Last Thursday night, David Lynch died. He was a writer, director, musician, sound designer, actor, and painter (first and foremost). He was also my creative hero and my favourite artist at the successful depiction of real life, not always how it looks but how it feels. 

His work is full of strangeness, brutality, terror, and ugliness, but it’s always underpinned by an earnest sense of hope: a sweetness so childlike that you think it must be ironic. But when you consider his favourite film was The Wizard of Oz, his passion for cookies and coke or pie and coffee, the little robin singing at the end of Blue Velvet or The Good Witch in Wild at Heart, I think he was as sincerely interested in expressing the light as much as, and maybe because of, the dark.

The lightness might feel particularly cheesy because of the intensity of its opposite, but I think his intention was to prove the permanent presence of one within the other. When asked if Twin Peaks was satirising the soap opera genre, he insisted it wasn’t: “No, no, no, no, no. It is a soap opera. Soap operas grow out of life and because they’re continuing stories you get to go deeper into the characters’ lives.”

It’s strange to feel big sadness over the death of someone you’ve never met and it’s difficult to imagine stepping into a post-David world. So far, I haven’t been able to engage with the outpouring of tributes, or begin revisiting his work, because to do so would be to step through the curtain to acknowledge that new world.

Thinking about him over the last few days has made me realise how hard it is to tell where his input stops and my own perspective begins. His presence has sunk through so many stages of my life that I’m unsure whether I always had an affinity for his style or whether it was something I grew into it, like a mold. There are turns of phrase, styles of music, fashion, food, architecture, design, and stories I love more because of his influence, and it travels down to things as small as the lamp in my apartment (that I bought because of its resemblance to the one in the Black Lodge):

I first saw his work when I was a young teenager, getting freaked out by Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, and then spending one Christmas watching Twin Peaks when my parents bought the DVD. It blew my mind, and expanded things I already loved about the woods and 50s Americana into something broader and more mysterious - without offering any clearer conclusions.

There have been many more big and small moments since that point: meeting an artist who unwrapped the lithograph he’d just bought to let me quickly touch Lynch’s signature, my last summer in Saigon watching Twin Peaks: The Return on my roof with doughnuts each week, flying to Poland with a friend to see his retrospective, discovering the Double R Club in London, learning TM, visiting LA and picking up a stone from his footpath, ordering the black coffee and chocolate milkshake he had every day for 7 years at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank.

But his most lasting impact for me has been on the experience of the everyday, something I’ve noticed more than ever since Thursday. Throughout his films, passing details - a flickering light, the hum of a machine, a strange reflection, a ceiling fan - are imbued with unspecified significance, and encountering them out in the real world brings me not only comfort but an expanded sense of wonder. It reminds me of what essayist Elaine Scarry says about beautiful things: that they function as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. 

To go through life under the influence of David Lynch seems
to reveal a world bound by secret knots, and charged details
that reward you with a type of magic (though not one always easy or beautiful). Of course, none of this has ever depended on me knowing him in person. But in the wake of his passing,
it’s difficult not to feel like the spring of that magic has gone,
the tap turned off at the source. The death of a language,
the end of a dream. 

It’s really sad. Your hero only dies once, but I feel lucky to have lived at the same time as him. It’s been heartening talking to so many people I’ve connected with over his work through the years and countries, and even with a heavy heart I feel aglow with how much I’ve seen and learnt through him.

Thanks for everything, David. I hope you’re still goin somewhere now that the car has broken down.