Mood Mystery
A little digression into my current obsessions
Maggi Hambling - “Nightingale Night”
While I will admit to crying at the Dora Carrington exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery, it has been their concurrent display that has been sticking in my mind lately. I think perhaps it’s the colour palette, blacks and golds; black paint cracking, revealing the hint of the base layer, a blue sometimes showing through, and the golds splashed on with copious amounts of white spirit, fading out to drips, vertical and downwards - as above, so below - with the gold thickening with each layer to splodges, impasto pronouncements of figures abstracted, listening to the titular nightingales, a rare song experienced on a dark night.
There is a sensuality to it, a paradoxical appreciation of the solid rough ground which talks to the unseeing air that carries the song. These are abstract pieces, but you can see the music.
These were entirely of my flavour, and I did not know they existed a mere week before I saw them. I keep thinking of the gold paint, the layers and patience it must of taken to produce work like this - allowing the paint to dry, applying more pigment and less turpentine - to produce something so vibrant and immediate. There is a sumputousness to the work, the same way that humus feels sumptuous. These are works to get lost in, and I do find myself, weeks later, continuing to get lost in them.
Tarot de Marsaille
If you’ve read my previous letters, then you know I enjoy using the tarot to help with my writing, when I feel like I need the extra confirmation. So recently, and I don’t remember why, I was reading Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Way of the Tarot, and there was this biting little extract that talked about the way the pictorial tarot - specifically the very popular and my favourite Rider Waite Smith deck - was “the very portrait of their creator’s limits and characteristics", bemoaning especially the more brutal depictions of certain cards, particularly the Five of Pentacles (beggars outside of a church) and the Ten of Swords (literally a person face down with ten swords in their back). This section particularly made me laugh:
This experience compelled me to patiently examine each of the Minor Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, which, obsessed with the ridiculous Tarots then fashionable with the hippies, I had scorned as being cold, vain, incomprehensible, too simple, too geometrical, and, in a word, boring.
He then continues, cryptically:
The initiates are correct when they say that the most difficult secret to discover is the one that is not hidden. These Arcana are hardly saying nothing: what happens is that the eyes of the noninitiated do not know how to see.
And that was it, a loathing for hippies and a desire for the mystery, that persuaded me to get a cheap-little-pocket-sized-miniature Marsaille deck.
I won’t go deeply into this, but as someone that is going through a process of relearning to listen to their own voice again and trusting it, not having a prescribed image feels like a violent gust of fresh air through your senses. And yet the images and stories that I love with tarot are still there, seemingly louder and with more clairty then with the RWS system. The cards dare you to think for yourself, which can feel like a challenge and scary when you are used to having your hand held through it all. But that is what I wanted, and as I said, the images are still there, you just need to find them.
Honestly now, thinking of going back to the RWS feels like that Drake & Josh scene.
David Lynch
“To understand what a mystery is, you have to agree to the terms of the mystery. It’s something that you cannot understand. If you agree to that, you are welcome to the mystery.” - Alexander, Tovborg, Welcome to the Mystery
[Lynch] was drawn to mystery becasue he understood mystery as a conversation - a collision of differences, interpretations, perspectives. Not a message sent down from an all knowing source.” - Kyle MacLachlan
In an interview trying to sell his then current film Dune (printed in the March 2025 issue of Sight and Sound), David Lynch talks about his next project, Blue Velvet:
“It’s a murder mystery. There is some darkness and fear in this picture, and some strange sexual things, but there’s also a very nice love story that goes with it as well. And all in the midst of a mood mystery, murder mystery.”
Did you catch that?
“Mood mystery.”
As soon as I read those words, I was like yesss.
What a perfect combination of words to describe what Lynch does, and what I love so much about his work. People put a lot of effort into trying to understand Lynch’s work - psycho-sexual, Jungian, Surrealism - and maybe they’re onto something, but for me, what captures me into his work is the mood he creates, the mystery he lets you sit in. You try and explain it, and piece of it is gone. As Tovborg says in the quote above, you have to allow a part of the mystery to stay a mystery if you want to even attempt to understand it.
Lynch does this very well with his more antagonistic ouvre: Inland Empire being a prime cut of the impenetrable and unsettling; episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, “Gotta Light?”, being both awe-inspiring and obfuscating; and Eraserhead’s famous blend of the domestic and the disgusting. It’s fascinating to experience, and it gives me chills and I love it. It’s viseral, sensual, lingering.
It’s very much teaching me to try and sit within the mystery more, like it’s a living, breathing ghost, rather than trying to dissect art like it’s cadaver in a Victorian operating theatre.
Thank you for reading in this little, experimental post. You know when you have something in the back of your mind that you can’t stop thinking about until you talk about it? That is what this letter is about. Let me know any of your own current obessions in the comments.
Also, episode 99 of ill fame has been released and you can read that here. I will be having my usual break down of the episode next week.
Have a great day!