The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  She spun around, aghast, “white, as the saying goes, as a ghost,” Leibniz quotes the astronomer as saying.

  And she cried: “You mustn’t touch that!”

  And he, although he suspected, correctly, that he already knew the answer, said: “What a pretty song! Where did you learn such a pretty song?”

  And she, although she wished, clearly, to continue frowning, could not suppress a small smile: “I learned it from Heinrich.”

  And he cried: “From Heinrich, yes, I thought so! I thought from Heinrich! And where is Prince Heinrich now?”

  Her smile vanished. “Heinrich’s in heaven now. You don’t know that?”

  When he said nothing, probably simply sat there with his mouth hanging open, she took on a look of solicitude remarkable in someone so young, inflected possibly by the joy of knowing something an adult did not, and about a matter so serious, and she patted his arm and said: “There, there.” And then: “It’s a shock, I know, it was a shock for everyone, that’s what Father said, a terrible, terrible shock! We were all so sad, Father and I cried and cried, we even cried more than anyone else, especially more than Margaretha who I actually don’t even think cried at all, Wilhelmina cried probably the second most, but Father and I definitely cried the most most, Father because Heinrich was his only son and I because I was Heinrich’s favorite sister, everyone knows Heinrich loved me more than Wilhelmina and Margaretha, he tormented me more, yes, he used to tickle me the way that hurts more than it tickles, you know how instead of stroking your skin people sometimes poke into your bones? He thought I tickled him too gently but what he called proper tickling I called poking into my bones! He used to tickle me way past the point where I was laughing to the point where I was screaming, but even Margaretha admits that he obviously tormented me more because he loved me more. Heinrich used to say, Wilhelmina and Margaretha prefer people, you and I prefer animals, those two are people people, we are animal people, they prefer to go to balls and interact with people, we prefer to go to the menagerie and interact with animals, they’re perfectly happy to have the same conversations over and over and over again with the same small circle of people, we’re perfectly happy to have the same conversations over and over and over again with the same small circle of animals, they’d always rather dance with a duke than feed a donkey, we would always rather feed a donkey than dance with a duke, wouldn’t we, Ina?, and I would say, Much rather, much much much rather!” Katharina cried, the astronomer recalled. “He would say, We prefer cows to count palatines, and I would say, Much prefer!” Then she said: “But we don’t have to be too sad, at least not too too too sad, Father says, because Heinrich is happier in heaven, a lot happier, he wasn’t all that happy here, I mean here on Earth, Margaretha says he was always sighing and even though she doesn’t mean that nicely it’s true, he was always sighing, even while petting the animals he was sighing, even while petting his favorite animal, this big old hog of his, he would sigh. Father brought in more and more exotic animals to try to cheer him up, first a zebra, then a camel, then a lion, then an orangutan, but Heinrich never favored these exotic animals, he always favored that hog, but even while petting that hog of his, actually especially while petting that hog of his, he would sigh. He was always feeding that hog slices of melon from a bucket, flinging his arms around its big head, and sighing. I sigh, he told me once, precisely because he’s my favorite creature, we’re always saddest when we are with, not apart from, our favorite creatures, he said every single poet from Homer till now has got this completely backward, our loneliest loneliness actually occurs when we’re right beside our most beloved loved ones, we want to be able to do more to our favorite creatures than pet them, this we somehow feel is not enough, for certain casts of mind at least it is not enough, for some casts of mind it may be enough but for other casts of mind it is not enough, yet no matter what cast of mind we have we can do nothing but pet these beloved creatures, we can do no more than this, this is all we can do, he said the mind wants more from other beings than it can ever obtain from them, here I’m speaking mainly but not exclusively of beasts, in other words of the human-beast relationship, that’s what Heinrich said, I remember exactly,” Katharina said, according to the astronomer, Leibniz wrote to the Philosophical Transactions. “And I said: But you do do more than pet him, you also feed him melon, and he said: I want more than that, too, more than melon—I want to do more than just feed him slices of melon! I want more than this exchange of melon for affection, this wretched melon-affection transaction! But when I asked him what he wanted to do to his hog that he could not do to it, he got frustrated and said: If it could be put into words, Ina, then I could do it. Anything that can be put into words one is capable of doing to anyone. But what of what cannot be said? he said. Margaretha says he was just fundamentally an unhappy person, or a fundamentally unhappy person, I forget which, she’s always saying stuff like that even now that he’s gone, I think she says it to make me upset, she kind of likes it when I cry, she’ll say, Heinrich was never happy, and I’ll say, Well, he sometimes was, and then she’ll say, No, he never was, never! And I’ll try to run off before she can see me cry but obviously I’m usually already crying a little bit, and she’ll yell, Oh, great, that makes sense, go cry in the Music-Making Room simply because you can’t admit that Heinrich was a fundamentally unhappy person, incapable of joy! Wilhelmina says she says that stuff not to make me upset but just because Margaretha is also fundamentally an unhappy person, or a fundamentally unhappy person, and the favorite topic of conversation among the fundamentally unhappy is the fundamentally unhappy, it brings them a little bit of happiness to pick apart other people’s unhappiness, that’s their one little joy in life and they’re actually extremely extremely good at it, that’s what Wilhelmina says. She says people like Margaretha can never sense their own unhappiness but they’re brilliant at sensing other people’s unhappiness, the unhappy she says are like bloodhounds of unhappiness, always sniffing it out, tracking it down, tearing it apart in their huge jaws, yapping with pleasure the entire time, sound like anyone we know? That’s their one tiny little joy in life so you know what, fine, let them have it! That’s what Wilhelmina says, anyhow,” said Katharina. She lowered her voice: “She says if Margaretha weren’t so upset about the wedding she would be in heaven there, everyone’s unhappy at a wedding, even the happy couple!”

