‘If Javier Bardem was a research chemical I think that he would be 4-AcO-MET or 4-HO-MiPT’
Parts 15 and 16 of The Demon Inside David Lynch ^ Plus our final pick of the recent releases in nonfiction
Art by Compusician
In today’s issue
—’The Moon is always there, at least in our lives, lit or dark, seen or not, a frigid or scalding globe of pits and rubble, of peaks and scars, our helpful companion in gravity and evolution, a symbol, a surface, a night-light during its days-long lunar morning and a silent siren for nocturnal predators, for mythic werewolves, lovers, geologists, and soon again, the astronauts.’: Still As Bright, our final pick of the best-written recent releases in nonfiction. The full list of books considered is here.
—‘If Javier Bardem was a research chemical I think that he would be 4-AcO-MET or 4-HO-MiPT’: Parts 15 and 16 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series, and welcome to the new readers joining us from Twin Peaks sites and groups.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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PROLOGUE
Each month, when the Moon returns at dusk, lit and waxing, the first “sea” I routinely observe is Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises—and the first “lake” I look for is the foreshortened Lacus Temporis—the Lake of Time. That seems just so. Mare Crisium is a huge plain of solid lava close to the near side’s eastern limb—it looks elliptical, you can see it with your own eyes—and in the telescope, Crisium is ringed by headlands, dotted with craters, and rippled with low ridges like cast-aside thoughts. Lacus Temporis, despite its weighty name, is a banal patch of gray rock, though shaped, appropriately, a bit like an hourglass.
The Moon is always there, at least in our lives, lit or dark, seen or not, a frigid or scalding globe of pits and rubble, of peaks and scars, our helpful companion in gravity and evolution, a symbol, a surface, a night-light during its days-long lunar morning and a silent siren for nocturnal predators, for mythic werewolves, lovers, geologists, and soon again, the astronauts. For me, until recently, as for other stargazers, the Moon was a bane that bleached out fainter gray-green galaxies and nebulae that one might otherwise see in the eyepieces of backyard telescopes or on the computer screens of professional observatories.
Not long ago, I found myself questioning, if not everything, then quite a bit—mortality, happiness, profession. I’d run my hand along the spines of philosophy titles in a used bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, tip one out, and purchase it to read at home in a certain silence. I’d lie down to meditate, trying to focus on breath instead of mistakes. I’d talk with my wife, Kathe, in a wide, gravelly yard behind our old adobe house beneath mesquites or the giant tamarisk. I’d fallen for that tree the first time we saw this place, a nineteenth-century ruin that Kathe would go on to restore and that would be our home for just two short years of our longer Tucson sojourn.
Too tired, too low, I couldn’t bring myself to haul the telescope south of the city where skies darken and the Andromeda Galaxy blossoms enough to be seen with the naked eye. Ever since moving to the desert from four riverside acres in semirural northern Utah, I spent far less time under night skies than I used to—one of several touchstones I’d slowly lost in those clotted, frantic city years. I’d forgotten what mattered most, what Lord Byron called “the heart… still as loving.”
One night, as Kathe and I sat beside a fire stoked in a battered woodstove—which was once the house’s only source of heat, and which we had since moved outside—there it was: bright, unhurried, sliced by light and shadow, the Moon. I had never paid it much attention, despite a childhood smitten with Apollo flights, years when I would tape-record television reports of the last missions and those of Skylab and the Apollo–Soyuz rendezvous. I replayed the news anchors’ voices—Walter Cronkite, Jules Bergman—on a cassette player at night in a dark bedroom in our trailer outside of Indianapolis. I was dreamy with imagined escape. Before then, I had sometimes used a three-inch Edmund Scientific reflector my father had given me and, with it, I would dash across the lunar landscape, and dash was right, because the telescope was rickety and hard to use. I caught the Moon in snatches. Too embarrassed to ask for help, I didn’t say a word to my father, especially after he left my mother, sister, and me. Somewhere and sometime the telescope also disappeared.
