To R.v.L.1
If you want to know something and can’t find it out through meditation, then I advise you, my dear, quick-witted friend, to talk it over with the next acquaintance you happen to meet. It doesn’t have to be a sharp-witted thinker, nor do I mean to imply that you should seek your interlocutor’s counsel: not at all! But rather, to begin with, just tell it to him. I see you’re looking puzzled, and promptly responding that you were taught in childhood not to speak of anything but matters you already fully grasp. But back then you probably directed your curiosity toward others; I want you to speak with the sensible purpose of enlightening yourself, and so, applied differently in different circumstances, both precepts may well be able to subsist side by side. The Frenchman says, l’appétit vient en mangeant,2 and this experiential verity still applies if we parody it and say l’idée vient en parlant.3 Often I sit at my desk bent over my law books, and wracking my brain with some twisted disputation, attempt to find the optimal angle from which best to decide the matter. Then I generally stare directly into the light so as to illuminate at the brightest point possible the great effort with which my innermost being is gripped. Or else if faced with an algebra problem, I look, sometimes to no avail, for the first equation that expresses the given conditions, and whose subsequent solution can readily be established by simple calculation. But listen, my friend, if I speak of it with my sister, who is seated behind me and busy over her own business, I promptly find the solution that I might never have found in hours upon hours of brooding. It is not as if she literally spelled it out for me; neither does she know the law books nor has she ever studied Euler or Kästner. Nor is it as if she had led me with insightful questions to the salient point, although this may very well happen often enough. But because I do have some kind of obscure inkling that harbors a distant relation to that which I am seeking, if only I utter a first bold beginning, as the words tumble out, the mind will, of necessity, strain to find a fitting ending, to prod that muddled inkling into absolute clarity, such that, to my surprise, before I know it the process of cognition is complete. I mix in unarticulated sounds, draw out the conjunctions, add an apposition, even though it may not be necessary, and make use of other speech-stretching rhetorical tricks to gain time enough to hammer out my idea in the workshop of reason. Nothing, meanwhile, is more helpful than a gesture from my sister, as though she wished to interrupt; for my, in any case, already strained mind will only be all the more roused by this external attempt to wrest a train of thought on which it is set, and like a great general, when pressed by changing battlefield conditions, I too will find my intellectual capacity stoked to yet a higher degree of performance. This is how I understand of what use Molière’s chambermaid might be to him; for if, as he maintains, he trusted her judgment as able to inform his own, this would bespeak a modesty I do not believe he possessed. But consider, rather, that, when speaking, we find a strange source of enthusiasm in the human face of the person standing before us; and from that look that signals comprehension of a half-formulated thought we may often draw the expression needed to find the other half. I believe that many a great orator at the moment he opened his mouth did not yet know what he was going to say. But the very conviction that he would derive the necessary inspiration from the situation and the resultant stimulation of his state of mind made him bold enough to trust chance to favor his send-off. I am reminded of Mirabeau’s “thunderbolt” of inspiration with which he made short shrift of the majordomo, who, following the conclusion of the king’s last royal session on June 23, in which the monarch ordered the estates general to disperse, returning to find them lingering in the council chamber, said majordomo inquired if the king’s order had been received. “Yes,” replied Mirabeau, “we’ve received the king’s order” – I am convinced of the verbal bayonet thrust with which he concluded: “Yes, indeed,” he repeated, “we heard him” we can see that he does not yet rightly know what he means to say. “But what empowers you, Sir,” – he went on, then suddenly, a rush of heretofore inconceivable concepts rolls off his tongue – “to issue orders to us? We are the representatives of the nation.” – That was just what he needed! “The nation gives orders and receives none.” – and promptly, thereafter, he rose to the pinnacle of presumption: “And let me be perfectly clear, Sir” – and only now does he find the words to express the act of resistance to which his soul stands ready: “You can tell your king that we will not leave our seats, save at the point of a bayonet.” – Whereupon, well pleased with himself, he sank into his chair. – If we try to imagine the majordomo, we cannot picture him on this occasion as anything but altogether at a loss for words, intellectually bankrupt; this, according to a related law of physics, by which, when a body devoid of electrical charge comes in