That Lynches It

Cold comfort that the woodsman is Abe Lincoln. In the darkness (of future past) I have seen sootdark men begging lights fall out of the shadows.

* 

Already paens are composed and careful contextualization performed for Twin Peaks: The Return. Better and more cogent minds have identified its resonance with modern pop culture and today’s landscape of American fear. “Part 8” has been sounded from turrets as the greatest artwork to grace the led screen and TV culture’s greatest kink since the original run—and for no small reason.

It would be easy to devote hours to breaking down the apparent (-ly subconscious) references to TV shows that have filled the intervening 25 years. No effort at all to summon what rings True in The Return, what tickles the quivering undercarriage of your lizard brain in an era of smartphones and CERN and reboots. And what a joy to parse the narrative technique, the sound design, the play and ply with expectation and online dissection.

Instead of any of that, we’re gonna talk about all of that—because today, it’s time to talk about inspiration.

David Lynch famously attributed the Red Room scene in the original run to sitting on the warm roof of a red car and closing his eyes. Those who know anything about his daily life know he likes American Spirits, coffee, and Transcendental Meditation (TM). Lynch has made a career of channelling, more or less directly, his meditative creative leaps onto film and digital media.

Case in point: last week’s shot at White Sands, New Mexico, of the bomb test that set off the atomic age.

David Lynch set the long, lingering, relentless zoom to Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima”. He was making a point with this; that point is not what you, or necessarily Mr Lynch, might think.

Yes, of course the piece is dedicated to the victims of that first wartime usage of nuclear weapons, but more importantly, that song was once titled by its composer simply “4’44””. It was only after the fact, when he sat back and listened to his composition performed live instead of in his head, that he recognized it as a threnody, and one of such horror that only one atrocity came to mind upon hearing it. “Threnody” existed as a created piece before it earned a meaning; and once that meaning came into sight, its association with the bomb was cemented forever in canon.

Much the same thing has happened to Twin Peaks over the past quarter of a century.

The original series earned serious scrutiny and analysis out of its fanbase, and, tulpa-like, its thoughtforms became reality across countless television shows that followed, including The X-Files, Lost, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Weeds, Hannibal, 30 Rock, Sons of Anarchy, and probably whatever your favorite (scripted) series of the week is.

That analysis now has to come to bear on the show in 2017. David Lynch sat back and listened to his old work and found its proper title. He’s probably been sitting back for quite some time.

In fact, there is some evidence of this. Naomi Watt’s character in Mulholland Drive is taking up the snipped thread of Audrey Horne, who never did go to Hollywood after all. Less tenuously, Lynch himself confirmed that Lost Highway took place in the same universe as Twin Peaks. Fire Walk With Me carved paths into future films that never coalesced. David Lynch has had ample opportunity to reflect upon the greater meaning of Twin Peaks, and, now that he was handed free rein over The Return, he has the opportunity to corral his greater universe together into one final threnody.

Twenty-five years has sprinted by at a crawl. Lynch now has the benefit of a popular understanding of parallel universes and the many worlds theory. He can harness current understandings of physics and the twin perils of ignorance and apathy. The crosshatch of internet communication fills in spaces we didn’t know were empty.

The world has grown smaller; now the whole planet is the warm roof of a red car.

*

Before I met Dr Rex Patch, he was the gentle Lear of Hardiner writers. As one of the founding members of the Society of Algiers and the establishing editor of The Rosewire Companion (a seriously handy tool for those of us who want to pick that series to pieces), he stepped back from his leadership positions at the Society and handed stewardship over the Companion to the Society’s new president, Zachary Osgood. This was sometime around 2008, after the strange death of fellow founder Maxence Lawrence and just before the swell of seizures and injunctions out of the Trust Maghreb which cut supply of Hardiner literature to a trickle to very tiny outcry.

Dr Patch described his writing from this period as his “daisy crowns”. He was playing, really, writing for nothing but himself. He cooked all his meals except for dinners with friends, he spent a month a year travelling the world and another month travelling the U.S. (which made the cooking thing quite a feat at times), and all the while editing his own past correspondence with Harry Hardiner. I can relate to the daunted feeling he described. Luckily for me, in a way, I was not bequeathed the task of editing down these sacred artifacts when Dr Patch died last year.

