Notes: Sunfish, Lynch, Just Stop Oil, Wasp Jar

28.01.25

Thoughts of storms and traffic jams this morning. Last night Just Stop Oil invaded the stage of a London production of The Tempest, with Sigourney Weaver as Prospero. It was all very fitting. Some cheered, some booed, as you might expect. A stagehand, possibly the director, appeared from the wings and escorted a calm Weaver from the stage as the protestors, one a Nottingham lecturer, made their case. It was a powerful intervention, the symbolism of the play and the most pressing issue of our time, both performances echoing each other. There is futility here also. In the video clip Weaver is seated on a chair centre stage. Rain appears to have fallen and the stage is carpeted with leaves. Just as a hatch opens at her feet to allow a semi-naked Caliban access to the stage the protestors appear stage left, awkwardly unfurling a yellow banner. The director strides over as if to reprimand, but then seems to check himself, perhaps alert to the idea that this performance – the performance of the protestors – is necessary, and that such words must be spoken in a theatre space.

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Video of a sunfish being winched aboard a trawler. It’s huge, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s dying mouth slowly opening and closing. The saddest thing. In captivity they survive for around ten years, whereas in the wild they can live for a century or more. The inescapable barbarity of humanity.

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One thing that I find compelling about David Lynch’s biography/autobiography is the extent to which his youth and college days were fairly impulsive and accessible thrusts into the burgeoning world of a young artist, and how more often than not they succeeded. At one point he talks at length about how, as a teenager, he and friend were able to run several studios using money raised from part-time low paid work and some help from mum and dad. Imagine that. Imagine having the freedom to just rent a studio for a modest sum and spend time making art during your formative years, and to be able to pay for it with a paper round.  

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Listening to the David Lynch biography/autobiography on my drive into work, a partnership between Lynch and Kristine McKenna. It’s a great listen. McKenna reads her chapters, Lynch his, and I love the vivid yet simple way he recounts his stories, and how often he says the word ‘beautiful.’ Maybe we should all say it more. I suspect it’s a conscious act on his part, a positive affirmation.

Anyway, I’ve been dealing with some mental health stuff for a while now, and in the past week I was talking to a psychotherapist about how when your psychological defences are strained during a prolonged period of attack your state of mind can shuttle back and forth between states of fearful anxiety and the wide-eyed aggressive defensiveness of a cornered animal. Our old primordial friend ‘fight or flight’. As I’m listening to Lynch talk about his first transformative experience with transcendental meditation, he suddenly shifts gear and starts talking about anger. In that instant, in fact the very same nanosecond that he begins to utter the word ‘anger’ the audio book freezes, forcing a long, almost mantric ‘ANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG’ to reverb out of my car stereo. It lasts only fractions of a second, then silence. I’m waiting in traffic and its dark outside, so the brake lights of the cars arrayed in front and behind bathe everything in a fierce electric red, the synchronicity of the moment catching me off guard. Anger! Stop! Danger! As I pulled away the Bluetooth reconnected to my phone allowing Lynch to complete his sentence. He described how the process of taking a lifelong spiritual look within had been the primary source of calming happiness in his life, far beyond the capabilities of the material world.  

As so often happens in such situations my immediate response was to impulsively assign a significance that was almost certainly absent. Was the universe manifesting itself as a supposed dialogue with David Lynch? Or was this my unconscious playing its usual TRICKS, sparking my imagination by jamming together random particles of coincidence? I suppose such moments arise because we are awake to them, this being my Christ-in-a-Dorito moment.

The other night, on the rare occasion of having the house all to myself, I watched Rodney Ascher’s documentary ‘A Glitch in the Matrix.’ I enjoyed his previous docu, Room 237, with its tantalising dalliance with the many conspiracy theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic interpretation of Stephen King’s The Shining. I fancied that I’d enjoy this latest offering, so paid for the download. Glitch is an exploration of Simulation Theory, which posits that all of us are living inside a Matrix-style artificially simulated non-reality. The documentary takes the form of a series of extended semi-formal interviews with those unfortunates (exclusively men) who have fallen under its captivating spell. One such person, a young man somewhere in his twenties wearing an elaborate mask to disguise his identity, explains how as a teenager he began to suspect that the world around him – small town backwater USA - was not entirely as it seems. Over time this metastasised into a hyperawareness of any perceived inconsistencies, those little breakages in the underlying code that hint at a sinister agenda lurking behind a velvet curtain. He started keeping a spreadsheet, recording a pattern, or so he thoughts, in the so called ‘glitches’, the synchronicities, that strengthened his belief in the simulation.

