The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  The Court Chamberlain was upon them.

  Emperor Rudolf, he declared, with a smile that to the astronomer seemed simpering and suspicious, would be honored to receive a gift from Emperor Maximilian’s illustrious former court sculptor. The latter nodded, straightened with a licked finger the refractory feather on his cap, clutched to his chest the knapsack containing the mechanical human head, shot his son a proud impish gleeful glance—eyebrows arched, lower lip bit—and then followed the Court Chamberlain across the Great Hall, past a withered old Paduan declaiming energetically from Aristotle’s On Coming-to-Be and Passing Away, between a trio of Jesuits scribbling figures and formulas on their slates, around a rotund Oxford bishop and oculist examining in the flickering light of a waxy candelabra a human eyeball seemingly astonished at its own state (and taken as it happens from the same young thief whose thick hair now festooned the Head of Phalaris), and at last, at long last, to the foot of the Emperor’s throne. And the Emperor, in whom the German mathematician’s monologue on his large, infinitely sophisticated, infinitely hopeless instrument had appeared to induce a state close to death, for his chin had fallen to his chest, and his eyes had closed, now opened them again, sat bolt upright, clapped his hands, and murmured something to the Court Chamberlain, who cried out to the crowd, in a manner that filled the astronomer with filial dread, “An artistic interlude!”

  The chatter stopped at once.

  The wind died down also.

  Even the logs in the fireplaces ceased to crackle.

  The hall was silent now save for the lamentations of the instruments.

  And the Court Chamberlain, as far as the astronomer could recollect, per Leibniz, declaimed: “This gentleman, who served His Majesty’s father in Vienna, and fashioned that splendiferous city, as well as the Hofburg within it, so precisely according to His Majesty’s father’s whims and wishes that whenever he stands in the Hofburg, in Vienna, His Majesty feels, as he has often expressed it to me, that he is standing inside his father’s head, inside his father’s head, that is, inside his father’s head twice over”—inside his father’s head, the astronomer told Leibniz, not mine!—“has fashioned for His Majesty, we are given to understand, a marvelous self-moving art head.” And the words “marvelous self-moving art head,” with their farcical ring, made the astronomer tremble. He told Leibniz: “Perhaps to exact revenge on his father by means of mine, perhaps to divert himself from the seemingly insoluble problem of the nature of the new object in the night sky, the Emperor, I realized, was about to turn my father and his work of art into an object of ridicule.”

  The Court Chamberlain said: “Please, sir, the moving art head, the moving art head!”

  The astronomer peered into his telescope.

  There were titters—“genuine titters!”—as his father delicately removed the lead head from its sack and held it in his hands.

  “And yet, were there titters?” the astronomer said. “Now, whenever I think back on this moment, I always think, Were there titters? And almost always I think, There were titters, I almost always think there were genuine titters! And I can almost always still hear those titters, that tittering, all of it aimed straight at my father. Whenever I wonder if in doing what I did next I did something immoral, I summon those titters, I play those titters for myself, and in hearing those titters in my head I know I did something moral, for my father I know would rather be dead than be made into an object of ridicule in the court of the Emperor. The head was intended to provoke, among other passions, laughter—but not this kind of laughter. Those titters implied delight perhaps but not the right type of delight, amusement perhaps but not the right form of amusement, everyone was probably highly entertained by the head but they were not entertained by the head for the right reasons. It’s not enough to know they were entertained by the head, we must ask why they were entertained by the head—why were they entertained by the head? I can hear the Emperor tittering, at the idea that this man-made metal head could possibly provide solace to him in his mental torment, that it could even touch him in his torment at all, and I can hear that obsequious young German, who as I later learned was none other than the famous Kepler, tittering, at the contrast between my father’s creation and his own, even though his own brass contraption however big and sophisticated could no more touch the Emperor in his torment than could the mechanical head—and basically I can hear everyone tittering! Hundreds of men of science tittering at my father and tittering at his art! These men who in a few short decades would all be wearing his head on their shoulders! Yet at other times, in remembering the moment my father removed his head from that sack, I cannot summon those titters, sometimes I think I actually hear no titters at all, not a single titter, none. And instead I think I hear silence, I think I hear a perfect and attentive and even reverent silence, and at such times I have to ask myself if I may have added those titters in retrospect, if those aren’t real titters at all, if it’s conceivable that I scored this memory with after-the-fact tittering in order to justify what I did next.”

