“Twenty-two minutes,” said the astronomer, peering into his telescope, according to Leibniz. “It is getting darker and darker.” And he picked up his quill and wrote something down.
* * *
TWELVE FEET, FOURTEEN FEET, seventeen, nineteen—then an astral tube no less than twenty-two feet long, borne with care from the capital on the backs of half as many men. Having long since dismissed his assistants, whose clock and quadrant measurements he could never wholly trust, the astronomer now wielded the clock and quadrant himself, in addition to the tube, and although as a consequence his stellar data were a great deal slower and more laborious to record they were more perfect, too; and so here in this observatory far away from the social as well as the visual distractions of Prague, from the people in other words and the lanterns, he saw farther and clearer than ever before, his increasingly long tubes were piercing through the cosmos, and sooner or later one tube or another would pierce through the cosmos in its entirety and his star catalogue would be complete. One day, however, when a dozen men hauled to his observatory a new tube twenty-four feet in length, there came with them a thirteenth man who instead of helping with the hauling identified himself as an imperial envoy and handed the astronomer a letter from Rudolf sealed with the two-headed eagle. It said, I paraphrase, Leibniz quotes the astronomer as saying, that the Emperor now found himself in a perilous situation, the Holy Father and the Estates of Bohemia having abandoned him at the very moment when he most needed the subsidies of the former and the tributes of the latter in order to pay the soldiers of fortune he had hired to protect Prague from his disloyal brother and who no doubt would plunder the city if their salaries were not paid. The astronomer would be doing the Empire a service if for the time being he would conduct his valuable investigations with the present tube and not request a new one until the current crisis with God’s help has passed. The astronomer, indignant, wrote back straightaway. Even if what the Emperor wrote was true and not simply a sly attempt to evade his responsibilities, these affairs of state and of man were nevertheless not the astronomer’s concern; his own empire lay on another plane. Pursuant to the terms of the Edict of the Tubes, and here he quoted it in full, tube funding without reason if Heinrich learns about triangles, he demanded a tube thirty feet in length, with a magnifying power of forty. Three weeks later an astral tube of those specifications was delivered to his observatory with a warm note wishing the astronomer well in his researches, signed by Matthias, Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor.
“Twenty minutes,” declared the astronomer, Leibniz reported. “Darker and darker.”
* * *
PRINCE HEINRICH WAS DEAD, Princess Margaretha after her brother’s death went no less mad than he had gone, Princess Wilhelmina was held captive by her husband the wary Count Palatine in his meticulously maintained but petite castle on the banks of the Schwarzbach at Zweibrücken, and as for Princess Katharina, musical Katharina, who, as you recall, the astronomer told Leibniz, had, according to the Court Chamberlain, been sent to Spain to visit her cousins at the court in Madrid of Philip III, the astronomer—after years of keeping an ear out for the opus he knew her capable of composing—learned at last that she had been sent to Spain, that much was true, but not to Madrid, and not to the court there, but rather to Toledo, where she took her vows, how willingly we do not know, and joined the silent Carmelite sisters of the Convent of Our Lady of Light. The astronomer said: “The world has not heard a peep from her since.”
Hence the field was cleared for the devout Matthias, and after Matthias for the fanatical Ferdinand II. Each of them, however, with that peculiar comical strut of constitutionality that marked German politics even in the depths of the war to come, when peasants feasted on human corpses, and imperial soldiers raped the daughters of respected burghers, and Swedes fed filth into the mouths of Bavarians until their bellies burst from the pressure, agreed, according to the astronomer, to abide by their predecessor’s Edict of the Tubes—“though you will see momentarily that this was less than forthright!”—and professed each of them an interest in the natural world.
Thus there was a forty-foot tube, and then a fifty-foot tube, and then a sixty-foot tube, the last of which conveyed to the astronomer’s eye 1,436 glittering stars.
He peered into his telescope and picked up his quill. “Nineteen minutes, darker and darker,” he said, and wrote something down.
