In a world where ‘Twin Peaks’ exists, do we even need Medievalism?

Those with ideas on this topic, I’d like to hear from you

David Lynch as FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole in his office, whistling past the Trinity nuclear test.

Filmmaker David Lynch, who recently reposed, was like a father to me — which is an expression normally understood to be affectionate: a father is a good thing to be. If someone is like a father to you, that’s considered a good thing! And well it should be. I don’t mean it that way in this instance, though. Many of our fathers are not entirely like fathers to us in a good way, and that is the more complicated sense in which David Lynch was like a father to me.

David Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, serendipitously enough exactly one day before my own biological father. The great American artist died this past January 16 (just shy of turning 79), since which I’ve been thinking about him a lot and revisiting his films. He was one of the original Baby Boomers, brought into the world at the same time as the atomic bomb, raised on early television and rock ’n’ roll. He perceived the spiritual realities behind these technologies and the corrupted American culture based on them, and like no other artist communicated these realities prophetically through media. In his audio-visual world of Twin Peaks (co-created with writer Mark Frost), the first atomic explosion, the Trinity nuclear test of July 16, 1945, unleashes a demoness mother who seeds foul spirits in the American Southwest. These seeds sprout as various demons a decade later, on August 5, 1956. One such demon, in the form of a frog-moth, climbs into the mouth of a young girl understood to be the mother of the show’s heroine Laura Palmer.

For David Lynch, 1956 is significant as the year Elvis Presley debuted on television and rock ’n’ roll (conceived some time before) hatched as a global phenomenon. Now, I know the Hollywood movie Blackboard Jungle premiered the year prior, in 1955, and was the first to use a rock ’n’ roll song on the soundtrack (Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock,” which became a #1 hit), but that vision was projected in theaters, outside the home, banned or censored in some places. There was something specifically explosive and powerful about the transmission of that music and those images (Elvis’s gyrations) over television airways and into people’s homes, emanating from a piece of furniture in their living rooms. It constituted a profound spiritual event. It’s as if everyone suddenly installed an icon corner in the center of their homes and started praying to the Lord and His Mother — except, you know, the opposite. The impact of television on the spiritual lives of Americans cannot be understated. The year 1956 also saw the first televised airing of The Wizard of Oz (a film with enormous influence on Lynch), which would go on to become a yearly liturgical tradition in this new emerging religion, one even I remember participating in, as the annual airings persisted through 1991. That is, it persisted even through the two-year run of the original Twin Peaks (but not a year further). The American psyche had left the proverbial Kansas, entered a world of Oz — and then returned to Kansas, investing it with the visionary knowledge of Oz. That’s the case, anyways, for those like Lynch who were paying attention.

In the show Twin Peaks, the same evening the frog-moth was hatching, in the summer of 1956, a demonic woodsman resembling Abraham Lincoln and covered in black pitch walked out of the New Mexico desert and into a lonely radio station on the edge of civilization, crushing the skulls of the two people he found there and hijacking the airwaves with an incantation that caused unconsciousness in those that heard it (including young Sarah Palmer, preparing her body to be a receptacle of the frog-moth). So Lynch sees radio and television as having been used to disseminate terrifying spiritual evil, beginning (at least symbolically) in 1956. Lynch was ten years old at that time. You can imagine, given his later works, what he must have been watching and listening to at that age and how it shaped his mind. That’s all very meaningful to me because when Twin Peaks originally aired on American television in April 1990, I myself was ten years old. I watched it at that tender age, and its images, music, and story profoundly shaped the way I perceived the world in which I was just then gaining consciousness.

David Lynch looks so much to me like my maternal grandfather, Lyle Jones.

I didn’t grow up with fantasy and fairy-tales and ancient mythology, like so many people I know, especially in Christian circles. Only as an adult did I learn The Lord of the Rings was my father’s favorite work of fiction. He never shared it with me as a kid, neither Tolkein nor Lewis nor anything like that. Instead I grew up in the Oz-infused Kansas of television: Twin Peaks, Law & Order, The X Files, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Homicide: Life on the Street, to name some highlights. That was the mythological world I grew up in. Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future notwithstanding, these were stories set not in a secondary world of sub-creation, as Tolkein would have it. They may have been acts of sub-creation — the myth of Oz may apply to them — but they were set in our own primary world. Kansas was Oz, and Oz was Kansas. When Jonathan Pageau stresses that “Symbolism happens,” I feel like he is speaking to those raised in secondary worlds of mythology, who need to be reconnected to the primary world. There are just as many people, of course, scientific materialists and the sort, who need rather to hear stressed that that which happens is symbolic, and Pageau speaks to them too.

