The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  The astronomer paused to peer into the telescope. Then he said:

  “All day long we took turns peering into the peephole and weeping.” It was the end of his childhood. “When you peer into your father’s mirrored box and tell him point-blank that it’s not a microcosm of anything, least of all the cosmos, you are needless to say no longer a child.” A teardrop had formed in the corner of one of the astronomer’s sockets, a fact to which the latter drew Leibniz’s attention and which Leibniz confirmed in his letter. Just as he could still see, he could still weep, the astronomer explained, since his faculty of sentimentality like his faculty of sight had not been damaged in the slightest when he lost his eyes. And Leibniz noted parenthetically that a failed assassin of John the Fearless of Burgundy was likewise seen to weep soon after his eyes had been cut out, and that an anatomist at Montpellier who examined the corpse reported that the tear ducts remained intact. The astronomer said: “I’ve always been interested in sentimentality, never scorned it, never feared it, always adopted a scrupulously scientific attitude toward it, so I’m actually glad you got the chance to verify this teardrop. You see it, yes? You confirm it? This is, needless to say, a most sentimental subject matter for me.” His father, like all fathers, had once been all-powerful, and his father had been even more all-powerful than most. He had once been the most powerful sculptor in the whole world. In Vienna not only the Hofburg Palace but the entire city had basically burst at the seams with his father’s busts, friezes, fountains, and columns. As a boy born in a city decorated to his father’s exact specifications, the astronomer often had the peculiar feeling, upon turning a corner and stumbling across another of his father’s columns or fountains or friezes or busts, that he had actually been born inside his father’s head. “The cityscape conformed to his concepts.” Sometimes as a boy the astronomer strutted down the streets of Vienna “with tremendous conceit, for this was none other than my father’s head we were all walking through!” and sometimes he skulked through the alleys with his back pressed to the high walls, woozy, bewildered, hyperventilating, looking in every direction for a way out of his father’s big black-bearded head—“forgetting of course that the very exit for which I was searching would also be built by him, as were the very walls against which my back was pressed.” His conceit turned into claustrophobia, his claustrophobia into conceit, these sensations were utterly inextricable or possibly even the same sensation, the astronomer told Leibniz.

  He added: “You have to understand all of this to understand the telescope.”

  And: “I want you to see what I’m seeing when I peer through the telescope.”

  And also: “By no means is the telescope merely an optical instrument!”

  Then one morning Emperor Maximilian died. By noontime that same day Rudolf had boxed his father up in a marble sarcophagus sculpted by the astronomer’s father and by nightfall messengers were streaming forth from the Hofburg Palace toward the homes of Maximilian’s former ministers. Their services were no longer needed. First the new Emperor sacked his father’s Imperial Secretary, then the old Imperial Physician, after that the Imperial Mathematician, and then, at the stroke of midnight, the Imperial Botanist, a man who had grown “outstanding plants” to “outrageous heights,” who had introduced the persimmon and the pomegranate both to Europe north of the Alps, whose orchards erupted with “red apples the size of children’s heads.” If he’s sacking the botanist he’s sacking everyone, the astronomer remembered his mother saying; she stayed up all night waiting for the knock at the door. But the sculptor, then at the pinnacle of his powers, inhabiting an opulent stone mansion in the dead center of a city that hewed to the very contours of his head, atop which sat a black velvet cap with the phenomenal feather of some exotic bird, said: “He would never dismiss me, not in a million years!” the astronomer recalled, pausing now to peer into the telescope, pick up his quill, and write something down. That night his father slept soundly in his madness—for that’s what it was, madness. Whenever you refashion your physical surroundings to reflect on the outside the insides of your head you run the risk of going crazy, which is precisely what happened to his father in Vienna, a place that rather than resisting him, and thereby preserving his sanity, proved all too pliable in his fists. So he was stunned, stupefied, when as the Sun rose the knock that his wife had been expecting and that he thought unthinkable sounded at the door. That knock woke him from one form of madness only to plunge him into another. For shortly thereafter the Emperor moved his court from Vienna to Prague, from gilded Hofburg to grim Hradčany, and the astronomer’s family followed him north, leaving their stone mansion on the finest street in the center of Vienna for a drafty wooden house on the periphery of Prague so that his father could try to reclaim the title of Imperial Sculptor. His entire life was now oriented around reclaiming that title. How his father wanted that title back! He claimed he didn’t need it back, he actually wanted to not want it back, he probably wanted to be the kind of person who neither needed it back nor wanted it back, who thought that such things were meaningless, but everything he did, including transplanting the family to Prague, indicated, in contrast to everything he said, that he both needed it back and wanted it back, that it was for whatever reason meaningful to him, and the astronomer could tell even at his age that his father would never be happy again until he had it back. But Emperor Rudolf was no Maximilian, and Prague no Vienna. If Vienna resisted him too little, Prague resisted him too much, “also obviously a recipe for madness.” In Vienna he met too little resistance and went crazy, while in Prague he met too much resistance and went insane. Sculptures that made sense in Vienna made no sense at all in Prague. Vienna is famously a city of golden facades, Prague famously one of black spires emerging from the mist and penetrating the sky. Vienna under Maximilian was enamored of surfaces, Prague under Rudolf enamored of depths, and therefore his father, a sculptor of surfaces not depths, flourished in Vienna, to the point of madness, but failed in Prague, to the point of madness. “I myself, incidentally,” the astronomer said, “have had a lifelong affinity for depths and no interest in the surfaces of things,” while his own son, a tapestry-weaver “who will enter this tale later on, and in a most disturbing fashion,” was, like his grandfather the sculptor, interested only in surfaces, so the astronomer, a lifelong investigator of depths, was basically “bound on both sides by surface-lovers,” Leibniz quotes him as saying. In Vienna he had seen his father mold the whole world and emboss it with gold, while in Prague he watched him glue thousands of mirrors into a little box, peer into a peephole, and weep. Times had changed. “Probably for me it was a presentiment of his mortality,” noted the astronomer, bending over arthritically on his stool to stroke the head of his sleeping cat, whom he now identified to Leibniz as Linus and who still had not once in Leibniz’s presence opened his eyes. “Not only had this virtuoso of appearances pandered to the local taste for essences, and not only had he failed,” the astronomer went on, “but I myself told him he’d failed.” From that moment on he felt like the father to his own father, hence his bringing to his father the idea for the mechanical human head, abominable though he thought it was, “the way one brings home for one’s son a toy or trinket one cannot oneself see the value in.”

  There is pathos, of course, in seeing one’s son seize with enormous delight upon something one knows oneself to be worthless.

  And how his father seized upon that head!

  All the faith he had put in the box now went into the head, right into that head. “He put all of his faith in that mechanical human head.” The few new commissions that still came in he declined. “Everything now depended on that head,” the astronomer told Leibniz. His father called it the Head of Phalaris. If his father knew that the sculptor who had presented Phalaris with the brazen bull wound up being burned to death by Phalaris inside that selfsame bull he did not let on. The astronomer began to have dreadful premonitions. Of course his father “could not actually be stuffed inside of his own h
ead,” the head having a circumference like the mean adult male of just over one and a half feet, “a body cannot be stuffed inside a head, that’s clear,” and since moreover it was to serve as an instrument of simulation and entertainment rather than persecution and execution it seemed unlikely that the Emperor, even if he were not amused by it, would consign its inventor to death. “The question of the Emperor’s amusement was, however, not a minor one, as you shall see,” the astronomer said, “and the foreboding I had about the head almost as soon as my father began building it, and in particular the peculiar foreboding I had about the eventual presentation of that head to the Emperor, was not, in fact, without foundation, for as you shall see, Herr Leibniz, something very terrible did come to pass, something very terrible indeed! Even though that terrible thing was intertwined in a way I could never have foreseen with something very great.”

  The astronomer put one empty socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down. There were two and a half hours till noon. Leibniz reported seeing a sliver of the Moon through the slightly warped slat, but where the Sun was at that moment he did not know. “And I might have been mistaken about the Moon.”

