He went back into the Purple Ocean
I'm sitting on the sofa, almost getting ready for bed. My husband suddenly looks at me from behind the kitchen bar and comes looking at his phone: "S'ha mort David Lynch!". I'm not going to say "we couldn't believe it," as he was 78, and the moment I would face his death came to my mind many times when I watched his daily weather reports after the pandemic, but ‒and this is something I don't usually say about famous people, as I tend to see with some contempt the adoration of celebrities and all the drama in the media when something like this happens‒ it really felt like a loss. The loss of a genius friend you love but don't see often.
For us, my husband and me, who are almost opposite in preferences related to art, entertainment, and hobbies, Lynch was common ground. We met when we both had watched Lynch in the nineties and had learned let's say, "the basic" set of responses to the edgy, bizarre, and poetic first layers of his works. Later, at the beginning of our relationship, we had watched Twin Peaks ‒smoking and eating donuts at his place‒ and started from there, rewatching all the films from the understanding, attention, and better image quality available in our late thirties and early forties. I began listening and reading his interviews, learning about his mind, his creativity, his healthy and indestructible vitality, his wisdom, his music.
Twin Peaks, the Return, brought us the opportunity of diving into Lynch one more time, offering the soundtrack to the trips to our new house in the woods, that are wondrous but strange, and rekindling the desire for going deep into the meaning and the intuition his films suggested.
That weekend after Lynch's death, we had our private celebration in the house in the mountains, rewatching the extraordinary masterpiece Mulholland Drive, connecting dots in and between our minds like beacons of meaning and insight.
An unasked Final Question
Nothing makes the feeling of death more powerful than when a question arises and you realise the impossibility of ever being able to ask it. Not that before the 15th of January was it probable that I asked anything to David Lynch, but now... it's impossible; it won't happen unless it's in dreams.
My question to Lynch would be about violence, about pain. Would he excuse my closing my eyes like a little girl before his violent images? What would he say? Twin Peaks talks about the banalisation of violence on TV, and I believe his films show violence in a way that has a profound reason to be that way, but, anyway, I can't watch. I can't watch, I can't even listen to, the beating in Wild at Heart (it still hurts when I slightly approach the memory of it), the Black Woodsman's skull crushings, the sadism in Blue Velvet, all that. And the fact that I have to skip some parts of it feels like a treason to his work.
Knowing what I know about his view of life, the benevolence of his address to the world, the spiritual enlightenment he wanted for humanity... I understand his use of violence as a way to show the dualism, the search of balance between light and darkness, the acceptance of the macabre inside the sublime. So this is the question that remains unasked in me... Mr. Lynch, what do you make of this inability? What can't I see inside of me, in the world, and why? Am I too "pure," am I too weak, am I too blind? Someday I will have the answers, but for now I'm missing a piece.
After reading the sad news of his death, I went to bed that day to finish a little book that had been on my to-read list for twenty years: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The world is winking around us all the time.
In Dreams
I'm living days full of things to do and places to go, with intense hours of work, daily train and taxi trips, many matters to control, and little time to stop, to be quiet, to do nothing. Only music and books on the train and before bed, and sleep as a sacred and primordial force, are lifting me up from the heavy earth.
I lay in bed, my legs and feet and lower back tired and aching, a new book in my hands. A book that has also been on the list, waiting for the right moment. A book I don't know absolutely anything about, except it's by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose other books I've read I've loved: The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun, and Nocturnes. Between them, they don't have many superficial elements in common. The settings, the style, the structure... I remember being different in each book and related to the internal needs of the book rather than to a personal style of the writer, as if he was using his amazing, formal, rich, perfect language to serve the needs of each of these books, to channel what each book has to say.
I start reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't know anything about it, not even, being an ebook, how long it is. It might be set in the pseudo-perfect world of an English great estate, or in the Tintinesque world of a Shanghai at war, or even in a misty post-Arthurian Britain. But after the first few pages, I see I'm not in an ordinary story. Definitely it reminds me more of The Buried Giant, and it certainly calls for a bit of Lynchean mind openness, because just before falling asleep I realise I'm dreaming. I'm not reading about a dream... I'm dreaming about a man, his story, his whole life. Thus start the days of my dreams of Mr. Ryder.
After the first chapters, I confess having looked for some information about The Unconsoled. For starters, I see people love it or hate it. I understand why some people would hate to be put in a dreaming state; we are so used to the linear story, to the three-act structure, that this oneiric confusion will make some dizzy. But I find myself enjoying the ride a lot. I love dreaming. I write my dreams, I make poems about them, I have dream journals, I do the Twelve Days of Dreaming Ritual... Dreaming, to me, is a present to the mind and the body.
