“They were squeamish,” Prince Heinrich told the astronomer.
A disturbing hypothesis began to form in Heinrich’s head.
His nervousness returned. He stopped sleeping also.
He now undertook to observe Katharina and Ludmila—“with as much rigor, precision, and systematicity as you, Father, when I incarnate you as an astronomer rather than a confessor,” said Heinrich, “must observe the stars, the only difference being this, that when you observe the stars it is of no consequence whether or not the stars watch you in return, whereas in observing Katharina and Ludmila it was important that they not observe me observing them, at the risk of perverting what I observed of them.”
To that end he tried to move in darkness. Once again Prince Heinrich hung over his windows his tapestries.
At nightfall, instead of sleeping—“Impossible!”—and without, as yet, quite knowing why, Heinrich turned his attention to the putting together of air pumps, no longer the taking apart of clocks but now the putting together of air pumps, of bigger and bigger air pumps, the integrity of which he tested with more and more songbirds, as well as a few other animals. “I find it interesting, Father,” the Prince said, “how, over the course of centuries, we breed dogs to love us, we fashion dogs precisely such that they love us, with each new generation dogs love us, by design, more and more, a dog breed is not finished until it loves us, we do not really call it a dog at all until it loves us, before that point we call it a wolf—and yet when, after all that, a dog does, tautologically, love us, we are nevertheless moved.”
Come dawn, he put aside his pumps and returned to his observations. And before long these observations validated the theory he feared, that Katharina and Ludmila, his little sister and his lover, once so different, were now the same, “and the conclusion could not be avoided, Father, that I had made them the same.” On the floor of the Music-Making Room he observed Ina singing to herself amidst his old glockenspiels, singing herself songs he had taught her, and between songs she spoke to herself, words he had taught her, thoughts he had taught her, everything she sang or said was his, and even the motions of her body as she sang and as she spoke “were mine, Father, motions I myself had taught her, even if I’d taught her them tacitly, unintentionally.” He recognized her swaying of her shoulders as his swaying of his shoulders. The subtlest things had imprinted themselves upon her. What she had learned on our walks went well beyond what I’d deliberately taught her. From the Music-Making Room I went to the Stonemason’s Workshop. There I saw the same thing, that is, myself … Though Ludmila spoke not to herself but to another person, and not in German but in Czech, Heinrich said, one nevertheless caught my own cadences, nothing but my own cadences, and my own gestures, or gesticulations, and presumably my own thoughts, and basically my own being, or at least my own behavior, which of course was also Katharina’s being or behavior. Heinrich: “The uncanny sensation of observing oneself, hearing oneself, albeit as a woman, albeit in Czech…” Before their walks she was different, after their walks she was the same; his mind had taken something different, evacuated it somehow of itself, and made it all the same. Heinrich said: “I thought: By collecting them in the same place and subjecting them to the same principles I have made Katharina and Ludmila indistinguishable from each other.”
And since, in nature, no two things are identical, whenever we come upon two indistinguishable things we always suspect them of being unnatural, artificial, “in other words, man-made,” said Prince Heinrich, “which is to say, not organisms but mechanisms, containing neither mind nor soul but gears engaging gears…”
How, thought Heinrich, can we tell an organism apart from a mechanism?
Ludmila had begun to seem profoundly unreal to him, “as unreal, perhaps, as she’s seemed to you the whole time I’ve been telling you this tale, Father. You would not be wrong if you’ve been thinking that Ludmila hardly seems to exist in and of herself (outside my telling) at all.” But her seeming unreal to him was no proof that she was unreal, that she was a mechanism, since after all, Heinrich noted, he might be mad, he might be quite mad and she quite real, organismic—“something seeming some way to me is no proof of anything.”
Her reality or unreality had to be demonstrated out there, he said: “On the outside of my head.”
How, Heinrich thought, as he told the astronomer, can we tell an organism from a mechanism, objectively, outside our head, when that mechanism might be very fine, very, very delicate, as precise as you like, and engineered by a craftsman of genius?
