David Lynch & Love Preserving

A few days ago, I was introduced to the concept of wind phones. Unconnected phones in the middle of the woods or other calm, natural environments, that invite people to have one-sided conversations with deceased loved ones. I like the idea of having a serene, designated area for this, and an apparatus that makes it all feel tangible somehow. I still speak to my grandma; all the time. In my mind and in my heart. But the urge to pick up that damn phone, dial those numbers – 824047 – still feels overpowering on some days. When my grandpa passed away fifteen years ago, there were two oddball things I started doing to truly start the process of grieving; moving on from the bottomless pain, and finding ways to fix the numbness instead. One, was to buy him books. Whenever I’d come across Spike Milligan works or photobooks on aircrafts and model planes at my local second-hand bookshop, I’d buy them for him. My book collection, went from weird to wacky.

The other thing I did, was to watch movies that weren’t really my kind of movies at all. When I had just moved to Spain and lived in an apartment sans computer let alone internet – imagine that! – and just a tiny little TV with three of the worst Spanish channels, someone ended up giving me an entire folder full of pirate DVDs. 95% I never would have picked or watched myself. Until then. I would crawl into bed in my cozy little mezzanine studio apartment and watch things like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and other films in a similar vein. I’d watch them through my grandpa’s eyes – a passionate home-movie director and enthusiast of “onscreen trickery”. Feeling as though he was somehow…around. Hearing his deep and notable laugh during key moments.

One of the last DVDs I landed on during this time, was The Straight Story – an unconventional road movie directed by David Lynch. Based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who travelled from Iowa to Wisconsin on a lawn mower, this film moved – and weirdly continues to move – me in ways that are as obvious as they are not. While I immediately took a liking to the old chap (portrayed by Richards Farnsworth) and his quest to see his ailing brother on his own terms, the film also tested my patience. In a way only Lynch knew to do. Keeping me seated in the silence and the gentle sputter of the lawnmower engine, a discomfort that momentarily took me out of the film and into my pain, yet always keeping my focus on the heart of the story and its purposeful pace. The ending answered by the unanswered.

This was not my first Lynch film; I’d seen Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. I understood that, The Straight Story – which he called his “most experimental film” – was the odd one out. But it wasn’t until I met the husband about a year later, that I really started to learn who the man behind these works and this unique school of darkness and light and surrealism was.

I can still see us now, so young and self-absorbed, lost in our visions of what being and becoming writers would look like. Spending entire evenings on the floor of my miniscule living room, terrace doors wide open to let in the warm, summer air. A YouTube exchange of musical and cinematic treasures; naïve observations and analysis on literary works and the occasional huff and tut about our actual social situations. Then off to the beach for a midnight swim in the choppy sea and back again, our clothes clinging to the salt on our skin the way we hung on each other’s words. It was on one of these nights that he welcomed me into the world of Twin Peaks.

It wasn’t love at first sight. It was a learning curve that, when it finally hit its peak, asked of me to leave rationale and linear narratives behind, and to be guided. By music and symbolism, the unspoken and the unobserved, the kitsch and absurdities and, of course, the unease that carries these stories through. And as I sit here now, sixteen years later, mourning my sweet, sweet cat who slept, nestled between my neck and shoulder as I became acquainted with Agent Dale Cooper and the Black Lodge, I appreciate the nuances of this cult-show more than I did before. Still shrouded in disbelief that we are also, collectively mourning, the passing of the man who created this world and these characters – a town in a perpetual state of grief so unbridled and pure, it often bordered on comical. Because what is life if not a constant cycle of death and rebirth? And what are all these crazy, secret obsessions and behaviors we tend to and engage in if not our individual coping mechanisms? We’re all trying to silence our drape runners, unwilling to admit that drawing the curtains on all that hurts us just turns up the volume.

As I write this, nothing about these past two weeks feels linear; it all feels like one, long restless night, tapping in and out of dreams and a groundhog-day-existence that has carried through the pre-and-post holiday era. Our holidays were served with a dose of heaviness, lightened only by the sparkle in our daughter’s eyes and finally, on New Year’s Eve, we reached a place of acceptance. Perhaps defeat. The kind that allowed us, for the first time in weeks, to throw ourselves into what matters most outside of the magnum opus that is our daughter – our work. The work. That which makes me, me and the husband, the husband, and us, us. The importance – the dedication, passion and responsibility – of which, was instilled in us by creative masters like David Lynch and Patti Smith. That night, ignorant of the clock-handle inching toward a new year, felt cathartic. The needle moving over prized vinyl possessions, pencil scratching against the thick paper of my abandoned notebook – the last portrait dating back to that same evening one year prior – the husband’s mouse surrendering to his commands. For a moment, things felt back on track.

Twenty-six days into the longest January following the longest holiday season in my recorded history, and I am only just starting to feel OK sleeping in our bed again. Moving away from that indetermined couch space, where the quiet chatter and the changing lights of the TV kept me right where I needed to be. In limbo, the precipice of consciousness – one foot tucked in, the other poking out from under three layers of blankets and away from my shivering body. From which I could awake at any time, crying into the empty space that had cradled my cat just nights before; from which I could torture myself with all should haves, would haves, could haves that accompany the stage of grief I quickly moved on to because denial had long been futile; from which I could not surrender, fully, into a sleep, as black as midnight on a moonless night. Like the one the daughter woke from, on the day of Lynch’s passing. Upset she hadn’t found any dreams. Whereas I, in that moment, did not want to find any dreams. Because that would make it all real.

I wanted to stay on the precipice. The way I wanted to stay in the vet clinic, with my cat’s lifeless body; unable to cross the threshold of that door, to walk away from her and into a life without her. The way I wanted to keep the literary and cinematic conversation going with my grandpa, with the books and chapters that remain bookmarked and unread. With symbolism and my grandma’s words inked into my skin, just not deep enough to poke at all those cells of hers I carry in me, though I hope she received them, like a boomerang, echoed back at her.

As I write this, between intervals of tending to and fully relishing life and the living, and mourning all that is dead, my urge to create prevails. To give voice or reason to that feeling – a loss of balance, somewhere between take-off and a crash-landing, hands flailing, heart fluttering, stomach sinking all at once. And I recognize it now for what it is, art in all its forms, what writing is to me…it’s love, preserving. Eternalizing all that is ethereal and agonizing. Keeping it forever fresh. On the page, the screen, the canvas.

I think of David Lynch and I think of my first, deep platonic love and their longing to connect from within the walls of the disconnected; through their vintage TV and the unreturned Blue Velvet blockbuster tape, their archaic sound system and inherited records. Of The Straight Story, what it meant to me then, with my cat purring into my ears when my heart dragged all along the south coast. What it means to me now, now that the protagonist – the man who portrayed him – and his quest feel interchangeable with one of the protagonists in my life. Of the night, early into the relationship with the husband, that I remember as bathed in blue hues, when tiny little mice popped up and out of the rain gutters all over town and I felt and saw and lived real-life magic.

This is me, picking up the wind phone; this is him now, Lynch, the apparatus. The giant kettle and the arm and the oil. An indirect line to the continuum of life and love preserved.