A few perfect cabinets, if I may: the winged altarpieces of the northern renaissance, particularly those by Veit Stoss and Nikolaus Hagenauer - and alongside them, the dream structures that Brodsky and Utkin etched into grids and mailed to Tokyo. Then this stunning case (with its exposed brass ribs, dappled glass, casters as tall and elegant as heels) that holds the sarcophagus of Sety I in the Sepulchral Chamber of Sir John Soane's Holborn townhouse. The two-story chasm in a central Tokyo tower that preserves an Imperial natural history collection; both the new V&A East Storehouse shelves (including the long approach through the badlands of post-2012 Stratford, that fulcrum of contemporary British history) and the vast steel armature of the Scottish National Museum's entry hall that preceded them, from which emerge hunks of coral, motorcycles, bone china, and propellers. That backlit chamber of Victorian microscope slides in UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology. Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes more than Duchamp's valise, if only because Cornell's retain the cramped intensity of the unheated house he shared with his mother and brother in Queens. Reinhard Behrens' feverish documentation of his voyages into Naboland, David Jien's pencil drawings, William Kentridge's projection theaters, June Leaf's unnameable devices. The chests of all alchemists and apothecaries. Korean chaekgeori obviously, but also the arrangement of shadow puppets in a casement window I passed once at dusk in Seattle - and the neat gallery of pollarded plane trees beneath Berkeley's Campanile (through the branches of which we circulated like swollen gibbons at 17). Certain books - surely Moby Dick and The Magic Mountain, the well wrought urns of digression - and some websites and many animations, like those by Yuri Norstein, the Brothers Quay, Phil Tippet, and Takehide Hori to start. The whole peninsula of terraformed marshland outside Sapporo that Noguchi scattered with unreal copses and geometric playgrounds. The purple velvet box that my mother keeps behind a sequined shroud, with one of its four padded compartments holding the whiskers of a lion gathered by my father.
Gene Wolfe writes, in one of his hundred perfect stories, of mortuary chambers launched into space, encased in asteroids or skinned with sheet metal. Decades later, a producer of pulp TV films himself spelunking into these memorials - floating cabinets arranged by and for the dead, waiting patiently to perform their compositions for the occasional visitor.
If there's a heuristic here, it's in systems neurotically arranged then lightly broken, near-misses at perfect taxonomies, the blinding compulsion (despite others' bafflement) to isolate and frame a specific fantasy like a section taken through the world.
And maybe it's miserly of me, but I think there's a size limit. As soon as a cabinet is immediately useful to too many people, it strikes me as having become something else, an archive or social network maybe. My father, a carpenter and the most prolific cabinetmaker of this sort I know, finds the more professionalized version finicky, almost unbearable. Because unlike kitchen cabinets, nothing listed here is broadly useful to anyone who might turn up - at least not in a way that can be anticipated. It's always a bit disorienting, the machinery of nostalgia and ritualized immersion. A good cabinetmaker of this school would need to dabble in essentially every human skill. It would take a full life I think to make one or two good ones; and they would in turn become the vessels of that life, compressed and rearranged, hurtling forward for centuries to come.
I'm doing my best. I have the skeletons of seven or eight on and around my desk right now, some inherited, others assembled from scraps or recovered from the side of the road. I like to think of them as broken optical instruments, awaiting only-partial repair. I've made sketches and fumbling first passes - the Aleph, a small tool for future cabinetmaking that holds every piece of digital imagery to my name, and this arrangement of some beloved objects from my desk, made to serve as a mute little website.
I’d like to break the next one out of the screen for good: encase it in a block of acrylic, mount it with mylar sails, and fire it into the stars. More modestly, I might first put it on some casters and call it The Night Country.