34 The New York Review
designed to execute a function deter-
mined by God. The exceptions were
thought and feeling, whose movements
could not be traced back to any single
organ, but seemed to emerge as the im-
material products of the organism in its
entire being. The novel, for Sachs, of-
fers a mechanism for giving form to the
immateriality of thought and feeling—
the essential quality of being human
that exceeds the singing, chomping,
and blinking thingness of the body.
Sachs’s twinkling and zany philo-
sophical account of the astronomer’s
father tells only half the story of why
a nineteen- year-old boy, even one as
uncommonly philosophical as Leibniz,
might want so badly to get inside other
peoples’ heads. The other, more senti-
mental half comes from the astrono-
mer’s stint as a teacher to the emperor’s
children, particularly his young, sadis-
tic, bastard son Prince Heinrich. As
the astronomer tells Leibniz in the sec-
ond hour of their encounter, Heinrich
had once fallen in love with Ludmila,
daughter of the Imperial Bloodlet-
ter. Ludmila (her name an echo of the
love interest in Italo Calvino’s metafic-
tional romance of storytelling, If on a
winter’s night a traveler) is an austere,
self-sufficient girl who, amid the mo-
notony of Heinrich’s palace life, strikes
him as immeasurably strange and dif-
ferent. He seizes her from her father,
rapes her, and makes her his consort,
a role that, from Heinrich’s point of
view, she seems to take up with hap-
piness, asking him about all the things
he likes: clocks, hogs, trees. “I wanted
to be transparent to her,” Heinrich
tells the blind astronomer. “I wished
Ludmila to know exactly what I was
thinking when I looked at a tree.” The
desire to be transparent to another per-
son, to disclose one’s thoughts without
misunderstanding, is a seductive pros-
pect—so seductive that Heinrich’s un-
disclosed thoughts begin to disrupt the
functionality of his head:
He came to realize that the pres-
sure he felt in his head, which was
not unpleasant but which could
only be relieved by disclosing to
Ludmila with perfect precision
what everything—hogs, trees,
people, paintings, and everything
else—evoked in him, in his head,
was love.... The feeling of being
in love is the feeling, Heinrich re-
alized, of one’s head being no lon-
ger equilibrated with the cosmos
but being instead perilously albeit
pleasurably out of equilibrium with
it, overinflated with private associ-
ations that must at all costs be dis-
charged, or pumped, into the head
of the loved one. One’s head never
feels more private, more clois-
tered, more one’s own, than when
one is in love, love seals us in our
head and our lover in our lover’s
head.... The fervid urge to share
one’s thoughts, in conversation, is
the mental counterpart of the ma-
terial urge to share one’s seed, in
the carnal act, Heinrich observed.Conversation, freely and willingly
given, transforms ordinary attraction
into love. Or so Heinrich thinks, never
suspecting that Ludmila may be feign-
ing interest in his thoughts as a tactic
of self-preservation. Nor does he real-
ize that the thought he fetishizes as the
“mental counterpart” to sex moves in
one direction, from his head to hers,
creating a perverse asymmetry between
the two. The more Heinrich discharges,
or pumps, into her head, the more like
him Ludmila becomes, losing her dis-
tinctive silence and depth, demateri-
alizing into nothing but a product of
Heinrich’s imagination—a mirror that
reflects him far too flatteringly to be be-
lieved. Weighed down by his thoughts,
she sinks into an “irreversible unreal-
ity.” Heinrich is “assailed... by his for-
mer suspicion that her head was hollow
and void or else filled like a clock with
gears upon gears.”
Since people do not mind hurting
what is not real to them,
Heinrich begins to take Lud-
mila apart to see whether
she’s a natural or artificial
machine. “He inflicted such
injuries upon her head in his
effort to open it up and look
inside, cutting off her ears,
plucking out one eye, shat-
tering her teeth, and finally
splitting open her skull,”
the astronomer recalls to
Leibniz. When Heinrich
is finished, he throws her
body off the castle’s walls
and into the pen of his pet
hogs. Devastated by what
he has done, he contem-
plates killing himself, until
he realizes that his crime
can be rationalized by a
shift in perspective. “What
had appeared organic to
him would not appear so
to someone much smaller,
or to someone equipped
with...‘a tube like yours,’”
Heinrich tells the blind as-
tronomer. Through a long
enough tube, all of human-
ity “would show itself to be
mechanical through and
through, little but toothed
wheels turning one another
in vast empty silent spaces.”
The estranging eye of the telescope
buffers Heinrich from the truth of his
crime, allowing him to pretend that
Ludmila was never real in the first place.
Killing her was merely a sane, philo-
sophical investigation of a mechanical
head with a human voice, no different
from the one the astronomer’s father
had invented. Unwilling to face the
crimes that his lens has allowed Hein-
rich to commit, the astronomer flees
the court for the forests of Bohemia.
It is not romantic love but filial love
that offers a momentarily incandescent
vision of a shared world of thought. In
the last half-hour before the eclipse
he has predicted, the astronomer tells
Leibniz that he had a son, the most
skillful weaver of tapestries in Europe.
