The Organs of Sense Read online

  In short, the astronomer told Leibniz, he had entered a period of madness.

  When he emerged from it the next morning, he emerged with the principle of the telescope.

  There was no eureka moment, he said. “There was only madness, and then incredible vision.”

  The astronomer put an eye socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down.

  Of course, his inability to furnish that eureka moment, to retrace precisely the route by which he had arrived at the notion that two convex lenses placed one behind the other would magnify, albeit invert, the world—the foundation, Leibniz noted, of what is now called the Keplerian telescope—rendered him suspect in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes of the chroniclers of the world, who, in devoting their lives to carving from the infinitely extended, infinitely dense glob of absolute nonsense known as reality numerous little globules of nonsense, then compressing these globules of nonsense into beads of pure nonsense, and finally stringing together these nonsensical fact-beads into handsome glittering concatenations of seeming sense, i.e., their history books, practice sanity, promulgate sanity, and privilege, in selecting what and especially whom to preserve and parade about for posterity, a species of sanity. Now, sanity has, no doubt, accomplished a great deal throughout European history, the astronomer told Leibniz. Sanity is important, too! But in all of the hoopla over sanity, we ought not to neglect the contributions of madness. “Of course, it is true, if I might anticipate your objection, Herr Leibniz,” the astronomer said, “that these sane chroniclers sometimes pay lip service to the merits of madness, or more than sometimes, perpetually, actually these staunchly sane chroniclers are almost always completely obsessed with madness, the saner the more obsessed, probably precisely because they sense the strictures imposed on their thoughts by their sanity, and they fill their histories with hymns to madness and its fruits: with painters who painted their greatest paintings with their left hand, in the dark, while chained by the right to a wall in a Fool’s Tower, with philosophers who lived in filth but spoke the truth, with mystics who walked into the desert and lived for forty years atop a pillar before returning to the city bearing the word of God. Their histories, you will object, Herr Leibniz, are in fact nothing but histories of madness, fairy tales and fables of madness, odes to madness as the supreme mechanism of art and science, histories of the world as the handiwork of the mad! And I reply: Whatever it is these sane chroniclers are chronicling, it is not madness. The painter is locked up in a Fool’s Tower … but he paints a painting the sane see as beautiful. The philosopher lives in his filth … but he says things the sane see as true. The mystic climbs up his pillar … but he climbs back down it with what the sane see as the word of God. This isn’t madness,” he told Leibniz, “it is only the portion of madness recognizable to the sane, expressible in the tongue of the sane, and is ipso facto the sane portion of madness: This is sanitized madness! The portion of insanity that can be put in the language of the sane is obviously the sane portion. It is the untranslatable residue that constitutes true madness. Notice how in the history books you never come across a man or indeed a woman who climbs up a pillar for no reason, and never comes down. Where is the history of this pointless pillar person? Whose bones are picked clean by the birds? Where is the historian who will write the history of this person who climbs up a pillar for no reason, reports nothing from God, and is ultimately devoured by birds? Where is the history of the philosopher who lives in his own filth, subsists on garbage, grunts incessantly, like a beast, brutalizes himself, and has never once been heard to utter anything even remotely intelligible, not a single word, much less a syllogism? Where is the historian who will write the history of this philosopher? I will tell you where he is: He’s nowhere! He does not exist! He does not and cannot by definition exist,” the astronomer said, according to Leibniz. “For the instant a historian writes a stupendously long history of a person who climbs a pillar for no reason and is devoured up there by desert birds, or of a bestial philosopher who cannot speak and eats garbage, the historian ceases to be a historian and becomes, himself, a madman. In the eyes of the world and in his own eyes also he has climbed his own pillar, ceased speaking intelligibly.

  “So it is that any book that tells the truth about the telescope is regarded as nonsense, including my own On the True Nature of the Astral Tube, which I had printed in Frankfurt at my own expense, and distributed for free at the fair there, one thousand copies, all of which vanished immediately and without a trace,” said the astronomer.

  His words were not even admitted as evidence, let alone taken as proof.

  “And so I resigned myself to vanishing, likewise, without a trace.”

  After all, most people simply vanish without a trace when they die, and so, he thought, would he.

  Then, lifting a crooked forefinger and issuing a crooked grin, he said:

  “Until, that is, I foresaw the solar eclipse.

