david lynch

The worst days ever are also the best days ever.  I hate nights when I can't focus on what I need to (homework, reading...), I don't have friends to be with, so I just waste the night wishing I could be doing something productive.  At the end of those nights, I am so fed up with my self that I realize it's time to do something about it.  So the worst day becomes the best day because it leads to BOOM! change.

Last night found me studying a little about a man I was introduced to by my friend Curtis Whitear back in high school.  I will admit, until recently, I was so afraid of David Lynch that I would not go near him- I would not let my mind even wander too close to thoughts of him (paranoid, yes.  Unprepared, yes).  He is a visual artist/sound artist/surrealist- he makes films and videos and music that are so pure and strange that you can't help but be moved in an unsettled way when you experience them.

My first real experience with David Lynch was a movie called "Eraserhead."  I could not sleep the night after I watched it because I was so unsettled.  It's a movie about really strange people who live in a strange, mechanical, dirty world but they act like it's the norm, like nothing is strange.  You are thrown into a world that the characters shouldn't be okay with (because you certainly can't be) but they are.  For example, the main character, Henry, goes to a dinner with his girlfriend.  In the house, Henry's girlfriend and her mother and him all sit down to talk.  First of all, it's super awkward.  Then, the mother asks Henry a question, and Henry starts to answer until he is interrupted by his girlfriend having a weird fit.  She starts moaning and rocking back and forth.  The mother is not fazed at all, and she grabs a nearby hairbrush and starts brushing the daughter's hair until she stops having her strange fit.  Of course, none of this is explained in the movie- why does she have a fit?  Why does brushing her hair make her settle down?  Is this normal?  You just have to take it for what it is.  And it's unsettling.

I started to look into David Lynch's philosophy and it's very interesting.  It's essentially a philosophy of meditation, and I don't want to go too far into it because I don't fully understand it and trying to explain it would lead to a lot of assumptions on my part.  But as far as I understand it, David Lynch is always looking inside himself through meditation and bringing those things that he finds in his mind out in the open and expressing them visually and through music and sound (I like this because I am an advocate of finding one's real self.  I think that that is where everything that is good has a place.  I think that is where beauty and power and everything Godly can be found.  I think that is where God can communicate best with us).  Lynch's works have a dreamlike quality and are very interesting.  They always cause you to feel something.  Those feelings he conjures are feelings that are still relatively new to me.  Want a taste?  He released two new songs in the past couple of days, and you can try them out here.  I really love the first one on here the most.

The whole point of this is that I feel like I have been too confined in my own expression and art.  I have always thought that great art followed a set structure (and I will never say that you don't need structure in art- everything great has a skeleton of some kind), but that never led me to any exploration on my own.  I want to explore my own mind and find some undiscovered recesses in there.  So, I have a new plan for the next little while.  I want to eat right, breathe right, sleep right, and think right in order to get my mind right.  I am going to wake up in the morning and instead of being groggy and slow, I am going to wake my mind up through concentration and meditation (I really am working on self-mastery and self-control right now, too.  I need it and I think this will help).  And then I am going to do some stream of consciousness writing- just let whatever comes to my mind fall to paper.  Because, I write poetry and I love poetry, but let's face it, as a society we are just not trained in understanding poetry any more.  The way our culture is accessed (at least writing-wise) is through prose.  I have always, always felt incompetent in story-telling and prose writing.  So this will be all about exploration and experimentation.

I think this will be good for me because last night I wrote a poem.  After I wrote the poem, I was thinking, this is the best thing that I have written.  It was one of the most controlled poems I have ever written and yet, at least to me, it seems natural and exploring.  Then, I went back and looked at my old poetry.  I saw that every single poem I have written taught me something new.  I was able to retrace some of my steps of progress to the poem I wrote last night.  It came to me that everything we do is important.  Every decision we make leads us somewhere, even if slowly, and if we want to go somewhere, we have to start making steps in that direction.  Each step gives us new insight and new tools to use, and who knows when we will need those to do some good for some one else some day, may be to day.  Every decision we make is important.

I have some new material to post on here, and I plan on doing the meditation/stream of consciousness every morning for a while, so I am hoping to post that experimental writing here every day.

Here's the first one.  Listen to that first David Lynch song while you are reading it.  Gro~ovy...

I had recently funded the ammunition of a basket-case. He had strapped for cash and breezed through the only test I have- windmills turning and fires burning. The result was inconclusive, so I spent the rest of my money on starving. We don't have to live this way, you know? I said to him. That's what he said to me.
I kept finding strange wooden barrels knocked over while I was walking home. Did he have something to do with it? Whatever the case, my initials were on those barrels- like when you find your name drawn from a cheap raffle.
We spent the night returning late movies. I had forgot to spend the money on saving, so loaded, the movie rental store didn't let us speak. The earth started moving the second we set off, so we never made it anywhere. When did the earth become a treadmill? I asked. Seven ghosts once inhabited our place, was his reply.
When we got home, I tried to eke out a meager existence. The seven ghosts had come back and I was a wanting host. I couldn't even turn my back on them. So I grew flowers and vegetables in the bathtub, with a slow leak keeping the floura watered.
In spring (seasons were judged solely on the rising of the plants in the bathtub) my heart caught in my throat. I choked and sobbed as I heard him say-
"What?
Scared and disillusioned by the flowers?
Horses Elliott must be determined by the hairs on his back."
That night, I ran to the fields. I stomped on every blossom that wanted to speak "life" and I spent the night forgetting mercy in the sand. Weeping, I dragged my self home, whispering things I forgot to understand. It all was clear to me as I saw him finally spend the last of my money on destruction.
But those were MY plants.