* * *
ONE MORNING A BOY knocked on the door of the observatory. From one look at his face, “which was my face, Herr Leibniz,” the astronomer concluded that the boy was his own son. He gathered from what the boy told him, after he embraced him and brought him in and warmed him by the fire, that the Count Palatine had concluded this, also. For as long as the boy could remember he’d often caught his father staring at his nose, he didn’t know why, the boy told the astronomer. When he had been drinking and thought the boy was sleeping the Count Palatine would sometimes steal into his bedroom and measure the boy’s nose between his thumb and his forefinger. Then, taking care to preserve the space between them, he would bring those two fingers to his own nose. “How many times had the boy awoken in the night to find this decadent drunk Wittelsbach Count hovering over him in the dark, comparing with his fingers the sizes of their noses,” the astronomer said. Of course when it dawned on him eventually that his father dreaded for some reason the growth of his nose, the boy tried everything in his power to stop his nose from growing, squeezing and squashing it, lashing it to his face with string, sleeping on his stomach with it pressed to his bed. “Basically the boy bound that nose in every conceivable way.” But no matter what he did, his nose continued to grow. Finally it could no longer be denied—not even by the Count Palatine, who, as the astronomer discerned from what the boy told him, although the boy did not seem to realize it, loved the boy deeply—that the boy’s nose wasn’t the Count Palatine’s nose, and so the boy was not the Count Palatine’s. The latter had no choice but to turn the boy out from his castle at Zweibrücken and let fall the portcullis behind him, which is what he did, with the brusque counsel through the iron grating that he find his true father, his father by blood, whom as far as the Count Palatine knew was a lunatic Jew bleeding the Empire fiscally dry by staring directly at the Sun through ever longer and ever costlier tubes somewhere in the mountains of Bohemia, near Schwarzenberg.
And now here the boy was.
The astronomer was overjoyed. In his absorption in the firmament he had forgotten his wish years earlier, at the instant Princess Katharina had struck with her mallet what she believed to be her father’s glockenspiel, for a child of his own. The mere sight of this face, a face he had not seen anywhere but in his own mirror since his last glimpse of his father in the Great Hall, caused him to tremble. Yes, he was overjoyed, at first! Very quickly, however, the astronomer realized that beneath the familiar face lurked an alien essence.
Only outwardly was his son his son. “Inwardly he was a Wittelsbach.”
The boy showed little interest in the quadrant, none at all in the clock, hardly any even in the extremely long tube. No sooner on that first night had they begun their astronomical investigations than the boy declared that he was bored, and asked to be taken to the aviary to see the astronomer’s falcons. The revelation that the astronomer had no aviary and kept no falcons shocked the boy silent. He recorded the coordinates of another three stars before looking up from the ledger and demanding to see the single oldest and most foreign coin in the astronomer’s entire coin collection; when the astronomer reached into a pocket and tossed him a thaler minted the year before in Joachimsthal the boy burst into tears and could not be consoled. He had spent too much of his brief life in that small castle on the Schwarzbach at Zweibrücken. He was a fop like his foster father. The astronomer: “He had come to me too late.” The astronomer thought of Prince Heinrich’s walks with Princess Katharina and reflected: “A young person is an astoundingly pliable thing.
A personality unlike a nose can in its infancy be bound and shaped.” Beneath the surface of this seven- or eight-year-old boy beat the heart of a jaded and dissipated middle-aged dynast and aesthete.
Now perhaps—thought the astronomer optimistically—the boy was pliable still, he was still, after all, fairly young! And he put reading material into the boy’s hands, books that would teach him how he, his father, saw things, what he took for real and what for illusory, what for the causes of our torment on Earth and what if anything for the consolations; but though the boy tried to feign an interest in them these books “obviously bored him half to death.” Euclid bored him, Campanella bored him, Grosseteste bored him, Friar Bacon bored him. Even if he didn’t take an interest in optics, the astronomer thought he might take an interest in his father’s interest in it, but he did not, though of course he said that he did. When the astronomer seemed engrossed in the tube the boy probably forlornly scanned the spines on his shelf for military histories, dynastic panegyrics, old volumes of light Latin verse. “The question of the fundamental nature of things did not grip him.” How many stars there were, how they were distributed, and how they were constituted—what the stars were—held no fascination at all for the boy in spite of the astronomer’s unflagging efforts over months and then years to interest him in such elemental questions; no, whatever allure the stars had for the boy lay only in their aesthetic potentialities, their vulnerability to versification, their more or less inexhaustible metaphorical application (“their ability,” the astronomer explained, “to mean anything”), and the decorative charm they possessed when shimmering above the landscapes the boy sketched of the surrounding mountains and valleys. In sonnet after sonnet he extolled the virtues of heavenly entities of whose nature he was wholly ignorant; in sketch after sketch their light was exploited to illumine one or another alpine scene. The astronomer responded coolly to such poems and drawings and the boy did not know why. “How could he have understood that the lordly way he put the world to his own artistic use was his Wittelsbach birthright? That though my blood ran in his veins his head had been formed by a Wittelsbach upbringing? That from that dissolute Bavarian dynasty he had inherited the chutzpah to transform the world at his will into aristocratic amateur art? That that which licensed his foster father the Count Palatine to bathe nude in the Vltava River before all the plebs and the potentates of Prague licensed also his own aloof aestheticization of the world?” It must have seemed cruel when he dismissed the boy’s sonnets as Wittelsbach doggerel, his landscapes as Wittelsbach doodles, when he cut short the boy’s attempts to converse with him about the stars on the grounds that what each of them meant by that word was too different for them to conduct a conversation; but although he must have seemed cruel, the astronomer was grieving. Often, like the Count Palatine, he observed the boy sleeping, though unlike the Count there was nothing he could measure with two fingers to quantify their divergence.