  “I,” he added, “and no one else!”

  An eclipse was actually better than words. The same words mean different things to different people, but a solar eclipse looks the same to everyone standing in the same place at the same time.

  “And so, Herr Leibniz, as long as you see the eclipse, too…”

  If Leibniz saw the eclipse, too, the astronomer “would not vanish after all!”

  The astronomer pulled a pocket watch out of his rags, either glanced at it or perhaps felt the angle of its hands with his fingers, rammed it back in his rags, and turned again to Leibniz.

  “But you are still wondering, But how in the world did this crazy old fool lose his eyes? Who plucked them out, and why? For I am revealing nothing you haven’t intuited already when I tell you that they did not simply fall out on their own…”

  * * *

  THE TRUTH IS THAT he himself did not understand right away the actual nature of his invention, nor, although it required considerable fortitude to resist the temptation, did he construct right away a prototype—for it so happened that the very morning on which his madness receded, leaving in its wake the concept of this remarkable distance-eradicating tube, his father rushed into his bedroom “not realizing that he was rushing into the birthing chamber of an epochal idea” and proclaimed with palpable pride that their mechanical human head was complete. Come! Look! See for yourself! His eyes shone. An impromptu demonstration was arranged. His father, wearing the black velvet cap he had not worn since his days at Emperor Maximilian’s court at Hofburg, but which even as the family slid into destitution no one dared to suggest he sell, and he did not propose it either, stood behind the Head of Phalaris. Then, with a legerdemain he had rehearsed fanatically so that like an illusionist he would be able to operate the automaton at the Castle without the Emperor’s apprehending its mechanism, he turned a small crank buried in the copious curls at the nape of the thief’s neck, which powered in turn a tiny rotary fan with three blades, which impelled air into a byzantine network of tubes, which produced from the head’s mouth in a wheezy, staccato, oddly high-pitched, vaguely unearthly, but basically comprehensible voice a very popular Bohemian folk song, then a poem commemorating the total annihilation of the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and lastly a short selection from the catechism composed by the illustrious Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius and ratified for use across the realm by Rudolf’s grandfather, Emperor Ferdinand the First. All the while the teeth chomped and the eyes blinked. The head asked itself one final question from the catechism, “What is understood by the name of Faith?,” answered it, “A gift of God, and a light wherewith man being illuminated doth firmly assent and cleave unto those things which are revealed by God,” and the performance was over.

  The workshop was silent now. When he could stand the silence no longer, his father tugged at his graying beard and said: “Well? So?” And he stood there, awaiting his son’s judgment. The feather in his black velvet cap, which in Vienna had always stood straight as a steeple, now drooped, poi
nting if not quite at the floor then nevertheless no longer at the heavens. It was astonishing how old, how visibly old, he had become, “less old than I must look to you now,” the astronomer told Leibniz, “but still old, old, truly old!” He added: “Possibly the sole aspect of the essence of a head expressed permanently on its surface, i.e., on its skin, is its age.” How could he tell this old man the truth? That he’d made an amusing parlor trick? That however high he had elevated this mechanical head, it still languished as far below man, as infinitely far below man, as man languished below God? That in point of fact it did not even rise to the level of an abomination? “Watch it again!” cried his father, and again albeit more frantically he spun the crank, and again the folk song started up, and the whole routine repeated itself. And again it went silent and again he plucked at his beard and again said, “Well? So?”

  The next word I say will shatter this old man into a million pieces, the astronomer thought.

