The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  But the room was bare now except for a single harpsichord that stood on the spot where yesterday Katharina had sat and sung.

  After a moment the astronomer realized there was someone kneeling behind the harpsichord. It was the Court Chamberlain, who by means of the most infinitesimal adjustments left and right was attempting to align the harpsichord’s bench with the center of its keyboard. “Symmetry, sir, symmetry!” he cried with a broad smile. The Princess, he explained in response to the astronomer’s inquiry, had departed at daybreak for Madrid to visit her cherished cousins at the court of Philip the Pious. She had begged to go, all dinner she had tugged at His Majesty’s doublet begging to see her Spanish cousins, and at last her softhearted father had given in. It was a shame to cut short her lessons, said the Court Chamberlain with a pained expression, but would these hours not in any case—here he peered at the astronomer pointedly—be better spent perhaps on the mathematical tutelage of the Prince?

  It had the form of a question but it was not one. The astronomer returned to the turret at once, at a run, gripped the iron bars, stuck his head between them into the squalid pitch-blackness beyond, and bellowed Heinrich’s name, not once or twice, and not three times or four, or even five, but altogether six times, at the top of his lungs, wondering all the while if the name he was bellowing still referred to a living being, and why the guards behind him were giggling, and if he had gotten Katharina in trouble, and whether she was really on her way to Spain, on the eve of her sister’s wedding no less, or else had been spirited away to some forsaken corner of the Castle, and what the Court Chamberlain’s aim was and if it was the Emperor’s aim, too, and what all this had to do with him, and with the heavens.

  He said: “The constant thought: We ought not to have touched her father’s glockenspiels.”

  From the black bowels of the turret there was, once again, no answer.

  He even aimed his fifteen-inch telescope into the turret, in the hope that it might concentrate and convey to his eye the few particles of light scattered within, but still he saw nothing.

