The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  Emperor Ferdinand’s solution was ingenious.

  He would continue, he declared, to uphold the letter of the law of the Edict of the Tubes, but no longer would he bankroll these costly tubes exclusively out of his own pocket, not, in other words, out of the imperial pocket, not exclusively, so the astronomer told Leibniz; henceforth the cost of the tubes would be subsidized by a new and annually escalating tax, a so-called tube tax, levied on the goatherds and salt miners who populated the mountainous province at the highest and most visible point of which the observatory stood. At first the new policy seemed inane; the people who lived here were poor and there were not many of them; even if the Crown confiscated every last thaler in the whole province, the revenues would not come to a tenth of a single tube. Soon, however, it dawned on the astronomer that the policy had political aims, not economic ones. “With that tube tax, the Emperor turned those salt miners and goatherds against me.” Across these hills there were thousands of manual laborers but only a single “laborer of the mind,” in the astronomer’s words; Emperor Ferdinand hoped, presumably, that the body would turn against the mind, so to speak, that it would reject the mind, attack the mind, and kill the mind. That is nearly what happened. It was, of course, no accident that the observatory itself was selected as the tube tax collection point, and as the goatherds and salt miners dropped off their in-kind payments of goats on the one hand and sacks of salt on the other they murmured imprecations at their aberrant neighbor with his arcane concerns. Some vowed violence against him. More than one tried to hack his tubes in two. When a goatherd’s wife, whose six sons, she said, were off God-knows-where fighting God-knows-who, and whose starving daughter could not make enough milk to nourish her newborn, inquired of the astronomer, as she surrendered her last runtish goat, what wisdom he had gained from his observations of the stars, and he replied with a laugh that he had learned nothing, he had gained nothing at all in the way of wisdom, and he knew less now than he did when he began, she with a howl such as he had never heard took from within her cloak a vial containing some sort of acidic substance which she flung at the astronomer’s face, and which might well have blinded him then and there had he not had the nimbleness to duck. One evening matters came to a head. Through the tube the astronomer observed a strange reddish glow emanating from the Earth that revealed itself when they had crested the hill to be four or five hundred of his neighbors bearing torches in one hand and weapons in the other, pickaxes for the salt miners and pitchforks for the goatherds. The astronomer told Leibniz: “These men had come to kill me.” He took what he feared would be his final glance at the heavens and then went out to meet them. And he thought, per Leibniz: My father, who worked his whole life with his hands, would know how to address these men; I, who put all my faith in my eyes, not to mention my mind, do not, I do not know how to address them, I don’t know how to speak to these manual laborers the way manual laborers like being spoken to. “For the first time in my life, I wanted to be more like my father.” No longer did he pride himself on the esoteric metaphysical torment that he sensed and suffered and that his father did not; now the astronomer just wanted to be able to speak to manual laborers, like his father could. “In that moment, there seemed to me nothing more worthy than to know how to get one’s meaning across to a man whose life is devoted to goats. But I knew I could not get my meaning across to him nor could I justify myself to those men with weathered hands whose coats glittered with crystals of salt.” And so, with little hope that his words would save him, certain that his own inescapable erudition would only confirm for these earthy people his monstrousness, the astronomer took off his thick spectacles and opened his mouth to speak—yet what came out, he marveled to Leibniz, “but my father’s words, my father’s cadences! He was within me still, I do not know how deep within, it was as if in my boyhood I had without realizing it swallowed the man whole.” He spoke to those manual laborers the way manual laborers like being spoken to, he made them laugh with the manual-laborer jokes his father had once told the men in his workshop, made them misty-eyed with his father’s manual-laborer mawkishness, gesticulating all the while with his father’s manual-laborer gesticulations. Though without his spectacles he could hardly see the crowd he could sense that his performance was winning them over. And he ended by justifying what he was doing there with his tubes in terms they understood innately.

  And so, as the King of Sweden plunged deeper and deeper into the heart of Germany, from Brandenburg to Saxony, then headlong through Thuringia and on to Bavaria, the miners and herdsmen put their hands on their hearts and pledged their devotion to the astronomer, and he demanded from Vienna tubes a hundred eighty, a hundred ninety, two hundred feet long, and what choice did the Emperor have but to provide them? Ferdinand’s gambit, however ingenious it was, had failed. He would have to formulate another.