contact with an electrified body, in which, due to a reciprocal effect, the electrical charge is subsequently increased, so too, in flooring his opponent did our speaker’s spirit soar to the height of bravado. Perhaps such daring was sparked in the end result by the insolent twitch of the majordomo’s upper lip, or a duplicitous turn of the cuff, which in France can bring about the overthrow of the social order. We read that, as soon as the court official had departed, Mirabeau stood up and suggested: 1) that they immediately declare themselves a National Assembly, and 2) declare themselves invulnerable. For like the Kleistian jar,4 Having emptied himself, he had once again become neutral, and retreating from his bravado, he suddenly gave vent to a fear of the kings’ authority and a newfound caution. Here we have proof of a remarkable accord between phenomena of the physical and moral world, which, were one to follow it through, would likewise manifest itself in secondary effects. But let me leave my simile and return to the matter at hand. Lafontaine likewise gives a remarkable example of the gradual completion of a thought from a pressed beginning in his fable “Animals Sick with the Plague,” in which the fox is compelled to offer the lion an apology without knowing what to say. You are surely familiar with this fable. The plague is ravaging the animal kingdom, the lion calls together the mighty ones to reveal to them that if heaven is to be appeased one of their number will have to be sacrificed. There are many sinners among them, the death of the greatest of these will have to save the others from their demise. He bids them therefore to candidly confess their offenses. The lion, for his part, admits, in the pangs of hunger, to having polished off a lamb or two; even dispatched the sheepdog if he came to close; and that, indeed, at greedy moments, he had chanced to consume the shepherd. If no other creature perpetrated greater offenses, he was prepared to die. “Sire,” says the fox, wishing to deflect the storm from himself, “you are too magnanimous. Your noble zeal takes you too far. What is it to throttle a lamb? Or a dog, that ignoble beast? And as for the shepherd, he continues, for this is the thrust of his remark: “one can well say,” – although he does not yet know what – “that he deserves the worst,” he hazards; and herein finds himself in a fix, “seeing as he is” a poor choice of words, which, however, buys him time: “one of those people,” and only now does he find the thought that saves his skin: “who make a chimerical empire of the animal realm.” – And now he proves the donkey the blood-thirstiest of beasts (who eats up every green in sight) and so the most suitable sacrifice, whereupon all leap on him and tear him apart. – Such a discourse is indeed a true thinking-out-loud. The series of ideas and their designations proceed side by side, and the emotional connotations for the one and the other are congruent. Language is as such no shackle, no brake-show, as it were, but rather a second, parallel wheel whirling on the same axle. It is something else altogether when the intellect is done thinking a thought before bursting into speech. For then it is obliged to dwell on the mere expression of that thought, and far from stimulating the intellect, this has no other effect than to let the steam out of excitement. Therefore, if an idea is expressed in a muddled manner it does not at all necessarily follow that the thinking that engendered it was muddled; but it could rather well be that those ideas were expressed in the most twisted fashion were thought through most quickly. We often find in a gathering in which lively conversation fosters a fertile intellectual atmosphere that individuals who ordinarily hold back, because of their poor grasp of language, suddenly catch fire, and with a jerking gesture, hold forth, expounding some enigmatic gem. Indeed, once they’ve attracted everyone’s attention, they seem to suggest with embarrassed gestures that they themselves don’t rightly know what they wished to say. It is altogether likely that these ordinarily tongue-tied people thought up something apt and very clear. But the sudden gear-shift involved in the passage of their intellect from the state of thought to that of expression subdued the first burst of mental agitation needed both to grasp the idea and to bring it forth. In such cases, a facility with language is all the more indispensable, so that we may as quickly as possible follow up the idea that we thought, but could not immediately express, with a fitting formulation. And in any case, of two individuals able to think with equal clarity; the one who can speak more quickly than the other will have an advantage, since he can, as it were, send more reinforcements out into the battlefield of discourse. In the examination of lively and educated intellects, we can often see how essential a certain excitement of the mind is, if only to permit the re-evocation of ideas that we have already formulated, especially when, without any introduction, such individuals are made to answer questions like: What is the state? Or: What is property? Or questions of that sort. Had these young people