In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.
In a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia, honored as heroes of the last great war.
Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass.
After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins sets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. All his life, Wiggins has longed to see it. But in the Town, he comes face to face with the diorama’s contradictions. Its legacy of political violence. Its manipulation by those with power and money. And its paper-thin promise of immortality.
Excerpt
Excerpted from Dioramas by Blair Austin. Copyright © 2023 Dzanc Books. Reprinted with permission from Dzanc Books. Ann Arbor, MI. All rights reserved.
Whales
A cloud of blood glows red. Our movement along the glass disperses the light. Never, were it not for the explanatory matter, would we guess that this display began long ago, someplace else, at the bottom of the rubble.
A shard of wood: a split oar, the oarlock still attached, drifts toward heaven’s reverse, turned ’round for darkness. This clue of a boat, once above, cannot be seen from the other observation windows of the Whale Diorama. Here (lower third window, floor seven), there is simply a vast undersea, a lightening of the green going upward, a darkening going down (we felt we floated), an orange glow as well, as of a sunset or, as some have said, a burning vessel or the furnaces of the whale oil extraction process, or the furnace of the wider world itself, which evoke the familiar sense of the sentries and symbol, “decline”—declension rather than outright, slope and y-intercept at the midway point of the parabola. Why, then, do we not know for sure?
This diorama, you may be aware, dating from before the early city, is over four thousand, six hundred years old, dated by the usual means. It was discovered under the iron and beams, the reinforcing bars like little trachea with a case of the scales, basemented by a catastrophe, and when discovered at the crystalline, southeast corner, glowing, or it seemed to the discoverers—and to thousands of pilgrims, who, earlier prayed to the strange, cubelike structure—they did not know it stretched on and on, both under and far, could not have known. Could not have known. Everything is “Could not have known.”
As you know, there are but three such ancient dioramas in existence, one of which contains the hind leg of a dog and the other of which was intended more as an encyclopedic bestiary with all sorts of species displayed on a “mountain side.”
The conservation of the Whale Diorama ran the usual track, save the fact that, being encased in that resin (so pervasive, so peculiar to the time before and enabling no picking-over, so air and watertight), everything was perfectly preserved. The worshippers found simply a blue and green projection, like glass, that would warp the light. Little did they know the great diorama that deepened under the rubble. No, it took the South River Flood, and more, to eat away the ground and expose this giant—and to us, quaint—museum as a lens of worship. That fascinating resin, that cool, clean substance that one can say is the very essence of the time before.
The excavation was the work of years done under a temporary roof out of the weather until, one by one, in great slices the diorama of the whale came into the light. To be taken to the warehouses, studied and conserved, restored and reassembled, at last, in the museum.
The seams of the reconstruction had to be flawless.
Each piece, when lifted out and reassembled, is quite smooth. Think of an aspic or the seamless room of an insect in amber (who were indeed the first prisoners of the diorama) or a lovely ordinance gelatin, cut with a wire pulled smooth—no stutters—then placed near as can be to the original before the final fitting of the holding-resin (made of locust gum) like honey that dries clear.
There were hollows where creatures had been dissolved over time. Great cracks, as from some cataclysm, ran through some of the resin, you see. A concussion sudden and total it must have been, and the rainwater trickled down through the collapsed structure. The conservators, to get the outline and detail of what had once dwelled there, filled these voids with dental plaster, which, when set, gave the shape of the creatures whole, every outline and hair, even the divots on the tongue of this individual. And then the great block of resin was sawn through and opened as if on hinges, like a sarcophagus, the whale in dental plaster hoisted out and transported with great care to the workshops. Following this, a selection of the likeliest dye brought out the details on the plaster, which was then painted, and the entire creature took skin, looking exactly as it might have done in the original. The two halves of the resin block were then refitted around the animal and sealed with a twinning-resin, exactly specified to blend so that no evidence of the repair can be seen.
Conservation is an act of despair and also an act of faith. The finished diorama, Window Six. The strained distances, the flecks of the watered world in their cloud-removes. As buildings of murk and passage, growing narrower, the now burgeoning corridor of the balloon’s interior, wet with breathing, has gone on, independent. “The sense that some localized portion of the world burns above ice.” These are Michaux’s, the great dioramist’s, words.
Our earlier ship on fire, our furnaces, perhaps, for whale oil. One isn’t sure. Some of the charm and the unease comes from the light itself, avoided, yet also coming toward us in the murk, through the timbre, if you will, of the smoke, the unintentional air trapped in these microscopic bubbles like white fleas.
Amateur
On my desk is a diorama of two theen finches, a female and a male, yellow with a brown cap. I finished the diorama—to my dissatisfaction—a week ago and sealed it in a glass box to keep out the dust. But the dust got in anyway, settling on the moss, which I’d intended to be wet. After taking it apart and cleaning the moss, I decided I could spare the materials for a second glass box, to nest the first, sealing the edges of the wood frame with wax, which I smoothed with a piece of wood I’d carved for that purpose.
I had found the female finch near W Station on my way to the museum when I still worked there. I wrapped the creature in my handkerchief and stored it in my lunch box.
She has pinned a hazelnut under one foot while pecking. Her head is raised, beak toward breast, for a powerful, downward thrust. Other hazelnuts, some still in their haired husks, are placed on the moss. I found them, too—in the woodlot near my apartment. But then on a whim I changed my mind. I wanted two birds. So I bought a premade male of the same species at a supply shop, colored blue-yellow, with a black cap. I took the boxes apart again and put him in.
Dioramas are an expensive hobby.
The theen finch is a ground-dwelling bird, and the male stands on the moss, its blue sometimes yellow, its yellow sometimes blue. Head tipped, he scratches the top of his head with a claw. He is an exemplar, unusually slender in his lines, while the female I tried to prepare is somewhat lumpy, as if the two had been twins separated at birth and released in different wood lots. In low light, they smear. It is difficult to tell which is which, save by their posture, but as morning comes and my room fills with sunlight, the birds go into themselves, like into a glass of water. Yet when the light is off, and I am near sleep, they are there in the dark.
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