The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  They came now with ringing things, with church bells and cowbells, with hand bells and sleigh bells, with wind chimes and triangles and cymbals and glockenspiels, and Heinrich narrowed it down to the last of these: what he heard in his head was the sound of a glockenspiel. “The moment he said that, Father set out to purchase every glockenspiel in Europe.” Each one Heinrich would hit with his mallet once or twice or at most three times and then discard. Every day a new glockenspiel, a new very expensive glockenspiel, and since “the manufacturers of musical instruments aren’t idiots,” said Margaretha, the prices began going up like crazy, “May third,” she read, “two hundred and thirty thalers, May fourth, four thousand thalers, May fifth, eleven thousand thalers,” the sums her father shelled out per glockenspiel would have cured her a hundred times over, “body and soul.” He was actually rapidly depleting the Imperial Treasury … Meanwhile, Protestants in the Palatinate were running amok … There were rumors, she recalled, that her uncle Matthias, Archduke of Austria, was amassing at his castle in Styria an army with which he planned to march on Prague and wrest the crown from his older brother … Also, incidentally, Heinrich received every day—and from the platter of fruit and pastries she disdainfully picked up and let fall a wrinkled little orange—a crate of these Seville oranges, the most expensive type of orange, and Heinrich’s favorite orange … A sour orange, she said … “I prefer sweet oranges, so did my mother, she loathed sour oranges, I loathe them, too. We used to get lots of sweet oranges here but ever since she died Father has bought only sour oranges, Seville oranges” … That is to say, Heinrich’s oranges … “I love oranges more than anything, but ever since Mother died I haven’t eaten a single orange, too sour!” … The Turks, meanwhile, were, if various reports were to be believed, massing along the border with Transylvania … Protestants in Hesse-Kassel were running amok … Protestants in Baden-Durlach were running amok … Protestants in Brandenburg were running amok … Protestants in Hungary were running amok, too … Radical Anabaptists had seized the free imperial city of Schweinfurt … The Pope, she said, was rumored to be extremely unhappy … The Papal Nuncio to the Kingdom of Portugal was said to have said that it’d be a good thing for Heinrich and Christendom both if someone were to strangle the bastard in his sleep … “Even Willa was grumbling, although it occurs to me now she probably already had her future wedding in mind” … The Empire was actually on the verge of collapse due to the ringing in Heinrich’s head … Still, every day, a new expensive glockenspiel … And another crate of Seville oranges … “Ah, the beauty of a father’s blind devotion!” cried Margaretha, and she burst into laughter, and plucked from her mouth with two fingers the pit of her peach. Gottfried: “Yet just as the pit lies within the stone fruit, at its center, so the concept of the pit, the stone, lies within the concept of the stone fruit, at the center of it. Though we are left in dining as in dancing as in polite discourse at the mercy of our reason, God in his goodness has ordered the world such that our reason is sufficient—precisely sufficient! Yes, our reason is but a dim light yet the world is fashioned so as to shine quite luminously in it!” Margaretha: “Who knows what might have happened to the Habsburg Empire had not Heinrich declared one morning without a trace of shame that the ringing in his head had disappeared overnight.”

  Gottfried: “This, My Lady, is a gift from the Heavenly Father. It cannot be anything else.”

  Leibniz: “Referring, I think, to the harmony between words and things, not to the sudden cessation of Heinrich’s malady.”

  “Perhaps,” said Margaretha, “you can now understand why, a few months ago, when my brother, in a jealous rage, butchered a young lady and flung her mutilated body to his hogs, our father, besides shielding little Katharina from the truth of what her beloved big brother had done, shielded him from the judicial authorities, as well, and locked him up in his turret instead. Father still holds out hope that he’ll get well again. That he’ll get, I mean, sane again. Father still holds out hope for Heinrich’s sanity! That is why you’re here, you know: not to tally up the stars, but to make Heinrich sane again. The previous Imperial Astronomer wasn’t able to make Heinrich sane again, but maybe you with that magical tube of yours will return him to his senses, my father must be thinking!” And she burst into laughter.

