some thoughts on david lynch

david lynch died today, or at least today is when the news says so. i wrote for a while in my journal just now and wanted to share. isn't it so weird that we can never fully express how art moves us or tell the artist thank you in any kind of way that feels right or accurate, if we are able to thank them at all??? i think you all know that twin peaks is very close to me, but i need to believe that it isn't just love of whimsy that i like about it, and that other people like about it, and it's not – it's something endlessly fascinating, captivating, compelling, moving, strange, unknowable but perceived and felt, in all these nameable or alternatively indescribable ways, to my brain and being that lives in and beyond that artwork and others by this man.

maybe i will write more about twin peaks or david lynch's works later. it's really hard to articulate and summarize your feelings about a topic, idea, artwork, place, moment, activity, relationship that has moved or changed or impacted you so deeply and fundamentally or in any case memorably, that you love so much. none of it feels sufficient, and sometimes, even worse, it can feel like you've gotten it all wrong!!!! and that you've bastardized (desecrated??? idk) your relationship to the thing itself!!! this is an experience i have sometimes when i try to describe journaling, or dancing, or the reasons i feel love for people in my life, or what love even is (a not-so-long long-ago talk with friends in an inflatable pool).

my coworker S said yesterday that the inner life is what she loves about living, that for all her decades it fascinates her still, that the outer life (everything else) is often "fucking hard!!!". during this convo she may have used the phrase "i decorate my little home-prison and make it nice." and of course we were talking about capitalism, and about the hardships and losses and griefs that find us all throughout our lives, that we are unavoidably facing all the time, one after the other, often many at once. (as I and L might say, sometimes all at once can be merciful). but S and i agreed that relationships, in which you feel that your inner life is seen and recognized, in which you recognize and feel and understand the inner life of another person or being, that is where the outer life can feel most meaningful. there is of course also engagement with movement, action, embodiment, satisfaction, pleasure, delight, wonder, hard good work, and much else. but aren't those types of engagements relationships too – with food, your own body, activity, objects in the world?? for me, thinking yesterday of these close relationships felt like a long-awaited n-th chapter in my fascination with ideas of authentic, true, "accurate"???? communication, if such communication is ever possible and if so how, and what are the best mediums, and how do we know????? and so on and so forth.

anyways, i know my relationship to the show of twin peaks and to the art of david lynch more generally has something of this, this knowing and being known, this feeling, this under the surface Thing, i think we all have relationships that feel this way throughout our lifetimes, or at least i hope so (and how lucky we are to have them. though i often still feel unsatisfied with just gratitude or grief-as-love-with-no-place-to-go; they are comforts but not the whole sum of what something meant and was, necessarily). these works said things to me that i recognized. and felt recognized by. i know many others in the world felt the same way in the same and different ways. it's the reason Blue Rose Magazine exists, and this book and this book and others and this website and countless podcasts and newsletters (the good ones) and many other forms of splintering conversations stemming from the same original work!!!

furthermore, we all are going to die, of course, and david lynch was 78, which is pretty old, though not super old. it's hard even already not to think that he did things pretty well. at least when it comes to his body of work. no one creates in a vacuum, but his creations feel very unique, and i wonder if anyone or anything else might ever strike me in precisely the same way. in a way i hope not. similar is always cool of course. but hopefully you know what i mean.