Musica Universalis

Musica Universalis

            Do the musical notes born from the symmetry of chaos play a tune of madness or pure genius?  Is comprehension of ‘forbidden knowledge’ the key to reality?  Or is it simply chemical imbalance that leads to an illusion of what controls the universe?

            “Music of the Spheres” was a concept the Greek philosopher Pythagoras developed which identified celestial bodies as being related by whole-number ratios of pure musical intervals, which in turn, created musical harmony.  Of course this ancient philosophical concept was founded on the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, but even so, the concept has since been transferred into modern models about structure of the universe. 

            Today, beyond a celestial connotation, “The Harmony of the Spheres” is used to describe the perception of ones reality and the interaction of knowledge.  In a short story by the critically acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie, this conflict of the mind is examined in a story of same quoted name sake.  The story tells of a paranoid schizophrenic writer and the effect his short life has on his best friend the narrator.  The perception of the mad writer Eliot Crane is at first one of intrigue for his eccentric visions of the world.  But as more is reveled, the best friend and narrator is forced to examine the tormented spheres of his own reality.  “If I find it impossible to let go of Eliot’s memory, it is perhaps because I know that the seductive arcane which drove Eliot Crane out of his mind almost ensnared me as well” (Rushdie 137).  Mad ramblings can so often be misconstrued as words of genius.  Simply to look throughout history is to see how people become drunk off the ideologies of crazed leaders. 

            The narrator goes on to reveal that at the time of his first meeting Eliot Crane, he himself was suffering from a “disharmony of my personal spheres” (139).  Being at a weakened impressionable state, the narrator easily fell victim to the ‘forbidden knowledge’ preached by Eliot Crane.  “I thought I’d found another way of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two othernesses, my double unbelonging” (Rushdie 141). 

            But alas, the forbidden knowledge was nothing more than an illusion; the mad ravings of a miserable soul.  There was no definable good in the memory of Eliot Crane, in fact, in the end; the “joke” was on the narrator.  Khan (narrator) faced collapse of his own harmony and demolition of spheres.

            To reach the limit of the dividing line between madness and all encompassing genius is to reach infinity.  Whether or not patterns of chaos or alignment of the planets define our existence, each and every human being (or yuman bean) experiences reality from within.  Tainted by a chemical imbalance or not, our perception of the universe is our own; none right none wrong.  Let us not fall prey to the ideas of others before first identifying those of our own.