David Lynch feature image by Gilles Mingasson via Getty Images

“We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives in the dream.” — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, as quoted by David Lynch

“…But who is the dreamer?” — Twin Peaks: the Return

This morning I woke up and went through my daily routines: showering, moisturizing, blow drying my hair. And then I stacked up two pillows on my bed and sat down on them to meditate for twenty minutes. As I closed my eyes, I thought sadly, “This is the first time I have meditated since Lynch died.” And then I went within.

Meditation came into my life through David Lynch. Though I am not a Transcendental Meditation practitioner as he was, I first considered the connection between meditation and art while reading his memoir Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006). I was attracted to the method, but wasn’t quite able to hold onto it. Like many beginner meditators, I let life get in the way. But during a protracted period of writers’ block a few years ago, I watched one of his lectures on creativity and decided then to finally make it a consistent part of my life.

On some level, I have to admit the embarrassing fan inside me. I hoped that by meditating like him, I too could reach into what he called the unified field of consciousness and pull up astounding, troubling, and inexplicable images to use in my writing and art. Whether I’ve yet caught any fish as big and strange as his from this universal current, I don’t know. What I do know is that meditation has become a core part of caring for my mental and creative health, clearing away the blockages and restoring abilities I once felt lost.

Thanks, David.

In Dreams

“That man has only two abodes, this and the next world. The dream state, which is the third, is at the junction. […] When he dreams, he takes away a little of this all-embracing world (the waking state), himself puts the body aside and himself creates (a dream body in its place), revealing his own lustre by his own light—and dreams. In this state the man himself becomes the light.” — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.3.9

David Lynch was a painter first. This, I think, is often the key to understanding his work. He used to tell a particular story about how he came to film. Sitting at night in a studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he was painting a canvas of a dark garden. As he looked at the painting, “the green began to move. And from the green and black came a wind. And I thought, ‘Oh, a moving painting.’” Things often happened like this for Lynch — out of nowhere, an idea would blow across the surface of his mind and, following it, he would be led into new and strange territory. He set out to make moving paintings, first with Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967) — an animation and sculptural hybrid depicting exactly what the title suggestions to the alarming drone of a siren — and, after a series of uncanny shorts, his debut feature Eraserhead (1977), which became a cult sensation on the midnight movie circuit.

Dreams are central to the themes and structures of his work. In dreams, identity, time, and place become malleable, turning in on each other and creating startling juxtapositions. We can harness the power of dreams to solve mysteries, like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks (1990-2017). In dreams, we can try to escape and transform who we really are, as Fred/Pete attempts through psychogenic fugue in Lost Highway (1997). Dreams can give us hope like Sandy in Blue Velvet (1986), or trap us in suffering like the Lost Girl in Inland Empire (2006).

But dreams were not just narrative and aesthetic fodder for Lynch. All of Lynch’s work — painting, sculpture, music, and film — exist in the porous borderlands between dreaming and waking life because they come from the intuitive plane. Lynch credits his meditation practice — for twenty minutes, twice a day, without fail — with putting him in touch with the universal intuition he believed hummed beneath the surface of the universe. “Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together. That’s essential for the filmmaker,” he explained in Catching the Big Fish.

Taking in any of his unpredictable and idiosyncratic work, it’s hard to argue with the man. He allowed intuition to guide his process and his decisions, and it’s for this reason that his work cannot be explained to any logical satisfaction.

You can’t fake intuition. You can only follow it.

A Woman in Trouble

Laura Palmer is already dead when we meet her, wrapped in plastic on the shore of the river. But that doesn’t stop her from becoming one of the most captivating and perplexing women in film and television. Her depiction in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Fire Walk With Me (1992), and The Return (2017) could’ve been just a body, an object around which the plot turned, but instead grew into something more. Like many of Lynch’s women, she contains an entire universe — dark corners and hidden rooms, secrets and lies. She is riven apart by the violence of the nuclear family, and, like many of us, finds destructive outlets to cope. But even dead, or in another dimension, Lynch tells us, she can find a way to make her voice heard — a scream that tears across time.

