Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
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Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
by Authors:
David Lynch
Released: 28 December, 2006
ISBN: 1585425400
Hardcover
Sales Rank: 5055
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| Book > Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity > Customer Reviews: |
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Average Customer Rating: 
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity >
Customer Review #1:
 Can you do himself or essay write for medical papers. "A Guy From Missoula" Battles "The Suffocating Clownsuit Of Negativity" -- And Wins
Filmmaker David Lynchs breezy Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, And Creativty (2007) is a slight but wise, stimulating, and often wonderful treatise on the creative process as Lynch has experienced it over the course of his lifetime.
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lt;br /gt;Lynch became a practitioner of transcendental meditation some decades ago, and meditation plays a very large role throughout the text. The experience of transcending, Lynch states, is like the experience "you can have just before you go to sleep. Youre awake, but you experience a sort of fall, and you maybe see some white light and get a little jolt of bliss. And you say, Holy Jumping George!"
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lt;br /gt;In keeping with his All-American Jimmy Stewart of the Weird persona (artists, he says, "are supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging"), Lynch writes in an uncomplicated, folksy, casual, and agreeable fashion, even when discussing subjects that writers as diverse as William Blake, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Hilda Doolittle, and academic Mark Schorer spent their entire lifetimes addressing.
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lt;br /gt;Lynchs simplistic, straight-forward manner may be too light for many readers: "If you want to catch a little fish, you can stay in shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, youve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and pure. Theyre huge and abstract. And theyre very beautiful...everything, anything, that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level." Or: "Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make head or tails of it is through intuition."
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lt;br /gt;Lynchs fish, of course, symbolize "ideas" and "thoughts." If this style of writing, which occasionally reads like something out of Dr. Seuss, speaks to potential readers and appears to carry weight and conviction, then Catching The Big Fish may provide them with guidance and enlightenment of a kind. Others may find the book little more than a passing curiosity.
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lt;br /gt;Discussing where the ideas explored in Blue Velvet (1986) originated, for instance, Lynch says, "In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song--Bobby Vintons version of Blue Velvet. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it."
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lt;br /gt;But diehard Lynch enthusiasts will want to read the book regardless. His Suffocating Clown Suit of Negativity, which is how he conceives of "depression and anger," suggest the roots of both Ben the Sandman (Dean Stockwell) from Blue Velvet and the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) in Lost Highway (1997). Lynchs stated love of the theater stage curtains (to which he adds, "maybe theyre red") suggests the initial image of Blue Velvet, and that films opening and closing montages of white picket fences, flowering gardens, robins, and firemen are very likely an example of his early impulse to create "a moving painting."
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lt;br /gt;Likewise, several scenes in Mulholland Drive (2001) seem reflected in his statement that "theres safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner," especially when one recalls that the Nightmare Man that Dan (Patrick Fischler) feared so much existed behind the diner in which Dan was eating, rather than it.
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lt;br /gt;The author also expresses practical truths, here via Bushnell Keller, a painter who inspired Lynch in his youth: "If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time." Lynch echoes what painters, poets, novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and songwriters have been voicing throughout the decades and centuries: that its "absurd" for the creator to have to explain what his or her creation "means in words," which of course is especially meaningful when discussing work that deals largely or solely in images.
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lt;br /gt;Lynch also very briefly addresses the pivotal question of why an increasingly serene man who has, and still is, partially devoting his life to world peace through mass transcendental meditation repeatedly makes films as violent, terrifying, desperate, and hopeless as Mulholland Drive, in which a state of perdition, and nothing else, concludes the film.
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lt;br /gt;Since there is a definite dark thematic thread existing in his work, from Erasehead (1977) through INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Lynchs simplistic answer here is unlikely to convince or persuade any reader, especially since he states that hes "just a guy from Missoula, Montana."
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lt;br /gt;Longtime readers of Vanity Fair magazine may remember ex-lover Isabella Rossellinis statement that Lynch ended their years-long affair by phoning her when she was making a film in Russia (and he on the other side of the world), saying, I dont love you anymore," and then hanging up. Though that alleged event took place almost twenty years ago, it, and some of the less convincing passages in Catching The Big Fish suggest that the filmmaker may not have as thorough or educated an understanding of himself as he appears to believe.
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Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity >
Customer Review #2:
 Only if youve never heard the word meditation
I really really like David Lynchs work. I will always remember how the "Twin Peaks" atmosphere bled into my sense of reality before, during and after airing. I ordered the book for an opportunity to find out how the heck he conjured his exceptionally unique and magical ideas. I learned that he derives them from daily Transendental Meditation. I learned that in his short prologue. The rest of the "book" (one short comment on each page)was a waste of my time.
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity >
Customer Review #3:
 A David Lynch/TM masterpiece
This book will give the reader an insight into how practicing meditation (in this case Transcendental Meditation--or TM" as it is known) impacts on the life of a genius artist/movie maker.
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lt;br /gt;In simple, humble, yet concise and insightful short chapters, Lynch gives us a peek into how TM enhances the creative process. He debunks the long-held and widely accepted premise that an artist must be suffering and tortured in order to produce movies such as Lynchs dark works. There is a common misconception that meditating and achieving inner peace and tranquility will dull the creative process. Not so! with TM, according to Lynch. He explains how developing more of our mental potential can only help us be more effective in creating our works of art.
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Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity >
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