  “What wedding?” the astronomer asked.

  “The wedding!” she hissed. “Wilhelmina’s marrying the Count Palatine of Zweibrücken next month, you don’t know that? We’re not really supposed to talk about it in front of Margaretha though, if we can help it.” She whispered: “I’m on flower-petal duty!”

  And the astronomer said: “When, if I may ask, did Prince Heinrich pass away, was this all very recently?”

  And Katharina said: “Oh, no, it was months ago, months and months and months and months ago!”

  And he said: “And how, if I may ask, did Prince Heinrich pass away?”

  But to this she did not reply. That’s all right, he said, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But to this, too, she did not reply. Presently she began to sway to and fro again. He assumed that she would break into song, as before, but no, this time she swayed to and fro without uttering a word, her disheveled braid reflected around the room in a million glittering bits and pieces. To sway like this while singing was one thing, to sway like this completely silently quite another. Say something, please, the astronomer said, but she would not, not one word, she would not even acknowledge his presence, no, now she would only sway, only silently sway! What, he thought, have I done? He was supposed to tutor her in the mathematical arts, but instead, in asking after the cause of death of her brother, a person who, incidentally, according to the possibly mad and probably manipulative Court Chamberlain, was very much still alive, I’ve somehow caused her to start swaying, I have caused her to start silently swaying, and now I cannot make her stop! Meanwhile through the window the Sun was sink
ing huge and red behind the black spires of the town. In some far-flung window—he imagined, why not, that it was his widowed mother’s—a lantern was already lit. Within a few minutes the evening star would appear. Before long he would need to procure his new tube from his metallurgists and lens-grinders and make his way to the Imperial Observatory. “I could hardly, however, leave the Princess in such a state, such a strange, silent, swaying state.” For her sake, but also for his. “Outside, in the hall, the perpetual patter of bureaucratic footfalls. At any moment, I thought, a bureaucrat will burst in here, lay eyes upon this scene, and interpret what he sees, first to himself and later to the Court Chamberlain, in the most uncharitable light imaginable.” How, though, to snap her out of it, so to speak? What thoughts, if any, he wondered, were going through her mind? What inward state did this outward state signify? Or perhaps this behavior wasn’t atypical of small children? How, the astronomer actually found himself asking himself, and in asking himself this question he felt that his incipient astronomical career had taken an odd turn, do small children behave, typically? What is a small child, does it think, and if so, what does it think? The absurdity of his predicament was not lost on him, the astronomer said, for he’d been appointed to plumb the mysteries of the heavens, yet it was the mysteries of an eight- or nine-year-old girl’s head that he now found himself plumbing. “The rich, I thought to myself, may hire you under the pretense of having you plumb for them the mysteries of nature, but it is almost always their children’s heads, if not their own, that they wish in the end to be plumbed,” he told Leibniz. The hint of a new intuition: he’d extricated himself from one family only to find himself entangled in another family, an actually even bigger and hence more emotionally convoluted family, when what he wanted was to peer in perfect solitude at the firmament. So it was that rather than pondering questions on the order of, Which force occult or otherwise dictates the motions of the orbs?, he found himself pondering questions on the order of, How do I get this small child to stop doing whatever it is it is doing?

