The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  “An absurd allegation,” sputtered the astronomer, so astonished that he was not yet alarmed, and the Court Chamberlain said, “Absurd, not impossible,” and the astronomer took a step forward, intending to pick up Della Porta’s book so he could illustrate the countless ways in which his own tube differed from the tube pictured within, but the imperial guards evidently interpreted his motion in another way for he swiftly found himself restrained by three of them.

  The Emperor gazed in contemplation at the horn. “The horn,” he muttered under his breath, “is everything, everything is the horn, and everything is also the bowl.”

  Now the Court Chamberlain ambled over to the astronomer, who was still held fast by the guards, and said: “I told His Majesty: Your brother has sent us this sham mathematician, let us cut off his sham mathematical organ, that is, his head, and send it back to your brother in a box. And His Majesty, who is far more sensitive than I to the subtleties of the distinctions of the disciplines, replied: Not a mathematician, an astronomer.” The Emperor, scrutinizing the bowl, muttered: “Astronomy concerns appearances, not that which can be thought but that which can be seen.” The astronomer to Leibniz: “True.” The Court Chamberlain said: “So I said: Then let us pluck out his sham astronomical organs, his eyes, and send them back to your brother in a box. Basically I wanted to send the Emperor’s brother some ironical organ of yours, in a box. But do you know what His Majesty said? He said: No sham astronomer could perceive in the stars what this man has perceived in them.” The Emperor murmured: “In the gut, as you wrote. Disguised in the black robes of my Father Confessor.” The Court Chamberlain: “In short, my dear sir”—and with the lightest tap of his hands on theirs he freed the astronomer from the grip of the guards and then fussily smoothed the creases they had left on his sleeves—“you have His Majesty’s faith in you to thank for your life. And this is not a man who believes in just anyone! No, the Emperor is a skeptical soul, a true son of Pyrrho.” “In the fiftieth year, the crumbling of the walls of the chambers of the heart,” murmured the Emperor. “All things emanate from the One—the horn, the bowl, everything else, the jars, and so on.” To the Philosophical Transactions, Leibniz remarks parenthetically: “An echo not of course of Pyrrho but of Plotinus.”

  The Court Chamberlain told the astronomer: “Perhaps you wish to express your gratitude…”

  And the astronomer, who by now had probably gone pale, bowed at once to the waist and said: “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  Raising his eyes briefly from the bowl, the Emperor nodded solemnly.

  And the Court Chamberlain said: “But perhaps you feel, and I don’t blame you, that this merely verbal expression of gratitude is insufficient recompense for all that the Emperor has given you: not only your life, but your house, your salary, your stewardship of the Imperial Observatory…” And the Court Chamberlain said he would now suggest how I might discharge my ostensible debt of gratitude, how I could, as he put it, “pay it off in full,” the astronomer recalled. And the Chamberlain leaned over to him and whispered: “Listen carefully, for though you may feel that there is an element of theater in all this, the theater, too, can frighten, you know,” and the Emperor evidently overheard this, for he murmured: “When the actors talk I am always afraid that I will suddenly stop understanding what they are talking about…” and the astronomer told Leibniz: “Although all this had seemed theatrical, it nevertheless had frightened me, so I did listen carefully. And as I did, it began to dawn on me how I might turn what he was telling me to my advantage.”

