A Spherical Point of View

 Last night I was watching Larry King (OK I admit it) and part of the show was dedicated to the profile of a man who thinks he is the messiah. His name is Wayne Bent and he and his followers live in New Mexico. As I watched a film clip of a National Geographic special that featured him, it seemed as if I could see the “madness” in his eyes and the eyes of some of his followers. I asked myself if this man truly believed what he was saying or if he is really just some kind of socio-path (like Charles Manson) who is very good at convincing weak and vulnerable people to believe what he says.

A psychiatrist would probably say that this man has some kind of mental disease and that the “voice of god” that he supposedly hears is just a biochemical misfire in his brain. This ultimately leads to the question: “what would people today say about someone like Jesus?”

Could some religious belief ultimately be based on faith in someone's biochemical imbalance?

The question of what madness really is, is a question that psychologists and psychiatrists are still trying to answer. It is also a question that has been tossed around by authors for hundreds of years. Some of Shakespeare's plays dealt with characters that were mad, and the effects that madness had on them and the people around them. Today, authors like Steven King use madness as a plot device to write scary stories. Then there is the short story “The Harmony of the Spheres”, in which Salman Rushdie writes about the apparent madness of Eliot Crane, an Englishman (who is also a writer) who delves into the “study of overt and covert occultist groups in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe.” The title of Eliot's book is the same as the title of Rushdie's short story: “The Harmony of the Spheres”. The story is narrated by Mr. Khan; a friend of Eliot's from Cambridge University. Mr. Kahn, his wife Mala, and Eliot's wife Lucy all revolve around Eliot and his madness. Khan is saddened by Eliot's progressive loss of reality. He respects and admires Eliot and thinks of him as “A mystical teacher in English translation; say it g'roo.” Eliot has introduced him to the world of black and white magic, and arcane mysticism. Part of Khan wants to believe that these things exist, and that he can become one of the holders of the keys to this mystical and dangerous world. But he can also see that the further Eliot delves into this mysterious subject matter, the further from reality he gets.

The first indication that Eliot may be losing his mind, is when he finishes writing his book “The Harmony of the Spheres”. It seems that harmony was the last thing that Eliot is experienced when he relates to Khan how “One night he awoke at three a. m., convinced of the presence downstairs of something absolutely evil....then all the lights went crazy, switching themselves on and off, and he made the sign of the cross with his arms and screamed 'Apage me, Santanas' (get thee behind me Satan)....whereupon, everything went back to normal”. At the time, Khan was more disappointed that his friend had not actually seen Satan than worried about his mental state. He was willing to believe that something so irrational might have happened (and secretly hoped that it could have). But as time progressed and Eliot's grip on reality grew looser, Kahn became convinced along with everyone else (including Eliot) that his friend was suffering from schizophrenia. According to the doctors, the two hemispheres of Eliot's brain were not communicating correctly, and a “biochemical storm” was occurring inside his friend's head. Eliot's (hemi)spheres were not in harmony; and this disharmony was affecting the lives of everyone else in his sphere. Khan's wife Mala would go nowhere near him, and his own wife Lucy was frozen with fear and confusion. The orbits of the spheres surrounding Eliot were becoming wobbly and losing their attraction; the harmony of the spheres was breaking down.

Khan admits that when he met Eliot “I was a little unhinged myself—suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres....a number of difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer.” Khan was a transplant from India, and felt a “two othernesses...a double unbelonging” that he hoped would be cured by “that world of magic and power” where there “seemed to exist the kind of fusion of world views, European Amerindian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately wanted to believe.” He hoped to find a kind of wisdom or harmony from these teachings that he could not find in the world he was living in. He rested all his hopes on that fact that Eliot's brilliant mind might hold the answers to all his questions. Ultimately, he found it difficult to admit to himself that all the knowledge that Eliot seemed to possess was possibly grounded in madness and not reality.

At times in the story, it doesn't seem clear that Eliot is truly a schizophrenic, or if it is the dangerous subject matter that he has made his life's work that is taking its toll on him. His obsession with the darker side of human nature is beginning to define him as a person. And this person is taking an inner journey that those around him cannot (or will not) join. At times Eliot worsens when he stops writing; at others he cannot stay sane unless he is writing. The two spheres of his inner and outer world seem at times to become one, and the effect of this is devastating for Eliot and for his wife and friends. He refuses the medication that the doctors prescribe, and begins to exhibit more and more bizarre behaviors. At times he is lucid and himself; at others he is filled with rage and hatred toward those who love him. He becomes paranoid and delusional, and refuses to see Khan for months at a time. Eliot's spheres are blowing apart and his demon is beginning to break free. He can no longer remember how to “draw the shape that would keep the beast 666 confined”.

Eliot's story ends the way you probably imagine it would. “He had sucked on his shotgun and pulled the trigger. The weapon had belonged to his father, who had put it to the same use.” The fact that Eliot's father had committed suicide himself may add to the argument that Eliot was schizophrenic. Then again it may not. Some mental illnesses like schizophrenia sometimes have a genetic basis. Sometimes. But the spheres that Eliot chose to travel in were those that many think have a dark and dangerous power. Looking too closely at the darker side of human nature can pull you into a place where harmony is a foreign concept and madness is a familiar friend.

People like Wayne Bent create their own spheres of belief and reality. People who follow men like Bent are perhaps looking for some of the same things that Khan was searching for: a cure for “otherness” and “unbelonging”, a way to find harmony in a disharmonious world. But I can't help remembering the look of madness in Wayne Bent's eyes. His type of reality means letting go of your own, and walking around in the darkness of the human spirit looking for the light.

Somehow I don't think anyone can find the harmony of their own spheres by living within someone else's.