The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  Every night he fell asleep.

  During the night he stayed asleep.

  And every morning he awoke in natural light.

  “Never had I dared dream of such happiness, Father.” Heinrich added: “Of course, it did not last.”

  One day, the inventor Balthasar von Ulm came to the Great Hall to exhibit his latest invention, a smallish thing concealed theatrically beneath a white sheet.

  “Ten years ago, Your Majesty, My Lords and Ladies,” proclaimed Herr von Ulm, Prince Heinrich told the astronomer, “you saw with your very own eyes that the law prohibiting the indefinite motion of bodies—the alleged law, legislated to us by the logicians—has no basis in fact, it is an artifact of their reason, a whim of their madness, the logicians inscribe their proscriptions of the perpetuum mobile in a thousand thousand books but Nature does not read their books and she need not heed their laws. With your own eyes you saw how my wondrous wheel moved of its own accord, your own eyes proved it to you! I daresay Your Majesty’s own eyes refuted the logicians.” Margaretha scoffed. She of course had not believed in that wheel, and she now signaled this disbelief to their father with the scoffing sound that remained for him (Heinrich) her most salient trait. After months of his being confined to his turret, Greta’s face, her jaw aside, was already growing blurry to him, but the scoffing sound she produced often in her throat remained clear as a bell. Prince Heinrich told the astronomer: “Wilhelmina and I, too, of course, had had doubts about von Ulm’s wheel, but only Margaretha took our father seriously enough to signal to him with her constant scoffing sound that she thought he was wrong, that there was a small person turning the wheel from the inside, et cetera. Of the three of us, not counting Ina, Willa once said to me, possibly ironically, only Greta truly respects Father, only Greta reveres Father, it is because she loves him so much (like a god even! Willa said) that as long as they live a friendly word will never pass between them. She told me: You and I were happy to leave him his delusions about the wheel, if it made him happy to think it revolved on its own we were happy to let him think that, but not Margaretha! Greta had to make him see the person pedaling inside it, for her everything depended on Father’s seeing that person pedaling and admitting that he saw him, whereas for you and me Father’s seeing that person pedaling away in there was a matter of indifference. You might say: You and I have given him up for mad, whereas Greta has never given him up. I’m tempted, Willa said, to say that of us three, not counting Ina, only Margaretha is a good child, only her devotion is undying, only she loves Father the way a child should love her father … To which,” Heinrich went on, “I replied: Maybe, maybe … I was thinking: Maybe she’s onto something—but maybe she’s overthinking things, maybe Greta just hates Father, maybe Greta’s apparent hatred for him, which it is tempting to see, paradoxically, as love, is simply hatred, straight, scathing hatred, Father, expressed incessantly by her scoffing sound. And I thought: And I do love him, I do—in my own way—respect him, I did care if he saw the man in the wheel dripping with sweat turning it from the inside, maybe not as much as Margaretha cared if he saw him but more than Wilhelmina did. I do take him seriously, I do, I thought…” the Prince told the astronomer, who now peered into his telescope and murmured: “Everything is darkening now, it is getting darker and darker, can you see that, Herr Leibniz? How everything’s getting gradually darker out there?” And Leibniz said that he did see it, everything was getting darker, and the astronomer said, “And a bit gloomier, yes?,” and Leibniz said yes, it was all a bit gloomier, and to the Philosophical Transactions he reported that the sky through the askew slat did in fact seem slightly darker, slightly gloomier, though he did not know of course if this was just a matter of suggestion, if he just was seeing what the astronomer wanted him to see. He wrote: “There was now hardly more than a half hour until the promised eclipse, yet the astronomer, in his tale, still had his eyes. How, I thought, will he have time to lose his eyes, to narrate, that is, the losing of his eyes, in the next thirty-some minutes, when we seem, in his tale, and in the Prince’s tale within his tale, no closer than when we began to a juncture at which they might suddenly be gouged out?”

  Now, ten years later, Balthasar von Ulm had gone on, he had returned with a new and even more stupendous invention, one with which, if His Majesty and His Lords and Ladies would lend him their eyes, he would refute another alleged law, a law that since antiquity has been held even more sacrosanct by those bookish thinkers who presume to hand down natural law without ever looking up from their texts to cast a single glance at the outside world: namely, the scholastic doctrine of horror vacui, the law prohibiting the possibility of the void. “Yes,” cried von Ulm, “the void exists, it exists, you shall see it yourselves!” With that he yanked off the white sheet to reveal a peculiar apparatus consisting of a glass globe about the size of an adult human head mounted on a wooden frame and into the bottom of which was inserted a brass tube that ran toward the floor, where it tapered and terminated beside a sort of foot treadle such as one might find on a loom or lathe. “With this machine,” von Ulm said, pulling over a stool and pedaling the treadle, “I shall evacuate the globe of everything inside it, producing the very vacuum that no less an authority than Aristotle assures us cannot be found in any corner of the cosmos. Yet we shall find it right here, in the Great Hall!” Margaretha scoffed, the Emperor leaned forward on his throne, and Herr von Ulm treadled away, thereby opening and closing a certain valve, and drawing a piston up and down the length of the tube, so the Prince explained to the astronomer and the astronomer in turn enlightened Leibniz, who noted parenthetically to the Philosophical Transactions that if it indeed existed, which he had doubts that it did, then that machine would appear to be an early “but of course quite crude” antecedent of the “very exquisite pneumatical engine” devised in recent times by the “Honorable Mr. Boyle, expert explorer of nature, who in this very journal” (to which Robert Boyle was already a prolific contributor, which made doubly delicate this suggestion by young Leibniz that he had found a possible forerunner to Boyle’s famous invention and thus cast into doubt the latter’s priority over it) “has brought such admirable clarity to the concept of coldness, and has related the interesting account of the monstrous calf discovered of late in its mother’s womb, whose hind legs lacked joints, and whose tongue was split into three parts…” For some time the Great Hall was silent apart from the rocking back and forth of the foot treadle, the shuttling up and down of the piston, the periodic bulletins (“A quarter empty! Halfempty!”) Herr von Ulm broadcast with monumental fanfare, and the scoffing sounds Margaretha produced at intervals deep in her throat, which, “although Wilhelmina and I were completely inured to them, still had the capacity to perturb Father, not to mention Katharina,” said Heinrich, and after each of which the Court Chamberlain whispered something into His Majesty’s ear.

  Finally Balthasar von Ulm leapt up from his stool, indicated with a flourish the glass globe, and proclaimed: “My Lords, My Ladies: the void.”

  Heinrich said: “My father fell to his knees before the glass globe. Remarkable, he murmured. Miraculous. And here on Earth, right here on Earth! Children, come look, come see, Heinrich, Wilhelmina, Katharina, come look, the void, come see. Margaretha, come see. The scoffing sound my sister produced in response must have come from very deep in her throat, very deep indeed, Father! To express skepticism of that magnitude one must will the walls of one’s throat to bleed. And she said: There is no void, there is no vacuum, that sphere is filled with our atmosphere just as it was before. Tell me, Father, she said slowly, in a singsong, as one would address not a god,” said the Prince, “but a child, or a simpleton, what sensible distinction do you note? How exactly does the nothingness in that sphere make itself known, she asked, to your organs of sense?”

  Their father, who now cocked his head and stared more quizzically into the glass globe, said nothing.

  Herr von Ulm did not, however, as Margaretha (the astronomer surmised) must
have expected that he would, and as he had done a decade ago, slink toward the door.

