DAVID LYNCH

It's never easy, realising that your gods can die. It's a feeling of displacement, the earth suddenly shifting on its axis. Someone we assumed would always be there, perhaps even taken for granted, is suddenly missing from the world. It's also a feeling of confusion, the question of how to grieve for someone you never met, even whether you should grieve them. More than anything though, it's the feeling of sorrow. We'll never have the thrill of new words, new works, new ideas from them. That possibility has ceased.

As hyperbolic as it may sound, I think it's appropriate to see David Lynch as a kind of god. He was someone many of us turned to for guidance, whether that be artistically or spiritually. Many of his works feel like holy texts, both profound and opaque, worthy of debate, interpretation and study. He could elicit in you feelings that were hard to describe, as much repulsion as exhilaration. You didn't engage with Lynch on an intellectual level but an emotional one, allowing the beauty and the mystery to lead you to a place of unexpected enlightenment. He felt bigger than any of us, connected to the heartbeat of the universe, and if we were lucky, he shared with us the sounds he heard.

Maybe "god" is the wrong term, then. Maybe David Lynch was more prophet, the vessel through which we could commune with the divine.

That's certainly the feeling when you discover and connect with his work for the first time. For many of us, it's as a teenager, budding cinephiles spreading his artistic gospel in hushed tones - a battered VHS of 'Eraserhead', a treasured DVD of 'Mulholland Drive', midnight screenings of beaten film prints of 'Lost Highway', breathless descriptions of episodes of a TV show called 'Twin Peaks' that sounds far too bizarre to possibly exist. Even though we don't have the language or experience to fully understand them (that will come later), as a teenager they feel prophetic, clues as to what is to come. Understanding their iconography and construction becomes like decoding a cypher, one you know deep down you'll never fully crack. That's the beauty of Lynch, especially when you're young. He's not providing answers but asking questions, and they're the kind of questions you want the answers to at that age - tell me what to expect, show me what it's going to be like, help it all make sense for me.

Perhaps you assume him to be some sort of dark prophet, an anti-establishment agent of chaos determined to dismantle the hypocrisy of Hollywood, of social norms, of capitalism, of sexism. You see pictures of him, the wild hair, the deep eyes, the perpetual cigarette. He looks as cool as his movies. He looks as radical as his prophecies. He looks like a man who lives his art.

As you grow older and revisit his holy texts, they start to shift. Suddenly unlocking the codes doesn't matter so much to you. As each year passes and you experience more love, more loss, fight for your dreams, take in the agony and ecstasy of being alive, you start to see things in those texts you'd never seen before. Now, Club Silencio isn't just cool but brings you to tears. Now, Lulu and Sailor are less radical and more classically romantic. Now, Jeffrey Beaumont's odyssey feels less an adventure and more a descent. Now, those two "lesser" Lynch films, the one about the deformed man and the one about the old man riding a lawnmower, feel immediate and vital. And now, that 'Twin Peaks' TV show feels less like a succession of intriguing idiosyncrasies and instead one of the most moving and heartbreaking works of art you've ever encountered.

It turned out David Lynch wasn't a prophet of darkness but a prophet of light. Not a god revelling in the worst of human nature but one who believed, wholeheartedly, in the best it could be.

If you look back at social media over the last six months, it seemed like we were all getting ready for the loss of David Lynch. Whether it was watching along with the recent season of 'Blank Check' as I had been (which ended only weeks before his death) or finally feeling the impetus to rewatch 'Twin Peaks: The Return', his work seemed to be in the air once again, and along with it, a new stage of understanding what this man and his work means to us. At the time, I was grateful to 'Blank Check' for the excuse to sit with his filmography, filling in the embarrassing gaps and revisiting the films I'd only seen in those teenage years. Now, with him gone, it feels like a blessing. For a few glorious months, I sat enthralled in the embrace of his work, each piece of the puzzle falling so beautifully into place to form a coherent, dazzling image of this artist and how he saw the world.

