Henry W. Hart (surveyor).  He returned in 1951 with a somewhat larger team including his wife, Jan Fairservis, whom he thanks for "her accurate field drawings."  He opens his monograph catologuing their findings in the region of Seistan with tributes to Hafizullah Khan, the Afghan who accompanied his party, and quotations from his wife's journal.

 He closed with "the final and most heartfelt word of thanks for making so much possible then, now, and always," to his mother.

During the first expedition Fairservis and his associates endured daytime temperatures of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, which fell to only 85 at night, and constant winds between 30 and 40 miles per hour.

The second expedition, which was more felicitously scheduled during the Afghan winter, was nonetheless enlivened by harrowing circumstances.  At one point, Fairservis recounts in the remarkably frank introduction to his monograph on the archaeology of the region, they found themselves on the brink of an important discovery 60 miles from the nearest source of fresh water.   All members of the team agreed to limit themselves to half-rations, "virtually lived off a colloidal solution of mud, and completed three additional days of field work."  On the way back, they ran out of fuel and were forced to walk miles to the village of the Baluch chief Mohammed Omar, who kindly took in this band of what, where I in his position, I would have assumed were potentially dangerous lunatics.

In addition to innumerable technical drawings of geologic formations and ancient artifacts discovered on the two expeditions he made to Afghanistan, Fairservis included a number of photographic plates at the end of Archaeological Studies in the Seistan Basin of South-Western Afghanistan and Eastern Iran.  These depict primarily landscapes and artifacts, the latter always accompanied by Fairservis'  knife, presumably for scale.  The only expedition member pictured in any of them is Jan Fairservis.

This was the beginning of an illustrious career for Dr. Fairservis at the American Museum of Natural History.  In 1960 he lead an expedition to a desolate region of Pakistan near the Seistan basin, reportedly discovering the ruins of an imperial complex forgotten by history and lost in the desolate waste.  It may be on the strength of this account that he acquired the distinction for which he is primarily known today, to those who know him at all, which is that of being the alleged model for the fictional archaeologist Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., played to much acclaim by Harrison Ford in a film released shortly after the opening of the Stout Hall.  When questioned later in life, Fairservis could only recall that a filmaker had once asked him what he typically wore into the field; my sources do not record whether or not his answer involved a whip.

Fairservis wrote mainly on ancient history, but travelled widely in Asia in the course of his researches.  His writings evince deep respect for his guides and friends on these expeditions, and he remained closely interested in contemporary Asian cultures and political developments.  It must have been difficult for him to accept the Museum administration's inflexible prohibition on representing anything Asian after 1920 in the Stout Hall, a bizarre decision apparently motivated by a desire to avoid any reference to the Cold War generally and, specifically and emphatically, any evocation of the United States' recent and ignominious defeat by a poorly equipped but evidently superior army of agrarian patriots in Indochina.  He spoke to the Christian Science Monitor correspondent, just before the opening of the Hall, with evident regret and ambivalence:

One of our biggest problems was to come up with an answer to the cliches most people have about Asians.  There is the feeling that Asia is either a land of exotic mysteries or suffering masses. This is the great misconception we tried to dispel. I'm not sure we succeeded.

New York Magazine reported on October 20th that Fairservis might not even attend the gala opening of the Stout Hall, citing longstanding tension with the Museum's Director, Dr. Thomas D. Nicholson: "There has to be a balance," Fairservis is quoted as saying, "between commercialism and scholarship, and he goes to far.  He goes for a public that doesn't read, one that responds only to colorful things."  I have not been able to establish whether he attended the gala or not, but shortly after the opening Walter Fairservis resigned from the American Museum of Natural History, after nearly forty years.  The Monitor attributes his decision to what the correspondent calls a "philosophical" dispute over the handling of certain contemporary Communist posters from China, and a copy of The Quotations of Chairman Mao.

I learned from the January, 1979 issue of the Eugene O'Neil Newsletter that two years before his resignation, Fairservis had adapted, produced, and directed a production of O'Neil's now obscure comedy Marco Millions, a Broadway show famed for its extravagant sets and huge cast, and which has generally been interpreted as a satire of Western materialism, although I can make no judgment since I have never seen nor read it.  Fairservis' version starred his daughter, Elf, who is said to have "captured the beauty and ideality of the East," and was apparently performed on a minimalist set and with the addition of a new part, which Fairservis wrote himself in blank verse.

Within the ambit of Fairservis' first expedition to Seistan stands the Kuh-e Khwaja, which is the only natural height in the region. It is an immense mass of congealed lava rising out of Lake Hamun, and when the lake swells the Kuh-e Khwaja is cut off, and and becomes an island in the lake's center.   It is thought that the prophet Zoroaster dwelt there at some point during his life, although it is really impossible to know since contemporary authorities agree that he flourished one hundred and seventy-five generations ago.  Amongst the ruins of the Ghaga-Shahr, however, which is the oldest complex on the Kuh-e Khwaja, are the remains of a Zoroastrian fire temple which are thought to pre-date the later Islamic ruins and burial sites by many centuries.

It is written in the Denkard that near the ending of the world, a maiden will bathe in Lake Hamun, where is miraculously preserved the seed of Zoroaster himself, and that she shall have knowledge of it.  She will give birth to Saoshyant, who will be Ahura-Mazda's agent in the rectification of the world.  Then the metals of the hills will run molten into the hollow place, and all the souls of earth will have to traverse the burning sea.  The Bundahishn tells us that then 

all men will pass into that melted metal and will become pure; when one is righteous, then it will seem to him just as though he walks continually in warm milk; but when wicked, then it will seem to him in such manner as though, in the world, he walked continually in melted metal.