That night in our Tucson backyard, I looked at the Moon with my own eyes and, touched by the shadows of delicate mesquite leaves that it cast, I felt something clear, something inevitable, something sweet without striving. Not a child’s silver-spacesuit fantasy, not an adult’s grasping for achievement and flattery, but a sober calm and, more, a grounded curiosity. I could go there, I thought. I could watch and learn. It felt like an epiphany, seeing that Moon—waxing past its “half-Moon” phase—brimming with potential, shining peacefully above ordinary darkness.
By then, I had learned that in a few weeks it would be the fiftieth anniversary of a forgotten, once-heralded photograph of the lunar crater named for Copernicus. The photo had been snapped by an orbiting probe sent to map the dangerous surface for safe landing sites before the astronauts descended. I was intrigued. I’ve always been interested in forgotten anniversaries. They tie me to history’s chancy sweep, and they’re a form of memento mori. They humble me and, somehow, make me feel loved. I decided to find that photograph, to learn why it had garnered so much attention. This small adventure in discovering something lost would be, like the moonlit night with Kathe, the beginning of my backyard journey to the Moon and its many histories. It would make my skin tingle. For the first time in a very long time, I would be part of something bigger than myself, and every month it would light my way.
In the luminously told Still As Bright, the story of the Moon traverses time and space, rendering a range of human experiences—from the beliefs of ancient cultures to the science of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, from the obsessions of colorful 19th century “selenographers” to the astronauts of Apollo and, now, Artemis.
Still As Bright also traces Cokinos's own lunar pilgrimage. With his backyard telescope, he explores the surface of the Moon, while rooted in places both domestic and wild, and this award-winning poet and writer rediscovers feelings of solace, love and wonder in the midst of loss and change.
Simultaneously steeped in rigorous cultural and scientific history, as well as memoir, Still As Bright is a thoughtful, deeply moving, evergreen natural history. It takes readers on a lyrical journey that spans the human understanding of our closest celestial neighbor, whose multi-faceted appeal has worked on witches, scientists, poets, engineers and even billionaires.
Still As Bright is a must-read for anyone who has ever looked up into the night sky in awe and wonder. Readers will never look at the Moon the same way again.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
In Twin Peaks: The Return Part 11: a box is delivered and opened in brushland
Abasement and Contempt
One of César’s defences of Cooper’s time travel and the retcon went like this: The series doesn’t actually approve of his journey back in time to erase everything that precedes this—it is shown to be a bad lifechoice with unforeseen repercussions. This too ties in with one of the series’ most important themes: anti-nostalgia, anti-retro, don’t look back.^^
It’s not just Cooper who enacts the retcon, though, but the series itself. If Scottie travels back in time and murders Madeleine/Judy halfway through Vertigo and therefore wrecks the audience’s experience, it doesn’t make it okay if the film then indicates that doing so was a mistake. In this case the film wasn’t ruined by Scottie but by Hitchcock.
A minging artistic choice isn’t okay if the artist agrees it’s minging, just as a relapse isn’t okay if the relapser knew it would be disastrous. A trainwreck in which the driver deliberately crashes the train is still a trainwreck. Many big-tent films feature effects and moments of spectacle that in no way compensate for the contempt for the audience and the sense that nobody involved cared about the events or characters, and you’d hardly say these projects haven’t been committeed to lowest-common-denominator sludge. Every last thing onscreen is deliberate, but this doesn’t excuse how bad they are, and it doesn’t excuse The Return either. I’m probably overexplaining this. You already know this stuff, surely, and would never have considered anything else.
A linked defence from certain Manbuns goes like this: Yes, the time travel and Green Glove versus BOB and plenty of other scenes are kind of iffy. But they’re kind of punk as well, yeah? Kind of masterly trolling of the audience. Season 3 was a five-month trolling session, which justifies all the iffiness, yeah?
