Catching the Big Fish (3 page)

ERASERHEAD

 

 

 

Eraserhead
is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

Eraserhead
was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn’t know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

 

I don’t think I’ll ever say what that sentence was.

THE PACE OF LIFE

 

 

 

Fifty years ago, people were saying,“Everything’s speeding up.”Twenty years ago, they were still saying,“Everything’s speeding up.” It always seems that way. And it seems even more so now. It’s crazy. When you watch a lot of TV and read a lot of magazines, it can seem like the whole world is passing you by.

 

When I was making
Eraserhead,
which took five years to complete, I thought I was dead. I thought the world would be so different before it was over. I told myself,
Here I am, locked in this thing. I can’t finish it.The world is leaving me behind.
I had stopped listening to music, and I never watched TV anyway. I didn’t want to hear stories about what was going on, because hearing these things felt like dying.

At one time, I actually thought of building a small figure of the character Henry, maybe eight inches tall, and constructing a small set out of cardboard, and just stop-motioning him through and finishing it. That was the only way I could figure doing it, because I didn’t have any money.

Then, one night, my younger brother and my father sat me down in a kind of dark living room. My brother is very responsible, as is my father.They had a little chat with me. It almost broke my heart, because they said I should get a job and forget
Eraserhead
. I had a little girl, and I should be responsible and get a job.

 

Well, I did get a job: I delivered the
Wall Street Journal
, and I made fifty dollars a week. I would save up enough to shoot a scene and I eventually finished the whole thing. And I started meditating. Jack Nance, the actor who played Henry
,
waited three years for me, holding this thought of Henry, keeping it alive.There’s a scene in which Jack’s character is on one side of a door, and it wasn’t until a year and a half later that we filmed him coming through the other side of the door. I wondered, how could this happen? How could it hang together for so long? But Jack waited and held the character.

There’s an expression: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.” If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that’s all you can control. You can’t control any of what’s out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best you can do.

The world
isn’t
going to pass you by. There’s no guarantee that meditation or delivering the
Wall Street Journal
is going to make you a success. But with focus and with meditation—although the events of your outer life may stay the same—the way you go through those events changes and gets so much better.

YOGIS

 

 

 

When I first saw pictures in books of yogis sitting cross-legged in the woods in the forests of India, something would make me look twice. I’d notice their faces. And it wasn’t the face of a man wasting time. It was the face of a man holding something that I not only wanted, but I didn’t know about. I was drawn to it.There was such a presence of power and dignity—and an absence of fear. Many of their countenances held playfulness or love, or power and strength.

That made me think that enlightenment must be something real, even though I didn’t know what it was. I figured the only way to try for it was to start diving within and see what unfolded. Because I knew that wasn’t going to happen with life on the surface in L.A.

BOB’S BIG BOY

 

 

 

I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think.

There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

THE ANGRIEST DOG IN THE WORLD

 

 

 

The Angriest Dog in the World
strip came about when I was working on
Eraserhead
. I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was angry.

And then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving—three panels were set in the day and one was at night. So there’s a passage of time, but the dog never moves. And it struck me that it’s the environment that’s causing this anger—it’s what’s going on in the environment. He hears things coming from the house. Or something happens on the other side of the fence, or some kind of weather condition.

It finally boiled down more to what he hears from inside the house. And that seemed like an interesting concept. That it would just be balloons of dialogue from within the house with the dog outside. And what was said in the balloons might conjure a laugh.

The
L.A. Weekly
wanted to publish it. So they published it for nine years. After a couple of years, it was in the
Baltimore Sun
as well. Every Monday I had to come up with what to say. Then I would phone it in. I wouldn’t always do the lettering and sometimes I didn’t like the way the lettering looked, so toward the end I did some of the lettering again.

The editor who had taken on the cartoon went off to another paper partway through the run, and I had different editors.Toward the end of the nine years, the same editor who had taken it on came back to that paper. And he asked me not to do it anymore. It had run its course.

MUSIC

 

 

 

I was listening to the radio one day when I was working on
The Elephant Man
, and I heard Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. I fell in love with this piece for the last scene of the film. I asked Jonathan Sanger, the producer, to get it. And he came back with nine different records. I listened to them, and I said,“No, that’s not what I heard at all.” All nine were completely wrong. So he went out and bought more. Finally I heard André Previn’s version, and I said,“That’s it.” It was composed of the same notes as the others, of course, but it was the
way
he did it.

 

The music has to marry with the picture and enhance it. You can’t just lob something in and think it’s going to work, even if it’s one of your all-time favorite songs. That piece of music may have nothing to do with the scene.When it marries, you can
feel
it. The thing jumps; a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” kind of thing can happen.

INTUITION

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.That’s essential for the filmmaker.

