The sign of the Punch
I have a pretty good grip on myself empathy-wise, but sometimes I am put into conditions and under pressures not covered by warranty and then I am helpless as a thermos with a broken ring-seal, pity comes out of me at the most inappropriate times onto the most undeserving people, it is very dangerous. DC has thus always been both good and bad for me because I love an unhappy man in a tie, beaten by the world & harassed by his conscience, but you never know what he's been up to that makes him look so tired and sad. Now more than ever, I got to keep my fondness off weary men in collared shirts shuffling through the metro stiles like the shades of the dead.
On the eve of Hallowmas, which was as many as eight days before yesterday if you like to know numbers and if you care to cast your mind far back in time, they were all dressed as three-hole-punches, all of them, all the sad young men that Marc Almond sang about and Shirley Bassey before him. A real double costume put on by every single man in the city, over their store-bought ones of Businessmen and Government Workers. The poetry of it would have weakened all the little erector & suspensor muscles that hold you upright, if you’d seen it you would have fallen all in a swoon. I didn’t, me, because I am used to it, and I still remember the sight from last year.
Their inspiration comes from a sitcom now grown old, but the execution comes from the dread that lines men’s souls as synthetic fleece lines the stumpy boots of Winter. This triple cavity, these three dead-black Holes in these so-many men, they ask to be read and understood: one for your blood to leave you; one for your soul to sneak out like curling smoke; one for a watchful possessing spirit to sneak into and coil up in, warming itself in your salaried vitals like a house-proud garter snake in a shrub. I empty myself, that I might be filled, all these Punched men say; I wound myself thrice over, that I might be healed, they murmur; under the sign of the Punch they say If I were to disappear piece by piece, hole by hole, the void eating me up in little round missing places cut out of me perfectly neat and circular, would anybody notice, sound an alarm, call for help? they say I work in an office; but what works in me, in darkness?
Anyway! I personally don’t do much dressing up for Hallowe’en, I just like to apostrophize it to be irritating & I call that celebrating. A year or two ago I did a strange and foolish thing: I got a blonde wig, in the idea that if I absolutely had to “be” something I could put it on and say I was Diane (that is, Diane of Twin Peaks: The Return, who is Laura Dern-shaped, not Diane of Twin Peaks seasons One and Two, who is an idea and a spirit and Kyle Machlachlan’s anima, and who lives inside a small hand-held tape recorder.)
This was a strange thing to do because I am Laura Dern’s physical opposite in all respects, and if you have never seen me this is an easy mnemonic with which to build a mental image if for some reason you need to. In my soul I am a brunette, and it tells in my eyebrows even when my head hair puts on a show, so I can go as far as fake redheadism but I cannot be a blonde. Not a dyed blonde, not a bewigged blonde, not now, not ever. We live in an age in which everyone can, it is said, have the hair they wish to have if they hand over enough money for it, nobody cares about naturalism and probability anymore, nobody will say: YOU can’t be a blonde, it isn’t likely at all. that may be so, for others; for others it may all be as it is said. but for me, the wig created on my person a peculiar non-Euclidian chromosignificance, a colour out of Space, it was intolerable.
and I never wanted to be blonde, not once in my life! not ever! not until I found out I couldn’t be. now it eats at me.
Halloween is a difficult time for me now, because of Eliza being dead, which means I can never again say we’re going to dress up as Ripley and Jonesy from Alien, the twist being that I would be Jonesy (I can, as I say, manage a red head) and she would be Ripley (just a little blue cat-size coverall and a lot of briskness is all you need). I am of course thinking all the time about getting a new cat, when I am awake and when I’m asleep, just all of the time. I don’t know whether I should or not, it makes me very tired, and the question of what our couples costume would be, me and my theoretical new cat, sits like a great boulder in the road preventing passage through or around.
* * * * *
Say—have you ever read Maurice Sendak on the Iliad? It’s in the middle of one of his better interviews, here’s what he says:
There's the point where Hector is coming up behind this young man — say his name is Ajax — and Hector's flashing sword is aimed at his neck, young Ajax who spent his own money to come all the way to Troy, he needn't have, he lived on the rolling plains of Corinth and he had a farm and his wife stood holding her big pregnant belly as she saw him off, this young man so promising, so beautiful, so brave — the sword strikes him just under the lobe of his ear, cuts his major artery and the head topples off and he falls into his smoking foggy death and he goes clattering on the floor and everybody grabs for his armor.
Maurice Sendak, together with Randall Jarrell and Hans Christian Andersen, make up the Three Dead Men I am sworn to love and protect, and by putting my ear to the ground I can hear wicked words spoken about any of them anywhere on the Earth and must fly at once in my enchanted flying salt-cellar to defend them. Andersen in particular cannot stand to have his feelings hurt or he will die a second time, and when the Three Dead Men have died three times more it is the end of the world. So if you have any unkind words to say or sighs to heave over Sendak, or the others, don’t keep them to yourself, I would never ask that. Just whisper them into a small hole in the floorboards and wait for me.
Sendak died before the airing of Twin Peaks: The Return, but he understood it better than anybody because he had already written the finale of it in Outside Over There. (Maybe also you could say in Higgledy Piggledy Pop, if you want to say Castle Yonder is another face of the Chalfont house. I certainly don’t want to say that, but you can if you like.) Here’s how he explains it:
I sometimes say I was trying to change history. Ida finds the baby. I refused to let the Lindbergh baby die. I changed history. And that is part of it — but it's a very superficial part, because I'm not crazy, the baby was dead, and I don't believe books bring people back to life. There's a stubbornness in me that resists some ways of taking comfort.
I had a recurring nightmare when I was a kid — I must have been four-ish — a nightmare about being chased by a very frightening something and my heart is beating out of my chest. In the dream I'm desperate to get the cellar door open, but this thing is right behind me. And I finally turn. And it's my father. And his face is hot on my face and his hands are out: murder. That's all it is: he will kill me.
To make time work backwards, to go back and save someone who is lost, which means someone who is dead, is an apocalyptic scenario that has only been completely and successfully realized by Sendak and Lynch, so far as I know. If you think of the scene in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe where Lewis so signally fails to achieve the same effect (I made time run backwards! Deeper magic from before the dawn of time! the lion says) you see the point of it, you don’t necessarily call it cheating, but as with all cheap imitations of David Lynch you don’t feel that something terrible has just happened. Only the Witch fully grasps the horror and the tragedy of it, and her full apprehension of this metaphysical catastrophe is her downfall: that, the moment of being all alone in her knowledge, and nothing else.
In conclusion, Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Jadis is the perfect viewer of Twin Peaks: The Return, and what a terrible tragedy it is that she couldn’t have lived to see it.