  “There has been no justice,” she added.

  She said: “His only punishment for murdering that poor girl has been a halt on his supply of Seville oranges … An amazing mismatch between punishment and crime … Citrus … Murder … Taking a life … The things he did to the body … Of a girl he claimed to love … Mutilation … Versus no more oranges … When he actually still gets daily grapefruits … And daily tangerines … You’ll find the floor of his turret strewn with citrus rinds … Still,” she said, “the freeze on Seville oranges, probably because it is the first time Father, or else the Chamberlain under whose sway Father has fallen, has imposed any constraint on him whatsoever, has perturbed my brother a great deal…”

  “And she picked up that wrinkled little orange again and handed it to me,” the astronomer told Leibniz.

  “The remarkable thing,” she said, “is that Father still intends to be succeeded by Heinrich.”

  When the astronomer tried to teach her a bit of algebra, using the numbers in the notebook in which she tabulated Heinrich’s expenses, she laughed and told him not to bother. “Father doesn’t actually care whether I learn mathematics, just whether Heinrich does. If you were told to teach me mathematics, too, well, that’s just my mother nudging him with her knee from beyond the grave.” Suddenly she emitted a sob. “I miss my mother! She loved me!” For a moment, according to the astronomer, tears ran down her cheeks. Then Princess Margaretha laughed at her own outburst, flicked away a tear, smoothed her skirt, and said: “I want you to know, by the way, that I’m actually happy in spite of everything. Deep down, none of this affects me.”

  Wilhelmina in her wedding gown tiptoed past the open door.

  “It is very improper,” Gottfried was saying as the astronomer left the Small Dining Room, “to eat a pastry with one’s hands.”

  * * *

  HE TUTORED PRINCESS WILHELMINA in one of her two fitting rooms until the evening star twinkled in the sky.

  * * *

  THEN, EN ROUTE to the Imperial Observatory, the astronomer, armed now with a Seville orange, and mindful of those old fairy tales his mother used to tell him in which things always occur in threes, stopped for a third time by the south turret, where, feeling not a little foolish, he declared to the darkness that he’d brought a gift, “a certain sour gift, I said,” the astronomer told Leibniz, and then tossed the orange between the iron bars. The next page has a sketch of the scene as Leibniz conceived it, above the caption: “The astronomer tossed a Seville orange into the south turret.” The astronomer said: “It rolled into the gloom like a head from the chopping block.” He put his ear through the bars. Perhaps (said the astronomer) he expected to hear an animalistic scurrying followed by the depraved devouring of that entire fruit, peel and all. But he heard nothing of the sort, nothing but the muted thud of the orange coming to rest against, presumably, the rear wall of the turret, followed by silence. He thought: So, then, I am not in one of my mother’s tales. And he had turned on his heels and made his way halfway back down the hallway by which he’d come, convinced now that the guards over whom he had to step, for they would not interrupt their card game, were guarding, whether they knew it or not, nothing at all, and concerned that he himself might be losing his grip on reality, if he was tossing oranges into turrets, and expecting something to come of it, when he heard what sounded like the striking of a match and saw, when he turned once again on his heels, a faint flickering light emanating from the aperture.

  He ran back, wrapped his hands around the iron bars, and peered in.

  The astronomer pressed an eye socket to his telescope.

  He said: “I invite you to imagine my state of mind—and at this remove I shall have t
o imagine it, too—when I saw, sitting on a silver platter on the floor, all of its toothed wheels taken out and replaced by a single candle, the light of which shone through the holes where the lenses had gone, my father’s mechanical head, corroded only slightly from its spell in the river.”

  He picked up his quill and wrote something down.

  Evidently, he said, the head had been salvaged from the bottom of the Vltava—but at whose behest, Emperor Rudolf’s or Prince Heinrich’s, and to what end? Was this a gift from father to son or an undertaking of the son’s own initiative? Why, in short, salvage this head? The astronomer noted the return of a familiar question: Had he underestimated his father’s head? Misunderstood it? Yet if it was worth salvaging, why empty it of its innards, leaving only its inert lead skull? And had whoever had ordered the salvaging of it ordered also the salvaging of the body of its maker, which presumably lay beside it on the riverbed?

