This got published back in Januray in issue V of Reverie Magazine and I've only just got around to sharing. A little excerpt from editor Isabelle Wei:

It is for these reasons that I admire the rich variety of genres in this issue; both the absurd and the mundane, and the many off-white notes in between. I love also how they show, collectively, that art need not be epiphanic.

Read the entire issue here.

And for the sake of your straining eyes the poem appears in clearer text below.

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Smorgasbord of avant-garde jazz

i

A chest for a flattened head

of nesting materials—a corner made

of expanses, a shoulder,

its vested slumbering—

leads to a run-down heightening

from peeling shutters and dreams

with the crusts cut off

ii

flitting wings for the see-saw of violins

under streams—twittering

fingers kicking up light where ankles twist in

harmonic gaps of daymoon twins

iii

Wet harp strings

Wet harp strings

iv

A sleepy asteroid pulls a thread

And the sky unravels its tapestry

Revealing purple gongs that sing

The bluest of blue goodbyes

v

and what is seen

cannot be told

and what is heard

cannot be held

only when breath

spreads its legs

and only then

cannot be known

vi

repetition of suns one one one

no sooner mooned than tuned-up

than refined to one and one and one

and sun and sun and sun orange

made of oranges and of orange segments

vii

Emulsion of Coalescence—Gloss and

Ooze the Dregs of Celestial Plumage—

Puffed up Polish smoked in Water

Stored in the Velvet Shuck of a Chew

viii

Forward cancels backward

(Rhythm) balanced (Balancing)

foot to foot on feet

(Balancing) forward

(Rhythm) backward

On foot to foot on feet

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Copyright Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken) 2026

noticed the folds first - “If you see the folds of garments in Varo's art, they become their own symbol...what's hidden in the waves, the undulating fold. She captures the feeling of being in flow or enraptured in creativity, neither here nor there, but inside, beyond self, further afield.” - and I followed.

A face of velvet drapery — all clavicle eyes and muffled mouth. A mirror without shine, without object. An impossible refraction of fold. Who sees the face? Certainly not the psychoanalyst, whose obsession with masks is its own reflection. Why speak of mirrors when it comes to secrets? What comes to light when speaking of folds? Only hands and eyes. Hair and feet. What happens in the shadows is its own business. It lives elsewhere.

Yet all spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction, writes Gaston Bachelard. Just slide in a finger. Tip of the tongue. Absurd. The fold swallows the whole. Turns in on itself. Consumes the rest. The seduction of the fold is a promise of ruin.

Face of the body’s

Body. Green curled

And silence. Crevice

Stretched in shadow

Skin. Echoes, echoes.

No more a word than

A fold folds in folds.

And so, beware the monad, the insulated snowglobe (Leibniz - no windows!) — to enter the fold is to leave. To depart from oneself and arrive face to face with the face which has no face on the other side of the glass.

As much, the fold yields light. Perverts the crooks of ploughs and rakes. Splays its moth-light innards — for what it swallows, it swallows in moons — edged in cobweb smoke. Inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition (Bachelard, again). The flex of the fold begets itself. It knows no unknowing, mulls over the undulations of space filling them with nocturnal sand.

Eclipsed by nakedness, the fold hunts on both sides of the net. Wraps its kinks around the meshes of a mirage, catching (but never capturing) the waxing in the wane, the fading in the swell. The problem is not how to finish a fold, writes Deleuze, but how to continue it.

How, indeed. Watch the fingers meander. Reach. Grasp. Pushed or pulled into furls, into blossom. (By whose mind? Whose muscle?) Liberated wanderers. At once, clenched hidey-holes for the timid.

Hooks for pot handles. For portraits. A vase for flowers and a shelf for books. The fold is a mobile dwelling. A nook on crooked wheels. Did you hear them, just? — echoes with clipped wings, the tautology of the cut-off vowel. Skimpy curios coiled up at the feet.

Not so in the case of the voltage fold. Static. And static. The threshold of goosebumpment.

Enter. Charge — current — ignition. Exit.

Go in to go out.

(Bachelard reprise).

Dusk in the ribs.

Trunk in trunk.

Grounded flight.

Circuit snapped.

The fold epileptic.

Moss-tissue over bones of rock-fold. Even the hardest gives — the fold is not a privilege of the yielding. And so it is that the quarry of meditating engines tunnel a path for the seeking flame. Flint and fire — the antithesis of the fold’s rebellion. The spark of its writhing desire. Which way? The fold knows not till it folds. Klee’s living line, taking itself for a walk.

When all is never said and never done, continuation is not a problem but a condition of the skin. A world under cover seen only when draped over a hemless head, a floorcloth face, of absorbed angles and indifferent inflections. Checkerboard order bent around impossible contours of the making of the made, the living of the life. Ceaseless creation of the ceaseless, the fold is not what we wear but what we are.

Thank you for reading further investigations into the fold. And thank you to Jana for the inspiration — this was a transformative piece for me, requiring a quality of attention I am not accustomed to and mode of writing that I have, for a long time, wanted to play with: the surreal poem-essay.

Sitting up in bed. Smoking another too-many-cigarettes. Not sleeping. It occurs to me that there are two kinds of weight to my situation. The first, an accumulation of bread crumbs. Balled and fleshy. The heroic insistence of a heel. This weight knows how to press my thoughts into tight shadows and make lumpish the pillow propped behind my head. 

The second, and this is where I believe eyes have something to do with the whole thing, moves upwards. A lifting weight. A room-sized kite that has no business being as dense as it is and perhaps extending beyond the room to who knows where. The plane of it pleated. That might explain its defiance of gravity but as I have a limited concept of physics (I could never make a paper plane that did not land nose first at my feet) I can't be too sure. 

Folds, folds. That's what I know. Folds pulling ceiling-ward from all sides of the bed, the room, up to the many wheres they desire to inhabit. 

And lump.

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Somebody once said that one must show up everyday. I've never understood that for I am always already here. Never arriving. Never leaving. Simply here. With those two species of weight conspirators of the fact. So, if I am unable to sleep, or prevent myself from rolling another smoke, it makes no difference. Still, I will choose as if choosing were a choice. I am writing now, cigarette between my fingers, not sleeping. The outcome, we will pretend had something to do with my showing up.

I hear a pulsing. Have the folds collected up the rhythms of my existence and ferried them to whatever territories they rumple into? As I contemplate the genesis and the destination of my condition - genesis and destination being possibly one and the same - I am gathering more crumb for the dough. The pillow lump fattens.

And so it is that I wrestle with the reality of my circumstance. In never arriving, I am always arriving. Never leaving is to continually leave. To drag on a cigarette is to stub it out.

This is what I mean when I say what I mean. 

To say what I mean is to take a ferocious bite of a moment's naked belly. Then spit it up. Finger the mass of pulp and saliva. Digestion under the fingernails. 

At once the mass belies itself. Meat greying before the clamp of teeth. I am saying saying. Writing writing. And yet I say nothing. Write nothing. The moment gives nothing.

This egg-goo on my hands. This residue of placenta. Sticky evidence of self-deceit. I am smeared with it. For I have captured what is no longer. I have fabricated a moment. 

Moment moment moment momentmomentmomentm omentmo men tmo me ntm o m e ntm ome ntmomentmomentmomentm m o m e n t momentmo ment m omen t m o m e n t momentmomomentmomentmo ment m omen tm omentmo men tmo me ntm o m e ntm ome tmomentmome ntmomentmomen tmomentm om entm momentmomentmomentmomentmomentmoment mo 

Stop.

I am terrified of falling through the gaps. Of tumbling into the open mouth of a vowel. 

Perhaps to be continued. But probably not.

Poem copyright Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken) 2026

If you caught my recent newsletter, you might remember that I’ve been experimenting with short films. I mean, teeny-tiny films. The film and poem below arrived in conversation. I’ll leave it at that.

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Thanks for reading and watching.

Copyright ©️ Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken) 2026

Who the hell am I?

Who the hell is the cowboy?

These are questions I’ve been sitting with, going to bed with, tossing and turning and getting tangled up in the covers with since I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Especially so since I decided to run No Hay Banda on October 1^st – a two-hour Cabinet even on the film. I’m excited. I’m a little nervous. I am, as ever, drawn toward discomfort. Which is probably why I keep watching the film.

There is no band. And yet we hear a band. This is either a profound statement about the nature of illusion or a very expensive magic trick. Possibly both. Definitely both.

