Introduction to Natural Magic - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 329

Tomcat Murr was a very unusual cat, because he learned by sitting on the
shoulder or on the table of his master, who was in the employ of a small
Duke in Germany, and this master's name was Master Abraham. And he
was sitting at the desk of Master Abraham, who was working practically all
the night writing and computing and thinking about this and that, and Kater
Murr, or Tomcat Murr, was watching his master, learning how to write and
how to read. So he tried it out a little bit for himself, and then observed
that he could indeed write, and Tomcat Murr thought his life was so fasci-
nating, that he should put it down as his biography, his autobiography.
When he decided to write his autobiography he was short of paper, and
he did not know where to find some, but he saw stacks of paper on his
master's desk, partly thrown away, apparently discarded. So he took these
papers and started to write his autobiography. Now, when he was through
with the autobiography, he made it known to one of the publishers in that
province. The publisher was of course fascinated with a tomcat's autobiog-
raphy, so he said, “We are going to print that.” This was the Autobiography
of Tomcat Murr .
When they started to typeset the story of Tomcat Murr, something very
peculiar happened. At certain points, the story of Tomcat stopped and con-
tinued in an entirely different fashion, a story of a little Duchy in Germany,
where the master is writing about the kind of things he has to prepare; he
has to prepare an Aeolian Harp for the next festivity of the Duke, when he
gets visitors—he has to make the water fountains in the proper shape.
It turns out that Kater Murr was writing on the other side of pages which
were written by his master, Master Abraham. The printers found this out
too late, so they could not, in practice, stop. The whole Kater Murr auto-
biography is now written in such a way that you read a couple of pages
about the Tomcat, and then you read a couple of pages of the stories of
Master Abraham.
The fascinating thing, going through that topic, is that you will see that
the observations of Tomcat Murr and the experiences of Master Abraham
are interlinked, because they live at the same place, live in the same envi-
ronment and they live in the same cultural setting. These are two comple-
mentary stories.
For me it was fascinating to read the Master Abraham part. I even made
little notes on the corners of the pages where Master Abraham's story con-
tinued, so I could skip the Tomcat Murr story, because Master Abraham
was applying physics to the entertainment world. The water fountains, the
water plays, the Aeolian Harp, the ways in which he constructed automata
to entertain his employers, etc., etc., fascinated me.
I knew that Master Abraham was collecting his information from one
extraordinarily famous topic. This was from a man by the name of Wiegleb.
Wiegleb published a series of topics—I did not know how many—a series
of topics which were devoted to the introduction to natural magic,
or Lehrbuch, that means textbook, on natural magic in which there is