He left instead a large body of writings on Hardiner, and our own correspondence, and unfinished essays and creative works. I don’t think I’ll ever get through it. It’s a tangle: in handbound books there’s musical notation and what looks like crude chemical geometry mixed with verse and quick observations. Including this one:

“Inspiration is what you see with your eyes closed.”

I saw that about a month ago when I came home from work and decided, for the first time in a while I’m ashamed to admit, to sit down to Dr Patch’s papers.

Dr Patch spent a great deal of time dwelling on the nature of inspiration in his interviews with Harry Hardiner—he conducted four of these interviews over the hermetic author’s career, the last of which he published in full as The Shattered Goblet, in which he convinces or coerces Harry Hardiner to engage in a little analysis of Rise. It’s really an exciting little book, because it moves outwards from the ninth Rosewire book into a wider analysis of the purpose of literature, and the meaning of writing. Hardiner’s views verged on the gnostic, and he eventually described his own inducement of inspiration like this:

“You just close your eyes and reach out. Reach out for what’s already supposed to be on the page, for what exists out there beyond where we’re sitting now, pull it out of the future, and pin it to words. That way it will never escape, but only travel.”

He was like that, I guess.

Rex Patch described him almost like a hoary prophet, even though the author was only about 40 at the time of his disappearance. From time to time, you could pull an anecdote about a dinner party or a night on a Manhattan rooftop out of Rex, one where Harry did something not quite outrageous, but memorable nonetheless. Once, Harry caught a pigeon and put it in his jacket pocket, which then, magician-like, was made empty with a swish of the wrist. Apparently he didn’t do card tricks exactly, but he would engage in a sort of fortune-telling game with a deck that involved a lot of drinking, usually by the person being read by Harry.

There are humanizing stories, too. When Rex complained by mail that Harry was behaving like Picasso, Harry posted back a pack of gummy ears. Harry didn’t eat mushrooms or olives because of the texture, but he loved the feel of a Southern treat called divinity, which I think is something like a pavlova, and he’d always get a pack if he went through Pigeon Forge.

In all of this, I’m starting to think of Dr Patch almost as a character in one of his own books; and paradoxically, it’s becoming harder to think of Harry Hardiner as just a depth to be plumbed or a faceless curiosity. The author was a friend of a friend, and only now that we’ve rounded the sun back to the anniversary of Dr Patch’s death has that really started to sink in. I could have asked Rex so much. We all could have.

There is still a hole where Dr Patch was, but it’s started to feel less personal. The more I sort through his papers, the more I remember what he was for so many others, and what he could have been had he chosen a path where he would have been more seen. Work at the Society has mainly consisted thus far of filing of documents, and reviews of documents, and cataloguing of documents, and reports of documents… it was easy to lose sight of Dr Patch’s pile when I got home after a long lunchless day.

Picking up Rex’s papers again, and of course this milestone, have reinforced the certainty that this loss is not personal, but human. The man was an unread book yet when he died—and the more I read of his work, especially comparing his early pieces with the passion of his works after he discovers Hardiner, the more I remember that what I feel about Rex must not compare to what Rex and his friends must have felt when Harry vanished at the end of the last century.

After all, I know where to visit Dr Patch. I will never know all his stories, but I at least have his papers and my memories of conversations. Rex and the others, and now I suppose me too, we don’t have Harry’s papers. Those have been claimed by the Trust Maghreb, years ago now, not long after the writer’s home was found abandoned, and again when a safe was dredged up out of the lake at Hardiner Hollow.

It is here that inspiration rears its head again.

For the longest time, I’ve pinned my inspiration to Harry Hardiner, and him alone, without really ever accepting him as another person. As I look over a piece prepared for the second annual Wallreaders Contest, it’s easy to see why that’s the easy assumption. But at a deeper level, I guess I never really challenged myself to describe what inspiration felt like to me, or how it found me, or why I had to write.