  Now, it seems, according to the Court Chamberlain, who repeated several times that he was only passing along what he had been told by his sources in Frankfurt, that Archduke Matthias’s primary stratagem for persuading the seven Electors that upon His Majesty’s death the crown ought to go to Margaretha, his eldest, instead of Heinrich, his firstborn son, had little to do with the latter’s alleged illegitimacy, as that line of argument, even if it overcame the challenge of His Majesty’s Edict of Legitimation, which is doubtful, would of course disqualify not only Heinrich but Margaretha as well. “Matthias is more clever than that!” No, his case rested not on Prince Heinrich’s alleged illegitimacy but on his alleged insanity, for which the Archduke’s main piece of evidence, and in fact his sole piece of evidence, was the unfortunate act that took place in Heinrich’s turret in the middle of November, two Sundays before the start of Advent. The Court Chamberlain’s sources in Frankfurt said that Archduke Matthias could not go two sentences without referring to “the things Heinrich did to the barber-surgeon’s daughter.” A devilishly clever politician, Archduke Matthias deployed the phrases “the things Heinrich did to the barber-surgeon’s daughter” or “the unspeakable atrocities Heinrich committed on the evening of November fourteenth” to imply, without ever explicitly asserting it, that Prince Heinrich was not of sound mind. Through shrewd repetition Matthias invested the words “Heinrich’s behavior on the night of November fourteenth” with the meaning of the unsaid words “Heinrich’s madness,” or even—and it seemed to the astronomer that the Chamberlain shot him a pointed glance—“Heinrich’s inherited madness.” “From our earliest youth,” muttered the Emperor, gazing at the horn, “Matthias has always called me mad. My gentleness he took for madness. My inwardness—madness. That I am soft-spoken makes me, for Matthias, mad … My interest in gems, madness, my interest in trompe l’oeil, in tapestries featuring elements of trompe l’oeil, madness, my interest in mechanics, madness, in emblems, madness.” The Chamberlain: “But it was always a political maneuver to call you mad, from the time you were boys,” and the Emperor, with, as the astronomer told Leibniz, sudden startling cogency, bellowed: “No, my dear Chamberlain, it is not always about politics! He truly thinks me mad, he truly thinks me truly mad, imagine being told by your little brother that you speak too close to other people’s faces, and realizing that he is right! What he and everyone else knew how to do naturally I had to learn. Why? Conversations he could follow I could not. Why could he follow them? Why could I not? Our father used to bring farces to the Hofburg, French farces in private productions, he and my brothers adored those French farces but for me they were private nightmares. They used to laugh and laugh at them, our father would laugh, so would Matthias, so would Albert, and so would Ernst, and so so would I, laugh and laugh I mean, but all the time I was laughing I was wondering: Can everyone tell that I don’t know why I am laughing? Watching Father’s face to know when to start laughing and when to stop … Sometimes I had an inkling why I was laughing but usually that inkling was wrong, it was actually something else that was funny, the thing that I thought was funny was usually really serious. A horrible thing, my dear Chamberlain, to laugh and laugh yet not know why you are laughing … when everyone else in your family seems to know … To not have inherited the family sense of humor: horrible … It is horrible, and it’s not politics when Matthias yells: Crazy Rudolf doesn’t know why he’s laughing! This happened once, I forgot to keep an eye on my father’s face and I kept laughing long after everyone else stopped laughing. And Matthias stood up, mid-farce, and pointed at me, and shouted: Look, Crazy Rudolf doesn’t know why he’s laughing, he’s laughing and he doesn’t know why!” The Emperor gazed at the bowl. “And I am the eldest, remember, I should know why I’m laughing. So I said: I know exactly why I’m laughing. And our father said: Let him be, Matthias. And I said: No, it’s fine, I know why I am laughing! And Matthias said: Good, then tell us what’s so funny, Crazy Rudolf. And I said something, and obviously whatever I said wasn’t the funny thing because suddenly everyone else was laughing, roaring with laughter, my whole family and even the actors. And Albert, obviously feeling guilty, or maybe it was Ernst actually, said, You’ve got to brush up on your French, Rudolf! And Matthias cried: He understands French perfectly, it’s not the French he doesn’t understand! Meaning I suppose that it was the human affairs. None of this, so far as I can tell, my dear Chamberlain, touches on imperial politics rather than simp
le, straightforward brotherly cruelty, save insofar as I know that Father always lamented that the son of his who inherited his melancholy was next in line for the throne while the son who inherited his sense of humor, plus his equestrian prowess, was not … I have never been comfortable on a horse, by the way, Matthias has always been comfortable on horses, he belongs on a horse, I don’t, I do not see what that has to do with politics…” The Court Chamberlain begged His Majesty’s forgiveness. “I only meant that as long as I have known him, I’ve always understood the Archduke best when I understand him as a wholly rational, wholly political being, as political reason incarnate.” The Emperor, satisfied, gazed intensely at the horn, the astronomer told Leibniz. The Court Chamberlain went on: “And it is part of his political genius to refer in Frankfurt only to Heinrich’s behavior, never once to his soul or state of mind. Here Matthias was a step ahead of us. While we suspected, rightly, that he would make the case for Heinrich’s being mad, we assumed, wrongly, that he would do so in those terms … And we assumed that the moment he turned the Frankfurt conclave into a referendum on the state of Heinrich’s mind, or soul, it would—like all symposia that seek to settle a matter incapable of being settled, for it is well known that the state of one’s soul is opaque to others, murky also to oneself, and seen clearly only by God—descend into an anarchy of opinion and interpretation, an anarchy without end. And if, as happens often enough, the disputants decided to truncate their otherwise infinite deliberations and solve the insoluble by appealing to the most prestigious man of science in their vicinity, whose expert judgment all would agree to abide by … well, in case of that, we had briefed fourteen of Frankfurt’s most eminent physicians, each of whom, if summoned, was prepared to testify, firstly, that Prince Heinrich’s mania on the night in question was consistent only with a blockage of the so-called pineal net, a membrane the many holes of which ordinarily allow the spirit to ascend and descend as it wishes, but which when blocked will induce the tics, perverse temptations, and sad thoughts that led to the unfortunate death and defenestration on November fourteenth of the barber-surgeon’s daughter; secondly, that Prince Heinrich’s mood from the morning of November fifteenth to the present day indicates beyond doubt that his pineal net holes have cleared up considerably, possibly completely; and thirdly, that these holes could be kept permanently clear (and so Heinrich permanently sane) simply by the ingestion once a week between his bloodletting and his bath of an electuary composed of pearls, amber, violets, verbena, barley, lettuce seed, the cordial powder aromaticum rosarum, and three droplets of human breast milk, as well as liberal quantities of saffron, honey, and sweet clover.”