  He put one eye socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down in his ledger a long string of numbers.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  In a stupor, stung by guilt and seized with foreboding, he staggered up and down the corridors of the Castle calling out Princess Katharina’s name until from within the Small Dining Room a voice replied and bid him enter. Here he found a woman in a very large-circumference skirt seated before an elaborate silver place setting. And she, who while not old, he said, wasn’t young, smirked and said: “So, you’re looking for Katharina, are you?” And, glancing up over her shoulder at the unsmiling bewhiskered old man who stood ramrod straight just behind her chair, she added: “Everyone is always looking for Katharina, aren’t they, Gottfried? And if not Katharina, Wilhelmina! Yes, there is worldwide interest in the whereabouts of those two, of some others not so much—of the whereabouts of some people the world really couldn’t care less, isn’t that so, Gottfried?” The bewhiskered old man cleared his throat. “At table,” he said, “one must have a serviette, a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a plate. It would be entirely contrary to reason to be without any of these things while eating.” Margaretha went on: “Of course, it used to be Heinrich whose whereabouts were most sought after, Father was constantly asking everyone, Where is Heinrich? How is Heinrich? But now of course Father knows precisely where Heinrich is, precisely how Heinrich is…” It struck the astronomer that he ought not ask her right away where her brother was, how he was. If he was. “Our conduct at table is an outward expression of our inward essence. Proper eating is nothing less than ethics made manifest,” said Gottfried, whom, Leibniz wrote, the astronomer recognized now as the acclaimed author of a thousand-page treatise—composed of a series of imagined exchanges between Epictetus, Epicurus, Plato, and Seneca the Elder—on the edification of ladies, one third of which attended to the theory and practice of dancing, another third to the theory and practice of dining, and the last third to the art of polite discourse. In the corridor, a pretty young lady tiptoed hastily past the door to the small Dining Room, pinching in each hand a piece of her long white gown. Margaretha smirked. The astronomer remembered pressing ahead: “I am, I must confess,” he told her, “a bit concerned that your youngest sister did not show up for our lesson today, indeed that she seems to have vanished overnight along with your father’s glockenspiels, the Court Chamberlain claims she’s gone to Spain but I’m inclined to doubt that.” Margaretha burst into laughter. “My father’s glockenspiels? Is that what Katharina told you? That those glockenspiels belong to our father? Oh, that is marvelous. Marvelous! Father’s glockenspiels. Oh, I love that!” She clapped her hands together and howled. “Father’s glockenspiels! Father’s glockenspiels! That’s actually hilarious.” A servant placed before her a bowl of piping-hot soup. “The spoon is intended for liquids, the fork for solids,” said Gottfried. “In parts of southern Italy and Sardinia thick soups are sometimes consumed with a fork, but that is entirely contrary to reason.” Margaretha continued: “You will find, sir, that my sweet little sister, bless her heart, is not the most trustworthy authority on the ins and outs of our family life, on the laws that govern our little familial cosmos. She is, after all, a relatively recent arrival! So much happened before she was even born, so much that it’s actually unfair to expect her ever to wrap her mind around it … She popped into being, you understand, in a world that was already very much in progress, that’s the fate allotted to younger siblings, particularly much younger siblings … Past injustices are, in the eyes of a younger sibling, and in particular in the eyes of a much younger sibling, just the furniture of the world she’s born into, that’s all, furniture that’s always been there … A decade-old injustice that for the older sibling is still fresh, still raw, has for the younger sibling the inevitability of an end table, the agelessness and innocence of an armoire, the sheer implacability of a couch … One does not interrogate the furnishings of one’s first bedroom … And so even the most well-intentioned younger sibling—which Katharina undoubtedly is!—will bridle at the efforts of her older sibling to point out to her how her whole world, her whole family, throbs with ancient obscure injustices, how it consists of these ancient obscure injustices, sedimented on top of one another. Youngsters like Katharina, I’ve found, have basically no interest in learning about the gradual sedimentation of very ancient, very obscure injustices that constitutes their world, their family … They have a vested interest in thinking the world to be fashioned by some other mechanism, but as I always ask her: What other mechanism! Perhaps you have some other mechanism in mind! Needless to say, she has no other mechanism in mind … I point out: Notice how even the most harmless words, like Father’s ‘Good morning,’ are not harmless at all, since they are intended above all for Heinrich, not for us, and think about what that means—but my sensitive little sister, rather than reflecting on this fascinating feature of our family life, starts to cry and runs off to the Music-Making Room. I point out: Notice how Father’s eyes betray him, notice whom (which child) they alight upon while he pronounces this seemingly all-inclusive morning greeting. Not Wilhelmina. Not you. Certainly not me! They alight upon Heinrich, I point out, and she runs off to the Music-Making Room. In the evenings I point out: Notice how Father’s ‘Good evening’ is intended above all for Heinrich, not us, his eyes betray him, think about what that means—and she runs off to the Music-Making Room … I sometimes feel she has chosen not to see the truth of things, sometimes seeing the truth, especially about Heinrich, I tell her, and about Father, is a matter of choosing to do so … Plus Wilhelmina’s always feeding her her Wilhelminian pap, her middle-child peacemaking pap, prepared by means of her famous Wilhelminian smoothing-everything-over techniques, that obviously doesn’t help Katharina see the world as it truly is … Aha, there she goes now!” The pretty young woman in the long white gown tiptoed past the door to the Small Dining Room, goin
g the other way this time, and casting in a quick sidelong glance as she went by. “Not to mention that our lovely little bride-to-be has never perceived the oddness of the Katharina/Heinrich relationship, which I do perceive, it’s hard to miss if you’re looking out for it … Yes, I fear the true nature of our family eludes both of my dear sisters completely … Particularly of course as it pertains to Father, and to our unhappy Heinrich…” “Which,” asked Gottfried, “is the spoon for eating soup? Which, in other words, is the so-called soup spoon? The ethics of soup are the ethics of splattering. Eating,” according to Gottfried, according to the astronomer, “is an inborn impulse buried in the mortal body after the Fall.”

