To David, Our Tulpa

Recipient Name
708 33rd Street
Everett, Washington.

Dear Editor,
The tears are still wet on my cheeks. I have listened to 'Lark' by Au Revoir Simone twice. I will listen to it again. I have listened to it nearly thirty times over the last five weeks. Next to me is David Lynch. Or rather, FBI Regional Bureau Chief (later Deputy Director) Gordon Cole. He is yelling and whispering. I plan on writing an epic poem about this pie para-social relationship that I have with David Lynch. He and the cast of Twin Peaks have been with me since I was 17. I am now the age that my mum was when she met David Lynch in February 1991. He is the third person in our relationship.

INT. EVENING: MIREILLE’S LIVING ROOM. ON THE TV, THE DVD MENU SEQUENCE FOR TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN IS LOOPING.

DEBORAHBut you’re not really having to write a blow by blow account… 

MIREILLENo, no

DEBORAHYou’re really talking about an angle, aren't you?

MIREILLEIt’s going to be such an abstract piece… it’s kind of not anything. Like, this piece is closer to poetry than anything else. It starts out as a letter, then I want to have some interview components…

DEBORAHBecause that is so… it’s a creative response to his creative response… as opposed to us trying to do the analysis.

MIREILLEOh, I don’t want to write an essay about all the themes in Twin Peaks. It’s more of a visceral reaction.

Wow wow wow you will have to take my word for it but this is a surreptitious text from Mum sent at 3pm. That places her an hour into a ten-hour Twin Peaks: The Return marathon at the Astor theatre. She must have been just finishing the first episode, Part 1, also known as ‘my log has a message for you’. In black and white, The Giant is watching a gramophone but no sound comes out. The credits roll, and she probably noticed that Carel Struycken is credited with playing a character called ???????. In Season 1, the Little Man told us that where they were from, the ‘birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air.’

We are all in the black lodge hanging upside down off the bottom of the earth, noiseless and shrill in our rejection of the other space, our feet bound in blood and muck.

I contemplate our quiet.

I turn to Mum on the couch and say, ‘do you know what this episode is called?’

‘The past dictates the future.’ We exchange a glance. She knows that I am her tulpa. Manufactured from seed and hair.

        .'uoy bɘɿuƚɔɒʇunɒM'

This here’s my destiny says Freddy. He has a ridiculous, fumbling English accent. This here’s my destiny I think. I’m looking with the eyes of my mother. Freddy is eventually masticated by a beachball.

‘I don’t think it means anything, not anything significant anyway’, says an anonymous user of Reddit. The understanding is in the letting go of meaning.

DEBORAHIn a way, [we’re all] grasping to normalise it, but you can’t really. And in some ways I’m conscious not to bring that sort of lens to it as well. Like, there is something unfathomable about it. But at the same time, it talks to you. So even in those areas where it’s difficult to know, on some level it’s like, you do know. You know something. I don’t sit there and look at it as if it’s science fiction. It touches you.

There is nothing more science fiction than real life. Spangled Christmas baubles decorating the abandoned lot, and mosquito bites in your armpits. Santa crucified on the cross. Sometimes my arms bend back too.

It makes sense on a DNA level. ‘It talks to existence,’ she says, ‘from the gross to the sublime.’ I am pushing kiwi fruit into my mouth, with the skin on (for fibre). The sweetness and the bristles. I am prickling inside. Remembering feeling young and feeling not normal. Wondering whether Mum also felt this way.

He spoke to her, like he spoke to me, across the fizzing glass vacuum tubes. In the velvet dipped cinema. I giggle because Mum says there are so many dudes there. You will have to forgive me dear editor if I have been wilfully obtuse. Mum has not met David Lynch in the literal sense, of course, he’s just always been with us. Gossiping on the shop floor of Linda Britten couturier, or at the dinner table, usually unspeaking, but conjured in a glance.

MIREILLEI don’t remember how it felt watching the first episode. I remember the broad experience — of that need to keep going and the need to go deeper, and, just the excitement — and couch time. 

DEBORAHThe transportation. 

We are both laughing. We are both nodding off on the drive to Washington. Or are we still on the Hume? ‘Stay awake for this part,’ says Gordon Cole, ‘It’s important.’ The road melts and the sun flashes through the trees. It’s the Giant (The Fireman) handing me a ball of light. The golden glow means slow down, not go faster.

The highway is compelling us towards a new reality of black trees and black asphalt. The owls are not what they seem but the owls are no longer here at all.