Pageau’s Symbolic World speaks to the immediate cultural schism that has been prevalent for the last quarter century, when, since 9/11 especially, primary and secondary worlds have been artificially split. You see it especially in television and movies from the era, where most content falls into either the fantasy or reality genre — and of course I mean “reality” as in scare quotes because it’s just as artificial. I’m talking about Harry Potter, Star Wars, superheroes, and Tolkein on one hand, and reality television, documentaries, political punditry, and prime time game shows on the other. In this era defined by reaction to Muslim fanaticism, atheism reached the peak of its cultural influence. And that’s what all Pageau, and his friend and patron Jordan Peterson, have been responding to. Their success illustrates how the untenable duality of our reality and fantasy over the past couple decades has been collapsing in on itself. The boom in materialist atheism in the 2000s appears to have been the pompous last gasp of a much larger historical movement. Of course, neither scientific materialism, nor the fantasy genre alternative to it, were invented by any recent generation.

This-worldly fatherhood.

Modern fantasy, for one thing, emerged — J.R.R. Tolkein being the fountainhead — from the trenches of World War I. That’s when the nineteenth-century undercurrent of atheistic materialism erupted like a volcano and covered the world with its lava and ash. The extreme trauma of industrialized violence caused a schizophrenic break that, in one sense, pitted the material and the spiritual against each other, but in another sense required fantasy to combat the illness of materialism for the sake of something more holistic than either. No doubt, Tolkein’s escapist fantasy can be remedial for those unfortunate souls imprisoned culturally in materialism, as the great author himself avers. The fantasy genre can be used as an escape not from the responsibility of living as ensouled bodies, but from the prison of soulless materialism. As such, its position on the shelves of our culture’s soul pharmacy must be protected. It is a drug, however, that should be used with caution. Just because it can be used as an escape from prison doesn’t mean it can’t also be used as an escape from the responsibility of living. A lot has happened since World War I. Hollywood went from being just a neighborhood to quickly becoming a global religion. Televisions entered the home, taking the place that icon corners should have (as St. Kosmas Aitolos prophesied two hundred years prior). The internet brought everyone online, and smartphones and social media have incorporated everyone into a cybernetic Leviathan. Technological materialism has turned inside out, and the demons are showing — the demons that were there all along. Those who, like me, met Twin Peaks’s Bob in 1990 are ahead of the curve on this one. Now, I impugn not fairy-tales, which are timeless and will always survive, but... the historical window in which the modern fantasy genre (which is a different beast) can serve a remedial purpose for the soul... may be closing. Atheism and materialism are dying out. Holding onto a remedy past its time of usefulness can cause a new kind of harm.

Allow me to expand on that idea. Already the age of the internet encourages us to live in our headspace alienated from our bodies. Continually spending time in secondary worlds of sub-creation can compound this problem. Remedies to traumas usually bear the same shape of the trauma; they have to in order to be applied to the wounds. Materialism, for example, severs our material lives from the spiritual realm, denying its realities; therefore, the fantasy genre diametrically affirms spiritual reality by way of mythological worldbuilding, but remains disconnected from “primary creation.” Such remedies can only be provisional. If they are held on to beyond the point that the wounds are healed, they can cause the adverse effect of afflicting the trauma anew, since they retain the mold of the original trauma. This is the case with fantasy genre fare, which retains an overemphasis on the dualism of secondary and primary creation, cordoning off the one from the other. Again, that’s okay, relatively speaking, when that division already exists in society, and the genre boasts other, more remedial features. When the remedial features exhaust their usefulness, though, the shape of division remains within the remedy and can cause harm instead of good.

(Another great example of this pattern is James Baldwin’s emphasis on the beauty of blackness when speaking in black communities. He knew — we know from other things he has said — that blackness wasn’t any less of a construct than whiteness; the whole matter of race was a construct imposed for the purposes of exerting power over the world. Baldwin didn’t believe in whiteness, and he didn’t believe in blackness either. But he knew that on the front lines of racism, where there were people who were told that they were black and that blackness was impure and inferior, that those beleaguered peoples needed first of all for the dialectical assignation to blackness to be inverted, to hear that blackness was beautiful. That remedy was required as an emergency application. Hold on to that remedy too long, though, and extend the dialectical inversion to whiteness, and you get anti-racism, still using racial constructs as leverage for power over others, opening old wounds anew. I submit that fantasy genre fiction is like this. Fantasy is beautiful. But when it turns anti-reality, a new kind of enslavement is initiated, one patterned after the materialism whence it came.)

