- Oct 2023
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Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee, 2006.
annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:7d3165882b27dc69918cc2de97baab96
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But you’re also expandingthe container of that knowledge.
David Lynch uses meditation to expand his container of knowledge.
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It’s interesting to seehow these unrelated things live together. And it gets your mindworking. How do these things relate when they seem so far apart? Itconjures up a third thing that almost unifies those first two. It’s astruggle to see how this unity in the midst of diversity could go towork.The ocean is the unity and these things float on it.
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It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any givenmoment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools tomake it happen.
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THE BOX AND THE KEYI don’t have a clue what those are.
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Now, you don’t use meditation to catch ideas. You’re expandingthe container, and you come out very refreshed, filled with energy,and raring to go out and catch ideas afterward.
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You’ve got to be able to catch ideas.
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New ideas can come along during the process, too. And a film isn’tfinished until it’s finished, so you’re always on guard. Sometimesthose happy accidents occur. They may even be the last pieces ofthe puzzle that allow it all to come together. And you feel so thankful:How in the world did this happen?
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When we were shooting the pilot for Twin Peaks, we had a setdresser named Frank Silva. Frank was never destined to be in TwinPeaks, never in a million years.
Because Frank Silva was a proverbial slip in David Lynch's living zettelkasten process, he ended up appearing in Twin Peaks by way of the serendipity of Lynch's method of combinatorial creativity.
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David Lynch's films are a personally structured output of his zettelkasten of ideas comprised of words, sounds, images, music, sound, people, and moods.
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But it wasn’t always that way. When I made Dune, I didn’t havefinal cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold out,and on top of that, the film was a failure at the box office. If you dowhat you believe in and have a failure, that’s one thing: you can stilllive with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s like dying twice. It’s very, verypainful.
Being an author is having the final cut on a string of ideas placed in a particular order.
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The entirety of David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish (2006) is a series of topically arranged chapters each with just a handful of either simple sentences or very short paragraphs very loosely strung together.
It's almost as if Lynch has taken his zettelkasten of ideas, potentially written on napkins from Bob's Big Boy, and dumped them out into the loose form of a book.
Tags
- catching ideas
- human resources
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- card index for casting
- work spaces
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- Frank Silva
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- integrated thinking environments
- references
- happy accidents
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- examples
- final cut
- combinatorial creativity
- Dune
- zettelkasten
- writing process
- David Lynch's zettelkasten
- meditation
- idea links
- ideas
- David Lynch
- tools for thought
- expandability
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- orderings
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- read
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- creativity
Annotators
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I'll write more in depth about it later, but I just read David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity https://bookshop.org/a/17195/9781585425402. He definitely has a zettelkasten-like creative process which revolves around "catching ideas". He talks about the philosophy and shape of his practice, but doesn't get into the direct physical form or substrate. He doesn't mention it in the book, but in the late 70s and early 80s his process definitely involved using napkins from Bob's Big Boy restaurant. He was influenced by his teacher Frank Daniel who had a practice of using 3x5 inch index cards for his screenwriting process. The book itself has a very zettelkasten-like flavor, almost as if he wrote ideas on index cards (or napkins), gave them some light arrangement by topic and then tipped the whole into book form without heavy editing. (It would be incredibly easy to cut it back up into individual index cards.) If you're into using zettelkasten for creativity (writing/creating), you'll appreciate some of his philosophy which he also wraps in a very light meditation wrapper.
This short video encapsulates some of the ideas and flavor of his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RFMCmfRmc.
Syndication link: https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992428117467615333/1158852901192605828
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www.openculture.com www.openculture.com
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https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/how-david-lynch-got-creative-inspiration.html
Lynch has spoken about the use of 3x5" index cards for screenwriting (via Frank Daniel).
Here he mentions writing down ideas for movies on the napkins provided by Bob's Big Boy restaurant. (zettelkasten made of napkins?)
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