Jared Stanley Meditates on the Boredom in Twin Peaks

At Literary Hub, Jared Stanley writes about his boredom affair with the beloved Twin Peaks. The essay moves from Stanley's childhood and the private realms of reading and listening, to his sense of Sarah Palmer's vision of a white horse, and back again, and to more elegance:

The first time I saw that private, secret boredom depicted in art was episode 14 of Twin Peaks, “Lonely Souls”—the one where we find out who killed Laura Palmer. It took the form of a white horse that appeared to Sarah Palmer in her living room, after she fell down the stairs, drunk or drugged. Sarah grunts. A record skips. It’s claustrophobic. Sarah is on the floor, looking up toward the middle of the living room. That humming—like air conditioning or a furnace. A spotlight, then a horse appears in the Palmer’s living room. It looks bored. Its eyes are rimmed with pink. It has an indolent splay to its legs. Does a little snort. Is it a Camarillo or an Appaloosa? Time starts to slow. It stands there for a few seconds and right before it disappears, the horse blinks. The blink is slow. And Sarah, whose face even in rest is a histrionic rictus of pain, source of the most otherworldly bleats, sighs, and oddly-timed screams, is quiet. She looks up at the horse and passes out. The scene cuts to Leland in the foyer, regarding himself in the mirror. In the mirror, Bob regards him back: it is happening again.

[...]

Everything in my family was (and still is) about crying, about using a position of vulnerability to try to get other people to love you. That was hard enough to figure out. But how to feel when someone was actually dying, had every reason to cry? I could feel something when I heard music, but something shriveled up in me when I heard crying. There was this controlled metamorphosis that gave the different emotional registers of, say Nina Simone’s voice or Brian Eno’s voice a way of flooding my heart. I loved their passionate control. I hated Janis Joplin.

Maybe the horse wasn’t bored, exactly. Maybe the horse was just the opposite of Sarah Palmer; a symbol, not a screeching person drugged by her incestuous murderer husband. The horse stood outside the action. And that’s not merely boredom; that’s aloofness. So when I thought I saw a creature that, like me, was out of place and bored, surprised to be where it was, in actual fact I saw something uglier: an image of a placid, unmoved spectator, peripheral to suffering. A horse in a living room was an incredible, bizarre thing to see, and that made it great on its face, but I made a mistake feeling something for a creature which was there to be out of place, when what I thought I saw was a way to be in control; in order to escape the family’s crying, I used the horse’s blank expression without knowing what that expression really meant.

Instead of that pose of indifference, maybe I’m looking for the thing that that boredom was really about—having the time to feel anything, horror or radiance. How do I say it without sounding ridiculous? You get older, people assume you’re making peace with your world, and most of the things you might conventionally do—buy a house, have a baby—proceed apace. But maybe you’re just too busy to feel, and that looks, oddly, like peace.

Beautiful writing, as always! Read it all at Literary Hub. The essay "was commissioned as part of The Twin Peaks Project, on ongoing series of reflections on the seminal 1990s TV series."