When I am about to fall asleep, my mind wanders through Solaria, tracing connections, questioning the characters who inhabit it, flying over its cities. It may seem like a futile exercise, a pastime for those with time to waste; instead, it is my way of understanding the real world. Solaria is the lens through which I observe this world: unjust, polarized, manipulated; by building my imaginary world, I try to understand how the real one works.
And yet this creation resembles invention very little and exploration much more—discovery. This island takes shape in my mind by connecting points that already exist and by creating others through interpolation, an activity that pushes me to study and delve into areas previously unknown to me. And so Solaria becomes the university I never attended, where there are no exams to pass, but pieces of a world to build.
Quando le diedi il nome non sapevo cosa significasse Solaria; quando tratteggiai i confini delle sue nazioni avevo un’idea di massima, riguardante il fatto che al centro ci fosse un altopiano, ma non sapevo bene perché. Oggi tutto questo ha assunto un senso e in questo articolo spiego il perché.
The elements of nature
In Sicily, in the city of Akragas—today Agrigento—about 2,500 years ago Empedocles proposed a division of the fundamental constituents of nature into four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. This vision was later taken up and systematized by Aristotle.
from the Liber de sapiente by Charles de Bovelles, 1510.
In my poetic and symbolic reading, I find resonances and similarities between these elements and those at the foundation of modern physics: earth corresponding to mass, air to space, fire to energy, and water to the flow of time.
The Quintessence
Aristotle introduced the quintessence, a fifth element distinct from the other four, not subject to the becoming of the world: the substance he believed celestial bodies were made of — eternal and immutable — set in contrast to the transience of the terrestrial world.
In fact, a few centuries earlier, in the Upaniṣad, Indian thinkers had already proposed — albeit with a conception less strictly physical — the same four elements and a fifth principle, ākāśa, understood as the condition of possibility that made the other four manifest.
Nella mia lettura analogica questo quinto elemento, questa quintessenza è la luce; e il nome della mia isola immaginaria, Solaria, deriva proprio dall’idea che essa sia l’elemento in cui convergono simbolicamente tutti gli altri.
Light, space and time
According to the theory of relativity, light represents the limiting speed that structures the relationship between space and time, the threshold that defines the very fabric of spacetime. The speed of light marks the boundary beyond which our universe is no longer physically describable.
What moves and strikes me most about light is the fact that, when it illuminates our squares, enters our homes and our eyes, it comes from a condition that borders on the metaphysical. At the speed of light, time and space collapse: for a photon, time does not flow and space is not traversed; a light born at the dawn of the universe has not aged by a single millisecond. And yet the light of the sun is here and, right now, it is illuminating my hands.
Light is the infinite that inhabits the everyday.
Light, energy, and matter
Light is an electromagnetic field whose energy propagates in the form of photons, much like waves in the sea. Energy is a property of the electromagnetic field, always present, but it does not coincide with it, just as the force of the waves does not coincide with the sea. For this reason, light is not reducible to the concept of energy, even though it cannot exist without it.
Photons have no mass, and for this very reason they can travel at the speed of light, unlike the particles that give rise to matter, which necessarily travel at lower speeds.
The speed of light therefore represents the limit that distinguishes particles with mass from those without it—that is, what is matter from what is not. Light is not matter.
Therefore, light coincides with neither energy nor matter, yet it carries energy and delineates the boundary between what is matter and what is not.
Information and consciousness
The five natural elements — earth, air, water, fire, and light — do not, however, include two realities that are fundamental for living beings and for human experience: information and consciousness.
Information is the message, the meaning: like the instructions contained in a strand of DNA, capable of guiding the reproduction and development of life. Or like a musical score: a set of signs, inert on the page, that nevertheless contain the possibility of becoming sounds, gestures, and emotions.
La coscienza è invece ciò che riceve, comprende e interpreta quel messaggio: quella funzione che, con sfumature molto diverse, è stata chiamata logos nel mondo greco, buddhi in India, yi in Cina, ʿaql nel pensiero islamico.
One does not make sense without the other: there is no information without someone to decipher it, and no consciousness without something to understand.
Together they form the deep dialogue between reality and those who inhabit it: between human beings and the universe, between subject and object. But since human beings are part of the universe, the universe itself also becomes a subject that, through human consciousness, recognizes itself. For we are pieces of self-aware matter.
For some, like myself, the universe and the humanity it contains are the object of a divine will, and thus information and consciousness, object and subject, can also be interpreted in a bidirectional way: both God and humankind are both information and consciousness.
Thus, these are not merely two elements: they are the dimension of meaning through which the other five become intelligible. I have therefore chosen to understand light as the symbol of what brings our consciousness into communication with meaning, as the threshold through which information becomes awareness, as has occurred in many cultures, albeit with different foundations—from the light of the Greek *logos* to the divine light of Christianity, from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the illumination of nirvana.
And this will have consequences for the mechanics of Solaria: even though I do not yet know how, I imagine that for the inhabitants of the island light is a means through which information is transmitted and received, and consciousness is created, regardless of one’s visual apparatus.
The three axes of reality
From the interweaving of the three axes — space–time, matter–energy, consciousness–information — emerges a three-dimensional cross of the seven elements: a symbolic key, partially rooted in modern science, in which light occupies the center as the principle that connects the other six.
This structure can be coherently translated into a musical object on which the seven notes of a scale are placed. I will write about this later.
Seven territories
The seven territories of Solaria correspond to the seven elements, though not in a direct way.
The five central nations symbolize the natural elements, while the smaller islands, Alma and Eos, separated from the mainland, represent consciousness and information. Altaluna, on the central plateau, symbolizes light, and its name derives from the fact that it stands as a place of reception and reflection of sunlight, understood as the crossroads of the other six elements. Altaluna is, so to speak, the antenna of Solaria, and the island’s name comes from what inhabits it while originating from an almost metaphysical condition: the light of the sun.
The overall shape of the island thus recalls that three-dimensional cross, in which the vertices and the central point evoke the seven elements, even though they do not correspond to them directly.
Nel prossimo capitolo racconterò di come ciò si connetta alle dodici capitali di Solaria – ognuna delle quali corrisponde ad una nota musicale – e ai sette meridiani simbolici che attraversano l’isola.
To listen to and learn about the first two parts of my composition, you can watch the related videos on YouTube:
01 - The game of music: winning or playing?
02 – The Game of Music: I created a palindromic composition
Or listen to it directly on Spotify: