Reader's letter and editorial: Venus, lunacy, and harmony of the spheres

Dear Readers, 

My short articles on the affects of the Transit of Venus have brought a flurry of correspondence and comments on Facebook and email. It seems that many people also experienced unusual affects at that time ranging from migraines that lasted several days to general feelings of inner disturbance in some readers. Others report that it coincided with or was followed by self-perceptions of transitional shifts in identity or actual discoveries that have transformed lives.

I recently received a letter from a reader in the United States, which I am reproducing here because it raises the interesting point of belief systems and affect, and how we define our selves in relation to the physical environment, a subject that I will be discussing in further article on this site. In the reader's letter below, J.H. mentions the term 'lunatic' in relation to the idea of being affected by the movements of planetary bodies, and the 'scientific' rational belief held nowadays by those with 'concrete' belief systems that such an idea of influence by the environment is somehow 'lunatic". Whilst I am sure we all are aware that the term 'lunatic' derives from the Latin for 'moon' and the observation of 19th century inhabitants of asylums increased signs of activity and distress at the time of the monthly full moon, what is not so widely known in our western culture, although it more influentially underpins and sustains our entire system of communications, is that the five principles of rhetoric (and consequently our traditions and conventions of composition in writing and music) are based on the intervals of the planetary movements that Pythagoreans termed the Harmony of the Spheres. 

The aim of the ancients was to imitate and thus achieve the harmony of the spheres or planetary bodies, in our own human communications, which is an analogy of writing surely worth aiming for. This also tacitly and subliminally acknowledges the effect and affect, by analogy, of heavenly bodies, the planets, on our perceptions and feelings and ideas that we express in communication in writing and oratory, and ideas from the classical world that survive in reinvented forms of rhetoric and composition in contemporary digital media writing, such as this blog.

Dear Dr Skilbeck, 
I am just now as a 61 year old granny, so relieved, to learn that such an accomplished academic as yourself, felt, as well, that

very personal, yet, inexplicable effect of that particular celestial event.

I would like to add, that .....I am the mother of three grown children, the middle one is a scientist, and professor, studying chytrid  fungus and amphibian

declines at James Madison University in Virginia, the eldest runs a nature center with her husband, and the youngest is involved in a cross country

marathon...Operation Amerithon.  And my husband is a lawyer.  They are all very concrete in their belief systems, and I have a difficult time, hiding

from them, what seems to be somewhat, sometimes, lunatic behavior on my part.

So, I am so relieved to have found your website, as you are clearly, given your credentials, no lunatic.

Would very much look forward to hearing from you, here in Carlisle, PA....

J. H.

Thank you for your letter J.H. I hope that you will be be able to join in further correspondence on this topic in the Daily Fugue.

Best regards,

Ruth Skilbeck

Fugue, Canon, Rhetoric, and Harmony of the Spheres

Excerpt from PhD thesis:   

Skilbeck, Ruth (2006), The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. PhD thesis. University of Technology Sydney library, Sydney, Australia.

PRELUDE:  The Writer’s Fugue

                                                                                   Canon

The Latin word fuga refers to ‘flight’, ‘fleeing’, ‘to chase’. The source of the word ‘fugue’, fuga, originally stood for what musicologists now call ‘canon’ (Horsley 1966:6). The word canon (rule) originated in Pythagorean philosophy.

Pythagorean inquiries were predominantly mathematical: ‘arithmetic construed as an investigation into the patterns of numbers, geometry construed as an investigation into metrical patterning of shapes, and harmony construed as an investigation into the patterning of musical intervals’ (Hamlyn 1987/8: 18).

Pythagorean harmony addressed properties of musical intervals, it could be related to arithmetic and geometry because the ‘relations between various musical intervals could be discovered by comparison to the lengths of strings which, when plucked, produced the different tones’ (Hamlyn 1988: 18). From this mathematical analogue developed a mystical belief by some Pythagoreans that similarities between mathematical principles – likenesses – could be seen in many different things. Pythagoreans entertained the mystical belief that as the planets moved through the heavens they made a divine music of too high a frequency for the human ear to hear.  From this application of commensurability, developed the theory that the universe was ordered entirely according to rational (mathematical) principles that, so to speak, articulated divine order or will to a ‘perfect’ plan. The Pythagoreans' discovery of incommensurables (‘numbers such as root two, which cannot be expressed in terms of a rational fraction’ (ibid.)) was considered dangerous to society. 

The word ‘canon’ in Pythagoras’s usage ‘refers specifically to the template used to mark off the harmonic divisions in the monochord’ (Johnson 2004: 147). The Pythagoreans believed that the study of number and harmony would lead to gnosis (wisdom), that the mathematical patterns in the natural world ‘reflect the archetypal laws on which all phenomena are based’ (ibid.).

The conceptualisation of canon (as rule) influenced Greek Rhetoric, as codified by the Roman writer Quintilian (1920), wherein there are five canons (rules) evoking harmonic principles:  invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. They evoke the harmonic principles of ordering by intervals used in musical composition. They also stipulate the ‘rules’, the social conventions or laws of language use for discourse in political and forensic oratory, and to some extent for criticism of the arts of drama and poetry.

The historical development of canon in different settings invokes the principle of    harmonic ordering given tangible expression in music, rational categorization and the setting of rules or laws in language, and an inter-connected mystical belief (incommensurable to modern sensibility) in the authoritative divine ordering of the universe.

Resurrecting this beginning-etymology of the word ‘canon’ there have been parallels and inter-relationships between the development of musical language, and the uses and functions of language as social, political, philosophical and critical discourse in western culture. The issue for modern artistic literary uses of musical concepts is not only how but why creative literary artists have used fugal musicalization in significant literary narratives of Romanticism and Modernism.

(Skilbeck 2006: 5-6)

©Copyright Ruth Skilbeck