David Lynch and the Elvish Model of Loss

Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime. For the Elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce, in which they may pass unhindered and leave the Middle-earth forever.

David Lynch very understandably left us to our dumpster-fire fate on this planet while I was in transit between Tasmania and Paraguay, so I couldn't comment at the time. Which is fine, everyone else did. Nika wrote the best thing I read over on her Zola Jesus Patreon. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing a snippet here:

"david’s work has been a piece of my DNA since i was a child… he singlehandedly corrupted me into the weirdo i am today. i'll never forget the first time my older brother sat me down to watch a japanese bootleg of eraserhead. my teenage brain couldn't wrap my head around the absurdity and surreal horror that i was witnessing. from that moment on i was transfixed by the mind behind the masterpiece. who could make something so fearless, so funny, so terrifying, so free?

i pinch myself at the amount of times i was able to meet him and collaborate. hearing his remix of "in your nature" for the first time was an overwhelming rush. how did a filmmaker i love so much, just turn my song into something i love even more? i still prefer that version to the original."

Girl, same. Except for that part about collaborating with him many times, obviously. For me, it was watching Twin Peaks on TV with my mother. “Okay, so… is the town like this? Or is the filmmaker like this? The reason I ask is I am either moving tomorrow or renting some VHS tapes.”

There are a few departures that hit different. Our beloved Gen-X brothers and sisters are losing their luminaries, and it has the feel of the Lorien Elves lamenting for Gandalf. When Bowie died, it felt like he took a good chunk of the promise that contemporary music could carry the magic of the stars with it. Lynch’s departure took all of the tiny remaining promise of western/Hollywood cinema with it. All of it. There are just Marvel movies and Kathleen Kennedy rolling around angrily in the tauntaun corpse of the Star Wars universe now. Lynch leaves the LA hills, and the place burns to ash. There is something synchromystically significant in that double tragedy.

This isn’t a post about how old-timey things are better than today things, although some of them are. Air and water quality, happiness, the wilderness, numbers of essential pollinators, oceanic microplastic levels, the affordability of housing, chronic disease. You know, trifles like that.

And I actually quite like Zoomer culture. Their memes have less of that ghastly Chandler Bing energy than our millennial memes have. (God, they’re so bad they make me want to have a vaccine-induced heart attack and drown in a hot tub.) And I adore Billie Eilish as both a singer and a songwriter. If she can make it out of the 27 Club she could legitimately have an Aretha-length career. The kids, as they say, are all right.

This is about something different. You can feel it. Do you know why the Elves actually made the three rings? It wasn’t because they wanted to try butt stuff with Sauron, for fuck’s sake, Amazon. (See above about how all the magic is gone.) It was to sustain things at their peak of beauty in a world that continually passes and changes. Were the Elves operating out of trauma, which expresses itself as a fear of letting go? Maybe. Read on. The point is the Elvish model of loss emerges out of the understanding that this is all passing away -they are indeed passing away- and that’s just what’s happening.

Why I stopped identifying as progressive over a decade ago had nothing to do with their goals -many of which I was and am in alignment with. It was the half-witted materialist philosophy that underpins its silly takes, it's the evidence-free idea that, as the Tony Blair campaign song sings it, "thiiiiiiiings, can only get betteeeeerrrr." Human society, through the correct application of managerialism, will continuously and ever-improve physical reality, forever, into a continuous future. But things fade, wheels turn, bad things happen then good things happen. If you can’t model that you get… well, you get what we just got, and now we live through the understandable reaction to that. Well played, everyone.

So the Elvish model of loss is one in which we lose things and we lose things and we lose things and that’s just what happens when an age ends. Other good things will happen, and better things will come, but not on timelines that mortals will understand.

And there’s a reason losses like our two David dads hit so hard. They really won’t come again. You can say this is because the music industry changed from it’s profitable A&R man to label to single to radio to album pipeline. And a similar gatekeeping was in play when it came to TV channels and film studios for Lynch, sure. Definitely part of it.

But what I want you to do is feel into the civilisation energy pushing behind both those moments like torrents of water flowing through a pipe. AngloAmerican cultural dominance was at its peak of power, confidence and range. Now it isn’t. Now a trickle flows through that huge pipe because the next centre of global cultural dominance is rising across the sea.

This isn’t a ‘woe is me’ moment. Nor is it one in which you will wake up one day and there is nothing left. Galadriel (the real one, not Guyladrrrrrrrrrriel) spoke of fighting “the long defeat”. It’s that energy. And it is melancholic. I wrote in my first-ever substack post about the Tzutijil understanding that grief is praise:

Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love. A nonfake grieving is how we praise the dead, by praising that which has left us feeling cold and left behind. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.

The Smell of Rain on Dust.

So part of the long defeat includes Elvish lamentation for what passed and what is passing. Not because you are a crying child who needs someone to ‘fix’ things. Because the thing we lost was really amazing and we won’t have it again. No more adorable videos of David painting and smoking and opining. (He really was so fucking adorable. What a blessing that my incarnation overlapped with that king’s incarnation, truly.)

You start to see the impulse to make a little costume jewellery, huh? But that’s not quite the right move, although it’s close. For about ten years now, I have been talking about the Rivendell Project. This is the idea that your life becomes "The Last Homely House East of the Sea". You retain in your mind and your heart and your bookshelves and your film archive in whatever form that takes all the Lynch and Bowie and Goya and Hegel and whatever wonderful things light up your soul. You make a homely house for them against the transforming world. Will it work? I don’t know. What I do know is you are not going to discover Blue Velvet on RedNote.

That is probably something to lament.

In gwidh ristennin, i fae narchannen
I Lach Anor ed ardhon gwannen
Dewidh! Dewidh!
Ú-reniathach i amar galen
I reniad lín ne môr, nuithannen