Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  Never before had Kircher reached such heights &, although flattered that he should consider me worthy of following him there, I had to confess that my mind was still confused. We seemed to have long since lost sight of the soul, which had been the starting point of our conversation, & so I tried to get back to it.

  Kircher gently reproved me: “O thou man of little faith! Have you so far lost your confidence in my abilities? Well let me tell you that, contrary to what your questions suggest, we have never been closer to your concern, for what I was saying about the stars, the Earth or the planets can equally well be applied to man. It is well known that the celestial farmer left in our brain, when it was born, a certain amount of that pansemen which is concentrated in the pineal gland & merges with what we are in the habit of calling the soul. Depending on which seed each of us cultivates, that will be the only one to grow. If it is vegetable seed, the man will become a plant; if sensory seed, he will become a brute beast; rational seed, he will become a celestial being; intellectual seed, he will be an angel, et cetera. But if, not satisfied with any of these creatures, a man retires within the center of his unity, becoming one spirit with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, he will surpass all things. With the result that there is nothing in the universe that cannot be found in man, the son of the world, for whom everything was made …”

  I felt I was finally beginning to understand what my master was getting at: if the human soul, despite its divine nature, possessed a corporality such as fire for the stars or salt for the Earth, it would be, like anything else, subject to mutation!

  “Indeed Caspar, to mutation, but also to fermentation, coagulation & other motions characteristic of matter when it reaches that rarefied state. Think of alchemy & you will see that what takes place in our soul is comparable to the mysterious transmutations that sometimes occur in the crucible. I have thought a lot, during the last few months, about the nature of the soul, I have examined all the doctrines down to the present & God has granted me the benefit of his wisdom: Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle & the rest have all given a different definition of the question that concerns us but although each of them has approached the truth in his own way they were all mistaken because of the narrowness of their perspective. For the soul is neither a number, nor a breath, nor a spark of the divine fire; it does not consist of a collection of loose atoms, nor of a nonmaterial trinity of our senses, our will & reason; nor is it the pure form of body or thought, but all that at once! Yes, Caspar, all that without exception! And I cannot thank God enough for having allowed me to understand this sublime truth, even if this late in my life.”

  “But how can something be both mortal & immortal at the same time?” I ventured to argue, suddenly alarmed by this composite doctrine. “Is there not a contradiction there?”

  “Only an apparent contradiction,” my master replied, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Death is no less of a mystery than birth, but it obeys the same principles. Why, of two men suffering from the plague to the same degree, does one die and the other not?”

  “Because God wills it so.”

  “True. But in that case you agree it is possible for the same physical cause not to produce the same effect according to the circumstances. And if the plague did not manage to carry off one of the two men, we must grant that it wasn’t the plague that did carry off the other one either. So what is dying, Caspar, if not being deprived of one’s soul by the will of God alone? For neither the plague nor cholera could kill a man whose life Our Lord has decided to preserve; & nothing could save one He wishes to remove from our world. And in this process God’s instrument, that on which and through which He operates, is not the illness but the soul, that particle of the universal seed he has deposited inside us. As you know, we are not immaterial angels, therefore the soul must have form & substance in order to exist inside us, just as it does in the Earth or the metal I mentioned earlier; it must also be situated somewhere in our body, on the analogy of a parrot or a squirrel in a cage. Aristotle says that this place is the heart, others suggest the liver or the spleen but, like Monsieur Descartes, I declare that it cannot be anywhere but in our head, that acropolis of the body, &, more precisely, in the pineal gland that is situated at the back of it. Remember Pietro della Valle: have you never noticed the strange object he had on his finger? It was the pineal gland of his wife, Sitti Maani! He had had it set in a gold ring, which he never removed for the rest of his life and took to the grave with him. Such behavior can be criticized in the sense that it is futile to attach oneself to the skeleton of a soul that has lost its seed, but nevertheless it shows a true awareness of the nature & function of that tiny part of our brain. This sheath that shelters our soul & allows it to act on our body is mortal and material; immortal and immaterial is the soul itself, that spermatic force, that puff of air like the brush of an angel’s wing inside us. Do we not say that we breathe our last when we render up our soul? Did not the Egyptians & the Greeks represent it in the form of a bird escaping from the mouth of the dying person? I tell you, Caspar, there is something in that gland that is not there after death. And if we can say nothing about the profound nature of that thing, at least we can assume it has mass, however minute, & thus measure it—”

  “Measure the soul!” I exclaimed, flabbergasted.