  Yet none of this made the astronomer happy. The tube now made sense to the goatherds, perhaps, “but it was making less and less sense to me.” Thousands of the astronomer’s tubes had flooded the continent ever since Galileo had popularized it with his fanciful tale about the Doge of Venice atop the Campanile di San Marco, but “no one, I thought, understands how it truly works, and neither do I.” If he truly understood how the tube worked, he thought, he should be able, whenever he wished, not to look through it, to stop looking through it, to curb the compulsion to look through it, complete star catalogue or no, even for the rest of his life if he wished, and that was something he was manifestly unable to do.

  And along with that thought, and linked to it in some obscure way he could not comprehend, came another: he wanted his son back.

  How badly he wanted his son back!

  And then one day, around the time Gustavus Adolphus traversed the Lech, and seized Augsburg, and conquered Munich, and threatened in fewer than three weeks to appear at the gates of Vienna with forty thousand men, the astronomer’s son did come back.

  “Ten minutes,” said the astronomer, peering into his telescope, picking up his quill, and writing down a string of numbers. “Be ready, my friend! It is nearly upon us.”

  * * *

  FOR YEARS HE HAD REHEARSED in his head the words with which he would beg for forgiveness if his son ever returned. As little blame as the boy bore for the nose that grew inexorably on his face, he bore even less—the astronomer intended to say—for the mind that formed inexorably in his head. How can anything that pops into existence from one moment to the next be held to blame for anything at all? The astronomer intended to say all this and much more besides. But when his son reappeared one morning at the astronomer’s door, the boy, who was now a grown man, tall and strong, though unkempt, and oddly unsteady on his feet, and with a glimmer in his eye which his father took for sincere derangement, fell to his knees before his father could, and buried his face in his father’s belly, and wept. “The perfect picture of the prodigal son,” the astronomer told Leibniz, putting an eye socket to his telescope. The boy, or now the man rather, said: “O the things I have seen, the things I have seen, Father!” and over and over repeated the phrase: “My accursed Wittelsbach detachment!” And then he cried: “My aloofness, Father! My absolute aloofness, my unbearable aloofness!” He cried: “The aloofness I imbibed with my mother’s milk, you tried to warn me, I know it, an aristocratic aloofness you tried to warn me about!” and he shrieked the words: “Breitenfeld! The bridge at Dessau! Magdeburg! Magdeburg! Magdeburg!”

  It was some time before the man recovered his composure sufficiently to tell what had happened to him in the order in which it had happened.

