“Fix Your Hearts or Die”
Enduring the flurry of fear, uncertainty, and doubt since Jan 20.
This isn't an essay on David Lynch, but Lynch has been on my mind lately as I reconcile my fundamental beliefs about people with the realities of these past two weeks. In episode 4 of Twin Peaks The Return, Lynch gives the character he portrays words to say to Denise, a trans character. Denise was introduced as trans on the her debut in 1990. Now, years later (in 2017), Lynch says to her:
When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.
It's a thing to be admired, even envied: a clean, pure, and powerful statement. Delivered by the artist, down camera, right to the audience. A vulnerability and courage of moral and love.
The Executive Order defining gender is the first thing to happen that's surprised me. Defining gender, and with a few keystrokes destroying much of what I've worked on the past few years. Except, is destroying the right word? The work was expended. The product of that work will either be obscured from public view or will not be allowed to bloom, for now. But only for now. The work will not die in my heart, and it won't die in the hearts of anyone who has worked on this before or after. I'm not sure I am good for anything but my work, but I'm not going to stop being good at it now.
I remember, in November, reading interest for a thing I was working on involving LGBTQIA+ folks. Someone wrote something like, 'this is a dangerous time -- how will you protect us?' I cried reading it. I think about it a lot. I am not personally in danger. The people I think about in my work are.
Encounters like that cannot be removed from my heart. High school. Watching a boy be called a fag, turning my head and watching our PE teacher hear this and more, see it and more, and turn away. Choosing to do nothing. That cannot be removed. That I stood there and did nothing cannot be removed. That my only response to this was to write an unsigned letter in our school newspaper cannot be removed. I submitted to that chill and cowardice and that can't be removed, even if I can empathize with the child that I was at the time.
Clip from Twin Peaks — please go watch the 9 seconds!
A strange culture of language at work, as if forbidding certain words will eradicate the concepts they represent.
A prediction: changes will be made to how certain data are reported. These changes will molest an already incomplete view of the many peoples that fill our world. Statements will be made that populations do not, in fact, exist, because they are not in the data. This is not new.
A challenge: what is your capacity to protect people, to mitigate harm? Where does mitigating harm end and committing harm begin? I'm talking to myself. Do you have it in you to navigate a culture of fear and trembling? Are your beliefs resolved? Your convictions such that they can withstand this and find ways to still do good?
I'm not sure. I think so, and I hope so. I feel it is my responsibility. Please don't think me arrogant, reader, I think it's your responsibility, too.
I wonder the endurance of these people. How long can they keep this chaos up, and can we outlast them? That is the struggle right now: persistence. I will find ways to put my values into my work. I will put my heart into that work until it is wrested from my dead hands. I wrote last week about my inability to raise my voice in a protest. That's not my skill set. It isn't where I feel confident and competent. This is.
Everything that has happened in the past two weeks is designed to punch us in the gut. To put us on the back foot. Shock and awe. They want our panic and fear.
It is okay to feel panic and fear. How could you not, if you have a heart that loves? You don't need to give your fear or your panic to them. The bonds between us are what they seek to suffocate, they are the bonds that absorb and console that fear. The same bonds that let us do good in the world. I am here for you. I hope you are here for me.
"What do you fear the most?"
"The possibility that love is not enough."
(Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 20)
I fear that too. Maybe it is my biggest fear, when you boil away all others of common life. Love may not be always enough. But here is what I know: love is all there is.
I've written that I believe people are good at heart, or that they want to be. It's a hard belief to have when you witness evil. A mature decision might be to say that there is no pure good or pure evil. And yet, I've seen pure good with my own eyes and felt it with my own heart.
Here's where I'm at right now. Love is all there is. In the way that darkness does not exist as anything but the absence of light, so is hate the merely the absence of love. Hate does not ask anything of you, but that you bore out your soul and give yourself to it. Love asks you to freely give pieces of yourself (or perhaps your whole self) to those special to you. It requires risk, trust, and care. Which one sounds easier?
I don't think it is our responsibility to love those that hate us. I don't think it is our responsibility to seek them out and save them, or to be kind to them, or to cede ground to their hatred, or to do anything else to accommodate the cavity in their hearts where love should live. Love does not mean that we don’t fight — it demands the opposite.
They must fix their hearts. Until they do, they are already dead.
Our responsibility is to love and protect those we love, to mitigate harm. Our responsibility is to lean on each other. Move slowly. Be calm. Take deep breaths. There is no need to be passive, but we can be thoughtful. That they are in the wilderness and the cold does not mean that we must join them.
I believe love is why we will outlast them.
Thomas B
Other Writing/Reading/Watching
1/16/25 — Film: MULHOLLAND DRIVE (not rated, no review, must rewatch)
1/19/25 — Film review: DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE (4/5)
Film review: PIG (5/5)
1/21/25 — Film review: TOMBSTONE (5/5)
1/26/25 — Book review of The Sun Also Rises (4/5, re-read)
1/27/25 — Film review: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (4/5)