This week it’s more of a prose poem, from the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s book From the Observatory. This book is a stream of reflections on two scientific images, one of an 18th century Indian prince who built a marvelous, Escher-like obsveratory; and the other of the epic migration of the European eel from continental freshwater streams to the Sargasso sea.
In this passage, the Indian prince Jai Singh “confronts the cosmic bull”, and is portrayed, not completely without irony, as someone who uses the scientific tools of his eccentric observatory to break free of human slavery to nature, or human slavery to superstition in the face of nature’s overwhelming force. In the book, Jai Singh stands in contrast to the pedantry of those myopic scientists who study the minutiae of the eels without any appreciation for the majestic scope of the eels’ life cycle.
Jai Singh must have dreamed something else raised like a guerrilla of the absolute against the astrological fatality that guided his lineage, that decided births and deflowerings and wars; his instruments stood up to a destiny imposed from outside, the pentagon of galaxies and constellations colonizing the free man, his stone and bronze devices were the machine guns of real science, the great reply to the total image facing the tyranny of planets and conjunctions and ascendants;
the man Jai Singh, little prince of a declining kingdom, stood up to the many-eyed dragon, answered the inhuman fatality as a mortal provoking the cosmic bull, decided to channel the astral light, trap it in retorts and spirals and ramps, clipped the nails that bled his species;
and all that he measured and classified and named, all his astronomy on illustrated parchments was an astronomy of the image, a science of the total image, a leap from the brink to the present, of the astrological slave to the man who stands in dialogue with the stars.
The Finch and Pea 