Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it… I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it’s people kind of going in circles. It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.
– David Lynch
I’d been in Los Angeles while David Lynch was still alive, but it never occurred to me to go to places he mentioned, or to look at his house (a shooting location for Lost Highway). This was, I guess, my way of showing respect. Let the man live and create and just enjoy briefly sharing the same air, the same blue skies and golden sunshine. That was enough for me.
That and the memory of meeting him once, in Dublin, through a strange set of coincidences. He was kind and patient, and signed the box of my Agent Cooper tapes. My friend Andrew who was with me that evening was as nervous and excited as I was, and so took an extremely blurry pic with his phone that looks like something straight out of one of Lynch’s movies. I don’t have a copy of that photo anymore, but I can still see it when I close my eyes. I still (of course) have my signed tape.
I remember thanking him for his movies and for his art. I’d been to Paris that spring to see The Air is on Fire at Fondation Cartier. I was working in retail at the time, barely earning above minimum wage, so a trip to Paris was no small feat. I’d met up with a Parisian friend (Mathilde) and we’d walked up there from Place St. Sulpice. It was a sunny day, a pleasant amble, and neither of us really knew what to expect. The exhibition was over multiple floors, with giant canvases on the ground floor and short films, props, and other art on the lower ones. We spent a couple of hours watching short films and admiring the recreated sets, photographs, and sketches before moving upstairs to look at the canvases. And that was where the strange duality of Lynch really kicked in. He’d developed a soundscape to go along with the exhibition and somehow we’d come up from the basement at the right/wrong moment to be bombarded with oppressive sonic dissonance. It was impossible to simply walk around and look at the paintings. We tried. I found myself walking faster and faster, my heart racing, my neck prickling. I kept telling myself I was being stupid. It was just noise. But it was noise like in the Pink Room scene from Fire Walk With Me. The kind of noise that burrows into you and makes you feel a way you really don’t want to. At some point I caught Mathilde’s eye and tilted my head towards the door. She nodded and we speed-walked out into the sunshine. We both stood in the courtyard, shaking the sound off ourselves like dogs, laughing nervously and wondering what the fuck just happened.
When I got home, I ordered the exhibition catalogue (being a bookseller came in handy). It came with a CD of the music and sounds accompanying the exhibition, and I’ve never been able to listen to it. You may think I’m a weirdo or a wuss, but when I tell you I simply cannot, I’m not exaggerating. And the thing is, that’s art. I can sit here typing at my desk in another country almost 20 years later and feel that same dread followed by the relief of sunlight and silence and almost compulsive giggles. Those moments, those feelings, lodged themselves in my brain perfectly and permanently.
When the exhibition catalogue arrived at work, a co-worker (Gwen) asked me about it. She’d never seen any of Lynch’s movies, and I guess was a little too young to have seen Twin Peaks. I told her that I loved his work, and that I was looking forward to seeing Inland Empire. She told me that her boyfriend had tickets to an event Lynch would be speaking at, and I told her how lucky they were and to please tell me all about it afterwards.
Well, she went to see Inland Empire and she was furious with me about it. She ranted at me for a solid 15 minutes (it was a slow day at work) about how it was too long and didn’t make sense and what the fuck were the rabbits about? I tried to explain that there isn’t really an explanation, that I just kind of let his movies wash all over me and let my subconscious work it all out over time. It’s more about how they make you feel. And yeah, I know that comes off as pretentious, but I didn’t and still don’t know any other way to put it. Anyway, she no longer wanted to go to the event, and her boyfriend wasn’t all that bothered (they were freebies from his job), so if I liked this weird shit so much maybe I should just take their tickets instead?
And that’s how I wound up shaking David Lynch’s hand in Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street on an October evening in 2007, and thanking him (inarticulately but earnestly) for all of his work. Gentleman that he was, he looked me straight in the eye and told me he was happy to hear it. As if it meant something to him, when really it meant so much to me.
Like so many others, I found solace during the pandemic watching David Lynch’s Weather Report and Today’s Number. They were small beacons of constancy in a time of chaos. I lost my Dad in May of 2020, and lost a beloved cat a few short weeks afterward. I spent a lot of that year feeling unmoored, dealing with waves of grief and living in this locked down new normal that confined me to within a couple miles of my home. Trying to figure out how to be in a world that seemed irreparably broken. But there was David Lynch, every day, telling me and many thousands of others about the weather in LA, and fishing a number out of a jar. Kindly, calmly, constantly. A community grew out of those daily videos, a little internet flotilla of nerds united in our appreciation for these daily acts of kindness. The world came to seem a little less broken, there were others out there relying on the same daily touchstone, and we shared in the simple joy of it.
We didn’t know that he was doing all this while dealing with a COPD diagnosis, and quitting smoking. We didn’t know because he didn’t want us to. And he kept up both daily videos for longer than he needed to, because he knew what they were doing for so many people. Simple kindness.
When the news broke of Lynch’s death in January last year, I didn’t really know how to process it. I didn’t know the man, I’d met him once, I loved his art and I respected the heck out of him, so it was hard to articulate how sad I felt about him being gone from this world. But I did know that the next time I was in LA, I’d make sure to stop by his grave and pay my respects.
And so last week, thanks to yet another friend (hi HK, thank you for indulging me!) I got to do that. We took a drive along Mulholland then past the house on Senalda Road that isn’t his anymore. We went to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank and I had one of those chocolate shakes that he stopped drinking because of the additives (I figured just one would be safe). That evening we watched Mulholland Drive because she had never seen it, and her roommate’s Dalmatian howled along to Llorando which was kind of perfectly absurd. We went to Hollywood Forever on a sunny February afternoon and I spent a few minutes at his graveside under those blue skies and that golden sunshine wishing him a happy hereafter. As I turned to walk away, a couple of dudes gave me a chin tilt and a smile before hopping into an electric blue Mustang. I bet they watched those YouTube videos every day too.
A strange carnival, that we’re lucky to experience together.