The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  “You see this tear, yes?” the astronomer asked Leibniz. “You verify it? The interesting thing is that I weep most not when I ponder my feelings for my father but when I ponder my father’s feelings for his cap, or his feelings for his box. Not my feelings for him, not his feelings for me, not his feelings for my mother, or my mother’s feelings for him—though all of these feelings like all family feelings were perfectly potent—but rather his feelings for his cap and his feelings for his box, as well as my mother’s feelings for his cap, for she was always trying to keep that cap clean for him even in the years he wasn’t wearing it, that black cap my father loved so much collected dust like crazy and it’s not too much to say that my mother, who was actually an extremely literate and intelligent woman, the daughter of a renowned jurist and humanist from Regensburg, wound up locked in a lifelong battle with the dust-collecting-qualities of my father’s black velvet cap. It is not the relationship between subjects and subjects that makes one weep most but the relationship between subjects and objects, that’s insufficiently understood! When I picture my mother trying to keep my father’s cap dust-free I can produce a teardrop almost at will.”

  He peered into his telescope.

  “Sentimentality remains radically understudied. The scientific study of the sentiments is still utterly in its nascence. Only in the last year or two, in Delft, has a teardrop finally been put under the microscope. Sentiments can be investigated only to a certain extent by introspection, i.e., in the absence of a microscope. Delft is the undisputed capital of teardrop microscopy.”

  He peered into his telescope.

  “The microscope has made its way to Amsterdam and The Hague, but in Amsterdam they put only sputum and spermatozoa under their microscopes, in The Hague similarly only sputum and spermatozoa, whereas in Delft, sperm yes and sputum yes, but also teardrops. The result is that eroticism and the respiratory system are totally devoid of mystery throughout the Dutch Republic, but the sentiments, insofar as they are understood at all, are understood only in Delft.”

  He peered into his telescope.

  “And even in Delft not well.”

  He peered into his telescope and wrote something down.

