The Magnetic Fields of the Whirling Mechanism, Part I

"All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated - worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen - the physical and the immaterial are all connected - each exerting influence on the next - bound, as it were, by chains of analogy - magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots" —Valentine Worth

Serendipity in the multiverse of the Los Angeles basin verges on the epiphanic. JJ Abrams, the renowned illusionist and purveyor of tour-de-force telematica stumbled on the museum 15 years ago in a pre-Re-gentrified downtown Culver City. This was before Sony Pictures, the insatiable moloch in one of his many avatars, swallowed 10-by-12 city blocks, creating a real estate vaccum of Angelenian proportions, eventually ushering in a reverse white flight to the dustier corners of the hill-bound enclave--the darker tribes banished south to the fox hills. The queue to the 405 on-ramp that afternoon was slower than an ATM drive-thru. Abrahms needed an iced latte. Where was a starbucks when you needed one. On a block no lonelier than any other block on that stretch of Venice Blvd. across from the Mealy Apple Market, the corner storefront read: The Museum of Jurassic Technology, like something from the desk of Rod Serling. So he had to stop in and look. He recalled from his Freshman geology course, the Jurassic saw the first fissures of the supercontinent Pangeaea, and Culver City being a supreme center of kharmic residues of the celluloid kind, flying rabid monkeys, burning plantations—well, these facts indubitably resonated. The facade to the Museum of Jurrasic technology looked like the the wall of an atrium, an inlayed fountain a knocker-less door, as if to say the world is a secret garden and past this door is what frames it. The attendant at the front desk, a more congenial version of bearded bespectacled grad student of higher arcana and epistemology, mentioned there was tea and cookies upstairs in the sitting room. The unassuming facade belied the vastness of the buildings holdings. Beyond the heavy black draped doorway of the foyer were rooms leading to more rooms, all darkly lit by emergency exit lights ensconced in the molding. The narrowly focused beams strategically spotllighted artifacts and signage with copper-plated lettering glowing like biblical illuminations. Abrahms' immediate connection: this is the haunted house in Disneyland by way of Alister Crowley (though later he would realize there was nothing quite so sinister in any of the exhibits, more dead science really than black magic). Among the numerous artifacts: Letters from rogue scientists sent to the Mt. Wilson observatory, stereoscopic photography, flea-sized figurines poised on the heads of sewing needles. But the exhibit in the southend wing devoted to the works of Athanasius Kircher was what sent the bell wheel reeling and sounding it's polyphonous chime.