Laurentius paused to think for a moment. Perhaps that wasn’t such a good analogy? He made a mark in the margin and wrote “check later” next to it.
For the first time in several days he didn’t feel hungry at all, and his reason, that which constituted his soul, was capable of apprehending the surrounding world, making connections, and putting them into words. He was happy, happier than he had been for years. The black bile which had been sloshing around inside him, the stifling smells and his sickness seemed to have disappeared. He felt like a different person. It was as if Clodia had brought him ambrosia, the food of the gods, which made them immortal. Aurum potabile.
After meeting Clodia by the steps Laurentius had obediently returned to his room. He had sat there and waited in the dim light, with the candle burning on the table and Alsted’s encyclopaedia open in front of him, and he had stared blankly at the text, thinking about Clodia, unable to decide what to do. What should he make of what had happened? How should he act?
When she eventually came, entering without knocking, Laurentius couldn’t think what to do other than to greet her with a nod and a smile. He felt awkward, as if someone of high standing had graciously started to serve him for no apparent reason. The situation even seemed dangerous, as if a single wrong move could unleash chaos, destroying the fragile balance which had miraculously maintained. It felt like a lion licking his fingers, wonderful and terrifying at the same time, but he dared not pull his hand back, nor reach out and stroke the beast on the head. So he stood and watched in silence as Clodia placed a loaf of bread on the table, covered it with a white cloth, and put a clay jug down next to it. She straightened her hair and smiled slightly mockingly at him. “I hear that you have some interesting views on the subject of dreams.”
“Me? Well, it’s not that I think dreams are unimportant, rather that they tend to be interpreted wrongly,” Laurentius blurted.
Clodia took a step towards him. “Do you actually remember your dreams?” she asked.
Laurentius stopped to think. It was true that he sometimes woke up sure that he had dreamt about something important, but was unable to remember what it had been. Sometimes a vague feeling would dawn on him later, often in a completely different context, that he may have already experienced something in his dreams. But these were normally just separate details, images detached from any whole. The dreams which he remembered clearly, the ones which he had dutifully written up, were mostly of a trivial nature.
“Sometimes,” Laurentius replied.
“And what did you see this time?” Clodia asked.
Laurentius tried to remember. Madlin had told him earlier that he had cried out in his sleep. What had he been dreaming about? Sandy knolls, glow-worms. Someone had approached from across a meadow and stood very close to him. It had been Clodia.
“You,” he said. “I saw you in my dreams.”
Clodia took another step towards him. “Are you certain that it was me?”
Laurentius laughed uncertainly. “Actually, I am not. It was dark, and you were walking across a meadow.”
“But I was there?” Clodia asked.
“I heard you breathing,” Laurentius replied.
Clodia came up very close to him, so that her hair almost touched his face, and he could smell the scent of flowers and the night. He could even hear her breathing, like a low humming.
Laurentius felt at a complete loss. He stood there staring straight at her, unable to turn his gaze away, unable to say or do anything. Eventually she smiled, turned round, and left the room.
“Enjoy your food,” Clodia said from the doorway.
Once the sound of her footsteps going down the stairs had faded, Laurentius slowly sat down at the table. Then, with a ceremonial air, almost as if he were performing some kind of ritual, he started to eat the food that had been laid out. He broke off some bread and poured himself some wine, almost as if he were an actor on stage being watched by an audience of hundreds, or a priest leading Communion before a full congregation.
This bread tasted of honey too, almost as if it had been made with honey. Maybe that was the answer? Maybe mead and honey bread were what he needed to cure the surfeit of black bile in his body? The medicinal properties of honey had been known since time immemorial, after all. Honey could be used to preserve and to protect, and it could even cure melancholy. After his death in Babylon, Alexander the Great had been brought back to Greece embalmed in soft, sweet honey, bound with beeswax twine.
“Beeswax,” said Laurentius, interrupting his own train of thought.
Of course! He nodded affirmatively to himself, trying not to let his thoughts run away with themselves, worried that they might upset the calm, ceremonious nature of the occasion. He would have to write all of this down later; for now he would just try to commit it to memory.
He slowly ate every last mouthful of the bread and drained the jug of wine dry; then he folded the white cloth down the centre, and placed it over the crumbs which had fallen onto the table. The cloth felt stiff in his hands, as if it had just recently been woven and pressed flat with a hot iron.
Only then did he get up and go to his writing desk. As he moved across the room his body seemed foreign to him; his limbs even seemed to be behaving strangely; he had to tell his arms and legs what to do, to give them clear instructions so that he could move forward. His thoughts were racing; he could see bright flashes here and there, like the spring sunlight reflected off river waters. Everything was clear, lucid.
