David Lynch’s voice has a diminutive, nasal inflection. You can hear the Pacific Northwest’s gentility and echoes of a woodland youth. In his new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, this calm is felt in each short, declarative sentence that makes up each short, welcoming chapter.
The book is slim. The 177 pages offer more blank, white spaces than text. Lynch doesn’t really explicate his ideas: he distills them into succinct statements. But he’s hardly condescending. Rather, the whole book is an invitation. When you open Lynch’s book, he, in turn, opens his front door and invites you inside for a cup of coffee. And, perhaps, a twenty-minute meditation session.
“I’m not always good with words,” he says. Being a painter first and foremost, this effort to express his abstractions verbally instead of visually bears the over-stitched scars of an artist slightly outside his usual medium. Lynch is swinging for the fences throughout the book, at times promoting (nearly propagandizing) the practice of Transcendental Meditation, while at other junctures explaining his distrust and disappointment with the film industry. Yet his prose is so simple (one cannot help but think throughout of Ordinary Language Philosophers) that the reader can relax with the book. Its main aim, it feels, is to engender peace and good will.
David Lynch has practiced Transcendental Meditation for thirty-three years. He regrets (and regrets to inform the reader) that his first response was flippant dismissal. Yet, once he decided to try, in earnest, he felt “as if [he was] in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss—pure bliss.”
To transcend, he says, is to dive within and explore (or catch) your ideas. Lynch’s use of “idea” is vague and fluid, and prevalent throughout. Chiefly, though, he wants to say that “ideas are everything.” Water, then, runs through everything:
“Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.”
He goes on to explain his idea of an idea in a one-page chapter called, “Ideas”:
“An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life.”
Catching the Big Fish reads just this side of a “How To” book, which is just this side of action: a “How To” book isn’t the act of doing, but a helping hand, a match lit—an impetus for the doing. It takes two, babe. As stated before, Catching the Big Fish is an invitation, a plea, not a sermon, and for his part, Lynch never affects a tone of authority. There’s a diary-spying element to the prose, but it is never cloying, only sincere.
And because it’s brief, you can sit down and read Catching the Big Fish in less time than it takes to watch Lynch’s newest film, Inland Empire: I read comparatively slowly and I finished the whole book in less than 90 minutes; Inland Empire runs 179 minutes. The book is like a coffee table companion-cum-summation for Lynch’s multimedia career. You could have it lying around at a party and guests would be free to pick it up and, at random, choose an aphorism to share. The best one-liner comes a little past midway, in a chapter titled, “The Box and The Key”:
“I don’t have a clue what those are.”
Its rival comes nearer the close in a clever, compact, and beguiling chapter, “Fire”. It reads: