I live in a fly

David Lynch wears a mask. He sewed his own mouth and nose protector and embroidered it with the sentence I LIVE IN A CAT, he says that cats breathe differently, so the mask protects him differently, more cleverly, as cats are.

I don’t understand this logic, but it sounds good, and in the end it’s always about who sounds best, how convincing the sound is, what you stand for. And what you breathe for.

We enter the fortress wearing our masks, that’s the rule, even if a virus up here, given the thickness of the walls, would lose all courage.

I take him on a tour of the classes, all the students are focused, and when we come, they are interested in what it seems like to us, how they appear, productive silence, voracious ant-attitude, you feel like a foreign body, like a virus, my feet get hot, but that can be because I wear such ugly shoes, my feet are ashamed, I have never understood style, and on my mask there is an embroidered fly. Lynch has style, but I forgot what his shoes looked like.

We meet Dorit Ehlers in my office, she’s doing a podcast for the summer academy, seven-minute interviews, you’re supposed to imagine, she asks those she asks, you live in a mouse, how would you perceive the chaos around you?

Lynch says he knows, he used to dissect and reassemble mice as a teenager, like Lego, he even thought about making construction kits and plans, “build your own mouse”, something like that was the plan.

Dorit Ehlers is an actress, she hails from Reinbek near Hamburg, has lived in Salzburg for 23 years, even worked with Lynch once, a small fluid theater project, Fluxus, which performed at various sausage stands in Salzburg, and the David Lynch in the play, well, was of course a chimera, a projection like Rebecca Del Rio in Mulholland Drive, and it is all the more surprising to Dorit Ehlers now that Lynch is sitting opposite her with me in my office in the fortress. Is it him? And am I me? Or am I just a fly in the ointment?

Does one know who one is when one knows who one is NOT?

Sometimes things are just what they seem.