Dear CORTEX reader, 

What follows is a rather unconventional publication that I feel warrants a moment of introduction. I am a student at Yale and an editor for CORTEX. I usually write fiction (and the occasional cartoon), so this piece – an edition of the surviving pages of a dubiously-legitimate 19th-century manuscript -- isn’t my usual fare. This piece is the result of a long and rather unbelievable story – but you know what they say about fact and fiction.

The story begins at the Hyde Park Library (HPL), a branch of the Chicago Public Library (CPL) where my mother worked as a librarian between the years of 1991 and 2007. The HPL was an ornate neoclassical building in a sea of the run-down brick apartments that characterized our neighborhood, fronted by looming pillars and a cement bench that was always uncomfortably hot in the summer and cold in the winter [1]. Far from the main library branch, it was not intended as a place to browse or sit and lose oneself in some volume of forgotten lore; rather, most visitors (of whom there were few) came to the library to pick up books on hold, root through a box of free SAT and ACT prep materials, come in out of the sleet or the snow or the hundred-degree heat, or use the three boxy desktop computers that I would posit have not been updated since the beginning of my mother’s employment. 

Naturally, the HPL was no librarian’s dream; but if my mother was disappointed to work there, she never let me know. I still remember the thrumming summer afternoons of my early childhood during which she shuffled me onto the bus and took me to work with her, and the endless discoveries she promised me were contained within the pages of a handful of cheap library paperbacks. As she scanned out copies of self-help books and relationship guides, my mother kept one eye on the table behind the shelves, where I sat behind a stack of books the height of my head, kicking my legs and humming to myself.

I tell you all of this because I want you to understand how strange it was for the manuscript to arrive in my mother’s hands. The Beinecke Library receives frequent donations from antiquarian book collectors; I don’t know how that process works, but I imagine collectors come to the library doors with a box of manuscripts like kittens to the doors of an animal shelter. You can find the occasional old tome in Sterling (or in its equivalent in Chicago, the Regenstein); even the Harold Washington Library, the CPL’s main branch, houses some manuscripts, both by virtue of being an aged institution and by virtue of hosting historical archives on its premises, something the HPL never could claim to possess.

Even stranger than the presence of the manuscript at the HPL was the manner of its appearance. Apparently, some visitor had “returned” the book to the library; despite having no connection to the library collections, it appeared one day on the reshelving cart, where my mother found it and brought it home for closer inspection. 

One of the more unfortunate consequences of digitizing the contents of a manuscript in this way is that I cannot show you the manuscript’s material characteristics – the worm-eaten binding, the clasps that once held the covers closed, the water-bent pages. It is not a beautiful manuscript; there are no illuminations, no colorful capitals. But its very existence is testimony to the movement of centuries.

The book contained a hand-written account of a discovery made off the coast of Sweden by a 19th-century polymath and Descartes scholar named Diggerus Heath. Though it is more a personal account than a treatise, Heath named the work “Treatise of the Mind-Child,” clearly intending it as a work of philosophical rather than personal importance. And yet despite its age and presumption of universal value, the manuscript is suspended in its infancy. Twenty-three pages of handwriting remain, and one woodcut purportedly created by Descartes himself; the rest of the book, consisting of over a hundred pages of parchment, is blank. Diggerus Heath stopped writing his Treatise in the middle of a word.

My mother, who – by a stroke of coincidence – had written her PhD dissertation on Descartes, poured her heart into the investigation of the Treatise. As she researched Heath’s life and the circumstances of the manuscript’s creation, she became convinced that “Treatise of the Mind-Child” was a work of incredible value – not monetary value, as the work and its author remains unknown among all but the most obscure intellectual circles, but of philosophical and historical value. My mother began the planning stages of a book, and filled notebooks with historical observations and connections that she made between the manuscript’s twenty-three pages.  She was convinced that her first book, a facsimile of the manuscript contextualized with an introduction and analysis of the philosophical implications of Heath’s supposed discovery, would be received with admiration by philosophers and historians alike.

My mother did not live to complete the project. In September of 2015, she lost control of her hand and shattered a coffee cup on the kitchen floor. Two weeks later, a CT scan revealed a tumor in her frontal lobe. It was glioblastoma – the most common, and most aggressive, form of brain cancer. As the tumor spread its tendrils through the parts of her brain capable of formulating all of the aspects of life that my mother loved – as it severed the mental connections that enabled her to read, to speak, to understand – the prospect of writing a book quietly vanished from the landscape of possibility. And soon enough, so did everything else. My mother slipped into a coma and died in June of 2016, two days after my fourteenth birthday. 

In the aftermath of my mother’s death, “Treatise of the Mind-Child” – along with all of her notes and plans for its unveiling – were packed away in a sealed box, along with countless other memories too difficult to confront. It remained in our attic for over three years. But when I was seventeen, plagued with nostalgia and the knowledge that I was imminently to leave Chicago for the rest of my life, I broke open the box and rediscovered the manuscript. 

