Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

I felt I was finally beginning to understand what my master was getting at: if the human soul, despite its divine nature, possessed a corporality such as fire for the stars or salt for the Earth, it would be, like anything else, subject to mutation!

“Indeed Caspar, to mutation, but also to fermentation, coagulation & other motions characteristic of matter when it reaches that rarefied state. Think of alchemy & you will see that what takes place in our soul is comparable to the mysterious transmutations that sometimes occur in the crucible. I have thought a lot, during the last few months, about the nature of the soul, I have examined all the doctrines down to the present & God has granted me the benefit of his wisdom: Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle & the rest have all given a different definition of the question that concerns us but although each of them has approached the truth in his own way they were all mistaken because of the narrowness of their perspective. For the soul is neither a number, nor a breath, nor a spark of the divine fire; it does not consist of a collection of loose atoms, nor of a nonmaterial trinity of our senses, our will & reason; nor is it the pure form of body or thought, but all that at once! Yes, Caspar, all that without exception! And I cannot thank God enough for having allowed me to understand this sublime truth, even if this late in my life.”

“But how can something be both mortal & immortal at the same time?” I ventured to argue, suddenly alarmed by this composite doctrine. “Is there not a contradiction there?”

“Only an apparent contradiction,” my master replied, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Death is no less of a mystery than birth, but it obeys the same principles. Why, of two men suffering from the plague to the same degree, does one die and the other not?”

“Because God wills it so.”

“True. But in that case you agree it is possible for the same physical cause not to produce the same effect according to the circumstances. And if the plague did not manage to carry off one of the two men, we must grant that it wasn’t the plague that did carry off the other one either. So what is dying, Caspar, if not being deprived of one’s soul by the will of God alone? For neither the plague nor cholera could kill a man whose life Our Lord has decided to preserve; & nothing could save one He wishes to remove from our world. And in this process God’s instrument, that on which and through which He operates, is not the illness but the soul, that particle of the universal seed he has deposited inside us. As you know, we are not immaterial angels, therefore the soul must have form & substance in order to exist inside us, just as it does in the Earth or the metal I mentioned earlier; it must also be situated somewhere in our body, on the analogy of a parrot or a squirrel in a cage. Aristotle says that this place is the heart, others suggest the liver or the spleen but, like Monsieur Descartes, I declare that it cannot be anywhere but in our head, that acropolis of the body, &, more precisely, in the pineal gland that is situated at the back of it. Remember Pietro della Valle: have you never noticed the strange object he had on his finger? It was the pineal gland of his wife, Sitti Maani! He had had it set in a gold ring, which he never removed for the rest of his life and took to the grave with him. Such behavior can be criticized in the sense that it is futile to attach oneself to the skeleton of a soul that has lost its seed, but nevertheless it shows a true awareness of the nature & function of that tiny part of our brain. This sheath that shelters our soul & allows it to act on our body is mortal and material; immortal and immaterial is the soul itself, that spermatic force, that puff of air like the brush of an angel’s wing inside us. Do we not say that we breathe our last when we render up our soul? Did not the Egyptians & the Greeks represent it in the form of a bird escaping from the mouth of the dying person? I tell you, Caspar, there is something in that gland that is not there after death. And if we can say nothing about the profound nature of that thing, at least we can assume it has mass, however minute, & thus measure it—”

“Measure the soul!” I exclaimed, flabbergasted.

“Or, more precisely, to weigh it, Caspar! Do not forget that that is exactly what Christ will do when he assesses the weight of sins in his balance. For my part, I am sure the soul has weight as long as it resides in our body & is part of the world where nothing can escape the laws of physics instituted by God. Not the weight of our sins but the weight of the quantity of matter necessary for its presence in a human body. And that, with your help, I can ascertain. I am soon going to die, Caspar, everything convinces me of that day by day. Thus, when the moment comes, you will have to place …”

My master stopped for a moment, as if to gather his thoughts, but the fear I could see in his eyes, which were still fixed on me, paralyzed me with horror.

“My head!” he suddenly howled, trying to raise his hands to his forehead; they stopped halfway. I saw the blood suffuse his face & he slumped back on his bed. When he started to groan horribly, his fingers gripping the sheet, I rushed out to find help. I woke Father Ramón de Adra, who was the first at his bedside. Having taken Athanasius’s pulse, he diagnosed an apoplectic fit &, with tears in his eyes, indicated that it would be best to administer extreme unction as quickly as possible.

WOKE UP WITH IDEAS UNWORTHY of a dog or an elephant …

A DIFFERENT WAY? A possible world?

CONTINUATION OF THE FLAUBERT QUOTE, from the notebooks: “Art is the pursuit of the useless, for speculation it is what heroism is for morality.” I hadn’t understood anything. If Kircher resembles Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet it is through his desperate, heroic attempt to harmonize the world.

KIRCHER: “Salt abounds in vile places, especially in the latrines. Everything comes from salt and the Sun.” In sole et sale sunt omnia . ( Mundus Subterraneus , II, p. 351.)

Rimbaud: “Oh the drunken gnat in the piss-house of the inn, in love with borage and wiped out by a sunbeam!”

THE FEELING that I’m very close to my goal, that at any moment I’m going to “lift the veil.”

SO MUCH MOLD has appeared on Heidegger’s books that I’ve been obliged to put them out in the sun to dry, to brush them then to spray them, on Euclides’s advice, with formic acid. There are still some suspicious reddish patches, like liver spots; “senile keratosis” in medical terms.

DYSARTHRIA, labiolingual trembling, Argyll-Robertson syndrome, transitory aphasia, mental confusion, symptoms of amnesia, general paralysis, in a third of cases a stroke, Dr. Euclides’s diagnosis is final: Kircher is in the last stage of syphilis of the nervous system.

“The psychological and neurological symptoms remind me of Bayle’s disease. I’m sure he had a positive Bordet-Wassermann, but OK … Hereditary cerebral syphilis or acquired syphilis, I’d stake my life on it. So the choice is yours, isn’t it?”

TREPONEMA: trepein: to turn, nema: thread. Kircher is caught in a spiral of regression; he is ill from the start.

BEING AT THE FOREFRONT OF ONE’S TIMES? Kircher is a contemporary of Noah. He lives in a fluid age in which present and past mingle. To criticize him in the name of modern science won’t get us anywhere at all. His struggles against war, against dispersal, against oblivion are more important than the solutions he suggests.

DELACROIX: “It is not new ideas that make men of genius, it is this one idea consuming them that what has been said has not been said enough yet.”