Polina pauses briefly, as if she wishes to say something about Mr. Freud. (She doesn’t like Mr. Freud very much.) Will is more important than understanding, Polina had always believed, and with this thought she catapulted centuries back, leaving behind the muddy present and the pathetic onion-like model of the soul dismembered by too much talk and endless stinging discoveries. Her soul was not an onion. And she also wasn’t a ruminant. If human will was as tortuous as the human walnut brain with its endless folds, nothing would ever come of anything.
And nothing ever did come of anything! There were an unfortunate number of cautionary examples. Once long ago at an evening gathering, Polina had wished to recite a poem from memory to delight the other revelers. Her voice was practically made for intoning hundred-year-old verse. She wanted to give herself, her whole aspic-like body, to the service of the poem, humbly and selflessly. Unlike the others, she didn’t imagine she was special. That one of her loathsome personal secrets, whatever it might be, could be an interesting topic of conversation. None of them were. But neither were anyone else’s secrets! Every explanation of a motive pressed into service as a blithe amusement—I only meant to wound him, that loud but oh-so-primitive way of speaking, I went looking for attention and I got it, believe you me, I got it with interest—sent shudders through her body. It irritated, scandalized, and shocked her. The direction of the conversation was always so depressingly predictable. Surely she wasn’t the only one to be disgusted by the exhibitionists? The admiring gazes and encouraging nods the confider received were just theatre. Right?
There Polina had stood and seized, as they say, the moment. “Mmmmm, do you know, I just read . . .” As a rebuke to the confider and in order to delight the others, she began to recite from memory an old poem that lacked any hint of the onion soul, that had a stately rhythm and a bright, uncomplicated will. Each line resounded in the hall, and, entranced by her own voice, Polina added volume. Everyone within ten meters froze to listen.
And then—silence. Someone snickered. The circle dispersed. Someone, perhaps in the corner with the fireplace, lobbed a feeble effort, doomed to failure, at building a swaying suspension bridge: “. . . that someone still knows how to do that in the age of copy and paste . . .”
That Sigmund Freud, not Swedenborg, received the glory for developing a method for analyzing desires and emotions was only a small, repulsive fact, though. Polina quickly brushes both of her ample, sagging breasts with her hands as if wanting to shake something off them. Then out of old habit she straightens her back (as she had done with her cat in her lap: her back hunched from reading, she would continue scratching and petting with her right hand as she straightened up, so as not to interrupt Begemot’s purring and cause him to misinterpret her change in position and jump off her lap, because, Begemot soon learned, now began the best stage of the evening, when his mistress would begin a trance-like oration, during which her touch would become almost supernaturally gentle). A bright, clear voice begins to rise from Polina’s erect frame.
“Swedenborg practiced his more customary scientific skills by founding a vernacular publication, Daedalus Hyperboreus, and serving as its editor. He was also a keen economic thinker, adamantly opposing limits on trade, such as customs laws and navigation acts. He placed society above the individual, the fatherland above society, and the church above the fatherland. Well. Ehem. Perhaps this is sufficient background on the temporal interests of Mr. Swedenborg?”
Instead of waiting for a reply, Polina continues, sliding forward like a slippery herring, like a shuttle in a loom, because she is in motion now, in her element; she is in a seraphic mood.
“So let us move on to Swedenborg’s literary output; here also we have reason to detour through his early writing in order to avoid misrepresenting his achievements. Regnum subterraneum, ‘The Underground Empire’, became one of Swedenborg’s most notable scientific works from his period of activity in the mining industry. Especially the sections on iron and copper, ‘De ferro’ and ‘De cupro’, which offered an excellent general treatment of the subject even for encyclopedists. Swedenborg adopted his conception of reality from Descartes, who believed in the fullness of the universe, not Newton, who defended void theory. We know that he should have listened to the latter ideas, at least if we’re approaching the matter from a scientific perspective. But poetic souls may find more inspiration in Swedenborg’s speculations. At least I find them both uplifting and diverting!
“According to Swedenborg, reality is made from small bubbles or bullae. The space between these bullae is filled with even smaller, finer bubbles, aether particles. The smaller the bubble, the more durable and quick moving it is. And things certainly have a habit of moving in this world! Nothing remains stationary for even a moment. Either movement arises internal to the bubble, tremulation (vibrations), or externally, that is motion caused by the bubble, known as undulation. Let me see if I remember how it went . . . ‘The atmosphere, whether the ethereal atmosphere, or the aërial, is a lower aura, and with this also the angels are compared; and the human animus, to which the affections or passions are attributed, is a similar spirit or genius.’ Yes, that was it!
“Gradually Swedenborg developed more interest in the human body, the kingdom of the soul. He became fascinated with the circulation of blood and especially the anatomy of the brain. Open a brain cell, Swedenborg said, and you will find small spheres within that give birth to material ideas. Continue opening, peel back one more small sphere, and you find new small vortices, namely intellectual ideas . . . According