 

How do you get something to feel right? Everybody’s got the same tools: the camera and the tapes and the world and actors. But in putting those parts together, there are differences.That’s where intuition enters.

 

Personally, I think intuition can be sharpened and expanded through meditation, diving into the Self. There’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us, and it’s an ocean of solutions.When you dive into that ocean, that consciousness, you enliven it.

You don’t dive for specific solutions; you dive to enliven that ocean of consciousness. Then your intuition grows and you have a way of solving those problems—knowing when it’s not quite right and knowing a way to make it feel correct for you. That capacity grows and things go much more smoothly.

THE UNIFIED FIELD

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

The ocean of pure consciousness that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi talks about is also known by modern science as the Unified Field.

When Maharishi first arrived in the United States in 1959, the Unified Field from quantum physics hadn’t yet been discovered. So people would say, “Oh, that’s baloney—they’re looking for some field at the base of everything, but it doesn’t really exist; no one knows if it’s true.” But then, about thirty years ago, quantum physics discovered this field.They discovered it by going into matter, deeper and deeper and deeper, and one day, there it was: the Unified Field. And then scientists like Dr. John Hagelin said that it’s true: Every single thing that is a thing emerges from this field.

So modern science and ancient science are coming together.

Vedic science—the science of consciousness—studies the laws of nature, the constitution of the universe, and how it all unfolds. In Vedic science, this ocean of pure consciousness is called
Atma
, the Self. “Know thy Self.” Well, how? You don’t know yourself by looking in the mirror. You don’t know yourself by sitting down and having a talk with yourself. But it’s there, within, within, within.

Transcendental Meditation is a simple, easy, effortless technique that allows any human being to dive within, to experience subtler levels of mind and intellect, and to enter this ocean of pure consciousness, the Unified Field—
the Self
.

It’s not the intellectual understanding of the field but the experiencing of it that does everything. You dive within, and by experiencing this field of pure consciousness, you enliven it; you unfold it; it grows. And the final outcome of this growth of consciousness is called enlightenment, which is the full potential for us all.

THE FOURTH STATE

 

 

 

Many people have already experienced transcending, but they may not realize it. It’s an experience that you can have just before you go to sleep. You’re awake, but you experience a sort of fall, and you maybe see some white light and get a little jolt of bliss. And you say, “Holy jumping George!” When you go from one state of consciousness to another—for instance, from waking to sleeping—you pass through a gap. And in that gap, you can transcend.

 

I picture it like a round white room that has yellow, red, and blue curtains covering the white wall. The curtains are three states of consciousness: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. But in the gap between each curtain, you can see the white of the Absolute—the pure bliss consciousness. You can transcend in that little piece of white. Then you come to the next state of consciousness. The white room really is all around you all the time, even though the curtains cover most of it; so it’s here, there, and everywhere. And sometimes, without knowing it or knowing how, people have transcended. With Transcendental Meditation, from the waking state of consciousness you can experience that white wall anytime when you sit and meditate. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

GETTING THERE

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

Some forms of meditation are just contemplation or concentration: they’ll keep you on the surface. You won’t transcend; you won’t get that fourth state of consciousness and you won’t get that bliss. You’ll stay on the surface.

Relaxation techniques can take you a little way in.That’s beautiful; it’s like having a massage. But it’s not transcending.Transcending is its own unique thing.

 

When you dive within, the Self is there and true happiness is there.There’s a pure, huge, unbounded ocean of it. It’s bliss—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual happiness that starts growing from within. And all those things that used to
kill
you diminish. In the film business, there’s so much pressure; there’s so much room for anxiety and fear. But transcending makes life more like a game—a fantastic game. And creativity can really flow. It’s an ocean of creativity. It’s the same creativity that creates everything that is a thing. It’s us.

 

And why is it so easy? Because it’s the nature of the mind, because the mind wants to go to fields of greater happiness. It just naturally wants to go. And the deeper you go, the more there is of that until you hit 100 percent pure bliss. Transcendental Meditation is the vehicle that takes you there. But it’s that experiencing of the ocean of pure bliss consciousness that does everything.

MODERN SCIENCE AND ANCIENT SCIENCE

 

 

 

Scientifically, more and more is coming out to show that transcending is real and its benefits are real. By measuring EEG patterns in brain research, they can prove that someone is transcending; they can prove that the person is experiencing a fourth state of consciousness. I’ve seen this in live demonstrations traveling with neuroscientist Dr. Fred Travis.

 

When you work on music, you use a certain part of your brain. When you talk, you use another part. When you sing, you use a different part. When you do mathematics, you use still another part. But if you want to use your full brain, you need to transcend. And then every time you transcend, you carry a little bit more of that transcendental consciousness as you work on your mathematic problems, as you sing, or what have you. Your brain is holding this coherence no matter what you do.