Notes On A Sunny Morning
Cause and effect. — Prod people into desperation by denying and disemboweling everything they ever held dear. When they actually become desperate and begin to act as desperate men do, accuse them of being extremists and assert the need for stern measures to tamp down their irrational outbursts.
Voter’s dialectic. — “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me thrice, we’ve moved beyond considerations of shame and into the realm of utter shamelessness. Perhaps into a cult of shamelessness.
The establishment. — Scientists teach us how to scratch. Marketers promise us the perfect itch. Moralists tell us scratching is virtue.
Drug culture.– “You say to me, ‘Life is hard to bear.’ But why would you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear; but do not act so tenderly! We are all of us fair beasts of burden, male and female asses. What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on it?” [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Kaufmann trans.), “On Reading and Writing”]
I have long had the habit of sleeping early, and of falling asleep very quickly. This is not because I enjoy sleeping, but rather because I am always in a hurry to get the sleeping over with — I look forward to waking up. To be less awake on purpose, not due to biological compulsion — the “lights out” order of the prison warden — but as an intentional act, would be anathema to me, and is contrary to the life impulse itself. We ought to submit to sleep voluntarily, but only when its intrusion is inescapable. To choose unconsciousness for its own sake is to forsake the soul for the body, feeling for numbness, activity for paralysis, truth for falsehood, development for stasis, thoughtful irony for mindless smiling, love for lethargy, life for death.
I just read the headline that film director David Lynch has died. Lynch, a cult favorite among film school types, is well known as a purveyor of weirdness, darkness, and an Americanized version of surrealism. Less well known — especially, I would say, among his legions of ardent (past or present) university student admirers — is that he was, at heart, a believer in sunshine. The darkness, even when it seemed all-pervasive, was usually set out as context for something else, even if that something else was merely implied by its very absence. He always struck me — formerly one of those aforementioned university student admirers — as being a man obsessed with a glint of light that he imagined might finally appear through those blowing trees and murderous lunatics if he examined them closely enough — or that, perhaps, he feared had somehow been lost, but hopefully not forever. Hope. That was always present beneath the sadness and violence. His hope was not the mocking pretense of sunniness with which he was often identified by audiences and critics. He was not a nihilistic mocker of humanity. On the contrary, at his best, it was his sincerity that was the jarring and disarming thing, and gave such gravity, such honest pain and sadness, to his strongest moments of nightmarish audio-visual juxtaposition.
I once saw him, in his later years, speaking to an audience about the creative process. He was asked about the role of depression in creativity. His answer, seemingly to the surprise of the audience, was that no one ever created anything while depressed. Lynch was never as great an artist as his fans claimed. His was an instinctive and intuitive muse, a kind of genius for getting under the skin of a fear or a longing to reveal it with shocking familiarity. But he lacked the ultimate mission of purpose and vision that a great artist must possess. Nevertheless, I would happily watch his best work before almost anything by any other current American director. (Are there still American directors? Who knows, and who cares?) I hope his final days were blessed with an occasional damn fine cup of coffee.