The 1945 Trinity nuclear explosion experiment as depicted in Twin Peaks (2017).

So I’ve drawn this pattern, identifying the fantasy-reality schism incurred by the 9/11 attacks a quarter-century ago as the omega of a cycle: a cycle the alpha of which resides in the trenches of World War I. Zooming out, that whole century-long cycle itself may be the capital‑O Omega of a much larger, millennium-long cycle, the capital‑A Alpha of which is found in the Romanesque reality and Gothic fantasy of the Middle Ages. Back then a seismic cultural revolution occurred in the West in the wake of the Great Schism, when the churches in the West, led by the Roman see, fused with their evil doppelganger and took on a polarized personality. It’s kind of a Dougie and Mr. C phenomenon, if you know the reference. Those are two different personalities within the 2017 Twin Peaks limited series (see the visual side-by-side below), but they are used to tell a single, complex history of good held down and kept dormant by evil. The Medieval era is a useful field of study for us Moderns because it exists on the same side of the Great Schism barrier that we do; the spiritual vectors are aligned the same as ours. But while all the elements of culture and religion had been loosed from each other at that time, and were showing the first signs of cancerous growth — in the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, those elements were largely still in their original positions and not yet thrown out of order.

That last sentence again, with elaboration: But (deep breath) while all the elements of culture and religion had been loosed from each other at that time (the Holy Spirit being still present in the West, observing, helping out where possible, but, sidelined by the filioque’s addition to the Creed, no longer serving as the hypostatic principle holding everything together), and were showing the first signs of cancerous growth (the tripartite phenomena of Scholasticism, the Crusades, and Gothic Romance being reflective of what was going on in the Western psyche left to its devices: rationally, thymically, and epithymetically) — in the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, those elements were largely still in their original positions and not yet thrown out of order.¹

So it’s useful to see the order of the cosmos, the order of life, as the Medievals had it. But what is “Medievalism”? Already the term Middle Ages denotes a break with and a transition away from what had come before. Western historians, lacking Christian discernment and idolizing the empire of Old Rome, tend to associate that transition with the fifth-century decentralization of Old Rome’s power due to the migration of Germanic barbarians in Western Europe. But this was not yet a permanent political change, to say nothing of a lack of spiritual change. No, the real Medieval transition — long in the making by the time it happened — occurred in the eleventh century with the Great Schism, pinned symbolically to the year 1054.² Only those Western churches that were pulled away with Rome in the course of those era-spanning events experienced this Medieval break and transition, which indeed precipitated a radical and heretofore permanent cultural revolution. Everywhere else in the world, there are no Middle Ages; the distinction between antiquity and modernity is marked merely by their interaction with what culture grew out of that Medievalism in Western Europe.

Western heterodoxy: at left, the addition of the filioque to the Creed, and at right, the continued worship of Jesus.

So Orthodox Christians Jonathan Pageau and Richard Rohlin, for example — following the pattern set by Catholic J.R.R. Tolkein and Anglican C.S. Lewis — may call themselves Medievalists, but I don’t think it’s because they adhere to some ideology or sect pertinent to the Middle Ages. They just mean to indicate a preferred field of study, indeed a very profitable one for Western converts of the Modernist era (which converts might better be called “reverts,” if the word didn’t sound so idiotic). I think this is an important distinction to make because Medievalism and Modernism, I aver, are not different beasts, but the same beast at different stages of its life. Medievalism, being so young, is more properly ordered in its elements, but the spiritual vectors animating it are very much the same we observe in our culture today. I can see this identity in how the influence of the world affects the leaders of Orthodoxy today: in how the Patriarch of Constantinople, in his intemperate desire for ecumenical union, and the Patriarch of Moscow, in his Crusader mentality, are re-creating the epithymetic and thymic aspects of where the papacy of Rome was a millennium ago (hopefully their schism isn’t as lasting). When this evil leaven corrupts Orthodoxy, as it did in the Middle Ages in the West, the same spiritual pattern repeats; it needn’t be particular to any time or place.

If anyone got the idea from the prevalence of Medievalist study on the Symbolic World that in order to join the Body of Christ one had to become a Medievalist, then it is well worth saying: that is not the case. Western “reverts” seeking redemption for their souls will naturally strive to nurture those good things within them which have been handed down to them culturally, repenting only of the bad things, the harmful influences. Medievalist study can aid discernment in these efforts by showing the order of things before the Renaissance and subsequent revolutions overturned everything — provided one does not at the same time swallow the apostate vectors within the Middle Ages. That would be a failure of discernment.