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But Mulholland Drive is not a puzzle with a solution. It is a dream with a dreamer – and like all dreams it knows more than it is willing to say. Directly. It works on the viewer the way the unconscious works on the sleeper: through doubling, through displacement, through the image that is one thing on the surface and something else entirely underneath. And above. And to the left and the right. Club Silencio shows you the trick. Tells us there is no band. The singer begins her goosebumpery. We forget everything we’ve just been told. Fall for the trick again. And again. Every time.

I am not interested in right or wrong theories about the film. I am interested in what it does to people. Cinematically, psychologically, bodily, creatively. The experience of it and how we make sense of the encounter. I want to know what you make of it - and I am genuinely, unreservedly keen to find out. We open with Club Silencio, one question to the room - what just happened? - and we see where two hours of collective dreaming takes. I anticipate no answers but deeper questions.

Bookings are open. Fifteen places. £35. Thursday October 1^st, 7-9pm UK time. Prior viewing of Mulholland Drive is required. If you haven’t seen it, watch it twice.

Learn more and book here.

No Hay Banda is the first event from The Cabinet – a monthly deep-dive into cultural curios. Future Cabinet events include The Mescaline Journals, an exploration of the strange writings-drawings of psychonaut Henri Michaux, and The Watcher, a look at looking through the symbolism of the eye. I created The Cabinet because I know there are others out there – writers, artists, researchers, thinkers, curious folk – who have the same strange coalescence of interests as me. Who want nothing more than to discuss, at length, in depth, experiences we have with the inexplicable. What I bring is several years of intense study and poetic practice (my PhD thesis is all about this territory, surrealist poetry practice and monstrous conjunctions. My supervisor has not yet asked me to leave) and a genuine eagerness to know what others bring so we can feel our way together. Because nothing grows in isolation. Even the unconscious needs company.

There is also the fact of my poor boyfriend. I talk his ear off (a figure of speech, of course. Nobody wants Jeffrey Beaumont to come snooping around, a can of Heineken in his hand. Fuck that shit). About surrealism, Jung, the uncanny and the downright weird. He is interested. And remarkably patient. But every human has their limits. The Cabinet is partly for him and the secure continuation of our happy relationship.

I am also leading a four-week poetry and depth psychology course for The Study ND, starting September 13^th. What The Imagination Knows. Eight poems, Jung underneath everything. Dickinson, Celan, Masnour, Paz, Rilke – poets who followed language to the edge of what it could hold and kept going. If you have ever read a poem and felt something happen before you understood why – this is the course for you. If you have never felt like that, this is also the course for you. Possible more urgently.

On community, on navigating together – during Covid (do you remember Covid? Did it actually even happen?) something unexpected happened on social media. People were kind to one another. People were interested in one another. I know, I was as surprised as anyone and will tell my grandchildren stories of this mythical time. They will believe it, at first, but the stories will be tucked away along with fairies, Father Christmas and the idea that a film could be made that wasn’t a sequel or a re-make. Writers, artists, makers, thinkers found each other and built communities, genuinely generative communities. It was a space that moved at a slower pace (though, admittedly, not so slow enough. However, in comparison...). I learned that we do not navigate alone. Much as we like to think we do, much as we romanticise the solitary figure on some hero’s journey (please, don’t get me started on the hero’s journey. Special thanks goes to George Lucas. An honorary mention for Joseph Campbell).

I have been missing the community. I think I’m finding it again on Substack – notes excluded. Substack is where I come to think slowly. Instagram is where I go to think quickly. Or to not think at all.

The slow reading, the slow making, the comments that turn into conversations that turn into essays. This brings me to Jana of Reimagined Self.

Jana commented on last month’s newsletter about folds (by the way, they are always about folds). About the folds in Remedios Varo’s paintings, the way the garments, the fabric of the environment, undulate and invites us into places within (and without) ourselves. Her comment has not left me alone since. I wrote and asked permission to follow her observations, to follow the folds. So far, they have led me into interesting territory. I have also found Bachelard and Deleuze tucked into creases. Here is a little sneaky peek:

The seduction of the fold is a promise of ruin. Just slide in a finger. Tip of the tongue. Absurd. The fold swallows the whole. Turns in on itself. Consumes the rest.

The fold epileptic.

The essay is going somewhere I did not plan to go. I do not yet know where it ends. That’s how I know it’s going somewhere.

I am also going somewhere. Or rather lingering somewhere. Lurking. Stalking. I’ve been on the hunt for writers and researchers whose work feels like it belongs in Hypnagogic Peacock – Vesica Press’s bi-yearly journal. Reading widely on Substack is part of the hunt. Plans are to keep the journal small, select, carefully curated. I want to be surprised. To be shown something unexpected. I wrote recently about what I’m looking for – Whatever It Takes is probably the most honest thing I’ve written about why the press exists. Recommendations of those who work in the in-between, the hybrid, the unnameable would be greatly appreciated. Even if it’s yourself.

Other things in the works are taking me into new territory.

A video version of my essay Bodies as Alembics: David Lynch and the Alchemical Opus is in production. It’s a slow, slow, slow, slow, slow process (be careful what you wish for, Cassie? OK, point taken). Making a video essay is like writing an essay except the essay can also be wrong about what it looks like. Mine has been wrong about this on several occasions.

Inspired by Lynch in part as well as surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, I have been attempting short films. A minute long. Two minutes. I have no idea what they are but they lend a different quality of attention compared with writing. Over time, I imagine they will become intertwined with my writing. Short nonsense films overlaid with surrealist poetry. It’s just what the world has been missing.

Believe it or not, I do find time to read for pleasure. Right now it’s Wuthering Heights (no, I have not seen the recent abomination adaptation). Stranger than I remembered, more surreal than I gave it credit for (the surrealists, I recently learned, praised the book for its portrayal of l’amour fou, or mad passion). Heathcliff arrives from nowhere, explains nothing, and ruins everyone. I respect this. The resemblance to automatic writing is uncanny.

Automatic writing – the technique I incorporate into my own poetic ‘method’ - is equally as unapologetic as Heathcliff. And as it underlies my approach to writing in general, I have never really written for a reader before. Unless you count myself, which sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t. I write with an understanding that there are autonomous forces at work in the making. But I believe that the creation is a collaboration with those forces rather than a bending to them. I am no conduit. When I imagine a reader, it is that autonomous force, or myself. If those are indeed separate things.

The PhD has introduced a figure into my life that I did not anticipate. The Examiner. A presence that wears a lanyard. It wants a bibliography. My poems don’t come with an appendix. The moors don’t bring citations. There is not an index tattooed on Heathcliff’s ankle. I am beginning to see a pattern. The shadow demands exposition and excessive levels of evidence. The voice whispers – but can you prove it? But where is your source? But what does the literature say?

I have to be on my guard. Else the shadow could sneak in, grow to looming proportions and smother everything else. The Examiner is useful in the thesis. In the Varo essay it would be catastrophic. I am still figuring out where to let it in and when to lock the door.

Do you create with a reader, viewer or critic in mind? Is it dependent on what you are making? Does it inspire you, motivate you or block you?

Another of my obsessions is the creative process and how others understand it and experience it. Let’s get a little conversation going for the sake of my poor boyfriend’s ear.

Always unfolding,

Cassie

Hear me read my anti-diary:

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Copyright Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken) 2026

So, I’ll begin the way these things always begin. Predictable, maybe. Cliche, perhaps. But proven to be effective in its simplicity...

It’s about time I introduced myself.

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But what to say? Introducing oneself becomes a complex task when you really start to think about it. Either that or I’m making it more complicated than it should be. My party trick: constitutionally incapable of doing things the sensible way. That I decided to begin a small press during the second year of a PhD stands as evidence of the fact.

I could tell you I am a 45-year-old woman from England with a body built from bread, nicotine and fingernails. Or that I am a child of the year of the monkey with green eyes and an Aries moon. A feeling-type intuitive who is lamenting the thievery of the em-dash and the obvious reduction of milk in a certain Cadbury’s chocolate bar.

But the truth is, I don’t know who I am (who really knows themselves?). If writing poetry has taught me anything, it’s that I am never a steady self, frequently surprising myself with myself in equal measures of delight and horror. Of course this is true of many (all?) of us. Still, it doesn’t solve the dilemma of how to introduce myself to you. To anyone.

Already my intention folds in on itself.

I shall, instead, introduce what I do. I, like my intentions, fold.