He hurriedly sat down and started making notes. There was no longer any question in his mind as to how he should take on the Neoplatonists or the pantheists influenced by Spinoza. According to contemporary thought the soul was some sort of innate substantial idea; some people even believed that it didn’t exist at all in the individual sense. But Laurentius was sure that the soul was an image, a phantasm, a figment of the imagination, just like light or a reflection. Similar to an encaustic painting, a drawing on wax. The soul enters from without, and it continues to exist both inside and outside us, like the breath we exhale, like the bees when they leave their hive to gather pollen. It arrives like a swarm of bees; then it fills the empty hive full of honeycomb, and stores the honey there. And it leaves the body just as bees leave the hive, a swarm departing suddenly one hot day, headed somewhere else.
He scribbled a note to himself in the margin: “Our experiences and our actions are etched onto our soul as if it were a wax board. Just as a picture does not exist until someone has painted it, our soul does not exist until we have experienced the world. Our soul and our very identities come into existence by virtue of our activities, through our apprehending the world and engaging with it. Otherwise we are just a husk, a blank slate, a tabula rasa.”
Laurentius wrote the words onto the blank sheet of paper. If he had not been writing on it, it could have been used to compose a poem or draw a picture—all manner of things. It could just as easily have wrapped a piece of fish at the market or had the most rousing of love poems written on it. Or even both of those things.
He located Aristotle’s treatise on the soul and wrote out a thesis from it: “Suppose that the eye were an animal—sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name—it is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure.”
Laurentius added a reference to Aristotle in the margin, and started to write a commentary.
“To hold something in one’s sight and to observe the world is an action, an intervention, which demonstrates that we are alive. Thus a carriage gains a purpose and a life when people enter it: those people constitute the soul of the carriage. The carriage moves and acts according to those people’s will. Just like a birdcage, the essence of which is to contain the bird. If there is no bird inside it, then it is a cage in name alone. Just as the soul of the beehive is its purpo
se, to contain bees.”
Having finished the sentence, Laurentius lifted his pen and wrote a reference to Virgil in the margin. According to Virgil, bees could sometimes carry sickness into the hive. They would take off from the mouth of the hive, come into contact with poisons and sickness, and then come back and infect the whole community. The infected hive can seal off the poisoned honeycombs with wax, but they inevitably leak, and over time the whole hive falls sick and itself becomes a source of infection. Similarly, people who bear too many terrible experiences and too much melancholy in their souls can seal it off and hold it within themselves for a while, but it will inevitably leak out. They start to radiate melancholy from their eyes, just as a candle radiates light, and they infect others with it. Laurentius found an exemplum on that subject: “When a crow alights upon a dead animal, it first gouges out its eyes, and from there its brain. Thus Satan catches a person’s eye with his gaze and draws out his brain, leaving him witless.” Whether we like it or not all the activities we engage in, even the simple act of looking at something, always bring about some sort of change in ourselves and our environment.
Laurentius recalled the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice which Peter staged. When Orpheus turned to look at Eurydice he sent her back to the underworld through his own actions.
There was a knock at the door and Madlin came in without waiting. She was carrying a pile of firewood, which she silently placed in front of the fireplace. Taking a quick glance at Laurentius’ breakfast she clattered off back downstairs. When she came back, carrying a smouldering piece of coal, it was clear from her expression that she was unhappy about something, but she remained silent.
“Clodia was here,” Laurentius said to break the uncomfortable silence, although he was sure that Madlin already knew.
“I don’t want to know any more about it. But if anyone asks, then I haven’t seen or heard anything. Don’t you worry, I’m not going to start blabbing your secrets,” Madlin said bad-temperedly, and she knelt down in front of the fireplace with a purposeful look on her face and started blowing on the piece of coal, trying to light the fire.
“But I haven’t done anything,” Laurentius blurted defensively. “I don’t see why you are so annoyed.”
Madlin stopped what she was doing and stood up. “There’s sure to be trouble from this. Big trouble, I can tell you. The landlady has forbidden lodgers from bringing strangers here, and you can tell me all the stories you want but I’m not totally simple. I know very well what people get up to and talk about behind my back.”
Laurentius nodded. He had hoped that everything which was happening to him would eventually come to a natural conclusion, one which was both logical and comprehensible. But for now it seemed that the explanation remained stubbornly beyond reach.
“Very well, I won’t ask you about it any more,” Laurentius assured her.
“It’s me that should be asking you the questions,” Madlin said, scornfully throwing his words back at him. “But I’m not going to. I don’t want to get mixed up in all that business.” She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking angry. “And I would prefer it if you stopped bothering me about it,” she added.
Laurentius nodded again. He didn’t plan to pursue the matter any further. He was all too familiar with the tales which warned the hero against being too curious. Some things in life were best left hidden; if they were dragged out into the light of day they might perish like a plucked flower. If he could just maintain his current lucid state and carry on writing, then he wouldn’t need to ask any more questions.
“I promise not to,” he said.