I’m straw-manning here, but only to make a point I think is crucial. One’s repentance must be positioned on the ground and oriented upward, never backward. There is a deep problem lurking in any repentance based in cultural nostalgia. Americans can’t wish to go back to the 1950s. Russians can’t wish to go back before the Bolshevik Revolution. Greeks can’t wish to go back before the Ottoman Empire. Moderns can’t wish to go back to the Middle Ages. You can never go back far enough that you don’t land on a slope that leads you right back down to where you are today. You can go all the way back to Paradise, historically, and if you don’t start taking God’s commandments seriously — primarily the call to repentance — you’ll be no better off for the journey. But you don’t have to travel anywhere in time to start taking God’s commandments seriously, to heed the call to repentance. God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, didn’t put you in Paradise. He didn’t put you in the Roman Empire, or in the Middle Ages, or in Holy Russia, or (save, perhaps, for some of my older readers) in 1950s USA. He called you into being in a time and place so that you may in Christian humility call down the Spirit of repentance there and then and nowhere else. The Holy Spirit wishes Christian redemption to saturate the entire timeline of creation, but, by His own standard of love, He needs your cooperation to accomplish that. Sure, through pilgrimage or exile, the place of your calling to repentance may be changed. But as long as you remain subject to bodily death, the era in which you are called to find a place of resurrection and build an altar to God does not change.

Medievalism doesn’t figure significantly in the foreground of my era as I have personally experienced it. Yes, it’s historically present, and I understand some of my contemporaries will be called to focus on it. Personally, I am more revolted by the corrosive vectors within Scholasticism, the Crusades, and Gothic Romance than I am attracted by their manifestly superior cultural orderliness relative to our own period. I recognize that’s a subjective stance to have, but I’m writing about it because I know I must not be alone in having it. I feel alone, oftentimes. The remedial content of Dante, on one hand, or Tolkein on the other, gives people something positive to gather around, which I appreciate. That’s a stark contrast from Lynch’s works, which I have personally known to be not remedial but rather representative of the trauma for which remedies are needed. But Dante doesn’t light my fire; he just makes me wish I were reading hesychastic literature instead. That’s my fourteenth century. Why would people read Dante when they could be reading St. Gregory Palamas? Well, why do I watch Twin Peaks? We all have our mission in this collective effort for redemption.

I’m asking the question, “In a world where Twin Peaks exists, do we even need Medievalism?,” but what I really mean to say is, “Not everyone needs to become a Medievalist in order to get where we need to be.” As traumatized as I think I was by watching the original Twin Peaks as a boy, I have to admit that it baptized me in an understanding of the empirical world that was as spiritual as it was material, an experience of secondary and primary creation as phenomenologically one, if two in nature. It did all the work of Medievalism in that regard, yet it aired on ABC in prime time. Then there’s a direct line from me watching the original Twin Peaks at ages ten and eleven, to me listening to Low at age fifteen and afterward, to me watching Tarkovsky and reading Dostoevsky at age seventeen, to me at age eighteen walking into a Divine Liturgy for the first time and immediately recognizing it as the center of God’s presence on earth, as a ritual of eschatological perfection, the Orthodox Church being in truth the Body of Christ the Godman, made perfect by the Holy Spirit.

April 8, 1990. Reader, it was Palm Sunday. But my Catholic family wasn’t in church that morning. We were on a spring break ski vacation in the Colorado Rockies, staying at a fancy condo in Beaver Creek that belonged to someone my dad knew. We had dinner that evening at the condo, and then for the evening’s entertainment, my mother really wanted to watch this buzzy new TV show that was premiering. Ten-year-old me was tuckered out from a busy day of activity and didn’t think he’d be up for a two-hour drama for adults. I went upstairs just as it was beginning. The bedrooms were upstairs, but there was a balcony at the top overlooking the living room which had a tall, two-story ceiling. Everyone else was down in the living room below the balcony, sitting around the television. The show came on, and the music played. It was the famous theme song, with Angelo Badalamenti’s radiant synthesizer and those sparse guitar tones walking around two-stepping, with all that reverb, just vibrating. I heard that music, and it got my attention. I poked my head out of the wooden balusters of the balcony at the top of the stairs and looked down at the television and all my family sitting around it. I was seduced. I went back down the stairs and joined the spectacle.

