Evidently the amputation strained his health, because he often suffered from weakness and melancholy. The pain of his left leg, which troubled him ceaselessly, he termed ‘phantom’, but he was afraid to mention it to anyone, suspecting that he was the victim of some nervous illusion or of madness. He would no doubt have lost his high position at the university had anyone found out about it. Very quickly he began working as a doctor and was accepted into the guild of surgeons. His lack of a leg meant that he was called more often than others for any kind of amputation, as though his personal experience guaranteed the success of the operation, or as though a legless surgeon brought – if it could be called this – good fortune in disease. He published particular works on the anatomy of muscles and tendons. When in 1689 he was offered the position of rector of the university, he moved to Leuven, taking in his luggage the tightly packed vessel with the leg in its rolls of linen.
It was I, Willem van Horssen, who served as messenger, when several years later in 1693 I was sent by the printer to show Verheyen the fat edition of his first book – the great anatomical atlas, Corporis Humani Anatomia, still damp from the printer’s ink. It contained twenty years’ worth of his work. Every etching, perfectly executed, transparent and clear, was supplemented by an explanatory text, so that it seemed that in this volume the human body became some sort of mysterious procedure etched down to its very essence, relieved of easily spoiling blood, lymphs, those suspect fluids, the roar of life, that its perfect order had been revealed in the absolute silence of black and white. Anatomia brought him fame, and after a few years the work was revised in an even larger print run and became a textbook.
The last time I went to Filip Verheyen’s was in November 1710, called by his servant. I found my friend in a very poor state and it was difficult to communicate with him. He was sitting at the south window, looking through it, but I had no doubt that the only thing this man could see were his own internal images. He didn’t really react to my entrance, just looked at me without interest, nor any sort of gesture, then turned back to the window. On the table lay his leg, or what remained of it, for it had been taken apart into hundreds or thousands of little pieces, tendons, muscles and nerves broken down into their smallest components, all of which covered the whole surface of the table. His servant, a simple person from the country, was frightened. He was afraid to even go into his master’s room, and the whole while he gave me signs behind his back, silently commenting on his reactions, moving just his lips. I examined Filip as best I could, but the diagnosis wasn’t good – it seemed that his brain had stopped working and that he had fallen into some sort of apathy. I knew, of course, that he suffered attacks of melancholy; now the black bile had reached the level of his brain – perhaps because of those, as he called them, phantom pains. The last time I had brought him maps, for I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps. I prescribed him rich foods for strength, and rest.
At the end of January I learned that he had died and immediately hastened to Rijnsburg. I found his body already prepared for the funeral, washed and shaved, lying in a coffin. Around his cleaned-up home were some relatives from Leiden, and when I asked the servant about his leg, he only shrugged. The great table by the window had been scrubbed and washed with lye. When I tried to ask further what had become of that leg, which Filip had repeated so many times that he wanted buried with his body, the family dismissed me. He was buried without it.
By way of comfort and appeasement I was given a sizeable stack of Verheyen’s papers. The funeral took place on the twenty-ninth day of January in the abbey of Vlierbeek.
LETTERS TO THE AMPUTATED LEG
The loose pages I received after Verheyen’s death put me in confusion. Throughout the last years of his life my teacher recorded his thoughts in the form of letters to a particular correspondent, a circumstance I’m certain anyone would deem sufficient proof of his madness. However when one carefully reads these hurried notes, which were almost certainly intended as an aidemémoire rather than for someone else’s eyes, one sees in them the record of a kind of journey to an unknown land and an attempt to sketch out its map.
I thought long and hard about what I ought to do with this unexpected inheritance, but I decided against its publication in any form. I, his student and friend, would prefer for him to be remembered as a wonderful anatomist and draftsman, the discoverer of the Achilles heel and several previously unnoticed parts of our body. I would prefer for us to remember his beautiful engravings and accept that it is impossible to understand everything of anyone else’s life. But to address the rumours that have been spreading after his death in Amsterdam and Leiden – that the master had gone mad – I wish to briefly present several excerpts from his papers here and demonstrate in so doing that he was not mad. I have no doubts, meanwhile, that Filip allowed himself to be overwhelmed by a particular obsession connected with his inexplicable pain. Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don’t know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way.
In the Letters to My Amputated Leg Filip attempted to prove coherently and without emotion that since the body and soul are in essence one and the same, since they are two attributes of an infinite, all-encompassing God, there must be between them some sort of proportionality designed by the Creator. Totam naturam unum esse individuum. This is in essence what interested him the most: in what way do such distinct substances as the body and the soul connect in the human body and act upon one another? In what way can the body, occupying space, establish causal contact with a soul that occupies no space? How and from whence does pain arise?
