What Makes Crazy?

One may often refer to somebody as “insane” after they either do something with little thought involved, or perhaps perform a stunt that we ourselves could not picture doing.  However, are these people really insane?  The stunt performers, for example, usually put more thought and planning into these acts of much risk than one’s self could even comprehend.  Truly insane people are really few and far between.  These people are the ones who do things with little to no thought involved.  Things like frying up bacon in the nude with the windows open for the entire neighborhood, or driving up the wrong side of the road with their eyes closed at breakneck speeds.  These absolutely insane people are the ones that have been examined for many years, people trying to figure out what in their brain makes them do what they do and act the way that they act.

In Salmon Rushdie’s short story “The Harmony of the Sphere’s” the troubled character of Eliot Crane is one of these truly insane people.  But what is it that makes Eliot insane?  In his own words it is “A simple chemical imbalance.” (Rushdie, p.134)  However, I think that the case of Eliot Crane is much more complex than just some chemicals that are a bit out of whack.  He says that his writing is part of the problem, and that when he writes his mind goes crazy but when he doesn’t write, he gets depressed.  When the topics of his most recent writings are revealed at the end of the story to be nothing of any organization, nothing of the book that he said he’d been working on, I would agree that his writing could have been a contributing factor to the loss of his mind.  All of the writing that was found was in a rant form, which for a lot of people can actually help with the insanity as it can enable them to bring it into order.  However, for Eliot, this was the opposite, as I think his writing was a way for him to bring himself further and further away from reality.

Another factor that contributed to the madness was most definitely the web of lies and deception that Eliot, and all of the other characters of the story, lived in.  It was a sort of love square and with this the truth was buried by all those involved.  The last line of the story sheds an illuminating beam of light on this deception.  Mala reveals that she had had a torrid love affair with Eliot that had been going on for all the time she and the narrator were married.  And I think that this web of lies is the main contributing factor to the insanity.  Living in a world with constant deception makes our footing in what is real and what is made up as firm as that of a tight rope walker.  One bobble to one side or the other and we are over the edge into the obis of insanity.  And this is where Eliot fell.

There are many things that can make people insane.  And for Eliot Crane, it was the unbalance of his own life that was his downfall.  What can compel an insane person to do the things they do is much of the time a mystery, one that science has trouble grasping upon.