For six days and six nights Heinrich brooded upon the conundrum in vain. At dawn on the seventh day, a Sunday, November fourteenth, “what should have been a day of rest,” the solution came to him, as blindingly obvious as such solutions tend to be: “You put her in the pump! You put her in the pump.” He understood now why he had been building pump after pump, and such big pumps to boot, “the man of science like the artist will sometimes find that his materials lead him to where his thoughts ought to go, though perhaps they fear to go there,” he had been building bigger and bigger air pumps in order to be able to put a person in one of them—or better to say, so as not to beg the question, something the size of a person, and the shape of one.
Life cannot subsist in the void, the Prince remarked, but a mechanism can. In the absence of the atmosphere a soul will grind to a halt but cogs will continue to turn.
On the Sunday in question, the Sun had risen, but the turret on account of the tapestries over the windows was still dark and Ludmila in Katharina’s nightgown was still asleep. Heinrich picked her up and put her in the pump. She had slipped into bed late the night before so even this did not wake her. But when he began to pedal the treadle and thereby to remove the air from the globe in which she found herself trapped she awoke and started to scream. Heinrich: “Her screams touched me, I’m human after all, it’s hard to hear such a human scream without imputing the scream to a human being. I almost stopped the experiment then and there, and I might have done so had I not remembered this mechanical head”—he indicated with his head the Head of Phalaris in his arms—“which, rudimentary as it was, mimicked nevertheless the sound of a man. Your father’s head gave me the courage to continue, Father.” Of course, the astronomer told Leibniz, peering into his telescope, such an assertion lay bare the disordered nature of Heinrich’s head, as he’d had the astronomer’s father’s mechanical head in his possession no longer than a few days—although as we’ve seen, Leibniz noted to the Philosophical Transactions, the disorder may have been in the astronomer’s head instead, or in addition, for those few days were likely a few years. Feeling ridiculous now in his costume, and unnerved by the Prince’s willingness to play along with his farce, but not wishing to disrupt the tale, the astronomer tugged on his hood, held up his staff, and intoned: “Go on, my son.” Heinrich said: “I continued to treadle, the pump continued to evacuate the air, Ludmila continued in the motions of her body and the color of her face to give outward signs that she like the bird was suffering, but obviously none of these motions and none of these colors were effects that could not have been generated by a craftsman of sufficient genius.” Then, all of a sudden, her behavior changed: between gasps, she began to apologize. “Yes, Father,” Heinrich said. “She apologized to me!” This baffled him. He thought: What in God’s name does she have to apologize for, when really I should be apologizing to her, for developing doubts about her actuality, and then putting her in this pump! It emerged, however, that she did have reason to apologize. She confessed—“and this, she must have assumed, was why I was doing this to her!” the Prince cried—to an affair with her compatriot the stonemason, she loved him and he her and their love had long ago been consummated, she was sorry to have hurt Heinrich but he after all had hurt her far worse, and the truth is—she could barely breathe now—she hated Heinrich, she detested him, he repulsed her, and she was certain he would go straight to hell, the stonemason was everything Heinrich was not, mentally of course, “m
entally, she said, and this of course was absurd, he was a million times my superior,” the Prince recalled, and he told the astronomer that this was so ludicrous that it did not wound him, but physically, too, yes, and somehow she summoned the energy to laugh, a mocking laugh he had never heard from her before, physically, too, My Lord, she said, there’s no comparison between you and the stonemason, no comparison at all—not in how you think, not in how you fuck. And in the gargantuan glass globe she collapsed and lost consciousness. “Now, it is true,” Prince Heinrich told the astronomer, “that the affair was news to me. And it’s true, as you may have heard Greta claim, for I know she likes to ascribe Ludmila’s passing to this, to something very base, rather than something very philosophical, that I went into a jealous rage. Yes, Father, I went into a jealous rage—true. But it is not true that that jealous rage of mine killed her. Quite on the contrary, it saved her life!” In his rage he despised her, he said, and in despising her she became real to him again, a being again, a different being from him, a despised being, of course, but a being nevertheless, a mechanism never elicits such fervor pro or contra. The Prince shattered the glass globe with an elbow and on his knees in the shards of it he held Ludmila’s limp body and wept over her and prayed over her and breathed into her mouth. Whatever he did did the trick; she came back to life, gasping for the air he was giving her. “We underestimate pneumatics,” the astronomer said to Leibniz. Heinrich told the astronomer: “All day long we stayed intertwined, talking and copulating, copulating and talking, and in our