The Cosmic Current of David Lynch

The Cosmic Mystery Club owes more to David Lynch than I can say. I mean that out of humility, but also inability. I’m not ready to contribute to the tide of remembrances and retrospectives that has appeared since his death earlier this month. How can I look back on a visionary when I feel like I’m only beginning to understand my relationship to his work?

Credit: Georges Biard

I enjoyed Devan Suber’s reflection at Polygon, because I first encountered Lynch’s influence through video games: Link’s Awakening, Silent Hill, others.

I was a kid. I didn’t know these dreamlike games were Lynchian. I just had a feeling of unfamiliarity that I was increasingly becoming familiar with. A subgenre of surreal, similar to the sensation of reaching for an object underwater, knowing the object and my hand aren’t where my eyes say they are, grasping it anyway. Refraction is clarity, displaced in time and space.

A few years before I began thinking about cosmic mysteries, I began to recognize Lynch by a peculiar sense of humor, a way to use idiosyncratic humanity as a scale marker with which to measure the cosmic. To me, this is best articulated by Laura Raicovich in At the Lightning Field (a record of an evolving relationship with land artist Walter de Maria’s eponymous installation):

There is great pleasure in looking at the infinitesimally

small aspects of an experience

as well as the infinitesimally large

David Lynch understood that people are endless expanses with shifting laws of mental, emotional, and spiritual physics, in no small part because people exist within similarly hard-to-comprehend expanses. The cosmic describes the mundane, and the mundane describes the cosmic. When I see Lynch in works of surreal horror, I always hope to find his sensibility for scale, too.

In November I wrote a little about coming to Twin Peaks by following Twin Peaks references home. Even with Lynch’s passing, I feel no hurry to close the distance between reference and source for his other works—I want to take my time. (Though I should watch Inland Empire soon; it is my favorite Disco Elysium skill.) The stories he’s inspired are now influential works in their own right. David Lynch is a current, and I’ll follow that current upstream or out to sea.