By Brian George
“The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which, through discordant tensions, through syncopes and cadenzas, as it were (as men employ them in imitation of those natural discords) progresses towards certain pre-designed quasi six-voiced clausuras, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.”—Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World (Harmonice mundi)
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In an email about her relocation to Wyoming, Amely Greeven wrote: “I committed to staying through the winter, in a cabin owned by a wildlife photographer. When I went to visit it, deliberating about whether to take the leap, a female moose ambled out of the trees, dipped her sable muzzle into the creek, and then wandered up the jewel-green field next to me—yards from where I was standing. I took that to mean, ‘Yes, come here, and live next to us....’ I felt like Snow White. Will bluebirds come and braid my hair?”
I responded: Whether animals can become the vehicles for higher powers, or whether, by some quirk of a-causal clockwork, they can appear at just the right time and in just the right place in order to make some larger purpose understood, you can certainly feel when something out of the ordinary is going on.
When I was 16, and at the beginning of phase of almost psychotic creative transformation, I experienced, late one night, at 2:00 AM or so, an enormously loud ringing and droning sound. At first, I took this to be some type of bizarre emergency warning system, designed to get each person in the city out of bed, although it seemed like overkill for anything short of an imminent nuclear war. The sound could also be compared to Tibetan chanting: Enormously low, bone-shaking bass notes supported a middle ground of somewhat complex musical geometries, repetitive but chameleonic, and difficult to hear all at once, which then rose into almost inaudible overtones.
When, in the morning, I discovered that no one else had heard the sound, I was, to a certain extent shocked. I was shocked in the way that you are when you find out that your parents have had sex, and that your birth may in some way be connected to this act. On a different level, I had begun, even as it was happening, to suspect that this sound was actually the “Music of the Spheres.” For many thousands of years, perhaps, the volume had been turned down way too low, or else our ears had been plugged with wax. Then suddenly—and no doubt for reasons that were long ago explained, but by temperamental teachers, and in a language we don’t speak—the music became audible.
