Splitting The Mind

Growing up he always seemed pretty normal. Maybe a little hyperactive, and above average intellectually, but nothing out of the ordinary. When we turned sixteen things started to change, he was unstable and you just had this feeling that something wasn’t quite right anymore.  At nineteen he barely escaped death by his own hand. The following years are a blur of up’s and downs and self-medication. Then one day there was an answer “Schizophrenia”…but giving it a name wasn’t enough to save him. It’s been a while since I thought about my friend’s death. It’s one of those strange situations; I was heartbroken and relived at the same time. He would no longer suffer from his demons; he’s now at peace. Why is it after years of normalcy he suddenly lost control? Salman Rushdie asks the same question in the story The Harmony of the Sphere’s. Why do we lose our minds?

Rushdie throughout the story tries to answer this question. Eliot Crane the narrator’s friend suffers from Paranoid schizophrenia. He eventually yields to the power of his demons and takes his own life at a very young age. Eliot an educated man believed his mind was affected simply by a “Biochemical imbalance.” (East, West, Page 134)  Something nature had caused, and nothing else. Traditionally I wouldn’t question the cause of Eliot’s mental illness, but as the story progresses one begins to challenge Eliot’s original reasoning for his mental illness. I’m confident he was sick but I also believe he was a deceiver. He deceived his wife, his friend, and most importantly himself.

Eliot, as our narrator describes was an “occultist pretending to be an academic” (East, West, Page 139). Eliot convinced himself that there was harmony between his two personas but it was a lie. “You never heard such a din as the ruckus in Eliot’s head. The songs of Swedenborg’s angels, the hymns, the mantras, the Tibetan overtone chants. What human mind could have defended itself against such a Babel.”(East, West, Page 142) Was his intellect his undoing? Did the quest for more and more knowledge become an obsession, leading to an understanding that perhaps split his mind? Did Eliot drown his brain into a state of distorted perception? Or was it something else. Rushdie at the end of the story offers a new twist. Could guilt have driven Eliot to lose his mind? He betrayed his friend, his wife, and a lot of his beliefs.  An affair between the Narrator’s wife Mala and himself could have easily caused Eliot high levels of stress. The Guilt and shame festering inside him could have easily caused a mental split. 

I don’t believe Rushdie’s goal was to find a definitive answer to his question Why do we lose our minds? I think his objective was to show the reader that the obvious explanation, which keeps the spheres harmonious, is often false but easier to accept. Yet “the collapse of harmony” (East, West, Page 146) typically signifies truth. If Eliot had stopped deceiving himself, and excepted disharmony would he still have lost the battle in his mind? I’d like to speculate that if acceptance did occur, Eliot would still be alive. He’d own up to his mistakes and demons. Learn to deal with his illness properly, and eventually create straightforward harmony for himself.