Catching The Big Fish
on David Lynch, meditation, tigers, and the urgency of love
Like most everyone, I’ve been processing David Lynch’s passing over these past few days. Any words I write will be totally inadequate.
He was probably my earliest introduction to “outré” film, the way Vonnegut was my gateway drug into books. Twin Peaks was illuminating—I didn’t know TV could be like that—and watching Mulholland Drive on 123movies dot com at three am on a Tuesday when you’re fifteen is pretty much a canon event for an arts-curious teen. I was disturbed, for sure, but for reasons I couldn’t yet articulate, I just couldn’t look away. I think DFW said it best:
“[Lynch’s works house] a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”
Despite his penchant for the morbid and grotesque, Lynch remained an eternal optimist. Everything in his universe grows towards the light—there is no other way things can possibly go down. Good trumps evil, every single time; most characters, with the exception of interdimensional demons, are given a shot at redemption. An audience is at once challenged to look inward at all the sticky, gunky shit clogging up our souls, and to correct course before we’re spiritually constipated forever. The codeword: love.
What I admired most about Lynch was his surety in his creative process. When watching his films, there is no question in my mind that what I’m seeing on screen is what he meant for me to see exactly as he conceived of it, not some half-assed approximation. Intention, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it, it’s indubitably there. The big question: where did he get these ideas?
Meditations
I’ve been fortunate enough to attend some wonderful meditation sessions with the lovely Melissa Broder (who doesn’t have a Substack, but would absolutely kill it if she did) who first told me about Transcendental Meditation (TM.)
I was very skeptical about meditation in the first place. I’m generally leery of anything “self-care industrial complex,” and I try and avoid any products / programs / practices that are branded as such. For a long time, I felt that meditation fell into a category of hyper-individualist self-servitude—how selfish to close your eyes to the outer world and hum away your inner one!—but I’m stubborn, and I’ll try just about anything twice.
The first time I really tried to meditate was right after reading Gopi Krishna’s autobiography as a teenager. Eyes closed, I tried to zero in on that snake of energy that was coiled at the base of my spine, but I soon discovered that my brain cannot shut up. I’ve always found some cuticle to pick at: random song lyrics, my grocery list, that stupid thing I did when I was drunk. Shockingly, I did not awaken my kundalini energy back then, and I soon abandoned it, leaving my inner consciousness dangling, a precarious hangnail.
The second time I really tried to meditate was with Melissa Broder, who is a TM practitioner. Over Zoom, MB guided us through the process: we did some breathing, and then she told us to dive into a body of water and see what was there. It was far more fruitful than my teenaged efforts—something actually happened!!
I found myself swimming under a lagoon to the base of a waterfall, where upon surfacing I found myself mano a mano with a child-prince riding a majestic tiger. I asked the child-prince what he was doing there with the tiger, and he said (with plenty of attitude) that the tiger had to drink water or he’ll die. Like, duh. The tiger’s name was Dos Equis, if that reveals anything about my deep consciousness. To this day I’m still trying to dissect what it all means, but I think about this insolent child-prince and his tiger most times I sit down to write. The lesson here, I guess, is that you cannot force the ideas out of yourself and onto a page / recording / canvas / whatever and expect them to be any good if you don’t let yourself marinate in them for a little bit: you need to stop and let your tiger drink.
Even more revelatory than this mediation itself, I learned that Lynch was not only a stalwart practitioner of TM, but also authored a book about it called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.
With nefarious business practices and a skeevy founder who once served as a spiritual guide to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the official organization of TM seems to cater to whimsical, artsy types. With expensive dues, isolating communities, and promises of flight, some have even gone so far to call the organization a cult. But the most elementary aspect—the meditation itself—seemed benign enough on its own, so I sat down, steeled myself, and gave Catching the Big Fish a listen.
Gone fishin’
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
Lynch says there are fish for everything: business, sports, you name it. The more one’s consciousness—one’s awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch. And I want to catch some big ass fish! Let’s go!
*NOTE: I tandem read / listened to Catching the Big Fish on Libby. I approached this book mostly from a novelist / writer perspective, so YMMV.*
Some of my (very unorganized) notes:
“The world is as you are.” Lynch says that every film screening is its own ecosystem; that is, a film presents differently in front of different audiences. There is a cyclical feed that exists between film and audience and film again.
Five years spent making Eraserhead, which is almost how long I’ve spent working on The Book™. This made my heart soar. It’s really never too late
“Keep your eye on the donut, and not on the hole.” So whimsical! Focus on the haves instead of the have nots. Hard to internalize, but the donut metaphor makes it less preachy somehow
“There’s a safety to thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.” A friend of diners is a friend of mine. I think the virility of late-nite diners is one of the last true metrics for the general psychic health of our nation.
