Thank you, and remember, the universe is in your basement

a few words on David Lynch

Back in 2006, David Lynch sat out in the open on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea in Los Angeles, next to a giant poster of Laura Dern, and a live cow to campaign for Laura Dern's Oscar nomination (source).

Watching

Thomas Flight 🐦

‘s recent video about Lynch, I get most floored by statements like these:

“Within each and every one of us is unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity, bliss, happiness, love, energy and peace.”

It’s odd, because people like Lynch, artists who are cool and altvantgarde aren't supposed to be all life affirming and ‘everyone is a genius.’

People like that, my mind says, are dark and angry. But Lynch isn't.

People like that, my mind is sure, hate everything and everyone. But Lynch doesn’t.

What if maybe just maybe the tortured artist thing is a complex mental gymnastics I use to justify my own negativity? Critical thinking, literally put.

It’s safer to stay here, critical and thinking, than go…there, where I have no idea how anything works.

At least here, in this hell, I know where the bathroom is.

Cinema, as Lynch reminds us, is a language that sidesteps logic and hits us smack right in the feeler, the source, the thing that words cannot know.

I always say: I love the dream logic. Cinema can say a dream logic which is an abstraction. It can say things that are difficult to say in words. Just like when you have a dream - so much understanding for you, but when you try to tell your friend, it’s very difficult to say in words something that would give your friend the same experience you had. But cinema can be the dream, can give that thing.

David Lynch

I want more Lynch energy in my life. To spend less time explaining myself and my work, to skip the prevailing trend of internet writing that is “let me tell you why I am doing this as I do it.”

What if, instead, I just did it.

You don’t have to say “Here’s why I want to write about this today” if you’re writing about this today.

The writing is the why.

—

Last night, after a bike ride in the basement that is the universe, I felt strangely good — a rare but not unfamiliar state in which all is right and all makes sense, creatively and otherwise.

I yearned to write everything down because it all connected because how could it not?

Waiting for the shower to get hot, I asked God to let me come back to this place at least one more time.

For this not to be the last time I get to be here, where even though it’s dark, I’m blinded with light.

Am I allowed to say stuff like that? Why not?

“Because it sounds like bullshit”

Only if you believe it to be.

It’s all as real as you want it to be.

Today that blissed out feeling is gone, though here I am writing this still.

Maybe the feeling is less a state of things, and more a momentary awareness of that which is available to me always.

All ways.

All waves.

My moods are waves. Ideas too. There they appear and all you can do is hold on and scream cowabunga.

For Lynch, ideas were fish. Deep ones were deep, and you had to be real still to catch ‘em.

We had his book in our house for a while, Catching The Big Fish, half chewed up by a dog who got the joke.

LYNCH
Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film.

INTERVIEWER
Mhhm…elaborate on that.

LYNCH
No, I won’t.

And on and on, the dance continues, each of us perfect, etc, just as we are.

Comments

A space to discuss all things David Lynch. How’d he influence you? What’s your fav work of his? etc.