Maybe if I had taken the time, I’d be able to track it down now.

As I watch “Part 8” of The Return, I’m reminded of Harry Hardiner’s Rise, the last book he was around to publish. The Birth of BOB sequence takes us into the mushroom cloud, outside the convenience store, through what might be the White Lodge. If we had to guess, this is the Lynchian version of an origin story: it’s not that this struggle isn’t vast and ancient and tied to the Native Americans, it’s that, well, great bells rang when we split the atom, and they haven’t stopped ringing. We had the chance: greed and wrath won out.

Now, it’s hard to imagine that Mr Lynch always meant to connect BOB to an eggvomiting headshredder, or envisioned in 1990 the purple sea, but that doesn’t really matter. Mr Lynch has been inspired—illuminated, even, by his work. He gazed at it from the darkness of future past, and it passed through twenty-five years of Mulder and Scully and Chandler and Monica Lewinsky and Fargo and Governor Ventura and 9/11 and Oceanic 815 and Pi and Life of Pi and Obamacare and Survivor and Mythbusters and Ringu and Benghazi, two and a half decades of minidiscs and iPods and boutique coffee and hipster disaffection and organic cigarettes and taxpaying pot and creeping despair, it shone at him like walking fire and Mr Lynch is bouncing it back like the face of a waxing moon.

The glass box does remind TV puzzle fanatics of Lost. Mr C’s brutal lifestyle brings to mind both Walter White and Jax Teller. The Killing, a show so pervaded by the memory of Twin Peaks that some watching the first season mistook it for a more grounded remake, spent gouts of time in the Wapi Indian Casino by the slots in that gauzy first season. To have a rootless Dale wander through the slots as Mr Jackpots is almost certainly not a reference to Sarah Linden’s investigation—don’t mistake my meaning. It exists, though, The Killing and its slots. And now The Return exists alongside it. Convergence is not always the same thing as coincidence. …Dig?

Inspiration. What we see with our eyes closed. The thing that already exists out there, ahead of us, in the darkness of future past, waiting for a magician who longs to see. All we can do is try to feel its outlines and birth it out breach so it can be there existing to grasp when we thought of it.

The last time I felt inspired, and I mean truly inspired, had been shortly before Dr Patch died last 4th of July. I was doing yoga, although that is a generous statement. I was engaging in a union of mind and body, at least, perhaps an accidental one, and an awareness came over me that I had a great deal of trouble pinning down into words.

I can’t say it was anything like what Harry Hardiner described, but I definitely had my eyes closed, and I definitely… saw something. I tried to sketch out the barest outlines—it had to do with symmetry in motion, and how that scaled upwards and downwards and inwards and outwards, how math integrates upwards into narrative, and the wise seeds of ur-religion that grew into a long vining telephone. It wasn’t even as clear as that last sentence, but I showed it to Dr Patch, and he seemed to… well, if not see exactly, he at least seemed to glimpse what I was gesturing towards.

I tried a few more ways to describe what I “saw”, but eventually it began to all fade like a dream. I only have the barest understanding now of what I fully understood but could not say sitting half-lotus. It is maddening, yes, to feel like I shortly saw into the wirings of Everything and now have lost it, but what is more maddening is knowing now what revelation feels like… and realizing it may never come again, at least like that.

Of course, for many months, I was not in a very receptive mood. Dr Patch dead was not, frankly, something I was willing to fully accept for a couple of weeks, although I don’t think I realized it then. I drank more (which, for me, was about a beer and a half a day, but still), and I got out less. The election cycle didn’t help, and that the day after the results came in I had to comfort a great many crying strangers was likewise discomfiting.

Truth be told, I love my work at the Society of Algiers—but it also doesn’t leave much room for inspiration to strike. There is a lot of paperwork and correspondence to attend to, which is actually up my alley in a lot of ways… but, like a chef who pops a can of soup when he gets off, I’m in a much better place to watch Twin Peaks when I get home than I am to close my eyes and stargaze.

But looking back, there have been some moments… some glimmers… that I may have missed, or only dimly spotted. And more recently, particularly as I’ve dived deeper into some uncharacteristically personal writings by Rex in the past few days, there have been outright gleams.

