Crane's Imbalance

It seems that for some reason opposites attract. I know when I was in high school I for some reason liked this girl that was way different than me.  She was completely on one side of the insanity spectrum and I was level headed and rational.  She was crazy, she would do crazy things and say crazy things.  She was way out of character for me, I would normally not even be friends with a person of her character, but for some reason I was drawn to her.  I was intrigued by her way of thinking, and even though we were opposites we had some sort of connection, the imbalance in our personalities didn’t seem to matter at the time..  Well to make a long story short one day she want crazy on me.  As hard as it was we went our separate ways and I really missed her for a while as she did me.  But, after some time al was well again in both of our lives.

In the Book East, West, Salman Rushdie has a short story called “Harmony of the Spheres” which is primarily about a man named Elliot Crane.  In the story, the narrator Elliot’s friend Khan, tells us about Elliot’s condition of Schizophrenia, and the imbalance in his brain.  He opens the story with Elliot killing himself because he could not longer take the demons that had been haunting him.  Elliot was an artist, a sort of scientist and a brilliant writer but he had his other side that was taking him over he would see things and do crazy things.  Elliot described his condition as a chemical imbalance that made him act in the different ways he did.  Kahn explores the reason for this in the story and why things happen like they do.

Kahn tells us how different the men are from one another and why and how they became friends.  This is the same thing I pondered about the crazy girl I dated.  He tells us stories leading up to the downward spiral that Elliot begins.  He attempts to put together how this happened and if their relationships they developed prior had any effect on the outcome.  It seems to me that this was just the way things were meant to be and nothing could have changed the outcome.  Elliot was blessed with a brilliant mind but in the sphere of a world that we live on things seems to balance and for that good mind he received a bad mind. 

It is similar with the relationship I had as well as Elliot and Kahn.  Two totally different things or people but for some reason they connect and go together, with no harmony.  It seems with every good, there is evil, for all madness, there is sanity and for every east there is a west; that is just the way the world turns.  Within the story we, as well as Kahn, ask ourselves how to deal or fix these imbalances and bring back the harmony.  However, believe we have no control of restoration.  In my story as well as Kahn’s there is a solution, we live our lives and eventually things happen; Elliot kills himself and no longer has to face his demons.  Kahn loses his friend and no longer has that imbalanced relationship with Elliot. We must just wait, and after time Harmony will restore itself.