He wrote for example:
What is it that awakens me, when I feel pain and suffering, since my leg has been separated from me and is floating now in alcohol? There is nothing pinching it, no reason for its suffering, no such pain that can be logically justified and yet it exists. Now I look at it and simultaneously feel in it, in the toes, unbearably hot, as though I were submerging it in hot water, and this experience is so real, so obvious, that if I were to shut my eyes, I would see in my own imagination the bucket of water overly heated and my own foot submerged from toes to ankle. I touch my bodily existing limb in the guise of a lump of preserved flesh – and I don’t feel it. I feel, meanwhile, something that does not exist, it is in a physical sense an empty place, there is nothing there that might give any sensation whatsoever. The thing that hurts does not exist. A phantom. Phantom pain.
The combination of these words initially appeared strange to him, but he soon began to use the phrase readily. He also took detailed notes on the progressive dissection of the leg. He took it more and more apart; after a while he was left with no choice but to proceed with the aid of a microscope.
‘The body is something absolutely mysterious,’ he wrote.
The fact that we so precisely describe it does not at all mean that we know it. It is like an argument from Spinoza, that lens grinder who polishes glass precisely in order that we are able to examine every thing more closely, who creates an incredibly difficult language in order to express his thought because it is said: seeing is knowing.
I want to know, and not give in to logic. What do I care about a proof from the outside, framed as a geometric argument? It provides merely a semblance of logical consequence and of an order pleasing to the mind. There’s A, and after A comes B, first definitions, then axioms and numbered theorems, some supplementary conclusions – and you might have the impression that such command is reminiscent of a wonderfully sketched etching in an atlas, where with letters particular sections are marked, where everything seems so clear and transparent. But we still don’t know how it all works.
He insisted that the highest sort of reason is intuitive, not logical. Learning intuitively, we will immediately notice the deterministic necessity of the existence of all things. Everything that is necessary cannot be otherwise. When we really realize this, we will experience great relief and purification. We will no longer be unsettled by the loss of our belongings, by the passage of time, by ageing or death. In this way we will gain control over our affects and attain some peace of mind.
We must simply remember the primitive desire to judge what is good and what is bad, just as civilized man must remember primitive drives – revenge, greed, possessiveness. God, which is to say nature, is neither good nor bad; it’s an ill-used intellect that stains our emotions. Filip believed that all our knowledge of nature is in reality knowledge of God. This is what frees us from the sorrow, the despair, the envy and anxiety that are our hell.
It’s true that Filip addressed the leg as though talking to a living, independent person, I will not deny that. Separated from him, it took on some sort of demonic autonomy, simultaneously maintaining with him a painful relationship. I also confess that these are the most unsettling portions of his letters. But at the same time I have no doubt that this is just a metaphor, a kind of mental shortcut. He was thinking that what once formed a whole but was then broken down into parts is still powerfully connected, in an invisible way that is difficult to investigate. For the nature of this relationship is not clear, and it would no doubt elude the microscope.
It is, however, obvious, of course, that we can only trust physiology and theology. These are the two pillars of knowledge. What lies between them does not count at all.
Reading his notes, it must thus be remembered that Filip Verheyen was a man who suffered ceaselessly and without knowing the reason for his pain. Let us keep that in mind when we read his words:
Why am I in pain? Is it because – as that grinder says, and perhaps only in this does he not err – in essence the body and soul are part of something larger and something shared, states of the same substance, like water that can be both liquid and solid? How can what does not exist cause me pain? Why do I feel this lack, sense this absence? Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces – doesn’t something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?
Is my pain God?
I’ve spent my life travelling, into my own body, into my own amputated limb. I’ve prepared the most accurate maps. I have dismantled the thing under investigation per the best methodology, breaking it down into prime factors. I’ve counted the muscles, tendons, nerves and blood vessels. I’ve used my own eyes for this, but relied, too, on the cleverer vision of the microscope. I believe I have not missed even the smallest part.
Today I can ask myself this question: what have I been looking for?
TRAVEL TALES
Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes, I could in the order of points or chapters reap the consequences of demonstrating step by step what it is I mean; I would verify an aforementioned hypothesis and ultimately be able to carry off my arguments like sheets after a wedding night, in view of the public. I would be the mistress of my own text, I could take an honest per-word payment for it.
As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds.
Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive.
