Making meaning in a Lynchian world

"But the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules." - Michael Hamburger

The pace of things goes differently when you are writing once a week as opposed to once a day (granted, I haven’t even been able to do this). The band of time between each moment of praxis stretches, slackens. Now, I understand better the advice of having a daily practice, some act that roots me, a moment of refocusing. Plotting these moments of praxis helps to make meaning with the world, to narrativize our experience. A world without praxis is a vast soup, an ocean of undifferentiated experience – enticing and bewildering.

When I was writing those poems each day, the process was a bit like rummaging around inside a box, pulling a few things out and sticking them together. Several disparate things had the potential to be combined in this poetic universe, where connection was, and is, preeminent. To write a poem, you don’t need to know much about any subject, though you need to know enough to be able to form connections, however ludicrous these may appear.

To write an essay implies creating something in which the connections need to be worked at, excavated. The pressure of a blank page that cannot be filled by a few lines, that cannot simply be squashed into a collage, is something altogether different. If poetry is liberating, the essay, as a mechanism of meaning-making, demands more structural adherence.

But the essay is also very vaguely defined, being not much more than a piece of writing, which provides the author with a vehicle for making a point. Beyond this, it is “nonchalant, inconsistent, digressive, flexible, personal, subjective, humanistic, tolerant, dynamic, voluptuous.”[1] In this sense, poetry and essay actually belong to similar worlds, worlds in which cadence and scale can dramatically shift from one line to the next, and, as with virtually all self-directed writing, the first question is: Where do I begin?

Last week, a friend suggested we toast David Lynch’s passing with black coffee, cherry pie and 20 Marlboro reds. He also suggested I use Lynch as an essay topic. I am not enough of an expert to be able to even begin writing an entire essay on Lynch himself, but not all subjects need to be written about exhaustively in order to merit their position in a piece of writing. A subject can simply be a way into something.

If one thing leaps out at me when I think of Lynch’s work, it is the creation of a certain atmosphere, a dream-like state in which conventional narrative takes a back seat. In Lynch’s films, we are constantly uprooted by the infiltration of the macabre and bizarre into an idealised world of comfort, security and – frequently - success. Much like the Michael Hamburger’s view of the essay, Lynch’s work “creates its own rules,” and through this has a special kind of transformative potential. So powerful is this transformative potential, Lynch’s own name has become an adjective: Lynchian.

There is, in much of Lynch’s work, a constant sense of unease. This is often most apparent in the moments of relative comfort, because there seems to be no escape from the feeling that this comfort isn’t real, that something bad will happen that will shatter any sense of stability. These feelings are both familiar and unnerving, and perhaps, the reason Lynch has become such a potent figure in the world of art and film is because he manages to provoke these feelings in his audience.

Though we will be seeing no new films or TV shows from Lynch, his work feels prescient today, given the world we live in. The mixture of comfort and decadence, with the ongoing slide towards a future that is becoming more chaotic, confusing and horrific, feels Lynchian. The flood of AI generated content, the seemingly runaway development of technology more generally, and the promotion of ‘alternative facts’ has created a world in which comfort abuts horror ever more frequently.

In this predicament, our choices are thin. Many of Lynch’s characters appear powerless to stop the thing that, frequently, has already happened. We do not live in that reality, but ours has become increasingly drenched in a sense of fatalistic inevitability. Bad things will happen. We don’t exactly know how, but they will. Do we surrender to this? Do we abandon the regularity of rooted praxis? Or do we stick with it, do we continue to root ourselves and make meaning with the world?

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[1] https://www.academia.edu/1996316/The_Essay_in_Theory