Choose Life or Death. Choose Love or Fear.
I was struck by the almost concurrent deaths in January 2025, both physical and metaphorical, of two giants of fantasy, goth, horror and surrealism: David Lynch, a master of film, and Neil Gaiman, a master of words.
Lynch is revered, and his work honoured, but Gaiman, following allegations made by young women since the middle of 2024, is still being reviled.
Lynch explored metaphysics, spiritualism and Transcendental Meditation; Gaiman admits to carelessness and selfishness, then denies everything beyond that, thus remaining non-transcendent, and very much mired.
One is a seeker. I cannot read the other as anything but a predator.
The energy they emanate is also vividly contrasting. At first glance, they are both sartorially odd: Lynch with a quiff of hair, Gaiman with a mop.
But there is a lightness and a joy about Lynch, and a darkness around Gaiman. I’m not stating this after the fact, either. I don’t own any of Gaiman’s works, although I love fantasy writing and went to university with young men who venerated The Sandman. My taste tends towards fiction which actually empowers women, rather than victimises them. Even if the women and girls in the landscapes of Ursula K. Le Guin or Anne Bishop are shown to experience base treatment by vile characters in the journey of their lives, they are always shown as worthy of respect and growth and fulfilment.
And so, for those of us who find meaning and beauty in what Springsteen calls ‘wanting things that can only be found/ In the darkness on the edge of town’, the world is complicated. We are joined together in a sort of smug condescension towards the non-magical, ordinary, settled people, while we in our fantastical gear are traversing the frontiers of human existence, fuelled by ego and aspiration and hallucinogenics.
There’s a healthy vat of narcissism underlying the choice not be like other people. But if we dismantle that and drain its corrosive contents, we can free ourselves and our work of its corrupting taint.
I see so many actresses proudly sharing photos of themselves with David Lynch, and speaking of the times when he directed them in his films or listened to them when he cast them for roles. There’s a purity and a joy in their descriptions of him.
Then we see his diametric opposite: the self-styled Dark Lord, king of shadows, presiding over the benighted landscape of his own home life, alledgedly preying on his own babysitter and opportunistically taking advantage of the vulnerability of moth-like girls who blunder into his orbit.
In the podcasts and the article that broke the story about Gaiman, two women, unknown to each other, are said to have likened him to a bioluminescent deep-sea creature. One of those life forms that mutate to live in perpetually darkened or even subterranean environments.
I think of Buffy, the small blonde sassy girl hero living in Sunnydale, part-time student and full time Slayer, living a multidimensional life which is precariously located on a Hellmouth in California. The split-screen shots juxtaposing those sun-filled surface and twisted baser realms always fascinated me. Because evil does live amongst us, and lies beneath us, and between us, and shows itself in the way people treat others and make other human beings want to die rather than live. And for evil to find a footing amongst us, it needs to clothe itself in some form of respectability.
Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift mocked people who had big opinions of themselves and boasted of being ‘wondrous deep’ when in fact—in their moral delusion—they were merely ‘monstrous dark’.
David Lynch, with his humility and gentleness, seems to have enabled people. Gaiman, whatever the courts have since decided, has not been forgiven.
I have read Gaiman’s so-called statement ‘Breaking The Silence’. Its self-referential narcissism was unsurprising. No doubt he had read the wording of the criminal law in the jurisdictions in which he was civilly accused of committing crimes. He must have seen that criminal intention has to be proved to be present for an action to be deemed a crime. He said that he engaged in all these relationships in the belief that they were mutual and consensual. One of his accusers said he told her he was on the autism spectrum and cannot always ‘read’ people very accurately. In his statement, he said that he had been a tortured man, with a split psyche: able to make himself physically available, but not emotionally available, to anyone seeking connection with him.
Well, Edge Lords are often wildly lacking in self-awareness. Too busy shooting up on the adulation of their susceptible idolaters, and revelling in being outliers. Failing to see that the mainstream and the Middle Way also contain morality, not merely mediocrity.
The problem with this book of revelation from Gaiman is that no one today is listening. Most members of his formerly adoring audience appear to be sickened by this unravelling. No one is stepping up to defend or support him. And he has in the past expressed himself as being in favour of cancel culture.
Lynch, in contrast, seems to have saved the surrealism for his creative vision and his art. I dread any revelations coming out about him, and I do not think there will be any.
If evil embodies a lack of empathy, then Lynch’s warmth in his dealings with others shows the opposite force operating in him, as if he is a remedy for the withering impact of the priapic egotism of the other.
In the aftermath of these events, I re-read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis. It was like going in a submarine to view the wreckage of the Titanic. Here we have another man of creative genius, of flamboyance and flair. Egotistical but also humane. Condemned to serve time with hard labour in jail for his actions in his personal life.
In his capacity for self-confrontation and self-examination, Wilde shows a courage Gaiman has not shown. And therein is his personal redemption. His plays are still filmed, and enjoyed by audiences all over the world, more than a hundred years after they opened in all the theatres in London and he himself sauntered down Piccadilly ‘with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand’.