  Upon leaving the observatory that cold winter night those many years ago, the boy like little Lázaro de Tormes had served a series of masters, each of whom, he said, thrashed him more than the one before, and fed him less, though with his ancestral aloofness he “felt far from all this, and absolutely safe, and looked down on them all,” until he met his final master, a tailor, in Münster, who thrashed him the most, and fed him the least—“I did
not feel it!”—but taught him also the art of embroidery. He had a knack for it. When the boy surpassed the master in his skill with a needle, the master, who had no heir, seized the boy’s hand between his and said in a voice wobbly with sentiment that he wished, upon his death, to bequeath him his business. The boy threw his arms around the old man and kissed his withered cheeks left and right and left and right but had no intention of spending his life in a Münster tailor shop letting out the waists of the trousers of burghers. No, his Wittelsbach breeding would not let him rest content as a Münster trouser alterer. That night, the old man, exhilarated by the thought that his establishment would live on after he himself had vanished from the mortal realm, drank himself into a delirium and had to be shepherded by the boy into bed, where, with a smile on his lips, he promptly began to snore, at which point the boy stole from beneath that selfsame bed the strongbox containing the old man’s life savings, with which he traveled in high style to Antwerp. There and afterward in Brussels he perfected his art under the guidance of two tapestry-makers of genius. Though he was but a weaver in a workshop he lived on the old man’s money like the son of a count—“I felt no qualms, nothing, nothing!”—and when that money ran out he continued to do so. He indebted himself to a moneylender who would accept no collateral from a young man he could plainly see was a fellow member of the faith, notwithstanding the borrower’s own diatribes to the contrary (and contra his own pecuniary interests) that he descended from a distinguished line of German dukes and kings who had been taking communion for some six hundred years. “My friend,” the moneylender cried with a wink, “the nose on your face is collateral enough!” When the loan came due he fled to Cologne, then Augsburg, and finally Salzburg, where he established his own workshop, the man told the astronomer. En route he saw horrible things. Near Mainz he saw a troop of dragoons looting a monastery, exhuming the tombs of the monks and cutting their fingers off to get at their rings. Before a farmhouse burning somewhere between Heidelberg and Stuttgart he saw seventeen putative thieves hanging by their necks from the only limb of a charred tree that could still bear any weight, two of them still in their boyhoods. In Frankfurt after a skirmish so many deserters and suspected spies were being publicly tortured by their imperial superiors that a representative of the citizenry was dispatched to request the army to stagger the punishments—now the strappado, now the wheel—so that the spectacle could be enjoyed less hectically. “We do not know where to look,” he explained. The astronomer’s son felt similarly. He remembered his “exultation” at the richness of the material with which God had seen fit to furnish him. No sooner had he finished sketching the avaricious amputation of the monks’ fingers than his eyes were offered the mass execution of seventeen peasants, two of them children, on a visually interesting tree. And no sooner had he drawn the hanged peasants than he saw in Frankfurt on that day of depravity one hundred things worth drawing, all of them congregated in the main square as if for his own convenience, all of them set against the backdrop of the Fountain of Justice, which God seems to have placed there to provide the young artist with an ironic counterpoint to the barbarism in the foreground. “I felt nothing, nothing at all, except gratitude at being given so much inspiration for my work, at entering the art world so to speak at a moment of such widespread and visually interesting cruelty. I could not believe my good fortune, to see so many interesting atrocities so artfully composed, so many corpses in such colorful positions! Germany at the moment is basically a series of arresting tableaux, I thought. I could not look away, nor did I want to look away—I could not understand those people who tried to shield their eyes from it, or to look at it through their fingers, those people must not be artists, I thought, not one of those people looking at that tree through their fingers is going to turn the tree and the peasants hanging from it into a tapestry, or into a painting, or into a poem, or into a song, or into a dance, or into a dish, or even into an interesting anecdote, is what I probably thought, whereas I wanted to look straight at it, to look at all of it, and to turn all of it into tapestries.” And although he added: “You are thinking: His wicked Wittelsbach aloofness!,” the astronomer was actually thinking: “My Judaic looking-compulsion!,” according to Leibniz. In his workshop in Salzburg he began weaving these sketches of brutality and inhumanity into colossal tapestries of wool and silk, which found many enthusiastic buyers among the wealthy, “though the poor, too, would have bought them, if they could afford them.” Soon his patrons commissioned him to make more. One patron, whose complexion and accent seemed to mark him as a Spaniard and whose wealth seemed inexhaustible, surpassing many times over that of even the richest burghers, commissioned him more than anyone else, with instructions to give his imagination free rein, not to restrain himself in depicting the sadism of war. “Tell the truth!” said the Spaniard. “Tell the truth.” Perhaps, he thought, this enigmatic Spaniard is a pacifist. Quite the contrary. Whatever he wove the Spaniard praised to the heavens but chided also in the same breath for being too restrained, “in terms of the