David Lynch and Knowing Without Knowing
My band Nonsemble played at GoMA in Brisbane a few weeks ago, as part of the Lynch by Night events. I was asked to give a talk after the show about how my work was inspired by David Lynch. It was tricky, because while I’m an admirer of the man, I can’t say my work is heavily influenced by his. So as not to talk myself into any traps, I ended up writing the talk out. I don’t normally like to talk from notes; I’m normally perfectly happy delivering hour-long lectures without a piece of paper in sight. It probably would have been better to go off the cuff, the setup was much more casual than I’d expected. But having written it out does at least afford the ease of posting it here. So here it is, my talk on David Lynch and Knowing Without Knowing
My name is Chris, I am a composer, producer, video artist, and educator. Most of my work explores a kind of complexity grown from simplicity, and tends to occupy a space somewhere between contemporary art music and adventurous styles of popular music. Some of the main manifestations of that are:
- my work with Nonsemble, a seven-piece hybrid chamber ensemble/rock band who played earlier this evening;
- my video work in which I explore synchronised repetitive audiovisual patterns in layers which move at different rates, drifting in and out of phase with each other;
- and my solo electronic compositions, textural and timbral experiments with analogue media and found sound.
When I was asked to give a talk on David Lynch’s influence on my work, I was wary of overstating it. I am a fan of Lynch’s work, but liking something does not always equate to influence. There are connections, of course: one of my first composition assignments at university was to write music to footage from Eraserhead, and since then I’ve always found something delicious to puzzle over in Lynch’s films. But what I really want to talk about tonight is a topic where I believe Lynch’s process and my own intersect: the power of the unconscious, and the idea of knowing without knowing. I’ve decided to draw on a single scene in Twin Peaks to tie this whole talk together.
There is a scene in Twin Peaks where FBI Agent Dale Cooper uses a technique he claims is inspired by Tibetan spiritualism. Cooper has been called into Twin Peaks to help solve a murder, and in this scene he takes the puzzled local Sheriff’s department out into the forest, with a glass bottle and a bucket of rocks. For each suspect in the list, he throws a stone at the bottle. When he hits the bottle, he takes it as an indication that the suspect is worthy of further investigation. This scene has stuck with me for many years, and I think about it a lot. Importantly, the stone-throwing scene is not about magic. Cooper’s understanding is that he knows more than he knows. Or, to be more specific, in looking over the clues, he has gathered more knowledge than he has direct conscious access to.
In the West, we have often misunderstood Eastern mysticism to be about magic. This misunderstanding is founded on a tendency to think that we have complete control over—and access to—all parts of our own minds at all times. So if someone appears to be divining information from outside their awareness, in the West we assume that something supernatural must be happening. But this is not usually the case. Reading tea leaves for example, is not about the reader divining something from a supernatural realm, but rather about allowing them to bypass rationality, and tap into hidden intuitions. The answer is not in the tea leaves themselves, but in the eyes and mind of the reader.
Western science and philosophy has begun to catch up with this. The German philosopher Heidegger accused the Western philosophical tradition since Plato of a deep misunderstanding of what it is to be a human. This accused misunderstanding is based in the idea that we are rational animals, whose behaviour is determined by theories and desires which can be explicated and understood. At its extreme, the rationalist paradigm fails to recognise the possibility that we can know without knowing. Or that some knowledge might exist not in the frontal lobe, but much deeper in the mind, or even in the body, its muscles and senses.
Neuroscience researcher David Eagleman tells us “the conscious mind is not at the centre of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.” We can verify this quite easily; I’d like you to imagine for a moment you are driving a car. You are in the left lane of a highway, and you need to change lanes to the right. Show me very quickly the hand movements required to achieve this. If you moved your hands left and then back to the centre, I’m afraid you have crashed your vehicle. To change lanes you need to turn left, back through centre to the right to straighten up, and then to the centre again. It’s not that you didn’t know this—I’m sure you have no problems with this in practice—but you may never have thought it about consciously, explicitly. Like many sophisticated things we do every day, there’s actually no need to understand it in that way. Understanding it more clearly doesn’t help us to do it better.
One of my favourite anecdotes on this topic comes from Eagleman’s book Incognito, and tells of the Japanese school of chick sexing. As dubious as that sounds, chick sexing is simply the art of telling the difference between male and female day-old chicks, which, as it turns out, is exceedingly difficult. To learn how to do it, aspiring chick-sexers travel from all over the world to study at the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School. The masters at the school cannot explain how to determine the sex of the chicks, and they teach by simply showing a chick to student, having them take a wild guess (male or female), and telling them whether they are right or wrong. This monotonous training continues for weeks, and results in graduate chick-sexers with 100% accuracy and absolutely no idea how they do what they do.
In another example, Hubert Dreyfus, one of the greatest interpreters of Heidegger, has described how expert chess players can simply look upon the configuration of the board, and in moments the optimal move is visible to them. There is no need for conscious deliberation—the answer has been calculated ‘under the hood’ so to speak. The player has no conscious access to this sophisticated processing.