  They set out early one morning, his father bent low beneath a knapsack containing the Head of Phalaris, which he insisted upon carrying himself. It was snowing. The Sun rose dimly in front of them, behind a tangle of tree limbs lined with white. As they passed the midpoint of the Old Stone Bridge, where centuries before the martyr John of Nepomuk had been flung into the Vltava on the orders of Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia, and which now was presided over by a statue of Emperor Maximilian on his steed, the winds, which were already crazed, grew positively demented, howling, as the astronomer recalled, over the frozen surface of the river below. Somewhere high above, hidden in swirls of snow, the big brass contraption groaned. The weather, in fact, had been worsening for weeks, the Sun had slipped behind a cloud the moment the Emperor had signaled the start of his astronomical convocation with the ringing of the bells of the Cathedral of Saint Vitus and it had not reappeared since, but only now, at the instant, as it happens, that the astronomer and his father reached the bottom of the long stone stairway that wound its way precipitously up to the Castle, did the storm intensify into a blizzard. It was well-known at that time that meteorological conditions in Prague were causally connected to conditions in the Emperor’s mind, a phenomenon that certain churchmen as well as the vulgar attributed to the action of demons flitting in and out of the Emperor’s head, which evidently they could, on this theory, enter at will—“anything of course can be explained by recourse to a head-entering demon!”—although the astronomer, employing a precursor of Torricelli’s barometer, had been able to establish that the Emperor’s head actually influenced the city of Prague through the medium of the air. So what they beheld in the skies now they would presumably behold in the Emperor’s head, if indeed they reached the Emperor at all. That boded well for the astronomer, since it meant the virtuosi invited into the Castle along with their archaic contraptions had failed to put the imperial mind at ease and had even whipped it further into a fervor, but it boded ill, he thought, for his father, and his father’s trinket, and did little to quell his appalling suspicion that he was deliberately escorting the old man to his doom. And as his father began dragging himself up those steep stairs, his huffing and puffing audible above the fantastic clatter of the gale, one hand outstretched for balance and the other pressed to his cap, which threatened to fly off at any moment, its feather flapping spasmodically in the wind, the astronomer felt quite certain that his father’s heart was about to give out, or that his father would slip on the ice and crack his skull on the stone, and even had a vision of the mechanical head sliding out of the sack and obliterating itself and its fragile inner workings as it whacked every single step all the way down before vanishing with a realistic gurgle in the Vltava. But that did not happen. In fact, as they approached the Castle, his father seemed, somehow, to gain strength. He caught his breath, straightened his shoulders, put down firm footfalls on the icy stone, while behind him his son began to huff and puff, to curl inward against the driving snow, to slip and stumble and once very nearly stagger backward into the abyss. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, where a snowy halberdier manning a grand gate flanked by two statues of Emperor Maximilian thumped the ground with the butt of his weapon (thus bursting forth from the snow blanketing him) and ordered the two to go no farther, he saw that his father’s beard, underneath the ice that now encased it, had even recovered some of its former coloring: the white was flecked with gray. This was no mere trick of memory. “He really was extracting some sort of life force from his increasing proximity to the center of the Empire and directing it toward his beard.” The astronomer realized that he did not and could not comprehend the appeal to his father of proximity to power until that moment, as he watched it affect the coloration of his father’s beard. “We were very different creatures, I realized, if I could not even sense this life force emanating from the center of the Empire, whereas he not only sensed it but somehow tapped into it to effect the rejuvenation of his beard.” It was not merely a matter of different tastes, of valuing things differently, but of different sensory apparatuses, of sensing things differently. “Seeing his beard get grayer, first a little grayer, and then a lot grayer, I naturally felt a surge of sympathy for my father, whom I ought to have regarded not as a man with different principles but as an animal with different senses, less a shameless courtier than a bat,” he told Leibniz. (One is reminded of Bertrand Russell’s contention that the contradictions of Leibniz’s philosophy stem from his hunger for “the smiles of princes.”) With newfound vigor the astronomer’s father righted his cap and in a bold voice informed the young halberdier that he was the former Imperial Sculptor to the deceased Emperor Maximilian, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and King of the Romans, and he, who had designed the famous Maximilian Fountains of Vienna, had come for an audience with Emperor Rudolf. And he said it in such a way that the halberdier not only swung open the gate forthwith but even saluted them as they passed. At another gate a hundred yards closer to the Castle this performance repeated itself precisely, and soon a retinue of guards, functionaries, and attendants had materialized around the astronomer and his father and conducted the two of them toward the bowels of the Castle complex, blowing through gates, doors, and checkpoints, eliciting a blur of bows, salutes, and clicked heels, while his father’s barely suppressed grin beamed forth from within a beard that was by now “the formidable and frightening black of my early childhood.”