The various activities I partake in (except brushing my teeth, actively avoiding calling my dad on the phone, begrudgingly attending to housework and any other such everyday mundanity — or maybe they can be included) each feed into the others. The poetry folds into the PhD. The PhD folds into the press, which folds into the editorial work. This folds into the courses I facilitate. And they fold back into the PhD, which folds into my writing, which is where the whole mass of folds began. Folds, folds, folds in a blanket of chaos. Pull any thread and you get it all. This is either a very coherent way to live or an elaborate excuse for not being able to stop, presumably to avoid cleaning. Possibly both.

The Folds

My PhD is in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. I am two years in, which feels, predominantly, like finally beginning to know what I’m doing. My thesis explores the alchemical structure of surrealist automatism and was borne of my intense fascination with the transformative effects of surrealist writing. The claim makes complete sense to me and requires a lot of explaining to everyone else, which is probably what a PhD is for. To add further complexity to the project, I am writing it in a hybridity of surreal-scholarly language on the basis that the two modes are not at odds but complementary the way that the wrong answer and the right question are complementary.

This slippery language will not be contained and is leaking out all over the place — into how I edit, what I aim to publish, what I want to talk about at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning with people I’ve never met. This is what I mean by fold. The poetry, the thesis, the editorial instinct, the search for work that defies classification (more on this next) are not separate things I am doing. They are the same thing approached from different angles.

Which is why, in the middle of a PhD, I launched a press.

Vesica Press exists for work, like mine, that lives in the overlap between things — between disciplines, between genres. The poem that is also a piece of critical thinking; the essay that can only be a memoir; the research that requires and thus produces its own form. I call it vesical work, from the vesica piscis, the eggy space made when two circles overlap. (I did not coin vesica piscis. I merely borrowed it and refuse to give it back.) The journal, Hypnagogic Peacock, opens for submission in September and I created a Discord community for people making this kind of work – or trying to, or want to try. For those who are not sure what exactly it is they are doing but are sure it’s doing something. Consider this an invitation.

My editorial practice — Soror Mystica — came from the same place. I am genuinely interested in manuscripts that have gone somewhere unexpected, that have exceeded their own container, that know more than their maker does. Following an alchemical structure, Soror Mystica holds a mirror to the work and asks what is this? What is it doing? What does it want to be?

The Unsayable and The Cabinet house courses that stem from the same impulse again. What the Imagination Knows, Flea Markets of the Unconscious, No Hay Banda bring the arts, depth psychology and practice together to explore ways of being that everyone has access to. I want to be in a room with people discovering that together.

And then there is Univocity Drift, a collective project with and , where we explore complex psychology after Jung – theory, culture, dreams, nonsense (my favourite part and also, in my estimation, the part that makes the most sense!). I like to think I bring my practice as a weird writer/ writer of the weird to the table.

Creatively (if I can separate creativity from anything), I am working on an extended surrealist prose piece — automatic, bodily, slightly philosophical, uncertain of its own genre, as all the most exciting things are. I might share pieces of it here as it develops. Or I might not. The fold has its own logic. As for poetry, I haven’t shared much here lately. But I am writing. Poetry is the mother of folds. Without it I would not be the unstable self I have come to embrace.

Of course, there’s copious amounts of reading involved in all of this. Here’s a run-down of what I’ve been feeding on:

Clarice Lispector — Água Viva — not a novel, not an essay, not quite anything with a name. Doing something to my sense of what prose is allowed to do that I am still processing.

Claude Cahun — Disavowals — again, always. I have written a long essay about the opening prelude as a set of editorial selection criteria. The chief criterion: I cannot name it.

Gilles Deleuze — The Logic of Sense — slowly, with a pencil, in the spirit of someone following a conversation in a language they almost speak. Occasionally I understand a sentence completely. I have learned not to trust this feeling.

Meaning and Wear — fashion writing that burns a hole in the fabric and peeks through. Liucija uses clothing, skateboarding, a Lynch scene, an Oura ring, and occasionally Bryan Johnson’s biohacking regime as ways into philosophy, temporality and the strangeness of everyday life. The writing is sharp, funny and digressive in the best possible way – it arrives somewhere without ever appearing to be heading there. Not what you expect fashion writing to be. Better.

Circul & Eas — Long-form philosophical essays on art, care, creativity and what it means to be human together. Matt starts with a deceptively simple provocation — a common saying, a phrase we take for granted — and follows it until it has unraveled into Marx, colonialism, Proudhon and the enclosure of the commons. The thinking happens in the writing, which means the reader is genuinely along for the ride.

Folding Forward

I aim to send one of these a month. A round-up of what I’ve been making, reading, watching, encountering, thinking about. Things that are a little off kilter, out of their lane, formally unusual or just genuinely strange. The kind of things that fold into each other in ways I can never plan.

In the meantime, a word about what this place — Origami Chicken — is. Or what I think it is. Poems; essays on culture, the arts, consciousness and the strange; experimental work that only comes out when the rational part of the mind has given up and gone to bed; the development of random thoughts that keep me awake at night as I try to connect the dots - so many dots. (Someone should probably stop me). Or is it simply a chicken made of paper, unfolding into something I have not decided yet. I will let you know when I know. Or I won’t and we’ll just have to find out at the same time.

If that sounds like something you want in your inbox — stay. If you were expecting something more conventional, I cannot help you, but I know someone who can. Her name is not me.

Always unfolding,

Cassie

Thumbnail image: Bladerunner, 1982

I woke with the uncanny residue dreams leave. Something had happened. Something that mattered. It was already going.

I did not interpret the dream. I never do.

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Which is not to say the temptation isn’t there, or that the dream doesn’t offer plenty to work with. Freud would not, I think, need very long with the sausages. Jung would take longer, and go further—a devouring mouth, a feeding figure, Cronos at the kitchen table; the chair eating before it can be eaten, the whole scene one short step from a swallowed god.

Both readings are available. Both are, in their way, perfectly plausible. And both, I suggest, are entirely beside the point of what actually happened, which is that a chair ate some sausages and I was floating. As a Jungian scholar, I am perhaps expected to pursue exactly what that means. I find, increasingly, that I don’t want to.

This puts me at odds with a very long tradition.

Dreams have been interpreted for as long as people have had them, which is to say, as long as there have been people. Trained interpreters in ancient Mesopotamia decoded them as divine messages. When the sick awoke from sleep in Egyptian dream temples, priests would read what arrived. The Greeks consulted oracles. The Old Testament is full of dreams that demanded interpretation: Joseph and his brothers, Pharaoh and his cows. For most of human history, the dream has been understood as a communication – from god, from the unconscious, from the dead, from the future—and the interpreter’s task has been to find out what on earth they’re saying. It has always been a profession with job security.1

Freud gave this impulse its most systematic modern form. In Interpretation of Dreams,2 he argued that the dream speaks in code. Its impossible content is a disguise, censored material of the unconscious, smuggled past a sleeping censor. Decryption is the work: find the key, read the message, bring Oedipus into the light. Freud was very good at finding Oedipus. He found him more or less everywhere.

Jung’s position is almost the opposite, while arriving at the same destination by a different road. The dream is not hiding anything. It speaks plainly, in its own native language—a language of image and symbol the modern waking mind, with all its rationality, has lost fluency in.3 Learn the grammar and the meaning becomes available.

Freud’s unconscious lies. Jung’s unconscious is honest but speaks a forgotten language. Both, however, assume the same thing: the dream is for something. It is a vehicle. Somewhere inside it, among the strange walls and in the kitchen with sausage-munching chairs, is a message and the interpreter’s job is to take delivery.

I want to question the delivery, not the postman.

In waking life, a chair is for sitting.

This seems obvious—and it is also, if you pause and think for but a moment, a remarkable reduction. A chair has a unique whorl to its grain, a particular relationship to the light in the room at four in the afternoon when the curtains are pulled back just so. It has a slight wobble in the back left leg that you have grown accustomed to with equal irritation and affection. When your face is close to the upholstery, there is a smell, a mustiness that evokes its history. Your history. An accumulated memory, perhaps from childhood where it always sat in that corner of that room. You may have grown fond of the chair in a way that has nothing to do with sitting. The chair has character. Considerably more, in some cases, than the people who sit in it.

And yet: it is a chair for sitting. The grain, the wobble, the memory, the character—all of those idiosyncrasies exist alongside function, and the chair’s function is what organises your relationship to it. The rest is noticed but it is secondary because there are things to do and the chair’s job, in a world of things to do, is to be sat on.

Henri Bergson noticed this kind of filtering of perception more broadly. We perceive not everything that is there but what we need to act on. The rest arrives without consequence. It comes in…nothing much follows.4 No skullduggery is at play. The filter is not dishonest. It’s the price of being able to function at all.

In the dream, the filter lifts.

