How do we loose our minds ?

Why do we lose our minds ?  How can a perfectly normal human being can suddenly loose balance and go insane ?  Can we say what really triggers a person to the point of insanity? Can we have a bit of madness yet still be able to remain sane?

These are the themes explored in the story the short story ‘The Harmony of the Spheres’ by the world renowned author Salman Rushdie in his book titled East, West., in which Rushdie Rushdie explores “binary opposites” in human life such as Fantasy versus Reality, Madness versus Sanity, Fiction versus Truth, Disturbance versus Harmony , Iconoclasm versus Iconography, Satire versus Tragedy and East versus West.( Burton Lecture Notes). In this story Rushdie writes about a tragic story about Eliot Crane, an Englishman, a genius in writing who delves into the “study of overt and covert occultist groups in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe.” And writes a book with the same title as Rushdie’s  “The Harmony of the Spheres”. In the process he looses the touch on reality and opens a door for extreme form of paranoid schizophrenia.

Khan, the narrator of the story, is an Indian gentleman living in England and he meets Eliot Crane at the prestigious Cambridge University, claims that he “was a little unhinged [him]self—suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres....a number of difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer.” Khan and Eliot become great friends even though they are completely opposite to each other in personality and he sticks by Eliot though his rough times. But unfortunately Eliot’s situation worsens to the point that he ‘sucked on his shot gun and pulled the trigger’.

The story of Eliot Crane and Khan is so close to my own personal experience. My uncle, Raja who was one of the brilliant minds I have seen and heard about, suddenly decided to leave medical school while he had just only two years left to completion. Why did he do that ? Nobody knew.. even my grandparents who were under the impression that he was still studying at the university. Not returning home, he decided to hide himself for months to the point that my grandparents lost all hope that he’s alive. After almost year, he had suddenly appeared at my grandparent’s house with no saneness in his mind. He had totally lost his mind that he could not even talk to anybody.  I always wondered when I heard about his childhood achievement…. How can such a brilliant mind suddenly snap and go insane ?

Is Madness really an illness or a ‘chemical imbalance’ as Eliot Crane justifies ?  Is it in the genes that gets passed along from generation to generation as the story of Eliot implies ?  I do not think so. As I believe, it’s the different individual circumstances and the magnitude of the effect of them on an individual are what push people to the edge.

Once they are being pushed a little, it may create a ‘quicksand’ effect where more the person struggles more and more they sink in their emotional dilemma. Some may get lucky enough to come to senses and see things differently and come out of the pit just as the case of Elizabeth in Bessie Head’s novel ‘A Question of Power’.  Or they might come into terms with their illness and live with it just as the case of John Nash in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’. But unfortunately most of them don’t have the courage or the support to make it out. Just as the case of Eliot Crane and my uncle, Raja who were consumed day by day by their uncontrollable mind.

So What is reality ?  Isn’t that just our perception of the world ? The power of the human mind is so phenomenal that throughout our lives from child ages, we develop a sense of reality vs. imagination in our subconscious mind and it becomes out looking glass or paradigms of how we look and interpret the world around us. As I believe,  if one messes around with this subconscious mind where logical reasoning and thoughts originate, it may create psychological chaos. By diving deep into his mind, it seems like Eliot did the same thing that he disturbed the harmony of his subconscious mind.

As a computer geek like me would describe, he, Eliot, messed with the Operating System Kernel in his mind and by doing so made the whole system crash.