Madness Through Imbalance

Standing in the shower. Loud. Pounding, ear splitting armies of water attack my shoulders, pierce my upturned face. Fear, trembling fear in untouched unreality. Shower demons pull at my soul, nails scratching at my thighs, a futile hope to hang on to the familiar. Sinking into my watery coma to a Dark hidden place, inexplicable to you, and to me. Then back again, back to the light out of the shower of my cruelest madness.

This experience is one that I have tolerated for years. Panic attacks, rising unbidden, have been the plague of my life since junior high. Are they madness? The psychiatrists tell me no, they’re quite common. But maybe they are. For certainly I feel unhinged during and after the experience. Can there be such a thing as this momentary madness or are the mad condemned to a lifetime stuck in this place, this place that I fear the most? Where does this madness afflicting every nerve, every artery and fiber, originate from?

These are questions that Salman Rushdie, author of the short story "Harmony of the Spheres" intends his readers to ponder. The main character of this story, one Eliot Crane, bonafide genius, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. This affliction is literally, the death of him as one day, without much warning, he shoots himself, quieting the voices in his mind.

Crane's "madness" has many possible origins. Crane himself declared his madness was due to a “simple biochemical imbalance.” Perhaps. But, if this were true a trick of chemical magic could make a person sane, balanced once more. Medication is rarely the only answer to any problems, in fact, medication can cause more problems than solutions. Therefore there must be another reason responsible for Crane’s madness, this great imbalanced genius.

As the story begins to develop is quite obvious that Crane is very well read. He reads about many different subjects, yet the one that seems the most fascinating to him is religion and more specifically the occult. Religion is an institution which claims to possess all of the answers mankind has been searching for since man began. In reality, these are answers that no human can claim to know for sure. Different faiths have different answers to questions of being, the afterlife, and a higher power. Crane, I presume, has learnt of many of them. Examining this intellectual and spiritual overstimulation, coupled with confusion and the search for answers it is easy to understand how Crane may have gone mad.

I emphasis that Crane is a creative human being, an avid reader and writer. As we’ve learned through reading Bessie Head’s novel Maru, many creative people self destruct when creative energy is bottled up, no release in sight. We get the impression that Crane is writing some work of art, a novel perhaps. Lucy, his wife, states that there “may be enough of the Glendower thing. Someone could pull it into shape”, alluding perhaps to this novel. Khan, the narrator and friend of Crane searches through Crane’s writings and discovers that there is no novel, only hate filled and pornographic rants. When Crane was unsuccessful in releasing his creative energy productively he self destructed. At Crane’s funeral an old classmate reminiscences about Crane, announcing that they used to say “He’ll probably make something half way decent of his life if he doesn’t kill himself first.” Yet Crane killed himself before he had the chance, just as countless other creative geniuses have done before him.

A third contributor to Crane’s apparent madness was his relationship with the two women in the short story, Mala and Lucy. The phrase “Madness, Love” is repeated throughout the story, in context of Lucy’s adulterous relationship with Khan. Crane, married to Lucy had an affair with Mala, married to Khan. We all know from personal experience of the maddening properties of lust and love. Crane is caught between these two women, Lucy, whom he is dedicated to, and Mala, who balances his creative energy with her scientific nature. Lucy cares for him, yet she has no ability to reconcile his madness with her practical nature. With Lucy, with this bottled up creative energy, with this information overload, Crane makes the final descent into madness.

“The Harmony of the Spheres” does not have an answer for the restoration of balance, at least not any empowering, practical answer. Crane’s depressing answer for balance was one unthinkable to many people, suicide. Lost without any other answer, he quieted the noise in his mind with a shotgun shell. “Bang. And at last, silence, requiescat in pace.” It is in this way that Crane creates his own “harmony of the spheres.” The spheres of his mind - alternating madness and sanity are reconciled in his death, creating a morbid harmony. Yet his death also creates unbalance; it creates a woman without a husband, it uncovers the secret of his affair with Mala, a disharmonious realization for Khan.

I am not mad, despite my family’s instance of the opposite. We all have our periods of momentary madness, occasions when the border of reality becomes slightly blurred. For me, this is reflected in moments of panic. When this border vanishes altogether madness takes over, as it did for Crane, who believed in an alternative reality of demons and aliens. Yet who is to say that Crane is that far off, what consensus determined that there is only one true reality? Crane ventured where only the most desperate travel - he opened the door to his new reality and leapt with open arms.