  * * *

  ALL DAY LONG the astronomer and his father hammered together that mechanical human head. Then his father went to sleep and he stayed up all night conducting his clandestine investigations into optics, reading Euclid and Ptolemy and Grosseteste and peering at the firmament through a glass, or in the reflection of a curved mirror. During the day he and his father scavenged lead scraps, which they melted down and sculpted into the shell of the head, elegant and lifelike, and topped with a shock of thick brown hair donated to them gratis by an attendant of the anatomical theater at Charles University where a week before a young thief had been dissected. Then his father went to bed and the astronomer—by the light of a single candle lit only after he heard his father’s sixth snore, for one snore could of course be faked, as could two snores or three, even four simulated snores is not unthinkable if his father had suspicions, and the idea of feigning five snores to catch your son in some verboten act is, if absurd, not impossible, whereas after six snores his father was probably asleep—read, for example, the portions of Friar Bacon’s Opus Majus concerning the physiology of vision or his Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature with its depictions of those ingenious devices of antiquity that according to legend made distant things seem near or near things distant, such as the fabled glasses with which Julius Caesar is said to have seen the cliffs of Great Britain from the beaches of Gaul, or the gigantic mirror atop the Pharos of Alexandria with which one could not only spot enemy ships at a distance of six hundred miles but by concentrating the rays of the Sun on them just so even set them ablaze. Naturally with all this reading the astronomer’s eyes began deteriorating, “the eye always deteriorates when it focuses on something so near at hand, in so weak a light,” so he had to purchase spectacles, first thin ones, and then thicker and thicker ones, until eventually he wore the thickest spectacles in Prague, but “for some reason my father never inferred from the thickness of my spectacles my contempt for his values.” Each morning when his father’s snores subsided it was time to return from the realm of contemplation to that of fabrication. For weeks the astronomer did not sleep. If he wasn’t peering into his father’s mechanical human head, he was peering out of his own head. One head was to be looked into: the mechanical head. The other was to be looked out from: his own organismic head. The former head had to speak, blink, and chomp, the latter head to think and see. But in his mounting exhaustion it did not take long of course to descend into complete head confusion, “utter head chaos.” Everything got mixed up! Which head was for looking at, and which head was for looking? One night he spent all night observing his head, instead of using his head to observe. “Obviously I had to use my own head to observe my own head, so in a sense I was still using my head to observe, but what I was observing with my head was my head, rather than the new twinkling object in the heavens.” He actually observed his head observing his head being observed by his head: a complete waste of time. That whole night was a waste, “particularly since the sky was perfectly cloudless.” He ought to have spent that time observing the firmament in the reflection of a rounded mirror. Not to mention that the head doing the observing was never quite the same head as the head being observed, even if it had the illusion that it was observing itself, so his data besides being worthless were meaningless. A head “no matter how sensitive” cannot catch itself in the act of observing itself, that much he did determine. “The observer head and the observed head are two wholly different heads, even if they sprout from one and the same neck.” Thus amid the confusion of heads, there was a multiplication of heads. The next day he spent all day tinkering with the cogwheels in his father’s mechanical head in hopes of inducing it to think, if not to reflect. Only toward the end of the day after hours of failing to make the head think, much less reflect, did he suddenly remember, prompted by his father’s asking him, So how’s the blinking coming along?, that this was actually not the thinking head, it was the blinking and chomping head! “Wrong head once again!” He was supposed to be contriving the flapping of the eyelids, not the churning of thought, the tingling of sentiment, or the synthesis of concepts. The eyes were to open and close, that’s all. So this whole day, too, was a waste. And then that night, as his father slept, the astronomer while looking at the heavens through a lens realized that he could see nothing, nothing at all, not a single star all night either fixed or wandering, the sky was cloudless once again and filled presumably with phenomena—indeed he would learn the next morning that Venus in the course of the night had transited Jupiter—but there might as well have been a curtain drawn across it for he found himself attending exclusively and involuntarily to his own blinks, scrutinizing his own blinks with an absorption that actually entirely occluded the world outside him and above. He said: “That night though I knew very well which head I had on my shoulders I still could not stop devoting my attention exclusively to my blinks, noticing each of my blinks, feeling and registering each of my blinks, counting my blinks well into the thousands, analyzing my blinks into their constituent parts, to the point where I could actually no longer blink, I basically forgot how to blink, or rather I suddenly understood blinking too well now to do it, I saw through what it means to blink, to experience an infinitesimal flash of darkness between two prolonged exposures to the external world, My God, I thought, that’s what a blink is?, my thinking you see had made my blinking impossible, I could still chomp, as I determined, oh, I could speak and chomp perfectly well, but I could no longer blink no matter how dry my eyes, I had utterly dismantled my blinking machine, it lay, as it were, in pieces, which I now had to put back together using only the most fundamental physical principles, I had to teach myself from scratch how to blink again, how to do this very simple thing, this very simple blinking thing, that hitherto I had done instinctively and in fact continuously from birth.”