The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  The Chamberlain said: “Now, Matthias and the Electors depart from Frankfurt this afternoon. They will arrive in Prague in a week. Between now and the moment at which they cross the Old Stone Bridge, you shall teach the Prince enough trigonometry for him to produce a reasonable estimate of the distance of the New Star.”

  And the astronomer, who by now had concocted a ploy of his own, replied: “It cannot be done.”

  And he recounted to the Emperor the pitiable state in which he had found his son, how he had looked and how he had smelled and the threats he had made, and the bowl and the unicorn horn fell to the floor as the Emperor buried his face in his hands. “Then Matthias is right,” he moaned between his fingers, “my madness has reached full flower in him, my boy is beyond redemption! He, too, is dead and damned, we’re all dead and damned in this family.” And scurrying to return to the Emperor the bowl and the horn, the Court Chamberlain insisted, with some desperation, that Matthias was wrong, that the Prince was much less mad than he appeared, that in his nakedness and agitation, in his smearing on his own body of his own effluence—“a calculated smearing!”—the Prince was obviously playacting the role of a madman, to secure for himself the solitude he had always sought, for he had never wanted to be emperor and that’s what would make him such a good one. It is a performance, he insisted, a cliché albeit quasi-convincing performance of a mad prince! And the Emperor kept moaning: “A dead and damned family, full of dead and damned family members!” And the astronomer, in order to intensify the chaos which, so he claimed to Leibniz, he had instigated intentionally, chimed in intermittently with: “Not suited for a trigonometry tutorial.” And the Emperor howled: “Dead and damned!” And the Chamberlain insisted: “An act! A pantomime! A performance!”

  Only when the havoc had reached its highest pitch did the astronomer put forward the proposal he had formulated.

  There is, he said, one condition under which he might consider risking life and limb to enter Prince Heinrich’s turret and teach him the mathematics of triangles.

  And peering through his fingers the Emperor murmured: “What is it?”

  And the Court Chamberlain hissed: “Speak, man!”

  The condition, the astronomer declared, was this: he required a written guarantee that, if he succeeded, he would receive carte blanche funding from the Imperial Treasury for the production of his tubes—not within reason, so to speak, but without, not bound by common sense but unbound by it, funding constrained by nothing but the demands of his own eyes. “That is my condition,” the astronomer said, and no sooner had he said it than the Emperor had drawn up an edict to this effect and signed it.

  “A historic document, with historic consequences,” the astronomer said, flipping through his ledger. “Eventually it pitted the Habsburg Empire against the exigencies of the infinite. Here it is, I am not inventing it, I am not making it up!” And he thrust under Leibniz’s nose a torn scrap of paper on which was written in faded ink: “Tube funding without reason if Heinrich learns about triangles, Rudolf.” Leibniz: “I cannot tell you the provenance of that paper, but those were the words on it.” The astronomer: “Some, with some reason, as you will see, Herr Leibniz, have blamed the so-called Edict of the Tubes for the wars that ravaged these lands a few years later. They pile millions of Germans at my feet, millions of dead Germans, and my father besides! But if not for this edict I would never have seen what I have seen, I would not know about the night sky what I know about it now. In science as they pile millions and millions of corpses at your feet you must keep your eyes fixed on the firmament, you must proceed as if everyone is already dead, your own family and everyone else also. The most modern scientific methods call for considering everyone in the world to be dead already. Not really dead, science is a social act, if everyone were really dead you would just laze about, but not really alive either. One must always proceed as if everyone is alive and dead, a little dead, a little alive, I think I learned that philosophy from Heinrich, actually,” the astronomer said. And he peered into the telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a long string of numbers.

  * * *

  “HER NAME, FATHER,” said Prince Heinrich at last from the spot where he lay on the cold stone floor of his turret, and from which spot he had for some time stared in placid silence at the black-robed astronomer, “was Ludmila. She was the daughter, the only daughter, the only child, of the bloodletter Zikmund who came once a week to open my veins and bleed me into my father’s beloved agate bowl, a procedure intended to relieve my nervousness, Father, for I am a nervous person, I am a known nervous person, that is not meant as an excuse. From the moment I laid eyes on her I said to myself, You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, no touching, no touching, this one is not to be touched! Even if she wants to be touched, you must not touch her, no touching, I said to myself. And for a long time, Father, I actually did not touch her.” The astronomer told Leibniz: “Meanwhile I am thinking, Does he actually believe I’m a priest? Perhaps he does, I hope he does, but it would also be quite in keeping with what little I know of Prince Heinrich’s character for him to be playing games with me, calling me Father, confessing to me some contrived and sordid tale, even asking me for absolution, all while knowing precisely who I am and lying in wait for the right time to reveal it. Do not forget,” the astronomer told himself, he told Leibniz, “that you might not be the only person here putting on a performance…” He, the astronomer, inspired by the prediction he’d allegedly made in his horoscope but which had probably been inserted by the Court Chamberlain, had returned to the Prince’s turret disguised in the vestments of a confessor, with a hood over his head, and he had knelt before the thick wooden door and rapped on the iron bars with the splendid gilded staff lent to him at the Emperor’s behest by the deacon of the Cathedral of Saint Vitus, and with the attitude of bemused compassion with which the Benedictine monks had gazed upon him he had asked the Prince to open the door so that he might hear his confession and provide to him the sacrament of reconciliation. His pleas were met, once again, with silence. This time, however, the four guards in the corridor leapt to their feet, as reverent of his religious regalia as they’d been scornful of his scientific paraphernalia, and as three of them genuflected before him the fourth took out a set of keys and said: “We can let you in if you wish, Father, but I’d advise you to minister to the Prince through the door, the last servant to go in the turret was stabbed five times in the legs with the Prince’s penknife and once in the head, and only by the grace of God did he come out again with his life.” And the astronomer said: “Let me in.” And as the other three readied their pikes, the tips of which could be seen to quiver, the fourth guard unlocked the door, bowed his head and mouthed a prayer as the astronomer entered, and then promptly clanged the door shut again and bolted it twice.

