Twin peaks of satisfaction

[Guest guest]

Twin peaks of satisfaction

ALEX WILLIAMS

 

IF YOU were looking for a face to preach to a new generation the

gospel of Transcendental Meditation, a hippie-era spiritual practice

espousing inner harmony, David Lynch would be the last person who'd

come to mind. As the director who conjured the reptilian mutant baby

of Eraserhead and the dancing dwarf of Twin Peaks, Lynch has built a

career by imposing his nightmares on audiences.

 

The idea of the surrealist and eccentric Lynch reborn as a guru of

bliss seems odd even to him. Now 60, he remembers how he recoiled

from the concept when he heard about it in the late 1960s, when the

movement - founded by the Indian spiritual leader Maharishi Mahesh

Yogi - was experiencing its first wave of popularity in the west,

thanks to pop stars like the Beatles and Donovan.

 

"The word 'harmony' would make me want to puke," recalls Lynch, in

the glassed-in painting studio atop his modernist concrete-walled

house in the Hollywood Hills. Even as an Eagle Scout and high-school

student in Alexandria, Virginia, he composed paintings, influenced by

Francis Bacon, in a studio with walls that he and a friend painted

black."Meditation would be a sickening thing to consider, because you

want to create that edge," he says, in his worn khaki trousers and a

tattered black sports jacket with a hole in the right elbow the size

of a saucer. "I don't want to be a namby-pamby." Besides, he

adds: "You would get chicks when you're angry."

 

That all changed in 1973, when the future filmmaker discovered

meditation, which he believes allowed him to quiet - and exploit -

his inner demons. He says that he has not missed a day since. Now,

the low-key auteur is emerging as the most visible, even fiery,

proponent of the resurgent practice, which is being used increasingly

in schools and in the workplace, as well as by a new generation of

stars, including Heather Graham, Laura Dern and record executive Rick

Rubin.

 

In July 2005, Lynch began the David Lynch Foundation, which finances

Transcendental Meditation scholarships for students in middle schools

and high schools to study the technique. Later that year, he embarked

on a series of campus lectures. And this winter, Lynch is taking the

message to the masses. His autobiography-cum-self-help book, Catching

the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, is out now.

This month, he will preside over a series of readings and

discussions, in tandem with concerts by Donovan in New York,

Washington and Los Angeles.

 

The idea of David Lynch as a spokesman for anything is a bit of a

stretch. He suffers from a lifelong fear of public speaking - "I

still hate it" - and will happily recount how he has recorded

speeches for awards ceremonies, then played them into the microphone

at the podium. "I call him the reluctant yogi," says Robert Roth,

vice-president of the Lynch Foundation and the man who nudged Lynch

onto the college lecture circuit. In the flat folksy accent of his

native Missoula, Montana, Lynch himself admits that his increasing

public involvement is "weird". "I guess it's as simple as this: I

wish I had heard about it earlier."

 

Transcendental Meditation is a trademarked mental technique

introduced by Maharishi in 1958 based on the theory that a

practitioner, by repeating a private mantra throughout two 20-minute

sessions a day, can achieve a state of "restful alertness" and tap

into a "unified field" of energy. The training process involves

working with personal instructors over five days at one of about

1,000 Transcendental Meditation centres worldwide, and it costs about

£1,900.

 

In the 1960s, adherents posed Transcendental Meditation as a natural

alternative to mind-expanding drugs like LSD. Now, proponents,

including Lynch, argue that it can serve as an antidote to a stress-

filled world, particularly for adolescents. Lynch cites his concern

for young people as the primary reason he launched his crusade.

 

"David has become a huge promoter of Transcendental Meditation," says

Donovan, whose full name is Donovan Leitch. Leitch learned the

practice from Maharishi himself, along with the Beatles, Mia Farrow

and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, in Rishikesh, India, in 1968. Leitch

says that Lynch has been able to "capitalise" on his fame

and "redirect meditation back where it belongs, with the students".

 

Transcendental Meditation faded from the pop culture landscape after

the 1970s, but it hardly disappeared. Maharishi, now believed to be

90, still directs the movement, which claims more than six million

adherents, from a log house on a 65-acre compound in the Dutch

village of Vlodrop. The organisation operates the Maharishi

University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa; its own incorporated

town, Vedic City (population 325), is nearby.

 

Over the years, the practice has been the subject of numerous

scientific studies, including one by the University of Michigan

Health System in 2003, which indicated 12-year-olds who were

practising such meditation appeared to score significantly higher on

tests of self-esteem and emotional competence.

 

But critics allege that it can inspire an unhealthy devotion. Rick A

Ross, who operates a non-profit research organisation in Jersey City

called the Rick A Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults,

Controversial Groups and Movements, said that the evidence he has

studied indicates that Transcendental Meditation can be relaxing when

not practised excessively. But the movement fits some criteria he

uses to define cults. It is "a personality-driven group, with

Maharishi as its totalitarian leader", Ross says, which at its

extremes "can be seen as one in which people lose much of their

ability for critical thinking".

 

But Lynch, who was raised Presbyterian, insists that Transcendental

Meditation is neither a cult nor a theology, but simply a practice

one learns, then pursues in private.

 

As an artist, Lynch says, Transcendental Meditation has allowed him

to unleash his imagination and be, in a word, weirder. He says that

many of his ideas - the "big fish" of his book's title - come to him

during meditation. Among these big fish are the sitcom-starring

rabbits and the Greek chorus of prostitutes in his fantastical three-

hour new film, Inland Empire.