attended a gathering at which a discussion of state or property were already well underway, they would no doubt, through a comparison, abstraction and summation of these concepts, have no trouble finding the definitions. But when the mind has had absolutely no priming, we see our young scholars get stuck, and only a foolish examiner would conclude from this that they do not know the answer. For it is not we who knows, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows. Only ordinary intellects, young people who yesterday memorized the meaning of the political concept of state and will already have forgotten it tomorrow, will have the answer at hand. There is perhaps no worse occasion than a school examination to put one’s best foot forward. And it is precisely because the experience is already so unpleasant and so injurious to our sensitivities, so irritating to the one being examined to be perennially on display, when such a learned horse trader tests us on our knowledge, be it five or six of us, so as to buy or dismiss us. It is so difficult to play a human intellect and tease out its true tone, for the heartstrings are so easily brought out of tune by unskilled hands that even the most seasoned judge of character, the most able practitioner of the midwifery of the mind, as Kant puts it, could, on account of his unfamiliarity with his young charge, do unwitting damage. What generally helps such young people, even the most ignorant, garner a good grade, by the way, is the fact that when the exam is conducted in public the examiners themselves are too ill at ease to allow for a fair assessment. For not only do they frequently feel the indecency of these entire proceedings – one would already be ashamed to demand that someone empty out his purse in front of us, let alone his soul! – but the examiners themselves must also undergo a perilous appraisal of their own intellectual capacity, and they may often thank their lucky stars to emerge from the exam without having laid themselves bare in a manner more shameful perhaps than that suffered by the young lads from the university whom they just examined.
(More to come.)
One evening in a public garden in M…, where I spent the winter of 1801, I happened to run into Mr. C…, who had recently been hired as the principle dancer of that city’s opera and was already all the rage.
I told him that I was surprised to have found him on several occasions in a makeshift marionette theater erected in the marketplace, an establishment that catered to the rabble with little dramatic burlesques and song and dance.
He assured me that the pantomime of these puppets gave him great pleasure, and suggested in no uncertain terms that a dancer inclined to improve his technique could learn a thing or two from them.
Since, by the way he said it, the remark seemed to me more than the stuff of idle fancy, I sat down with him to learn more about the underlying premises for such an extraordinary statement.
He asked me if I did not, indeed, find some of the movements of the puppets, particularly the smaller ones, to be extraordinarily graceful.
This fact I could not deny. A group of four peasants dancing the Ronde to a rapid tempo could not have been portrayed more charmingly by Teniers.5
I inquired as to the mechanism of these figures, and how it was possible, without myriad threads attached to fingers, to direct the motion of each limb and its pauses as prescribed by the rhythm of the movement or the dance?
He replied that I must not picture it as if each limb were individually posed and tugged by the machinist during all the different movements of the dance.
Each movement, he said, had a center of gravity; it would suffice to control this point from the center of the figure; the limbs, which are, after all, nothing but pendulums, would follow mechanically on their own without anything else needing to be done.
He added that this movement was very simple; that each time the center of gravity is moved in a straight line the limbs trace curves; and that often, when merely shaken in a haphazard fashion, the entire mechanism slipped into a kind of rhythmic motion that resembled dance.
This remark seemed at first to shed some light on the pleasure he claimed to take in the marionette theater. But I did not then and there have the slightest inkling of the conclusions which he would subsequently derive from it.
I asked him if he believed that the machinist who controlled the puppet had himself to be a dancer, or at least to have a sense of the aesthetic of dance.
He replied that even if a task seemed simple in its mechanical basis that it does not necessarily follow that such a task could be practiced without any sensibility.
The line the center of gravity had to trace would indeed be very simple, and in most cases, he believed, straight. In those instances in which it was curved, the gravitational law of its curvature appeared to be of the first, or at most, the second order; and even in the latter case, it would only be elliptical, which form of movement was, in any case, (on account of the joints) the most natural for the nethermost parts of the human body, and consequently demanded no great artistry on the part of the machinist.