  “Or, more precisely, to weigh it, Caspar! Do not forget that that is exactly what Christ will do when he assesses the weight of sins in his balance. For my part, I am sure the soul has weight as long as it resides in our body & is part of the world where nothing can escape the laws of physics instituted by God. Not the weight of our sins but the weight of the quantity of matter necessary for its presence in a human body. And that, with your help, I can ascertain. I am soon going to die, Caspar, everything convinces me of that day by day. Thus, when the moment comes, you will have to place …”

  My master stopped for a moment, as if to gather his thoughts, but the fear I could see in his eyes, which were still fixed on me, paralyzed me with horror.

  “My head!” he suddenly howled, trying to raise his hands to his forehead; they stopped halfway. I saw the blood suffuse his face & he slumped back on his bed. When he started to groan horribly, his fingers gripping the sheet, I rushed out to find help. I woke Father Ramón de Adra, who was the first at his bedside. Having taken Athanasius’s pulse, he diagnosed an apoplectic fit &, with tears in his eyes, indicated that it would be best to administer extreme unction as quickly as possible.

  Eléazard’s Notebooks

  WOKE UP WITH IDEAS UNWORTHY of a dog or an elephant …

  A DIFFERENT WAY? A possible world?

  CONTINUATION OF THE FLAUBERT QUOTE, from the notebooks: “Art is the pursuit of the useless, for speculation it is what heroism is for morality.” I hadn’t understood anything. If Kircher resembles Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet it is through his desperate, heroic attempt to harmonize the world.

  KIRCHER: “Salt abounds in vile places, especially in the latrines. Everything comes from salt and the Sun.” In sole et sale sunt omnia. (Mundus Subterraneus, II, p. 351.)

  Rimbaud: “Oh the drunken gnat in the piss-house of the inn, in love with borage and wiped out by a sunbeam!”

  THE FEELING that I’m very close to my goal, that at any moment I’m going to “lift the veil.”

  SO MUCH MOLD has appeared on Heidegger’s books that I’ve been obliged to put them out in the sun to dry, to brush them then to spray them, on Euclides’s advice, with formic acid. There are still some suspicious reddish patches, like liver spots; “senile keratosis” in medical terms.

  DYSARTHRIA, labiolingual trembling, Argyll-Robertson syndrome, transitory aphasia, mental confusion, symptoms of amnesia, general paralysis, in a third of cases a stroke, Dr. Euclides’s diagnosis is final: Kircher is in the last stage of syphilis of the nervous system.

  “The psychological and neurological symptoms remind me of Bayle’s disease. I’m sure he had a positive Bordet-Wassermann, but OK … H
ereditary cerebral syphilis or acquired syphilis, I’d stake my life on it. So the choice is yours, isn’t it?”

  TREPONEMA: trepein: to turn, nema: thread. Kircher is caught in a spiral of regression; he is ill from the start.

  BEING AT THE FOREFRONT OF ONE’S TIMES? Kircher is a contemporary of Noah. He lives in a fluid age in which present and past mingle. To criticize him in the name of modern science won’t get us anywhere at all. His struggles against war, against dispersal, against oblivion are more important than the solutions he suggests.

  DELACROIX: “It is not new ideas that make men of genius, it is this one idea consuming them that what has been said has not been said enough yet.”

