It has taken a few days for the feelings to begin to settle so that some words can come. It is still hard to express in a meaningful way what the passing of DKL means to me, but I would like to try, as a sign of respect for someone who has enriched my life so much.
It has been wonderful to read others’ thoughts and comments on their love and admiration for his work and life these last few days. He was one of a kind in many ways, and I think the fact that he is loved and mourned by so many is testament not just to his artistic talents, but also to his authenticity.
That right there, the fact that his work, his intellectual genius, is also matched by his trueness of self, is one of the key measures of his greatness. He was exactly who he was, and exactly what he projected through his work and life, a person in complete alignment with his values. This kind of honesty is extremely rare.
He had, and gave, love in abundance. Respect. Curiosity. He embodied what we all want to be: someone who practises what he preaches, and does it with grace, ease and humour.
This does not mean that he was separate from the real world, though. I think what connected me most to him is his quality to move easily between worlds: the level world of the everyday and mundane; the world below, that of the basest instincts and horrors and grotesque disfigurements of the human psyche; and the world above, of spirituality and connectedness, of freely flowing energy and inspiration, of the highest levels of freedom and love.
Contrary to prevalent lazy types of faulty thinking, it is not isolating ourselves from one or more of these spheres that makes us strong, resilient and dependable people. It is knowledge and understanding of them all, acceptance that they are all manifestations of our own – and striving to elevate ourselves and others nonetheless. There is beauty in all, even the things that are conventionally repulsive. Because it is all part of us, part of life, existence and making, and therefore an expression of the divine.
To me, there is nothing more comforting and healing than this. A full and complete understanding of the range of what it means to be human, and still finding strength and love and hope to do better, to be better. And do it with humour, and grace, which is exactly what DKL was so good at doing.
Through the fourth year of my yoga teacher training, and through receiving my training in Transcendental Meditation at around the same time, I came to understand more about the theory of universal consciousness and what is called the unified field. How connectedness means we are all in this together, in every way imaginable. How each of us is a manifestation of this universal energy and when we hurt each other, we hurt ourselves, and when we choose to lift ourselves and others up, we lift everyone up with us. These ripples are very real and DKL is a shining example of what happens when you focus on what is good.
He gave those of us who are of a more sensitive disposition worlds to live in. He gave us acceptance, and permission to love and enjoy parts of life that are outside of the narrow norms of the prevalent societal middle ground. While simultaneously zooming in on, and celebrating the minutiae of the very everyday and ordinary, often elevating it to be extraordinary. He gave us art and stories that shocked us with their horror, only to interweave them with arcs of love and redemption and hope. He let us make up our own minds. He set up the art so we could come and meet it and complete it with our minds, through the prism of our experience. He encouraged us to embrace the complexity, the mess, the tragedy and contradictory nature of life. He showed the obstructive, small minded, idiot bigots and bullies for the truly ridiculous people they are. He helped us to see that evil does indeed exist, often under the same roof as innocence. He showed us that evil and good manifest through us, our very human, worldly choices, that there are portals through these spheres. Which is why free will and healing and redemption are a matter of life or death.
He had such a knack for both the micro, and the macro levels of expression of all of this. And his visual language is something so rich, so beautiful and original that countless books, articles and studies have been written about it – and some day soon, I will base my PhD on it, too. He celebrated the love of lights, moods, textures, sounds, feelings.
And this is another key point of appreciation for me (and I am sure many others, too). DKL actively embraced the use of intuition, both in his creative process, with his colleagues and collaborators, and with us, his audience. I have learned so much about creativity from him, through TM, through his artistic process, through the book Catching the Big Fish. I absolutely love his thoughts in his (auto)biography Room to Dream about how being happy and content makes creating better, doing away with the long outdated cliché of the tortured artist. Again, this subject alone could merit an entirely separate essay.
I love how he celebrated women and their stories, and had a very deep understanding of the suffering of women that informed so much of his art. He treated women with respect in his art and in his life and he told complex stories that celebrated qualities traditionally considered to be feminine: softness, kindness, nurturing, understanding, but also resilience, strength, bravery and instinct.
He played around with these assumptions of traditional femininity and masculinity. He gave agent Cooper intuitive qualities that relied on dreams and subconscious messages just as much as reason and science. He played around with ideas of traditional gender representation in characters, and in the process was also one of the earliest allies for trans people in mainstream TV. He broadened the boundaries of what’s within the acceptable range of what we agree to view as life and made us all more tolerant in the process.
From the moment I first cast my eyes on the TV screen and saw Cooper driving into the town of Twin Peaks when I was 14, I was gone. I was instantly at home in his world and I have never stopped feeling like that since, through all the years, all the art, all the different forms of expression of DKL’s mind. Of which there is a LOT. The paintings, the films, the music, the design, his commercials, venues – he turned everything into beautiful, compelling art, inspiring so many others as a result. One of the great joys of my life has been to share his work with my daughter, who was just as easily taken in by it as I had been. Her own art exam pieces have been influenced by DKL’s vision. How wonderful is that? He had such affinity for art and creation, and often said, ‘anyone who creates is a friend of mine.’
He was so wonderfully collaborative. His success didn’t happen at the detriment, exploitation or exclusion of others, as it so often can in any industry; the exact opposite. His art was richer for including so many others in it. He had friends and collaborators who worked with him throughout his life, from art school onward. And he never slowed down, he never became stale or closed off – right up to his seventies, he was working and producing art and helping younger artists do the same. He was not just championing art, but also the creative process itself, which I found so very useful and enlightening – it is one of my favourite subjects in the world.
I have never met him in person, but I have met some people he has worked with and they each have exactly the same thing to say about him. That he was the most wonderful person to be around, he made you feel safe and cared for. That he was fun and great at making his vision come to life. My life has changed in a million ways for the better for knowing him through his art and work. I am so grateful to have been trained in TM by one of the last remaining teachers who was trained by the Maharishi in person. I am glad to have, in some small ways, helped the work of both the Maharishi and the David Lynch Foundations. I am glad that I could in a very, very small way help with the making of the documentary The Art Life that celebrates his work. I will continue to do what I can, personally, to do what I can to be a good version of me every day, and to help others be that, too.
I think, for knowing DKL, we can never underestimate the power of living authentically. Living in a way that promotes what you want to see more of in the world is very clear at the moment as words and messages of love keep pouring in from all over the world in his memory. He made it cool to be imperfect, complex, to do your own thing, even if it’s strange to others; to seek your own inner truth, and to want to do the right thing, to have hope in a world that often is so hopeless. To celebrate beauty, to not be cynical, and to heal from the bad things that have happened to you. He made it cool to be a good person and to want to be better, and to demand better for us all. In his words, to “fix your hearts or die.”
Tomorrow would have been his 79th birthday and his family is inviting us to meditate together for ten minutes to celebrate his life at 12pm noon PST (8pm UK time), Monday 20 January. I will be joining.
And for now, all I can say is thank you. Thank you so much for everything. Because of you, the world was a better place. Because of you, I see things differently. Because of you, my life has been made immeasurably better. And because of you, even when things are really dark, and the assholes seem to be taking over everything, I know there are things that are real and worth fighting and living for. Thank you for helping me know what is important and what is not. Thank you for flying the flag for those of us who know that a spiky truth is always more beautiful than a cosy lie. Thank you for really showing me what art is and can be, and how it is a form of love that transcends place and time to connect us and lift us up.
Thank you. I wish you nothing but infinite blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.
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