68
PARTISAN REVIEW
He advised me not to imagine that each limb was placed and
manipulated singly by the puppeteer during the various moments of
the dance. Each movement, he said, has a center of gravity;
it
would
suffice to direct it in the inside of the figure; the limbs, which are
nothing but pendula, follow mechanically without anyone's aid. He
added that this movement was very simple, that each time, when
the center of gravity moved in a straight line, the limbs were begin–
ning to follow a curve, and that often, when shaken accidentally, the
whole thing was swept along in a kind of rhythmic movement which
resembled the dance.
This remark seemed to me to throw some light on the pleasure
which he pretended to find in the marionette theater. Meanwhile
I did not yet suspect the consequences he would draw from it later
on.
I asked
him
if he believed that the puppeteer who directed these
figures was himself a dancer, or at least if he did not have to have
some idea of the beautiful in the dance.
He replied that, though a thing might be easy in a mechanical
sense, we could not necessarily deduce from that that it could be
manipulated entirely without sensation. The line which the center
of gravity had
tb
describe was, to be sure, very simple, and, in his
opinion, mostly straight. In caies where it is crooked, the law of its
curvature is at least of the first or, at best, second order, and also
in this last case only elliptical; which form of movement, he said,
was natural for the extremities of the human body, on account of
the joints, and therefore it did not require much art for the pup–
peteer to describe it. On the other hand, this line· would remain
something very mysterious. For it was nothing other than the road
taken by the soul of the dancer, and he doubted if it could
be
found otherwise than through the fact that the puppeteer placed
himself in the center of gravity of the puppet; in other words, that
he danced.
I answered that the puppeteer's job had been represented to
me as something rather dull, somewhat like the turning of a handle
when one is playing the hurdy-gurdy.
"Not at all," he replied, "on the contrary, the movements of
his fingers are in somewhat artificial relationship to those of the
puppets, which are attached to them, comparable to those of num–
bers to their logarithms, or the asymptotes to the hyperbola." He
expressed the belief that this last-mentioned vestige of the mind could.
also eventually be removed from the marionettes, that their dance
could pass entirely into the world of the mechanical and be produced