So then, there are good reasons why Dale Cooper would expect to get better results from a glimpse into the unconscious than by traditional methods. As Alan Watts has it, ‘trying to understand the world, purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the pacific ocean out of a pint beer mug.’ Watts here is talking about the kind of thinking of the conscious mind, thinking in systems of discrete words and symbols.
Lynch’s interest in Eastern philosophy, his practice of transcendental meditation, and the themes of the unconscious that appear in his work all point to a faith in knowledge beyond the conscious. Of the box and key that appear throughout Mulholland Drive, Lynch has simply stated “I don’t have a clue what those are.” Of Eraserhead, Lynch similarly states “it was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant.” In the rationalist paradigm where knowledge is a conscious thing, we might assume that if Lynch cannot explain the meaning of his creations, then they must be meaningless. But Lynch’s admissions point to the fact that in creative work, we can glimpse meanings that are not readily explicable. Lynch’s boldness to trust these ideas, without the need to explicate or verify their meaning is inspiring to me. Just because Lynch cannot consciously explain an idea that has emerged from his consciousness, this doesn’t exclude it from containing meaning, and nor does it prevent that meaning from being conveyed to an audience.
Composers of music are less frequently called upon to explain themselves. We might be asked to explain what a particular piece is about, but music is understood by most as a non-representative art form, and thus no-one expects the particular melodies and chords of a work to mean anything explicit beyond themselves. I recently completed my PhD in composition and found myself at a difficult impasse—As I began to read Watts and Heidegger I started to feel like it was impossible for me to say anything explicit about my compositional process. This is an unsettling thought when faced with the task of writing a thesis about it. I managed to get around the issue by explaining how and why I couldn’t explain it, which seemed to work despite the inherent paradox.
Since the PhD, the biggest work I’ve composed is a 30-minute work for Nonsemble, called Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke. The work uses the patterns of moves from a 1953 game of go, the ancient Chinese board game, to stimulate musical ideas. For those unfamiliar with the game of go, you might have seen it played in the films Pi and A Beautiful Mind—it is played on a square grid, the players take turns to place black and white stones on the board. Though it is Chinese in origin, the Japanese elevated the game to an artform, and hundreds of years of records of important games have been kept, and continue to be studied by players. The 1953 game I used was between the two greatest players in the world at the time, Go Seigen and Fujisawa Kuranosuke. Go Seigen won, cementing his place as the greatest go player of the 20th century. Go Seigen passed away only last year at the age of 100.
Using the recorded moves from the game, I converted the game data into melodies, rhythms, harmonies and structures, through a whole range of strict and not-so-strict processes. Some musical processes of this kind aim to reveal some latent musicality inherent in the source material—this was not the case for me. In fact, the game really could have been anything at all—a game of snakes and ladders might have yielded equally good stimulus. Choosing another match would have resulted in a different work, certainly, but I held no belief in some beautiful musical structure lying dormant in the game of go.
The data is like a pebble thrown into the pond of the mind, for the purpose of observing the ripples. Lynch says that “ideas are like fish… down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” What Lynch describes here as ‘deep’ I interpret as out of reach from every day consciousness. What we know without knowing. Artists often have strategies to access these worlds—drugs, dreams, or for Lynch himself, meditation. For me, using the go game was not dissimilar to Dale Cooper throwing rocks at a bottle, and in fact, the image of that scene in Twin Peaks came back to me a lot while I worked on the project. The answers Agent Cooper was looking for were not in the rocks, nor in the bottle, and nor did a piece of music exist in the game of go I’d chosen. Finding a melody in a pattern of stones on a board is not dissimilar to reading fortune into an empty cup of tea. It is a way of circumventing awareness, stirring up unexpected ripples from the depths.
And whilst I make the point that the source patterns could have come from anywhere, I also think that the go game is a wonderful mythology with which to surround the work. The ancient game of go fascinates me, and I am captured by its mysteries, its elegance, and its overwhelming complexity despite the simplest of rules. Allowing listeners to project that image into their perception of the music is a part of the composition. As McAdams states, “perceiving is an act of composition,” and what a listener brings to a piece of music is a large part of what they hear.
And so, in resolving the paradox ‘to know without knowing’, we have to accept that there are many ways to know. Explicit, conscious knowledge is the most readily available to us, and is perhaps the most defining feature of human beings in comparison to other animals. But we all hold kinds of knowledge which are implicit, embodied, intuitive, and difficult to access. I personally get very excited about the possibilities of this kind of knowledge. Ways of accessing it are easily misunderstood from the perspective of a rationalist paradigm—next time you have to make a big decision at work, try taking your staff out into the woods to throw rocks at a bottle, and see how that goes down. But Lynch reminds us, through Agent Cooper, that to bypass the conscious mind and access the elusive depths of intuition can lead to the most unexpected and wonderful discoveries.