decided it’s time for a rewatch on David Lynch’s films (and “coincidentally” his wife filed for divorce the same week). despite abiding love for the work, a neurotic part of me’s avoided revisiting it for the past few years, especially twin peaks, for reasons too baroque, esoteric, and plain psychotic to get into here. the short version is i became convinced that twin peaks is a refracted message from the astral plane about my personal karma, and the associations resulting from this, again, psychosis, made me wary of ever being able to watch the show again. but i’ll get there soon. i rewatched eraserhead this past sunday. in my letterboxd review, i said “David Lynch is a gnostic. in his films, the universe is a failed, fallen realm, plagued, menacing, and grotesque. attempts at making sense of existence will always only dredge up more mystery, more confusion, more insanity. our only hope is in embracing the darkness within, and in so doing, allowing the light to shine forth all the more clearly, despite futility, despite absurdity. these are the themes he will explore throughout his career, but with Eraserhead, he presents them in utero, waiting to be born.”
if i disentangle the ego-driven paranoia from the phenomenon, i’d still argue that art is a “refracted message from the astral plane.” those works that most resonate with you, they reveal something about you, sometimes uncomfortable things.
even if i don’t want to grant the extremity of my most deranged and neurotic associations, even if it’s not exactly the case that the correspondences i feel acutely in times of psychic distress are as meaningful as they seem, even if it’s purely coincidence about lynch’s divorce….put it this way. why is it the case that around the time i finally decide to brave the neurosis and revisit a cinematic realm which holds particularly strong associations in my psyche, why’s it that i have a dream in which i have two car accidents, then the following day get into an actual car accident? explain that one for me, freud and/or jung. (everyone’s fine, it was a minor fender bender in the parking lot.)
slowly an essay about a theory of writing is coming together.
my day job workplace is an absolute shitshow right now. fittingly, the management team all have lynchian names that i won’t divulge here, not for their sake, but for opsec.
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