Ten years later, April 22, 2000, in Boston, after well over a year of faithful church attendance as a catechumen, it was Lazarus Saturday, and I was joyfully received into the Orthodox Church by baptism. A week later, and it was Holy Friday. That evening at Matins for Holy Saturday, I was so eager to experience again the Byzantine Lamentations that I was so struck by the year before in my first experience of Holy Week — then, as a spectating catechumen, but now, as a fully participating member of the faithful. My parish, the whole congregation, would gather in the middle of the nave, on the two sides forming a path down the center, and would take the time to sing the entire Lamentations, with all 176 verses of Psalm 118 chanted by the priests, and all the stichera sung by the choir in between them. This was the soundtrack to Christ’s harrowing of hell. The path of negative space down the middle of the nave was like the line Christ travels when He rips the belly of hades. This is the death of death and the new birth of eternal life. If you’ve heard the Byzantine Lamentations, you know how amazing this music is, how the three stases build gradually over a long time from somber, low-pitched mourning with a hint of hope, to a surprising pivot that descends from above, to ecstatic, unbounded jubilation. At the end of seven weeks of fasting, the ritual event opens up for the participants a window into the transformation of the cosmos, the re-creation of heaven and earth that occurs via the deification of man.

Well, all week since Lazarus Saturday I had been wearing my white baptismal robe in church, and the problem was the hem was too long. I kept stepping on it. I had some pins now, and as Matins was beginning and the lights were dimmed, I went up the stairs to the choir loft at the back of the church, which we only used for storage, where off to the side there was a door to the bell tower. (This was an old Methodist church that had been converted to Orthodox use.) In that little room I could turn on the light to pin up the hem of my robe. The beginning of Matins went by more quickly than I anticipated, however, and I was still finishing up when I heard the sweet, mournful sound of the Lamentations beginning. As twenty-year-old me emerged from the bell tower and stood in the choir loft, looking down over the balcony to all my beloved ones singing down below, I immediately recognized the parallels to what had happened to me ten years prior. But the music wasn’t seducing me now. Lovingly and with freedom was I being called. Joy overwhelmed me as I hastened downstairs to be with my Savior.

I always, from the moment it happened to me, interpreted this event as a reversal of the experience prepared for me by Lynch in my childhood on that vacation in the mountains. And so it is. The spiritual vectors within Twin Peaks had been turned around. My very dark and depressing teenage years had been resolved. But they were also redeemed. Now I have to recognize that besides a reversal of the evil that had transpired, there was also a fulfillment of the good. It is to Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s credit that that show, underneath its vulgar surface, and regardless of its fallen and corrupt modality, conformed to the shape of the loftiest liturgical beauty. It initiated me into a world where I never would think of questioning whether spirits were animating all the material reality around me, even our electricity-fueled technology, in spite of the materialist ideology that went into its design and proliferation. Secondary and primary worlds were never divided in my experience, as if David Lynch ushered me right past the whole schizophrenic mindset of modernity, incidentally preparing me to exit the whole millennium of Western apostasy — years before the rest of history caught up. Of course, history is still catching up. The young apostle John stands panting at the empty tomb, waiting for slow-of-foot Peter to arrive, that he may enter first. Meanwhile...

The man, David Lynch (photo by Wally Skalij for the Los Angeles Times).

Let’s agree: the redemption of Modernism is no less worthy a goal than the redemption of Medievalism. They’re the same beast after all. I’m not a Medievalist, though; I’m a Modernist (using the term in a way inclusive of postmodernism). The sad, dangerous old man quality of Modernism just appeals to me more than the spastic, reckless, toddler-like naivete of Medievalism. How many people out there are like me in this? Where is our point of gathering? How do you make friends when you’re old? It feels like Medievalists — well, and Modernist partisans of fantasy genre — have so much more community than we do. I mean, I get why: their culture is more remedy-oriented. But the conversion of their culture is not more valuable than the conversion of mine. The conversion of Modernism, at least in the few souls who would accept it, may even prove more valuable in the coming era.

I say I’m a Modernist in soul, but at the same time I’ve never been subject to the division of science and religion, reality and fantasy, that marks this period. There were Modernist seers, though, who peered through that false dialectic, and they carve a path that others can travel as well. I was fathered by one of these seers in my youth. Then, by the end of the nineties while still in my teens, at the dawn of the War on Terror, I was spirited away from the zeitgeist and sheltered from its influence. At no point did atheism ever touch my spirit. The boom in reality television and prime time game shows occurred when I didn’t have a television. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies held no attraction for me because the mode of secondary-creation filmmaking was so evidently inferior to the spiritually-infused reality of artists I was used to, like Lynch and Tarkovsky. Oh, and when smartphones came out and social media exploded in a burst of delusional poptimism, I was in a monastery. None of this culture was for me. But since my life in the monastery fell apart (which I’ve written about elsewhere), I’ve just been waiting and wondering: When will my life begin to make sense? I trust that it will one day, without a doubt — but when? Any time soon? Should I be prepared for it to make sense, or should I just let it go?