  ON A PIEDMONTESE, Chevalier de Revel, who at the time was the Sardinian ambassador in The Hague: “He claims that God, that is, the creator of ourselves and of everything around us, died before completing his task, that he had the grandest projects for the world and the greatest implements; that he had already set up some of these implements, as you erect scaffolding for a building and that he died in the middle of his work; that everything we have at present was made for a purpose that no longer exists and that we in particular feel destined for something of which we have no idea; we are like clocks that have no dial and whose works, endowed with intelligence, go round and round until they are worn out, without knowing why, but all the time telling themselves: since I turn I must have a purpose. This idea seems to me the most spiritual and most profound madness I have ever heard and far preferable to the Christian, Mussulman or philosophical madnesses of the first, eighth and eighteenth century of our era.” (Benjamin Constant, letter of June 4, 1780, Revue des deux Mondes, April 15, 1844)

  THE IMPORTANT THING IS neither to deny nor to assert the divine, but to despair of it. In its place leave the undecidable, don’t bother with it, just as we couldn’t care less how many mites will feed off our dead skin.

  ALL MODERNITY, when it suffers the pains of metamorphosis and questions its own existence, needs to go and find in the preceding centuries a big brother it can identify with. Without warning, the age of gold becomes the precursor, or even the founder of ours, depending on the rhetorical skill of the person undertaking that kind of demonstration. As if it were absolutely necessary to find the causes of an illness or of good health to be able to treat or understand it. This return to the origins of our ills is symptomatic of our societies, symptomatic of Kircher. But it explains nothing. Knowing where everything started to go wrong is of interest to those alone who suffer those ills.

  KIRCHER will have been my golden fleece, my own quest for the origins.

  “IT IS SOMETHING I CAN PROVE TO YOU,” Alvaro de Rújula concedes, “but that I cannot explain to you. It is one of those profound things one cannot really comprehend intuitively.’ It has become impossible, even for the physicists themselves, to be able to imagine the universe other than by mathematical formulae, that is, by a device that allows anything you want apart from seeing, from grasping reality through our senses or our intellect. Until the theory of relativity came along, everyone could visualize the real, apprehend it with a greater or lesser degree of clarity. The way Aristotle or a nineteenth-century geographer such as Élisée Reclus saw the world was not much different from the way a sailor or farmer of the time did. Even if ‘wrong’ it had the advantage of being precise, of forming a picture in people’s minds. Our knowledge of the universe is certainly closer to the ‘truth’ but we have to content ourselves with taking the few chosen ones who have managed to master the equations on which this certainty is based at their word. All that leaves us with is a little bundle of metaphors: puerile stuff about a big bang or astronauts who have grown younger or bigger during their stay in space, lifts going crazy, fishing rods that shrink when turned to the north, punches that never reach their target, stars whose light itself never manages to escape—and of which we know nothing except that they could contain more or less anything, including the complete works of Proust … Our notion of the world can be entirely summed up in the set of fables that scientists fabricate from time to time to explain to us, as if to little kids, that the results of their work are beyond our understanding. Kircher, Descartes or Pascal were still in a position to handle the sciences of their time, to falsify the hypotheses themselves, to formulate new ones. But who can boast of being able to embrace enough of the current sciences to be able to visualize the universe they account for? What can one say of a population that is incapable of visualizing the world in which it lives except that it’s on the road to ruin for lack of landmarks, of reference points? For lack of reality … Is not the way the world has of henceforth resisting our efforts to represent it, the mischievous pleasure it takes in escaping us, a symptom of the fact that we have already lost it? To lose sight of the world, is that not to begin to be happy with its disappearance?

  WE HAVE PRECISELY THE WORLD that we deserve, or at least that our cosmology deserves. What could we hope of a universe abounding in black holes, antimatter, catastrophes?

  TO SERVE AS a television, a pocket calculator, a desk diary, an account book, a commercial catalog, an alarm system, a telephone or a driving simulator is the worst that could happen to a computer. However, Ernst Jünger had warned us: “The importance of robots,” he wrote in 1945, “will increase as the number of pedants multiplies, that is, in enormous proportions.”

