Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

We also have Lambshead’s own wistful words from his diary, written on a long-ago day in 1964: “It is never possible to completely reconstruct a person’s life from what they leave behind—the absurdity of it all, the pain, the triumphs. What’s lost is lost forever, and the silences are telling. But why mourn what we’ll lose anyway? Laughter truly is the best medicine, and I find whisky tends to numb and burn what’s left behind.”

The Broadmore Exhibits

Greg Broadmore came by his interest in Lambshead’s cabinet of curiosities honestly: through a familial connection. “Lambshead’s family and mine were connected by an uncle, so even after my grandparents moved to New Zealand, they kept in touch.”

On a trip to England at the age of twelve, Broadmore and his parents visited Lambshead. The artist remembers “a man in his eighties who looked more like fifty, but was as big a curmudgeon as you could possibly imagine. But he seemed to have a soft spot for me. At the very point where I was getting bored listening to them talk in the study, Lambshead suggested he step out to take me to the kitchen for some dessert . . . and instead he brought me down some steep steps into an underground space filled with wonders. The place was hewn out of solid stone and had that nice damp cool mossy smell you find in caves sometimes.”

Broadmore remembers Lambshead giving him a wink and saying, “Don’t break anything,” and leaving him there with a glass of milk and some banana bread. “For me, it was like being given a free pass to an amazing fairyland—the outward expression of all of the visions in my head of anything miraculous. It had a deep and lasting effect on my art.” For two hours, Broadmore roamed through Lambshead’s collection, finding “countless old toys and ridiculously complex machines and scandalous artwork and comics and . . . well, I began to wonder what wasn’t to be found there.”

Broadmore never visited the cabinet again, and since then has, of course, gone on to forge a near-legendary career as an artist and creator aligned with Weta Workshop. “I was particularly saddened to hear of Lambshead’s death a few years ago,” Broadmore remembers. “It brought back all of those memories of those perfect hours in his cabinet of curiosities.”

For this reason, among others, Broadmore kindly agreed to provide illustrative reconstructions for four of Lambshead’s museum loans, which have never been photographed, even after his death, pursuant to instructions in his will.

Constructed:March 14, 1914 (patent still pending)

Invented by:Nikola Tesla (Serbian subject of the Austrian Empire, later an American citizen, born July 10, 1856; “died” January 7, 1943)

History:Stolen from the “robotorium” (barn) of farmer-tinkerer Rhett Greene in St. John’s, Dominion of Newfoundland, 1947, by Yugoslavian agents. Held in the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation, until sold to Thackery T. Lambshead in 1997 and subsequently lent by his estate to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering; L2010.01

Biographical Sketch

Few intellects in the history of Man achieved such Daedalian heights as those conquered by Serbian inventor, mechanical engineer, psychemetrician, and electrodynamist Nikola Tesla. Men as grand of conjecture and achievement as Tesla attract, along with their many accolades, such a volume of obloquy as to produce an aneurysm among all but the most robustly confident of souls. And while Mr. Tesla was confident indeed, even “galactically arrogant,” as one detractor called him, he was also terrified of the charge that many of his foes in the scientific and journalistic establishments had hurled at him, viz., that he was insane.

Indeed, as the twentieth century of our Lord unfolded, Tesla served for many cinematistes as the very archetype of the deranged natural physicist or “mad scientist.” So it was that, in 1913, Tesla returned from his adopted America to the land of his birth to devote himself to constructing a mechanism that would ensure he never be chained in Bedlam’s urine-spattered halls: the electrical neurheographiton (nyu-REY-o-GRAPH-i-ton, lit., brain-wave writer).

Function of the Electrical Neurheographiton

Mr. Tesla’s electrical neurheographiton (1914) was the forerunner of the electro-encephalogram and the electro-convulsive malady-eraser, and the estranged nephew of the intravenous mercury phrenological brain engine (known popularly as the “liquid silver guillotine”).

Tesla “ionically enthralled” by his electrical neurheographiton.

A massive mechanical device consisting of a generator and the most sophisticated magnetic-electrical scanner in the world at that time, the neurheographiton beamed electrical energy into a patient’s cranium via a “healing helmet.” The “electrical balm” demonstrably and immediately undercut the mania, enthusiasm, apostasy, anarchism, and other emotional morbidities of Tesla’s numerous test subjects, apparently via relieving them of the burden of painful and traumatic memories (such as the recollection of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and dotage), priming the patient’s brain for emotional “rewriting” with whatever “biographical” data the therapist deemed appropriate. Following a single usage on himself, Tesla declared to his assistant, Mr. Igor Hynchbeck, that, “I’m cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured of all my obsessive impulsions! Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely free of all of them!”

Electrophantasmic Discharges

A type of energetic pollution arising from the neurheographiton’s manifold and highly charged internal mechanisms were what Mr. Tesla described in his Apologia Electronika as “electrophantasmic discharges”—plasmic fields that “disgorged horizontal ejaculations of lightning of a most disturbing and slaughterous composition.” These discharges also warped light into phantasms that mimicked recognisable objects and people with resolute credibility. Such apparitions chiefly consisted of:

a.A Bosnian Coarse-Haired Hound eating a clown composed entirely of human kidneys.

b.A massive bust of influential English occultist Aleister Crowley that transmogrified into “a field of bunnies dancing with all the glee of becandied children.”

c.A politely dressed Central European man offering a 1907–24 issue Hotchkiss No. 4 Paper Fastener (i.e., a stapler) to an unseen coworker.

Controversy and a Continent Torn Asunder