"The Owls are not what they seem"

The Giant speaks to Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, saying, "the Owls are not what they seem"

I was recently driving to a train station in Bristol, UK. I had the radio on and I was listening to Radio 3. The presenter was talking about David Lynch's Twin Peaks, and he introduced the theme tune with this quote, 'the owls are not what they seem', which immediately disturbs my sense of reality. If they are not what they seem, then what are they capable of? Do they see things that we don't? Are the eyes of the owls the eyes of something other? If the owls are not behaving normally, then do they have what Mark Fisher refers to as 'a deliberative agency they don't normally possess' (Fisher, 2016, p.65)? The eerie sensation that arises when things are not what they seem implies that there are other forces or agencies at work.

The sensation that I felt in the town of Llantwich Major, a strange silence as if the town was 'on mute', inspired many strange stories of the town and its folk. In this ordinary town, things were not what they seemed. There was a silence at its core - which ignited our imaginations in the creation of the performance Goat Song - a hushed silence, no laughter, no sounds of babies crying, even the lawn mowers were muted, no creaking, no sound of shoes on the pavement, no clattering of coffee cups, of curtains being drawn. The sense of the everyday is infused with something other, an agency that cannot be seen but is felt as an eerie materiality. The ordinary little town does not function as it should, which led to people behaving not as they seem, the 'man in the green suit' who would turn up to wakes and weddings uninvited, as if addicted to beginnings and endings, none of which were his own. The sticky tarmac that melts in the summer, which pulls off people's shoes and makes them walk with one shoe on and one shoe off. This is a passing-through place, where once you leave, you never want to go back.

Inexplicable things happen, as if there is no control over the town, an eerie fatalism that takes away songs, speech, and sounds. The mystery of the town is at the heart of the story. Is it hiding something? There is a disappearance, and along with that, a pervading sense of unmourned grief descends; the town falls into silence.

As David Lynch says'I love going into another world and I love mysteries'. He goes on to say that the reason we are so drawn to mystery is that our lives are born out of mystery. Mystery is at the forefront of the human condition; mystery is a space to DWELL in, a reality to bask in.

It is the inexplicable that makes things interesting and that keeps us searching.