I suddenly wake up, sweaty and thirsty. It's 3:53, again. I stand up in the middle of the dark, slightly unsteady, feeling my way to the bathroom, my eyes closed. I pee and I wash my face, and then I drink a full cup of water from the tap, the midnight oasis.
I go back to bed, trying to get comfortable, checking the tension in my jaw, in my neck, in my back, loosening the fibres of my body, breathing deeply. I tumble for some time, from side to side.
Some moments later, I stand up again. The blinds are still completely black. I go through some black sheets hanging up across the room to dry; it feels like the side curtains of a theatre.
I open the bedroom door, and I'm in a big room with bright lights on. Seconds later, I realise it's not a room but some kind of indoor sports court, full of partitions and people and beds as in an emergency relief facility. I talk to some people, but I go directly to the opposite corner, where I see a cot in which my baby daughter is trying to sleep. She's tumbling from side to side, trying to find a comfortable position. She's not crying; she's not scared. I can see she's just a little anxious, moving her small lips as she does when she sucks her thumb or as if she were quietly talking to me. She smells of growth and milk; my breasts tighten. I talk to her softly, stroking her chest and her belly, telling her sweet things, telling her to breathe deeply.
Isn't it Too Dreamy?
The first hint of the special world of The Unconsoled comes on page 3, and it's about the magic and freedom of time in dreams. Here, the lift trip from the hotel lobby to a room takes the same time a car ride would take. As I was reading the detailed explanations and long exchanges in that passage, I started suspecting something was off, so much as to go back and check that I had read well, and they were still in the lift and not already outside it. Time is elastic, and in the book there are almost no references to clocks or watches. It makes me think of the dream sequence in Smultronstället by Bergman and also of the many time-related dreams I've had, in which I felt anxious about having little time or being on time, or not knowing the time. How would dreams be before clocks ruled our lives? Through the book, if I don't let myself be carried away, I feel anxious. But if I just read on, accepting things as they come, I see everything is fine, as Ryder does. Every time he tries to control time or events, he gets scared. Every time he detaches himself from the eerie atmosphere around him, he gets angry and frustrated.
Space is also wildly free in the dream world. It sounds very plausible to a dream the fact that Ryder discovers shortcuts connecting apparently distant places, and after Ryder's first surprise he starts using this flexibility, as if he has learned the internal logic of his own dream and can benefit from it. He also discovers that a place is at the same place another place, making time and space a mix of analogous sensations. This is why my dreams take place at my parents' house when they deal with important topics, when I have to make decisions or assert myself, or demand to be valued. Any place is my parents' house; any place can suddenly dissolve into my parents' house or be my parents' house and another place at the same time. In the end, it's not my parents' house; it's my mind, like everything else in my dreams.
This applies to people, too. Ryder meets many people during the days after his arrival in town, but of all the people, many are himself; others are symbols; others are parts of himself he needs to work on. The whole book is like Lynch's Red Room: the mind of the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. It makes me think so much about my own dreams. All our dreams are pieces of the same big life-long story, and all dreams are about the same, the deepest truth, the only truth we can really learn and finally understand: who we are.
The Wound
I kneel, bowing in front of Lynch and Ishiguro. We're in a Japanese room surrounded by misty woods. They are both sitting in seiza and look past me into some deep place they only see. I feel so small and shallow as a puddle. I'm trying to keep all their words and pictures inside to ponder for the rest of my life.
Chiron, the afflicted centaur, has come in the shape of Brosky, the conductor, with his wounded leg and his eternal pain, and has told me the only way to live is by loving the wound and helping others heal theirs.
Mrs. Hoffman has given me a small blue box containing the force, and she has told me it's useless to wait for some extraordinary moment in which the force will vanish. It won't go by any external power. It's the everyday work of love and consciousness that will make it disappear, but it will never, never go away because it is in me as is everything else. The force she has given me, I'll put in my basket with that wet grey wool I sometimes find wrapped around my eyes.
Beneïts dies!
Quan la visera de llana grisa i mullada
es fa gairebé invisible
i obro els ulls al cel clar i al verd rutilant.
Quan et miro i veig molt més enllà
de les puntes dels meus dits tensos.
Quan veig els teus músculs treballar
sota el sol
i cada cosa
té un sentit i una simplicitat
eterns.
The fire is crackling, a light snow has started to fall, and a robin has come to the bird feeder and looks inside through the window.
