Triumph In Blog

I’m searching for something that can’t be found, but I’m hoping

Around a month ago, I wrote that David Lynch was one of my biggest inspirations as an artist. Now, in January 2025, he has been declared dead. In addition to my own grief, I’ve spent most of the day idly scrolling through social media, seeing all my fellowmen doing tributes and eulogies and good memories and what have you, which has been a heartwarming thing in itself. Even after he is gone, his singular ideas will live forever. He was and is universally loved and undeniably one of a kind. But what didn’t really warm my heart so much was seeing all of the people who have worked with him over the years, now getting up there in years themselves, delivering terse and clearly devastated goodbyes to their friend.

I saw Ray Wise say goodbye, I saw Michael Horse say goodbye. I saw Kyle Maclachlan and Naomi Watts say goodbye. I saw reuploads of those pictures with him and Harry Dean Stanton together, before the latter died. It occurred to me that this whole sphere of people, of unconditionally loved and admired artistic geniuses, was unilaterally old and wrinkly. Lynch was older than a lot of people he worked with, but the bulk of his work is well over 20 years old, and he wasn’t young when he was making Twin Peaks. Even the people who were young then are old now, and the resigned “see you soon” messages read less to me as contented recognitions of Lynch’s transcendental ideals and more like grim omens of death’s future. Stanton went, Jack Nance went, Catherine E Coulson went, and now Lynch himself. He is survived within his sphere almost entirely by people older than my own parents.

I’m not the first person to observe things like this, but it’s hard to contend with because it’s a simple fact. All the heroes of art, all the giants on whose shoulders we stand, they’re all fading away. They have no real replacements. Not because there’s no talent anymore or even no room for art anymore, but the culture no longer gives people time to breathe, or become so influential or important or special. Everyone who made us what we are as artists is dead, dying, or in some other way lost to old age or obscurity. Lynch himself was denied consistently in the final years of his life the ability to actually make the ideas he continued to have up until the very bitter end, and he had already proven himself as capable and then some. Within just film alone, who do we have left with an important voice from the time before us? The list is very small, and getting smaller.

When all our heroes are gone, what are we going to do besides flounder around in nostalgia? That’s practically what we all do already–it’s so fast and so widespread, the window for nostalgia itself is getting rapidly smaller too. Things are being lost quicker, or just becoming reflexively vapid. For me personally, I have very little interest in many of the popular “new” ideas that seem to come about. I didn’t write this just to angrily shake my fist at kids these days (I’m 24 years old) but I don’t see any way forward where we don’t collectively, as a culture of artists, have to face the idea that we are now responsible for making important shit for the next generation.

Nobody who isn’t a huge narcissist thinks that the things they’re making are important while they’re making them I guess, but to me it’s metacognitively frightening. The safety blanket of all my heroes suddenly falling away, leaving me alone to just figure something out from whatever they left behind. Disheartening too, how we all seem to recognize in one way or another that we are hemorrhaging our biggest influences. In the end it doesn’t matter really. Everything dies eventually, nobody thought these old COPD-riddled prunes were gonna get younger. But every time someone you love and look up to for their work, work that changed your life or your mind or your whole fucking world, every time they just sort of quietly pass on without some kind of big, gratifying, swan song send-off for you, the one who probably needed it even more than they did? That does kinda hurt.

It’s a selfish impulse but a genuine one, to be hurt by this. I used to be some dumbass kid listening to my dad’s old CDs and watching old movies, and after a while I realized that a lot of that junk made me who I am. By the time I got old enough to show some respect, and to make something with what I had learned, all the guys who gave that stuff to me, to the world, they all started dropping. All my personal heroes are a hundred billion years old and everything I love came out and got cool and fell off in one whole cycle before I was even born. For the most part, anyway. If I end up making something bigger than what I have now, and it strikes people as I was once stricken, and I love it, and it makes me proud, that kid in my head’s never gonna get to show it to David Lynch so he can put it up on the fridge. It may be too late to be validated like that. “Never meet your heroes,” well I might not even be able to!

That has to feel as bad to everyone else as it does to me. Looking back at how the world was changed and realizing you might never have anyone tell you that you’re changing it too. You have to trudge into the future–a future that looks worse every fucking day–being fully aware that you’ll be chasing a high forever, and there will likely be no relief from the outside. We could very well spend the rest of our lives in a rearview mirror.

A lot of people have done and will continue to do comparisons between connecting to art and being in love, which I think is perfectly apt. Sometimes there’s no way to appreciate something enough, even if you appreciate it while you have it. Even if everything goes right, you could eventually lose something and that’s it, and the memories will be insufficient. To me, that is the “possibility that love is not enough.” The realization that you’re a sum of parts that nobody keeps in stock anymore. Twin Peaks is immortal, but there’ll never be another one. In a lot of ways that’s better off, but we feel bad about it anyway. That bad feeling is the possibility in question. Nostalgia is powerful and often times it’s all we have, and also it sucks. It makes you feel worthless, and weak. A reminder that no matter what you’re doing or how much you seem to achieve, you’ll always have a rock to hide under and withdraw from it all.

I indulge in nostalgia a lot myself, which is why I’m so seemingly dramatic about these feelings. It’s not just the Lynch movies or whatever that rocked my shit when I was in college, but usually more crass, more pathetic things. Old youtube videos that only I ever happened to see, prehistoric internet memes that remind me of when I had more free time, conversations with my boys about how much cooler video games used to be. Sometimes I’m vindicated for worshipping the past, sometimes I’m not. I am, however, always transfixed and sidelined by intense emotional outbursts when I let it all get to me, and sometimes all it takes is some old song to flash the “YOU’VE WASTED A LOT OF TIME” warning light inside my brain. When I’m old and moribund like all my influences, what will I have to show for it?

And then I react by beating myself up further for being such a drama queen, when I’m technically too young to rent a car. I guess, what’s the point? Lynch faced death with zero fear and always insisted on us all meeting again, and to an extent I believe that I’m awash with relief at his optimism. I can hammer myself for wallowing around in all the shit I loved when I was 19, but the works themselves are immortal. We don’t necessarily need replacements, and a 1:1 replacement would just be kinda repugnant anyway. So I’ll take my angst and run, and just accept that the past sticks with me forever. All my heroes will be dead soon and the halls of my creative mind palace will be silent and empty. That’s why I spend time writing this solipsistic fluff and making this weird spacy music, in order to get some background music in there. In a way, that’s what everyone else has always done. 20 years ago, Mark Kozelek wrote:

People before us had heroes and they all died, but we’re lucky enough to live in a time when all that work can outlive the ones who made it. Artists can die but not their art. Maybe it feels bad to think that I worship at the feet of the same old crap that people did before me, maybe it feels bad to think so little has changed and that there are people who had these same thoughts in every generation before me, maybe it’s sad that there’s nothing to do about it. But there is one thing to do that might help just a little bit: smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and paint. Which I guess is 3 things, but you know what I’m saying.

I remember watching The Return the first time, and being astounded. I remember seeing some of those paintings for the first time. I remember watching Inland Empire on a chinese bootleg that didn’t have subtitles for the polish parts, and I loved it anyway. I remember breathlessly stammering at a speech classroom full of disinterested 20 somethings about his life and times as the subject of my project for that month. I remember just today, when I pulled my copy of Catching the Big Fish out from my work bag, because I take it with me everywhere, and throwing on The Big Dream to go with it. Maybe it’s okay that some things die, and we’re just left with the remnants. I gotta lighten up!

1946-2025