As a little girl, I was strange, riddled with bouts of sleep paralysis and a nervous and sullen demeanor. It was hard for me to make friends.
During the earlier days of my childhood, I escaped into books and endless daydreams I’d mostly indulge in on the hour-long bus ride to school. I grew well-versed in the art of consumption. Cinema eventually became the remedy for my disconnection—a way I could feed my curiosity for human nature without ever having to engage with it directly.
Seeking out a more familiar world, David Lynch’s surrealist landscapes provided context to my wake-induced lucid dreams and the Fellini-esque terrains of nightmares I experienced in childhood They offered a sort of catharsis for my ailment of perpetual misunderstanding. I found solace in their strangeness as witness to a mind as bizarre as it was brilliant. I thought, if even the most tortured parts of the world can be this beautiful, then maybe nothing could ever be that bad.
When I fell into a deep depression in my college days, I started attending late-night screenings alone. It became my own private ritual of confronting the Real World at times when I wanted nothing but to retreat from it. I never felt alone there. That feeling was no different after Lynch passed last month, leaving Los Angeles in the wake of its destruction.
It’s January 20 and I’ve just returned from LA. Puffy-eyed and violently groggy, I text Abby. I napped for like three hours again. She asks me if anyone is going to the Inland Empire screening with me. I tell her it’s just me and she calls me strong and independent.
Hey! Look at me. And tell me if you’ve known me before! Laura Dern’s “Nikki” joins the cast of On High in Blue Tomorrows, descending into madness as the line between her life and her character Sue’s melds and morphs. And I think of what it means to live the Art Life.
When his childhood friend Toby Keeler’s father Bushnell gifted him the book The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, Lynch decided it meant doing nothing but drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and painting. There’s a steep drop from consumption to labor, and I wonder if I’ll ever have the discipline to live the Art Life. Not to mention, what do you do when you’ve lost the time to daydream?
Like the Lost Girl, I’m hypnotized by the TV fuzz of an alternative reality. I listen to “Black Tambourine” and try to conjure up something remotely profound. I tell myself that I’ll avoid the terrifying therapists at the periphery of the Inland Empire and take up Transcendental Meditation. That if I were truly wild at heart, I’d fight for my dreams. I’d follow the yellow brick road in spite of my egotistical fears.
As a budding painter, Lynch once said that he “knew [his] stuff sucked.” But he had to burn through to find what was his—and the only way to do that was to keep painting, waiting to catch a fleeting idea.
When Nikki loses herself entirely to her art, she wanders the barriers between dimensions, eventually finding the Lost Girl and reaching pure consciousness—a light that burns bright forever.
Lynch taught me that, to achieve enlightenment, I must live to create and do it unflinchingly. He taught me to find happiness, to break out of the loop, to go beyond. That there is a magic to this world I once only perceived in daydreams. And for that, I’m no longer lost.