And a chair—no longer required to be useful—can be anything. Apparently, sometimes, it is an offal-gobbling orifice.

The same logic applies to a floating body.

A human body, in waking life, is for walking, running, navigating—for moving through a world that requires it stay, for the most part, on the ground. A world in which our bodies might suddenly float would be a world impossible to plan in, build in, rely on. Gravity is not a rule imposed on the body from outside—it is part of the package that makes the world usable to us at all.5

In the dream, the package is not required. And the body—freed from the requirement that it remain navigable—can float. My feet were inches from the floor. Not because I willed it but because nothing was requiring otherwise. Gravity, it turns out, is not a principle but a request.

Not all dreams are as fantastically impossible as this.

Last night I dreamed of a blue dress. Hanging in a wardrobe. That is all.

In the day to day. A blue dress in a wardrobe would be filed immediately. It means something—it belongs to someone, it’s to be worn at a party, it connects to a memory—or it means nothing and is dismissed. The meaning-filter requires that things either connect to the ongoing narrative or be set aside as insignificant. The blue dress in the wardrobe in the dream was neither. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t connect to anything. It simply was—completely, excessively, without the requirement to signify. The meaning-filter lifts alongside the utility-filter, and what remains is a dress in a wardrobe that is blue, more present than any waking dress has cause to be.

But, at the same time, it didn’t mean nothing. I was afraid. Rooted on the spot afraid. Couldn’t shake the dream for hours afraid.

Not afraid of anything the blue dress in a wardrobe did, or suggested, or might mean. The fear arrived with it. Part of the package. As inseparable from the image as blue was from the dress’s fabric. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was only the blue, the dress, the wardrobe, the hanging, the fear.

A Jungian might say: this is the numinosity of the symbolic encounter.6 The dress exceeds any meaning you can pin to it, which makes it a message from the unconscious.7 The fear is a signal—an indicator that something significant is pressing towards consciousness. Find out what the blue dress hanging in a wardrobe means and the source of the fear will be revealed, the fear will be resolved (presumably the blue dress will then be less blue).

Perhaps. But I want to suggest something else. Perhaps the fear is not a response. Perhaps its another thing in the dream insofar as the blue dress is a thing in the dream. In waking life, the filter that governs emotional coherence—the requirement that feelings attach appropriately to their objects, that fear have a cause, that emotions connect to meaning—operates alongside the filters of utility and meaning. In the dream, it lifts too. And what becomes possible is the impossible configuration: fear and a blue dress and a wardrobe, arriving together in one undivided event. None causing the others. None pointing beyond itself.

Some might say: then dreams are simply random. Noise. The sleeping brain firing without aim.

I don’t think so. Not random—not when the fear is that specific, not when the dress is that particular shade of blue, not when the wardrobe stands exactly as it stands. But not meaningful in the interpretive sense either. Not carrying a message from beyond or marking an X on the spot of some buried treasure or waiting to be decoded.

Something else entirely. Experience freed from the requirement that things mean what they should mean, that emotions attach where they should attach, that the world cohere into something navigable and useful and significant. The dream gives us the full monty—objects, emotions, configurations—without the filters that govern which can exist alongside which.

The dream is a living of the impossible. We wake from it with something we cannot quite name and cannot quite lose. Not knowledge. Not meaning. The residue of having been, briefly, in a world where the filters were switched to ‘off’. Where a chair is everything it could be. Where fear does not need permission. Where blue is just blue, completely, excessively, without apology.

I don’t interpret my dreams. I live them. And I let them live me.

Cassie Fielding is the Origami Chicken, a poet, editor and educator who has spent considerable time in the company of Jung, the surrealists and an unreliable unconscious. She is completing a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where she has been known to take alchemy seriously. She is the founding editor of Vesica Press and Hypnagogic Peacock journal, and runs Soror Mystica, an independent editorial and educational practice. She does not interpret her dreams.

*This essay works best if you know Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead and Fire Walk With Me. If you don't, consider this an invitation, but be warned—spoilers abound.

*The photographs in this essay are my own, taken at the David Lynch: Up In Flames exhibition, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2026, and Speculum Alchemiae, Prague, 2026. Some contain nudity and explicit imagery. Lynch did not flinch. Neither, I hope, will you.

Bodies as Alembics: David Lynch and the Alchemical Opus

Prague keeps its secrets in the lower registers. The baroque of the Charles Bridge, the astronomical clock, though now more a choke point for the shuffling masses, a marking of time for cameras, retain their gothic imposition and cosmic reckoning. But it’s in the narrow streets that turn without warning, in the weight of the air in certain doorways that Prague’s secrets whisper. There’s a sense that the city has been conducting clandestine experiments for centuries that it has not yet finished and does not intend to stop. Rudolf II kept his alchemists here. The golem waits under the Old Jewish Cemetery. The city knows things it is not telling.

I had come for David Lynch.

The David Lynch: Up In Flames exhibit was showing at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Nestled in among humble apartment blocks, off a high street lined with grocery shops and bus stops, littered with locals going about their everyday business, the centre is strangely at home in the mundane, alive as the ornate fabric of Prague’s old town. The perfect spot for Lynch, whose obsession with the mundanity of life is equally matched by his propensity for the strange, the eerie and the transcendent. A 45-minute walk in the snow to reach it seemed fittingly hard-won.

I moved through Lynch’s work—paintings, prints, short films sensitively curated and arranged—with quiet absorption. Noting, not yet knowing.

A pencil sketch. Dogs and humans in an orgy of bestiality. Perhaps I should have recoiled. Turned my head in disgust at Lynch’s depravity. Instead, I laughed. Genuinely and with unconsidered delight. The audacity of the image. The absolute commitment. The human and animal together in creaturely desire, preceding every category the civilised mind imposes on it. Pure appetite. Shameless. And yet…

Indulging on a manicured lawn, in front of an ordinary and respectable enough house, these people, these pets, they might be our neighbours. The human may have been animaled but, at once, the wild had been domesticated. This union of unlike natures finds itself in the alchemical coniunctio—the dissolution of the boundary that keeps unlikeness apart.

Another room. Another unsettling image. A wall of images. Disfigured bodies. Missing limbs. Limbs where heads should be. Feet for spines. Bodies organised around absences. Photographs, explicitly sexual. Voyeuristic in a way that made me watch my own looking, a complicity both demanded and implicated. These were figures the world had decided had no right to desire. To be desired. And yet here they were—fully alive in their wanting, flesh insisting on itself regardless of its form. Seeking union with themselves through themselves. Their own beastliness turned inwards. Not the animal in the human but the human refusing to be tamed by what the world considers acceptable flesh. Their wanting no less human for its form but more so. More insistent. More fervent. Reaching towards gratification from within bodies the world decided should not reach at all.

I was looking into the hidden contents of something—not Lynch’s, but ours. The full range of what we contain. The monsters in us all, attracting as they repel. What struck me most was the sheer freedom of the figures. A freedom that comes not from escape but through the limitations of our own nature.

And then I found her. Elongated past the point of anatomy. Limbs feeding back into the body, the flesh suggesting both consumption and gestation. Existing in a state before the body had been fully organised, or after organisation had broken down. Becoming and unbecoming. Dissolving back into what preceded her or refined towards something not yet nameable? The question stayed open. I didn’t want to close it.

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The Alembic: The Body as Vessel

The following day, I visited Speculum Alchemiae—a real alchemical laboratory, uncovered beneath a Renaissance house in the old town, unchanged since the sixteenth century. I descended. The space was dark, low, filled with the weight of shadowy ghosts, dense with things that had been sealed and slowly transformed over unimaginable time. On the stone floor were original glass vessels with rounded bellies and long necks curving away from themselves and back again—alembics. The same impossible elongation, the same logic of the limb feeding back into the body, that I had seen in the gallery the day before in who I had come to call The Albedo Woman.

The body as vessel. The vessel as body. The gold always in the substance that looks least likely to hold it.

Underground, the laboratory opened into room after room—different spaces for different operations, each one designed for a specific stage of the opus that took years, lifetimes, to complete. I revised my idea of the alchemists entirely. I had imagined careful men—attentive, methodical, somewhere between scientist and mystic. The space suggested something else: renegades. People who had chosen to work with forces that could kill them—the fumes, the unstable compounds, mercury accumulating in the body year after year—and had continued regardless. The dedication was not careful. It was absolute. The task, overwhelming in its ambition: the metamorphosis of matter itself, the transformation of the soul, the creation of something impossible, at any cost.

