conflicting chords

The Harmony of the Spheres was a concept known among ancient Greeks who imagined that seven celestial bodies: the Sun, the moon, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn revolved around the Earth.  They imagined that each sphere was associated with a different note on the musical scale.  In Salman Rushdie’s short story of the same name (The Harmony of the Spheres), his characters can be related to the different spheres and what happens when they collide.

Eliot Crane, the main character in the story, experienced schizophrenic attacks for the last two years of his life.  His wife Lucy took care of him during these couple of years and rearranged her life and turned down a more prestigious job just to be with him.  Her choices are questioned by the reader, and may be believed to be off balance from the life she should have chosen.

The narrator of the story is a man named Khan.  He was a college friend of Eliot’s who continued to have a close relationship with Eliot up until his death.  Khan and Lucy (Eliot’s wife) had lived in the same town as children and had actually been attracted to one another at some point.  It wasn’t until Eliot started his descent into insanity that Khan found out who Eliot’s wife was.  

Lucy had a boat which was named Bougainvillaea, and Khan, his wife Mala, Eliot and herself, would take trips together aboard the ship.  At one point in the story, Eliot had to depart from the boat early to attend an important meeting.  Mala wasn’t  there, so Khan and Lucy rode alone.  After drinking heavily and reminiscing of their past of growing up in the same town, they headed off to bed.  While lying next to each other, Lucy murmurs “madness, love” (p.132) to Khan and then turns her back to him.  I believe what Lucy had said was a reference to the choices she had, and the one she took.  While alone on the same trip, there was a point when they (Khan and Lucy) were both covered by darkness while moving through a tunnel.  Khan led the way with a torch and in the end they came out together as Khan recalls: “Our luck held; we emerged into the daylight.” (p.133) I believe this event was symbolic to the ways things could have been, had they not been thrown off their ‘balance,’ using the metaphor of the Greeks’ celestial bodies in The Harmony of the Spheres.

At one point in the story, Khan recalls how Lucy, Eliot, and himself were riding in a car with each other after a Jubilee they had attended earlier that evening.  Eliot was driving, and he did so recklessly through blind corners, and lightless back roads.  This short story came directly after Khan asks the question, “Why do we lose our minds?” (p. 134) I see this situation as symbolizing Eliot’s crazy and out of control travel into the unknown and Lucy and Khan’s inability (as they sit in passenger seats) to influence the outcome.  Lucy and Khan are just witnesses to Eliot’s insanity and they cannot help him.

In the end, Eliot takes his own life because he can no longer take the insanity and the voices controlling his thoughts.  I believe the tragedy of this story can be related to the Greeks’ system of Harmony of the Spheres.  The celestial bodies, as the Greeks believed, were each on their own path parallel to one another.  When one takes a different path or collides with another’s the musical notes interrupt one another and something is created that wasn’t meant to be.  Eliot, Lucy, Khan, and Mala had gotten off track at some point which caused an unnatural flow of things.  Khan and Lucy were probably supposed to end up together, while Eliot and Mala were to be together as well.