Was it his infatuation with M., the notorious mystic of the Parisian demimonde, that so altered the professional trajectory of Dr. Leonard Clerihew Gow?

Gow’s earliest machines were designed to test his hypothesis that the five senses noted by Aristotle — our sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — were but a meager part of human reckoning, and indeed, the first Gow device demonstrated that our senses of temperature and humidity are independent of touch. The second device, with its pair of disorienting emitters, proved conclusively that balance and proprioception qualify as our eighth and ninth senses, in a famous series of studies repeated by Gladwyn and Openshaw. It is here that Gow first encounters M., a mysterious sybarite whose name was never recorded, and who different accounts describe as a transcendentalist, an opium addict, a prostitute, a medium, a member of the Hapsburgs, a member of the Ballets Russes, syphilitic, a Persian seer, a disgraced mathematician, a woman of twenty five, and a man of more than two hundred.

After meeting M., Gow’s work begins becomes erratic and strange, though the designs of his machines remain reassuringly clinical. The third Gow device ostensibly measures subjects’ senses of hunger and thirst, along with two qualities he called epimoní (persistence) and antochí (endurance) that go undefined in the notebooks that he mostly destroyed. Using the fourth device, Gow made the fantastical claim that humans have an untapped capacity for echolocation, magnetoreception, and sensitivity to polarized light. His mechanism was never submitted for review, and in demanding that his elliptical study be published without data, Gow earned the mistrust of the scientific community. It is twelve years before the news of his death, and the delivery of a package to the provost of his alma mater, that contained the fifth and final Gow device. Included is a caution that the machine must not be activated until 777 years have passed, which the university intends to mark with a ceremony on December 6, 2716. The workings of the device are unclear, its symbols undecipherable, but some speculate that its tympanic membrane emits low frequency sounds far below the threshold of human hearing, and none fail to note that its two-axis keyboard seems specifically unsuited to human hands.

Published December 6, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.