What makes someone a genius? And for that matter what makes someone insane? Most of us are born into this world either with or without the so called “gift” of genius. Yet the majority of these superior intelligent individuals that we here of are often battle some form of mental disorders. Are these caused by a simple chemical imbalance? Or does the wiring that allows their brains to be both brilliant and logical also cause their illusions and phantoms?
Salman Rushdie tackled this issue in the short story The Harmony of Spheres. In this story the character of Elliot Crane faces this same predicament in which he is both a genius and someone who battles demons. His work on the occult and of the underworld became more than an interest, it became an obsession. He dove so deeply into these beliefs and fantasies that they actually materialized in his world. Once he had begun there was no stopping it. “…the drugs were working, the drugs were not working because he refused to take them regularly, he seemed better as long as he did not try to write, he seemed worse because not writing plunged him into such deep depression” It seems that no cure is offered. Medication might stop Elliot’s hallucinations, but the cost is the constraints and fogging of his great mind. Same goes for his writing; either he writes and allows the ideas and demons to pour out or he refuses to write and fights the depression and pain associated with that decision.
The narrator of the story is Khan, a long time friend that has watched this breakdown over the years and has even been accused of being a Martian with evil intentions. Khan admits that he too was drawn into the madness, “I though I’d found another way of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two othernesses, my double unbelonging. In that world of magic power there seemed to exist the kind of fusion of world views, European Ameridian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately wanted to believe.” Yet Khan fights his own demons. He has several personal issues that are always in the back of his mind. From Laura who had threatened to kill him at their wedding to fantasizing about Elliot’s wife Lucy. He will eventually find at stories end that his current wife Mala was having an affair with Elliot. While his disharmony of spheres did not include any visions of the super natural they can be no less demoralizing and perhaps will become just as crippling as the personified evil that Elliot battled to his final moment before taking his own life.
So again I ask is this “craziness” caused by a chemical balance or is it a way to make sense of what we can’t understand? Yes and yes. And yes to any number of other reasons that only those who have ventured into such waters can attest to. As I explain in my blog on A Beautiful Mind, perhaps that it is the case of the “gift and the curse.” With the gift of supreme intelligence comes the curse of madness. Perhaps it is the only way for the human brain to be able to manage such break through thoughts. The balance between left and right brain material must be just as balanced as in less gifted minds. While the majority of us only use 10% of our brains, these individuals are clearly using a much higher level, but at the cost where extreme rationalization and logic meets just as extreme creativity and vision. Maybe 10% is all we are intended to use without losing our minds, or possibly these men and women serve as an eye into the future of what evolution will eventually take us to.
-Truth
2 comments on The Disharmony of Spheres
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I don't know if it is truly madness or simple that a true genius has such difficulty related to the mundane of life.