But much of the response to the previous defence applies to this one too. Just because your mince is deliberate and punk doesn’t make it okay. Sid Vicious taking a bike chain to the journalist Nick Kent may or may not have been punk, but it was hardly commendable. And we shouldn’t have to point this out, but there’s a reason nobody’s ever made an eighteen-hour punk track.
The Return’s nearest musical equivalent, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, is sixty-four minutes of listener-goading kookiness, and the verdict of Reed himself was that ‘anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am.’ You might want to put yourself through a track from it sometime and picture César listening closely to every one of its droning minutes, fiddling with the waxed ends of his moustache, puffing meth, and telling himself he’s enjoying what Reed’s served up. Metal Machine Music is kind of punk and also unlistenable mince, yet even its tracks are only sixteen minutes long, not an hour like episodes of The Return. As with every other form of provocative so-bad-it’s-good, punk and trolling only work in relatively short bursts.
And they work best in the young. César slumped in alcoholic blackout at a family gathering and snarling at invisible persecutors looks worse, is worse, than the same from his chiselled-cheekboned nephew.
It should be said that we eventually guessed the showrunner, Mr Lynch as we wrongly believed at the time, the hermit or Dr Evil as we now called him, would pull some kind of stunt in the finale to retrospectively sabotage the rest of Twin Peaks. Waiting for that finale was like waiting throughout Se7en’s final scenes for John Doe to complete his horrorwork. Here comes the delivery van. You wonder what might be inside. Then with a growing sense of dread you think back over your twenty-seven-year history with Twin Peaks and remember Laura’s dead body wrapped in plastic, your birthday party in the woods, the next day when you thought you’d solved the mystery of who killed her, the consummate Episode 14 when it’s revealed it was her father, then Fire Walk with Me’s peerless portrayal of incestuous abuse. Then you remember the antipathy for the audience and for Twin Peaks nostalgia throughout The Return and you know what’s in the van. The entire story never happened. Who killed Laura Palmer? Nobody did. None of it happened, sucker. How else was this farce ever going to wrap up?
This link between its audience-trolling ending and Se7en is made explicit in Part 11 when a mysterious box is delivered and opened out in rural brushland. When we became the same consciousness, the Twin told me this box was one of many such trollings of its cultist marks like César, which he then lapped up and declared yet more evidence of the auteur’s genius, which the Twin knew he would and disliked him for in advance, and so felt no guilt about using him and other Lynch cultists as dupes in the entities’ masterplan, and as we’ll see planted more jokes about this, which the Césars misunderstood and instead declared yet more evidence of genius. This is a fairly advanced state of submissiveness, equivalent to those reduced to degraded wretchedness by sissy-hypno porn.
And the abasement never ends. Whether with The Return and its Césars or with fascist leaders and their cultists, the trolling and abasement, contempt and acceptance or welcoming of that contempt, it never ends. Not until a rock bottom comes along.
Buer by Astarte23
Research Chemicals
[Ella]
The substances which for better or worse I got Andy into, they are not against the law here in Spain, and can be magical, some of them. I might not now share them with people that are in recovery for alcoholism, but even someone as dejected as Andy often was only had problems with them when he tripped more than once a month and did not rotate the substances.
1. 225 ug oral of the LSD analogue AL-LAD, which opens up in you classy and mature emotions, unearthly emotions. These are then potentiated by visions of gods and goddesses and god/desses so keen on knowing you, so in your face and every other part of you, that they would be a little frightening if they were not so graceful and classy about it, hardly ever pushy or hectic, nearly always sagrado, elegante, just on the right side of dirty-tasteful.
2. 20-30 mg oral of 4-AcO-MET or 4-HO-MiPT, analogues of magic mushrooms which among their best qualities maximise those of AL-LAD, including the beauty of the little deities. Both are highly stimulating, engrossing and charismatic. If Javier Bardem was a research chemical I think that he would be 4-AcO-MET or 4-HO-MiPT.
