The Organs of Sense Read online

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  THEN THE ASTRONOMER told Leibniz: You will shortly accuse me of perfidy, if not patricide. You will perhaps be right to. Yet what I told my father about the Emperor was also probably true. Once, many years later, as the Emperor’s Court Chamberlain and I stood in the Castle before Arcimboldo’s Water, he told me the following story. He and the Emperor, he told me, had once stood before that very painting, just as he and I stood before it now, and the Emperor had said to him: I have often been indicted for fixating on the insignificant, but throughout my life I have always found that it is precisely in the insignificant that the significant lurks. And the Court Chamberlain had replied: And in the significant lurks likewise the insignificant. The Emperor: Indeed it does! The insignificant is in the significant, the significant in the insignificant. They agreed, the astronomer told Leibniz, that the significant was rarely if ever found in the significant and the insignificant almost never in the insignificant but rather the significant was in the insignificant and the insignificant in the significant. And the Emperor told his Court Chamberlain how he came to possess that spectacular painting, which as surely you know, Herr Leibniz, depicts the head of a woman by the ingenious juxtaposition of a thousand beasts and beings of the sea. The Emperor says to him: Many years ago one of my agents, a soi-disant connoisseur of the art of Italy, returned from a journey to Florence and Milan with two paintings for my consideration, each portraying the head of a woman in profile, but one which did so with perfect grace, naturalness, and simplicity, while the other did so by the juxtaposition of fish, many fish, “together the fish make a head,” the agent told the Emperor. And the Emperor tells the Court Chamberlain: The instant my agent utters the phrases “juxtaposition of fish” and “together the fish make a head,” I know, sight unseen, that it is that second head, i.e., this fish head, this head which my agent, an erudite man who’d studied for years and years in Rome and Bologna, is signaling to me with all of his words and all of his gestures is ostensibly the insignificant head, that this head is in fact the significant head, and the simple, natural, graceful head, the ostensibly significant head, is worthless. Evidently, the Emperor tells the Court Chamberlain, my agent was embarrassed to have even brought me this head composed of fish, he considered it beneath him, but often my agents must bring me paintings they deem beneath them because they think (and I know that they mutter as much among themselves!) that my tastes run toward what they consider the perverse, although I of course think that their tastes, in running toward the simple and the natural, not to mention the graceful, run precisely toward the perverse. Each side thinks that the other side’s taste runs right toward the perverse, a symmetry broken only by the fact that one side is supposed to be procuring art for the other side, i.e., they for me, not I for them, I am quoting the Emperor here, the Court Chamberlain said, the astronomer told Leibniz. In any case I decide to toy a little with my agent, to torture him just a little bit, in hopes perhaps of making him see that all of his Bologna-bought erudition and all of his Rome-bought erudition put together was useless to him in the ultimate task of divining the significance which lurks in the insignificant, the task facing us all, the Emperor says. Possibly a good educational institution can help one see how the seemingly significant is, in truth, insignificant, but in seeing the significance within the seemingly insignificant one is always alone. In the first half of life we ruthlessly flush out the insignificance of the seemingly significant, for which an education might come in handy, but in the second half we must divine the significance within the seemingly insignificant, for which task an academic institution is not merely impotent but actually detrimental, notice how my agent’s learning blinded him to the value of the head made up of various fishes. You will note, by the way, Herr Leibniz, how this man who stood at the center of the most formidable institution in the whole world outside of the Catholic Church apparently shared my ambivalence not to say my antipathy toward institutions! One discovers allies not to say duplicates of oneself in the most unexpected places. Here the astronomer peered into his telescope. Then he said: So, the Emperor and his Italian agent go into the Castle’s so-called Artwork-Viewing Chamber, where these two quite different women’s heads (and actually these two quite different approaches to art and existence) are hanging on the wall opposite each other, one by Bronzino, the other, of course, by Arcimboldo. And the agent starts going on and on in his professorial fashion about Bronzino’s brushstrokes and mastery of perspective and treatment of light, all in the service of this perfectly competent and even technically virtuosic but patently pointless painting, with its elegant surface concealing a void, a painting incidentally that his father the former Emperor would have adored, while on the opposite wall, totally ignored by the art agent, who obviously considered it beneath him, was this perfectly ridiculous painting whose utterly inelegant surface of juxtaposed fish concealed within it an entire world, and which incidentally his father the former Emperor would have abhorred. So the Emperor interrupts the agent and says, Tell me about the composition of the head made of fish. And the agent says, Of course, My Lord, and he launches into a disquisition on Arcimboldo’s brushstrokes and Arcimboldo’s perspectival technique and Arcimboldo’s treatment of light. And it occurs to me, the Emperor tells his Court Chamberlain, that there’s one word he’s not uttering, and that word is “fish.” I keep expecting him to say the word “fish,” or “fishes,” and he keeps saying almost every word except “fish” and “fishes.” At any moment I think he’ll finally say the word “fish,” finally relent and say the word “fish,” at last surrender and say the word “fish,” or “fishes,” but so far he has not said the word “fish,” and he’s almost summarized the formal properties of the entire painting! And I realize: My agent wants to synopsize the formal properties of the woman’s whole head without even mentioning the fact that it’s made up of fish! That aspect, for him, is insignificant! It was an amazing feat, actually, to hold forth on this painting at length without using the words “fish” or “sea creatures,” nothing about “oceanic organisms,” no reference to “beasts of the deep.” By ignoring the fact that the head is composed of fish he is, intentionally or not, trying to coerce the painting into the categories familiar to him from his books, that’s why I’m hearing so much about brushstrokes, perspective, and light, but not a word about aquatic critters, a great deal about the color palette, nothing about a world beneath the waves. The Emperor tells the Court Chamberlain: My agent, I realize, has only looked at this painting through the lens of his books, or in the reflection of his books, never directly with his own eyes. He hasn’t actually gazed at this painting with his own two eyes, unmediated by his books, and since his books erase the fish he erases the fish. His eyes actually are not his own.

