Ocean of consciousness

On the passing of David Lynch

Yesterday, as my friend Heather Kravas and I were driving our Prius Cs in opposite directions toward our shared destination, an exalted little coffee shop called Volunteer Park Cafe where we like to meet, we both learned of David Lynch’s death. Heather heard it from a friend and I got the news on NPR. Preceded by a snippet of Angelo Badalamenti’s unmistakable Twin Peaks theme—which made my ears prick up for an interesting story about Lynch—the unadorned announcement of his death felt like a misdirection, a sucker punch. “Oh, no,” I lamented out loud. “Oh, no.”

Recently, Dave and I came up with a little game, if you can call it that. It goes like this: Name your most personally influential works of art. Not your favorite art, not your “top ten,” but the art that has managed to change how you perceive the world, to affect either how you think or the work you make or the things you choose to do. Not much of a game, I admit—but I love it because the list grows and grows. Sometimes you don’t realize how profound that impact has been because the work has been ingrained in your mind so long you take it for granted. Then it occurs to you and you add to the list. I love this game because it goes beyond taste—it asks you to consider who/how you were before you encountered that work and who/how you were after. What about the work struck you as it did? Why were you susceptible to its impact? This running list can serve as a chart of growth, a measuring wall of personal evolution.

Driving toward Heather it hit me how weirdly often I think of (and creepily whisper-sing) the song, “In Heaven” from Eraserhead. How the line, “I’ve got this damn sticky stuff in my hair,” has lived rent free in my head since 1990 when Wild at Heart came out. How that ridiculous animatronic robin from the ending of Blue Velvet flies across my mental transom—or hurls itself against its glass, as the case may be—once a week on average. For more than half my life, my imagination has been steeped in the surrealist, humanist imagery of David Lynch. I’ll try to convey the aforementioned who/how and the what/why another time, but for now…well, he’s got a few notches on my list.

David Lynch is also on my list of profound influences because of how he talked about consciousness. When, in my early 40s, I was visited by a bout of thanatophobia, it was triggered in part by the recurrence of strange phenomena in the realm of consciousness—experiences that had tormented me since adolescence which I’d never dared explore. It wasn’t TM, as Lynch promoted, but a different type of meditation (another post, another day) that helped me surrender to those experiences rather than recoil from them, to life-changing effect. Lynch’s consciousness campaign, and one lecture in particular, reinforced this shift—and brought into stunning focus the fundamental connection between deeper experiences of consciousness and the act of making art.

Here he is, sometime in the aughts, talking it up in his “Great Plains honk of a voice,” in the words of Kyle MacLachlan (whose tribute stands out among the many, many poignant, insightful words I’ve read in the last few days):

“It’s consciousness. And there’s an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us. And it’s right at the source and base of mind, right at the source of thought, and it’s also at the source of all matter. And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaches a technique called transcendental meditation that’s a simple, easy, effortless technique, yet supremely profound, that allows any human being to dive within, experiencing subtler levels of mind and intellect, and transcend and experience this ocean of pure consciousness. This pure consciousness is called by modern physics the “unified field.” It’s at the base of all mind and all matter, and modern science now says that everything that is a thing emerges from this field. And this field has qualities like bliss, intelligence, creativity, universal love, energy, peace. And it’s not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything. You dive within, transcending, experiencing this field of pure consciousness, and you enliven it, you unfold it. It grows. And the final outcome of this growth of consciousness is called enlightenment. And enlightenment is the full potential of all of us human beings. And a side effect of enlivening this consciousness is negativity starts to recede.

Now these negative things like anger and depression and sorrow, they’re beautiful things in a story, but they’re like a poison to the filmmaker. They’re poison to the painter, they’re poison to creativity. They’re like a vise grip. If you are super depressed, you can’t hardly get out of bed, let alone think ideas, have that creativity flowing. So it’s money in the bank to get that beautiful consciousness growing, which is flowing creativity, the ability to catch ideas at a deeper level. Intuition grows. This field is a field of pure knowingness. You dive in there, you just sort of know how to go. You know how to solve solutions. It’s like an ocean of solutions. And you can just feel this thing growing. But the ultimate thing for me is the enjoyment of the doing, the enjoyment of life grows huge. I love making films now more than ever before. Ideas flow more. Everybody has more fun on the set. Creativity flows, there’s no—people look like friends, not like enemies. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing, and it’s us.”

As Heather joined me at the coffee shop, before we excitedly launched into our updates, our new ideas for dances and films, our questions and offerings for one another, we looked at each other. “First of all,” Heather began, her eyes bright and serious. Slight pause, then she made a gesture: “David Lynch.” Beat. What was there to say? “Ocean of consciousness,” I replied. Surely he’s diving around in there now.