Writers Block Is Driving Me Insane...How Will I Find A Balance?

            Am I to write a blog about balance, or a blog about losing my mind? Is it life’s way of poking fun of me as I sit here suffering from writer’s block, that I should have to write a final blog about the topic of losing my mind? If I am to intertwine the two I think I can overcome my state of writer’s block, and express how quite possibly the two topics go hand in hand. Currently enrolled in 24 units, and also working 32 hours a week is beginning to take its toll (or perhaps it already has). My undeniable downward spiral into absolute insanity is most definitely a result of my chaotic lifestyle in which I am forced to fit 48 hours of activities into a 24-hour day. How am I to balance 8 classes, four 8 hour shifts, and still have time to have fun…it is simple…I never sleep.

Now this is just the chaotic world that I have constructed for myself, and although I am certain that I am now clinically insane because of it, I think I may have got off a little easier than Eliot Crane; Salman Rushdie’s main character in his short story “The Harmony of the Spheres.” Eliot suffered from “brainstorms of paranoid schizophrenia” (Pg 125). Rushdie wastes no time in bombarding the reader with a climax within the second paragraph of the story by telling the reader about Eliot’s demise, “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” (Pg 125). Now if we’re talking about balance, how do you equal out an introduction involving a suicide that is in essence, hereditary? I think if we’re covering the crazy issue, then the nail is already struck on the head.

The narrator of the story, a “Martian” friend of Eliot’s, emerges as the true main character of this story. Rushdie sculpts the story so perfectly, that until the very last moment, the reader believes it is a story about Eliot, and he crafts the narrator’s words so meticulously that it isn’t until the very last lines that the narrator comes to his own realization, that he is learning about himself, and not Eliot. Even after reading it, although I don’t believe that Eliot and the narrator are the same person, you get a sense that they are these ancient archetypes. Opposites of each other yet, drawn together, Superman and Lex Luthor, good and evil, yin and yang. The narrator is heartbroken to read the harsh words Eliot had written about him, after so many years of loving Eliot. “I searched the tea-chests in vain for a loving remark. It was hard to believe that such a passionate and eager man could have nothing good to say about life on earth. Yet it was so” (Pg 144).

What makes us crazy? Environment? Knowledge? Drugs? Born that way? Eliot has a simple one-sentence answer, “A simple biochemical imbalance” (Pg 134). That is not a sufficient answer. This story is going to drive me even crazier than I already am. I think the balance that exists in this story lies between the narrator and Eliot, and how these two personalities could have coexisted amongst each other, and now that Eliot is gone, the narrator is watching his life shatter as well.

In order to maintain the concept of harmony and balance, I feel I should come full circle with my blogs as this is the final one. You may have been thrown by the clips inserted throughout the blog. All of them are clips I have previously inserted in other blogs throughout the semester, from I Heart Huckabees, Smallville, Heroes, and Dexter. All these shows share similar themes with “The Harmony Of Spheres.” A hero is lost, without a villain. Clark Kent will never kill Lex Luthor. All heroes need villains. I Heart Huckabees deals with a man who is in search of the meaning of life, and is told by one side life is completely meaningless, and another side that life is amazing and everything is interconnected. And finally, full circle to my first blog, which I wrote coming off a 10 hour television binge of the show Dexter. Dexter is a serial killer who only murders “bad people,” but also feigns a normal life working as a forensic scientist in Miami. Eliot Crane in “Harmony of the Spheres” has his kind of crazy, Dexter is a headcase as well, I Heart Huckabees searches for the meaning of life, and superheroes need supervillains. Here I am, a college student one semester left until graduation, stressed beyond belief, and probably a bit crazy…but I find balance.

Every Friday, and ever Saturday, I find balance amongst my friends…and together we find balance on several pitchers at The Bear.