Cross Wired Spheres

            “Fred that’s not good, you can’t do that, Jack he wants me to be bad again.”  I heard those words from a man who walked by me as I was weighting for a ride.  I was young.  I had seen crazy people before but never someone who could have a conversation with their self.  I remember thinking whoa that guy looked like he could snap violently at anytime.  I later learned the human brain is very strong yet very fragile.  Some people naturally have issues with bad brain chemicals.  For some reason every humans brain is wired differently.  Some people can achieve the highest level of mathematics but cannot competently do simple tasks that people do everyday.  Some people are social phobic while others go crazy when they cannot be in public.  Some people can read normally while others read backwards.  Normal brains function happily when there is a good balance between the left side of the brain and the right.

            However, when there is what is called a chemical imbalance in the brain, problems occur.  Problems like depression, scarcity, constant repeating of tasks, hording and imagining things that are not there.  Naturally, suffering people try to self medicate their selves by inducing alcohol and drugs.  For some this helps but for most, it makes things worse.  Nowadays modern medicine has saved many people.  However, some cannot be saved.   When your friend tells you, “his friends were revealed to be agents of hostile powers, both earthly and extra-terrestrial.  I was an invader from mars.”   These are the words from a man named Eliot Crane in the story The Harmony of Spheres.

            Eliot was a writer and had gone nuts he thinks there are people spying on him including his wife Lucy. He says, “look out for Lucy." “She lies like a whore. And she listens in on me. They give her the latest machines. There are microphones in the fridge. She hides them in the butter.”  Eliot has lost his mind and has become paranoid.  Lucy says sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they do not.

            The only thing that helps Eliot hurts him.  Writing is his passion but his research and writings make his brain so tangled up that his spheres cross each other.  The catch is when he does not write he gets depressed.  He had no way out.  One day Lucy got a call, which said, Eliot was found driving on the wrong side of the motorway.  Eliot’s brain was so twisted up he did not know what he was doing.

            Eliot ended his life with a shotgun leaving only a note telling how to properly clean the gun.  When his papers and notes where read it was found he had not accomplished a whole lot.  He had three chests full of “Delirium, hundreds of pages of operic, undirected obscenities and inchoate rants against the universe in general.”  Much like the movie a beautiful mine Eliot had believed that he was doing something real but his mind was so mixed up his spheres so crossed that he did not know what was happening.  The real world did not exist in his mind it was make believe to him although he did not know that. 

            The author of this story Salman Rushdie writes about weird twists and differences in the human world.  What he has shown us this time is a very common case.  Crazy people live all around us.  Some are able to help themselves or get help and others like in this case cannot be helped.  I think Rushdies point here is that in life, we are all different and know matter how much we reach out to help success does not always happen.