Letter #92: Weed Smokes Terrence Howard
Trying to get the right angle on the world.
OK Mr. Wise-Owl,
Heartbreaking what you say, and true: progress always brings decay along with it. Or, to put it another way, you can’t move forward without leaving things behind. Importantly, that means the spiritual desolation we’re facing doesn’t have to be the result of some sinister plot by hooded devil-worshippers conspiring to blind the world to God. It might just be a natural fact of our sad pilgrimage that what we gain in knowledge, we lose in childlike simplicity.
Sooner or later, the scientific revolution had to come. There was no way to avoid noticing the problems with Medieval Aristotelian physics—Aristotle’s own insistence on logical rigor made those problems impossible to ignore. There was no way to keep new evidence from piling up in favor of the sun spinning around the earth, rather than vice versa. But as we gained that information, we also gradually erased Aristotle’s beautifully ordered picture of a universe with mankind at its center. And that picture, though false in some particulars, was actually truer as an image of divine wisdom than whatever pile of hash we’re looking at now.
Which brings me to this lunatic, Terrence Howard. Have you heard about him? He’s been making everyone crazy by going on Joe Rogan and rambling dazedly about harmonic frequencies in the periodic table. My favorite YouTube comment about him is, “when weed wants to get high, it smokes Terrence Howard.” He goes on these psychedelic flights of fancy about the spiritual resonance of, I don’t know, geodes. Even I can see it’s junk science. But also, even I can see it’s kind of beautiful.
I think the reason why people are so hypnotized by Howard is that even though we all know deep down he’s wrong on the facts, we also feel deep down that something like what he says is true. He spins out his myth of a cosmos sobbing with sheer joyous life at the level of the micro-particle. And we all sense that we do live in that cosmos—we just have to learn to see it without getting magisterially stoned.
We have this feeling that the universe we already live in, unclouded by drugs, fully populated with quasars and bosons, can shimmer with all the crystalline perfection of Aristotle’s older, simpler picture. It’s just nobody can find quite the right angle to look at it from.
I suspect Christianity is that right angle, if we can figure out how to open our eyes to it in the here and now. Because if our original sin was to try and learn about things by tearing them apart, then it was probably inevitable that the world of atomic fission would also become the world of the atom bomb. But if the God who made the atom walked into that world, maybe he could stitch new life out of its broken pieces. And maybe if we could learn to believe that, we who are blind would begin to see.
Love,
Spencer
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God named all the stars.
Psalm 147:4 He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.
This is exactly right: "...our original sin was to try and learn about things by tearing them apart..." The concept of good and evil is the first manifestation of this "tearing apart". Is it that moral judgments are left to God, or is it that, in God, the concept of good and evil does not exist? Perhaps God doesn't tear apart the world with the concept of good and evil, and therefore neither should we. This position looks less heretical when we come to it from the spirit, not the flesh.