  The astronomer peered into his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a long string of numbers.

  “So,” he remembered saying, “when Katharina says that Heinrich fell from the top of a high tower…” and Margaretha had picked up a spoon, smiled with infinite forbearance into her steaming soup, and said: “Let me begin this way: If you do not understand that those are in reality Heinrich’s glockenspiels, if you do not understand the circumstances in which he amassed such a vast and expensive collection of glockenspiels—not one of which he played more than once, you must wrap your mind around this, that he never played a single one of those exorbitant glockenspiels more than a single time!—then you cannot begin to understand our family, or our father. You cannot begin to understand how our family works. How it functions…” She began spooning up her soup. “Nor can you understand what in recent months has befallen Heinrich—or rather, what Heinrich has done…” “But,” said Gottfried, “it is possible to rehabilitate this brute inborn impulse by applying at table a number of rules, a finite number of wholly rational rules.” Between spoonfuls of soup, Margaretha went on: “And you cannot begin to understand his glockenspiels without first understanding my headaches, the horrible headaches I have endured almost continuously for years and years, but about which my father has always been extraordinarily skeptical.” From the moment her headaches first appeared—in the middle of a minuet in her fourteenth year—her father had never believed in them. He claimed of course to believe in her headaches, You, my dear, he told her, she said, are the authority on what’s happening in your own head, but it was obvious that he doubted them. “And my bodily aches, too, he disbelieves.” If her soup was too hot, Gottfried advised, she ought to blow on it in the bowl, never in the spoon—“reason dictates that hot soup if it must be blown on at all be blown on in the bowl.” In Spain they blow on hot soup in the spoon, “but that is contrary to reason.” Such rules do not obtain, needless to say, when we eat alone, he added: “Only at table does eating rise from a matter of mere efficiency to a matter of ethics.” The ethical problem of soup, at table, he said, is the ethical problem of splattering. “Manners presuppose others.” Leibniz: The astronomer shifted Linus a little on his lap, peered into his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a string of numbers. The astronomer: The Princess had slurped up about half of her soup. She said: Her horrible bodily aches began soon after her horrible headaches first struck, also (as it happens) while she was in the Great Hall learning the steps to a minuet. “A different minuet, but a minuet all the same.” She had collapsed on the dance floor both times and both times was carried to her chamber. Both times the Imperial Physician had been summoned and both times he’d declared—“after the most cursory conceivable examination of in the first instance my head, and in the second my body, the first time barely palming my forehead, the second barely palpating my kidneys”—that Margaretha was in perfect health. This in spite of the fact that she could describe with precision where her pains were located, her head pain “near the exact center of my brain, midway between its two hemispheres and equidistant between front and back,” and her bodily pain “most intense in each of my bones but also in all of my joints and beneath my skin, about one-eighth of an inch beneath my skin all over my entire body, concentrated in particular in the region between my knees and my neck, including my knees and my neck, but also around my shins, calves, feet, and face.” The bodily pain was best described as an incessant itching deep in her bones. She was also always tired, she noted, and the nodes in her neck were constantly enlarged. “She suddenly seized my hand,” said the astronomer, “and touched it to a node in her neck, which was perhaps slightly swollen.” “You feel that, yes?” she said. “And this is nothing, they actually get a lot more enlarged.”

  She was also always cold, she added.

  Leibniz writes: “However one inclines concerning the existence of the pain in the middle of Princess Margaretha’s head, it is interesting to note the degree to which her description of its whereabouts corresponds to that of the famous pineal gland of Monsieur Descartes.”

  And from time to time, she added, her hair fell out in clumps.

  Gottfried: “It is in the nature of bread to be broken by the hands, not sliced by the knife.”

