Personal Notes on Naked Lunch

I won’t even pretend that I’m capable of talking about Naked Lunch in terms of plot or meaning as the author intended it. In fact, Burroughs mentions in the novel that the reader should be able to flip to any chapter, start reading, and it have the same intended effect. This, to me, suggests that any implicit meaning in Naked Lunch is relegated to the way in which the novel is read, not to the content in particular. And this is just as well—every time I picked up where I last left off reading, I may as well have been flipping fifty pages ahead. 

So if I can’t talk about the What or the Why of the content, I can talk about the How of its impact on me. Naked Lunch was a prose experience unlike any other I’ve had before. I’ve read things that blur the line between prose and poetry, but not quite like this. Here image upon image upon scene upon scene erupt from a hot magma source that glows with an olden magic—a source that is dark and frighteningly obscure yet familiar all the same. This source is the unconscious, and when I say that I don’t know if I mean Burroughs’s unconscious, my unconscious, or Jung’s collective unconscious. No matter where I started reading, it felt as though my mind, in response to the violence, sexuality, baseness, and mystery, was reaching into its core and throwing a fishing line into a region very far away. That’s the best way to describe it. There was no clarifying it any further. I just went with it.

So what did it this novel do to me as I was reading it. It pulled me under. It dragged me down and tore off with me, leaving me no choice but to hang on and ride it out. Burroughs used his addiction to heroin as a driving force of the “narrative,” and this in a way limited my perspective. He was coming from a particular angle in reference to a particular experience with a particular substance. I have no personal understanding of where he was coming from on that, but I did strongly feel that the themes of addiction and withdrawal running through the novel could in some ways be compared to a certain brand of American Dread. I don’t think I have to define this Dread, because I think everyone has experienced it and each in her own way. Anyway, to put words to it would be to put borders around it, and this feeling, this Dread, has an inherent property of making itself resistant to limits.

The Dreads go along with widespread Mental Sickness; they are both symptoms of a larger, far more malign problem. That problem is reality, or, more appropriately, the Keepers of Reality whose reign we silently consent to by virtue of doing nothing. Rather than experiencing reality through the unique and natural lens of our own minds, we let others think for us. Worse yet, we let idiots think for us. And in the chasm that emerges, there are the Dreads, there is the Mental Sickness. Each of the characters that wander through Naked Lunch are experiencing the world through a Mental Sickness carried to its extreme yet logical end. And this is honest and as it should be. In many ways, this is one of the most honest novels I have ever read: because everything is weird and sinister and horrible, but taken as the same old same old. The SNAFU principle at work.

Other ways the novel affected me: the point where dreams and waking life merge; the similarities between dream state and conscious state that often go unnoticed; language as the fundamental building block of reality; the alignment of prose and conscious life as we shape it; the alignment of poetry and worlds of the unconscious; rewiring the centers of the brain that sift through the information of reality; acknowledging a personal darkness that is really more neutral than good or bad; the world as a science fiction—Interzone; resigning oneself to the unfathomable and going with it; and so on.

To sum it up:

Archetypes of the unconscious

Addiction-->American Dread

Mental Sickness as a reasonable symptom

Misc.

David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

I guess you could say David Lynch was one of the first “weird” personalities I encountered in high school/early college. As I imagine he is for a lot of people of my generation, nursed on Harlan Ellison’s “glass teat” from infancy onwards, led, in cases such as mine, toward the Strange in a floundering attempt to make sense of cultural fragmentation, existential confusion, and the revelation of parental imperfection. 

David Lynch makes art films, but he’s married his art house sensibility with an Old Hollywood nostalgia that has contributed to a wider viewership. 

 Eraserhead was a lightening bolt that tore through my boyfriend’s darkened Atlanta apartment when he first moved in, when the living room was furnished with only a loveseat, a chair, and the television on a small stand. It was an experience—the emptiness of the room, the darkness with the television screen floating in front of us. Wild at Heart made me feel sick and enormously entertained at once in John Waters fashion. The Elephant Man I saw in a high school biology class, and INLAND EMPIRE I saw in Athens and understood none of it. I can remember my brother letting a friend of the family borrow Mulholland Drive since she liked Blue Velvet and was generally open-minded about film. She put it on when my parents next stayed a weekend with her, and, when talking about it later, my dad said he especially liked the masturbation scene (This instance, I imagine, was an early watermark in a series of failures as parents to raise wholesome and pretty children.). 

I like David Lynch. I wouldn’t say he is in my top five favorites of anything, but I still admire and enjoy his movies a great deal. Dune, not so much. I’m fond of the very distinct atmospheres he creates in his movies. I like the elements of the grotesque that seem to lie beneath plastic exteriors, whether the artificiality of suburban manners and pretenses or shiny Hollywood facades. I like David Lynch, and I like his movies, but my picking up this book was really a fluke. I remember hearing about it when it was first published, but even then I didn’t give it much thought. I found a hardback copy for a few dollars in a used bookstore when I was visiting Columbia this past weekend and picked it up on a whim.

It’s not necessarily that I thought David Lynch as a writer would suck or anything like that. I guess in part I worried that he would be pretentious, something that can completely ruin my taste for anyone, whether they are a friend or a cultural figure I admire from afar. I did not, however, find this to be the case at all. Catching the Big Fish is a slender volume—I read it all in about an hour or two. A couple hours isn’t long, but for that entire duration I was constantly finding myself in awe of how warm David Lynch can be. A completely nice guy, really. That voice drew me in from page one, but I found plenty of other reasons to keep reading. Every short chapter was engaging and interesting. The main thrust of the book is Lynch’s work in Transcendental Meditation, and how years of continuous practice have affected his creativity. He says that while meditation itself does not draw in ideas, it expands the consciousness to such a degree that the artist is able to go deeper and deeper “fishing for ideas.” The Big Fish lurk in depths that most people are unaware they even have access to. 

And there are other insights into Lynch’s creative process. He describes the ways in which ideas present themselves to him and how he builds on them piece by piece. He talks about setting, sound, music, and lighting and how they all contribute to a singular world in each of his films. Though he remains frustratingly general, he does lend the reader a glimpse into certain of the core ideas at the heart of particular films. Biographical details of Lynch’s life come up throughout the book as he embellishes on the development of his artistic vision. I don’t know if these facts are readily available to the general public, but even if they are, it was enjoyable to read his own descriptions of a surprisingly humble upbringing. Finally, in addition to remarking on meditation, creativity, his films, and his personal background, Lynch gives advice to the budding artist—be she involved in film or painting or sculpture or writing or whatever. And he seems to genuinely care when he is directing himself to the struggling artist. He went through his own struggles and transitions, and he allows for the authentic greatness of any work of art done by someone from their heart, whether their art receives any recognition or remains a personal lifelong venture. 

Warm, interesting, insightful, and surprisingly void of the perverse and the dark, I’m completely happy with this out-of-the-blue purchase.