Returning to the streets of Prague with my PhD thesis working in me—surrealism and alchemy, the connections I had been following for several years—and now this: the bodies in the gallery and the vessels in the laboratory, The Albedo Woman and the alembic, all one and the same. The city held it all without comment. Prague has seen stranger experiments than mine.

My visit had—and I only understood this slowly over the weeks that followed—changed the way I connected with Lynch’s work. This wasn’t merely new information collected and tucked neatly into existing schema, but a new way of seeing. The films I had watched many times were no longer the same films—the alchemical lens that Prague had refined, without asking permission, had been placed like new corneas over my eyes.

Lynch, as far as I’m aware, didn’t study alchemy. But his commitment to ‘catching ideas’, to following intuition into the depths of consciousness, and bringing back what lives in the darkness, put him in contact with something essential, something archetypal. The alchemical resonances in Lynch arrive the way they arrive in dreams: not from the library but from the same creative ground the alchemists were working with.

If Lynch’s art is alchemically resonant, then what it is showing us, again and again, is something about ourselves, as the sealed vessels that we are and what we carry in the dark. About what we might be in the process of becoming.

Lynch’s work lives in the Sol Niger—the Black Sun of the alchemical tradition. Unlike the sun as we ordinarily encounter it, external, illuminating, casting light on a world held at a safe distance. The Black Sun is internal. Radiating from within the sealed vessel, generating its own heat, processing in its own darkness. It does not illuminate. It transforms. Carl Jung understood the Black Sun as the symbol that the alchemical process has truly begun: the substance no longer dependent on an external flame because the internal fire had been lit.

A conjunction of darkness and light, the Black Sun feels unnatural, monstrous—the quality that saturated the Prague exhibition. The disfigured bodies, charged by the heat of their sealed desires. However, they are not the aberrations they first appear to be but inevitable products of the internal flame. The Black Sun is the condition that generates the uncanny otherness we prefer not to see.

But see it we shall. And Lynch makes sure of it. Even as we avert our eyes, we inhabit the Black Sun’s realm. In the thoughts and feelings that happens to us, undirected, processing what proceeds in us without our knowledge or consent. Lynch does not present this as pathology but as a call to the work. Whether we answer or not is the difference between self-knowledge and self-destruction.

The Caput Mortuum: The Sealed Vessel and the Oracular Head

Embodying the Black Sun, a painting from the exhibit: Man Thinking Alone. Internally lit, a spherical body on rudimentary legs, a head impaled upon one of its appendages. From it, tethered by a stem, the word floats: Thinking. Not thinking as we usually picture it, as we might prefer it, directed and purposeful, but thought as bodily, as pressure, produced from inside a sealed vessel without the head’s consent. The words Man and Alone, untethered, suggest that bodily thinking has no use of concepts the directing mind would impose upon it. It does not know it is a man. It does not know it is alone. It simply processes—the thinking happening in the body before identity can claim it.

This is the thinking that happens before we know we are thinking. The insight at 3am that belongs to no one, that the directing mind—if it were still in charge—would immediately organise into narrative, into the story of the man who is alone with his thoughts. But the head is not in charge. The body processes its own darkness without the concepts that would make it bearable or meaningful or mine. Lynch shows it as the condition of anyone whose directing head has been removed from the chain of command. MAN. THINKING. ALONE. Not a diagnosis. A recognition—and perhaps a relief. The thinking was never only yours.

The alchemical tradition has a name for this: the caput mortuum. The Dead Head. Depth psychologists von Franz, Hillman and Jung each return to this image. For von Franz, the skull is the alembic itself—the vessel and the contents indistinguishable, thinking happening inside the sealed chamber of bone. For Hillman, the decapitation is the condition of soul-making—the heroic, goal-directed head removed for psyche to attend to its own logic. For Jung, the severed head is oracular—the Dead Head as concentrated wisdom, the head that knows more after separation from the body.

Eraserhead is a translation of the Dead Head. Made over five years in the darkness of Lynch’s own circumstances. Through the industrial wasteland, the perpetual night, Henry Spencer exists the way the Man Thinking Alone exists: sealed, internally processing, thinking as bodily weather rather than directed cognition. And in the dream at Eraserhead’s centre—Henry’s head falling from his body, landing in the industrial mud, retrieved and refashioned into eraser material—the head as the alembic made literal. Henry did not choose. The Dead Head did not ask permission. It simply proceeded.

The Dead Head is not only Henry’s fate. It is the condition of anyone whose heroic head has been removed—by grief, by failure, by the simple exhaustion of having directed for too long without rest. The head falls. Something new, something alien, emerges. The opus requires the removal of the directing consciousness so what the vessel contains can finally be worked with.

Major Briggs knows. In Twin Peaks: The Return, his severed head appears floating in the darkness, still speaking. The Dead Head in Jung’s oracular aspect, the concentrated knowing continuing after the body has gone. But Briggs is more than a severed head. His body, found years after his disappearance and perfectly, impossibly preserved, had been sealed and processing in the dark for decades. Inside it, a gold ring. The ring as the lapis—the alchemical gold. The body had been working without interruption, without directed thought, slowly distilling the substance it contained. Briggs did not decay. He distilled. What we carry in the dark for years knows something we don’t. The gold within, unknown until the vessel is opened. The question for us is not whether this is happening. It is always happening. The question is whether we can trust the process enough to accept it.

To understand quite what Briggs had been carrying—what all of Lynch’s vessels have been carrying—we must go back further. To the origin of the duality that entered the world and has been working in the vessels ever since.

The Beginning: The Bomb and the Separatio

Episode 8 in Twin Peaks: The Return has no equivalent in television history. A nuclear explosion not depicted but inhabited. On 16 July 1945, at White Sands, New Mexico, the Trinity test detonated the first atomic bomb: the first splitting of the atom, the first moment in human history at which the binding energy of matter was forcibly released. Lynch takes us inside the detonation: the fireball expanding in slow motion, the shock wave moving through matter, the cloud forming and reforming in patterns that are simultaneously cosmic and cellular. It is nine minutes of calcinatio—the alchemical burning— the most violent of the operations, the combustion that reduces everything to ash, the moment of maximum heat at which the fixed forms are destroyed and volatile essences released. Episode 8 is the experience of the operation at full force.

The burning is not the beginning of the alchemical process but the start of transformation. The prima materia—original matter—must be burned before it can be worked with. Fixed forms, crusted assumptions, the calcified structures that prevent us from becoming. The burning does not destroy—it frees.

The bomb is not only calcinatio. It is separatio—the forcible splitting of what was unified into its constituent poles, the binding energy of the unified form released in a single violent instant. The atom divided. Duality loosed into the world. From the cloud of the explosion something emerges: a vast dark presence and within it, BOB—the shadow released.

Lynch is diagnosing an age. Not only a fictional event in a fictional world but the condition of the world that the bomb inaugurated. We are the vessels that received the duality. We are the dreamers of the dream. The splitting did not only happen in New Mexico in 1945. It happened in us—in the structure of the world we have been living in ever since, in the duality that organises how we understand ourselves and each other and the forces we cannot name.

The irony is that The Return was Lynch’s last major work. He spent his entire opus circling this origin without naming it, and then at the end went back to the beginning of it all. The bomb that splits the world appears in The Return as the source of the duality that structures every film Lynch ever made. But it was always there. In Eraserhead’s wasteland—the post-industrial landscape of a world already transformed by what the bomb initiated. In Henry’s apartment, a picture on the wall: a mushroom cloud. Henry’s hair, too, rises from his head: the bomb written into the body of the man who did not know he was carrying it.

Duality is everywhere in Lynch. The Black Lodge and the White Lodge. BOB and Cooper. Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla. Every Lynch film is a vessel containing the duality. Every vessel is the opus attempting to work with what the splitting produced.

The bomb asks—what do you do with the duality once it has been released? You cannot put it back. You cannot resolve it. You can only be the vessel that holds it and wait for what the process will yield.

The Solutio: The White of the Eye

Ashen figures—grey with soot, the residue of the combustion—move through a town in the aftermath of the Trinity test. The Woodsmen. They are what remains after the fire: the matter that is not inert but the agent of the next operation.

Gotta light? The question is comic. It is also precise. Do you have the fire? The alchemical fire that initiates the next operation. The Woodsmen are not bringing the fire. They are asking whether the vessels they encounter are prepared to bring their own. The repetition of the question is itself the incantation: are you ready to begin your own combustion?

(The same invitation BOB extends throughout Twin Peaks—‘Fire, walk with me’. The alchemical question in its most seductive and most dangerous form. The difference is the Woodsman asks, he gives us a chance to comply. BOB simply assumes the answer is yes, we are too far gone already.)