He told Leibniz: “He was a stranger wearing my face.”
One winter night, years into a cohabitation that had long since turned taciturn and cold, the astronomer, having combed every inch of the heavens with his seventy-five-foot tube and found only three stars that he had not seen through his previous tube, of seventy feet, and who, in consequence, was suffused with the ecstatic awareness that he was finally approaching the goal toward which everything had been directed, dreamily let the tube drift, and it drifted toward the portion of the heavens known to the Greeks as the Milky Way and to the Germans as the Way to the Shrine of Saint Jacob, and there he saw something he did not expect.
He roused the boy and ordered him to look through the tube. “What do you see? Tell me what you see!”
The boy looked through the tube. And after a moment he murmured: “It is beautiful.”
“I am not asking you if it’s beautiful,” the astronomer said. “That you find it beautiful is absolutely immaterial to me. I am asking you what it is.”
And the boy, who by now was a young man, replied: “What it is, Father, is a rather beautiful illustration of the futility, the farcicality, and the senselessness of your life. That is what I see through the tube.” And he put on his boots and his coat and walked out of the observatory into the deep snow, and he did not return that day, or the next, or any of the days that followed. The astronomer said: “And he was not wrong, Herr Leibniz. For what we saw through the tube was that the nebulous substance that composes the Way to the Shrine of Saint Jacob consists of nothing but innumerable stars crowded close together.” Between his catalogue and the sky itself there was now almost as great a difference as there’d been when he began; and between an absurdly long tube and one that was infinitely long there was, he thought as he contemplated throwing himself out of a window of his observatory, perhaps less of a difference than he’d hoped.
“Fifteen minutes, darker and darker,” the astronomer added, peering into his telescope. Leibniz noted that whatever slight darkening he had formerly assented to had long since passed, and through the askew slat it was now as bright outside, and as blue, as it had ever been, or more so.
* * *
INSTEAD OF KILLING HIMSELF—“which would have been exceptionally foolish to do then, before I knew what the stars actually were, and where they actually came from!”—he catalogued the stars in the Way to the Shrine of Saint Jacob, nearly three thousand of them, and requested from Emperor Ferdinand a new tube ninety feet long, after that a tube one hundred feet long, and shortly after that a tube not less than a hundred and fifteen feet in length, with the power to magnify things ninety times, and which required, per the astronomer, a whole battalion of Wallenstein’s men, fresh from their victory over Mansfield at Dessau, on the Elbe, to haul up the hillside. Through each new tube something that had appeared in the prior one to be a nebulosity or a cloud of dust was revealed to be another multitude of stars, necessitating the tube to follow. “Until the sky looked the same through two tubes of different lengths the star catalogue was incomplete.” The tubes, it is true, now became enormously long. But so long as Wallenstein struck fear into the hearts of the Protestant princes, the Emperor with his veneer of constitutionality was if not delighted to supply them at least prompt in doing so, in accordance with the edict issued by his predecessor by two. Years passed in this way, the tubes getting longer and longer, and resolving more and more nebulosities into clusters of stars. What is interesting, noted the astronomer, per Leibniz, is that his inner technology kept pace with his outer technology; as his outer technology, the tubes, grew longer and longer outward, his inner technology, the introspective mechanism, grew longer and longer inward, and became more and more powerful, and as he resolved the nebulosities into vast multitudes of stars, he also simultaneously resolved himself and his mother and his father and his son into vast multitudes of motivations; “The tale I am now telling you—minus of course the last and most crucial part, wherein I lost my eyes—began in those days to arrange itself in my head, as I peered at my life through my longer and longer introspective mechanism and broke myself and my family members into smaller and smaller (rearrangeable) bits and pieces,” said the astronomer. This was not entirely a good thing, he felt, and in fact as he resolved the nebulous portions of his life into discrete and indistinguishable bits and pieces, just as he resolved the nebulous portions of the skies into discrete and indistinguishable stars, he felt it was entirely a bad thing. With his longer and longer and more and more powerful inner technology he resolved his mother into smaller and smaller and hence less and less nebulous and interesting bits, chopped her basically into hundreds of tiny bits and pieces, and then did likewise to his father, then to his son, and then to himself, until they were all chopped into extremely small, entirely unmysterious, and completely uninteresting bits, bits of disposition, personality pieces, bits and pieces of belief and inclination and habit. And to the sky he did the same thing, or something similar.