  You know a great deal about this painting, the Emperor told his agent, the astronomer said.

  And the agent, bowing his head just a touch, replied: Thank you, My Lord.

  You know everything there is to know about this painting! Truly!

  And the agent said: I would never bring an artwork to His Majesty without having studied it extensively.

  Studied it. Yes. Looked at it, the Emperor said.

  And the agent, after a moment, bowed his head just a touch.

  You have looked at the painting, then, said the Emperor.

  The agent took one of his hands in the other. Of course, My Lord.

  Excellent, good. So you have looked at the painting with your eyes, said the Emperor, according to the astronomer. And your eyes have seen the fish.

  And the agent said: Yes, My Lord.

  And since you have studied the painting, a painting composed primarily of fish, you have, therefore, naturally, studied the fish.

  The agent squeezed his own hand. Naturally, My Lord.

  And the Emperor said: Please identify for me all of the fish.

  And the agent went ashen, according to the Emperor, the astronomer told Leibniz. And in a quavering voice he had managed to say, This is an ee
l, when the Emperor raised his hand to stop him and said, You know who would enjoy this is the Imperial Fish Specialist. Now of course, the Court Chamberlain told the astronomer, there’s no such thing as an imperial fish specialist! But the Emperor summons one of his valets and instructs him in a whisper to send in a servant clad in academic finery who is to nod yes after the first twelve fish named by the agent but after the thirteenth fish to shake his head almost imperceptibly no. My Imperial Fish Specialist knows all about fish, he will enjoy this, he will enjoy this, the Emperor kept telling his agent. Soon this fictitious fish expert entered the Chamber accompanied by two imperial guards whom the Emperor had sent for also and who took up their positions on each side of the agent, where they stood impassively with their immense swords in front of them balanced by their sharp tips on the silk rug. Please identify the fish, the Emperor said. And I am thinking to myself, the Emperor tells me, the Court Chamberlain told the astronomer, This is a lesson in proper vision. I am teaching him how to see. The relationship between surfaces and essences. The significance and insignificance of certain surfaces, the attendant presence and absence of certain essences. The difference between books and the Book of Nature, between the self-serving writers and the ambitious publishers of his beloved books and the writer and publisher of the Book of Nature, the self-publisher of the Book of Nature, i.e., God. After this, I’m thinking, the Emperor told his Court Chamberlain, my agent will never again rely on his books when his eyes will do! Never again on the opinions of his forefathers when his eyes will do! The fish, the fish, please identify the fish, the Emperor said, and his art agent, in a now thoroughly strangulated voice, began by naming the more recognizable creatures, first the eel again, then the lobster, then the octopus, and then the crab. After each one the Emperor glanced at his Imperial Fish Specialist, who nodded. Tortoise, stingray, sea horse, shrimp: all correct, indicated the ersatz fish specialist. Swordfish? Nod. Pike? Nod. Flounder? Carp? Nod! Nod! The agent was gaining confidence. He must have learned a thing or two from those nauseating Mediterranean fish markets he had to pass through en route from one gallery to another, one library to the next! the agent must have thought, said the Emperor. A mind such as mine is actually always absorbing the world! Now he pointed at the creature that constitutes the eye of Arcimboldo’s woman and said: Sunfish. Ironically, the Emperor would later learn, as he told the Court Chamberlain, the Court Chamberlain the astronomer, and the astronomer Leibniz, that this was quite correct: The eye of the woman was, in fact, the eye of a sunfish. But the agent obviously did not know that, and when he and the Emperor looked over at the Imperial Fish Specialist—who pursed his lips and shook his head—the blood that little by little had returned to the art agent’s face now drained from it once more, and the Emperor murmured, Take him to the dungeon and gouge out his eyes, they aren’t his anyway and he knows not how to use them, and the two guards had hauled the agent halfway across the Castle complex before the Emperor ran up, almost speechless with mirth, and revealed that all this was just a little joke, a little joke, that’s all!—albeit a little joke with a dead-serious lesson in it. Via humor, I am honing your eye, the Emperor told his agent. Arcimboldo, you see, the Emperor told his agent, began with fishes, but out of fishes he made the most magnificent face, whereas Bronzino began with a face and ended up with nothing. You cannot aim right at the face! The goal of course is a human face, not fish, but one arrives at human faces only through the roundabout route of fishes. (The Emperor added: I am saying something fundamentally philosophical when I say: The Bronzino is boring.) The true artist walks straight toward the insignificant, while slyly keeping an eye on the significant, and moving at all times away from the gorgeous, he instructed his art agent, the Emperor recalled. The Emperor had a lot more to say on the subject of significance and insignificance, but he noticed at that point that his art agent had urinated down one of his pant legs, so he thanked him graciously for both paintings—which can now be found in adjacent galleries at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna—and sent him on his way. The astronomer told Leibniz: It was a nasty little joke, the Emperor told his Court Chamberlain, but from then on he brought me the most marvelous art. Peering into his telescope, the astronomer added: One wants above all to understand the Sun, but one cannot aim one’s telescope right at the Sun!