  Once she even brought a clump of hair to her father in her fist, but it made no impression on him at all. “Perhaps he imagined I had torn it out myself.”

  You must understand, said Margaretha as her soup bowl was cleared, that her father is not some staunch skeptic, no Socrates reincarnate—“He is not, sir, a Bohemian Montaigne! He believes, on the contrary, everything.” In the dictations Dr. Dee took from angels her father had full faith, in Mr. Kelley’s transmutations of metals likewise, Herr Thurneysser the quack apothecary he regarded as a wonderworker, and when on warm evenings the windows in the North Wing were thrown open it was not uncommon to hear him intoning kabbalistic incantations in unison with the Jew Judah Loew. He does not doubt any of that. “But my pain, he doubts.” A crazy old man came barefoot from Krakow, proclaimed that he had perfected the ancient lost art of divining the future by inspecting the intestines of animals, in particular of poultry, and demanded from the Emperor an outrageous sum to tell his fortune; her father paid it at once and for months afterward spoke with awe of that Polish magus’s admirably accurate duck. “But my pain, he doubts. What a demented Krakowiak claims to perceive in a duck’s liver my father believes, what his eldest daughter tells him she feels, he doubts. The maddening itching she endures in her bones and beneath her skin, the agonizing ache in the dead center of her head: These phenomena His Imperial Majesty sees fit to subject to withering skepticism! In this case the evidence, which is to say his own daughter’s word, not to mention the clump of hair in her fist, is insufficient!” She burst into laughter. A platter of veal tongue was placed before her. Why, Margaretha demanded—and she seemed, according to the astronomer, genuinely bewildered—would she make up this pain? To what end? “A princess in possession of the faculty of reason will naturally serve tongue to herself using the tongs,” Gottfried said. “Compare the fingers of a senseless princess, which during the course of a meal will have touched all manner of sauces and syrups, and other greasy substances, to the fingers of a sensible princess, who having served herself the tongue with the provided tongs has kept her fingers clean.” Why make up this pain? Did her father imagine she wanted to spend her life attempting to persuade him of the reality of the itching in her bones and the ache in her head? A daughter should not have to convince her father that her bones itch, “that is not a desirable father-daughter relationship!” she said, and burst into laughter, and speared a tongue with her fork. “I am going to tell my father every single day that my bones itch and my head aches, even though they don’t, simply to torment him and cause him pain: That is what my father must think that I must be thinking! I shall concoct a pain to cause him pain, and his pain (his concern) will give me pleasure: He must think that I’m thinking along lines like that. And to think that I am thinking along lines like that,” she said, laughing, “is tantamount to thinking me mad.” Gottfried: “The manifest senselessness of a princess whose fingertips are slathered in sauces or syrups.” Her headaches grew worse and worse. The Imperial Physician continued to insist they were not real, not really real. To her
father he said things like: I do think that she thinks they are real, and: The pain in her head exists in her world, My Lord, it just doesn’t exist in ours. He spoke of her phlegm and bile and said: We ourselves are always the worst witness to what ails us. She begged her father to send another doctor, a Paracelsian, if not a demonologist, “anyone less shackled to the Galenic dogmas!” Yet he refused. He said he didn’t want to undermine the authority of the Imperial Physician (“even if upholding his authority over my head meant undermining mine”), but the truth of the matter, Margaretha told the astronomer, and the latter told Leibniz, is this: that he did not want to squander a single thaler on his deluded daughter’s illusory head ailment. Finally, one day, she stopped getting out of bed. The next day, it just so happens, was her mother’s birthday. For her, his beloved mistress, visibly pregnant with his fourth child, whose delivery a few months later would kill her—“One cannot, of course, hold against Katharina the fact that she was a huge fetus, an abnormally huge fetus, and in the end a lethally huge fetus—the irony of this being of course that she’s now exceptionally short for her age”—the Emperor had organized various festivities. Margaretha sent word: She could not get out of bed, her headache now was too painful, she wished her mother a most happy birthday but to her great regret would not be able to join them. Her father sent word back: You will join us. The palace guards who delivered that message hauled her by the armpits to the Great Hall. First there was a banquet, during which her head pounded. Next there was a concert, during which her head throbbed. To conclude there was a demonstration of the—“dubiously ennobled,” she said—Balthasar von Ulm’s purported perpetual motion machine, a vast canvas-covered wooden wheel some eleven and a half feet in diameter, capable of turning twenty revolutions per minute while hoisting a weight of some thirty-five pounds, and doing so, declared its impresario-inventor, indefinitely, entirely on its own, without any source of external power. The wheel started to rotate. The Emperor was delighted. “Look at that!” he cried, catching first Heinrich’s eye, then Wilhelmina’s eye, and only then (and only because Mother nudged him with her knee) my eye, said Margaretha, then Heinrich’s eye again, then Wilhelmina’s eye again, and only then (and only because Mother nudged him with her knee again) my eye again. Throughout her childhood her mother was actually constantly nudging her father to remind him to engage with her, too, to appreciate with his eldest daughter, too, this or that wonder, this or that marvel, this or that spectacle, like the spectacle of this wheel, “don’t only enjoy it with Heinrich, enjoy it with Margaretha, too!” her mother was always reminding him by means of her knee nudges, “which were a lot less surreptitious than she seemed to think,” Margaretha said. Her mother probably thought she saw none of these nudges, but the truth is she saw all of them. (She added: “As soon as Mother died, and therefore stopped nudging Father, he never again paid the slightest attention to me.”) “Astonishing!” her father had cried in the Great Hall as the wheel spun. “And entirely of its own accord! Is the wheel not astonishing, Margaretha?” And Margaretha had replied, “Astonishingly astonishing, Father,” but in a tone that left no doubt as to her actual feelings about the wheel. “In those days I liked nothing more than to yawn before my father’s marvels and monstrosities.” He would show her a three-headed beast pickled in a glass jar, she would yawn, and “that, in my childhood, was as close as I got to happiness.” And yet she was, at least at first, astonished by this wheel. The truth is that she shared her father’s zeal for mechanism almost to the degree Heinrich did, but she had always hid that zeal from them in favor of the more immediate pleasure of casting scorn on the things they loved. In their presence she feigned an interest in high fashion and fine dining, in exquisite balls and eligible bachelors, “hence,” she said, bursting into laughter, “Gottfried here, a gift from my father, who actually imagines I’m still interested in an advantageous marriage!” when in fact, “in another life, I might have been a clockmaker.” At that moment Princess Wilhelmina in her long white gown tiptoed past the door, going the same way she had been going the first time. Margaretha: It was, incidentally, supposed to be some enormous tragedy that her younger sister was getting married before her, and to a member of the redoubtable House of Wittelsbach at that, that’s why the wedding was spoken of only in whispers, but “when you see the fop to whom she’s betrothed you’ll realize it’s an enormous comedy!” This the astronomer would learn to be true. Half rising from her chair, Margaretha peered out a window overlooking the town. “Often one finds him bathing totally nude in the Vltava in plain view of all the plebs and potentates of Prague.” She laughed, kept looking for a moment more, said, “Not now, but often,” and sat down again. “She has been fitting that wedding dress for months now, you know. Months! She has two fitting rooms, each with a hundred full-length mirrors, and she goes back and forth between them a thousand times a day. The fitting rooms are actually identical, but she says each gives her a slightly different perspective on her figure. What I find curious is that the route between them always seems to pass right by the room in which I happen to be sitting … Curious, no?