I will confess that when I first read the Treatise, I was unsure about my mother’s conviction that it was a work of universal relevance. If you read on, as I hope that you will, you may have similar doubts. Heath is a wandering narrator, and the readability of the work is not improved by his frequent, thinly-veiled references to his deceased wife, Ada von Hohenheim. I suspect that he was already halfway to madness when he began the Treatise, and the resulting work is half genius, half lunacy. Nevertheless, when I discovered the Treatise wrapped in a dusty old quilt in a box of what remained of my mother’s life, I knew the real significance of what I had found. Her work was her memorial, and thus my duty. 

At the time of writing, I have sent this manuscript to seven different academic institutions, four of which have not responded, two of which have sent back form rejections, and one of which instructed me to quit sending them fraudulent material. I am thankful to the rest of the CORTEX staff who decided to let me publish this piece in the issue, though it differs rather substantially from the kind of work that I have contributed to the magazine in the past.

Without further ado, here is Diggerus Heath’s Treatise of the Mind-Child, transcribed from the original manuscript by the late Anna Schwab, with notes contributed by herself and compiled by her daughter.

Format of Editors’ Notes: 

Footnoted: left by Lee Johns, 2022 - 2024

Footnoted and italic: left by Anna Schwab, Lee’s mother

In the text and italic: Unknown English hand, possibly a woman, mid-19th century

A TREATISE of the Mind-Child:

CONCERNING the discovery of the erstwhile Forgotten automated daughter of Rene Descartes

First Written in the Year 1817 by Diggerus W. Heath.

Storms blew cold and merciless over the North Sea, and the waves towered over the tallship masts, and the bravest man wished for home when his sail flipped in the trade winds; and from the shifting deck a captain could not see the white sands of the Swedish shore until his vessel was close enough to run aground. So unrelenting were the tumbling clouds – they covered the earth from coast to coast, thick as a dust storm. Behind the clouds men died a thousand deaths, gasping deaths, deaths as quick as a snapped hull and as long and slow as a swallowed parasite [2], quiet deaths masked by the sound of thunder and the crash of water against the deck. 

We pulled her from that dark place, the mind-child, tangled in a net. Scraps of seaweed, flopping fish, and she; she with her green algae skin, layered with clams and debris. She was barefoot, scrape-kneed, so whole and young I almost thought her alive when I first held her in my eyes. 

My hosts thought her the final sunken evidence of a drowning. Indeed, children went missing in the sea, stumbling from docks and beaches into riptides that swept them towards the mouth of Hades. The body of a five-year-old was no monument, no memorial [3]; the North Sea, her murderer, hid her from fishing nets and adventurous divers in their fishbowl visors. To find her body was extraordinary luck – a gift that the sea had given us, a treasure marked on no maps. But according to my hosts, her open glass eyes cast the journey in a veil of bad fortune.

The fishermen who sailed the Augustana were crude mechanicals. They did not want to move the body that the sea entrusted to them, for fear her touch would damn them. They protected themselves with obscure superstitions; they would not speak of her without spitting over the railing into the sea, joining their small living water with the angry, churning water of God. Were it not for my intervention, they would have thrown Francine overboard with her meager haul of fish – but I insisted that my search would not come to waste only so long as I could keep her body on board and saturated them with kronor until they allowed me to take her beneath deck. Hastened by the discomfort of the crew, we took up anchor at once and sailed on towards the port of Holland.

It took little investigation to discover that the body that we had pulled up from the bottom of the sea was not a human child. A human body is fragile; its bones shatter under the pressure of the waves, its skin decays, its flesh is food for hungry creatures. But where any human child would have died a hundred times over, the mind-child survived. I scraped the barnacles and rust away and sat her down upon my cot in the ship’s cabin. Her face was porcelain, cracked and discolored but remarkably intact; she was covered in scraps of fabric, torn and muddied, but beneath it her skin was unbroken steel; in her wooden right hand, I found a slot in which a quill was meant to sit, now clogged with mud. Her cheeks and lips were painted red, blood-red, and she was as cold as the Earth. 

She was the mind-child. I knew it at once, from the moment I cleaned the mud from her. She was a child borne not from man’s flesh, not the fallible flesh that dies and suffers and rots [4], but from his perfect mind – the mind of one remarkable man who inscribed his scribbled signature like an artist on the unflinching metal surface of the bottom of her left foot. The caked dirt blackened the lines against Francine’s porcelain skin. Though the signature was scrawled and individual letters were nearly impossible to make out, after my lifetime of study and my year of heavy solitude [5], I would know it anywhere. It was him – the great philosopher [6].

