TWIN PEAKS

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Insanus
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

Post by Insanus »

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't understand anything about the new Twin Peaks. I liked the ending though, and the repeating scenes (is it future or is it past) suggest that there is an alternate order in which the episodes could be watched.
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obnoxion
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

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Insanus wrote:...suggest that there is an alternate order in which the episodes could be watched.
At least there seems to be a parallel sequence, as seen from this YouTube-clip - I guess one could call it a fan video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm3T4zYWvdc
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Nefastos
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

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I finally saw the last episodes, and continue to be positively impressed by this rare opportunity to find Art both subjective and mystic in a television series. How Twin Peaks manages to balance itself upon these poles of ironic humor & warm-hearted smile, sunshine of life and the most obscure & evil moon-blaze right out of nightmares, is something that one seldom if ever sees in any other art form than classic novels. Even from our occultism, I think we can so easily lost either one or other of these vital extremes of Living and Dream, which in fact are not separate at all.

Personally I am so bad to grasp nuances or even the most obvious turns in the film format, that it will require at least another & most likely many more times of viewing the episodes before I can add much to this great conversation, at least regarding the symbolism in the chain of events. I think my ability to lost the red thread in even the most simple films (a fact often witnessed by my ex-wife sister Astraya) might be connected to my similar handicap regarding three dimensional orientation, which makes me so easy to get lost with physical geometry. And speaking of digressing, let's get back to TP...

obnoxion wrote:Finally, in the 15/18 episode, agent Cooper is back! And he has filled all possible hopes, even the most immature ones, that the despairing viewer might have placed in him: he is a santa claus ("I know you have hearts of gold"), an action hero ("I am the FBI"), a good father ("I am you father"), and, a Messiah, with a seemingly perfect vision of his mission - he is even a unifier of two hands, a champion of the two lodges.


Yes, I love it how Twin Peaks expertly handles this "panem & circenses" attitude with good taste, without contempt as I see it, and at the same time remains true to its own very unique vision. It is like an optimal church: something for the masses, something for the clergy, and the whole construct is just so damn beautiful.

How Cooper faces the problem of duality of the lodges, wrestles with it, and is yet unable to solve it, grows beautifully in the series. Ultimately (so far) he keeps repeating his mistakes from the original episodes, where his fall to the role of the paladin hero keeps enabling the greater evil. Instead of integrating, he keeps separating, and forming new false personalities just to ensure shallow happiness of the profane (a bit brutal underlining here, apologies).

Yinlong wrote:Ugh, just finished recently all the episodes. I think this is a classic (or will be, time will tell) - a kind of master piece, where many praising words are fitting.


I agree. You mentioned Hawk as your most thought-provoking character. In the end, his unwillingness to get involved seems to border on apparent uncaring. In this, he becomes a bit like my personal favourite, Major Briggs. With satisfaction I felt ongoing identification with this "tolerant man, whose patience has its limits", connected to the White lodge research. It grew even more intense now when Briggs followed the path of John the Baptist in beheading & thus entering the double paths of formal duality & inner enduring with partly tragedic, partly transcendental connotations.

Kenazis wrote:Would the ending of this be somekind of Lynchian black humour. First Twin Peaks ended in Cooper being wrong place and many was annoyed by that. That wasn't good way to end the series. Now it seems that Cooper is on exactly right place with right person, but in wrong time.


Did the Doppelgänger Cooper have just the opposite part of the key, having two false coordinates (with which to burn the youth) and the third, time coordinate right? (This reminds me of the Fighting Fantasy game, "Starship Traveller", where the star ship captain lost into a parallel universe has to find coordinates for place and time to enable riding a black hole wormhole into his own cosmos. The game usually ended with dying in the wrongly entered or wrong black hole, naturally.)
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

Post by Yinlong »

Nefastos wrote:
Yinlong wrote:Ugh, just finished recently all the episodes. I think this is a classic (or will be, time will tell) - a kind of master piece, where many praising words are fitting.


