On the edge of whimsy

In his signature volume from 1995, Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler spun the curious tale of the Museum of Jurassic Technology: David Wilson's celebrated Wunderkammer, located on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. The museum, which houses a Borgesian array of authentic and fantastic specimens (unicorn ants, X-ray-emitting bats, a sculpture of Pope John Paul II hewn from a human hair), seemed scarcely more bizarre than Weschler's account of it. By turns erudite and chatty, precise and digressive, his writing is typically poised somewhere between strict reportage and the knottiest meta­fiction. With Everything that Rises, a selection of essays and fragments on uncanny cultural connections, Weschler turns his collector's eye on a species of more mainstream arcana.

His subject here is the unexpected visual or conceptual rhyme, the way images and ideas haunt each other across genres, history and politics. Weschler calls these meeting points his "visitations", and there is something spectral about the correspondences he conjures. Some are primarily visual: the phantom whorls, for example, of DNA, volcanic ash and distant nebulae. Others seem like ur-structures of human understanding, as when he traces the tree as a metaphor from genealogy to the genome, and art history to the grammatical ramifications of a sentence in Proust. At times, he sedulously follows links that others have contrived: an essay on the graphic design of the Solidarity movement is a small masterpiece of historical tenacity.

It is the more audacious synaptic couplings that truly impress. Weschler suggests that the clunkily addictive Russian computer game Tetris was a timely image of the mounting crises of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Searching for written symbols of eastern Europe before 1989, he lights on Ryszard Kapuscinski's study of Haile Selassie, The Emperor, as a displaced metaphor for Poland in the 1970s, but then trumps it with the suggestion that Oliver Sacks's Awakenings is the most apt allegory of a populace suddenly stirred from its historical slumber a decade later. That Sacks's account of his neurologically frozen patients was published in 1973 does not bother Weschler unduly; "convergences" pay little heed to chronology - in fact, that is Wes­chler's whole point.

The best essays in Everything that Rises are enriched by the author's deep but vagrant knowledge of art history. The book was inspired, he says, by a passage in John Berger's The Look of Things, in which Freddy Alborta's photograph of the dead Che Guevara's body is compared to the composition of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. Weschler essays his own masterful reading of the painting, pointing out that everything revolves around the living hand of the anatomist, and not the corpse. He reproduces a conversation with the photographer Joel Meyerowitz about the latter's (only partly conscious) harking back to Old Master cityscapes in his images of the ruined World Trade Center. As with the twinned images of sublime desolation that connect Rothko to the moon landings, links such as these may be unintended but they are not merely accidental.

Berger provides one model for the way Weschler exploits the gravitational attraction between disciplines; his writing has something, too, of the essayistic elan of Roland Barthes or Walter Benjamin. With his extrapolations from simple motifs to cosmic themes, Weschler sometimes resembles the Emerson of the great essay on "Circles". But in its compendious oddity, Everything that Rises also consciously recalls early-modern adepts of the cabinet of curiosities: the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, or the physician Sir Thomas Browne, whose obsession with symmetrical structures in nature is recalled here through W G Sebald's Rings of Saturn.

Weschler writes often on the edges of whimsy, and has in recent years found a congenial milieu among the McSweeney's set. If he shares the formal and conceptual playfulness of his younger associates, he is also aware that the whole notion of secret correspondences has something absurd about it. Everything that Rises reads at times like the musings of some postmodern Casaubon. "Of course," Weschler writes, "it never ends: you start thinking this way and it just goes on and on." He starts to fantasise "some sort of Grand Unified Field Metaphor that unites all these metaphors". The danger is that his pet notion of the telling conjunction starts to sound like the kind of glib cultural catch-all peddled by Weschler's former New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell, and that fine distinctions between images and ideas vanish in a mist of witty correlation.

Weschler, however, is too much the writer to let his "loose-synapsed" insights shrink to Blink-style cliché, and Everything that Rises is too well provisioned with what Thomas Browne called "things of rarity and observation" to exhaust itself on one intellectual track.

Brian Dillon is the author of "Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives", published by Penguin (£18.99) and is UK editor of the arts quarterly Cabinet

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