  At last they entered the Great Hall, a vast vaulted chamber that had hosted countless coronations, royal weddings, winter waltzes, and other scenes of official elation, including the occasional chivalrous competition, “three weeks ago horses had galloped up and down that hall to the ecstasy of the Emperor,” but which now was a scene of utter despair, scored by the tick-tock of precision clocks and swarming
with men of science who in their fancy black cloaks and frilly white collars twirled their well-oiled models of the cosmos or pointed their useless instruments at the gray Prague sky, and in the midst of whom, upon his throne at the head of a banquet table laden with cold cauldrons of stale goulash and littered with the bones of diverse beasts and birds, sat the Emperor himself, cradling his huge, profoundly horrified-seeming Habsburgian head in the palm of one hand. “My first glimpse of the man, and of his huge imperial head, and of the horrified expression upon the face of it, which I immediately found not only congenial but reminiscent of an expression I’d sometimes seen when, while trying to glimpse a reflection of the heavenly vault in a spherical mirror, I glimpsed instead, however fleetingly, my own face.” To this horrified imperial head the astronomer of course sought to bring “intellectual relief,” while beside him his father, “precisely I think because the appearance of that new twinkling object had not thrust his own head into metaphysical torment,” dreamt merely of bringing artistic delight. The astronomer added: “Only someone essentially untroubled by the nature of things will go around offering delight rather than relief, as I often told my son, himself a purveyor of art delights rather than means of mental relief. Only someone whose head is rarely or never thrust into philosophistic torment would rather please the eye than relieve the intense philosophical pressure that builds up behind the eye, I often said to him,” said the astronomer. One glimpse of the Emperor’s head was enough to assure the astronomer that it was not only huge, it was also thrust deep into torment. Why, the astronomer recalled asking himself for the first time in his life, had such an expression of fathomless metaphysical horror never flitted across his father’s face? He said: “It is only upon leaving one’s father’s house and workshop, and gazing upon another man’s face, that one realizes, retrospectively, that there are expressions one never observed upon one’s father’s face, the range of expressions of which had seemed, growing up, exhaustive, i.e., definitive of all possibilities.” Distinctions, and hence knowledge, and hence self-knowledge, begin with this gazing-at-another-man’s-face. “There’s no knowledge until there’s another man’s face.” In your father’s house, gazing at your father’s face, the world is bright, but without definition; then you leave home, and gaze elsewhere, including at other men’s faces, and your eyes begin to deteriorate, but your mind begins to discern, and the world dims, but grows more distinct; finally, your eyes are plucked out, but your mind becomes infinitely discerning, and the world goes black, but becomes fantastically well-defined, “possessed of a crispness that in fact remains shocking to me.” That’s the standard story of knowledge acquisition, he said, “and the standard story is true.” This process of coming to know himself, “which only with the eclipse will come to fruition,” began with that gazing-at-the-face-of-the-man-in-the-alleyway but quickened markedly with this gazing-at-the-Emperor’s-face, and observing upon it an expression (of fathomless metaphysical horror) that he’d sometimes fleetingly seen in his spherical mirror but, since he’d never seen it upon his father’s face, had never registered seeing until now, “I must have seen it without seeing it,” he must have overlooked it as trivial, perverted, or an artifact of his instrument. Seeing the Emperor’s face schooled him in the art of seeing his own. “I had to admit to myself the terrible truth that I already, within seconds of seeing him across the hall, felt a closer kinship to the Emperor than I ever had to my own father, simply because we, and not my father, nor later my son, were seemingly thrust into the same torment.” Years later, incidentally, the astronomer had done everything in his power to introduce his son to that torment, obviously he’d felt a certain ambivalence about seizing a young person’s head and thrusting it without warning deep into the philosophical torment, “Did I really have the right, I had to ask myself, to thrust this content young man’s head deep into torment? For the sake of company? What are we doing, exactly, when we give a child reams of reading material for the express purpose of thrusting them into the age-old torment?,” but even though he’d decided that, yes, he had that right, and even though he’d actually gone ahead and thrust his son’s head deep into the torment, his son was not, in the end, tormented. He kept “bobbing up like a buoy from the philosophical depths.” A head might be more or less dense than the philosophical fluid into which it is plunged. His son’s head was less dense. “The deeper I thrust him into the depths, the higher, like a buoy, he bobbed.” A uniquely untormented individual, for better or worse, interested above all in the delights and distractions of art. His father and son would have liked each other, “had they ever met.” He added: “A logical impossibility, of course, as my son’s birth was a distal effect of the same cause, this encounter with the Emperor, that more proximally brought about my father’s demise.” Neither could’ve understood how the popping into being of a point of prettily twinkling luminosity overhead could bring to the imperial face such an expression of horror, nor, for that matter, how the horses who had galloped up and down here three weeks ago could bring him such happiness, whereas the astronomer with one glance at the Emperor thought he understood him, i.e., understood both why the horses had made him so happy and why the popping into being of that new twinkling thing now horrified him so.

  The astronomer stroked his cat, peered into his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down. Only someone truly horrified by the heavens can derive such happiness from a horse, and, a fortiori, a cat, he said. When you see someone deriving not altogether too much happiness from a horse, or a cat, you see someone at ease in the world. “An aphorism,” declared the astronomer. “A man delighted by a cat is discomfited by existence, a man delighted by existence is discomfited by a cat.” A cat owner is invariably an individual not in possession of any consoling doctrines or articles of faith, just as an individual in possession of some such doctrine invariably has no cats. A man who believes he possesses both a cat and a consoling doctrine will discover at some dreadful moment, when his faith is put to the test, that his doctrine is not truly consoling, or, if it is, that his cat is not really a cat. In his blackest hour he discovers that the doctrine on which he has founded his life is itself without any foundation, or if it does have a foundation his cat is a dog, the astronomer said, according to Leibniz.

