The paperback edition of David Lynch’s slim book of peculiar creative tips Catching the Big Fish has just been released, and he is now working on a documentary of his recent lecture tour on Transcendental Mediation, which he has practiced for over three decades. (I’m pretty sure this is the only thing he and Howard Stern have in common.) Joe Pompeo of the New York Observer caught up with Lynch recently and found him as inscrutable as ever.
“Stress is hittin’ us, and it’s hittin' us hard,” says Lynch. “And if that was the only reason you wanted to start Transcendental Meditation, you would definitely walk away from stress. You experience the deepest level of life. Pure, bliss-consciousness with every meditation. To experience bliss is so powerfully beautiful. It is infinite intelligence, infinite creativity, infinite love, infinite energy. Negativity begins to recede. Say goodbye to stress.”
I’ve heard Lynch say words to this effect an awful lot in recent months, notably after a screening of Inland Empire last year. It always sounds inviting, but really non-specific. But Lynch has “non-specific” down to an art form. For instance, when asked about his favorite scene from one of his movies: “For a scene to be like that, there have to be many things that go before it. Like in a piece of music -- for the most thrilling sections to soar, so many notes have to come before. It has to build in a certain way. I just like the whole process, and I like falling in love. Films are like little children. You have them all standing there, and someone says, ‘Now pick your favorite little child,’ and when you see their faces look at you, wondering if you’re gonna do that – well, you could never do that.”
It’s almost impossible to read something Lynch has said without hearing it in his gee-whiz voice, accompanied by his patented fluttering hand motions. If you haven’t had the pleasure, these guys have an amusing take:
