Prompts for David Lynch

"Jeez Louise, enjoy!"

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Leave it to David Lynch to leave at a moment when his words ring truer than ever and shine brighter in this time of utter nonsense.

I know I’m preaching to the choir in my love for Lynch’s work, and moreover his perspective on life. A moth toward the light, he relentlessly found the beauty inside the horrifying. There is wonder in the weather; there is mystery everywhere.

His vision was singular. He was doggedly obsessed with his work, and with working itself, and with making no compromises (and yet was also flabbergasted that anyone cared). There was absolutely no time to wait (unless you were being asked to work against your vision, in which case something could wait for 30 years, or forever).

He believed in the essence of the thing, of being obsessed with your own ideas, of free-falling into the bizarre…even when no one else gets it, when everyone questions you. He defied a formula, was the antithesis of the algorithm. Everything is camp, melodrama, and Coca Cola and cigarettes.

May we all be go forth with this macabre optimism. May we all be down to clown with life’s absurdity. And may we uplift those who champion these ideals instead of those who try to flatten our experiences, to divide us, to convince us we are enemies (or worse, that we are all the same).

Prompts for David Lynch

1. “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted—you’ll be afraid to let things keep happening.”

In what way(s) are you getting lost in the future before it’s happened?

2. “What a heavy load Einstein must have had…fucking morons everywhere.”

Select a specific moron to release from your attention.

3. “We only dream of images we have inside us”

What’s something that’s currently being limited by a lack of imagination?

4. “Life is filled with abstractions; the only way to make heads or tails of them is going through intuition.”

Pause. Stop. Is your intuition saying anything? Hello?

5. “Enjoy the doing. So many people do stuff, but they don’t really enjoy the doing of it…that’s your life going by…Jeez Louise. Enjoy…”

Locate a way you’re confusing busyness for satisfaction.

6. “People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you”

In what ways, or toward whom or what have you hardened? …is it helping anything?

To listen:
“Between Two Mysteries” by Mount Eerie
“Mississippi” by The Cactus Blossoms