As a kid, signs of winter meant it was the middle of hockey season. The Super Bowl had just passed. There was still time to go sledding down the local hill with friends. If only a late winter storm provided the potential of a snow day. A chance at no school always made it important to watch the nightly news to see if your school would come across the ticker.
As a kid, my stepdad introduced me to Calvin & Hobbes. The winter comics were always my favorite. It was aided by the fact that I was a gregarious child with spiky, blonde hair who loved to play in the snow. Growing up in Buffalo allowed me to see the might of Lake Effect snow in person. Thick blankets of snow would fall, and my childhood bedroom in my mom’s apartment had a window that faced the back of the building and the side street that ran down by a hospital. I remember a bright light from what I swore was the emergency entrance of the hospital, but looking back, I posit it was just an ill-placed streetlight.
On the nights when snow would fall, that light would grow a halo as the falling snowflakes would obscure the light. Creating a halo ring through the beat-up vinyl windowpane. It felt majestic, angelic, but something was amiss. Those nights I didn’t sleep as well. The bright light should be there. Unobsecured, nearly blinding me to sleep, but the moments of snow allowed me to enjoy snow.
I remember a time I went on a class field trip to a maple syrup farm in southern Ontario. It seems like a fever dream at this point, but I have hazy memories of going during peak harvesting season and a man in a green jacket and a woman in a maroon coat leading the group of twenty 1st graders to a tree covered in snow—with a faucet sticking out of it with large buckets underneath. It feels fantastical now looking back at it—because it is. The memory is fuzzy and cursory research shows that tapping for maple syrup happens in late winter, early spring, between thaws. That much snow being clung to nature seems unlikely if we were there to see taps. Though, as much as I try to remember specific details, nothing comes to mind other than the snow and the tap. Snow sticking to dead trees always felt like a comfort for me. It feels like the trees stripped bare by the fall were given another chance, a second act draped in white. To me, even at that young age, the comfort amongst the cold and dead world felt different. Driving through winding back roads covered in the winter varnish is magical, but the anxiety adults had while driving on those winding back roads in winter made me realize how different that feeling of magic was.
Do you think about David Lynch at all? I don’t remember the first time I heard of David Lynch—but I do remember hearing the word “Lynchian” in high school. My mom was a big fan of his movie The Elephant Man—the story of a man learning high British society with a congenital deformity. The story of change - what it means to be human. Learning to love. I was too young, too incurious to ask her why she liked it so much, but I am sure it has something to do with the story and the beauty in learning to see another person for who they really are.
Do we ever see people who they really are? Is that the core of “Lynchian” art?
A cursory search trying to define “Lynchian” now spits out an AI answer. The new pox was released upon the world by the tech powers that be. A little more digging shows a Salon article that has a highlight that defines it as:
“Calling something Lynchian means recognizing what we’re seeing is off-kilter and that it doesn’t entirely compute.”
To be Lynchian is to be recognizably different, but in a language of another person who is different. Yes, it is spawned from David Lynch’s particular style—dense, complex storytelling, distinct use of color, and a visual palette. I love movies, but there are better people to explain those things.
That period of malaise is between winter and spring, a time that isn’t officially recognized, but it is acknowledged by the constant gray—like the crystals in film are exposed from the melting snow. The grime of daily life, the grit of the earth, the toil of humans. The crystals, lifted into the air and suspended in the grain of the horizon. The air is soupy and thick—not in the same way as the dog days of summer, where humidity clings to you like stepping outside is the way to another planet where the gravity is much denser than that of Earth. It is thick in the sky—like the horizon that stretches out is being pressed upon, bows inward, pressing down on the days, shortening the sun's time in the sky.
Before I was old enough to dress myself, my mom always hesitated to buy me white clothes. The adventures of a young boy in the time before technology normally involved mud. The in-between time spring was the beginning of a particularly dangerous time. The white of the snow gives way to the grit and grime of the Earth. The patches of brown grass - still long dead for the season. It’s unsightly. In the dying gasps of the cycle, it spits at and tears asunder the beauty it created. Like a performance artist at the end of a lengthy exhibit in which they create and destroy their work. Razing their creation till it is unrecognizable. Winter has decided that it gave us something graceful, elegant, and heavenly but could not bear to let it last a second longer in the face of the unpleasantness of the world. It suspends us in this film-like state until we are rescued by the full weight of Spring.
In the in-between time, winter always thrashes before its death knell. One more violent cough of snow—one more wretch of its body chilling the air. Reminding us all of its being, but what comes next has already set in. The in-between demands to be remembered. To make such a fuss of its time that the memory of the last cold day sticks in the back of the mind. When the in-between time comes, you're forced to ask if this is it or if winter has finally finished. The death of winter comes and goes. Forced to end eventually in some vague, unrecognizable form. To die a Lynchian death, so the world can begin to move seasons. Slowly but surely, its patina is removed, and eventually, the warmth of the sun is no longer a surprise when we step outside.
This is what happens when David Lynch and Maple Syrup collide.
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