I don’t want to give any straight man too much credit, but long before the lesbian prestige dramas of the 2010s, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) put lesbian romance on centre stage. And not some softcore pillow fight fantasy or staid period drama of unrequited yearning. He gave us Naomi Watts sobbing in a filthy apartment while she masturbates to memories of the woman she loved and was spurned by. Now that’s representation, baby!

Complicated, passionate relationships between women caught in a world marked by male violence were a frequent motif in his work — whether it be the lesbian actresses of Mulholland Drive, Laura Palmer and her many frenemies in Twin Peaks, or in Inland Empire where a kiss between women is what finally frees the dreamer from her suffering.

The Lynchian woman is not singular, but you know her when you meet her. Lynch’s camera had a empathetic eye toward women not often found in straight men’s cinema, and I think this is why women — both the actresses he worked with, and many, many women critics and audiences — connect so intensely to his characters. Like so many, I saw pieces of myself in Audrey Horne, in Alice Wakefield, in Laura Palmer. Lynch’s “women in trouble” are often constrained and exploited by their worlds, but they never felt exploitative because there was a light of compassion shining through them.

It is through women that Lynch reminds us: No matter how dark it gets, there is always the possibility for suffering to end.

Fix Your Hearts

“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they are like poison to the artist.” — David Lynch

In his magnum opus television series, Twin Peaks, Lynch introduced audiences to Denise Bryson. When she enters the series in season two, Denise is a DEA agent who, to Agent Cooper’s surprise and delight, has recently transitioned to living as a woman. I don’t feel like parsing out the politics of a white trans woman government agent, but her portrayal by David Duchovny did bring us one of the most beloved moments in trans film history. In The Return (2017), Lynch’s own character Gordon Cole visits Denise, now FBI Chief of Staff (again, don’t ask me to go there, please! Let a girl live! It’s TV!), and delivers this monologue:

“Before you were Denise, when you were Dennis, and I was your boss, when I had you working undercover at the DEA, you were a confused and wild thing sometimes. I had enough dirt on you to fill the grand canyon. And I never used a spoonful because you were, and are, a great agent. And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues — those clown comics — to fix their hearts or die!”

This unusual moment of allyship has become a mantra among many trans people and our friends — spawning endless memes, tattoos, and shouted refrains. Though it comes as a moment of trans acceptance on the show, this attitude is central to everything Lynch stood for, as both an artist and a spiritual philosopher. For all of the dark and sadistic elements of his work, Lynch exhorts us to always reach for the light. Forty minutes of meditation a day might not unite humanity and usher in peace, but believing that, as he did, is a brave and shining bit of optimism in a frequently bleak world.

The cultural baggage surrounding the figure of the artist revels in the idea of mental anguish, poverty, and self-torture. But in his books and lectures, Lynch always pushed back on this. You can’t create if you are suffering, he told us plainly. He referred to these afflictions playfully as the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. “If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”

Lynch’s vision of the Art Life hangs everything on the catching of ideas. Nothing else mattered. Anything that got in the way had to be excised. Maybe it didn’t always make him the easiest partner or parent, as he discusses in his memoir Room to Dream (2018), but it made him a singular voice of our time.

My own life and work as a writer and artist owe so much to Lynch. He taught me to keep reaching inside, to trust those inexplicable feelings within, to dedicate myself to the Art Life, and to find the light even in the darkest moments. To follow some strange wind. He urged us all to fix our hearts and live.

Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, the organisation Lynch created to spread the practice of Transcendental Meditation, made a statement claiming that Lynch was meditating when he died. It’s a beautiful final image, like that of many Bodhisattvas. He went down into the universal stream of consciousness, the same way he had every day since 1973, stepped into that current, and it gently carried him away.

A light did not go out, it simply became one with a greater brightness.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!