talking and copulating both we felt for the first time that we were getting to the bottom of the other person, I told her about my father and my sisters, how I really felt about them, I told her things about them I have not even told you, Father, intimate and complicated things, the truth, the truth! And she told me about her father, i.e., about Zikmund, whom she loved like no one else in the world yet who had more or less abandoned her to me, and all of the complicated feelings that entailed, she shared thoughts and feelings of remarkable intimacy and astounding complicatedness, and she even told me at my urging about the stonemason, every single thing about him, even at my urging how he made love, at my urging she told me what he looked like, everywhere, and what they had done, in detail, and in return I told her about my demons and doubts, how I had come to question her inner life, she was a quick study on this and soon wielded the same thought process against me, how do I know you think, how do I know you have a mind, how do I know you’re not a machine, she cried cleverly, et cetera, and in this way we peered all the way down into each other’s depths, never in my life had I peered into someone so deeply or let them peer so deeply into me, deep, deep, unbelievably deep! Yet at bottom there was between us a substrate of mutual loathing that safeguarded for each of us the autonomy and actuality of the other. The perverse pleasure of a jealous rage … The salubriousness of jealousy,” he said, per the astronomer, “which is nothing else but resistance … And it is good for a prince to feel such resistance, so rarely does the world resist him, something is only real to you when it resists you, and so makes you rage.” (Is it fanciful to discern in such sentiments the seed of Leibniz’s later contention that “the nature of body does not consist in extension alone,” as the Cartesians liked to insist, but also in the solidity of bodies, in their impenetrability, in their exclusion of other bodies, in their ability, in short, to resist things?) Heinrich: “That day she seemed so real to me, so real, more real than ever before.” That night, however, as she slept, and he did not, and he watched her sleep, her body rising and falling with each breath, Ludmila sank back into a profound and, as he could plainly see, irreversible unreality, and he was assailed once again by his former suspicion that her head was hollow and void or else filled like a clock with gears upon gears, and it was then (“I confess!”) that he inflicted such injuries upon her head in his effort to open it up and look inside, cutting off her ears, plucking out one eye, shattering her teeth, and finally splitting open her skull. The severity of her maiming should not imply, he noted, that it was done in violence, no, it was done with equanimity, in a philosophical mood, it is just not as easy as one might think to open a human head. Upon doing so, and finding that her head was neither hollow nor filled with gears, he flung her corpse in Ina’s gown to his hogs in the menagerie down below, and he’d put one foot on the sill to fling himself after her before it dawned on him that he had not been wrong, what had appeared organic to him would not appear so to someone much smaller, or to someone equipped with a magnifying glass of sufficient power, “or a tube like yours, Father”; seen by such a small person, or under such a powerful glass, or through a long enough tube, what appeared to be organic, pinkly, soggily, squeamishly organic, would show itself to be mechanical through and through, little but toothed wheels turning one another in vast empty silent spaces.
Then Heinrich said: “For these and all my sins I am very sorry.” He added: “It sounds stupid when I say it. When I say anything.” Since the world was his the Prince was obviously doing something completely crazy, truly stupid, and entirely contradictory whenever he opened his mouth to say anything to anyone, Heinrich noted. “And in any case I haven’t infiltrated my own turret disguised as a priest in order to forgive myself my sins such as they are but in order to teach myself about triangles, yes, triangles! So, then, Father,” said Prince Heinrich, and he burst into laughter, then looked frightened, and at last went still: “Speak. Teach me. I am all yours.”
And the astronomer took off his hood and set down his staff and taught the Prince about triangles.
And he found—“and this tells us something about the nature of mathematics”—that despite his being clearly completely crazy Heinrich’s aptitude for trigonometry was undiminished.
And when the delegation of the Electors arrived a few days later the Prince with extraordinary skill and the ardor of a genuine pursuer of truth estimated the distance from Earth of the New Star, and when the Electors departed each for his own dominion all seven were persuaded beyond doubt of the young man’s sanity, and thus his fitness for his father’s office, the astronomer told Leibniz, putting an empty eye socket to the eyepiece of his telescope, picking up his quill, and writing down a long string of numbers. And even though Prince Heinrich was found dead the next day in the privy protruding from his turret, slain, it seemed, by his own hand, it could not be denied that he had learned about triangles, and the grief-stricken Emperor assured his Imperial Astronomer that he intended to honor the edict he had signed.
