knew its song, though, and he wrote it down. Pulled it out of the air and trapped it in the neat cages of a five-lined staff. He studied how the sloth so perfectly intones the first elements of music, how sloths and goats and cats and nightingales so loosely guard their secrets. And he knew they had secrets. Buried deep and silent and waiting in the slow, instinctive twitches of the world. They all knew without knowing, maybe Kircher did too, waiting for that message to weave its way into distracted ears, coded but somehow clear. Another cipher without a key. And Kircher there smiling, pen in hand, deciding to tell us what it is, deciding to keep what it means to himself, always smiling.

Manufacturer’s note on psychiatry, the third: Reil’s theory of the mind was incomplete. Not wrong, but not finished. Not until sometime between 1795 and 1803, when he met Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and his posse of giddy romantics at the university in Halle. For Schelling, there was no difference between the ideal and the real. Alone each was complete; taken together they formed complimentary parts of a different whole. So what you wish exists, somehow, perfect wisps of dream built into the flawed, tangible approximations known as real things. And those pictures in Reil’s mind — those whiskers, ears, eyes and tails — they must exist, too. To Schelling their immateriality was no constraint, no problem. Maybe that thought sent Reil flipping back into dictionaries, back into the L's to take another look at lebenskraft: def: life force; alt: the force of life; alt: vitality. And maybe that’s why Rhapsodieen uberdie Anwendung der psychischen Curmethodeauf Geisteszerriittung, his next book, seems so much less concerned with forces and chemicals, so free from the weight of things. And maybe that’s when Reil found Kircher, in that place the old man had been waiting all along — still grinning after all those years, still listening to all those tacit purrs, still waiting for two more hands to join him in silent duet.