On the other hand, viewed from another angle, this same line was something very mysterious. For it was nothing less than the pathway of the dancer’s soul; and he doubted that it could be produced in any other fashion than that the machinist adopted the center of the marionette, in other words, that he danced.
I responded that the puppeteer’s craft had been described to me as rather vapid: more like the tuning of the crank that plucked at a lyre.
“Not at all,” he replied. “The manipulative relation between the movements of his fingers and the movement of the puppets attached to them is really rather ingenious, more like the relation between numbers and their logarithms or between asymptotes and hyperbolae.”
At the same time, he believed that this latter soul splitting, of which he spoke, is extracted from the marionette, that its dance is completely transposed from the realm of the mechanical, and could be evoked, as I had supposed, by means of a crank.
I expressed my surprise to see what attention he lavished on this art form invented for the masses, as though it were a fine art. Not only that he deemed it capable of higher artistic development, but even that he seemed to dabble in it himself.
He smiled and said that he dared claim that if a mechanic could build him a marionette according to the stipulations he envisioned, that he would have it perform a dance which neither he himself, nor any other skilled dancer of the day, not even Vestris,6 could execute.
“Have you,” he asked, upon noticing me cast my gaze in silence to the ground, “have you heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortunates who’d lost their own?”
“No,” I said. I had never laid eyes on such a thing.
“What a shame,” he replied; “for if I told you that these poor unfortunates could dance with them, I almost fear you would not believe it. – Well not exactly dancing! The sphere of their movements is indeed limited; but those movements which they are able to command are executed with a calm, ease, and comeliness that makes every thinking person stand in awe.”
I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. For the artist able to construct such a remarkable limb would undoubtedly also be able to build him an entire marionette according to his specifications.
“What?” I asked, for I noticed him casting a somewhat despondent look at the ground: “Of what sort are those specifications that you would make for the workmanship of a puppet?”
“Nothing,” he replied, “that can’t already be found here: symmetry, flexibility, agility – but all to a higher degree; and especially a more natural disposition of the centers of gravity.”
And the advantage that this puppet would have over live dancers?
“The advantage? First of all, a negative one, my fine friend, namely that it never strikes an attitude. For attitude, as you well know, arises when the soul (vis motrix) finds itself twisted in a motion other than the one prescribed by its center of gravity. Since, wielding wire or thread, the machinist has no other point at his disposal than this one, all the other bodily articulations are as they should be, dead, pure pendulums, and merely follow the law of gravity; an admirable quality that one may seek in vain among the vast majority of our dancers.
“Take P…, for instance,” he continued, “when she dances the part of Daphne, and turns to peer at Apollo, who is pursuing her, her soul sits in the axis of the spine; she bends as if she were about to break, like a Naiad from the School of Bernini. Look at young F …, when in the role of Paris, he stands among the three goddesses and passes the apple to Venus: his soul, if I dare say so (and it’s a horror to see) lodges in his elbows.”
“Such missteps,” he added as an aside, “are unavoidable ever since we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is bolted shut and the cherub is on our tail; we are obliged to circle the globe and go around to the other side to see if perhaps there’s a back way in.”
I laughed. – Indeed, I thought to myself, the spirit can’t go wrong if there’s no spirit to begin with. But I sensed that he still had more on his mind, and bid him continue.
“The puppets, moreover, have the advantage in that they are gravity-defiant. They know nothing of the inertia of matter: for the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the ground. What wouldn’t our worthy G… give to be sixty pounds lighter, or if a weight of this magnitude were to aid her in her entrechats and pirouettes? The puppets only need the ground, as do the elves, to graze it, and thereby to reanimate the swing of their limbs against the momentary resistance; we need to rest on it and recuperate from the strain of the dance: for us the moment of contact clearly plays no part in the dance and we have no other recourse but to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.”
Whereto I said, that, as cleverly as he might maneuver the crux of his paradox, he would never convince me that there was more grace in a jointed mechanical figure than in the structure of the human body.