“It’s not the intellectual understanding of the field, but the experience of it that does everything.” Less thinking more doing girl
Lynch uses the word “bliss” to mean “all things trying to kill you diminishing.” Yes! FIX UR HEART OR DIE, FUCKERS!!!
Transcendental consciousness = Unified Field = spiritus mundi. It truly is thrilling how this same concept duplicates itself in every iteration of creative society
“If you do what you believe in and have a failure, you can still live with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s like dying twice.” Man! With each passing day, it seems like there’s a new ding in the shiny prospect of writing books, let alone writing them for a living. Might as well only write what I believe in
When he refers to Kyle MacLachlan as his alter ego!! What a beautiful meeting of minds. How lovely to have another body to house one’s soul
To Lynch, “rehearsal” is just a word for the learning of some lingua franca for the idea of the film. Once everyone is fluent in the lexicon, you start being in conversation with one another. Creating this internal language = the answer
“Ideas come along in the strangest way when you just pay attention.” I am an oyster and there are pearls pearls pearls pearls or perhaps fish in this case. Be present in the world. Go on walks! Go sit at lunch counters! Take the bus! Is this a form of meditation? It might as well be. I am the boddhisattva of the LIRR. Whatever.
“It's good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won't be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don't have to live in it.” Tormented artist working in the darkness of some forlorn basement, begone! I’ve been so sick of this idea that you have to be stretched to your wit’s end to make anything worthwhile. Harkens back to that quote about van Gogh: “I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”
Lynch said Lost Highway is pretty much about OJ Simpson by way of psychogenic fugue. “I like to remember things my own way. Not necessarily the way they happened.” TO DO: investigate this
Favorite section, THE BOX AND THE KEY, is thirteen words: “I don’t have a clue what those are.” Me neither, man.
His favorite textures: fire, cups of coffee, rotting bodies, pine wood. These are important. TO DO: make a list of good textures
Through the last 25% of the book, he’s mostly giving cinematography tips and takes. Ex. Light is everything; darkness is just the absence of it. People coming out of darkness and into light = better than simply standing in either. That is boring and stagnant and lame
He drops a few French films that I’ve gotta watch. To do: study picture-story
Trust in the unity of things. Standalone scenes that speak the same language are related, “floating on the surface of the ocean of unity.” This is immensely comforting, considering this is exactly how I end up writing my own stuff. These stories are like puzzles, except there’s no picture on the pieces when you’re putting them together, and then one day you step back and suddenly there it is.
Mediation is not selfish—it’s strengthening yourself to enter back into the world. It’s like they say on airplanes: “put your own mask on before helping others.” Sure, why not.
Don’t let anyone else have the final cut—that is yours and yours alone.
My thoughts:
Big Fish was surprisingly very sweet and folksy, two words one doesn’t typically associate with Lynch’s work. In it, he trades alien babies and lopped off ears for happy accidents, wishes for world peace, kooky sunglasses, hunky carpenters named Gunter, and plenty of fishing allegories. His love for TM is bright and perennial, and it makes me wish I loved anything that much.
Maybe Lynch’s uncanny ability to enter these weird and wonderful spaces and places and empathize with whatever he finds there can be directly attributed to his expanded consciousness. Maybe through this practice, he is able to anchor himself in love (and diners) deep enough to be able to recede into the darkness and come out with something fantastic.
Will I fling myself wholeheartedly into the world of TM? Probably not. But I will take the time to wipe the glasses of my vision clean and sink down into something a little deeper. I’ll meditate for fifteen minutes in the mornings with my coffee and again at night before bed. Maybe it’ll kick my spiritual ass in gear to quit courting the artist’s life and actually live it. Plus, learning to shut myself up every once in a while would probably be a gift to all mankind.
For better or for worse: I will fix my heart or die.
-t
A powerful tribute. I haven’t read Catching the Big Fish and didn’t know much about it until reading this post, but it seems so innovative for creators. I enjoy the notion about the Final Cut being yours alone. I feel I learned a lot from your writing in this post :)
I also knew this about David Lynch, and I attributed it to another quirky oddity of his. But this is a really powerful reminder that rarely is anything only skin deep if it drives someone to create. "I love you to the point of invention" and all that.
We need to have a deep deep sit down and discussion about him soon. Also, have you read any books by Paulo Coelho? Specifically The Pilgrimage? If you haven't we need to have a book club with hours long discussions about it. I think we could really catch some big fish.