FOUR
THE REST OF THE STORY spans half a century, but is swiftly told—and must be swiftly told, said the astronomer, according to Leibniz, for the Moon will interpose herself between us and the Sun exactly twenty-four minutes from now, “neither more nor less.”
* * *
WITHIN A WEEK the astronomer had his three-foot-long ninefold-magnifying tube, within a month he had ordered and obtained a telescope four and a half feet in length that magnified objects thirteen times, and before the year gave out the astral tube which he trained at the heavens was as long as the astronomer himself was tall, enlarged the world some sixteen times, and disclosed to the eye no fewer than 1,202 stars. Matters might well have continued in this fashion, “and my eyes, my dear Leibniz, have remained right here in my head,” were it not for the fact that Wilhelmina—only eight months after her nuptials to the decadent scion of the House of Wittelsbach, in a small, sullen ceremony at which a decrepit factotum of the Castle scattered the flower petals to which Katharina had once laid claim, and during which no one in the chapel beamed more strenuously than Margaretha—gave birth in Zweibrücken to a baby boy who appeared to have been carried to term. The suspicions of the Count Palatine, who besides bathing nude in the Vltava was known mainly for his zest for masques, falconry, drink, poetry, old foreign coinage, and decor, as well as for his academic interest in the art of war, were stoked by one or another of the astronomer’s corruptible colleagues, who for a presumably trivial sum informed the ira
te aristocrat that the Princess’s mathematics tutor had on at least one occasion emerged from her fitting room in a state of dishevelment. The old man apparently grinned, and then peered into his telescope; a note of diffidence here enters Leibniz’s text; the conjecture of one contemporary Leibnizian, having scoured his archives, is perhaps relevant in this regard, that Leibniz in his long life never loved, and was never loved. In any case, as the Count Palatine in his finery and with his sash of white and blue galloped eastward from the Rhineland with a hundred cavalrymen, intending to demand satisfaction from the astronomer, the latter, with the forbearance of the Emperor, absconded from Prague, first by carriage, then by horse, and lastly by foot, concluding with a frenzied ascent of this very mountain, an ascent during which he was very nearly driven mad with visions, around every bend, behind each tree, at first of the Count Palatine, but then of his mother, of his father, his father in his prized plumed cap holding out his many-mirrored box—“he had fixed it, he cried, he had fixed it!” said the astronomer to Leibniz—but even in a state delirious enough to confuse the visions of my father for the real thing I knew nevertheless that he had not fixed it, he had by no means fixed it, what do you even mean fixed it, fixed it how, with more mirrors? Meanwhile his mother or his vision thereof said not a word, she did not even look at me, the astronomer told Leibniz, she was fixated on the velvet cap on my father’s head, it was dusty, incredibly dusty, she was wondering how it had got so dusty, and how she would ever dust it. As my father bore down upon me I wanted her to look at me, just my mother looking at me I felt would save me from him, but she was wondering how to dust his cap, it had got so dusty, and the dust showed up so clearly against the black. “I remember thinking, vis-à-vis my father and his box, You’ll never fix it, and vis-à-vis my mother and that cap, You’ll never dust it.” Then he saw that his visions of his father had a mechanical rather than a corporeal head on his shoulders and his mother, too, had a mechanical instead of a corporeal head, and he recalled that both of them were dead—Leibniz observes that the astronomer hadn’t mentioned his mother’s death—and it occurred to him at that moment that he had actually ascended the entire mountain and stood now on the peak of it, “right here, right where we now sit, my dear Herr Leibniz,” and the final vision he had before fainting was of an astronomical observatory, seemingly perfectly circular but, for reasons touching on the workings of the senses, actually departing from perfect circularity at an infinite number of points, “a polygon, not a circle,” which the Emperor duly constructed for him and equipped as he wished with a tube nine feet long, with the power to make objects seem twenty-five times larger than they actually are, and with which the astronomer brought the number of entries in his star catalogue to 1,277.
The Organs of Sense Page 17