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

“FOR NOW WE SEE through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known.” I am submissive, it’s the fault of St. Paul; and I live on illusions, it’s the fault of … a familar tune.

ON EUCLIDES’S REMARK ABOUT GOETHE AND THE ELECTIVE AFFINITIES . The doctor appears to be talking to me in metaphors, but I have difficulty seeing what he’s getting at. That damned parrot’s definitely getting on my nerves. Must get rid of it.

TARTARIN DE TARASCON REVISITED: “Father Jean de Jésus Maria Carme, having become separated for a while from the people who had undertaken the same journey with him, saw a frightful crocodile coming straight toward him, mouth wide open, to devour him, and at the same time an angry tiger emerging from the rushes, equally determined to take him. Alas! How could the poor wretch flee the death that was threatening from all sides? What skill could he use to escape the fury of the two most cruel monsters of nature? There was nothing he could do. Thus exposed to this peril, with no human help, he made vows and prayers, now to the Virgin Mary, now to all the saints. But while he was trying to get Heaven to look favorably on him, the tiger leapt. The man bending down low to the ground to avoid the animal’s jaws, it flew right over him and hit the crocodile which, having its jaws wide open, fastened on the head of the tiger instead of that of the poor man and gripped it so tight in its long teeth that it died immediately. At that, the poor man fled, taking advantage of the opportunity as fast as he could.” (A. Kircher, China Illustrated )

KIRCHER’S FAULTS: preferring rhetoric to deductive rigor, commentary to the sources, the apocryphal to the authentic, preferring quasi-artistic expressiveness to the cold realism of geometry.

FROM LOREDANA: Chuang Tsu passing judgment on Moreira: ‘When the Tsin king is ill, he summons a doctor. To the surgeon who lances an abscess or a boil, he gives a chariot. He give five to the one who licks his hemorrhoids. The baser the service performed, the better he pays. I suppose you treated his hemorrhoids — why did he give you so many chariots?”

I REMAIN CONVINCED that our faculty of judgment is sharper, closer to what we truly are, in the negative — that is, in exercising criticism, in everything our very fibers reject before any conscious intervention of the mind. It’s easier to recognize cheap or corked wine than to distinguish the specific qualities of a great one.

KIRCHER is a mystical forger.

“SHE LIVED FOR THE EXQUISITE PLEASURE of remaining silent.” A nice quote, and one that seems to have been made expressly about Loredana. But we must be able to take it further … (Relate it to the Tractatus : “Whereof one cannot speak,” etc.)

1 If I may be permitted to compare small things with great.

In which the story of Jean Benoît Sinibaldus & the sinister alchemist Salomon Blauenstein begins

IN 1647, AT the age of forty-five, Reverend Father Athanasius Kircher was still a fine figure of a man. His beard had gone white in places, also his hair, but nothing else about him suggested he was that old. He had an iron constitution, much stronger than mine despite the difference in our ages & was only occasionally troubled by hemorrhoids, which he treated with an ointment he had formulated himself.

Summer & winter he rose a little before the sun & attended mass in our chapel, then had a frugal breakfast: a piece of black bread and some soup, which the bursar had sent up to his room. Not that he refused to take his meals with us in the refectory, but his multifarious activities meant he could not afford to waste precious time by devoting it to food alone. Eating at his desk, he could continue to read or write & was very content with something none of us would have thought of considering a privilege.

Thus from seven o’clock until noon he stayed in his study, fully occupied with his books, working on several different ones at any one time. My task was to help him as best I could.

Normally we would go down to the refectory for our midday meal, but during those years of intense work it happened more than once that we missed lunch without even noticing. “It just means we’ll have an even better appetite this evening,” Kircher would say with a smile, though he would then call the porter by his acoustic tube & and have some confectionery brought up or a cup of that decoction called coffee that was fashionable at the time.

We were also in the habit of having a sleep for an hour or two, immediately after lunch; it was a custom from which my master never departed, but he never lay down, having a leather armchair with a spring that allowed the backrest to to be tilted. After that, Kircher spent his afternoon in various practical activities. He supervised the assembly of the machines he was constantly designing for the amusement of the Pope or the Emperor; several of the priests were occupied with these inventions in the College workshops as well as various outside craftsmen.

Many hours were devoted to chemistry, an art that Athanasius pursued passionately in the laboratory he had set up in the cellars, below the dispensary. He prepared the Orvietan antidote & the sympathetic powders to cure the ills with which the great of this world, or simply our brothers in the College, were afflicted. He also had to entertain & guide the scholars who had come to Rome especially to see him & view his collections. Without forgetting, of course, all the physical experiments he regularly carried out in order to test his theories, or those of others, against reality.

At six he attended vespers, then we had our dinner. The hours after that were devoted to reading, conversation &, whenever the clarity of the atmosphere permitted, to observing the stars, an occupation that my master pursued persistently & that we did from a little terrace that had been put up on the College roof. Toward eleven o’clock we went to our well-deserved rest, but it was not uncommon to still see light in his study late in the night.

That year was marked by an episode that, all in all, was fairly pleasant but that was to cost Kircher certain unexpected vexations twenty-two years later.

There was in Rome a French doctor, Jean Benoît Sinibaldus, with whom my master was on good terms because he was a useful acquaintance. Sinibaldus, who had a considerable personal fortune, was a keen alchemist & spent a lot of money, to the great displeasure of his wife, acquiring the materials that were indispensable to the art.

One afternoon in the spring of 1647 Sieur Sinibaldus appeared at the College & asked to speak urgently with Kircher. My master, with whom I was working on a machine that was later to become famous, showed some irritation at being disturbed by this tiresome interruption; nevertheless, he received him with his usual courtesy.

“O joy! O happiness!” Sinibaldus exclaimed a soon as he saw Kircher. “I have seen the sophic sal ammoniac! I have seen it with my own eyes! It’s incredible! The man is a genius, a huge, profound genius, a truly sublime mind.”

“Now, now,” said Athanasius, who found the man amusing & could not stop himself from addressing him with a touch of irony, “take a hold of yourself, my dear friend, & begin at the beginning. Who is this individual who is so happy as to merit such praise from your lips?”

“You’re right,” Sinibaldus replied, absentmindedly adjusting his wig, “you must forgive my overexcitement, but when you know what brings me here, I am sure you will understand my agitation. This individual is called Salomon Blauenstein & the whole city is talking of nothing but him, for he knows how to make gold from antimony with an ease that says much about the extent of his knowledge.”