Perhaps this is why the news of his passing hit me so hard. His work was fresh in my mind, as was the feeling they had elicited, a feeling I hadn't quite expected. And this is important to remember in the process of grieving for an artist, someone who you never personally met. In many ways, you have met them, certainly when they're an artist of the calibre of Lynch. Their work is them, a part of them. Engaging with their art is the act of engaging with them. Lynch has never spoken a word to me but his work has, and every word it has said felt personal to him and to me. That's an integral part of how our relationship with Lynch evolves as we age. We move from needing the answers to understanding the power of the mystery. If (as 'Conclave' articulates) mystery is the basis of faith, then to fall in love with David Lynch is to find a kind of faith. At it most potent, his art makes the world make more sense.

David Lynch believed in the inherent good in our world. That may not seem immediately obvious, especially with films as dark as 'Blue Velvet' or 'Lost Highway', or as impenetrable as 'Inland Empire' or 'Mulholland Drive'. There are moments of astonishing violence and brutality in his work, moments that send you reeling, that haunt your dreams for years. I don't know anyone who doesn't brace themselves when that face appears behind Denny's or can stand to look as Frank abuses Dorothy or doesn't shake with horror as Laura Palmer is ripped from the world. At first glance, Lynch's world view seems impossibly, irrevocably bleak.

And yet, when I look back on the experience of watching his work, those aren't the moments I remember. I remember John Merrick screaming for human decency in a public toilet. I remember Audrey being asked to dance. I remember a father realising what he has done to his daughter. I remember two brothers silently healing a wound neither remembers the cause of. I remember Sailor running to embrace Lulu through a sea of cars. I remember a father trying to keep alive his bizarre, sickly baby. I remember Bobby bursting into tears at hearing a long-forgotten name. I remember Laura in the presence of an angel. I remember a young woman in a school room watching a classmate run through the quad screaming, and her hand grabbing her neck as she is wracked with tears. I remember the humanity, the endless humanity that runs as a pulse through everything he made.

With his passing, we're reminded that David Lynch was not only a god but a human being, maybe as wholly a human being as an artist can be. At his heart, Lynch was a humanist, a man who looked into the dark pit of the human soul to try and understand how a species capable of such good could also be capable of such evil. In the world of David Lynch, acts of violence rip the universe apart. They are atomic bombs that shatter reality, they are rifts in time, they are the disintegration of the soul. They are not who we are. If you look at Lynch's work and only see darkness, then you aren't listening to the music in its heart. It's been endlessly commented that Lynch pulled so much from the 1939 film 'The Wizard of Oz'. Of course he does. In that film, a young girl sits and dreams of a better world, before being drawn against her will into a surreal reality where she must discover what it is she truly wants. It's dreams and hopes and nightmares and revelations. Isn't that what we see, over and over again, in what Lynch left us?

In a body of work as remarkable as his, it feels foolish to single out only one, but in the past few days since his passing, my brain has returned, over and over again, to his magnum opus, 'Twin Peaks', especially its monumental third season. Revisiting it recently, it felt like the culmination of his career, not just of the legendary series. Everything he'd made had echoes throughout it, the sound of it rising into a breathtaking, melancholy symphony, but it also felt like a preparation for some kind of end. What have I done with my life? What do I leave behind? Will these cycles of pain ever end? How do I end them before it's too late? That final scene, which had shocked me to speechlessness in 2017, now brought me to tears. It felt so incredibly raw, incredibly desperate, reaching for a final answer that it knows, like all the others, it can never reach.

This, fundamentally, is what made David Lynch one of the most important artists of our time. He asked the questions we were all too afraid to ask, because he needed to. He created work that was from his heart more than his head, from his gut and from instinct, because he knew no other way. There is no irony in David Lynch, only sincerity. He believed in the world. He believed in us.

In the wake of his passing, it's understandable to despair. We will never see a new work from David Lynch again. We no longer have him to help us make sense of the world. Our god is gone, our prophet is silent. But the human being remains. He remains in the art he leaves us. And because he insisted on asking questions and never requiring answers, those questions will continue to resonate as long as there are human beings to listen and to watch. And I, for one, will watch and watch and watch and watch.

In that sense, David Lynch is a god. His work makes him immortal.

"Llorando, por tu amor."