Catching the big fish

Talk about a lightness of being. Writing so much about health issues as I have been lately is gloomy work, and being free of it again today was wonderful. What to do with all this time? I feel so free. Chillax is the answer.

To that end, and already festively plump, I went down to the gym for an albeit rather mild-mannered session. Pottered briefly in the North Lanes. Once home, I discovered that I have been contacted again by Giles from a BBC website, asking for a comment on the Argos adverts so I sent him something (which I've also put on my daywork blog).

This afternoon I sat down to watch the only David Lynch film I'd never seen: Eraserhead. This was his first movie, made with scraped together cash over a period of five years, and it is amazing. So many Lynch tropes are in place - the parallel world, the weird stage, curtains, and the general unexplained air. There is a thread in Lynch which is like Samuel Beckett, and this is his most Beckett-like film.

It's a Freudian nightmare. The protagonist Henry Spencer visits his girlfriend and after a disgusting scene where during an awkward meal where Henry has to carve a little chicken and it begins to gout blood and twitch, it becomes clear that his girlfriend has had a premature baby. They are forced to marry and mother and baby move in to his dingy hellhole of an apartment. It transpires the baby is a disgusting mutant which cries all the time, and eventually forces its mother to abandon it. Henry is left with it, its body swaddled tight with its repulsive head poking out. There is lots more increasingly disturbed stuff in the movie, but it is unforgettable and shot through with a dark slow comedy.

Then I caught up with some correspondence, while watching the noble Chelsea ease into the next round of the European cup (despite an earlier hexing "good luck" call from Anton) thanks to the return of the mighty Didier Drogba.

Rereading Catching the big fish last thing, which is Lynch's book on creativity, consciousness, and meditation. He is so elusive. Here's what he says about Eraserhead:

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the whole thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was.

Ah well then. You've got to love Lynch. I'm a sucker for enigma.

Below Henry Spencer played by Jack Nance (who also played Pete Martell in Twin Peaks). I learned that he died after getting into a fight in a donut shop in 1996.