Lynch

Letter to David

Hi David.

You have passed, 78 years, but if I know you at all, and I don’t, I’d think that something like a letter to those who have crossed over would be a thing you’d agree with. For maybe in the milky darkness we all return to, one might imagine your mail gets forwarded. Pomp and poetry aside. There are somethings I’d like to say.

I first encountered your work through a friend, Gabriel, when I was at acting school. I was around 15 at the time and it was a short called “Rabbits” I immediately experienced a phenomenon commonly observed by viewers of your work, a thing I would again experience in films like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. A thing discussed by film students in bars for the last 40 years, the thing that has brought about the term “Lynchian.” A sort of unsettling comfort. But if I know you at all, and I don’t, you would reject the idea of putting a name this thing.

You have a quote that I have been trying to find. About how when you name something it loses apart of its true essence in the naming of it. As soon as an apple is called an apple it is somehow less of an apple than it was before, because once it is named, it loses the potential to be more. So I am not going to go about trying to describe the thing that makes your films the way that they are, that is for film historians and frankly annoying people at parties to do, and this is a letter and I can’t imagine you’d be interested in my half baked musings on your work.

I can’t imagine you’d be interested in this letter at all actually, you probably have a lot to do, or perhaps you have nothing to do, and eternity to do it in, so maybe something like this letter will help pass the time. Regardless I thought maybe it be best to talk about what you mean to me as an artist.

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching your interviews and reading quotes of yours. Something that stands out to me is your concept of fishing for ideas. That one must become very quiet and wait for the idea, and that ideas are precious and rare things, and that if you catch one and it is big enough, it can feed you as you go about the long and painful process of pulling that idea from the milky darkness into the world.

I too, have always been the sort of artist that needs to be hooked by an idea, I have to lie in wait for them and it is only when the idea is big enough, that I can bring it in into the world. Films come to me in this way, poems come to me in this way. Honestly it is the realest joy I have felt in my adult life, the childlike wonder of feeling the tug on your fishing rod. When you know you must create a thing. But if you don’t mind me being self indulgent, and maybe a little bit self critical, I feel I stray from the fishing boat too often. Too often I am creating things I don’t believe in. I eat fish I haven’t caught, and I believe it’s making me sick.

I have been living a dual life as an artist. My instinct to survive and “feed my family” has lead me to parade my muse around cheaply. Primarily in my first love, acting. Acting has become a place where I don’t create the way I’d like to, a distraction from the from the quiet I need to catch ideas. It comes from my insecurity, that my ideas are not enough, and that my value only lies in whatever other people see in me, or my fear about being able to survive. In this letter, I’d like to include the promise that I will no longer be creating by these measurements, I will wait, I won’t get distracted. I felt like if I made that promise to you, I’d have to keep it. But enough self inspection.

The biggest con that was ever pulled off was turning the artist into the fabricator, into “the content creator.” I feel because of this, there is an impoverishment of artists who live to sit and lie in wait for the idea, and since your passing, the world is even poorer on that count. I know you believe you are on a wheel, of birth and then life and then death. Then the silent wait in the void to be born again. I hope we get to meet next time your here and know that your presence this spin around made a huge difference to me and so many others, an your absence makes me fear for our future. But if I know you, and I don’t. You’ll be back to teach people to sit and wait.

-Avan

The below photo was taken by a photographer Tanmay Saxena, three weeks before David’s death. I like it. It warms my heart.

-Avan

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