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  THIS, THEN, WAS THE MAN whom his father had to amuse with his mechanical head. Now, it so happens that the frigid winter morning on which the astronomer and his father set out to obtain an audience with the Emperor was the sixteenth morning of an interminable astronomical disputation the latter had convened at the Castle for the purpose of determining whether the new twinkling thing which had recently appeared in the heavens dwelled above or below the sphere of the Moon, and therefore deserved or did not deserve to be called a star. At once intrigued and tormented by that object’s inexplicable emergence and enigmatic meaning, the Emperor had summoned not merely every astronomer in the realm (“minus of course myself!”) but also freethinkers from the Low Countries, Oxford theologians, Jesuit mathematicians from the Collegio Romano, and Peripatetic schoolmen from Padua, who came north on horseback or sailed south up the Elbe or in one case scrambled (“just as you scrambled!”) over these very mountains on foot. From the far-flung window of their workshop the astronomer and his father could see the skylights of the Castle’s Great Hall pop open and a slew of astronomical contraptions emerge into the Prague sky, where they were whipped about by the crazed winter winds. A big brass something-or-other groaned over the city. It is said, the astronomer said, that Emperor Maximilian, upon learning that Rudolf intended to abandon the Hofburg and all that he’d accomplished there and move the imperial capital to Prague, had decreed on his deathbed that nothing in Prague rise higher than the steeple of the Cathedral of Saint Vitus—“Nothing higher!” At that moment, the tale went, he had a stroke that robbed from him for the final forty-eight hours of his life all of his language except the words “no,” “higher,” “steeple,” and “Vitus,” with which he emphatically filled the silence. In his last hour he retained only the word “no,” but “everyone understood the gist of what he was saying,” the astronomer told Leibniz. It was not as though the dying Emperor had constructed that steeple, the steeple was centuries old, no, this was “a pure posthumous filial constriction.” “The gratuitousness of it amazes me still.” But some of these contraptions soared higher than the steeple, and some even soared much higher. Our search for truth inevitably makes a mockery of our fathers’ deathbed decrees, not as an empirical matter but as a logical one, since what we mean by truth and where we look for it are obviously defined, in negative, by nothing other than what our fathers decree on their deathbeds, construed loosely to include their decades of decline. “Is your father dead?” the astronomer asked Leibniz, and Leibniz said yes. “Then this isn’t news to you,” the astronomer said, and Leibniz said no, it was not, although as he noted parenthetically to the Philosophical Transactions he was merely appeasing the astronomer on this point since he had nothing but the fondest memories of his father, a professor of moral philosophy at Leipzig who had died when Leibniz was six years old and with whose beliefs Leibniz’s own were in “perfect accord.” (Two years before his death half a century later, in an often-quoted 1714 letter to Nicolas Remond, Chief Counselor to the Duke of Orleans, in which he provides a brief polished account of his own philosophical development, Leibniz would claim to “possess no memories of my father,” and deem his father’s philosophy to be “of no especial interest.”) Now, the astronomer went on, hoisting onto his lap his plump cat, who without opening his eyes began to purr, some of these contraptions were quite sophisticated, and some were quite large, and one, the big groaning brass one, was both sophisticated and large, but all of them, as anyone could plainly see, were nothing but naked-eye astronomical contraptions, contraptions only as powerful as the eyes that peered into them, contraptions which in no way transcended us.

  In the Castle, brought the
re by the invited astronomers, were contraptions that left us as blind as before, or basically as blind, the astronomer thought, while in my head—the head of a noninvited astronomer!—was a contraption that would permit us to see, I mean truly to see.

  Now it was merely a matter of getting this head into that Castle.

  This head, containing that contraption, or the concept of that contraption, into that Castle.

  Under the guise of helping his father get his father’s mechanical head into that Castle.

  “Tomorrow, I told my father,” the astronomer told Leibniz, “we get this head into that Castle! Purposefully ambiguous of course about whose head, which head. I mean, of course: Let’s get my head into that Castle! but my father hears: Let’s get your, or our, head, the head we built together, into that Castle! And he, his beard now basically completely white, his mouth more or less toothless, on his head his prized plumed cap, breaks into one of those infinitely creased old-person grins that evoke the beatitude of an infant.