David

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Resolutions. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

I had another post ready to go for this week, but then came the news just now of the death of David Lynch. (Thanks to my friend Carl for pointing it out to me.)

In 2010, I was cleaning my apartment in Echo Park during the golden hour on a Sunday and noticed something sitting on my doorstep. It was a box set of “Twin Peaks,” Lynch’s medium-warping early-’90s TV show—possibly ordered by my roommate, though that somehow went unconfirmed. At any rate, it was sitting there without a shipping box or a note, in its shrink wrap, under the golden light on the wooden staircase on the west side of my stucco building. So I watched the show, and learned a lot of new things about what art could be.

That wasn’t my first exposure to Lynch’s work, but it was a formative one. Later, it was his wildly devoted advocacy for Transcendental Meditation that brought me into that practice and reset the game.

Though we are quite different, I can’t think of a creative person I have a greater wish to be like.

Here is a passage, chosen basically at random—but what is randomness? That feels like the root of an animating question in Lynch’s work—from his delicious book about meditation and creativity, “Catching the Big Fish”:

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, you sort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is not correct because it feels incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like the idea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, it feels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. You start one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned. But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct to you. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others.

…

Sometimes accidents happen that aren’t happy; but you have to work with those as well. You adapt. You throw out this thing, and throw out that thing, and throw out another thing. But if you pay attention to the original idea—stay true to that—it’s surprising how, at the end, even the things that were accidents are honest. They’re true to the idea.

We’ll miss you, David. See you in the wordless, imageless, infinite beyond.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.