The Americans

Self-Portrait as David Lynch

27 Self-Portrait as David Lynch I wear a flower in my lapel. I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose. A carnation, the fool’s flower, its heart a wilting empire. In late-night editing sessions, I imagine I’m planting flowers in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps me reach our rigor mortis, bound behind the wheel, a little Bowie on the radio, maybe, at six frames per second, headlights plowing the dark’s divided road. Cities grow to calcified castles. Fish groom the coral brains anchored in a tank’s purple volume. I love the scratch of celluloid and a low-register noise, the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb. Sometimes I swap my carnation for an orchid or rose. On-screen, there’s every hint a man-child built the night. I read it once, by flashlight, as a kid— that Sleep and Death are brothers, 28 and they send our dreams through two gates, one made of horn, for the true dreams, and one made of tusk, for the false. ...