Flying into Pucallpa, the main city of the Upper Amazon, I listen to my favourite podcast, Weird Studies. In particular, the episode On David Lynch. The perfect accompaniment.

Let me explain.

I had been meaning to get back to what I find so regulating in Lynch’s work, but now I don’t have to. You can just listen to Phil and J.F. talk about it.

What I would have said is that Lynch was a shaman. And when I say that, flying into the Amazon, I mean it technically. Anthropologist Graham Harvey says shamanism is not so much a collection of things known (statements of faith) but “an assembly of techniques for knowing”.

Shamanism is open-ended because the cosmos is open-ended. It is a means of sense-making and navigating through a cosmos that is too gloriously complex to be contained inside concepts and definitions. It always amuses me when ‘science communicators’ (95 IQ technocrat propagandists) will say something like “There are just so many species in the Amazon unknown to science!” Like, bitch do you think there will be a day when that won’t be the case? Do you think it’s a finite project or something?

As far as I can tell, the drive to have everything contained within a single, interrelated cosmology goes back to the Greeks, which then entered Christianity, which then entered the Enlightenment project. This is the belief that there is a single, totalising explanation that contains everything, within which everything has a name and a little string attaching it to all the other things with names near it, which each have their own little strings.

Most of the world seems to have been smarter than this. Certainly, in the Amazon, the human cosmovisions have had to operate within and in relation to far greater levels of complexity than anywhere else. Before we even get to the spirit world, just on the level of mere biology, they are drinking from firehoses. The idea that everything has discrete lives and names and entries in London’s Museum of National History is a recipe for mental illness. It’s some sort of trauma-based OCD, like switching all the lights on and off before leaving the house.

The open-ended cosmology of the shaman is a better match to how we understand our sensory input. There is just so much going on and our consciousness function (which includes but is more than the brain) selects what appears to be relevant in that moment out of a great torrent rushing over us at every moment.

The cosmos is busy and crowded. You know very little about it. From this place, Harvey’s shamanism forms the connections and makes the maps and recruits the allies for whatever the tribe is seeking to achieve in that moment: a successful hunt, a healing ceremony, protection from other sorcerers, safety in a storm. Whatever else is going on in the big, wide cosmos; whoever else is doing what they’re doing… It just is.

Lynch was just such a shaman and -although I’m putting the S word in his mouth here, potentially against his will- J.F. says as much in the podcast. He calls Lynch a horror director and then elaborates with ‘supernaturalist’. This is exactly right. He was a supernaturalist because was not an occultist. An occultist would occultsplain the lodges and the owls and the beings that broke through from the nuclear blast. A supernaturalist is aware of the lodge. The occultist recruits for it.

Compare Lynch’s works to Crowley’s execrable novels in which you are foie-gras-fed clunky, obvious, heavy, dreary symbolism. They’re like doing grammar drills in high school French class. They’re awful, ham-fisted, blockish, ‘teachable’ exercises that allow midwits to feel smart because they recognise some symbol like it’s a child’s game of memory. (For the rest of us, they’re a cute little mental note to never do heroin.)

Lynch just… shows you. He shows you, to quote the podcast, “Stories about people being manipulated by forces they don’t know exist.” That is shamanism, kids. Diagnosing that is a big part of my shamanic healing practice. Sharing stories about people being manipulated by forces they don’t know exist is almost like Lovecraft, except Lynch

1. As a lifelong TM meditator, knew these forces were real. (I think he came to earth with this understanding, tbh. I think the meditation just made him really good at it.)

2. Did not have Lovecraft’s gynaecological repulsion to these phenomena. They just… are.

You exist in an open-ended cosmos in which it is vanity and folly to totalise. Your maps will fall short, but that is neither here nor there to the cosmos. In this sense, Lynch was absolutely a horror filmmaker, but it occurs to me he was also a comedy one. This is a cosmic joke. He is in on a secret that is, in all likelihood, governing the fate of mankind, and most people in the West don’t even know it. That’s actually quite funny when you stop to think about it.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a brief little post to point you in the direction of a fantastic podcast discussion. Which it still is. But then I emerge from the jungle to a new episode of Weird Studies where J.F. describes a posthumous dream visitation from Lynch himself, and they talk about precisely this: the things we can know and the things we can not know. Speaking professionally, I’m agreeing with Weird Studies co-host, Phil Ford. This was a ‘real’ posthumous visitation. I say this because of the sophistication of Lynch’s dream commentary. (Not to disparage J. F.’s unconscious in any way, of course. I’m sure it’s lovely.)

In the dream, Lynch is talking to J. F. about a closet of secrets that we should not open. Now, the asinine, basic bitch critique of occultism is there are “some things we should just not mess with” because there are “some things that mankind was just not meant to know”. That’s not what Lynch tells J. F. Lynch says that the secrets belong in the closet. That is where they are supposed to be. They are not being concealed from us like a parent hiding a child’s Christmas gifts before Christmas morning. They belong there, like sharks in the ocean. So it’s not so much that there are some things that mankind is not meant to know. It’s that it might break the cosmos to open the closet. That’s why you leave it closed.

A shaman could not have said it better.

Go listen to those episodes.