the blue box and the key

I’d gone through something and I thought I would never write again. A pervasive sense of worthlessness infected all my past and future work. On one of those interminable days I was trying and failing to reestablish some sense of creative purpose, I discovered David Lynch talking about the times, in his industry, that he had also died.

It was through him I learned there was a way to do this—to live and die for the art life. All you needed to do was stay true. “Stay true to what you love” and, whether or not it kills you, you’ll eventually be all right. David Lynch taught me to name the edge you need your heart to hold you back from, and I began making an effort to take better care of mine. No extraordinary circumstances would have ever unfolded in which I’d had the opportunity to tell him his work changed my life, and the work of my life, but I wanted to say something about it, to try.

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I’d been thinking of him the day before his death was announced, because I’d been writing one of his kinds of scenes; a moment where the ordinary brushes up against the uncanny, of those unexpected and startling expressions of humanity that fall between. His influence is deeply present in the manuscript I’m working on. And long before I committed to loving his artistry—whether or not I ultimately loved his every piece of art—I tended to gravitate to works I’d come to discover were also inspired by his own. I believe in its expressions of violence and sex and death and life and dark and light. I believe in those things because David Lynch believed in them too. Because as good as watching or listening or reading or looking at the things Lynch has created is learning about his process of making them. His sincerity, his love for and commitment to the creative seemed the underpinning of everything he produced. To think of Lynch’s work as incomprehensible, inaccessible, or remote is to deeply misunderstand its invitation—to miss a chance to connect.

"I never talk about themes,” he once said. “People, they want to have an easy understanding of a film, whereas with music, they don't have that problem; it's just an experience. It's like a dream sometimes. You tell your friend a dream, the words fail you, but still you know inside. I think people should trust the understanding that comes from them, from the experience."

I keep this quote in a notepad file on my laptop, and I’ve invoked it frequently as my writing tentatively progresses, as I consider the questions the narrative poses and who I am entrusting its experience to and what it means that I do. These things have always been important to me as both artist and lover of art, but increasingly so in an age of publishing imprints founded to prioritize fickle algorithms over authors and readers, of streaming services investing absurd amounts of money to produce filler content, the ever-present threat of AI . . .

What, of you, is my work inviting?

What is it I want you to connect to?

What, of me, is your work inviting?

What is it you want me to connect to?

I hope my answers always emerge from a place beyond bitter cynicism, from a place of artistic integrity, sincerity, and care. I hope those answers find an audience and leads them there, to a dream that words fail to describe, to an understanding they know to trust inside. That’s the place David Lynch’s work led me that painful stretch of time I was going through something, and thought I’d never write again.

“I love to see people coming out of darkness,” he once said.

Thank you, David.

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