  Now, the solution to that, thankfully, lay quite literally at hand, for he had not in all this time let go of the mallet and upon realizing this he brought it down loudly on one of the glockenspiels. Instantly Katharina sat quite still and clapped her hands over her mouth. “You mustn’t do that, I told you!” And why mustn’t I? “Because these are Father’s glockenspiels, we aren’t to touch them!” These are all Father’s glockenspiels? “All of them! All Father’s glockenspiels! All! All! All!” It doesn’t appear that he uses them, he said, and he struck another note. “He might! At any moment he might! Nothing good can come from touching Father’s glockenspiels, that’s what Wilhelmina says!” Yet the squeal she issued when he struck a third note seemed to contain not only terror but also a mischievous delight. Obviously, the astronomer said, there was nothing in the world Princess Katharina wanted more than to make music with her father’s corroding glockenspiels; why else would she sit among them? “Your turn,” he declared, and he held out the mallet. She looked at it intensely, the surfaces of her eyes seemed to strain toward it, but she made no effort to take it. “Take it, you’re allowed!” the astronomer cried, waggling the mallet. “In fact, your father has asked me to teach you music. Why do you think I’m here?” He waggled the mallet again. Tentatively she took it. “And he said we could touch the glockenspiels?” “That’s what he said,” he said, and in his head he heard himself murmur the words “within reason.” “Promise?” “Promise.” And Katharina brought the mallet down on a glockenspiel key.

  The note rang out.

  “I cannot describe the look on her face,” the astronomer told Leibniz, peering into his telescope, “except to say that I realized only at that instant that I would one day want a child of my own.” He added: “A colossal miscalculation, of course, as you’ll see, Herr Leibniz; how many people exist merely because their parents happened to observe a stranger’s child in an abnormally sublime moment? Such moments of abnormal sublimity among the children of strangers are probably responsible for the existence of millions. And yet, if I saw again that look on her face, I’m not sure I wouldn’t want another one.”

  That, he told her, is a D-flat.

  He taught her the notes, then the scales, then various elementary techniques, then various higher techniques, then various even higher techniques, and finally actually the very highest techniques, all of which she picked up with astonishing ease and miraculous rapidity, it was clear she was a prodigy, and by the time the Sun slipped below the horizon she had mastered Gabrieli’s Toccata del decimo tono as well as four of Sweelinck’s most difficult fugues. “I’m sorry, I have to go now,” the astronomer told her at last, “but shall we continue our lessons tomorrow morning, first thing?” and Katharina cried, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir, thank you!” and she curtsied, curtsied again even more emphatically, and ran out of the room. A moment later she ran back in, cupped her two small, hot hands around one of his ears, and whispered: “Father says he died of a broken heart, but I know he really fell off the tip top of a tower and broke open his head. I heard the thud. See you tomorrow!”

  She curtsied a third time and ran out.

  * * *

  WHEN, HOWEVER, HE RETURNED the next morning, Princess Katharina wasn’t there, and neither were the glockenspiels.

  “Listen,” the astronomer told Leibniz, peering into his telescope.

  In the course of the intervening night, at the last stroke of midnight, as the two Roman automata who stood atop the astronomical clock slowly wound down their flagellations of the automaton Christ, and in the background the bells of the Benedictine monastery continued to chime wildly, ceaselessly, to the point where he began to wonder whether their liturgical calendar contained feasts and solemnities unheard of in other strains of the faith, the astronomer surpassed the 1,005 stars tallied by Tycho Brahe.

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

  Then he thought: What will it mean for me to have seen more than Bayer?

  To compose, that is, a star catalogue greater than Bayer’s Uranometria?

  The telescope is only an instrument, a means to an end—nothing in itself.

  The importance of seeing more than Bayer. The necessity, the astronomer said, of seeing more than Bayer.

  “Suddenly: the fear that I would die before having seen more than Bayer.”

  At dawn, as the Sun rose, after requesting from his lens-grinders and metallurgists a tube not of fifteen inches but nineteen, forged not of bronze but of silver, and with the power to magnify things not three times but four, and after dispatching to His Imperial Majesty a horoscope which prophesied, nonsensically but rigorously, i.e., on the most precise possible astronomical grounds, both tremendous obstacles and the tremendous fortitude necessary to surmount them, he hurried without a second of sleep yet with a proverbial spring in his step to the Music-Making Room. His high spirits, he was surprised to realize, derived not only from pride at his own progress (“Yes, I think I thought I was making progress, actual scientific progress!”), but from his anticipation of the pleasure of another music lesson.