 

Of course, artists are allowed their quirks, and Lynch revels in his.

Last month, to campaign for an Academy Award nomination for Laura

Dern, the star of his new movie, Lynch sat on the corner of Hollywood

Boulevard and La Brea with a cow and a giant poster of Dern's face.

 

Early in his career, while other Hollywood hopefuls were losing

themselves to cocaine, Lynch got strung out on milkshakes, visiting a

Los Angeles Bob's Big Boy almost daily for seven years. Now more

health conscious, he favours the veggie burgers at Astro Burger. "To

be a grown-up and to do what you want to do is the most beautiful

thing," he says, his grey-flecked hair pomaded into what looks like a

tangle of swaying prairie grass. "But this doesn't happen for most

people. Sadly, they have to make ends meet."

 

For these people, Lynch argues in the book, meditation can be a way

out. For example, an unhappy insurance salesman who learns to "dive

within" will find his soul-crushing commutes and stale breakfasts

enlivened by ideas. Little by little, Lynch says, the salesman will

find his weekdays "becoming more like Saturday morning - the sun is

coming out, this beautiful warmth, with his favourite breakfast,

birds chirping.

 

"If you were a burglar, you'd become a much better burglar," he

adds. "But after a while, you would probably say, well, wait a

minute. You would probably have compassion for people you were

burglarising. You might even bring some stuff back."

 

The director's goal is to raise 7 billion (£3.6 billion) to help open

seven "peace universities" around the world. He also endorses

Maharishi's belief that a mass demonstration of "yogic flying" - a so-

called "advanced technique" in which meditators, seated in the lotus

position, begin hopping in unison and theoretically start to hover -

can radiate peaceful energy out to the world. (Asked if he had tried

this, he responds: "Yes." Did it work? "No.")

 

Lynch writes in his book that he began meditating on the

recommendation of his sister, Martha. At the time, Lynch was a year

into a five-year quest to complete his first feature film,

Eraserhead, which was released in 1977, and was separating from his

first of three wives, Peggy.

 

"There was a hollowness inside," he recalls. "I thought, something is

drastically wrong."

 

He dropped in on a Transcendental Meditation centre. After 20

minutes, he felt a weight lifted.

 

"The side effect of growing that consciousness," he explains, "is,

negative things start going away. Like fear. It's like the

suffocating rubber clown suit begins to dissolve." Certainly, the

teachings of gentle-voiced Maharishi never made Lynch go soft. "You

don't have to suffer to show suffering," he says of the violence in

his movies. The filmmaker sees no contradiction between inner harmony

and external edginess.

 

"I heard Charles Bukowski started meditation late in his life," Lynch

says, referring to the poet laureate of Skid Row, who died in

1994. "He was an angry, angry guy, but he apparently loved

meditation."

 

Of course, just as meditation never got Lynch over a taste for the

macabre, it never quenched Bukowski's famous thirst for whisky.

 

"Well, maybe in time, it would have," Lynch says with a smile. "In

the meantime - just more enjoyment of the whisky."

 

• Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is

published by Tarcher/Penguin, priced 19.95/£10.30.

 

Lynch lifelines

David Lynch was born today in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, to Donald, a

US Department of Agriculture research scientist, and Sunny, a

language tutor.

 

He had a happy childhood in the Pacific Northwest, with his younger

siblings John and Martha, although the family had to move frequently

due to his father's occupation. The idea for the setting of Blue

Velvet (below) may lie in Lynch's childhood, as much of it was spent

in the woods of Spokane, Washington.

 

Early career

After studying the arts at Boston Museum School, Lynch moved to

Pennsylvania in 1966 to take a place at the Pennsylvania Academy of

Fine Arts, where he began to experiment with film. His first short

film entitled Six Figures Getting Sick (1966) won the Academy's

annual film contest. In 1970 he won a 5,000 (£2,570) grant from the

American Film Institute to make The Grandmother (1970), a piece about

a boy who grows a grandmother from a seed.

 

He is fond of using recurring images - all of Lynch's films feature

red curtains, smoke, fire, dogs, diners, cigarettes, deformities and

the colour blue.

 

Biggest successes

His first big hit was surreal cult classic Eraserhead (1977), which

he had worked on obsessively for five years and which is still

regarded as a standard midnight movie at arthouse cinemas around the

world. Other well-known Lynch films include The Elephant Man (1980),

Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Mulholland

Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (2001), not forgetting his popular

television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991, above).

 

His favourite actress is Laura Dern - she was just 17 when he cast

her in Blue Velvet. Four years later she played Lula Pace Fortune in

Wild at Heart and she stars in his soon-to-be released three-hour

epic, Inland Empire.

 

Personal life

Lynch met his first wife Peggy Reavey at the Philadelphia Academy of

Fine Arts. They married in 1967 and had a child, Jennifer Chambers

Lynch (now a film director) in 1968. They divorced in 1974 and he

married Mary Fisk in 1977 and had a son Austin Jack Lynch. After they

divorced in 1987 he married Mary Sweeney and had another son named

Riley Lynch. He also had a much-publicised affair with Isabella

Rossellini (star of Blue Velvet, left), in the 1980s.

 

He is known for his eccentric behaviour, including constructing the

plot for Twin Peaks on the napkins of various branches of Bob's Big

Boy diner, where he had a chocolate milkshake and six cups of coffee

at 2:30pm every day for seven years.

 

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=82692007

 

Last updated: 20-Jan-07 01:24 GMT

http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=82692007