‘Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.’ Thanks, Coop.

DEBORAH (cont.)Well you know it’s bit of a cliche — so you’ll need to find other words for it, but as they’re driving along that dark road, that’s the journey he takes you on. And to some extent, maybe it is a journey that it’s hard to stay awake to. 

So good to see it again. You know, you forget. You go back to sleep. ‘I dream like other people sometimes,’ says Laura Palmer. But doesn’t she (don’t we) look exactly like Laura Palmer. She’s filled with secrets. We’re just supporting characters in our own stories, aren’t we? Golden light and dust motes illuminated by a film projector.

Dear Editor,
In Odessa, you can eat at Judy’s diner, the waitress is harassed and the coffee is bad. Agent Cooper deep fries three handguns. And at number 1516 of some anonymous boulevard, Laura Palmer is still being abused, this time she is Carrie Page who has a southern accent. A white china horse on the mantelpiece.

DEBORAHAnd I think also what we are continually reminded throughout is the mystery of people. He really captures that about being human, that mystery and to some extent, those secrets about ourselves that we carry.

Sometimes the woods are a place to be and to learn about yourself, sometimes it’s for creatures. Sometimes people enter the woods at the wrong time and they learn about things they shouldn’t. Animals keening in the cluttered lounge of Laura’s family home. Laura’s mother stabs her photograph with bottle, reversing, repeating, scattering glass. The cesspool, the organisms at the beginning. ‘The energy of the forest has captured her,’ says mum.

Vibrations as fingers fly across the screen. What does…tap tap zip… Laura Palmer… tap tap… Whisper…tap zip tap… To…tap tap… [What’s his name?]… tap tap zip… Agent Cooper.

Mum reads aloud from the ghost-in-the-machine: ‘This scene highlights the theme of being caught between time or reality’, I would say both, she says, bemused—‘and it serves as the final haunting image of the series. While the audience does not hear the words, the reaction from Cooper suggests a realisation that his attempt to save Laura Palmer has trapped them in a different, possibly more dangerous, reality.

Was it the whisper of hope that never materialises?

‘OK I didn’t get the sense of danger, but an attempt to save her? That’s not going to happen.’ She’s incredulous.

‘He’s looking to free her, or come to some kind of conclusion, and she’s trapped in the pain. So, whilst in other aspects, you know, hope did prevail, in that case, no. It’s a waste of time thinking you can change the trajectory of events to get to a different outcome.’ Mum has her glasses on and is still looking at her phone.

DEBORAHIn another life, or timeline. I don’t know whether it’s sequential or simultaneous. I think it’s both. There’s a continuity to certain sorts of experiences. You continue through time, and space. 

MIREILLEThere’s a question of fate, and the impossibility of breaking cycles of abuse. 

Past and present futures. The continuity of experience through space and time. Aspirations, hope, fear and wishful thinking combined. Balanced on shared molecular instruction, my blueprint for life.

        ⸮tƨɒq ti ƨi ɿo ⹁ɘɿυtυʇ ti ƨI

Dear Editor,
I’ve just had two boiled eggs on toast. Quite firm, but the yolk was still bouncy. It takes intuition, love and magic to boil an egg. No cherry pie here, although the pastries at our local bakery are exceptional. Would I be pushing the friendship to say, ‘damn good’? No, no, that’s such a Twin Peaks cliche.

It’s slippery in here. Smoking bodies disappear into the carpet, that’s what’s brought us to where we are today. Alternative futures exist but pain can be both infinite and amplified. Alice Treemont now lives in Leland and Sarah Palmer’s house, Laura’s family home. ‘What year is this?’ Asks Cooper, Carrie looks at the house and screams. It’s Laura’s scream.

The lights go out and the black screen gives way to melancholic music, credits roll, and Laura appears, frozen, whispering in Cooper’s ear.

What’s that? What’s that? Gordon Cole can't hear you.

What’s that? What’s that? I can’t hear you.

DEBORAHI think it touches somewhere where there is a similarity. There’s worlds that we can go in, in our way, that are other worlds. 

MIREILLEYou get to meet each other there.

MIREILLEit doesn’t feel like a happy ending does it. 

DEBORAHNo, it’s just the primal scream.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Mireille Stahle is a writer, mostly of emails and birthday cards, and a contributor to Peppermint Magazine and Seamwork Magazine. She loves the interview format for the opportunity it affords to share in the remarkable journeys of others. She has interviewed prominent artists, musicians and academics, but this celebrity interview with her mum Deborah is an all-time favourite.