David Lynch’s Leaving Limerence
Once you get one fragment, it’s like bait on a hook to catch more fragments. —David Lynch
And by David Lynch, I mean me, the donut hole, the whole of the donut, that which is and isn’t existence. This mystical isn’t woo— it’s what God the father under his eye can’t account for. It’s the women who hear with history’s mycelium. It’s the monster behind the diner, with her unshaven armpits, that calls the limits of your view into view. Today, it’s noodles at Lucky Catskills with a boiled egg pro-lifers should be protesting because it was fertilized first. Folks, the choir needs permission to feel, so writers, write the record and say the how of politics as personal. Lay claim to the collective unconscious, give voice to 170 dead girls you never met. Murder in our name matters. Murder for masculinity junkies matters. Turning people into bodies put into camps counts as real. Amy, you’re preaching to the choir. So what does a choir do? Make melodic pleas to the guilty to stop sinning on our behalf? What came first? Lineage. Survivors testifying. Didn’t stop future wars. But the record is containment. Is resistance. Songs diagnose. Poems dissect. Voices excavate. They help people feel less alone. See it. Name it. Refuse it. Silence is worse. The air fills with bloodlust. A pedophile’s pardon. The flavor of iron-tinged chaos fills my bowl. I’m but a drop in the ocean, one of infinity. But oceans carve mountains, if we taste the sourness and do our parts. A choir amplifies and hastens awareness. It sings out, We won’t stand for this. Shakespeare writing three years in a plague didn’t know his work would teach centuries. Sappho penning poems for women on an island, was unaware her fragments would comfort in 2,000 years. Forget impact. Do the work. Embody presence. Trust accumulation. Invest in community. Mutual aid. Unsilence normalizing any of this. Discomfort the celebrants with their demands for more destruction, more death. Press on in the dead of night, like crickets breaking darkness with song. As Persephone is the goddess of flowers and the queen of hell, we too are both the donut and the hole, tugging sweetness and songs from the abyss. —Amy King