One of the Woodsmen reaches a radio station. His voice goes out across the airwaves, into every vessel tuned to receive it. His hands seek out the skulls of the townsfolk, crushing them to pulp. The incantation he speaks is the most precisely alchemical passage in Lynch’s entire work.

This is the water.

And this is the well.

Drink full and descend.

The horse is the white of the eye

and dark within.

This is the water—the solutio, the dissolving medium. Certainties, the managed surface, the ordinary life arranged just as we intend, now burned up, must be washed away. The coat of ashes is dissolved to reveal what lies beneath.

And this is the well—the vessel, the contained depth, the unconscious from which the water is drawn and into which the substance descends. In Lynch's world — and in ours — the substance is always the same: what we carry in the dark, what the split released into us, what the vessel processes.

Drink full and descend—not a warning, an instruction. To take in the full substance without managing the dose, without flinching from what the well contains. To descend without the protection of ironic distance or the comfort of interpretation.

The horse is the white of the eye and dark within—the albedo image. The albedo is the alchemical stage of whitening that follows the dissolving and apparent purification. Identity has been clarified—we now know who we are. Or do we? The alchemists warned against this state: do not mistake the whiteness for the gold. The shadow is still in the vessel, duality concealed.

The white horse Sarah Palmer sees in her kitchen—unbidden, impossible—is the same horse. And in the Red Room, appearing again: white, still, at the threshold between worlds. The horse is the white of the eye. The eye rolls back. The white surface faces outwards, the dark pupil disappearing from view. The eye now looking into the vessel, to the dark within. The pale horse of death, symbolic death, the conscious mind releasing its grip. The townsfolk drop where they stand. The well lives behind our own eyes.

In Blue Velvet, Lynch already named the well. In Dreams, Roy Orbison sings over the darkest scene in the film: the well is always there, in the night when eyes turn towards the shadows within and we drink; we drink, in dreams.

The instruction to descend is also Lynch’s to us as viewers. Drink full and descend. Do not manage the encounter. Do not watch from the safety of distance. Enter the well and let the water receive you.

The Fermentation: Garmonbozia and the Age of Putrefactio

In the wake of the bomb, the world ferments. The combustion split the world in 1945 and the substance has been breaking down ever since—slowly, invisibly. This is putrefactio—the fermentation—and it takes its time. When the Woodsmen arrived it was 1956, eleven years into the process.

A love-struck teenager lies on her bed listening to the radio. The Woodsman’s spell lulls her to sleep. A creature that belongs to no taxonomy crawls through her window. Frog and moth conjoined into a monstrous, hybrid thing. It approaches the girl’s mouth and enters. She does not wake. She has only ever known the world as split, too young to have witnessed the explosion. But fermentation reaches everyone eventually—through the night, through the open mouth of sleep. The frog-moth, the offspring, matured in the long-rotting of the post-bomb world, ready to enter the vessel, the next stage of its becoming.

The Woodsmen appear again in The Return—chronologically sixty years later—still ashen, still at the threshold of the other-world. The effects of the split linger. The ferment proceeds. The figures are its permanent yet liminal presence in Lynch’s world and in ours.

We do not choose our frog-moths . The otherness we refuse to see arrives in the dark, when the conscious mind is suspended and the forms that protected us have been sufficiently broken down. What we will become, what we will create, what we are, is not yet known.

What the fermentation produces, during the stage the alchemists called the yellowing, Twin Peak’s Lodge entities call garmonbozia. Creamed corn vomited up as foodstuff for the gods of Twin Peaks’ inner realm. Pain and sorrow, transmuted into that which is consumed, which nourishes the process. This is Lynch at his most alchemical: the most base, most human, most unbearable of substances—suffering—revealed as the ferment that feeds the opus. BOB consuming garmonbozia is the alchemical fire consuming the ferment—the process feeding itself from its own dissolution.

Garmonbozia was always present in Lynch’s work. In Eraserhead, the baby’s innards—exposed, visceral, disturbingly organic—ooze with the quality of creamed corn: the suffering made visible, tangible, consumable. Henry’s pain and fear, fermenting inside the vessel of the baby, producing what Twin Peaks will later name.

We feed on it, too. The suffering of our duality has been fermenting in us for eighty years. We are the ferment building. Not waste—our suffering is not in vain—but the necessary work without which nothing new can come to pass.

Fire Walk With Me is a fermentation film. The most unbearable of Lynch’s works precisely because it does not manage the ferment. It inhabits it. Laura Palmer in her final hours is the substance at the point of its most extreme breaking down: the vessel at maximum pressure, suffering at maximum concentration, the ferment reaching the point at which it must either destroy the vessel entirely or produce something from its own dissolution. Laura chooses the ring. She chooses to live her suffering. At the close of the film, the angel is the next phase breaking through—the first warmth after the darkest cold, the yellow of garmonbozia transformed into the yellow of a new day. Laura has transmuted her suffering into gold. Laura is the One.

If Fire Walk With Me is the fermentation film in image, Inland Empire is the fermentation as form. Suffering does not only apply to the characters but the film's own coherence—its narrative logic, its ability to stabilise identity, its formal structures that would normally protect us as viewers from the fermentation by maintaining the boundary between film and us. Narratives dissolve and reform without resolution. Identities bleed into one another. Laura Dern's character—or characters, since the film refuses to stabilise her—does not watch the fermentation. She undergoes it. And the film's own formal dissolution means the viewer undergoes it too. The ferment has spilled into the vessel of the cinema itself.

The Pelican Vessel: Damn Fine Coffee

After all of this—the bomb, the crushed skulls, the frog-moth, the decades of fermentation—coffee.

Cooper has been drinking black coffee as if his life depends on it (and maybe it does). Every diner, every roadside stop, every damn fine coffee delivered with the conviction of a man who has never doubted that this particular darkness is worth returning to daily. Black as midnight on a moonless night. Its bitterness carries a hint of the ferment—the first intimation of the substance beneath the surface, tasted but not yet reached, experienced as mystery rather than horror. The coffee is the solvent: the substance taken in daily that keeps the surface permeable, that loosens the fixed conscious attitude, and enables the capacity for descent. Cooper does not consciously know this. He experiences coffee as pleasure, as ritual but also as the intuitive recognition of something essential. The mystery calls and he answers it every morning with a raised cup.

The credits roll at the Twin Peaks season two finale. Cooper has descended into the Red Room. What he finds there has broken him—or broken open what was sealed inside him. On the table, a cup of black coffee. And on the surface of the coffee, a vision of Laura’s face, looking up from the darkness.

Laura’s coffee-bound face indicates that the solvent has finally done enough of its work. She was always in the darkness and the object of Cooper’s investigation. She is the gold—the garmonbozia distilled, the substance the daily dose of the dissolving agent (Agent?) was always moving toward. Cooper has been preparing for this encounter, one cup at a time. But he did not know what he was preparing for. That is what mystery is: the unconscious pressing through from beneath the surface of identity.

The pelican vessel—the alembic whose neck curves back into its own belly, circulating the substance through itself repeatedly—is the most sacred of the alchemical instruments: the instrument of repeated descent. Cooper is the pelican vessel. Each cup of the solvent taken in, circulated through the body that is also the alembic, the surface gradually dissolved, the capacity for descent maintained and deepened. The descent is not always a single event. It is a practice of gradual dissolution—the solvent passing through the vessel again and again, each pass softening the surface identity further, each morning producing a Cooper more capable of receiving what the darkness always contained.

But what lies beneath the surface is always more terrifying and more our own than we had believed. Lynch knows this. He shows us the mystery first and then he shows us what the mystery costs. As we will see, not all are willing to pay the piper.

The pelican vessel sounds suspiciously like an image we have already encountered in Lynch’s visual world. The Albedo Woman—the figure whose limbs feed back into her own body. The human figure as the alchemical instrument of self-circulation, the body processing its own contents by feeding them back through itself. She was always the essay’s subject. Standing in front of her in Prague I did not want to close the question she opened because the question is the operation: the substance passing through itself, each revolution dissolving the surface further, the pelican vessel that is also a body that is also, finally, what the darkness always contained.

In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed ear in the grass and leans in to look. He does not have to. Jeffrey leans in because the mystery calls. What he finds—Frank Booth, Dorothy Vallens, his own desire moving toward both—is far more terrifying and far more his own than he could have imagined. As it always is. The solvent has dissolved the surface and the ferment is there, exactly where it was always hiding.