  For when his father placed the Head of Phalaris on the banquet table before the Emperor, the astronomer saw that the clouds had parted just enough to permit a glimpse, for the first time in sixteen days, of the new twinkling thing. It shimmered and burned in the heavens behind the Emperor’s head. His father lay his hand upon the crank, the laughter, if not the silence, reached its peak, the place shook with laughter or silence, and at that moment, before his father could impart life to the head, the astronomer bellowed from the back of the Great Hall: “My Lord, I have invented an instrument that brings far things near, and with it I can yank that twinkling thing down from the firmament into this very room!”

  And he flew across the Great Hall, and seized his father’s mechanical head, and dug his fingers into its eye sockets, and tore out the two convex lenses.

  And he held one lens in front of the Emperor’s eye and the other an arm’s length away toward the luminous object.

  And the Emperor peered through both and muttered, “My God.” And then: “It is a new star.”

  With that, the astronomer told Leibniz, the Great Hall erupted so to speak in pandemonium. Mathematicians and theologians thronged him to shake his hand and examine the New Star through his instrument, and he was thankful that his view of his father and in particular of his father’s face was, consequently, occluded. “That it would be eternally occluded”—that his father would, on his way home, heave the now mutilated Head of Phalaris onto the frozen Vltava from the midpoint of the Old Stone Bridge, and then hurl himself into the hole the head made—“I of course did not know.”

  He learned what his father had done only the next morning, by which time he had already been appointed the Emperor’s Imperial Astronomer.

  The astronomer was silent for several minutes.

  Then he said: “I am tempted, on occasion, to describe the astral tube as an apparatus that allows pressure to escape from this little head of ours into which a whole world has summarily been stuffed.” He added: “Though strictly speaking of course that is nonsense.”

  The astronomer pressed an eye socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a very long string of numbers. For a split second, writes Leibniz, a sunbeam happened to align precisely with the warped slat of the window blind and blasted the interior of the observatory with a brilliant light, “excruciating after such a prolonged spell of continuous quasi-darkness.” Leibniz shielded his eyes. On the astronomer’s lap the cat opened his eyes, which gleamed crazily in the sunlight, “and therefore existed.” Then the Earth rotated a little bit and the light was gone. It was now ten o’clock “on the dot,” reported Leibniz to the Philosophical Transactions, in my translation. One hour had gone by, and if the astronomer was right about the eclipse, there were two more still to go.

  THREE

  HIS DUTIES AS Imperial Astronomer, the Court Chamberlain informed him, were threefold, the astronomer told Leibniz. First, “and, needless to say, the o
nly duty of any significance to me,” he was to deploy his astral tube to map the starry heavens more accurately and more precisely than ever before, to compose, that is to say, a star catalogue of unprecedented accuracy and unprecedented precision, “and also, I volunteered, unprecedented prodigiousness,” for he was confident, as he informed the Court Chamberlain, that with his marvelous device he would not only see all the known stars more clearly than they had yet been seen but also see unknown stars that hitherto had been too dim or distant to see. Second, he was to cast horoscopes for the Emperor, whose actions, and particularly whose thoughts, were—according to the Court Chamberlain, who claimed to be speaking on behalf of the Emperor, i.e., conveying the Emperor’s thoughts on this as well as all other matters, although the astronomer would later learn there were those in the Castle who held that the Court Chamberlain, the only official with unrestricted access to the North Wing, where the Emperor dwelled all day among his monstrosities and wonders and increasingly often slept at night, was systematically misrepresenting the Emperor’s thoughts and wishes in order to amass power for himself, “Nothing he tells you ought to be taken at face value!” the Imperial Antiquarian hissed once in passing after seeing the astronomer emerge from the Court Chamberlain’s office—while not exactly determined by the stars, “and in this sense His Majesty’s thoughts are perfectly free,” nevertheless inclined by the stars, i.e., subject to their influence, “and in this sense His Majesty’s thoughts are, if not quite coerced, still drawn in certain directions, or so His Majesty thinks, not constricted but still coaxed hither and thither.” Of course, as the Court Numismatist once mused—and he, the astronomer, had found the argument compelling—it was in the Court Chamberlain’s interest to install in their heads a picture of a sovereign not wholly in control of his own faculties, for the less power the Emperor seemed to have over his own head the more the Court Chamberlain seemed, perhaps only in their eyes but in their eyes was half the battle, or more than half, to have over it. The Court Numismatist said: “One sometimes has the sense that the Emperor’s apparent madness has been filtered through, if not concocted by, an exceptionally rational mind, a calculating and conniving mind, that this is really a manipulative sane man’s madman, a madman whose seeming madness is in truth serving some very ambitious sane person’s purposes.” It was, of course, also possible, conceded the Court Numismatist, that the Court Chamberlain was a genuinely loyal servant to a genuinely mad monarch; this was the view of the Court Cartographer. A third theory, promulgated only by the Distiller-Royal, and he only hypothetically, as a sort of amusing thought experiment, was that the Court Chamberlain was himself quite mad, and that we therefore knew very little and perhaps nothing at all about the actual state of the Emperor’s mind. “And so,” the Court Chamberlain went on, “if you would, each morning, and on the holy days each evening, too, determine by means of your tube the influence on His Majesty’s mind of Mercury and Mars and Saturn and so on, the Emperor would be most grateful.” The third and final duty of the Imperial Astronomer was to tutor the Emperor’s bastard son as well as his three illegitimate daughters in the subjects of the quadrivium—“for it is the Emperor’s most fervent wish” (according to the Court Chamberlain) “that each of his children and his son in particular be conversant in the mathematical arts, that is to say, in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.”