But you must not confuse these little beings with the entities. They are much more beautiful than the entities are but you cannot become one of them, or at least I never have, and you hardly ever forget that they are hallucinations, whereas the twiddlers of knobs, the entities, they are realer than real.
These three drugs so evolve and deepen your feelings that you can become emotional more often than before, even when you have not had them for weeks or months. This may explain in part the strength of emotion we see in this story from Andy, and also the melancolía in him which he does not like to speak about, and how all of this affected the direction the story took. The truth is I often wish I never shared these drugs with him.
3. 75-150ug oral of the LSD analogue ALD-52.
4. 60-120mg oral or 30-70mg snorted of the MDMA analogue 3-FEA.
But none of these chemicals shows you the entities. For this you need to take the famous psychedelic DMT, which is not usually called a research chemical, because it has been used for centuries. The only drug which does not only allow you to meet the entities but become one of them is Tsarbomba, also called 8-BOM-DMT, a substance available on research chemical sites and which also exists inside many plants and animals. It allows this becoming by somehow wiping away the illusion that you are not an entity, that you are one thing and not any other.
Among the best books on these two psychedelics are the inspirational novel-memoir by Rob Doyle called Threshold, Sancia Ignacio’s award-winning Tsarbomba: La molécula milagrosa del espacio (Tsarbomba: The Miracle Molecule from Space), Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and his DMT and the Soul of Prophecy which draws parallels between the entities and the supernatural beings which are in the Bible. Ignacio has established beyond dispute the release of Tsarbomba in the human pineal gland at moments of intense stress, and also when you are born and when you die.
What you do not just understand but act out in the later stages of Tsarbomba trips is that the entities have it wrong with their ‘Argument leading to the Promised End’ approach. Very wrong. They think that they have a job they have to do to bring about this Promised End, which they believe will happen at some point in some future they imagine.
But the fact is the Promised End has already happened, is forever already happening, as are the projects the entities engage in to supposedly bring it about. What Tsarbomba lets you see is that from the perspective of fifteen dimensions and more, time stops being time as we humans understand it and becomes simply one among directions without number which are already written down in (gem)stone. Like professional wrestling, the Ultraverse is a narrative which is unscripted and unpredictable only in the way it appears. In reality it is more similar to a perpetuo Diamond of consciousness which never changes, with facets in infinite numbers and also dimensions in infinite numbers from where they come, and it is this Diamond which you become on a Tsarbomba trip, as well as becoming entities and going to heaven.
These trips are quite heavy, then, and you might describe them as like 4-AcO-MET to the power of DMT. This is why I have only had a few experiences of this type, at most perhaps a dozen, while Andy has only had the trip he had in May 2024 which was brought on by pineal Tsarbomba due to an acumulación over years of stress and melancolía related to David Lynch, and also to me, no doubt.
The drugs I have mentioned here, which together make up the most advanced transport network the Diamond has for humans, they allow you to comprehend the mysteries of death and other matters. They just do. If you have a problem with this then you need to bring it up with the Diamond.
Especially on Tsarbomba everything sparkles with a clearness which gets into all of your perceptions, a clearness which cleanses them of, as Andy put it, ‘shoddy slacker loser mark faux-naive faux-humble dopiness’. And in this clarity things are seen in the interior way you see them in your dreams or when you are in love, with a UHD trueness which lets you forget their encarnación in shapes and behaviours which you approve of or do not, and now you perceive their real inner sides, and perceive their shells as simply form, just an accident of glassy, swirling Lines. They lay aside these shells and are changed into a vessel clear beyond any words of their essence, of their actual being as the entities see them and as wonderdrugs and loving provocativos security guards let you see them, without any limits or names.
"...as Andy put it, ‘shoddy slacker loser mark faux-naive faux-humble dopiness’. And in this clarity things are seen in the interior way you see them in your dreams or when you are in love..."
I love the back and forth between close-up and macro-view.
As usual, you intrigue and delight, Sean, with Bardem and Tsarbomba.