Keeping the Balance

Many centuries before Salman Rushdie wrote the short story “ Harmony of the Spheres,” an astronomer and a mathematician developed their own concept of a harmony within the spheres. Pythagorean, in the first model, stated that as the celestial bodies drift through space, the intervals in their orbits could be inserted into an equation and in this equation, you could get different pitches of sound. If you gathered the pitches of all bodies, you could then compose a harmony that occurs naturally in the universe. Pythagorean’s model was Earth centered and therefore he had a different melody than his successor, Johannes Keppler. Johannes Kepler fully developed this harmony of the spheres in the way it truly is supposed to sound, with the sun in the middle. If you do a little research into this man, you can see all the different pitches that can be assigned to each body of mass in the surrounding solar systems and from these numbers, a series of sounds can be composed.

Rushdie skillfully describes the parallel between what is needed to keep the celestial spheres and our minds in harmony through the examination of the character named Eliot Crane. Crane is plagued with “brainstorms” of paranoid schizophrenia. These episodes would occur at random but were also triggered by Crane’s writing. Eliot Crane’s obsession with the paranormal, the occult, dark philosophies and abstract religious practices threw his mind into a confused state of consciousness where he even develops his own story of a confrontation with a demon. The narrator is not surprised at the demise of the balance in Eliot’s mind because of his immersion in the dark arts. Songs of angels, hymns, Tibetan chants, and mantras, combined with various schools of thought and religion all filled Crane’s head. The narrator even asks,” what mind could have defended itself from such a Babel? In order for a mind to be protected from itself it has to know its boundaries and limits.

What makes people lose their mind? “A simple chemical imbalance” was Eliot’s point of view, but it is not that “simple.” The narrator claims that he knows what made Eliot sick, and that he was going to remain well by not flooding himself with spiritual confusion and the occult. What makes people lose their minds is when one half of their brain overpowers the other, therefore causing an imbalance. As in Eliot’s case, constantly flooding his brain with the dark occult caused a transformation in his ability to responsibly decipher reality. His rational thoughts were replaced by the spiritual, and the dark. When ones rationality is stripped away, it causes biochemicals to surge and this is what led Eliot to drive the wrong way, blindfolded, down the freeway. When you flood yourself with the metaphysical, the un-earthly, and the spiritual, you detach yourself from your body, leaving you floating far away in your mind. Someone with as much “forbidden knowledge” as Eliot Crane cannot live a normal life, it is simply impossible. Although Eliot’s studies of Pentangles, the illuminati, the Great Pyramid, the Golden Section and the intricacies of the spiral impressed the narrator because of his perceived scholarly ambitions, it was these studies that were leading Eliot down a one-way path to death. Your earthly mind only has the capability to handle a certain amount of non-earthly ideas, and occult philosophies. An overindulgence in any of the above ideas causes massive confusion in a person, and this confusion leads to detachment, and then to schizophrenia.

Just like the equations of Pythagorean and Keppler balanced entirely on the exact harmony of spacely bodies, the functioning of a human mind functions on the balance of creativity and rationality. If one planet or star were not in harmony with the others, Keppler’s whole symphony would have been different because of one note. When your mind cannot determine the difference between the paranormal and the normal, reality and fiction, a paranoid schizophrenic mind state erupts. Human beings, like everything else in the cosmos, are meant to live in balance. A study of the Yin Yang shows that if anything in ones life is out of moderation, balance is impossible. A functioning mind has the ability to know when to stop searching for forbidden knowledge, and knows, to what extent, the pursuit of this knowledge can harm you.