  No, Princess Margaretha’s doubt had evidently been anticipated—and not merely anticipated, but actually incorporated into the performance, for von Ulm began now to pace dramatically back and forth, mumbling to himself The senses!, the senses!, his hands gripped behind his back, a frown on his face as ludicrously pronounced as that on the mask of a tragic figure in an Italian commedia. At last, he came to a halt. He snapped his fingers. “A bird!” he cried. And he brought one hand to his lips and behind it in a stage whisper he hissed at his son, who was also his assistant: “Hans, bring me a bird!” And turning to the audience he clasped his hands before him and said: “Lady Margaretha is quite right. Why should you take my word for it? That would not be in the spirit of our times. Why should you take this globe to be empty simply because I say it is, when perhaps it is filled with air? Perhaps the globe leaks where it meets the tube, or perhaps the pump is a sham, and I a charlatan! Ah, excellent, here is Hans with a bird.” Enter Hans with a pretty little bird on his finger, singing (the bird) a pretty little song, said the Prince, and from where he lay on the floor he sang me “snippets” of the song the bird had sung, the astronomer told Leibniz. “I am mad enough to sing you a snippet of that song, Father, perhaps even several snippets, but I’m not so mad as to sing you the whole birdsong, Father!” said the Prince, laughing. “Snippets only, snippets only! In a world such as mine—for this is my world, not yours, although of course that sentence makes no sense at all aloud, when I say it it sounds stupid—one must come up with one’s own measures of true madness (not the entire birdsong, Heinrich, sing him only snippets thereof! I actually told myself that) and measure oneself, which is to say myself, by them. All nonsense of course. Today, Heinrich, you shall dress him, which is to say yourself, up as a confessor and regale him, which is to say yourself, with your tale, which is to say your murder tale, and when you reach the birdsong part you shall sing him (yourself!) only snippets not the entire thing, that is a sign of your sanity, yes, not singing yourself the entire birdsong is today’s sign of your sanity!”

  He laughed.

  “I believe the bird, incidentally, was a lark.”

  And though it struck him now that Prince Heinrich knew he was no confessor, the astronomer nevertheless tugged on his hood, held up his staff, and intoned: “Go on, my son.”

  To Leibniz the astronomer added: “If you are wondering about the point of all this, rest assured that what the Prince told me would have major ramifications for my ultimate interpretation of the tube, my ultimate understanding of what the tube, or telescope, is—what it actually is. Everything I am telling you, everything I have already told you, and especially everything I am still to tell you: it all touches the problem of the true nature of the astral tube.”

  Hans held his hand beside Herr von Ulm’s hand and the little bird hopped from the one to the other. Herr von Ulm stroked the bird’s head. “If, Your Majesty,” he said, “the globe remains full of air even after I have pumped it, as your daughter suggests, then she should have no qualms about my repeating that operation with a little bird inside. God only knows what would happen to a bird in a vacuum, but if it is indeed a plenum, as your daughter suspects, then a bird should continue to sing in it quite contentedly! So, shall I put the bird in the globe, Your Majesty?”

  And Katharina cried: “Father, no!” And Margaretha laughed and waved her hand and said: “Why not, go ahead, put it in.” And the Emperor looked at the Prince and said: “What do you think?” And Margaretha said: “Why are you asking Heinrich that?” And the Emperor said: “I’m asking all of you, I’m canvassing all of your thoughts.” And Margaretha said: “No, Father, you’re asking Heinrich, you are obviously only asking Heinrich, and in terms of the canvassing of people’s thoughts it’s obvious you’re canvassing only his thoughts, do you really not see that? Really? Is that not obvious to you, Father? Am I going crazy? Obviously there is only one opinion about the bird that matters here, what the rest of us have to say about what to do with the bird is immaterial.” Heinrich told the astronomer: “On my father’s face I saw the expression I often saw there after she had spoken to him, an expression of solemnity, perplexity, and woe.” The Court Chamberlain whispered something into the Emperor’s ear. The astronomer peered into the telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down. He said that Prince Heinrich had told him: “My concern for the bird was overridden by my desire for family harmony, by the fear my older sister could still instill in me. So I said: I agree with Margaretha, put the bird in the globe.” Katharina ran over to the Emperor where he was kneeling before the pump and wrapped her arms around him and cried: “No, Father, please, no! You can’t let him do it, it doesn’t matter what’s in there, and it’s going to hurt that bird!” And Margaretha burst into laughter and said: “It does matter, of course it matters, the truth always matters, silly child, the fact is that nothing matters except the truth, nothing else matters, you will learn that sooner or later—at least I hope! And of course it is not going to hurt the bird, it’s a trick, an illusion, nothing more, you know nothing about this man, he’s a magician, an illusionist, nothing more, the last time he came here you didn’t even exist yet, you were still sloshing around in Mother’s belly, Mother was still here and you were still in her belly, yet you talk as if you know what’s going on here! It is the funniest thing, really. Have you not noticed that Heinrich and I, your oldest siblings, who actually know something about this magician, have both said: Sure, go ahead, put the bird in the globe? Honestly, Katharina, it amazes me sometimes how confidently you talk about things that came along a long time before you did, such an attitude may serve a person well in politics, but in circumstances like this it just makes you look a little ridiculous. Come here, come here, come here, come sit on my lap.” Katharina, who, noted Heinrich, had begun rubbing her eyes, shot a quick glance at Wilhelmina (who, probably fearful of Margaretha, did not return it) and then shuffled over to Margaretha and climbed up onto her lap. “It’s just, I don’t want him to hurt the bird,” Katharina managed to say between sobs, and Margaretha, smoothing down her hair, said: “You are the sweetest thing, and you have the softest hair I’ve ever felt in my entire life, and a big wonderful heart besides, but you know nothing about anything happening here, the meaning of all this is flying over your head, and the bird, I promise you, is not going to get hurt.” And she kissed the top of Katharina’s head.

