Recently, I bought a boxset with the Television series Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish.
“Ideas are like fish”, Lynch writes. “If you want a little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” It is well-known that Lynch uses transcendental meditation to go deeper. Everything there is, comes from the deepest level, he says, which modern physics call the Unified Field. “The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go towards this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”
Reading this little book while watching Twin Peaks was illuminating. For example, the series opens with the log women speaking and telling us what it’s all about, she ends up saying: “Laura is the one.”
She, Laura Palmer, is the Unified Field. Everything that happens in Twin Peaks, is related to her: Laura Palmer.
The whole series is drawing a map of a complex totality as a way of gradually going deeper and deeper. For example, in later episodes, the log women speaks about dreams and ideas. The FBI special agent Dale Coper often gets his ideas, or clear up a misunderstanding, in his dreams, perhaps as an illustration of the “hidden” potential that lies deep within – something unconscious, something still unknown, waiting to actualized.
I recall seeing the series when I lived in small town (some years younger than the young bunch of main characters, some of which I found both cool and very attractive back then). Twin Peaks caught my attention like no other series had before (and not like anyone else had until I saw the first season of True Detective).
Lynch, reminds me of the Danish poet and film instructor Jørgen Leth, who I once wrote a book about. (I encountered Leth’s poems and films more or less at the same time, I saw Twin Peaks). Leth is also semi-inspired by a humble philosophy where you’re open for whatever happens; you take it, whatever it is, and use it as good as you can. In continuation of Leth (and later with the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño), I’ve tried to develop a poetic and attentive philosophy, where the senses are all active.
Both Lynch and Leth mention how certain coincidences that happened at their filmset later were integrated into their films, making them better. They both believe that time should be allowed to unfold as it unfolds. Time is not a passive medium within which acts are placed; rather, time is immanent “within” action, when opening for or making another possible future actual. They both believe that everything is connected.
I emphasize that everything is connected or interconnectivity, recalling the Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Næss who once said something like: if I destroy another life, I also destroy myself to some degree. Why? Because relations compose who I am, who we are. Relating this idea to a small community like Twin Peaks, then the life of each one of the characters is not sustainable without the others, and vice versa. The death of Laura Palmer is, therefore, not only a tragedy for her and her closest relations; rather, it’s an attack on the social bonds that holds this community together.
Perhaps Twin Peaks can be seen as how fragile or vulnerable these social bonds are when we focus on money, power, greed and hate, and how these bonds can be strengthen through friendships, honesty, trust … stressing something like an equal value of all lives. For example, special agent Dale Coper listens to all citizens with equal care and interest, even those we (the viewers) might look at with skepticisms. He is a fairly good person.
Seeing Twin Peaks and reading this little simple book brought me back to my own youth—perhaps not as something deeper (not sure I agree with Lynch’s vertical metaphor)—but as an expanding of my consciousness, reconnecting with these basic social bonds of love, care and friendships. Catching moments of life.
In a way, re-watching Twin Peaks made me recall how ethics is generous. It gives or shares without asking for anything because it passes on what cannot be owned: love, friendship or social bonds.
Isn’t philosophy’s first virtue to be humble as in curious, open, available?
FINN JANNING 