Father and son had always argued over
whose system of thought, art or as-
tronomy, brought mankind closest to
the truth of the cosmos. Though the
astronomer tried to interest his son in
the question of “what the stars were,”
his son was interested only in what
the stars could be made to represent:
“Whatever allure the stars had for the
boy lay only in their aesthetic potenti-
alities, their vulnerability to versifica-
tion, their more or less inexhaustible
metaphorical application.” Father and
son part in anger, but are reunited
when the son joins his father in his ob-
servatory, ready to accept that art stops
at the surface of objects, while astron-omy penetrates the depths of the uni-
verse. Together, they begin to chart the
heavens. Yet one night, the astronomer
discovers that what he thought was the
night sky over Bohemia, is, in fact, his
son’s most magnificent tapestry:With a few exceptions—the rings
of Venus!—the tapestry was re-
markably accurate, his son must
have had an intimate and sophis-
ticated understanding of the as-
tronomer’s work in order to weave
it, “it suggested to me a prolonged
period of time during which he had
done nothing but study my work,
scrutinize it, live with it, in it.”...This is what the astronomer was
thinking when his son ran up to
him, dug his fingers into his sock-
ets, and tore out his eyes.Like Heinrich’s murder of Ludmila,
the astronomer’s blinding makes him
realize that, by looking at the sky only
through the eye of the telescope, he has
collapsed representation and reality.
Blindness restores the tension between
the two. It replaces the certain visibil-
ity and invisibility of the stars, and the
astronomer’s relentless counting, with
his indefinite memories of the heavens.
“From deep down inside my head I am
peering out at the inner surface of the
outer wall of my head,” the astrono-
mer tells Leibniz. “As for the stars in
the sky, Herr Leibniz, basically I had
blasted them up there myself, onto the
inner wall of my own skull.” He ushers
Leibniz to the telescope at the exact
moment of the predicted eclipse and
urges him to look. Through the eye-
piece, Leibniz sees nothing but a mon-
umental darkness. When the darkness
lasts longer than four seconds, he real-
izes that the telescope is broken. Mean-
while, the astronomer has vanished.I started reading The Organs of Sense
several weeks after a team of over two
hundred scientists produced the first
image of a black hole: a glowing or-ange torus that pulsed softly when you
blinked at it. The image was created
by the Event Horizon Telescope—not
a telescope in any physical sense, but
a synchronization of over a trillion
data points from eight radio telescopes
around the world. If the telescope had
been real, the diameter of its lenses
would have been as big as the diam-
eter of the earth. In the days after the
image of the black hole was published,
memes of it began to circulate online.
My favorite zoomed out from the un-
canny void to reveal, first, two uncanny
voids; then, in the middle of them, a
pink heart; then, hanging below the
heart, two gray whiskers—a feline
face, surfacing as swiftly
and startlingly as the grin-
ning Cheshire Cat in Alice
in Wonderland.
“An aphorism,” says the
astronomer to Leibniz, who
intuits that the philosopher
is eyeing his snoozing cat
with mistrust: “A man de-
lighted by a cat is discom-
fited by existence, a man
delighted by existence is
discomfited by a cat.” What
the meme’s creators under-
stood was that any work of
art that aspires to represent
the infinite with instruments
designed by men is court-
ing, at best, absurdity, and,
at worst, dread about the
significance of human exis-
tence. The only appropriate
response is, to echo Calvino
once again, cosmicomic: the
construction of a narrative
form that can wrest laugh-
ter from the impossibility
of comprehending the scale
or substance of our alien
environments; the futility of
placing man meaningfully
in the universe.
Yet the comedy of The
Organs of Sense is never
easy, never lazy, and not
especially accessible. Reading it can
sometimes feel like overhearing an
inside joke or eavesdropping on a pri-
vate conversation. Sachs makes you
work for the privilege of sharing his de-
rangements of thought. (Do you think
I knew this much about Leibniz or bra-
zen heads before?) For this reason, the
novel is less a novel of ideas than it is
a novel about the emotional, illogical,
concealed, and self-duplicitous reasons
why we grasp, and are grasped by, par-
ticular ideas at particular moments;
how our histories and history writ large
get twined together by forces not totally
within our control or imagination; how
whatever space is left for human deter-
mination must be claimed by a spectac-
ularly, hilariously exaggerated effort
of will. “The stars incline but do not
necessitate,” Leibniz wrote in his 1711
treatise Theodicy. “The event towards
which the stars tend... does not always
come to pass, whereas the course to-
ward which the will is more inclined
never fails to be adopted.” In project-
ing his own stars onto the inside of his
mind, the blind astronomer shows how
one’s will may be strengthened by fic-
tion, the issue of a man’s fancy, which
lights the darkness of the world from
within. And by telling us the story of
the blind astronomer, The Organs of
Sense shows how the rationalist project
may have been spurred by the blindest
and most irrational impulse: love. QGiuseppe Arcimboldo: Water, 1566KunsthistorischesMuseum,^ Vienna