What David Lynch Taught Me

For David Lynch, who taught me to question reality and helped to set me on the spiritual and creative path I am walking today.

Written January 15.

Still from Mulholland Drive.

I woke up this morning feeling horribly bad. I could barely get out of bed. The WiFi was not working. Things felt skewed, distorted, as if something had gone terribly wrong or perhaps disappeared from the universe.

Then I saw the New York Times alert. David Lynch was dead.

Somehow I was not surprised at. Not that I believe that I am so perceptive that I can sense the death of someone I have never met… but Lynch’s work has always traversed that weird boundary between the real and the unreal, the magical and the mundane. His work asks the question, and acknowledges the strange porousness shadowy silence that follows: Was it real? Did I imagine it? Was it all a dream? Or is there actually something more to all these coincidences? Did some part of me sense that one of my favorite artists had departed this earthly plane?

Lynch’s work dove deep into the marrow of Hollywood and the mind. It traversed the dream-cores of storytelling, narrative, and monomyth, and unearthed the ways they can get distorted when placed upon the broken screen of the real. His work has always felt like an accurate description of reality to me, by which I mean it accurately reflects how bizarre and magical and cursed and skewed and heightened existence on Earth actually is.

*

Life has always felt extremely surreal to me, with its reflections that dance in mirrors, its synchronicities and coincidences, its mesh of horror and wonder, and its humans whose minds traverse such genius and agony. Lynch’s work reflects those contrasts, portraying the wounds and wonders of life through a lens of compassion and infinite creativity.

Right after I learned that he died I was struck by a sudden burst of energy. I knew, or sensed, without a doubt that his greatest wish for our world was for us creative people to continue to create. Lynch would want me to make art.

So I dragged myself out the door to go to a recording session with a friend. And I will keep dragging myself to the altar of creativity for my entire life.

Lynch on the set of Twin Peaks.

*

Lynch’s work first appeared to me during the summer just before I turned 18. It was one of those long, aimless summers, and I spent a lot of afternoons with a friend watching films or drive around our silent suburban town, listening to Lana Del Rey, sitting by lakes, and dreaming about moving to Los Angeles and New York City and making great art.

That summer my friend showed me Mulholland Drive, a film that ripped apart my perception of reality. It sent me down a rabbit hole and made me obsessed with the question of whether we are dreaming or not. I wandered the streets of New York City a lot after moving there for college, wondering if everything was actually unreal.

The boundaries of reality seemed so thin to me then; it was easy to see that everything was constructed; the very pavement seemed to be made of scraps of silt; everything was a dream within a dream, time past and time present were contained within time future. There were real-life things that were contributing to this sense of disorientation: Some of my closest high school friendships had ended suddenly, and I found myself wondering if they had been built on reality at all, or just a shared illusion of closeness. Caught up in unrequited loves, I wondered if my feelings were real.

Lynch’s films gave me the language and tools to question my reality. Eventually I would discover that many of the world’s greatest sages do posit that reality actually is a great dream, and that awakening or enlightenment means waking up from this dream, waking up to what actually is, which is our interconnectedness, our shared oneness, our actual union with the divine.

I like to think this was Lynch’s intention. His work rips up the fabric of what is, revealing the molten, oozing core, the places where everything melts into everything else. By exposing the brokenness at the heart of the so-called “real,” his work creates a pathway into exploring the transcendent and sublime.

*

In college I discovered Twin Peaks, and finished watching it as I drove across the country alone. In the show, spirits and surreality and demons brew beneath the surface of a small town. Mysteries are solved in dreams, and there are places where time falls apart entirely and identity fractures and the unthinkable happens.

We think the world is rational and solid, or we like to think. But it is not. My life, and my moods, seem to follow a sort of dream-logic, working with some unknowable guiding force that is both benevolent and chaotic that Lynch’s work mirrors.

His art provided a framework for understanding that I was not alone in seeing that there was all sorts of magic hidden away in the world. It taught me to listen to the part of me that knew there was so much more. There was much darkness beneath the surface of my ordinary suburban upbringing and my Hollywood dreams, and yet so much light too, beyond the numbed edges of the apparent.

Lynch’s work awoke a part of me that became a direct portal into spirituality, which has become a much bigger part of my life than I thought it would be in the years since I first watched Mulholland Drive. Spirituality has given me a framework for talking about things like subtle energies, and intuition, and dreams; it’s given me a way to incorporate magic into my real life.

I was a staunch atheist growing up, fixated on the pure absurdity that literal interpretations of religion seemed to rely on. In my hyper-rational mind there could be no spirit. Yet I always loved fantasy, myths and stories that explored other worlds. Lynch’s work started opening up cracks in my atheistic psyche. Along with Allen Ginsberg, he set me on a path of following a sort of inner wildness that still guides my life today, for better or for worse, and sometimes I feel I am always just following their music.

*

On the day Lynch died, after the recording session, I headed out to a kirtan session at a Bhakti Yoga center on the Lower East Side. Dozens of people sat in a crowded room and chanted mantras to Krishna, to the divine, to the savior who, a woman told us in between the singing, has lived within our hearts all the time.

She also told us a long story that featured one detail that stood out to me: self-loathing, she said, is a demon, and Krishna is the light that can guide these demons to peace.

Lynch believed in demons, and he saw the darkness and chaos of the world in a clear-eyed way, but he also believed in the possibility of finding peace by seeing and embracing all of it. A staunch advocate for transcendental meditation, he believed everyone held the keys to unlocking their own creative magic and to truly seeing the world as it actually is.

The good news is that if this is all a dream or an illusion, then we can wake up to something better. That’s the legacy that his work leaves with me. His is a legacy of creating for the sake of engaging with the divine creative spirit that wants nothing more than but to sing. A legacy of not compromising your work, not explaining it or dumbing it down, but allowing it to bloom into a strangeness that at last can match up to the strangeness of actual life.

I know he is not gone. He lives on in his work and words. He did not believe life ended in death. Though his work delved into our world’s most nightmarish depths, he leaves behind a legacy of kindness, creativity, and spiritual insight I can only hope to emulate.

Safe travels on your soul’s journey into the great beyond, David Lynch. Thanks for opening the blinds for so many of us.

Still from Twin Peaks.