… We always speak of Willa the peacemaker, Willa the sensitive one, Willa-who-is-attuned-to-feelings—never Wilhelmina the person wholly capable of purposefully inflicting pain, all the more so because she’s so attuned to feelings.” Not to mention that the dress already fits her perfectly, everything always fits Willa perfectly, “She got Mother’s body, I got Father’s body,” Heinrich and Katharina also got Mother’s body, “I’m the only one who got Father’s body!” Wilhelmina tiptoed past the door, going the other way again. “In short,” Margaretha whispered, “everyone thinks she’s doing a splendid job of not rubbing her impending wedding in my face, not pressing on what they assume is a sensitive spot for me, when in reality that’s exactly what she’s doing: rubbing her impending wedding in my face and pressing on what she assumes is a sensitive spot! What she doesn’t realize is I’m not sensitive there. What she fails to realize is that I want her to marry this person, because of how ridiculous he is.” She rose partway from her chair, peered out the window, then sat down again and whispered: “I would love to see her marry this ridiculous person, I cannot wait to see Wilhelmina who is such a terrific judge of character joined in holy matrimony with a fool, I am so excited to see what sort of ridiculous offspring they produce! I wish I could show you him bathing. It is impossible to imagine her loving this person, even she must know she doesn’t love him, what she loves is the notion of marrying someone, anyone, before I do … I pretend to be upset about it, but only to stiffen her resolve to go through with it … As for me, no, I never want to marry anyone, never, I have zero interest in becoming a count palatine’s wife. Yes,” she said, “in another life I might have been quite happy as a clockmaker, I rather like mechanical objects, no one knows that about me…” And so, she went on, beneath her expression of wonder for the miraculous moving wheel of Balthasar von Ulm was a tone of contempt, but beneath the contempt was wonder. At first. For after a dozen revolutions of the wheel, a dozen hoistings of the weight, she started to smell a smell coming from the contraption, the distinctive smell of human sweat. And she asked von Ulm: “Is there not someone inside it?” And von Ulm replied: “No one inside! The wheel turns of its own accord.” And her father cried: “Of its own accord!” Then she began to hear sounds coming from the wheel: breathing, gasping, wheezing, panting, even what sounded like someone muttering Mein Gott, mein Gott … And she said: “There’s someone in there, Herr von Ulm,” but he said: “There’s no one,” and her father said: “The wheel is a perpetuum mobile.” It felt now as if that colossal clattering wheel were revolving inside her head, slicing and slashing her fragile mental tissues as it turned. All signs pointed to there being a small person in the wheel, just as all signs pointed to there being an unbearable pain in her head, but in both cases her father overruled the testimony of his senses, for von Ulm, against her. She wondered: Why does he give von Ulm, a blatant charlatan, the benefit of the doubt, whil
e to me, from the moment he made me, he has never once extended the benefit of the doubt? Why make me only to refuse to extend me the benefit of the doubt? “Make me or don’t, but don’t drag me into existence only to refuse to extend me the benefit of the doubt! cried Margaretha, chewing on a piece of tongue,” said the astronomer, who added: “I am paraphrasing.” Gottfried said: “We contravene reason when we hold our fork with our whole hand, like a stick.” Margaretha said: “At last I spotted, through a tear in the canvas, a small person pedaling feverishly on a mechanical device installed in the center of the hollow wheel. Herr von Ulm was already slinking toward the door. The presence of the small person inside this big wheel was now undeniable. What more could my father say? There he was, the small person, pedaling madly! I thought: At last I have my father cornered, due to this indubitable small person! Yet when this small person was pointed out to him, what my father said was: This person is actually much too small to turn the wheel entirely on his own. Whatever his own contribution it must be in addition to the dazzling self-moving properties of this astonishing wheel…” At that instant, Margaretha said, her headache reached a point of unparalleled painfulness, never before or after had it hurt so much, and she mumbled, My head, and stumbled and collapsed and hit her head on the floor of the Great Hall. And because she bled there in front of everyone, before not only her family but also a horde of courtiers, because they could all see the blood pouring out of her head, her father, although he probably assumed she had fallen on purpose, relented at last and promised to send a new doctor, a chemical physician as she wished.