Dont worry be happy!

What is the worst thing you can do with five thousand dollars of hard earned money? Keep tropical fish and live coral. I have been keeping fish and coral at a fairly advanced level for almost four years now and to top it all off I work twelve hours a week working at a fish store. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like without the huge burden and sometimes I think of getting rid of it all. The one hour a day I spend on maintenance the worry I have when I leave town all of it. The level of involvement can be sickening at times when I think about it. And when I read The Harmony of the Spheres by Salmen Rushdie I can appreciate the level of enthusiasm that the main character has.

The main character in this book Eliot Crane is completely involved in his study of Occults and everything to do with them. He writes a book called Harmony of the Spheres and in his everyday life has interacted with demons. I dabble in fanaticism with fish Eliot is completely dominated by his work with occults. On one occasion he actually makes contact with a demon “As he neared the kitchen he felt arctically cold and found he had acquired an erection.  Then all the lights went crazy, switching themselves on and off, made a sign of the cross with his arms and screamed ‘Apage me, Satanas.’” (p.135)    Some would say that he actually did come in contact with a demon, but how he decided to go downstairs tells us more “One night he woke at three a.m., convinced of the presence downstairs of something absolutely evil.”(p.135)  To me the story sounds more like previously unrecognized paranoid schizophrenia.  Not that this makes him a bad person but constant thoughts that are that intense would no doubt drive many people to killing themselves.

In this short story there is a lot of talk of harmony and about how to keep it.  It seems that the harmony of the spheres represents a harmony we keep with our minds.  Eliot the main character attributes losing your mind to a “simple chemical imbalance.”(p.134) This is no doubt one way that some people fail to achieve harmony.  From the narrators prospective in this story he began to descend to where Eliot was, they practices rituals and verses one possible explanation for his new found success was that he “was a little unhinged [himself]” and looking for somewhere to spend his energy that would make him feel better.  The narrator eventually he found his harmony restored when he met his wife Mala.

This superb story seems to deal with the idea of infatuation and how to control it.  Whether Eliot had a chemical in balance or not he was  so into his studies that he lost sight of what was happening in his life and they began to control him.  This story seems to say that the key to keeping harmony is to control how much you give to one thing, whether it’s an activity, celebrity or object or maybe even a religion.  As long as you can strike a balance you can keep your harmony in balance.