There’s actually nothing interesting above and actually nothing interesting within, the
astronomer thought at that time. Prince Heinrich was right. “Everything everywhere is more or less the same.”
For the first time in his life, the astronomer wanted to stop looking, to stop looking out at the sky, and to stop looking into himself.
But he could not stop. He felt he had a “compulsion to look,” to look closer and closer, “a looking-closer-and-closer compulsion.” What (he wondered) would it take to stop looking, “to look this closely, and no closer? Through such and such a magnification, and no higher?”
Now, these thoughts must have occurred to him around the year 1628, just after the imperial army failed at the siege of Stralsund to oust the King of Sweden from his foothold in Pomerania, for that was the moment at which an anonymous Munich pamphleteer, “as though reading my mind,” charged the astronomer with a “Judaic looking-compulsion,” which, by channeling toward his long nonsensical Judaic tubes funds required for the defense of Germany and Catholicism from the heretics and philistines of the north, sacrificed the fatherland to the singleminded “compulsion to look ever closer” common to all Jews but especially pronounced in this particular Jew, “who reserves for himself the right to look as closely as humanly possible at all things, though it means the devastation of our mother country, and the ruin of Christendom.” As he read the pamphlet, and even as he recognized the danger it posed to his project, and to his person, the astronomer recalled thinking that no one on Earth understood him as well as did this pamphleteer, perhaps not even he himself, and certainly not his own son. Still, he would not let it deter him, “a compulsion leads a life quite independent of one’s consciousness of it,” and the afternoon of the morning he read it he wrote to Ferdinand demanding a new tube one hundred and sixty feet in length, with the power to magnify things a hundred and twenty times. The timing of this demand was inauspicious. It arrived at the Hofburg at the very instant that a breathless courier came with the ominous news that the Swedish Estates had voted with one voice to finance three years’ worth of war with Germany. If Gustavus Adolphus had not already set sail from Stockholm with his forces he was surely soon to do so. Meanwhile the Imperial Treasury was in a lamentable state. Ferdinand had taken to selling his own land, first Lusatia in perpetuity to the Elector of Saxony, then Upper Austria as a pledge to Maximilian of Bavaria. In partial payment of a debt of some half a million gulden Wallenstein was granted the dukedom of Mecklenburg. And now this superannuated Imperial Astronomer, “having taught Prince Heinrich about triangles,” as he prefaced each of his demands, was demanding a tube one hundred and sixty feet long, so fast on the heels of one that was one hundred and fifty feet? Ferdinand, moreover, was not deaf to the whispering among his Bavarian subjects, including Duke Maximilian himself, that he was held hostage to a Judaic looking-compulsion, that he was mortgaging the German lands in order to let a single Jew look more and more closely, indeed “pointlessly close,” in the words of the Munich polemicist, at all things, in heaven, on Earth, “and in himself, as well: into his own repugnant and blaspheming soul,” as the astronomer recalled one of the pamphlets alleging, “not wholly without justification,” he told Leibniz. The Emperor therefore found himself in a bind. On the one hand he had to uphold at all costs the appearance of constitutionality, or else it was certain that Saxony would relinquish its neutrality and align itself with the Swedes; and no argument founded upon the reason of state, upon the identity of the reasonable with the necessary, would persuade the Elector of Saxony to do otherwise; if, on the other hand, he continued to tap the Imperial Treasury to pay for these longer and longer and now extraordinarily long tubes, he would lose the support of the good people of Munich, then of all Bavaria, after that he would lose Maximilian, and hence the army his Catholic League had put under the command of Count Tilly, and soon after that he would lose the war. “In either case my tubes seemed to spell the end of the Holy Roman Empire,” the astronomer told Leibniz.
The Organs of Sense Page 18