  “It took a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness,” the astronomer remembered, peering into the telescope, picking up his quill, and writing down a long string of numbers. At last he saw the outline of a bed, but the Prince was not lying on it. He saw a three-legged stool, but the Prince was not sitting on it. Where, then, was the Prince? You should leave! he thought, and it was only by summoning the countervailing thought, The world, as you’ve established, is entirely pointless save possibly for the composition of a star catalogue that is genuinely complete, that he was able to prevent himself from fleeing. His eyes, meanwhile, continued to adjust. He stepped on something that crunched delicately underfoot like a dead bird, the phrase “a dead songbird” popped into his head as soon as he stepped on it, though it was obviously unlikely, he realized, to be a dead bird; and he remembered Margaretha’s forewarning that he would find citrus peels littering the turret floor; but when he squatted down to inspect what he’d stepped on he saw that it really was a dead bird, a dead songbird, not the desiccated rind of a tangerine. The floor of the turret was littered, as he saw now, not with citrus peels but with these dead birds, as well as with large shards of glass. “Soon enough,”
Leibniz quotes him as saying, “I would learn what the dead birds had to do with the shards of glass, and what the birds and the glass had to do with the various bits of brass tubing that also (as I now saw as my eyes continued to adjust) littered the floor, and what the birds and glass and bits of brass had to do with Ludmila, the young doomed only child of Zikmund the Imperial Bloodletter.” As the astronomer’s eyes adjusted still further they alighted on his father’s mechanical head, which lay toppled over onto one side just a few feet away and appeared (“through its two mournful eyeholes”) to be peering at him queerly. And when his eyes adjusted fully he saw that Prince Heinrich lay right behind it, also on his side, one ear to the floor, also peering at him queerly. Heinrich did not blink, and it occurred to the astronomer that he, “and therefore my dream of a complete star catalogue,” was dead. Then, however, he blinked, he wasn’t dead. He wore breeches now, and white stockings, possibly a positive sign, as against his past nudity, though “I knew I could deduce nothing very definite about the state of his mind from the fact of his breeches, the fact of his stockings.” Tugging on his hood to better hide his face and adopting again the tenor that had struck him so at the foot of the wall of the monastery, of sympathy as infinite as it is indifferent, the astronomer asked the Prince whether there were any sins he wished to confess. The Prince was silent. And for several minutes he remained silent, his two glassy eyes fixed almost unblinkingly on the astronomer’s face, which he, the astronomer, had to hope was sufficiently hidden by the hood. What is he seeing when he stares at my face, under this hood, in this light? the astronomer had to wonder, wrote Leibniz. Then (“Did I observe a slight smirk or did I invent it?”) the Prince pulled the mechanical head into an embrace, shot out his legs in a “curiously catlike” stretch, and said: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirteen years since my last confession.” And then: “Her name, Father, was Ludmila.”

  She came to the Castle every Wednesday with her father, to whom she was apprenticed, a tiny, solemn girl who participated in the task of bleeding the Prince with, although she was only a few years older than Katharina, an astonishing lack of squeamishness. On Tuesdays his nervousness reached its peak, Tuesday nights he never slept a wink but skulked around the Castle observing his sisters sleeping (“My sisters have always been good sleepers, superb sleepers, even Greta, with all her ailments, has never had any trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, whereas I cannot fall asleep or, if I do fall asleep, stay asleep”), and on Wednesdays Ludmila came with her father to bleed him. “My father believes that we share the same form of madness, that mine is merely a heightened version of his, a quantitatively greater madness, yet he is a sleeper!, he is a sleeper, I’ve even seen him fall asleep on his throne while a supplicant is addressing him, he is a sleeper, our madnesses are qualitatively different. He and Greta are superb sleepers, they think they have nothing in common but they have this in common: They sleep, they fall asleep and they actually stay asleep … Wilhelmina, as perhaps you yourself know, is a sleeper, too … Perhaps you’ve even seen her sleep … Whereas my mother had insomnia, like me, Father…” Katharina liked to pretend she had insomnia as well, oftentimes staying up late with Heinrich in his turret, complaining that she couldn’t sleep, but he could tell she was exhausted, she wanted to sleep, “she was only staying up for my sake,” so sooner or later he’d shut his eyes and pretend to sleep and she would fall asleep in a flash. He, however, did not sleep. Only on Wednesdays, after being bled by Ludmila and her father, and then taking a warm bath, was the Prince able to sleep, sometimes continuously for up to three or four or even five hours.