The port of Holland was alive with sailors escaping the storm. We took Francine in under a canvas sheet in a carriage, her pale feet uncovered like those of a child in a mortuary. For the past months, I had been renting a room in the village center, the top floor of a townhouse owned by an old woman named Mrs. Havish who made a sound of distress as we entered. I did not look at her; I carried Francine up the stairs herself, my arms under her arms. In my room, I set her in the chair under the window that shut out the morning and lit a candle. In its hesitant light I tried to place a pen in her hand, but in the intervening centuries pens had turned from thin feather stalks to manufactured steel; I had to deconstruct the machine [7] to make her come to life. I searched her body for an exposed cog, a gear I could turn to make her move, to hear her voice trickling from the ends of her fingertips. Her skin was warmed by the candle, and in the movement of its flickering she seemed to smile. 

Francine would not speak to me that first night. I sat across from the table from her in the late evening, writing a letter. The golden light moved across Francine, across the walls, and cast golden shadows on her dirty hair. The scratching of the pen seemed to echo, and a dripping from the ceiling, and a ringing of regret in my ears. There was a woman in London – we shall call her A. – who made the most intricate machines; whose fingers wove steel more surely than embroidery thread; whose five-centimeter toys marched across the table to me as we ate breakfast, little soldiers carrying sweet regards and the echo of her laughter. She remains in London, though her home is dark and windowless. To her I wrote until the candle died. 

The dark fell, cool and silent, over me. My melancholic heaviness returned. My writing scattered; A.’s long hair seemed to brush the back of my neck; my hands seemed not to be my hands. I set down the pen and carried Francine to the washbasin. She was heavier than a child, and my limbs ached already from the atrophy of isolation and the effort of keeping her skin from slipping free. I scrubbed the drying dirt from her hair and pulled seaweed from her forehead [8], scraped silt from the corners of her eyes with my fingernails, combed her hair with my fingers. It lay dull and dead on her forehead. The sight settled, despite myself, into the place in my chest that held something sharp and self-devouring. 

References

[1] It’s since fallen victim to the inescapable tide of gentrification – Targets, Whole Foods, and mansions are gravestones for old South Side Chicago homes. 

[2] A.H. [Lee’s note: Ada von Hohenheim, Diggerus Heath’s wife] died three years earlier, in 1814. Her place on the Heath genealogical tree includes a line leading nowhere – death during childbirth?

[3]  I’ve tried to track down what happened to Ada von Hohenheim, and I remember my mother spending countless fruitless hours seeking an online record of Heath’s own grave site. I did find a claim from one of Heath’s contemporaries that a wealthy, unnamed explorer, supposedly mad after the death of his wife, had sponsored a party to seek passage through the Arctic and insisted that he would accompany them. That is the last trace I can find of Diggerus Heath – and who knows if it refers to him, as it seems that every third British polymath sought Arctic passage in those days. 

[4]  Not necessarily, of course. Perhaps it freezes in some desolate land where the air bites and the ice devours. Perhaps it is cremated and kept in an urn in a cardboard box in an attic where nobody wants to look at it, for fear it will summon dangerous memories, mental ghosts. Perhaps it vanishes completely and becomes an idea. 

[5]  A tantalizing detail. I can’t find much about life after A.H. – no publications, no appearances in book auctions or the census. Perhaps he was simply alone/reading but where I don’t know.

[6]  H. resists saying D.’s name through most of the manuscript. Separate identity = broken identification/projection? [Lee’s note: Nearly a year after my mother died, I realized that I had forgotten her voice. I say “forgotten” and not “begun to forget” because the process had already concluded by the time I noticed it. It had occurred somewhere at the boundaries of my mind. One day, it seemed that I could recall the sound of her telling me, over the phone, that she would be late, or saying that I had missed my father’s birthday and should call him up; the next, the memory was gone, as if it had slipped out in the night. Sometimes I find myself trying to summon echoes of her from a video of an old lecture posted on her university website, piecing her together from five minutes of an electronic voice and from memories of certain words she spoke in unique ways to me as a young child (“body,” for instance, she used to draw out long, not quite with a Southern drawl but with a kind of dip in the middle – “does anyboh-dy feel like lunch?”). Now she says nothing at all. As I read her notes, I try to twist them into a voice that no longer exists. Did my mother imagine Heath’s voice as she read? Did he imagine Descartes’s? In Heath’s desperate attempt to find meaning in a scrawl, I see not only his desperation, but a chain of longing that seems to reach on indefinitely – a hand that reaches and grasps at a ghost, which grasps at another ghost, which reaches for another. Late last night I reached for my mother and found ink on a page.]

[7]  The pen, presumably – not the MC -- though it’s more poetic somehow to assume he means the latter.

[8] The first fights that I can remember between myself and my mother were about my hair. It was long and thin and twisted overnight into monstrous snares. She would corner me with a comb while I screamed as if I were dying, confusing me with deconditioning spray the way a park ranger might confuse a bear, then pulling it through with a force that I judged cruel and unusual. When the ordeal was done, we sat together, worn out and ears ringing, and she braided my hair. I would forget my resentment as she showed me how to tie the knots back in, this time intentional and reversible. These would stay for several days, slowly fraying. When I finally unwove them, my hair would fall in tight curls formed by habit – the hair of a deep-sea mermaid.