2025-01-17
Today marks the death of David Lynch.
I am stumped because for some reason, in my mind, he isn't supposed to die. I know, that's one hell of an impossible statement. People die. Celebrities die. Artists die. While some I just killed in my mind, deliberately removing them from the confines of my brain because of heinous acts, retroactively undermining their works because of being inhuman at their core, Lynch stands as one of the masters in their field whom I learned a lot from just by being exposed to his craft. And in some way, he has already immortalized himself in the souls touched by his art.
When a great artist dies, for a few days the whole world seems to circulate around the void they’ve left behind. We realize how deeply we’ve come to depend on them, how much of our lives have been lived inside their dreams, among their words and images.
— jon repetti (@pourfairelevide) January 17, 2025
Up until now, I did not realize that he had this effect on me, where in being unapologetically creative, you assert yourself as an artist in the absence of audience recognition, which is essentially, how an artist should be. To dance when no one is watching. There is freedom in creating uncompromising works of art solely based on your vision—or perhaps, if I rephrase that bit: being able to do that in itself is freedom.
I have always believed that be true to your craft without fanfare and validation and it will naturally find its audience. Nothing has ever dictated my creative pursuit so deeply than this approach. My only failure is to be defeated by the voices inside my head. It was the opposite of what Lynch had showed me. It was a failure on my part to embody and look at my own fears. Yet I know overcoming them head on is the task of the hero. During that time, I wasn't able to show up for myself. I left myself to be wrecked under the pressure of my environment. I avoided a confrontation with myself, with my fears, and with my nightmares.
I know I have reflected on this countless of times. Written a lot of paragraphs about my past creative failures. But this day has brought another dimension to reflecting to my own creative struggles. My adolescent pretentious self, where art becomes a playground of ideas and self-expression without consequence, is when my creative journey started its path to crystallization. When I resorted to obscurity in order to express myself, I thought I was able to grasp what Lynch's surrealism and dream logic had told me. Since he offered no explanations, I made it up for myself. And what came out was a pathetic excuse for creating art, because it was not honest.
In a sense, I am still in the process of trying to build myself up after facing disillusionment, which took me half a decade to internalize. There were a lot of detours. A lot of experimentation. A lot of attempts to forge a path towards things I do not fully understand. But all of them led me back to writing. I did not expect, even with the seeming convoluted turn of events, those times planning and strategically convincing myself that I can live a life without putting creativity as my main line of work, that it would still lead towards my imagination.
Lynch started it all for me. Watching a Lynch movie requires a surrender to the abandonment of understanding. Everything becomes a personal experience. He had shown me how to confront the self, the inevitable return of the repressed, and how to talk to your demons. Now, those demons grew up with me. While we still have the occasional chaotic conversations, they are more approachable now. I have made my own red room inside my own inland empire.
As I write this, there is a deep melancholia that swells because now gone is the man who has helped me become a better version of myself because of his uncompromising vision and approach towards creation. He showed us his own fears and nightmares, opened a space where there is the pressure to understand the world does not matter, where there is harmony among the chaos of the world and chaos within the self. This is why his works can only be described in a personal level because it eludes the objectivity of the world. He created a space and time where dreams and nightmares meld into one, and after the credits roll, we are back to a place where we can apply what we just experienced to see the world in a different way, and in turn, to see ourselves with more complexity, allowing us to navigate the creases of ourselves we haven't seen before, and from there, create an understanding from seeing the organized chaos of another person's subconscious.
He opened up the possibilities of cinema. Showed that there are no boundaries in language that films cannot communicate up to the point of abstraction and meaninglessness. He showed us how to dream. He showed us how to see through ourselves.
There's nothing else but gratefulness that Lynch chose to be himself. This is the task of every artist.