David Lynch (1946-2025)
He gave us what we already had. This was no mean gift, since recognition was included in the giving. Through him, we could see ourselves more clearly. He brought my own childhood, my own adolescence, into sharp relief. Decades and numerous accomplishments separate us—I never once met him, not for a moment—but I feel a fierce sense of pride in his legacy. Both of us grew up in the Intermountain West, moving from town to town, the children of government workers, our fathers in the same agency, as it happens, the Department of Agriculture. There are certain indelible images held in common by people of that upbringing: a traffic light signaling at an empty forested intersection; steam from a paper mill evaporating in the dawn light; the bluish gray of meltwater plunging down a waterfall. There were parties in high school, parties at the lakeside, parties by the railroad trestle, things said and done between kids, no longer kids, that could never be taken back, things said and done between them, between those who remain and those who have vanished, never to grow old, but who are still, nevertheless, present in the landscape. Now he is a part of that landscape. He revealed what had been, before him, incommunicable, there in the rocks and water, there in the clouds drifting between the trees.
Courage in Writing
It might not seem that way, especially given how long it’s been since I’ve sent a newsletter, but I can write very quickly. I can fill pages and pages every day, thousands of words. I just slow myself down. This is because I’m afraid—afraid for a lot of reasons, but I’ll give one: when I was taking an undergraduate creative writing course at the University of Washington, I turned in a short story for the entire class to critique. I don’t remember it very well. It involved a boy, a stand-in for myself, who took long rides on a rural public bus system and who, as a consequence of one of these rides, catches a glimpse of a wolf, its fur entirely black, though the animal is not wild and lives in rehabilitation center run by a woman the boy dislikes. Anyway, the plot is irrelevant, but so is the style, or whatever I could muster at time that would count as style, since in the manuscript for the story, the one which I handed out to the entire class, I mistakenly wrote “shit” when I should have wrote “shirt”. Unaware of this error, I watched the class as they read this story in silence, their reading punctuated, every so often, by a chuckle or a grin I had no way of accounting for, since the story, like so many awful stories, was written in complete earnest. It was explained to me later, by the professor, who did his best not to smile or chuckle himself. So now, years later, I can’t help but think about this episode every time I write, can’t help but think of it every time I send off my writing to be read by others. It’s foolish to be afraid of something like that. Whatever ignorance, whatever carelessness I could ever present to the world has already been presented. There’s no hiding it, not unless I stop writing completely; but, my own pride notwithstanding, there are contractual obligations to meet. So I write slowly, sometimes slowly and carefully, sometimes not, always afraid of being shown the idiot, even though that has already happened, is happening, will happen, again and again, until this dim bulb finally burns out.