I agree. You mentioned Hawk as your most thought-provoking character. In the end, his unwillingness to get involved seems to border on apparent uncaring. In this, he becomes a bit like my personal favourite, Major Briggs. With satisfaction I felt ongoing identification with this "tolerant man, whose patience has its limits", connected to the White lodge research. It grew even more intense now when Briggs followed the path of John the Baptist in beheading & thus entering the double paths of formal duality & inner enduring with partly tragedic, partly transcendental connotations.
It is related to the following thought (I'll try to phrase my viewpoint better):
I think native people are kind of guardians. Whether they are (specific kind of) guardians that either give-in, dodge, give context, support, mingle, or just watch depends on the case. Of course it can be said that they do all of the things at the same time. It is both their right as the original landowners but also the kind of destiny, since for example in North America it is unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon invaders will give in. So, here we come to Hawk, who's profession is also a police. He is not the head of the police, but clearly the police that is contacted, also directly in spiritual matters (e.g. log lady). He also goes and visits the inhabitants when he feels it is the right thing to do. In any case, he is not satanistically aware of things, he just knows them. It is the Anglo-Saxons and modern Americans who are on foreign land. In the sense they don't understand it all, which then is perceived as evil (= unknown). However, I think Hawk feels empathy for these new inhabitants and he helps them. However, it is not his quest. He is just acting his role. And yes, I think Major Briggs can be seen as a sort of counter part for Hawk's role:
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Nefastos
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

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Yesterday I finished reading "The Secret History of Twin Peaks", a nice little book (well, actually it's quite hefty) that offers some extra peek inside Twin Peaks' characters & world. Like the autobiografy of Dale Cooper from the first seasons' times, which I also thought was quite sympathic, although not a bit necessary, addition. It also discussed the background of Major Briggs:
Milford: Good. Contradictions. Very helpful. So you went to Catholic school?
Briggs: Where my Jesuit education ingrained in me the value of fealty to an established order while retaining a private allegiance to the truth.
[...]
Milford: Catholics, real ones, are all about the mystery.


I liked this idea of Brigg's Catholic streak, for once again it's something I can also identify with...

By the way, I had thought that it was the "White lodge" that abducted Briggs in the original series, even though he suffered trauma from the demanding experience. At least according to this book, I was apparently wrong.

Yinlong wrote:I think native people are kind of guardians. Whether they are (specific kind of) guardians that either give-in, dodge, give context, support, mingle, or just watch depends on the case.


The last night I dreamed of the native American people, or Indians like we barbarians say. In this dream of mine I was visiting a different city, and one part of the town held three districts: one that was open to all, one that was more like a liminal state, and the third, the deepest part, that was reserved only to the Indians. Sister Astraya was living in that city and gave me an engraved object – this time the object was a screw driver – whose marks gave me safe access to the Indian districts. I think that this dream underlines your point: the Indians were guardians of the deeper, more holistic, but nowadays more repressed part of the psyche. We see them as a culture more connected to the flow of nature, more holistic and thus apparently less dynamic, like a whole culture of "seers" from our point of view. Needless to say, such an archetype is necessarily naïve. But I believe in archetypes, if one handles them with respect, and takes into account how archetypes always overlap to create any particular individual or situation.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
obnoxion
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

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One of the most intriguing scenes in Twin Peaks is the meeting above the convenience store, where the entities connected to the Black Lodge discuss, among other things, the sharing of the Garmonbozia, that is, fear and pain that take the form of creamed corn.

One of the other things established in this meating is, that there is a formica table in the the room, and its colour is green. There is a circular little piece missing from the green formica surface, and this must be the green piece in the center of (at least one, if not each) the Owl Ring(s) of the Black Lodge.

It has been speculated that formica as a material stems from Lynch's fascination of electricity, because formica is a synthetic form of the mineral mica, both of which have been used as insultaion in electric appliances, especially in ones that produce heat.

But I have recently been studying the Sanskrit text of a fundamental Kaula treatise by Matsyendranatha called The Kaulajnananirnaya, where there is a sentence "...having meditated on Shakti in the form of a flash of lightning in the five skies". Here the Sanskrit word for sky is "vyoman", and according to online Sanskrit dictionary this word also means "mica" and "one who cannot be saved".

When considering that Lynch is a long time practioner of Transcendental Meditation, and the fact that many TM practioners seem to be enthusiastic translators from Sanskrit, could it be that the formica table includes the symbolism of the relative unredeemability of the Dugpa state? Of all the entities in the room above the convenience store, only The Man from Another Place and Killer Bob sit around the formica table, and the rest of them are situated near the walls of the room.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Nefastos
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

Post by Nefastos »

obnoxion wrote:the sharing of the Garmonbozia, that is, fear and pain that take the form of creamed corn.


Does this term have presence outside Lynchian terminology?

obnoxion wrote:One of the other things established in this meating is, that there is a formica table in the the room, and its colour is green. There is a circular little piece missing from the green formica surface, and this must be the green piece in the center of (at least one, if not each) the Owl Ring(s) of the Black Lodge.


Ah, so that's the origin of the Saturnian green gem!