  Leibniz wrote: “Here the notion entered my head, and I could neither dislodge it nor yet judge the truth of it, that the cat, too, was missing its eyes.”

  Now, the astronomer went on, the Court Chamberlain approached the Emperor—who was listening halfheartedly to a German mathematician demonstrating with obsequious gestures and honeyed words the inner workings of the largest and most sophisticated of the contraptions, the brass one whose groans sounded as far as the Jewish Quarter—and whispered into the Emperor’s ear while pointing at his father’s former Imperial Sculptor, who stood as broad-chested as he could at the far end of the Great Hall. The Emperor raised his head a half inch off his palm and said, just loud enough for the astronomer to hear it over the din of “zenith”s and “azimuthal”s and the whistle of the cold wind coursing through the open windows and spewing snow on the floor, “My father’s what?,” in a tone—was it wistfulness? disgust?—which the astronomer could not decipher, “nor, of course, owing to the strange acoustics of that vaulted hall, was the tone of those words as they reached my ears necessarily that with which they resounded in the Emperor’s head.” The Court Chamberlain whispered once again in his ear and the Emperor, with eyes fixed gravely on the astronomer’s father, said something in response, and then let his head sink back onto his palm. The Court Chamberlain made his way toward them. “I assumed we were about to get thrown out, or locked up, or worse.” Everything depended now on the exact nature of the Emperor’s attitude toward his father, and by extension his father’s representatives, several decades after his father’s death, and this, to his subjects, was notoriously inscrutable. On the one hand, as you know, said the astronomer, the Emperor had forsaken his father’s palace in Vienna for his own
Castle in Prague, but on the other hand, and this I may not have mentioned yet, he filled Prague with hundreds of statues of his father. Hundreds of statues! However, the astronomer added, each statue portrayed his father at only three-quarter size. In other words, he populated Prague with innumerable, slightly smaller-than-life representations of his father. What should one make of this? “What does it mean? Was it merely parodic?” the astronomer wondered as the Court Chamberlain approached them. But if it were merely to parody his father, why would the Emperor have chosen as the moment to memorialize his father’s greatest triumph, when he rode his steed into Transylvania after conquering it from the Turks? Innumerable, slightly too-small fathers riding victoriously into Transylvania, the astronomer thought as the Court Chamberlain strode swiftly toward them, a territorial inheritance which, as it happens, Emperor Rudolf would later relinquish back to the Turks in a series of skirmishes he hardly contested. What does this mean? The statues are too small, yes, he thought, but they are triumphant, as indisputably triumphant as they are self-evidently too small. And parody, anyway, needless to say, is always implicitly reverential of what it parodies, it always takes most seriously precisely that which it mocks most ruthlessly, this paradox is well-known, so even if these statues were intended not as tribute but as parody, perhaps especially if they were intended as parody, they still reveal the high esteem in which the Emperor held his father, the astronomer thought, with the Court Chamberlain now no more than a dozen paces away. Yet how high could that esteem really be, he thought, given that the steed in these statues was full-size, not three-quarters, so that the father actually looked extra small compared to his horse? “How, Herr Leibniz, would you characterize this relationship? He commissions hundreds of statues of his father, yet each is slightly smaller than life, although also quite regal in bearing, and at a moment of military triumph, yet dwarfed by his horse? What kind of relationship is that? What is the nature of it? Which sentiments are involved?” The number of statues indicates one thing, the size of them another, the air of them another still, and the size of the horse in them quite another, “and of course that is only four of the infinite attributes of these statues!” One could not escape the conclusion that the Emperor’s filial sentiments were, correspondingly, infinitely complex. On the other hand, the Emperor would either receive his father’s sculptor or he would not. The most multifarious phenomena are always being boiled down to the most ridiculous dualisms, said the astronomer—“just as, tomorrow, you will remember only that the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon, or that it was not.”