SATURDAY RUBRICS: 1/18/25

A DAVID LYNCH MEDITATION

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS

“Darkness is different to me from evil.” - David Lynch

The above photo of David Lynch with Isabella Rossellini and the one below were taken by Annie Leibovitz in 1986. The photos were styled by Joe McKenna. They ran in the March 1987 issue of Vanity Fair and accompanied a story about Lynch written by Stephen Schiff. There is no specific mention of what was the linchpin of Lynch’s life and maybe still is in whatever awaited him this week in his next one: transcendental meditation. And yet it is there seeping between the lines. In some manner, that is what TM is - the seeping between. “Life is a short trip but always continuing,” Lynch told The Guardian’s Rory Carroll in 2018 when his biography-cum-memoir, Room to Dream, was being published. “We’ll all meet again. In enlightenment you realise what you truly are and go into immortality. You don’t ever have to die after that.” Lynch even set up The David Lynch Foundation UK in 2012 to advance TM’s benefits in improving the physical and mental well-being of individuals who have experienced traumatic stress.

In 2013, he wrote an essay for The New Statesmen about his devotion to TM since he began to practice it in 1973. He made this drawing to illustrate it.

In that essay, he wrote:

“About 300 years ago, scientists started wondering: what was matter, what was wood, what was air, what was water, what was flesh, etc? And they started looking into matter and they began to find things – things that we now learn about in school. They found cells and molecules. They went deeper and found atoms; they went deeper and deeper, all the way down to the tiniest particles – the elementary particles.

‘They found four forces that act upon the particles. And on a deeper level, they found that the four forces became three. Some unification started. And, on a deeper level, the three forces became two. About 35 years ago, modern science, quantum physics, discovered the Unified Field at the base of all matter. This field is the unity of all the particles and all the forces of creation. This is a field of nothing, but the scientists say that out of this nothing emerges everything that is a thing. This Unified Field is unmanifest yet all manifestation comes from this field.

“Ancient Vedic science, the science of consciousness, has always known of this field. Believers say that it is an eternal unbounded ocean of consciousness. And this consciousness has qualities. So this Unified Field, this ocean of consciousness, is a field of unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity, unbounded happiness, unbounded love, energy and peace.

“Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique, an ancient form of meditation brought back for this time by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It is a technique that allows any human being to dive within, through subtler levels of mind and intellect, and then transcend – that is experience, that ocean of pure consciousness at the base of all mind and matter – to experience this Unified Field within with those all-positive qualities.”

In 2018, he was interviewed by Vulture and talked a lot about TM and after confessing that he was probably a bad parent balanced that out by saying that he did however start his children very early in their being taught to meditate:

"All my kids started when they were 6 or 5. I’ll tell you a story: I was in Italy, and this nun was asking me about Transcendental Meditation for children and wanted to know at what age kids were old enough to start. I said, ‘When they’re old enough to keep a secret.’ She said, ‘Oh, no! No secrets!’ But you get your mantra and you’re not supposed to say it out loud because it’s meant to take you inward, not outward. The nun freaked out about that. Maybe that tells you something about nuns.’”

In the Vanity Fair story Schiff writes about the subconscious detritus of desire floating about artistically in Lynch’s films, “oddities stitched in from time to time, scenes and figures that seem arbitrary or dissonant until one recognizes the way they spank the rest of the structure to life.” Lynch’s take: "Sometimes you need to put in this gleaming little jewel. It's different from everything else, but it fits and it completes things. And it thrills your soul."

Schiff goes on to end the story with these four paragraphs:

“It's rare to hear a contemporary artist talking about what thrills his soul— rarer still a contemporary filmmaker. In today's commodity-mad art market and blockbuster-mad movie market, we're not used to people like Lynch, who creates out of some churning yen, out of the almost physical desire to realize the imagery he glimpses in his head—to build it and light it up and warm himself by its flame. Perhaps that's why his most disquieting visions are often his most alluring. The hushed, excitable way his camera steals toward them evokes a lust to know, a lust to penetrate and enter, that's almost sexual. Lynch's films aren't so much stories as they are spaces, dimensions he yearns to ‘float’ in, just as he once yearned to hear a certain sound with a painting he'd made, just as the viewer yearns to enter the moody ozone of his drawings.

"‘Creating a place is super important,’ he agrees. ‘Like Sunset Boulevard, for instance, which is one of my favorite films. I want to be there in that house. I can drive up Sunset Boulevard even now, and I say, If only I could turn off and go to that house, and I just can't believe that I can't do it. That's why I love looking at that film over and over. I don't care about the story or even about knowing it—I love to experience that place.’

“This passionate urge to explore hidden worlds is something of an obsession with Lynch—not unlike the obsession that draws Jeffrey, the hero of Blue Velvet, into a torch singer's tawdry universe to drink in the voluptuous horrors that await him there. ‘David is obsessed with obsession,’ says Rossellini. ‘He finds it irresistibly funny. He finds Frank comical in Blue Velvet, because Frank is so obsessed—even in the scene where Frank is raping me. When we were filming it, David couldn't stop laughing—he had to grab hold of himself not to disturb the scene. And you know, sometimes when dogs look at your food and they won't leave—I think he finds that extremely comical. I laugh, too, but I don't know why.’

“Rossellini stops for a moment; she's hit on something. "With David, you understand without really understanding him. Most of the time you see a film and you ask lots of questions, then you talk to intelligent friends, you think, you read, and then you have it all figured out. Not with David. He just reaches that spot where there is no answer.’”

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