  He repeated: “His son in particular.”

  In exchange the astronomer would be granted, first, an annual salary of so many thalers; second, stewardship of the Imperial Observatory, including access to the Castle Workshop, Castle Library, and Castle Laboratory, and carte blanche use, “within reason,” of the treasury for the making of his tubes, a “carte blanche” and a “within reason” that obviously—as the astronomer was later to realize—each annulled the other, for if “carte blanche” meant anything at all, “within reason” obviously meant nothing at all, and vice versa, “within reason” meaning something meant “carte blanche” meant nothing, not to mention that if he was indeed bound by reason, who knew what reason meant, if it meant by his own reason or by the Court Chamberlain’s reason or by some kind of shared reason, if such a thing existed, that is, perhaps his rights to the treasury extended only so far as the boundary set by common sense, a probably purposeful ambiguity that would intensify the Court Chamberlain’s power over him, with finally dire consequences; and third, he was granted for his living quarters a stately residence no less impressive than the Viennese mansion in which he’d been born. It was perched high on Hradčany Hill not far from the Castle, just beside an old Benedictine monastery whose bronze bells were pealing merrily as the astronomer pulled up in his carriage.

  * * *

  THAT DAY, THE DAY AFTER, and the day after that, the astronomer oversaw the construction of the first telescope, a brass tube thirteen inches long fashioned for him by a crew of expert metallurgists in the Imperial Forge and fitted at both ends with a lens of fine Murano glass purchased with imperial funds and shaped to the astronomer’s strict specifications by a master lens-grinder from Nuremberg along with his Augsburger apprentice, and which magnified objects two times. “In other words,” said the astronomer, “a magnifying power of two. You’ll want to write that down, Herr Leibniz, for the numbers will prove dreadfully significant in what is to come. Two, a magnifying power of two, and a length of thirteen inches.”

  On the night of his third day as Imperial Astronomer he began cataloguing the stars. That night, the night after, and the night after that, he trained his astral tube at the celestial meridian. When a star crossed it he gave a shout, an assistant wielding a quadrant called out the altitude, another watching a clock called out the time, a third wrote down these two spatiotemporal coordinates in a ledger, which a fourth compared to the corresponding entry, if one existed, in the famous catalogues of Piccolomini, Tycho, and Bayer. Toward dawn on the first night, throughout which the monks in the monastery kept their bells ringing continually as if in anticipation of his feat, the astronomer surpassed the 919 stars enumerated by Piccolomini.