sadism.” (My translation. Though the word of course is an anachronism, it captures the Spaniard’s meaning, at least as the Spaniard’s meaning has come down to us through the weaver, the astronomer, and Leibniz.) “Tell the truth!” he would cry. “Tell the truth about the sadism of man.” Over and over: “It is very pretty, but next time tell the truth! In terms of the sadism.” Or: “You’re withholding, my friend! Weave truthfully what you have seen.” Yet no matter how truthfully he converted on his loom what he had seen with his own eyes, the Spaniard responded: “Where is the truth? Where’s the sadism?” Or else: “You are being sentimental!” Or simply: “More sadistic.” Finally the weaver realized that what that Spaniard meant by “truth” greatly exceeded even the most barbarous things he or anyone else had ever seen on Earth. For his next tapestry, his largest, ornamented lavishly with threads of gold, he magnified the anguish, doubling the height of the flames and doubling the number of the dead, tripling the number of carnal crimes, and making more intimate the relation between villain and victim; and when he saw it the Spaniard said: “Aha! The truth. Now this is how the world is.” And stooping to kiss the artist’s hand he introduced himself as an agent of Emperor Ferdinand and invited the tapestry-weaver to come to Vienna in the role of Imperial Embroiderer. He accepted and went. There in the Imperial Workshop he continued to weave into tapestries the consequences of Ferdinand’s policies. “I was sent to witness and weave for the walls of the Hofburg the battles at Dessau, at Wolgast, at Lutter am Barenberge. Even of those battles where his own army was massacred, as at Breitenfeld, the Emperor wanted a largish wall hanging.” It was, in fact, while watching Ferdinand linger pensively over a tapestry portraying the slaughter at Breitenfeld that the words of his father—“Your words!”—had first returned to him. Lordliness … Aloofness … The aestheticization of the world … Yes, I thought, Ferdinand with his Habsburg upbringing and I with my Wittelsbach one are aristocratically sequestered from the suffering of our fellow men. Look at him, solemnly fingering the needlework where a bayonet pierced the neck of one of his soldiers, I thought. I could actually remember seeing that man being run through, or a man like him, the blood spurting from the hole in his neck. I had felt nothing, more or less. Probably I thought: I should weave that. Remember, I probably told myself, how his neck looks right now, do not forget how that neck looks! Probably my central concern was that I would forget how the hole in his neck looked by the time I got back to my loom. But evidently I did not forget. I wove it, and it became beautiful. The Emperor admired it. From the moment he saw Emperor Ferdinand contemplatively fingering those red threads the weaver understood that there was something the matter with his own mind and therefore with his art. “From gazing at Ferdinand’s face as he gazed at the depictions of the death of his men I realized how little I had penetrated into their pain, I wanted to be able to penetrate their pain, but I had stopped at the surface of things, just as you always said I did. You’re interested, you used t
o tell me, in the sensuous only and the superficial, whereas I like to penetrate the essence of things, we have two different temperaments, we’ll never understand each other, never! you used to say, I remember this well, never, never! I did not understand it then, but gazing at Ferdinand’s face I understood it now, I understood how little I had penetrated into the pain of those men.” But while he understood it intellectually he could not feel it viscerally. He understood that he ought to feel disgusted by his art, by his transfiguration of suffering which he could not feel into wall hangings for Emperor Ferdinand to admire, but he did not feel disgusted by it. As Emperor Ferdinand dispatched him to more and more battlefields, having politely declined the recommendation on the part of the Imperial Embroiderer to bring some variation to the walls of the Hofburg by means of a sequence of mythological tapestries, the weaver found that he did have a new attitude toward his art, one that he hoped was a kind of incipient disgust, but which he realized, to his dismay, was a kind of incipient boredom. At least, he thought, let me grow disgusted by what I’m seeing and doing before I grow bored of it, at least that! To become bored of this before I grow disgusted by it, he thought, standing amid the scorched ruins of Magdeburg, amid the stench of it, amid the wails of suffering and worse of pleasure, sketching everything he could see for a tapestry he knew would be his magnum opus, would be a sign of a genuinely irredeemable soul, he told the astronomer, and the astronomer Leibniz, who commented parenthetically that in fact Magdeburg was sacked months before Breitenfeld was lost. Please: not bored before disgusted, not bored before disgusted, he prayed, the tapestry-weaver told the astronomer, let me at least as a minimal sign of my humanity grow disgusted by all this before I grow bored of it! Only a monster could stand in the old square of Magdeburg in the midst of its sacking and grow bored of all that he saw before growing disgusted. “All I wanted,” said the tapestry-weaver from his knees, his face pressed against his father’s belly, “was to feel a pang of disgust before I felt a pang of boredom, to become disgusted before becoming bored, but no, I became bored before I became disgusted.” The pang he felt in Magdeburg was a pang of boredom, not of disgust. Of everyone who witnessed or committed or suffered the atrocities that occurred that day and night in Magdeburg, which only a sixth of the citizenry survived, the tapestry-weaver was probably the only person who experienced boredom. Only in retrospect, back in Vienna, long after he had grown bored of his material, did he finally grow disgusted by it, by everything he had seen there.