I’ll See You In The Trees

Today began with the death of David Lynch. I’ve mentioned Twin Peaks any number of times here, being the most central of his works in my life. Of what of my blogging that’s been restored so far, the earliest mention relates the night in 1990 that I tried to dream of Bob.

Twin Peaks premiered when I was in college. I attended the SUNY system’s arts campus, where the show was as close to appointment television as you could get for that particular audience. I’d never seen the TV room in the dorms that crowded. It was in our on-campus apartment, though, where we watched episode three, when Cooper’s dream at the end landed like an atomic bomb in the American television landscape.

There was television before Twin Peaks, and television after Twin Peaks. The show was as much a portal to a new place for the medium as its opening titles were for the viewer.

This morning first thing, I played “Sycamore Trees” as performed by Jimmy Scott. Then it was “The World Spins” as performed by Julee Cruise. Then I just put on the entire soundtrack to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. After breakfast, I grabbed coffee, hopped the bus, and took a short wander through the Douglas firs at Pier Park. I couldn’t bring myself to find a spot and just start playing the original television soundtrack on my phone, and see who among the trees wondered what was happening, but I’d thought about it.

It’s mentioned in the post I link above, but the very first thing I ever contributed to the internet back in 1993 was a long, somewhat discursive text file containing everything I’d thought about, and everything I’d researched, about what Twin Peaks possibly could mean. I’d uploaded it to the Twin Peaks archive, at the time hosted on an FTP server in Australia. That act in itself was for me its own kind of portal into a new place.

Were you to look back at my life pre-diagnosis (before 2016, at 46), and ask just how actually autistic I somehow was without knowing it or anyone else noticing, see that file. I was exactly that much autistic.

Recently I’d finally read a piece on how Lynch’s weirdness cannot be separated from his empathy, and mostly today in that light I thought about Bobby Briggs at Laura Palmer’s funeral. It’s the identification of the importance of empathy through a confession of its absence.

Anyway, David Lynch is gone. I’ve started a Twin Peaks rewatch. Given the world as it is today, it’s kind that one of the final memetic ways in which he’ll be remembered is Gordon Cole telling transphobes to fix their hearts or die. There are a lot of fitting epitaphs for David Lynch, but I’ll take that one.

Fix your hearts or die.