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

THE ESSENTIAL CLOSENESS to death, a fleeting insight from this homemade hell where my struggles take place.

DRAGONS: If God is perfect, Kircher asks himself, why has He created these hybrid creatures that appear to cast doubt on the natural order of things? What is the meaning of these breaks, these departures from the norm? In that way God manifests His omnipotence: He can unmake what He has made, he can dismantle what He has set up. For however long it has been our experience that a stone thrown up to the sky falls back down, nothing can assure us that one day it will not disappear into the clouds, on a divine whim and to remind us that it is He who makes the laws.

This simple deduction forbids Kircher any pretension to knowledge: he chooses to believe the unbelievable, systematically, because it is absurd and that is what should make a true believer believe.

FAITH IN A WORLD created for the human theater and at times not merely theatrical. Kircher has an innate sense of the theatrical, a quasi-Borrominian art of vertiginous asymmetries (thanks, Umberto!). Reason’s elastic vision, a tendency toward the picturesque, toward reminiscence, flights of the imagination, a taste for the raw forms of life, for theatrical machinery, for illusion: Kircher is baroque, quite simply baroque ( Barocchus tridentinus, sive romanus, sive jesuiticus … ).

SERTÃO is a deformation of deserto : the desert. They also say the Interior. Sertanejo : someone who lives in the desert, who is himself deserted …

ADD A NOTE on the “anemic machine” invented by Kircher. Ineffective but charitable. Ineffective to the point of charity? At least it makes him more human.

INDISPENSIBLE MACHINES:

for brushing monkeys

for licking the soap clean

for recovering the energy of copulation

for growing old more quickly

for delaying the millennium

for blackening albinos

for cooling down tea

for demoting soldiers

NOTE. If you’re going to get it wrong, do it with precision! Kircher and his contemporaries allowed our world a princely 4,000 years of existence; but at the same time the survivors of the Mayas were counting in millions of years and the Hindus calculating the cycles of successive creations of the universe in periods of 8.4 billion years …

1 I had soiled my sheets.

In which are recorded word for word the licentious conversations of the guests of the Prince & various ignominious acts that put Caspar Schott in grave danger of damnation …

WHEN WE RETURNED to the great hall, we discovered that a very large table had been set in our absence. Kircher was given the place of honor, opposite the Prince, & I was happy to discover I was seated on the left hand of his wife. The banquet started immediately. To describe the profusion of dishes we were given is beyond the weak power of my memory, especially since I was paying particular attention to what my master & the Princess were saying. I do remember, however, that there was a large amount of seafood, shellfish & lobster, as well as poultry & joints of game, which the guests despatched indifferently. As I was hardly touching the pieces that arrived on my plate, being careful to avoid the sin of gluttony, my master lectured me on the matter, telling me it was a feast day & that there was no harm in rejoicing both in body & in spirit at the birth of Our Lord. I must confess that I followed this advice enthusiastically & did full justice to our hosts’ meal. Our glasses were refilled as soon as they were emptied, the crystal sparkled & the whole table was abuzz with laughter & witty ripostes; the Princess was gracious & amusing & I was happier than I could have imagined when I arrived at this place.

The conversation turned on trivial topics & every time they looked to Kircher for, if not the last word on the question, at least the most authoritative opinion. This turned into a kind of game among the guests: to see who could put forward an argument that my master would then confirm, reveling in his approval. Since the profusion of dishes suggested it, we discussed the relative qualities of various foods & the strange habits of ancient or far-off peoples. La Mothe Le Vayer reminded us of the abstinence from all meat practised by Pythagoreans & the Brahmins of the Orient, the latter leaving even grass unless it had been dried, the reason being that the soul is in all green growth; the rhizophagi, spermatophagi, hylophagi & foliophagi of Africa, who live solely on seeds, leaves or the heads of plants & leap from branch to branch as nimbly as squirrels. We can read in Mendès Pinto, someone said, that the flesh of asses, dogs, tigers & lions is on sale in the butchers’ shops of China & Tartary. And in Pliny, another said, that the Macrobians owed their long life to the fact that they fed exclusively on vipers, as we know do certain European princes, who have them swallowed by poultry whose flesh they are going to eat subsequently. And what would you say, Kircher added, trumping the lot, of the cynomolgi, who live on the milk of bitches, which they suck? The struthophagi of Deodorus the Sicilian, who eat ostriches, the acridophagi who eat locusts or even the Asian phthirophagi mentioned by Strabo — who are perhaps Herodotus’s Budini — who swallow their lice with great pleasure?

The ladies cried out in disgust at such habits, but it was even worse when La Mothe Le Vayer started talking about the anthropophagi …

THESE PEOPLE, WHO prided themselves on being philosophers, knew their classics well. References to Latin & Greek authors flew from all sides & the ladies were not slow to stand up for their sex with erudition. Only the Princess remained silent. I saw that she blushed whenever certain remarks reached the limits of propriety & I pressed my leg against hers to show that I shared her embarrassment & agreed wholeheartedly with her disapproval.

Arguing that love was a passion & that this passion could be satisfied either by ourselves or with the help of others, Sieur Jean-Jacques Bouchard analyzed that hoodwinking of the nerves they call “masturbation,” which is an abomination but which he justified with numerous famous examples. In support he called upon Diogenes, of course, Zeno and Sextus Empiricus, who all swore by this method alone because of the independence of others it gave them, & also the entire population of Lydia, which practised this manual operation in broad daylight.

Count Manuel Cuendias, a young Spaniard with a pockmarked face, condemned such conduct, but only to defend love between men. He deluged his audience with a flood of Greek & Latin figures who in the past had all extolled what today we look upon as an act of depravity. Olympus was full of the likes of Ganymede and Antinous, Hercules only had eyes for his Hylas or his Tarostes, Achilles for his Patroclus; the wisest & most highly respected philosophers swore by their catamites: Plato indulged every whim of his Alexis, his Phaedo or his Agathon, Xenophon those of his Clenias; Aristotle went weak at the knees at the sight of Hermias, Empedocles at the sight of Pausanias; Epicurus courted Pytocles, Aristippus crawled for Eurychides …

The female part of the company cried out in indignation at these customs, objecting that humanity would quickly die out if such vile practices should spread excessively; love was really only to be found in the difference between the sexes & not in the androgyny vaunted by that debauchee Plato to justify his vices.

The Prince took up the argument in his own language. “If we are to believe you, mesdames,” he said, “it is only among animals that true love is to be found, for they have the advantage over you of a greater difference & of not philosophizing …”