This reminds me how I came to understand the working of "demons" (evil spirits connected to suffering) and how they are and are not related to Satan. The picture I got from my "meditations" was that these spirits – or dugpas in Lynch's Blavatsky-loaned language – receive scraps from the table of the actual divine "gods of evil" (or the problem of karma). I have used this metaphor several times in my texts after this realization.

obnoxion wrote:"...having meditated on Shakti in the form of a flash of lightning in the five skies". Here the Sanskrit word for sky is "vyoman", and according to online Sanskrit dictionary this word also means "mica" and "one who cannot be saved".


Extremely interesting, thank you for sharing this. Along with some painful personal thoughts this revived in me, I saw a more symbolic dream on the subject. I had lain awake with risen temperature and close to astral fear, but when I fell asleep in the morning hours, the dreams were peaceful. I saw, however, the statue of a woman connected to this idea of yours, standing in the gloom of the lodge. In her hand was this goddess' symbol, which was yarn. I think this is quite fitting. Besides the obvious and mythic symbolism, the word is also interesting in several different levels:

Wiktionary wrote:From Middle English yarn, from the Old English ġearn (“yarn, spun wool”), from Proto-Germanic *garną (“yarn”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰorn-, *ǵʰer- (“tharm, guts, intestines”). Akin to [...] Latin hernia (“rupture”), Ancient Greek χορδή (khordḗ, “string”), Sanskrit हिर (hira, “band”). Compare also the obsolete doublet garn.

obnoxion wrote:could it be that the formica table includes the symbolism of the relative unredeemability of the Dugpa state?


Such a symbolism would indeed fit to Saturnian, fractured, round (possibility of a vicious circle) object that is repeatedly referred to by its outer, artificial material.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
obnoxion
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

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Nefastos wrote:obnoxion wrote:the sharing of the Garmonbozia, that is, fear and pain that take the form of creamed corn.Does this term have presence outside Lynchian terminology?
As far as I know, Garmonbozia is exclusively Lynchian term. I have followed some loose associative chains on this word, but I haven’t caught a big fish yet…
Nefastos wrote:obnoxion wrote:"...having meditated on Shakti in the form of a flash of lightning in the five skies". Here the Sanskrit word for sky is "vyoman", and according to online Sanskrit dictionary this word also means "mica" and "one who cannot be saved". Extremely interesting, thank you for sharing this. Along with some painful personal thoughts this revived in me, I saw a more symbolic dream on the subject. I had lain awake with risen temperature and close to astral fear, but when I fell asleep in the morning hours, the dreams were peaceful. I saw, however, the statue of a woman connected to this idea of yours, standing in the gloom of the lodge. In her hand was this goddess' symbol, which was yarn. I think this is quite fitting. Besides the obvious and mythic symbolism, the word is also interesting in several different levels:Wiktionary wrote:From Middle English yarn, from the Old English ġearn (“yarn, spun wool”), from Proto-Germanic *garną (“yarn”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰorn-, *ǵʰer- (“tharm, guts, intestines”). Akin to [...] Latin hernia (“rupture”), Ancient Greek χορδή (khordḗ, “string”), Sanskrit हिर (hira, “band”). Compare also the obsolete doublet garn.
The Goddess with the yarn, especially in a dream which began with temperature but turned peaceful, and in this context of term “vyoman” might also be interpreted like this: One of the names of Shiva is Vyomakeśa or “Sky-haired”. And in almost every anthropomorphic icon of Shiva, we can see the Heavenly Ganges – Vyomaganga – descending to the earth by Shiva Gangadhara’s matted, yarn-like hair.

In the case of this dream, I would suggest that the yarn is symbolic of both the Gangadhara, that is, Shiva as portioning the descent of Ganga as for her not to destroy the Earth by crushing down unchecked from the Vyoman. But also, in relation to the temperature you mentioned, this might also function as a Rudra Abishek, or the pouring of libation on the Linga, as to cool it down. Considering the formal dream symbolism of the yarn, perhaps it was an invitation to patience?