Three Degrees: The Cup, The Ear, The Ring

The pelican vessel is available to all of us—the daily return to the same operation, the same darkness, the same dissolution, each pass softening the surface further. But the pelican vessel demands more than the descent into mystery. It demands that when the ferment becomes visible, you do not reach for restoration, for the surface. Lynch shows us three figures who choose the solvent. Only one lets it do its full work.

By the time Cooper reaches the Red Room he has been dissolving for some time, each coffee taking him closer to what lies in the darkness. But at the crucial moment Cooper reaches for restoration rather than reception. He tells Laura not to take the ring. He goes back in time to save her—to undo the suffering. He is trying to run the pelican vessel backwards. Laura screams. The cosmos refuses. The solvent cannot be undone no matter how many times we might try. The surface cannot be restored and so the process repeats—what year is it?

Jeffrey enters the darkness through the mystery of the severed ear. You’re just like me, Frank tells him. He is not wrong. Jeffrey has found what the ferment contains. The pelican vessel demands that he now complete the circulation—return to himself with what the dissolution has revealed, sit with the recognition, let the darkness alter what he is.

Instead, Jeffrey shoots Frank in the head. The heroic, goal-directed head reasserts itself. The shadow is not integrated—it is eliminated. The surface is seemingly restored: Sandy, sunshine, the white picket fence. And at the window a robin arrives—the symbol of love Sandy dreamed of, the sign that the good has returned. But the robin is mechanical. Its movements are wrong. And it is consuming a bug—a creature of the underworld. The ferment Jeffrey could not accept is still active, relocated into the smallest possible domestic vessel. The solvent’s work undone by the bullet. The surface, a fragile veneer. The work, unfinished.

Laura does not restore the surface. She has never had one—not in the way Cooper and Jeffrey do. She has been contending with what the coffee only hints at, flitting between her two sides, the homecoming queen and the girl who walks with fire. When she takes the ring she is not making a new choice. She is completing a process she has been inside all along—wedding the suffering, the otherness, the ferment, choosing to let it do what it needs to do rather than continue battling between the two sides of what she is. The angel at the close of Fire Walk with Me is not the restoration of the girl before the darkness entered. It is what the darkness produces when it is finally allowed to complete its work. The pelican vessel’s full circulation. Nothing withheld.

Three degrees of the same encounter with the ferment. The question is not which solvent we choose. It is whether, when the surface has dissolved and the ferment becomes visible, we can resist the impulse to shoot it. Whether we can resist the impulse to run the vessel backwards. Whether we are willing to receive what the darkness always contained.

Damn fine coffee. The lapis in a cup.

Rubedo: The Gold That Burns

The red curtains have always been understood as theatre. The staging of the dream, the backdrop of illusion, the velvet that announces: what you are about to see is not real. Pull them back and find the mechanism behind the magic. This is the conventional reading. It is not wrong. It is incomplete.

The red curtains are the rubedo.

In alchemy, the rubedo is the final reddening—the crimson that the substance takes on when the opus has reached its most concentrated expression. Not the completion of the work but the work at its most alive: the alchemical gold is not inert metal but living fire, the red of blood and passion and the fully realised presence of what the substance always held. It is not comfortable. It does not promise resolution. It promises the full presence of what the opus has produced: everything the process has worked with, everything it could not eliminate, everything it has refined and everything it has had to bring along.

The Red Room is not behind the curtains. It is the curtains. The vessel walls—the reddening container in which the most concentrated reality in Lynch’s world is held. Step inside and you step into the opus at its most complete. The chevron floor, the single lamp, the backwards speech, time misbehaving—these are not the features of a dream or an illusion. They are the features of matter at its most refined, operating according to the rules of a reality more concentrated than the one we usually inhabit. The Red Room is not where the illusion lives. It is where the real lives.

And BOB is here too. In the reddening vessel, in the gold itself. The reddening brings the shadow along rather than eliminating it. The vitality that does not distinguish between the life-giving and the life-taking. The crimson that is both blood and fire. BOB in the Red Room is not the failure of the opus. He is its most honest product. Lynch has always known: the gold burns.

To enter the Red Room is to be tested by what the work has produced.

Laura enters and takes the ring.

Cooper reaches for restoration. We know what happens.

What year is it?

We keep looking for the happy ending. The sunshine, the white picket fence, the robin on the windowsill. But the surface of the happy ending contains the dark within. Love and predation are symbols held in the same image. Lynch is not being cynical. He is being precise. The shadow does not disappear when the curtains close. It takes up residence.

The Monstrous Coniunctio: Damn Fine Monster

Lynch has no shortage of visible monsters. The frog-moth. The Woodsmen. The distorted face of Laura Dern at the climax of Inland Empire. These images are the monstrous announced, kept on the other side of the screen. But the reddening unites us with our monstrosity—brings the shadow into the substance rather than setting them in opposition. This is the monstrous coniunctio.

I saw the monstrous coniunction in Prague. The dogs and humans on the manicured lawn—the human and the animal conjoined without resolution, the unlike natures held together in their full unlikeness. I laughed because we know. Because it is us.

Hillman writes that the monstrous coniunctio does not arrive as pure revelation or absolute horror. It arrives, more often, as uncertainty—as paradox, as the absurd pun, as the joy of the joke. Lynch has always known this dark humour. The Arm dancing in the Red Room is not comic relief from the horror. He is the monstrous coniunction in its most concentrated form, wearing the face of the absurd. The dancing woman on the car bonnet in Blue Velvet, swaying in the light of In Dreams while the violence takes place below. The Log Lady and her absolute, unironic seriousness about what the log has told her. These are not aberrations in Lynch’s dark vision. They are its most precise expression—the monstrous coniunctio arriving as Hillman said it would, as the joy of the joke, as the wrong-footing moment that produces the laugh as the recognition that what you are laughing at is also what you carry.

Lynch shows us the conjunction in ordinary, bodily form—and it is not what we were hoping for. In the final episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, a figure crosses a threshold—call him Richard. He stands up for the girl being harassed by three burly customers in Judy’s Cafe. He looks like Cooper. He has Cooper’s decency, Cooper’s instinct toward the good. But when the harassers confront him, he shoots them, deep-fries their guns with the cool demeanour of Mr. C. Acts with Mr. C’s absolute, unhesitating violence in Cooper’s register. More monstrous than Mr. C because he is not legible as a monster. He looks ordinary. The Cooper we love. Something is off—sinister, wrong-handed — the seam imperceptible.

BOB—pure monstrosity, the face of the ferment that we could organise our fear around—now fully absorbed. The conjunction has produced not the gold refined from the shadow but the gold and the shadow fused, indistinguishable. Lynch’s darkest claim—not that the monster exists but that the conjunction produces something that looks like us.

We contain all of this. The dogs and humans on the lawn, the robin on the windowsill, the red curtains and what lives behind them, the Betty we present to the world and the Diane we have constructed the dream to conceal. Lynch does not show us these things to disturb us. He shows them to us because they are already there—already present in the sealed vessels we are, already working in the dark, already producing what the opus requires.

The question is not whether we will ever be ready to take the ring. Readiness is not the right concept. The opus does not move toward a state of completion from which we look back at the fermentation and call it finished. Laura takes the ring and suffers beyond measure. Cooper reaches for restoration and the vessel spits him back out. The robin eats its bug in the sunshine.

The bodies are the vessels. The vessels are the substance. The gold burns because it is alive. Because it is real. Because nothing was withheld.

Lynch had been sitting by the water for fifty years, drinking his coffee, going down to the depths each day through meditation, through painting, through film—taking in the solvent daily, descending into what the darkness contains, bringing it back into the light of the camera, the light of the reddening. What surfaces is never what was expected. Sometimes it is BOB. Sometimes it is Laura’s face smiling in a cup of black coffee. Sometimes it is an albedo figure that stops you in a gallery in Prague and will not let you close the question it opens.

Is she becoming or unbecoming?

Both. Neither.

SOURCES

Films referenced:

Eraserhead. Directed by David Lynch, 1977.

Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch, 1986.

Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, 1990–91.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch, 1992.

Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch, 2001.

Inland Empire. Directed by David Lynch, 2006.

Twin Peaks: The Return. Directed by David Lynch, 2017.

Exhibition:

David Lynch: Up In Flames. DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2025-26.

Alchemical readings:

Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14. Princeton University Press, 1970.

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12. Princeton University Press, 1968.

Edinger, E. F. Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy. Open Court, 1994.

Hillman, J. Alchemical Psychology. Spring Publications, 2010.

Hillman, J. Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row, 1975.

