SIDEQUEST - The Third Temple: Tortured Artists and the Search for God

    Nick Drake, Brian Wilson, Sylvia Plaith, Edvard Munch, Daniel Johnston, Osamu Daizai, David Foster Wallace, Chester Bennington, and Terry A. Davis. A wide array of famous people that I know you readers are at least somewhat familiar with. What do they all have in common?

    When I was fourteen years old I was obsessed with the album "Pet Sounds" by The Beach Boys. I found much solace in its quite sad lyrics about love and alienation. "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" felt like a song written entirely for me; I related to it so much. Needless to say, with Pet Sounds comes Brian Wilson. His story tragic story completely enamored me. I wondered how someone with such talent could be so unfortunate to struggle with the things he did, auditory hallucinations and the like. Schizophrenia is perhaps the prototypical mental disorder that one thinks of, but the artists previously named all had different struggles within their own minds.

    I was inspired to write on this subject at work today actually. I was listening to Nick Drake and began thinking of his own tragedy. Drake unfortunately died due to a probable suicide drug overdose at age 26, not becoming famous until after he had died. While listening to Nick, I of course thought of the other tortured artists I knew of. One of them that popped into my head was Terry A. Davis, the unusual, controversial, but ultimately extremely talented man that created TempleOS.

Terry before his mental deterioration

Jeremiah 1:5 -

"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."

    Some people believe the idea that successful people sold their souls to the devil in order to gain fame and riches. As I was thinking about these artists, some of whom achieved great success or acclaim either in life or after, it seemed to me that rather than dealing with the devil, these people were instead handicapped by God.

    While at work I decided to actually put on a little YouTube documentary about Davis. I knew the basic story of TempleOS and its intended religious meaning, the fact it was created by one man entirely by scratch, and that it was created by a schizophrenic man known for shouting the N-word. Quite the eclectic story when you put it that way. Terry created TempleOS believing that he was chosen directly by God to be a priest that would construct the Third Temple and give up offerings to God, all in this operating system that he himself would create. He also believed that he could communicate directly with God through use of random number generators in the TempleOS system. In addition to these seemingly pseudo messianic delusions, he also believed that "CIA n***ers" were persecuting him. Anyway to the naked eye, TempleOS seems extremely rudimentary. It looks like an old MS-DOS program or something like that. But in fact, the creation of an operating system by a single man is an extremely ginormous undertaking. A comment on one of the videos I watched by a self-professed computer programmer likened it to "building a skyscraper by yourself." I have not explored TempleOS myself but based on videos I've seen, its content seems so innocent and childlike. It reminds me of those crappy old bible games for the NES, or a computer game Evangelical-raised children would probably play back in the 80s. For me, this made his story all the worse.

Terry with a cat

   "I'm sorry. You are good and I have made myself hatred [sic] for some reason. I don't know. Forgive me, I have to try and figure out why I remember that I love you." Terry says this to his mother while having a brief moment of lucidity after ranting and cursing at her. I honestly began to cry after hearing him say this. In another moment while showing off features of TempleOS he says "I like elephants and God likes elephants." It seriously pains me that such a man was so deeply misunderstood by nearly everyone. It pains me that he was treated as a lolcow to be mocked and ridiculed like Chris Chan or someone else like that. Unfortunately someone who has such a loose grip on reality like Terry did is an easy victim of trolls.

    At this point inthe story you may be asking, "Terry's story is sad but why do you care? Why did you feel compelled to write a blog post about him and these other people when you said this blog is about reviewing movies?" Those are good questions. I found myself asking the same thing. Why do I care? I don't mean to glorify Terry. In the twilight of his life, his rhetoric and livestreams became more and more disturbing. He believed he was in a marriage with a physicist woman whom he had never even met. He'd upload public videos on his website of himself masturbating, ostensibly for her. He also ended up homeless after being arrested and for domestic assault, barring him from living in his parents' home any longer. I guess the reason I care so much is because of the tragedy. I believe Terry is one of the best examples of the tortured artist in recent years. I do consider TempleOS to be a work of art. When you truly grasp what an undertaking it was as a project, you realize what a truly intelligent man he was, and how truly, truly unfortunate it was that he had to suffer the way he did. A solid decade of blood, sweat, and tears. For God.

    I guess I see myself in the tortured artist, as stupid, and probably self-righteous as that sounds. I have such a deep appreciation for art, particularly film and music, but also paintings and poetry and the like. When I think back, nearly all of my favorite stories are tragedies. I believe this is because in my own life I've always felt "down." I definitely have a melancholic personality and I truly see myself in the likes of Nick Drake and David Foster Wallace. I can't relate to Terry A. Davis quite as much; I've never experienced psychosis or delusions. Yet, I still feel a connection. I wonder what he could have been without the handicaps. That's often how I feel in life, handicapped. Not the same way a person without legs is handicapped, but like a horse in a race; weighted down. I have had my own struggles with mental illness for as long as I can remember. I've often not been able to escape the trappings that my own mind sets for me. In fact, a feeling I often feel is that I'm not truly in control of my own head. It's an awful feeling if you want to know the truth. I won't go into detail about it here, but I have struggled and fought with myself a lot on the inside. Part of the reason I created this blog is for it to be an outlet for my thoughts, my feelings. Who else would I talk about Terry A. Davis with?...

    I believe in God. I don't think my conception of God is quite like Terry's though. I don't believe I can receive messages from God, I don't believe I was chosen by God to build the Third Temple, and I don't believe that CIA atheists are trying to imprison me or something. What I do believe is that in life there is a lot of suffering. Some people suffer like Terry or Nick Drake or Daniel Johnston. Others suffer very little. I guess what I'm trying to say is good things can come out of suffering. There are very few "fans" of Terry A. Davis, but he made something that impacted the world, even if it was small. People know who Terry is and what he did with his short time on Earth. People know he was a a talented man who made something that very few, if any, other people could make. As for the others, Brian Wilson created an album that changed pop music forever, David Foster Wallace and Osamu Daizai wrote books that people find wisdom and solace in. Unfortunately, many of these names had their bright stars shine too shortly. Many took their own lives. But imagine if they hadn't? Nick Drake could have made another song, Daizai another book. I can't really say what Terry might have done, but I can only hope that he would have found some help and a community where he could ground himself in his love for computers. I guess this is all a long winded way of saying "Keep on Truckin'." It's all you got.