In the most disturbing case, a young man’s paranoia became so pronounced that he wound up murdering both his parents and then calmly calling the police to report his crime, the strength of his delusional conviction only breaking once the enormity of it all finally hit home. It was a difficult watch, and the severity of his crimes only come to light in the second half of the film, which makes the seemingly playful, purely intellectual speculation that precedes feel suddenly dangerous and powerfully subversive. I get the sense of playful escapism, and is it really so outlandish to think the world is a simulation when hundreds of millions of people believe that all of this was the creation a divine entity? I see it as another road to the supernatural but with a technological component that seems very much rooted in our historical moment. And of course as a young person, and perhaps especially those are closed-off from a wider community, that feeling of otherness, of not belonging and feeling out of step with everyone else would be equally invigorated by the converse feeling of being special since you and only a handful of others were capable of perceiving the true reality.

**

05.02.25

This morning, the strangest thing. I parked-up at work around 6:50am, at which time the bin lorries are usually finishing up their run along that street. I try to get there a bit earlier on Wednesdays because of this, since you can’t get past the lorry and into the carpark so it’s best to arrive just before. At that time the refuse collectors are busy wrestling the large ‘dumpster’ style bins out from around the back of the student accommodation. Every Wednesday we do a little dance as they make a space for me to walk through between the bins that they line up along the road. This morning, as the bins parted, a tall man, one of the collectors, with a rusty-coloured blonde ponytail and hi-vis all-weathers bellowed: “morning Paul!” at me before disappearing round back for another bin.

I do not know this man.  I have not spoken to him before, let alone introduced myself. But he looked directly at me and spoke my name as though we were old friends. It was such a weird and unexpected moment in time that it took me a few steps to fully take it in. He had an accent I did not recognise.

My first instinct was to wait until he came back to ask how we know each other, because I am utterly convinced that we do not. But he didn’t reemerge as expected and by then the other men were busy lining-up the bins outside the student accommodation. Not wanting to get in the way I departed, a couple of backwards glances dropped in my wake, but still no show.  

Walking away, I had the uncanny feeling that I was still asleep. As I got into work, I found myself craving a packet of crisps so went by the vending machines, but thought better of it and pressed the button for a breakfast bar instead. Only when I opened the hatch there was my bar along with a packet of reduced fat Popworks BBQ crisps, a free offering from the oh-so miserly vending gods, and this from one of those fancy computerised venders that can’t be relied upon to make the same kind of mistakes as the old analogue variety. Based on the weird synchronicity of the morning I played the lottery, the first time in probably twenty years – 03 – 12 – 14 – 33 – 39 -50. Didn’t get a single number.

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Thoughts of the Mexico trip Jan 2024

I recall the smell of diesel, garbage and fry oil from my experience walking those streets in 2019 and 2024, a mass of tangled overhead cables snaking off in every conceivable direction. I remember seeing street venders hunched over gas burners, their hands darting into an array of plastic bags for pastes and dry ingredients, a beaten up picnic cooler holding cans of unfamiliar carbonated drinks. A most vibrant deprivation.

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Wasp Jar

I was probably eight or nine years old when my father presented with me a large Kilner jar only instead of the one’s my mother filled with blackberry and apple jam this one contained something mysterious, papery, the colour of crumbled Weetabix. It was a wasp nest, my father explained holding it up to the light, plucked from the rafters using the same long handled rockpooling net we used on rare family holidays. I’d only seen cartoon wasp nests, American ones at that, large rugby balls hanging threateningly from a branch, whereas this one bore no resemblance to those. It was, in a tangible sense, alien to me, horrifying to me, yet beautiful. You see, back then wasps filled me with mortal fear, the remnants of which still makes itself known whenever I hear that tell-tale insectoid whine. To find myself holding a piece of their secret architecture built in total darkness in the space above my bedroom, with its impossibly intricate, implausibly delicate structure was as unsettling as it was exhilarating.    

The wasp jar lived on my window ledge for a time, a little slither of waspish partition wall crumbling each time it was moved aside for dusting or presented to a visitor for inspection. Then one day, for reasons that escape now, I took it down and in a moment of terrible boyish violence shook it to pieces. Perhaps this was just another example of the inexplicable cruelty of children - the impulse to break precious things, or perhaps we could say something here about conquering one’s fears.

At least call it a testing of boundaries. But I think it was something else that day that made me do it. There was a deathly quality to the thing that unsettled me. Lying in my bed I sometimes imagined that I could hear the desiccated wasps moving around inside.  

They knew how to build. A genetic blueprint repeated over and over again across the globe through billions of generations, and there I was struggling in school for all kinds of reasons and feeling quite lost outside. What secret knowledge do we posses other than the impulse to destroy? There’s something terrifying about the unspoken, silent precision of Nature. You hear it sometimes when Herzog talks about the jungle. It’s all teeth and stingers and exquisitely terrible the way he tells it.