I’ve been working on a small piece about the Trust Maghreb, and their fatwa on Hardiner’s work under the guise of protector, for some weeks. It’s long, slow work. Until yesterday, when I took a break from a passage about a rumor (that the Trust is collecting Harry’s books to destroy them… by his request) to read through the New York Times… and read about Edward Albee’s posthumous request to destroy his unfinished works.

After that, paragraphs fell out of me. There will be some editing and further research to round it out, but who knows—there may be more than one blog post this month!

Inspiration is funny. And right now, David Lynch may be its dark lord.

*

“Part 8” of The Return is abjectly horrifying. Some of that is owed to its outright expressionism and nonlinear narrative, to be sure: it is jarring to interrupt the flow, as it were, of Agent Cooper’s journey back to himself with much of anything, let alone what may very well have been the birth of blind mad humanish destruction.

Plus, nothing about the woodsmen screams normal or nice. Not only do they appear to be vagrants (Lynch is not shy about using our fear of the homeless against us), but they are devoid of color or contrast: it is almost as though they are crude copies, made by something that doesn’t quite see the same things we do. Costumes from a doomed first contact.

I’ve already talked a bit about the bomb sequence, and Penderecki’s “Threnody”, but their combination into… well, almost a music video… it’s almost as though Lynch is reminding us that music can also be horrifying, that something we frequently discuss solely as beautiful can also be a medium for the evil and bloodsoaked. He may be doing the same thing moments earlier as Trent Reznor performs.

The chaos within the blast is unsettling, and leaves us aaaalmost as tense as when we watched the Roadhouse get swept the week before (seriously, I was on the the edge of my seat, and not just the first time I watched it)—but that sloooooow zooooooom innnnn…. At some point, when I first had the episode playing, sitting there alone in the dark, I realized I was shaking my head no, no, please don’t keep going, stop…

That happened again at the end of the episode with the bugfrog that moved like a shot rabbit. No. No. Please don’t keep going. STOP.

It is almost impossible to imagine producers devising anything like what David Lynch gave us in “Part 8” (which, I will admit, due to the wonderfully Log-Lady-like episode descriptions on Showtime, I have been calling “Gotta Light?”); in and of itself, it is a screaming testament to the accomplishments of a single artistic vision being given instrument and agency. Like it or not, in this episode, Mark Frost has left the building. 

Which brings us, barely, back to inspiration.

* 

I don’t ordinarily tell passers-by, but my closest brush with Mr Lynch came roughly five years ago, before I met Dr Patch or revived Pinkum Press, as I entered a poor script into the Austin Film Festival’s teleplay competition. No, nothing came of it. It was a poor script. But while writing it, what I could see beyond what I could write felt… close to right. Not quite spot on, but something that could fit.

It was a pilot called Twin Peaks.

Not a reboot, not really, and not really a revival. The pilot introduced a southern town called Twin Peaks that gained notoriety after the original show aired. To profit off of this newfound attention, the town poaches a Laura Palmer from elsewhere, builds replicas of the sets, prepares an annual festival… And things go wrong.

I sent Mr Lynch’s lawyer this script with a request to use it solely for competition purposes. Mr Lynch gave some acquiescence on that count through his lawyer, although he ceded that accurately tracking the rights was a bit stickier than just speaking with him.

In my script, one act closes on two galumphing cops discovering evidence of a crime: two right hands, lit by flickering lights. The lead cop says, “Oh, hell.”

When Detective Dave sees the body in the bed, and later the flesh in the trunk, and said, “Woof,”… I freaked out.

Not because I think David Lynch read my script and was making an extremely oblique reference to it. Dig?

But my script is out there. And, similar or not, I recognized something of it when I was watching the new show. Convergence. A glimmer or a gleam.

That’s inspiration.

Seeing with eyes closed.

Delivering the future.

The world is a red car roof.

This is the water.

And this is the well.

Drink deep, and descend.

The horse is the white of the eyes and the dark within.

…

…Maybe I should pick up Transcendental Meditation.