  In short, the Chamberlain explained, a battle over the state of Heinrich’s mind, or soul, was a battle on favorable terrain. “As soon as Archduke Matthias uttered the words ‘Heinrich’s mind’ or ‘Heinrich’s soul’ or ‘Heinrich’s madness,’ or ‘Heinrich’s hereditary madness,’ the battle was won.”

  He added: “And Matthias must have known that, for he never once uttered those words.”

  Rather than planting his flag inside Heinrich’s head, Matthias has planted it outside it, on the grounds of Heinrich’s behavior on the night of November fourteenth, his observed and mutually agreed upon behavior, his indubitable and incontrovertible behavior, his well-witnessed crime, the magnitude, iniquity, and oddity of which, regardless of what was going through his mind as he perpetrated it, ought to disqualify him, so argued the Archduke, from the office of Holy Roman Emperor. That was the extent of the Archduke’s argument, and despite its apparent simplicity, in seeming to reason simply that a prince who has dismembered and defenestrated the daughter of a tradesman ought not ascend to the throne, it was in fact terrifically subtle. “An emperor cannot behave this way: That’s been Matthias’s constant refrain in Frankfurt,” said the Court Chamberlain, and, leaning toward the astronomer, he whispered: “I doubt whether His Majesty appreciates his brother’s cunning in selecting that verb. Like all world-class politicians, the Archduke is, above all, a world-class wordsmith. An emperor,” he repeated, enunciating each word, eyes alight at the Archduke’s artfulness, “cannot behave this way.

  “And so,” the Chamberlain continued, “our strategy has changed accordingly.”

  The astronomer put an eye socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a string of numbers. There was, he declared, pulling his pocket watch from his rags, little more than an hour now till the solar eclipse.

  Leibniz asked him: What exactly did the Prince do to the barber-surgeon’s daughter? And why?

  “Those were my questions, also!” cried the astronomer. “Yes, what did he do, and why did he do it? Was there, in other words, a reason? What of the jealous rage Margaretha had mentioned? My questions also. But I suspected I would not get the truth from these two.”

  “Yes,” the Chamberlain had said, the astronomer continued, “our strategy has changed accordingly—and here is where you come in. Since Matthias has brought the battle to the shores of Heinrich’s behavior, we must engage him there. We must prove what we know to be true, that the night of November fourteenth was a bizarre aberration, that Heinrich’s behavior now is behavior befitting a Holy Roman Emperor. We must prove by his behavior that he is sane.”