Madlin’s expression had softened a little, and she even smiled, barely noticeably, as she left. Laurentius sat looking at the door for a while before turning back to his text and quickly running his eyes over what he had written so far. He would need to make some corrections in a few places, but he decided to leave that dull work for later and get down to the next thesis right away. It was essential to act while he was still experiencing the feeling that he was flying. Just as in a dream, the rational side of him knew that his body could not really be that light, but the air was somehow still holding his weight. As he looked down, the tops of the trees and the buildings all seemed very small, as if he were viewing them from a church spire. The experience was ethereal. He knew that it could not last for long.
“Everything which is concealed in hidden places, in towns, armies and the like, can be made visible with reflected light,” he wrote as he started a new line.
He had to quote from memory, because he did not have the works of Roger Bacon to hand.
SATURDAY NOON
AT ONE SIDE OF THE ROOM, directly under the windows, stood a metal-plated table which was almost at chest height. There were grooves running across the top of it, and a large pail had been placed underneath to collect the bodily fluids. The table was positioned on a large improvised podium which had been covered in dark cloth, and the overall impact was quite theatrical. It was clearly an attempt to emulate the anatomical theatre in Leiden, and some of the elements of the design were already familiar to Laurentius. Professor Below had been educated in Holland just like him, so his idea of how an anatomical theatre should look had come directly from his alma mater. Next to the podium stood the obligatory skeleton: the anatomy assistant was expected to indicate the part of the body which was being examined at any given time. The skeleton wasn’t in the best state of repair, and some of the bones were clearly broken or missing. Someone had glued the lower ribs together, and the taut wire pushed through the finger joints had buckled, causing them to jut out at unnatural angles. There were a couple of shiny white sheets of paper on the wall of the auditorium where mottos such as memento mori had been painted, although in those troubled times such advice seemed worse than useless. With all the odd goings-on and constant unrest the students and teachers were rather too vividly aware of death anyway, and would have preferred not to be reminded about it. Maybe that was why there were not as many people as one might have expected at this first public dissection of a human corpse. Professor Below had apparently been telling the city governor for years that the university needed corpses for study purposes, but they had not managed to procure one before now. Given the circumstances there was probably no shortage of suitable material; the delay was largely due to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the city officials and questions of a technical nature.
“It became apparent yesterday that not a single one of our current students has previously taken part in a scientific dissection,” Professor Below began. “I shall therefore have to take Laurentius Hylas as my assistant. I understand he has been present at a dissection in Leiden at least once before.”
Laurentius was not taken off guard by Below’s proposal, since the professor had stopped him the previous day and informed him that he would like him to be his assistant. He had told Laurentius that he would not have to do anything which required any special knowledge; the main thing was not to pass out at the sight of blood. People could sometimes turn out to be unexpectedly weak-nerved at their first anatomical dissection, even if they had experienced war at first hand. According to Below, those who had witnessed death and mutilation in battle could be particularly sensitive.
“War makes people cowardly,” Below explained. “Cowardly and superstitious. If you want my advice, don’t ever become a soldier.”
“Is it not the sight of death which makes people cowardly?” Laurentius had suggested. “Only people who have not experienced death are brave.”
“But doctors witness death all the time,” Below said with a dismissive gesture. “Death is nothing in itself. It’s not death, but fear of death which is key. Yes, indeed. War is full of all kinds of horrors, including human life departing the physical body, and that makes people cowardly. Death is a state of not being and as such it cannot affect us, or it can do so only indirectly. That which is in our souls, which is active, can have a direct influence on us. Without life, the body is just
an empty husk.”
When Below asked Laurentius to come up onto the podium he felt a sense of dread, the same feeling which usually makes people cowardly. He had been calm and happy the whole morning, but now he could feel the anxiety growing in his stomach again.
“Don’t just stand there being shy; come and help me, why don’t you,” Below said, spurring Laurentius on as he started to unload his instruments in the middle of the table. “As Professor Sjöbergh and I discussed, we might start by acquainting ourselves with the human head.”
Sjöbergh stepped up to the table and nodded to Below. Turning to address the whole auditorium, he posed a question which was clearly intended to be rhetorical: “This might not normally be part of an introductory demonstration, but perhaps we could start with the structure of the cranium and the brain?”
A murmur of approval came from the massed students, and one of them even cried out: “Always best to start from the head.” This was followed by slightly uneasy laughter. Although everyone had a certain amount of experience of executions and death, the cold-blooded dissection of a human body aroused some apprehension. Just the sight of Professor Below, dressed in his leather apron, placing saws, knives and tongs onto the table was enough to unsettle some of the students, even before he started using them.
Laurentius took up his position on the podium, and almost immediately the door of the auditorium opened and a corpse wrapped in cloths was brought in.
“Aha,” announced Below.
The murmur of voices started to die down, and the curious audience thronged closer.
“Lift it up onto the podium right away. Yes, like that, over here,” Below instructed.
He started to unwrap the corpse, a look of expert concentration on his face.
“As we can see, rigor mortis is not present in this case.” He lifted one of the corpse’s arms and let it flop back down. “This indicates that we are dealing with an individual who died more than two days ago. Although there are of course cases in the literature of people never developing rigor mortis at all, particularly those of more advanced years.”
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