2/45: On David Lynch
My sister died in Wilmington, North Carolina, where David Lynch had filmed Blue Velvet. She and her husband had been halfway through the third season of Twin Peaks. I’m only just now looking at IMDb, but she died in the early morning after the third-from-last episode premiered. A week later, the two-part conclusion. My sister died, returned to life, and fifteen minutes later died again.
N. and I began watching The Return in the following days. A couple weeks later, my mom, my brother-in-law, and I went to a small island off New Bedford. Everywhere I turned on Cuttyhunk, the world I saw was Lynchian. Irreal and super-real at once. Beauty and terror adjoining at every level of magnification, like a severed ear on a lawn crawling with ants. Disconcerting degrees of freedom, uninflected in every direction. Good and evil everywhere present, and neither with any moral valence. Beneath both, a deep and impersonal emptiness. This is the divine of oneness: loving like cold sunlight, outer-spacious, inhuman.
Early this morning, Walter Kirn tweeted that he had once been commissioned to profile Lynch, but “I couldn’t get a grip on him, at all. Because there was nothing to grip.” In recent years, I have met a number of men and women I would call spiritual masters. There is almost nothing to say about them. Flaubert famously wrote, “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.” Lynch took this a step further, emptying himself of the personal in order to channel the suprapersonal, if not divine.
A decade ago in Fairfield, Iowa, home to Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation, the podcast Buddha at the Gas Pump recorded a panel discussion on “refined” or “celestial” perception, a level of consciousness development between the gross and the absolute. This is the level where one starts to see angels and demons, nature spirits and laws of nature, potentially the whole celestial hierarchy, not as beings “out there” but as aspects of one’s own big Self; where one starts to see things as they are. The textures of the panelists’ perceptions are far from Lynch’s—Lynch paid more attention to darkness—but the panelists are his peers as much as are Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Capra, Fellini, Fields, Herzog, Tati.
When I was a child, on a picnic with my mom, I pulled a plum out of the plastic bag. The fruit was creased in on itself. It looked like a butt. I said to my mom, “I want to open the butt,” and when I did, black ants came pouring out. She said, “That’s gross,” and made me throw it away. Then my elementary school principal, whom in recent years I came to remember obscurely as a sinister and abusive man, came up to us and said hello. He used to quote William Carlos Williams to us at school assemblies, plums in the icebox and all that. He called us “My loves.” A Freudian would find a lot to interpret here. A Jungian would find a lot to say. A Lynchian would find nothing.