  The astronomer: “I suddenly wondered what kind of minuets Gottfried had been instructed to teach Margaretha … In retrospect, the way he was teaching her to eat seemed completely insane. I remembered what he’d said about soup, about serving tongs, about stone fruit. Gottfried was intentionally inculcating in her the manners of a madwoman, I realized. He was not there to help her wed…”

  The Court Chamberlain continued: “Now, among the seven Electors, there is one who is friendly to our cause. For his sake I shall not name him but suffice it to say it is neither the Archbishop of Trier nor the Archbishop of Cologne, papal zealots both.” The Emperor: “I want to say who it is.” He raised both the horn and the bowl and cried: “It is the Duke of Saxony!” The Court Chamberlain: “It is. And the Duke is well positioned, for though he is a Lutheran he is a lukewarm one and has steadfastly refused to join the Union of Auhausen, a fact that has led Matthias to believe that the Duke wishes to curry favor with the Catholic states, and has even led Matthias to dream—rather madly—that he might coax Saxony to join the Catholic League.”

  Leibniz, parenthetically: “This incidentally supports a theory of mine that events which the astronomer narrated as taking place over three or four days actually took place, if they took place at all, over three or four years, for the Protestant Union was not formed at Auhausen until 1608, four years after the supernova, and the Catholic League was not formed until July of the following year…”

  The Emperor pressed the horn and the bowl together and scrutinized them that way. Then he put the horn into the bowl, held the bowl aloft in the palm of one hand, and scrutinized that.

  The Court Chamberlain said: “So we were in the fortunate position that the very person whom we wanted to gain Matthias’s confidence was being sought out by Matthias, who wanted to gain his, the Duke’s, confidence … Instead of the Duke approaching the Archduke, we could wait for the Archduke to approach the Duke.” The Emperor murmured: “Archduke, archduke, duke, duke, very astute.” The Chamberlain: “And that’s what happened. Matthias midway through the Frankfurt conclave sidled up to the Duke of Saxony and said, sotto voce, So, how do we settle our little Heinrich problem once and for all? This happened just a few days ago. How, in short, Matthias asked the Duke, do we put the bastard to bed? And the Duke of Saxony, as we had rehearsed, said: We ought to let my fellow Electors see the boy’s behavior for themselves … If they have some suspicions of what you say, especially our friend from the Palatinate, it is because they know you aren’t impartial, you do after all have an interest in the matter, they fear that it aligns too well with the interests of Rome. But let my colleagues see the poor Prince for themselves, let them assess his sanity, or I should say his insanity, with their own eyes
, and their doubts will be put to bed—and with their doubts the bastard himself. Let them see him, I say! He is said to be interested in the stars, let us pose him one or two simple questions, which one is the Dog Star, which one is the New Star, how far away do you suppose they are from us, he will respond in his disturbed and disordered way, and that will be that. And Matthias thought this very crafty, a sanity assessment the boy was bound to fail. How far is the New Star, do you suppose? we will ask him, said Matthias, probably smirking, a most innocent question, and the boy will utter something unutterably mad, and that will be the end of it! Of course,” the Court Chamberlain told the astronomer, “what he does not know is that Prince Heinrich, in the meantime, will have mastered, under your tutelage, the principles of trigonometry…”

  “You must teach my son about triangles!” cried the Emperor, lifting his eyes for the first time from the bowl and the unicorn horn and staring wildly at the astronomer. “The relations of their sides, the relations of their inner angles and their outer ones!”

  The Chamberlain said: “Matthias will ask, How far is the New Star? And the Prince will proceed calmly to his scientific cabinet, procure from within it one of your state-of-the-art tubes, aim it at the star, and then perform for the Electors a dazzling calculation of its remoteness based upon the principles of trigonometry you shall have taught him. And since mathematical reason is or is regarded as the queen of reason, his sanity will be demonstrated beyond all doubt.” The Emperor whispered into the ear of the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain said: “You must go into his turret and teach him all about triangles!” And the Emperor whispered in his ear again, and the Chamberlain said: “All about all triangles. How the sides relate to the sides and the angles to the angles, and the sides to the angles and the angles to the sides.” The Emperor whispered in the Chamberlain’s ear and the Chamberlain said: “This cannot be done through the door of the turret, it must be done in the turret, inside the turret, face-to-face interaction is vital for truly teaching someone trigonometry.” The Emperor, gazing at the bowl, murmured: “For Pythagoras, the triangle lay at the root of all things, beneath the circle, beneath the square. For Pythagoras the square was really nothing but two right triangles, pressed together. When you see a square, you are actually seeing triangles, two of them, pressed tightly together, the diagonal line of their union erased, Pythagoras taught, and for this he was killed.”