DEATH DAVID LYNCH | Meditation, karma, biblical passages and a talk against negativity at a secondary school in Madrid: this was the most ‘magical’ and spiritual David Lynch
“I learned that just below the surface there is another world, and even different worlds as you dig deeper,” he said. David Lynchresponsible for one of the most hermetic filmographies of recent times, in which supernatural situations, dream scenes and symbols occur with total normality, causing the layers of meaning to superimpose one another. A cinematographic story that opens the door for its followers to develop countless interpretationswhile closing it to the less enthusiastic and patient. “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch small fish, you can stay in shallow waters. But if you want to catch big fish, you have to go to deeper waters,” reflected Lynch, who always preferred those less lazy spectators.
Among them is Andy Burnseditor-in-chief of the website Biff Bam Pop! and author of Wrapped in plastican essay on Twin Peaks in which he reviews some of the esoteric references contained in Lynch’s worklike the theories of Madame Blavatskyfounder of the Theosophical Society,—an organization “for the search for divine wisdom, occult or spiritual wisdom”—numerology or the symbolic meaning of colors. However, Burns is not alone in these analyses. The writer Daisy Phillipsonfor example, has found in the unsettling blue velvet details that refer to the order of the Rosicrucians oa Hermes Trismegistus and to his well-known saying “As above, so below; as below, so above.” In fact, those two worlds that the author of the Hermetic would appear connected in that film through a channel as peculiar as the hole in that severed ear that Jeffrey Beaumont, the character played by Kyle MacLachlanfound on the grass surrounded by ants.
“It’s like an open door to the inside of the bodya hole inside something else. Like a ticket to the other world. The ear is located on the head and goes directly to the mind,” Lynch himself explained when the film was released, in an unusual gesture for him, known for wanting to explain the meaning of his films. Not even when one of his actors made speculations about his character’s motivations or the meaning of what they were filming, Lynch confirmed whether or not they were right: “eraser head It’s about karma,” he said, convinced Jack Fisk actor who plays the character in Man from the Planet. “I didn’t realize it while we were shooting it, but The Planet Man is moving levers that symbolize karma.” Faithful to his silence, Lynch would limit himself to saying that “Eraser Head It is my most spiritual film. Nobody understands me when I say it, but that’s how it is. It arose from some feelings, but I didn’t know what they really meant to me. So I took out the Bible and started reading, and I kept reading and reading until one day I came to a sentence and I said to myself, ‘Here it is.’ But I can’t say what phrase it was.”
Peace and creativity
“At that time they were beginning to see hippies; I didn’t look down on them, but that seemed like a fad and many of them ate grapes and nuts. Some dressed as if they were from India and said they meditated, but I didn’t want to know anything about meditation then,” David Lynch recalled in his book Space to dream (Reservoir Books, 2018). Everything would change in 1973, during the complicated filming of eraser head. Lynch, overwhelmed by the financial difficulties and technical difficulties in making the film, called his sister. Martha Levacyto which he noticed a different tone of voice. He asked her if something had happened to her and she told him that she had started practicing transcendental meditation.
“I once showed Doreen Small something I was writing before I started meditation and she started crying because it was a text full of anger. When I started meditating, the anger disappeared“, recalled David Lynch who, at first, feared that this practice could make him lose creative intensity. “Then I discovered that it gives you more fire to do things and more joy when doing them, and you don’t lose powers but you gain them. Many people think that anger gives you a point, but deep down anger is a vice that poisons you and those around you. “It’s unhealthy, and it goes without saying that it’s not good for relationships.”
From that moment on, Lynch not only practiced transcendental meditation, but did everything possible to make its benefits known, first among his closest circle and later on an international scale. With that objective, In 2005 he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.an institution designed so that all children anywhere in the world who want to learn to meditate can do so, convinced that good emotional health not only improves people’s quality of life, but is the best way for the world live in peace.
Lynch, during his visit to Madrid in 2013. / Kiko Huesca – EFE
In fact, it was this work of making transcendental meditation known that brought Lynch to Madrid for three days in October 2013. In that city he gave a talk on the subject at the Reina Sofia Museumshared a table at Ramses with a select group of guests, dined at the Circle of Fine Arts with one hundred diners at 150 euros per cover and participated in a less exclusive farewell party, at 20 euros per ticket. Despite his busy schedule, Lynch also He took time to go to the Luis Braille Public Institute in Cosladato fulfill the invitation he had given him Marlen Campayoan English teacher at the center, when she was given the floor during question time at the Reina Sofía conference: “I am a secondary school teacher and most of my students are problematic. Would you come to my class tomorrow to help me?”
The next day, before fifty teenagers, David Lynch spoke about how negativity is the enemy of creativity, that every human being has great potential, that they should not allow anyone to tell them otherwise, and he shared with them the exact moment in which he decided to make films: “I was painting a picture of a garden at night, mostly black with some touches of green. I sat down to observe it, the green began to move, I heard the sound of the wind and I said to myself: ‘a moment, a painting that move?’ And that’s how I started.” Pure magic.