  LIFTING UP the bird-eating spider to clean it, I freed its disconcerting progeny. Myriad minuscule spiders that disappeared in the house before I realized what domestic hell their escape was exposing me to. Soledade is packing her bags …

  EN ROUTE FOR FORTALEZA … Lifejacket is under your seat

  “Are you asleep, Governor?” Santos asked, leaning over the back of the seat in front of him. “Can I have a word?”

  Moreira turned his tired eyes toward his assistant. He looked worried but ready to grant him a few minutes to talk.

  “The program for the next couple of days … Would you like to check it over?”

  “Of course. Come and sit next to me.”

  Santos changed places, pulled down the tabletop and opened the file with his notes. “ETA at Fortaleza half past ten,” he said, adjusting the little pair of round glasses on his nose, “then transfer to the Colonial Hotel. One o’clock: dinner in the town hall with the mayor—here’s the summary of the index cards you asked me for. Four o’clock: presentation of an honorary doctorate to Jorge Amado, in the presence of Edson Barbosa, Jr., then a reception in the education offices. I’ve prepared a little speech for you, but it’s up to you to …”

  “What’s it about, your speech?”

  “Literature and popular realism. Something simple but fairly punchy. Intellectuals and politicians ought to work together to get the country out of the mess it’s in, that kind of thing.”

  “I’ve every confidence in you, Santos. You do that kind of talk very well. Will the television be there?”

  “Only regional.”

  “Doesn’t matter, I’ll say a few words to them anyway. You never know, they might put the ceremony on the news.”

  “OK, I’ve got that. To continue: tomorrow, around seven, working breakfast with the minister followed by a meeting with the Social Democratic Party councillors and some local employers. Subject: investment and the northeast. You’re speaking at ten. TV channels, journalists, the lot.”

  The Governor nodded with the expression of a man perfectly aware of his responsibilities.

  “Following that, lunch in the Palacio Estudial with the minister and the junior minister of education. Then you go off together to fire the starting gun for a jangada regatta and you all stay together until the election rally. It will be outdoors, from what the head of protocol says. Since the television will be there, they’ve arranged for the whole works: walkabout, handout to the crowd, the lot—but there will be appropriate security.”

  “My speech is ready?”

  “Jodinha’s just putting the finishing touches to it, you’ll have it by thi
s evening. After the rally, a dinner-dance at the sailing club with the crème de la crème of Fortaleza, return to São Luís the next morning at 8:05—”

  “Has the flight been confirmed? You know I’ve a very important meeting at eleven.”

  “Everything’s OK, Governor. I rang VASP myself.”

  “Well, then,” he sighed, “I’m not going to be sitting round twiddling my thumbs …”

  “Not at all, no,” Santos said with a smile. “I’d rather be in my shoes than yours.”

  Moreira turned his eyes heavenward, simply out of habit. He was good at making people feel sorry for him from time to time, to tighten the ties with his subordinates. “I’m sorry to bother you with this,” he said, “but I’d prefer to go back the same evening. The time doesn’t matter, but I don’t want to risk being late in São Luís. Could you take care of it?”

  “I’ll see to it,” Santos said obligingly, “don’t worry.”

  A stewardess stopped by their seats, sent specially to Moreira before the other passengers were served. She was indubitably the prettiest of the crew. “A drink, Governor?” she said with a smile like a model on the front cover of a magazine. “Coffee, fruit juice, an aperitif?”

  “A glass of water, please,” he replied, taking the hot napkin she handed him with a pair of tongs. “And you, sir?”

  “The same please,” Santos muttered with a touch of pique. To fly first class and drink water, only the rich could afford that kind of whim.

  Moreira tilted his seat back and wiped his face with the napkin. “I’m going to try and get some rest.”

  “In that case,” said Santos, going back to his seat, “I’ll call you five minutes before we land.”