From the Archive: 158 being alone

on David Lynch

This is a playlist I made around the time I was watching Twin Peaks for the first time. I feel like it carries the perfect mixture of strangeness and beauty that the show revealed to me as possible.

I remember where I was when I found out Joan Didion died. I was walking through the grocery store with my mom in my hometown, visiting on a school break. I went outside and sat down on the curb in the winter sun and cried—although she hadn’t published new writing since Blue Nights (2011), I felt that her being in the world symbolized a dam against the flood of illogic in politics, lack of understanding for the other, disrespect for the written word. She was to me a hero of art, culture, and the articulation of exactly what you mean as a vital and necessary skill.

If Joan Didion taught me to write, David Lynch taught me to dream; I watched Twin Peaks (1990) and Mulholland Drive (2001) when I was a teenager and they shaped my understanding of what television and film could be, how they could describe the realest parts of the human psyche through the fantastical. People need not be perfect, nor even comprehensible. Stories need not make sense or come to tidy conclusions; neither does life. Art is not meant to be explicable, but rather to transmute a feeling.

The loss of my heroes in my adulthood has been an interesting experience, mostly because each time I realize I idolized someone only when I feel their absence in the world. I wasn’t even really that well-versed in David Bowie’s music when he passed, but I sat in my car in the parking lot of my high school listening to “I Can’t Give Everything Away” and realized we would never get another piece of music so poignant on the subject of death by the dying. I was wrong; later that year, Leonard Cohen released You Want It Darker (2016), just days before his own passing.

My point is that there are as many artistic giants as one decides to hold up as such (cathedrals for those with eyes to see, etc), but that the death of these giants creates a void in the canon of their influence, the root suddenly severed from the tree. I felt deeply the loss of David Lynch not because I was waiting for him to put out another movie that would change my life (although apparently Netflix rejected his final pitch for an animated series), but because he symbolized a life so completely worth living, so rich with artistic contribution and exploration, that he could actually die having done exactly what he was put on the earth to do.

David Lynch was known among artists as someone who believed one need not suffer to create meaningful art. He was a happy man, despite what the darkness portrayed in his films might suggest, and told people as much. He believed in reincarnation, and did not fear death, even at the hands of his beloved cigarettes. He touched the lives of countless people, not just the audience’s of his audacious, emotionally stirring films, but of the actors in them—Kyle Maclachlan’s tribute is especially moving. In refusing to explain his work, he gave us the greatest gift of all: imagination.

Maclachlan says of David: “He was not necessarily a word person. I think he just found them insufficient.” I think often of the Twin Peaks theme, the distinctive style of music so well matched with the misty, dense forest which becomes so important to the plot of the show that it is almost a character. David was also a sculptor, painter, and musician, mediums that transcended the need for words to convey pure feeling, the same way his films did (which is not to say that the scripts of his movies weren’t brilliant—one of my favorite monologues of all time is this one from Twin Peaks), using language in unexpected ways so as to outrun words themselves, arriving at meaning.

But David Lynch taught me that art need not mean anything to be meaningful. As a musician and writer, often finding the thread of my own work buried in the material halfway or more through the process, I was personally transformed by the realization that I was allowed to, encouraged to even, create things with no ostensible purpose, with the confidence that their meaning would be revealed in the creation itself. I feel so lucky to have been touched by his movies, which felt like they were made just for me. And this was his power; by transcending any need for translation, it seemed he personally gave you a feeling, right through the screen. His legacy is this directness and precision that I believe all artists are striving towards—like Joan Didion’s too—to say exactly what you mean.