THREE HUNDRED KILOMETRES
I dreamed that I was looking from above at cities splayed out across valleys and on mountain slopes. From that perspective it was very clear that those cities were the felled drunks of once-enormous trees, probably gigantic redwoods and ginkgoes. I wondered how high the trees must have been, since today their trunks contained whole towns. Excited, I tried to calculate their heights, using a simple ratio I remembered from school:
A is to B as
C is to D
-------------------------------
A x D = C x B
If A is the surface of the cross section of the tree, B its height, C the surface area of a town, and D the height of the town-tree I was trying to work out, then assuming the average tree had a cross-sectional area of around 1m2 at its base and a height of 30m, then the town (or rather small settlement) would be 1ha (or 10,000 m2):
1 – 30
10 000 – D
-------------------------------
1 x D = 10 000 x 30
which gives a result of 300 km.
This was the answer I got in that dream. The tree would have been three hundred kilometres high. I fear this slumbering arithmetic can’t be taken too seriously.
30,000 GUILDERS
‘It’s not such a great sum, really, in the end. It’s the annual income of a merchant trading with the colonies, on the assumption that there is peace in the world and the English aren’t arresting Dutch ships, resulting in interminable legal wranglings. It is in fact a reasonable sum. To it must be added the cost of strong and stable wooden crates, and transport.’
Peter I, Tsar of the Russian Empire, had just paid this sum for the collection of anatomical specimens amassed over the years by Frederik Ruysch.
The Tsar was travelling all around Europe with a retinue of two hundred people in 1697. He greedily took in everything, but he was most drawn to the Wunderkammers. Perhaps he, too, had some sort of syndrome. After Louis XIV refused the Tsar an audience, he remained for several months in the Netherlands. Several times he came incognito, accompanied by several sturdy-looking fellows, to De Waag, to the Theatrum Anatomicum, where with a look of concentration on his face he watched the fluid movements of the professor as his scalpel opened and displayed to the public the bodies of the condemned. He also initiated a kind of friendship with the master. It could be said that they became close, as Ruysch taught the Tsar how to preserve butterflies.
But what he liked the most was Ruysch’s collection – hundreds of specimens enclosed in glass jars, swimming in fluid, a panopticum of the human imagination broken down into component parts, a mechanical cosmos of organs. He got chills when he looked at human fetuses, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them, so fascinating was the sight. And the dramatic, fanciful arrangements of human bones that got him into a pleasant, contemplative mood. He had to have the collection for himself.
The jars were carefully packed into boxes lined with tow, tied with twine, and taken by horse to the port. Some dozen sailors spent an entire day loading the valued goods below deck. The professor himself supervised the loading, cursing and flying into rages because one careless movement had already destroyed a beautiful example of acephaly, a very rare specimen. Ordinarily he didn’t keep aberrations, preferring to focus on pieces which reflected the beauty and harmony of the body. Now the glass cover had broken, his famed conserving mixture pouring out onto the pav
ement and soaking in between the paving stones. The specimen, meanwhile, had rolled down the dirty street, rupturing in two places. On one shard of glass a label inscribed carefully in the hand of the professor’s daughter was visible, with an ornate inscription in a black frame: ‘Monstrum humanum acephalum’. A rare specimen, extraordinary. A shame. The professor had wrapped it up in a handkerchief and, limping, carried it home. Perhaps something could still be done with it.
It was a sad sight – rooms now empty after the sale of the collection. Professor Ruysch cast a lingering gaze over them and noted on the wooden shelves some darker stains – flat projections of the three-dimensional jars, traces in the ubiquitous dust, barely a width and length, without a hint of reference to their contents.
He was getting close to eighty now. The collection was the product of his work over the past thirty years, for he had started fairly early. He can be seen in a painting by someone named Backer, conducting the best anatomy lessons in town at the age of thirty-two. The painter managed to capture the particular expression on young Ruysch’s face – self-confidence and mercantile cunning. In the painting we also see a body prepared for dissection, the corpse of a young man perspectivally foreshortened, looking fresh. The body looks alive – the skin colour is a milky pink, not at all that of a corpse, its bent knee brings to mind the movement of a person lying naked on his back but instinctively about to cover the shameful part of his body before prying eyes. It’s the body of hanged convict Joris van Iperen, a thief. The surgeons cloaked in black are to this embarrassed and defenceless dead body an unsettling contrast. It shows what thirty years later made the professor’s fortune – that mixture of his creation preserves the freshness of tissues for a very long time. Likely the same composition that Ruysch used to conserve his rare anatomical specimens. Deep down he worries he won’t have time to reproduce it now, although he feels exceptionally well.
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