  And he thought cheerfully: I have now seen more stars than Piccolomini, if not yet Tycho or Bayer.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, having sent word to his metallurgists and lens-grinders that he desired now a tube of fifteen inches, forged not of brass but of bronze, and with the power to magnify things threefold, the astronomer, careful not to neglect his other duties, wrote and dispatched by messenger a horoscope for the Emperor “consisting of course of utter nonsense but of utterly rigorous utter nonsense, and which brought His Majesty good tidings.” It is in dealing with the nonsensical, he noted, that we must be most rigorous, for sense itself is always by definition quite rigorous, the requisite rigor has already been provided by reason working hand in hand with reality, it is precisely by its stiffness and structure that we identify it as sense, if it’s very stiff and very structured we tend to say: That is, or makes, sense, whereas nonsense must be structured and stiffened from without, i.e., given form, which is why writing the Emperor’s horoscope, insofar as it entailed writing an absolutely nonsensical document, was no easy task, it was harder even than his scientific labor of the night before, a fact which, the astronomer added, might have suggested to him now what he realized only much later—namely, that there was something awry with his science. Then, with a Latin edition of Sacrobosco’s Algorismus vulgaris in one hand and a German vernacular version in the other, he set out for the turret in which he’d been told that the bastard prince dwelled, on the southernmost corner of the Castle complex, antipodal to the North Wing and overlooking the Imperial Menagerie, where imported beasts with eccentric stripes stood shivering in the snow; but after knocking three times on the thick wooden door with no answer, and observing only blackness between the bars of its little iron-grated aperture, and extracting from the four palace guards playing cards on the floor of the corridor nothing but shrugs, smirks, sexual innuendo, and sarcastic asides, the astronomer, “without, as I real
ized only later, asking myself why Prince Heinrich if indeed he did dwell there dwelled in such a turret, behind such a thick wooden door, with such a small iron-grated aperture, minded by so many armed guards,” went off to look for one of the princesses.

  At length he found the youngest of them, Katharina, a girl of perhaps eight or nine, of at least seven and at most eleven, softly singing a song to herself in the so-called Music-Making Room amid the clutter of old instruments there, many of which, he saw, were glockenspiels, most of which, in fact, he realized, were glockenspiels, and actually all of which, on closer inspection, were glockenspiels, the instruments were all glockenspiels without exception, “Basically it was just a room full of glockenspiels,” of various shapes and sizes and states of disrepair, all of them heaped together, piled on top of one another, there was something gruesome about this glockenspiel pile, this big heap of hundreds if not thousands of glockenspiels, the millions of metal bars of which flashed splintered reflections of little Katharina’s unkempt blonde braid as it swung to and fro behind her head. She sat cross-legged on the floor. He stood outside the doorway and listened to her sing. Her voice, while untrained, was lovely, the tune lilting, but the tale it told, of a “little pink pig” trying to evade slaughter at the hands of a “big black-bearded butcher,” began to perturb the astronomer. At first, as the little pink pig “pops out” of the big butcher’s arms and “pops through” a hole in the fence, he thought: She’s singing one of those wily-barnyard-animal songs beloved by children the world over; and he expected, needless to say, that the pig would emerge victorious from the encounter; but shortly thereafter the butcher “catches that little pink pig by her pink little leg” and “chops it off with his big shiny axe.” The refrain, “appallingly, to my mind,” spoke of the pig’s survival: “But did she go down? No she did not go down, no she did not go down, no she did not go down!” The astronomer marveled: “The song wishes this to be heard as a message of resilience.” The pig escapes again, is instantly caught again. In the second, third, and fourth verses, as the astronomer eavesdropped and Katharina’s braid swung to and fro, the butcher chops off the pig’s second, third, and fourth legs. “But did she go down? No she did not go down, no she did not go down, no she did not go down!” By now, the astronomer noted, one was praying for the pig to go down, at last to die. Instead she escapes again, the butcher catches her again and chops off her head, then chops her in half, “But did she go down? No she did not go down, no she did not go down, no she did not go down!” The butcher chops the pig into quarters, into eighths, into sixteen pieces, into thirty-two, still the pig doesn’t die, but that fact was actually becoming—as the song went on—less and less appalling and more and more abstract, his revulsion subsided, “The song,” he realized, “had taken a mathematical turn,” it seemed to be no longer about the brutality of the butcher but the perplexities of the infinite, the pig endures in sixty-four pieces, in one hundred and twenty-eight pieces, “the characters were receding, the numbers were coming to the fore,” two hundred fifty-six, five hundred twelve, and at this point the astronomer realized that if he did not intervene the song would actually not come to an end, not ever, or at least not until she lost interest in singing it, “and small children as I’ve since established time and time again, Herr Leibniz, do not naturally lose interest in singing songs,” it is an empirical fact, he noted, that children are instinctually drawn to infinitely long, infinitely iterative songs, we all sing such songs throughout our childhood, and it is only at a certain stage of our maturation, a stage evidently not yet reached by Katharina, that we abruptly stop singing such songs and subsequently sing only finitely long songs. One might, of course, postulate that Princess Katharina’s powers of computation would impose their own limit on the length of the song, which required its singer to multiply by two larger and larger figures, but the astronomer could already intuit, and would soon confirm, that this little girl’s mental abilities were of no common sort. So he tiptoed in, picked up one of the many mallets littering the floor, and at the moment she reached once again the refrain he struck on a glockenspiel the corresponding note.