Schizophrenia

Have you ever known someone who would tell you something and when you repeat it back to them right after they say it, they deny that, that is what they said and their whole mood does a 180? I have a grandmother who does just that. Something could go wrong for you, something not so very important, and she would act all comforting and apologetic that such a bad situation happened to you. Then five minutes later you tell someone else exactly what she had said to help you while she’s standing there and she goes berserk, denying that she said any of the retelling. And she doesn’t just deny it, she furiously and venomously, in your face denies it. She seems like a whole other person altogether.

That is how Eliot Crane seems to be with his schizophrenia in the story “The Harmony of the Spheres” in the book East, West by Salmon Rushdie. Even though Crane should have known otherwise “Eliot had elaborated a conspiracy theory in which most of his friends were revealed to be agents of hostile powers, both Earthly and extraterrestrial” (p. 127) because of this disease. Plus he believed his good friend, the speaker, to be “an invader from Mars.” However, as long as he took his drugs regularly and didn’t write he was ok and his demons didn’t visit him.

Eliot Crane’s demons were usually triggered not only by his writing but by his writing on “the occult stuff” (p. 130). Although at the same time in another part of the story the speaker says, “as long as he did not try to write, he seemed worse because not writing plunged him into such deep depressions, he was passive and inert, he was raging and violent, he was filled with guilt and despair” (p. 128). When he met his demon for the first time Crane was about to finish he latest story “The Harmony of the Spheres” and he woke up in the middle of the night positive there was something evil in the house. As soon as he encountered his demon and the electricity went haywire he immediately said, ‘Apage me, Satanas’ Get thee behind me, Satan”(p. 135), and everything was okay once again.

A similar thing occurred at my grandmother’s birth. My great-grandmother had said once that when my grandmother was born great-grandma saw a lamp jump form one table to the other and then back again. There are some people who say that such occurrences like that of the lamp at my grandmother’s birth and the way she seems to have two different mind sets or personalities, as did Eliot Crane, are the characteristics of being possessed by a demon while others simply call it a chemical imbalance within the brain. Which one do you think is a better explanation? Or should I say which one do you feel more comfortable with admitting to?