  Was, in other words, his father’s corpse in that turret, too?

  Then he realized:

  Obviously, Prince Heinrich was trying, for whatever reason, to horrify him. And given what he knew about the Prince, and what he would learn subsequently, he should, in fact, have been horrified. The truth is I ought to have been horrified, the astronomer told Leibniz: “What I saw through that little iron-grated aperture should have horrified me.” But it did not horrify him. On the contrary—it amused him. He began to laugh; and not simply to titter like the virtuosi in the Great Hall or to burst into Margaretha’s scornful laughter but really to chortle, to laugh from the belly, to produce, that is, belly laughter. (“Have you noticed, Herr Leibniz, how our most celebrated scientists of the sentiments always possess the crudest understanding of laughter? I have seen laughter taxonomies that bundle together the giggle, the chortle, and the titter, or the chortle, the titter, the snicker, and the hoot. Even in Delft, where they have a superb understanding of tears, they do not distinguish between the whoop, the cackle, the guffaw, the hoot, and the hee-haw. Of course, the hee-haw has nothing to do with the hoot, and the whoop is not even a species of laughter at all! A man who confuses whimpering and weeping is rightly excluded from the circle of learned men, we demand very fine distinctions on the tragic side of life, yet someone who considers a hee-haw a hoot may still be regarded as an eminent authority on the nature of the world.”) At the time, and for a long time afterward, the astronomer could not figure out why the sight of his father’s gutted mechanical head sitting there aglow on a silver platter provoked in him this outburst of uncontrollable belly laughter. Maybe I am finally grieving, he thought, and the thought pleased him, he was actually relieved to find himself racked with grief, his grief hitherto had been all too controlled, too lucid, “I am always in my own head,” he welcomed this spasm of grief even if it happened to express itself as belly laughter. But in truth his laughter had little to do with grief. This he realized only recently. His laughter, he realized at last, decades after the fact, was merely “the laughter invariably provoked by exceptionally bad art.” The theatricality of the tableau Prince Heinrich had arranged, the utter artificiality of it, the melodramatic lighting, the (probably completely meaningless) allusion via the silver platter to the head of John the Baptist, all of which was meant to instill terror in the astronomer, for reasons he would begin to fathom shortly, provoked, instead, laughter. “He wanted I think to seem mad, but each of these aspects, and in particular the John the Baptist aspect, suggested, in fact, a surplus of sanity, of control, of intention, you see. There was something ineluctably sane about what I was seeing. The thought: I am seeing something so sane right now! That is what I thought as I peered through those iron bars, even if I didn’t know at the time that that’s what I was thinking. He wants me to see something insane, but I am seeing something sane! Sane, sane, I thought. The truly mad constantly try to make art, but they make only madness, the truly artful constantly try to make madness, but they make only art. He wants to seem insane, but in arranging in this pitch-black turret a tableau centered on my dead father’s salvaged and repurposed lead head, lit from within, probably in emulation of Caravaggio’s histrionic lighting techniques, if not in fact in direct imitation of Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, which hung as I knew in the North Wing, he shows himself to be sane, I thought, though I only realized that this was the thought I was thinking many years after the fact,” he told Leibniz. “He wishes to seem insane, he intends to come across as mad in my eyes, but the very wish, the very intention, and more than that the ability to execute his intention by means of a coherent set of artistic techniques, even entirely derivative ones, even wholly Caravaggesque ones, down to the absurd and probably meaningless John the Baptist reference, shows him to be sane, completely sane! Intention, Herr Leibniz, I am drawing your attention to the presence here of intention, intentionality, of reasoning about means and ends, and therefore of reason full stop. He wanted his artwork to do something to me! Peering through those iron bars, or rather peering between those iron bars, I probably thought: Merely by intending to make something horrific, he has made something ridiculous. He aims for the horror of the madman, but in so aiming he has achieved only the ridiculousness of the artist,” the astronomer said. “The ridiculousness of the visual artist.”