Since the Covid unmasking, there does feel like there has been some historical movement towards something other than what has been. Stagnant perspectives have been jarred loose, and new ones are appearing, as old dialectics collapse. Through the mystery of new technologies, spooky action is happening from a distance. Psychedelic pharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence provide gateways and avatars for demonic spirits even more efficiently than radio or television ever could. Government reports are coming out suggesting that UFOs are interdimensional beings. I wonder if we are not so far away from seeing a generation coming of age, and into power, who have only known the material world to be alive with immaterial spirits. It’s possible even that such a generation may, like me, relate more with Twin Peaks than with Tolkein. And that could be a real problem! As Twin Peaks itself will tell you, once the longed-for resolution comes to the Mr. C–Dougie conundrum, that’s when the real travesty begins.

There’s so much I could say about Twin Peaks — you can tell I’m not even trying to put forth any interpretation here. There’s a story here about the interpenetration of secondary and primary creation, and Twin Peaks isn’t just about that story — it is that story. It does that story. By being effectively a story about its own media and what it’s doing, Twin Peaks lays bare the spiritual reality of what is happening in America, in the sense of “Symbolism happens.” And what is modally happening in America, it just so happens, is in the end neither beautiful, good, nor true. Twin Peaks follows the patterns of corruption so lucidly, however, that it cannot help reflecting at times, especially in the concluding 2017 limited series (prophesied by the original show), glimmers of redemption in all its beauty, goodness, and truth. Of course, after those glimmers are reflected, the show cannot but proceed to consume itself in a pit of lethe and evil. Lynch rejects the Christian path. Not for nothing are people raised on Tolkein flocking into the Church, while people raised on Lynch are not. Alas, as it turns out, merely to fuse in a phenomenological unity primary and secondary worlds, spiritual and material creation, is to fall well short of our ultimate meaning and purpose, which is to enter into a loving marriage with our uncreated Creator, beautiful, righteous, and true.

But I believe those few of us who are on the Lynch-to-Church off-ramp may have a helpful perspective to share with those coming from Tolkein’s and Lewis’s realms of fantasy. I know I’ve encountered several of you before, and there’s something here worth talking about. I’d like to hear from you — I know not in what capacity, but I would like to hear from you (cormacmjones at gmail dot com). Or maybe there are some people who relate very much to what I’m saying here, but for whom some artist other than Lynch is their touchstone. As atheism dies and the re-enchantening happens — and maybe, just maybe, fantasy genre based in secondary creations loses its purpose? — we might need these conversations more than anything.

Regarding Twin Peaks, though, it would help if we had a foundation of interpretative method upon which to build, considering the mysterious nature of Lynch’s art. For that purpose I recommend the videos of YouTuber Twin Perfect. This guy has the most Pageauvian content for Lynch that I’ve seen (besides the three mammoth videos on Twin Peaks embedded below, he also has one on Mulholland Drive). His approach to research, basing his method of interpretation strictly on things David Lynch has said and done, is the ideal way to begin investigating the meaning of these works. But after six hours and twenty minutes of content, I think he has merely laid a foundation for discussion of Twin Peaks. The most meaningful things about it remain left to be said, although they probably can’t be said without first accomplishing this groundwork. There are so many things I’m grateful Twin Perfect has said, so that I don’t have to. Anyways, I’ll leave you with these videos in case anyone is interested.

1. Gracias, St. Maximus the Confessor, for providing justification for such long sentences — my gratitude also extending to my readers for their patience in these trying times. Writing is hard.

2. July 1054 was not only when papal legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople exchanged bulls of excommunication; it also saw an historically stunning supernova by the tip of Taurus’s horn so bright it could be seen even in daylight for the space of two weeks, as documented in various places around the world (including in an ancient pictograph in New Mexico, less than a five hours’ drive from the Trinity Site). Symbolically enough, the remnant of this 1054 supernova, by name the Crab Nebula, has been measured as the most radiant source of dangerous gamma rays in the sky. I should probably write an article about that some day.