Love, Loss, Music, and Alternate Realities - Part 1

What is a world without myths? Just mundane reality with its drudgery. And so we turn to works of art. Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a paean to works of creation - to rock 'n' roll, to love and death; treading the line between reality and fiction, a riff rising through the rifts in our memories.


Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it. 


These thoughts and more trouble the narrator (Rai) in his telling of the doomed love story of rock 'n' roll stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Rushdie's version of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth begins with an earthquake that takes the life of the music diva, leaving more than a couple of shattered souls. It prompts Rai - her friend / photographer / part-time lover - to meander through the fault lines of their shared pasts to wonder if it could've been any different. It causes the love of her life to lose his altered vision, the part that created scrambled versions of 'I Got You Babe' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' before they were released in the West. Rushdie's world is a collision of realities and crazed visions where the music is constant, and shifting all at once.


This is a violent story - of unstable love; love lost, sought, and found only to lose over and over again, marked with the irreversible stamp of death - of murders and suicides and slaughter. And death is not the only kind of loss. It is a loss of home, of never finding a place to call home, as Rai keeps repeating "disorientation is a loss of the East". It is a loss of the ground beneath a lover's feet, the ground we worship.

Beyond the parallels with the Orpheus story, is its inversion through the Indian myth of Kama and Rati. It is a Rati figure that gets Ormus back to life twice, but then in the end, Ormus fails to bring his Eurydice back from Hades. Is music or love not sufficient to get her back? Is music not enough to defeat death? Questions abound. And through it all, the music slips between realities and time, still singing its siren song to the grave.


Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the shadow.