  Now the folk song started up a third time, and the astronomer, losing patience, was about to utter something quite cruel—something terribly cruel—when he realized that his father’s hands were still, and the mechanical head was silent. The singing now was coming from outside. The astronomer flung open the window, stuck his head out, and “it was only then that I grasped the enormity of my father’s accomplishment.” For there in the stinking alleyway behind the workshop was a man with a head on his shoulders that was likewise singing, chomping, and blinking, “and actually nothing else.” He enticed the man into the workshop with the promise of something more to chomp on, “something sweet, I promised.” He positioned the real head beside the mechanical head and cranked the mechanical head and told the real head, Be yourself. Now there were two heads singing, two heads chomping, and two heads blinking, “one of the heads was ostensibly also thinking but if you couldn’t see the crank you would be excused for thinking that the thinking one was the lead head with the thief’s hair.” Until this moment the astronomer had conceived of the human head as primarily a thinking thing; he now realized that it was first and foremost a singing thing, a chomping thing, and a blinking thing. “We create all kinds of scholastic perplexities for ourselves by thinking of the human head as a thing for thinking that are eliminated when we think of it as a thing for chomping,” the astronomer said. This was a critical juncture in his philosophical development. His prejudice against the mechanical head was rooted (he realized as he watched the flesh head sing and chomp) in a sentimental rather than a scientific conception of the human head. Campanella had written, sentimentally, that “pneumatic apparatuses can never capture a human soul,” but that assertion at once vastly overestimated the soul and hugely underestimated pneumatics, the astronomer realized as he looked back and forth between the head of lead and the head of flesh, which was now asking, Where was its sweet thing, where was its sweet thing? It is true that his father had not elevated the mechanical head to the level of the human head, as he thought he had, but what he had done instead, and it amounted to the same thing, or more strictly speaking to its polar opposite, was grab the human head by both ears and yank it down to the level of the mechanical head. He was not a bad artist, really, he had just drastically misconstrued his own medium. In trying to breathe life into the mechanical head he had actually sucked life out of the human head, the more life he thought he was breathing into one the more life he was sucking out of the other, and he kept breathing into the first (but actually: sucking out of the second) and breathing into the first (sucking out of the second) until “both heads were sucked astoundingly free of life and thought.” The mechanical head was worthless, a curio, an aristocratic gewgaw, but his father without knowing it had created the modern human head, the seventeenth-century human head, the astronomer said, the head that every learned man in Europe would soon want to be seen wearing on top of his body. Women, too; the Marquise Catherine de Vivonne apparently caused a sensation in Paris when she wore that head to the literary salon she hosted in the chambre bleue of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Of course, the astronomer himself later contrived an even newer head, an eighteenth-century head, “a head that will actually be everywhere in the eighteenth century and will probably even endure into the nineteenth century, to the extent, obviously, that our particular world persists after the eclipse,” but that is getting ahead of ourselves, the astronomer told Leibniz, and (rapping on his skull with his knuckles) “what you and I carry around on our shoulders is still to a considerable degree the head chiseled, unbeknownst to him, by my father.”

  “Well?” said his father a third time, tugging frenetically at his beard. “So?”

  And the astronomer replied: “It is your masterpiece.”

  He had one suggestion only. Observe how a lit candle held near the eyes of the real head caused the pupils to contract. The mechanical head lacked of course any such so-called pupillary reflex. His father thought this a minor matter but the astronomer insisted it was an omission that could doom the whole work, for since the time of Galen, if not before him, the widening and narrowing of the pupils has been seen as a sign not only of operative vision but of the presence of inner life. If it was true, as it was said, that the Emperor incorporated only ostensibly “perfect” objects into the exquisite collection of naturalia and artificialia that he kept under lock and key in the North Wing of his Castle, that even the monstrosities preserved there in jars were perfect monstrosities, that he scrutinized prospective instruments, ivories, tapestries, gems, bezoars, sculptures, and automata with the fervor of a lunatic, that he had rejected an astonishing portrait of his great-great-great-grandfather Frederick by Dürer due to an unstipulated “issue with the lips,” that a bump on the surface of an ostrich egg troubled him intensely, that he spent weeks on end wandering the North Wing pensively rearranging his mirabilia into ever more auspicious orders, ever more truthful orders, orders purportedly ever more reflective of the cosmos, only to command his servants in a burst of sudden staggering wrath that everything be put back just as it was: if all this was true, the astronomer told his father, as he recalled to Leibniz with a rueful laugh, then there was no doubt he would discover the mechanical head’s lone empirical lapse, the flaw in its eyes, and not only discover it but fixate on it, “for an individual like the Emperor the tiniest of flaws will occasion the most fevered of fixations, what seems insignificant to us will seem significant to him, I told my father,” and ultimately he’d not only fixate on it but even reject the whole head on account of it. Yet it would be simple to fix. Indeed, he already had the solution! “And purely for effect I went to my room and fetched my copy of Witelo’s Perspectiva.” There is a certain black fabric known to swell—he told his father—when heated, two circles of which would serve perfectly as pupils; and to gather the light and focus it upon them, two convex lenses would serve ideally as eyes.