Von Franz, M.L. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Inner City Books, 1980.

Hear me read Time takes a long time:

Words (2025) by Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken)

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Writing: © Cassie Fielding 2025 (Origami Chicken)

Joyce Mansour, In the Glittering Maw: selected poems (2024)

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Alejandro Pizarnik, Extracting the Stones of Madness, Poems 1962-1972 (2016)

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Writing: © Cassie Fielding 2025 (Origami Chicken)

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Writing: © Cassie Fielding 2025 (Origami Chicken)

Writing: © Cassie Fielding 2025 (Origami Chicken)

Yet how poetry makes of us bodies. How it things us. Reminds us that our bodies do not belong to us but we to our bodies. Our melancholies abiding in toe bones and triceps; our joys in nail beds and sweat beads. We live in the taste of morning breath and in the rise and fall of goose bumps; in the roundness of vowels; in the ephemeral glance of fingertip on key. It is in the artificial fusion of the senses that the flavour of my experience is put on the table; in the interbreeding of image that I know how to feel at all. I was no body before poetry.

Strange how we talk of feeling as if it belongs to us, as if feelings were the offspring of our exposure to existence. The slipperiness of words reminds me of the autonomy of feeling. That it lives for its own living: it is we who are the incurable side effects and poetry the symptoms.

Jung said “the secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive”. The surreal statement takes this further: possibility becomes necessity. The delicacy of the eggshell is an unreality while the conditions for the egg’s beingness is dependent on the breaking of its casing. I would also add that language itself is murdered in the poeming of it as meaning is not only reconfigured but boiled down to a liquor of sonic marrow.

Meaning is found where there is none, it seems, and Surrealism is the inside joke. Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen. I posit that Surrealism happens out of nothing and we drink from the vital meaninglessness of it all. For how else do you suppose it is possible for a porcelain dove to settle on a branch of salt-dusted footprints? Or for a red telephone in a penthouse in Paris to ring in the basement of Daedalus' ubiquitous meander?

Too many poems leave dreams in puddles, secret mirrors for collecting the dissolution of shames. Ours is to animate exquisite monsters from the desire which makes us things in a world of things and in turn bewitch those who see only one shimmering surface of reality.

The best poems create the most space. I once preached to a congregation of glittering stones that poems exist in the in-between. Imagine how my throat corroded into a box of mania when the echo of my proclamations told me, in mime of all mediums, how I was wrong! Poems are the edifices of in-betweens. Does that make us architects? Or dogsbodies? And do these nameless strangers that dwell in our dreams want us to baptise them with our freshly squeezed blood?

Every poem is an Ars Poetica. Life as one endless ream of red curtain is The Ars Poetica, each incarnation an indecency born from the pleat of a pleat, from the friction of velvet folds. Yearnings for yearnings.

For what do poems yearn? For what do they come begging at the threshold of our skin? To eat the refracted light from glass inheritance or to suckle on the malignant shadows of arched feet would benumb their wild veracity and strip the knife’s suavity of its hairy hide. I find it helps to throw them the scraps of my dreams to keep them from stealing the silver casings of my eyes, though I suspect they smuggle them into their pockets when I’m looking too much and they trade them for the tongues of rabid mice.

I believe I’ve known it my whole life that longing both feeds and feeds from the marrow of the human condition. The image of papercuts is befitting of the poem: as the ink strikes the page, our skin is lacerated from within and discovers to us the object of our yearning. Its infinite facets demand a tautology that can never be exhausted and thus destroys itself in its meaninglessness. What remains is the total absorption of ourselves into the object, which is reciprocated in kind, until meaning itself is rendered meaningless. The risk of expunction is exemplary of the alchemical opus: solve et coagula.

Is it the image? Is it the way it flosses teeth? Polishes eyeballs with god-spit? An oiled kaleidoscope turning its smiting caresses on flesh. Soundless and tarred, I am honed to the number of dimples I could fit into a bubble. Reaching behind a sheet of sandfall, hands learn that they never needed fingers. That seeking is the necessity of futility.

I know that the poem belongs to no one. Not even itself. The surreal poem as both mirror and shadow reveals that, as neither do we belong to ourselves, we belong to nothing and thus belong to everything. Perhaps this explains the awakening of forces chthonic and elemental in the silver echoes of the poet's cavernous soma. The anima mundi watches on as she makes love to herself.

What I also know is that poetry affirms unknowing. It must be movement itself because I am moved by it. Movement in all its definitions and as I shift so, too, does the world. I watch the ceiling breathe and feel the pavement rise to kiss my feet. I trace the wood grain on the surface of a table and sense it shudder as it arches into the shape of my hands. As I read its words aloud, whatever constellation of atoms that gives form to voice finds itself in the temper of water and we become a singular articulation of wordlessness.

There are no magic words: the doors are already open. We are the doors and the magic walks through us. It rises from the sympathy between growth and that which is growing, between flight and that which flies, between the force that loves and that which is loved. And it lives in our place when we are dying and when we are that which dies. Perhaps our mortality is negated by the theurgy of poetry.

The chicanery of existence is equal to the subterfuge of non-existence and it is the fated fluke of all phenomena to contend with the flux. What, or who, is responsible for this symbiosis of trickery is the subject of poems and headstones alike. We are navigated as we navigate, these skins as arbitrary as they are vital.

It all makes sense when we have burned words with a moon that has outgrown the sky. Ripped up the carpet from the stairs that join the backs of our heads. We bump down to face the image. A mosaic of splintered abstracts. Thoughts deformed and thrown like paint on frameless windows from paper cones carried by shuffling rows of borsholders. We pay our tithes in bushels of frayed lips. We pay in words.

Where are the wearers of red bowler hats? The black-gloved dancers? They are in bed with mermaids and peddlers of the soul. I remember how I watched them snore feathers from the one's toe gaps. Pebbles from the other’s miserly gills. How I laughed at the absurdity of sleep then took a nap in the eaves of an abandoned sycamore. I dreamed of 360 degree hair. Girls without faces running from men the shape of tin cans. I dreamed of humming closets and wilted throats. Lemon jazz played on violins by French bus conductors in high-waisted slacks. Wrote it all down and I realised my poetry is more fantastical than my dreams.

The cuckoos will keep and the wick of dawn will languish in the dry folds of my nonsense. My. Mine. I. What extravagance. Indulgences of foreheads without panes. Now rationed till I am skinny with them. An I for starters, frozen in the hot-hole of dry spells. What fetter is this behind the ears? What presence, blue and heavy and breathing. The candle. The oyster candle. Staring at shuffling shoes. Salivating driblets of triangular mastication—the humming of hidden temples. Purring. Incessant. Lulling the little god to sleep in the brine of throat-blooms.

These are the images that flicker. Nonsense. Meaningful. Matter. Can it be the seriousness of frivolity in fleshly illusion? Mattering and meaning have no place here. This is the realm of truth. Lying truth. Nonsense is the truth and the mockery.

Image. A sound with no more meaning than hedging bets on car window raindrops. Some choose solitude. Others merge with the harmony of the battering source and elicit an upward sigh from the flattened face of I. When I am I it is as a slice of the four dimensional. The namer of things. You, reader, are the bringer of meaning. Another I outside the first. Yet of. And together we write these words that are not really words. I name them poetry. You understand that they mean nothing. But isn't it nothing that makes glass of the tongue? A mouthed aquarium too intentional to be anything but falsehoods.

If the image is not the truth then the truth lives behind it. Around. Within. Beyond. The fat of the fat. The fatness of nothing. Gaping unctuousness cloaking ears with bowls of fur echoes. I crave the fat that feeds the image. The milk of it. The gorge of lip-shine and sky-held feet. The chuckle of invisible spores dusted before my toothy eyes. Egg-meat orbed in the wasteland of my palms.

As our poems ask, they reveal. What we hide from ourselves is found in the bubbling behind the coagulation of the echoes of our dreams. Our insides are laid bare in the essence and the form, the movement and the silence. It’s all a matter of looking with the glass eyes of our butchered hearts. Hearts seasoned in the salt of the poem find solace in the reek of its balm. Do you, reader, also lose the centre of yourself when the poem inhales the musk from the nape of your longing? When it traces the silhouette of your shame until you believe that your existence is justified and that your shadow is the best of you? It is only the poem’s love that is unconditional.

Afterall, poetry has taught me that shadows make the most fertile of bluenesses and hand-shaped shadows have proven themselves to be exemplary alembics. What golden geese may be hatched from the coagulation of agony’s seminal seepage! What alchemy we might perform!

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