How banal it seems, the shape accounts like those about Gaiman take. Read together they describe a world in which people are interchangeable, forgettable stand-ins enacting bit parts, with one man as ringmaster. Dissatisfaction, in the round.
Whereas Lynch gave each individual in his imaginative landscape a chance to shine and speak and develop. To dismantle the dynamics of objectification.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, the Archmage Ged comes to confront a dark wizard who is draining the energy out of the world, and draining life out of others, in order to live. Risking his own life and the loss of his power, Ged overcomes him.
He had learned a hard lesson himself, as an apprentice. In his pride and desire for acclaim, he had unleashed a shadow into the world. And it chased him until he started to hunt it down and conquer it. But that conquering encompassed his own humility, and was prompted by a wish, a compulsion, to repair what had been broken and mismanaged, especially by his own erring judgment. Le Guin brilliantly described his stumbling recovery: he did not speak quickly anymore. He had been glib, facile, volatile. Now he was forced to think before using words, and to be aware of the consequences of his actions and their impact on the Equilibrium of the world.
How often in the last thirty years have we felt that the hinges of the previously known world have become unwelded, and the structures we grew up with are eroded beyond hope of repair or restoration? We are overinformed and undertaught. Made dependent on resources that are dwindling and ephemeral.
And now we are here, in the chaos at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, frozen by ice storms, burnt by forest fires; free falling together through a new kind of darkness, fractalled by the illusion of our separateness from each other.
Democracy had a brief period of bloom in the second half of the 20th century, I feel, and now the world we are living in will require daily acts of community-based humanity for survival of anything good. Of course, it is in fantasy realms that the solutions are envisioned most clearly, just as it is in these landscapes that the problems breeding at the heart of the human condition are seen as the bedevilments that they are.
The daily victories occur within our homes, when babysitters are not violated; when vulnerabilities are cared for; and when people’s feelings and hopes are not seen as access points for exploitation.
Our water and our air are polluted; mass infections and mass media misinformation plague us; supply chains are disrupted; customers are being wronged. The very building blocks of our lives need to be urgently reconstructed.
We are in a maze, a labyrinth underground, where abysses gape on either side. Step by step, we venture forth, hands on rock walls, rope ladders and crumbling bridges, seeking our own emergence into clean air and natural light, the remnant of a once beautiful and pure world.
It seems to me that we must return to a more tactile and primitive diurnal routine: wake up, give thanks that we were not harmed in the night, wash the sleep from our faces, clean and clear an altar, light a candle—and pray. Ask for our everyday activities to be aligned with the greatest good of which we are capable. Extend ourselves.
The alternative, of colossal and creepy boredom, of self-sedation and cajoling our lower selves, of exerting power over the powerless and temporarily flexing in front of the fragile, is gross, unsightly and unacceptable.
What hope do we have now, at the zenith of our achievements, except the evidence of our senses, our history and experience, and our ability to read the energies emanating from those around us? Wholeness comes at a price, and mischief must be managed—or it will devour us and all our aspirations.
The remedy for pride is the capacity to weep, to feel for the tragedy of the shortfall in which we all live, self-created as it is, and created by others who have scant respect for what binds us to each other in loose affiliation.
I remember how Tenar, in Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan, holds a vision of the beautiful city within her: that description of Havnor is one of the loveliest, most lyrical, most legendary pieces of writing I have ever read. She had been brought up to serve as a priestess in a dark and harrowing area of the world. But she was able to break free. Later, she fell away from her path and into domesticity. But she found her way back into creativity again.
How else do we rebuild? Or hold onto anything good? Walk out of situations where our shock paralyses our bodies into stasis while our trust is being violated? What beautiful vision do we hold within us?
Sometimes, when I attend a brilliant play, or sit in contemplation of a wonderful art work or a natural landscape, or observe the gorgeous playfulness of a quirky living creature, I feel such an emanation of love and affection that it seems to me that my whole existence is distilled into the intensity of receiving those impressions. I feel as if I must hold steady, to sustain the vision as it is being transmitted, not only to me but through me. I must clear myself to let it flow freely.
Even Neil Gaiman goes walking at night and looks up at the stars which stretch over his head like a mantle of magnificence, a visual benediction. His dog has an illuminated collar. I know, because he shared pictures of it on his Instagram, before it all went dark.
Devika Brendon is an academic, teacher, reviewer and editor of English Literature, as well as a creative writer of poetry and prose. She was consultant editor for FemAsia Magazine, and a poetry editor with Girls On Key, and is currently content editor for the New Ceylon Writing Literary Journal, executive editor of Glitterati Quill Magazine, and reviews editor at Verity La Journal. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and journals, both in print and online.
Devika is also a journalist, whose opinion pieces and articles have been published in The Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews, Ceylon Today, The Morning, and The Sun. Her first novel, Aversion, set in contemporary Sri Lanka, has recently been published by Jam Fruit Tree Publications. She is currently working on the sequel, Oh, My Darling.