  “And so before I knew anything about her, Father,” said Heinrich, peering at the astronomer, who adjusted his hood, he recalled to Leibniz, peering into the telescope, “Ludmila signified sleep. You must not touch her, no touching, this one is not to be touched, I would tell myself, but also: When Ludmila comes, you shall finally get some sleep.”

  When some procedure gives an insomniac some sleep, some rest, a respite from perception, a respite from intellection, he cannot resist sentimentalizing that procedure, no matter how straightforwardly scientific that procedure may, in reality, be, Heinrich said. Hence he probably transfigured in his mind Ludmila into an angel who bestowed upon him the blessing of sleep.

  In fact, everything about Ludmila seemed as far as possible from the world to which he was accustomed, and to which he had grown—“far worse than merely hostile”—chillingly indifferent. His days of hostility toward the world were behind him. “That was what frightened me.

  “But Ludmila was different, Father, she wasn’t of that world,” Heinrich told the astronomer, who, as he told Leibniz, had begun to worry about how upon the conclusion of the Prince’s murder confession he would suddenly turn the topic of conversation toward the mathematics of triangles.

  Yes, Heinrich said, “Ludmila was different.” Her father would open one of Heinrich’s veins and she would silently hold the stone bowl and watch his blood rise in it, her eyes held level with its rim—possibly, the astronomer surmised, “to avoid the illusions of parallax.” Prince Heinrich: “I was squeamish, I couldn’t bear to look at my blood in that bowl, I got nauseous, it was pure princely squeamishness, but she wasn’t squeamish at all, she kept her eyes fixed on the bowl, on my blood, and when it had reached a certain level she’d say something softly in Czech to her father, who would close up the wound.” The Prince was mesmerized by her facility with his blood, her comfort with it. “Her upbringing had inculcated in her an entirely different attitude toward blood than mine had in me, and this astonished me, captivated me, and consoled me.” At the time he could not understand why it provided consolation. Now he understood. His malaise in those days, Heinrich explained to the astronomer, issued from his “horrific suspicion” that “everything everywhere was more or less the same.” He felt in all things and in all people, and even in all animals, a “creeping sameness.” Everything, in short, was the same, he felt, Heinrich told the astronomer/confessor, reported Leibniz. This suspicion, forged in the formalities of diplomatic ceremonies and the eerie regimentation of imperial dinners, had vexed him from his earliest childhood, but it had seeped far beyond its initial ambit, first from the public chambers of the Castle to the private ones, then to the animal kingdom and even to the stars, and it had now congealed into a “scary conviction” concerning “all things.” From the sameness of Castle life he was led inexorably to the sameness of life life, and from the absolute sameness of life life, seen from a strictly scientific perspective, he would be led, he feared, to “a bad conclusion!” “Even my sisters, apparently so different from one another, and from me, were actually more or less the same as one another and the same as me,” he realized. The distinctions the Prince had drawn between Margaretha and Katharina, and Katharina and Wilhelmina, and Wilhelmina and Margaretha, and between the three of them and himself, and him and his mother, and him and his father, and his father and his father’s father, and the Austrian Habsburgs and the Spanish Habsburgs, were all artificial, “These distinctions did not carve nature at its joints, Father, for nature, I thought, in horror, has no joints, I had the horrible image in my head of a jointless nature, a giant jointless nature.” Every distinction and thus every thought was contrived: “The world is an undifferentiated manifold, a giant everywhere-identical tapestry.” There were of course slight variations here and there, “variations in the stitching,” some things were things and some were people, some people were princes and some were pig farmers, some princes—and probably most pig farmers—were sleepers and some did not sleep well, but “more or less everything was the same, I felt, Father,” Heinrich told the astronomer. The Emperor saw in the novelties he collected in the North Wing evidence of different worlds, tears in the world-tapestry through which perhaps one could peep at God, but the Prince saw everywhere the same world, with no tears in it, and considered his father’s novelties to be the mere detritus of that sameness, “identical elements wh
ich my father was making even more indistinguishable by collecting them together in the same place, jarring them in the same sort of jars, subjecting them to the same principles of acquisition, restoration, and display. My father’s fabled cabinet of curiosities only contributes, I thought, Father,” the astronomer quoted Prince Heinrich as saying, “to the catastrophic sameness of the world.” It was catastrophic because if everything was more or less the same, then nothing could any longer surprise him, “and I am someone who has always taken great pleasure in being surprised.”

  Heinrich added: “It is only in this context that you can understand why the fact of Ludmila’s being different, her being an obviously different kind of being, affected me so.”