To go back to my theory of the formica table and the convenience store, I just read from the original script that in the scene the Woodsman that has no lines in the move FWWM, was supposed to have several. (The Woodsmen as Sooty Ghosts were in a bigger role in the third season of TP). The scene would have opened with the Woodsman saying. “We have descended from pure air”, to which the Man from Another Place would respond with: “Going up and down. Intercourse between the two worlds”. So this strengthens the “Vyoman”-connection, I think. The scene was, however, cut short by Lynch, after they had recurrent electrical difficulties. Here is the situation, as related by Michael J. Anderson (the actor of the The Man from Another Place):
We were shooting Fire Walk With Me and … well, one of the scenes blew a generator, and Lynch replaced the generator. We tried it again and the generator blew again. So then he did not change at all the lights. He rearranged the dialogue. He said, “No, you say this instead of this, and you say this here.” He rearranged the dialogue. “Let’s try it again.” Plugged into the generator again, no changes in the power requirements, the scene played again, the generator did not blow that Time. And he goes, “I thought it might have been that!”

http://www.davidlynch.it/twin-peaks-the ... nce-store/
It has been a curiously Twin Peaks-ean affair to delve into The Kaulajnananirnaya. Right in the 2nd Patala we get e reference to the prominent Twin Peaks theme of the Blue Rose, when Bhairava speaks:
O Goddess, the deity is devoid of mind and non-mind, independent of meditation (dhyana) and concentration (dharana), always perceivable , eternal, in appearance like a blue flower (atasi), rich in all hues and at the same time beyond all colours, attainable through transcendental wisdom (jnana), through the succession of Master and disciples (parampara).

Translated by Satkari Mukhopadhyaya in collaboration with Stella Dupuis.
This is something – the occurrences of spiritual symbolism in entertainment and art – that has been a huge influence on me since I was a child. Take, for example, the skulls and bones decorations of many eighties heavy metal records and horror films, that I was heavily into as a kid, but lost interest as an adult. This lost of interest has usually coincided with finding these same decorations is another, more profound and traditional settings. As for the skulls, I would mention the iconography of the Tantric hero Padmasambhava, who is often depicted sitting by three severed heads – one is dry, one is fresh, and one is rotten. Now these are symbols of the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. After these kinds of realizations I have been happy to understand that I weren’t morbid, but rather that I was attuned to a symbolic language of a tradition that was mostly foreign to my native culture, but that nevertheless pushed through entertainment, and was picked up by me, and others whose souls were made of similar fibers. To get back to the theme of severed heads as lofty symbols, as an adult I found it again from Symbolist art. So I think these themes, this language of certain souls, is a universal phenomenon, and at least for some of us it is the only language through which we can really understand the complexity of life in a profound manner.

With this in mind, I am not surprised to find such rare and profound themes of Kaulism behind a TV series that has fascinated me since I was ten years old. It was the closest I could get to a spirituality that spoke to me intimately.

Does this make sense to any one you?
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

Post by Kenazis »

obnoxion wrote: This is something – the occurrences of spiritual symbolism in entertainment and art – that has been a huge influence on me since I was a child. Take, for example, the skulls and bones decorations of many eighties heavy metal records and horror films, that I was heavily into as a kid, but lost interest as an adult. This lost of interest has usually coincided with finding these same decorations is another, more profound and traditional settings. As for the skulls, I would mention the iconography of the Tantric hero Padmasambhava, who is often depicted sitting by three severed heads – one is dry, one is fresh, and one is rotten. Now these are symbols of the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. After these kinds of realizations I have been happy to understand that I weren’t morbid, but rather that I was attuned to a symbolic language of a tradition that was mostly foreign to my native culture, but that nevertheless pushed through entertainment, and was picked up by me, and others whose souls were made of similar fibers. To get back to the theme of severed heads as lofty symbols, as an adult I found it again from Symbolist art. So I think these themes, this language of certain souls, is a universal phenomenon, and at least for some of us it is the only language through which we can really understand the complexity of life in a profound manner.

With this in mind, I am not surprised to find such rare and profound themes of Kaulism behind a TV series that has fascinated me since I was ten years old. It was the closest I could get to a spirituality that spoke to me intimately.

Does this make sense to any one you?
Yes. While this (my) observation is not Twin peaks related, but related to your post, I keep it short and simple. What you say above is something that I haven't deeply thinked about and this error must be corrected. To "collect" the most important influences (morbid, odd, and not) from childhood to this day and trying to see the connections (if there are and I think there are) and the hidden meaning. This kind of practice would be interesting, important and also enjoying (in contrast to all death and nothingness contemplations).
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Re: TWIN PEAKS

Post by obnoxion »

Kenazis wrote:Yes. While this (my) observation is not Twin peaks related, but related to your post, I keep it short and simple. What you say above is something that I haven't deeply thinked about and this error must be corrected. To "collect" the most important influences (morbid, odd, and not) from childhood to this day and trying to see the connections (if there are and I think there are) and the hidden meaning. This kind of practice would be interesting, important and also enjoying (in contrast to all death and nothingness contemplations).
Judging by the GG Allin - shirt you were wearing the last time we met, I am quite certain that you too have enough morbid & odd material at hand for this type of practice...
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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