  He added: “Hence, I laughed.”

  His laughter evidently perturbed the Prince, for a body came bounding out of the blackness …

  To demonstrate the ensuing action the astronomer had to evict Linus from his lap. The cat meowed. “None of that,” the astronomer said. To Leibniz: “Watch, he’ll now sashay off with a show of indifference and begin licking himself zealously beneath the armillary sphere.” Leibniz: “A minor prophecy, perhaps, but an accurate one.”

  Then, with difficulty, the astronomer stood up from his stool.

  “A body, you see, bounded toward me out of the blackness,” the astronomer said, and with his own bent, shrunken body he mimed what he was describing. “Yes, a body emerged from the blackness: from nothing, suddenly, a body! The body obviously of the Prince. Somehow he had an obviously princely comportment despite being naked top to bottom and streaked here and there with some sort of dark and foul matter, such is the power of upbringing. At first I thought, He’s covered in mud from the river bottom, but from its texture and stink I realized it was more likely blood or feces, that is, matter of his own making. And probably I realized: It is too simple to say that he is sane. And all this time he is bounding toward me, bounding toward me so fast that the door separating him from me, however thick it was, seemed hardly sufficient, and I thought: He will splinter this thick door into a million pieces and I shall join my father in oblivion.”

  But instead the Prince came to a halt on the far side of the door. “Like so.” And the Prince placed his hands on top of the astronomer’s and gripped them as firmly as they were gripping the iron bars. “Like so,” the astronomer said, and he found Leibniz’s hands, tightened them into fists, and gripped them with what Leibniz reported was startling strength. Then the Prince spat in the astronomer’s face. “Like so, ptew!” the astronomer said, and though he added, “I won’t actually spit in your face, of course,” Leibniz noted that the astronomer had, actually, spat in his face, when he had said “ptew” he had spat in his face. The astronomer tried to run away but could not, tried at least to wipe his face but could not do that either: the Prince’s grip was preternaturally strong. And so, wrote Leibniz, for his age, was the astronomer’s.

  Then, quite calmly, while his saliva trickled down the astronomer’s cheek, Prince Heinrich said:

  “I shan’t learn mathematics, sir. I shall not learn it. My father wants me to learn mathematics but I cannot and I shall not learn it. I have no interest in mathematics and I have no aptitude for it, sir. No mathematical aptitude, do you understand? My father puts far too much faith in mathematics, too much faith in it and too much emphasis on it, my father has altogether too much mathematical faith, sir, and if he expects that we will one day comm
unicate mathematically, he is mistaken. I shall not learn mathematics. Perhaps at one time I could have learned it, I used to be clever, I used to be a clever person, but now I cannot learn it, now I am a stupid person, now I am a crazy person, my mind no longer functions as it ought to. My sisters have much more mathematical aptitude than me, they should have been me and I should have been them, yes, I should have been my sisters! That I should’ve been my sisters and my sisters me is a thought that often recurs to me. Father must not make me do mathematics, Father must allow me to be mad. Please inform my father of this, that if a mathematics tutor, in his capacity as a tutor, were to step foot in this turret, that tutor, in this turret, even before he attempts to impart to me the most elementary theorem, the most intuitive axiom, would be straightaway torn apart at the joints, a message for my father. I would pluck out the tutor’s eyes, I would cut off the tutor’s ears, I would tear out that tutor’s tongue also. I thank you for the orange, sir, but I shan’t learn mathematics. No, no, I shall not learn it.”

  And with that Prince Heinrich withdrew to the farthest and darkest corner of his turret.

  * * *

  THE ASTRONOMER PEERED into his telescope.

  “The bodies are aligning exactly as they should,” he said, according to Leibniz. There were eighty minutes till the predicted eclipse. Through the warped slat the sliver of sky was still bright and blue. The astronomer said: “The darkness will be very brief but it will be very dark, so dark that of the three of us only Linus will be able to see. The domestic cat is capable of seeing in conditions of considerable darkness.”