Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion
[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]
There is something very strange about the human mind.
One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization.
One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.
A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.