  At a gesture from the Emperor, von Ulm unscrewed a portion of the globe, lowered the bird into it on one finger, and screwed the globe shut again. The bird hopped to its left, hopped to its right, cocked its head, and sang its song. Von Ulm began to work the foot treadle, and the bird, according to the Prince, continued to sing. “You see, you silly child!” said Margaretha, bouncing Katharina on her knee, and Katharina laughed through her tears. Soon thereafter however the bird began to suffer. First it ceased to sing. Next it started to wither and droop, and after that to convulse. Now Katharina began to scream. But not only she, for “what surprised me more, Father,” Heinrich told the astronomer, “is that Ludmila—who before our walks in the menagerie had shown no affinity for animals, for she, like so many of her class, for whom privation instrumentalizes the relationship with animals, had seen animals as potential resources rather than potential friends—had also begun to scream, and to scream, moreover, the same scream Katharina was screaming. I thought: The sound coming out of them is the same! Katharina was shaking me, I think she wanted me to stop von Ulm’s experiment, and Ludmila was shaking me, too, for the same reason, but I was too consumed by their startling similitude, not only externally—for Ludmila was wearing, as she had been from her third evening in the Castle, one of Katharina’s gowns—but also internally, to intervene. And then I realized: The scream they are screaming about the bird is the scream I, too, would have screamed about the bird had I not been able to achieve, via thought, a philosophical distance from the bird. The scream the
y’re screaming is my scream, the emotions inducing it are my emotions, I taught them this scream, I inculcated in them these emotions, one is not born feeling bad for a bird.”

  Von Ulm, smiling, being pummeled now by Katharina’s little fists: “As you can plainly see, Your Majesty, the little bird, who cannot live in the absence of air, has been deprived of it. That the globe now contains nothing, a void, is beyond all doubt, I am sure even Lady Margaretha would agree! Shall I now open it up again and rejuvenate our little ornithological colleague here so we can thank her for her contribution to science?”

  Margaretha scoffed. “It is no bird, this bird is no bird, it’s a mechanism, an automaton, a clever facsimile. He takes you for a fool, Father.”

  Von Ulm, nervous: “Your Majesty, may I open the globe? If I do not open it now the bird will surely die.”

  Margaretha: “Look at him squirm, he knows that thing won’t die, he knows it cannot die, something that does not live cannot die!”

  “Father,” whispered Katharina, recalled the Prince, having reached beyond her delirium a mad sort of stillness, “please save the bird.”

  But the Emperor, kneeling with his nose to the glass, just behind which the bird twitched and convulsed, simply said: “This bird is dead and damned.” It died half a minute later, its yellow breast pointed upward at the fine ribbed vaults of the Great Hall, its head twisted weirdly to one side.

  Margaretha’s headaches had not visited her in years, said Prince Heinrich, but a moment later she was apparently struck by one, for she mumbled, My head, and pitched forward headfirst onto the floor. And when, between the courtiers who gathered around Margaretha to attend to her, Ludmila and Katharina caught a glimpse of the gash on her head, and the blood that spurted from it, they gasped identically, went identically pale, and ran identically from the room.