He replied that it would simply be impossible to even hold his own with the mechanical figure. Only a god could measure up to inert matter in this regard; and here precisely was the point at which the two ends of the ring-shaped world came together.
I was ever more surprised and did not know what to make of such extraordinary assertions.
It appears, he suggested, taking a pinch of tobacco, that I had not read carefully enough the third chapter of the first Book of Moses; and it would be impossible to confer with a man who was unfamiliar with the first period of human refinement concerning the subsequent periods, let alone concerning the last.
To which I responded that I did, indeed, know all too well what a mess consciousness had made of the natural grace of Man. A young man of my acquaintance had, as it were, before my very eyes, forfeited his innocence with a single remark, and was never, thereafter, despite every conceivable effort, able to retrieve this lost paradise. “But what conclusions can you draw from this?” I added.
He asked me just what had transpired.
“Some three years ago,” I recounted, “I happened to be bathing beside a young man, blessed at the time with an astounding beauty. He must have been about sixteen years old, and manifested only the faintest traces of vanity fostered by the favor of women. It so happened that we had both shortly before seen the young man pulling the thorn out of his foot in Paris; a copy of that famous sculpture can be found in most German collections. A glance he cast into a large mirror at the very same moment at which he set his foot on a stool to dry it reminded him of it; he smiled and remarked that he had just made a discovery. In fact, I had at that same moment made the same association; but, whether to test that his innate grace was still intact, or to put a healthy damper on his vanity, I laughed and said he was seeing things! He blushed and raised the foot again, to show me; but, as one might well have predicted, the attempt failed. Befuddled he raised his foot a third and fourth time, indeed he raised it ten more times: but for naught! He was simply unable to repeat the same movement – and what’s more, the movements that he did manage to make looked so comic that I was hard pressed to restrain my laughter.
“From that day, indeed, as it were, from that moment on, the young man underwent an incomprehensible transformation. He began to stand for days at a time in front of the mirror; and he lost one charm after another. An invisible and inconceivable force, like an iron net, seemed to settle over and impinge upon the free play of movements, and after a year had gone by, not a trace could be found of the charming allure that once entranced all those whose eyes fell upon him. I know a living soul who witnessed that strange and unfortunate incident, and could confirm, word for word, my account.”
“In this context,” Mr. C … replied in a right friendly manner, “I must tell you another story, of which you will immediately comprehend the connection.
“On a trip to Russia I happened to find myself on the country estate of a certain Sir von G …, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at the time very much focused on their fencing; especially the older one, who had just returned from his university studies, played the virtuoso, and one morning up in his room handed me a rapier. We fenced, yet I proved superior; passion helped put him off his guard; with almost every thrust I struck him, until, finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half in jest, half pained, he said, as he picked up his rapier, that he had found his master; but everything in nature finds its match, and he would soon lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: ‘Off with him! Off with him! To the woodshed he must go!’ Whereupon they took me by the hand and led me to a bear that Sir von G …, their father, was training in the yard.
“When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G … , egged me on: ‘Thrust man! Thrust!’ he said. ‘See if you can teach him a thing or two!’ And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G … The bear’s perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints. Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses he did not even budge.
“Do you believe this story?”
“Absolutely!” I replied with cheerful applause, “I’d believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!”
“Well then, my fine friend, said Mr. C …, “you now have all the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite – such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as the jointed manikin or the god.”
“In which case,” I observed, a bit befuddled, “would we then have to eat of that fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?”
“Undoubtedly,” he replied; “which will be the last chapter in the history of the world.”
- 1. Kleist’s friend Rühle von Lilienstern
- 2. Eating stirs your appetite. The quote comes from François Rabelais’ Gargantua.
- 3. Speaking stirs your ideas.
- 4. Better known as the Leyden jar, this experimental receptacle was invented by an ancestor of the author, Ewald Georg von Kleist, and subsequently reinvented by Dutch physicists Pieter van Musschenbroek and Andreas Cunaeus, both from Leyden.
- 5. David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish genre painter.
- 6. Marie-Jean-Augustin Vestris (aka August Vestris), a famed French dancer.