O Shining Orb of Baldness,
Yesterday around 2pm there was a solar eclipse in Nashville. In pre-Christian times we’d have concluded that angry gods were demanding punishment for our sins and promptly executed some busboy in the royal mess hall. Those were the days. Now when eclipses happen we just have to put on funny glasses, which is its own kind of punishment.
But it’s odd, when you think about it: almost every civilization in history has taken it for granted that major events in nature have some significance for mankind. A bit self-centered, really, to assume the sun is going dark to send humanity a message rather than just for the hell of it, to try out a new style. It’s not all about us, okay? Except we seem almost instinctively to assume that it is. Our most ancient astronomical data comes from omen tablets, where priests would record correlations between eclipses and political intrigues. To this day, whenever some heavenly portent crosses the skies, people start guessing what it all might mean.
You could chalk this up to primitive instinct, I suppose—tell a just-so story about how pattern-spotting facilitated our survival when we were scrounging for food amid the sagebrush. Except of course that’s just begging the question: why were patterns so useful, if indeed they were, to our feral mammalian ancestors? If the world is just a spastic jumble of found objects, why is it intelligible to us at all? Maybe the Babylonians were wrong that eclipses come before palace coups. But why was Thales right that there would be one in 585 B.C.? Maybe we’re not crazy: maybe the world does contain information for us, for the kinds of thinking beings that we are.
Which brings me to your Brooklyn sex freaks. You write that “you often have to master desire to make your body express the person you were made to be.” Plato said something similar, and now that I think of it, I’ve never seen the two of you in the same room together. He compared our appetites to “a many-headed beast,” wild and unpredictable, always changing shape. Obeying the beast is a kind of slavery, which I suspect is where Shakespeare ultimately got the idea.
It’s ironic that the word “identity” has come to mean “whatever the beast wants.” Because the whole point of our desires is that, like random mutations in physical nature, they have no stable identity in themselves. It takes a reasoning mind to tame the beast according to a higher logic, a deeper pattern.
Then the brute facts of the material world become less like gods and more like servants, acting out their parts in a story with a meaning. We have our story to tell, too, which is why sex isn’t just sex. Our bodies are a kind of living allegory—just as the lights in the heavens are “markers and signs,” not of pitiless divine caprice, but of a world made to be understood.
Love,
Spencer
Speaking of the eclipse, anyone else find it just ever so odd how neatly the moon covers the sun given their true differential in size? It’s as if those in its path happen to have front row seats to catch a glimmer of the crown of the heavens, if for just a moment once in a lifetime.
"Heaven and earth" is an absurd conceit on the materialist view of the world. "Earth" counts for next-to-nothing in the vast, cold nothingness of the cosmos.
But on the biblical view, it's the whole game. "In the beginning...", that's what God created. The human itself is the joining of the two: God's breath and dust. The male represents the one, the female the other, and neither is complete without the other, merged to form... yet another microcosm, another union, another image.
More than that, we alone in the cosmos can act as priests of the lower to the higher, the only capable of reflection (in all senses), the only being with a voice to express the praises of the lower to the higher, and to capture in language the union of the two, of thought in material expression as word, the word made flesh. (Fully realized as the Word made flesh.)
And so too, only the human is capable of managing those ranks beneath it in the cosmic hierarchy. We represent God to earth?! Wonder! What is man!? says David. Astounding. Source of worship.
And then, greater still, union with God, revelation teaches us, is our ultimate end.
So that sex is—Can it be?!—symbol or sacrament of the union of Christ and his church?!
So, how good it is to see highways north from Boston JAMMED with cars of people hurrying to stand outside, stand between heaven and earth, to observe the heavens, to gaze in wonder, and thus to occupy, however unwittingly, their place in the cosmos.