do you know what it means to miss the Kingdom of New Orleans?

Dreamt I visited the Kingdom of New Orleans. A cloaked Mardi Gras cult kidnapped my girlfriend, ceremonially sacrificed her, then shot & left me for dead.

A princess in disguise as an urban "prince" found me, tending my wound. Waiting to regain her throne from the interim republic, she DJed dirty beats, living in a rundown five-story house where she threw underground parties & exotic illegal dinners in. The city was walled like Carcassonne with additional giant saurian sculptures, a much larger Vieux Carré inside accented by medieval stonework & gargoyles, neon & glass, the sprawl extending all the way down to the Gulf Coast. The suburbs were composed of both brownstone and the raised gabled roofed houses, with bright but peeling shutters the Big Easy's known for.

The city was attacked by a sorcerer who came from the West with thousands of troops and gargantuan automatons, and I thought the city was done for.

[Carcassonne lit up. The city walls were like this but with neon accents.]

Then the outer wall's saurian sculptures animated, slashing with claws and breathing fire in their city's defense. The troops got in via many of the entrances, but the citizens of N.O. were no slouches, all taking up arms to defend their kingdom. The princess discarded her disguise, donned ballistic armor, and organized the people more effectively under her royalist banner. We fought the troops, but the invaders were overwhelming. She used magick to phase us into the depths of the city, but somewhere along the way I found myself displaced back in our world.

Weeks passed, and the phone rang. "It's the princess on the line," my Dad said, pausing, then, "At least that what she says she is." She told me that the city had been kept safe and she'd regained the throne, and was wondering when I'd be back for cake, champagne, and her latest setlist. But I knew that I couldn't get back there, that however I got there in the first place wouldn't be available again for a long time, and I was left saddened by the lack of means to return ...

... or couldn't I?

This dream of the Kingdom of New Orleans was amazing and all-too vivid. It felt more real than imagined. Sure, I could craft a short story or novella from this New Orleans that never Louisiana Purchase-d, that was discovered by France pre-Columbus and broke away from European colonial rule early. Instead I'm inquiring about the realness of the city, the feeling of its being out there somewhere, a solid in the chaos of dream, a true place.

[Crescent City Bridge. photo by Fred Gramoso.]

We can entertain the possibility of another thread on the Web of Wyrd, a variant design woven by The Norns to awe & explore, a quantum tapestry warp & wefted of a differing time & place, a shadow of choices not made here but elsewhere, where another version of ourselves louches purple absinthe at Duke Lafitte's Parlour House and eats ghost pepper & blue okra gumbo on cobblestoned Saint Peter Street.

This seems akin to a geographic slippage from the Berenstein to Berenstain universe, the rustling of cousinly leaves together from near branches of Yggdrasil, touching and aware of each other for a long, strange, wondrous moment.

In its Calvino-esque way, this Invisible City of New Orleans overlays, nests within, or is hidden upon the one we already know. Could the Texan Wizard's attack & invasion be the destructive Katrina of that world? Could the defensive saurians be our Louisiana swamps' aggressive alligators, memories of ancient colossi, or perhaps fossils & petrifactions given life in our foreshadowed future?

[Pink Alligator sculpture by the Cracking Art Group.]

Maybe the calls that say nothing from unknown numbers on your cellphone are coming from there, the princess dialing, looking for sleeping tourists who were once heroes of her kingdom's greatest battle. The city & her androgynous princess will haunt me, and I will miss them. So we ask: Have you been to the Kingdom of New Orleans? And if so, how did you get there?

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

Twin Peaks: The Resolution.

You waited 25 years for Twin Peaks: The Return. You finished it. And you still want answers. Here they are as only Dark Entries can provide them:

Alt-dimensional Dale: The secret no one knows when Laura whispers in Dale's ear is how to save her. In order to save Laura, Dale travels back in time to pull her away from her bondage cabin date with Jacques, Ronette, & Leo. By doing this, Dale effectively prevents her from meeting her fate at Bob/Leland's hands in the train car. When the past gets pulled out of true, Laura is whisked away to an alternate reality where she (and Dale, and Diane) are no longer who they originally were. The Twin Peaks we knew is in the dimension that Dale & Diane drive away from to follow now-displaced Laura, leaving behind the changed dimensional reality where Laura never got murdered. When Dale asks what year it is in his final line, it's the wrong question because he's made the false assumption that people in the parallel dimension are going to be in the same place.

Three Dimension Shell Game: Dale travels across three dimensions. First, he's in the prime dimension where the action for the whole show mostly takes place and where Laura stays dead. Second, he goes into the past to rescue Laura, and this action alone creates this secondary dimension/branching timeline where Laura never gets killed that runs parallel to the first. His intention is to bring Laura back to the primary future, but time proves too inelastic and moves Laura into a tertiary dimension where Dale & Diane then follow her to.

Diane Once-Removed: Diane & Dale both drive into the alternate dimension knowing on some level things aren't going to be the same. When Diane sees her double at the road motel, it's a presentiment that she's not going to remain herself, and weeps during her sex with Dale, covering his face/identity with her hands, sad that so soon after getting her freedom from the Black Lodge, she's only going to lose herself again so soon. The note Dale finds in the morning proves this as Diane has unwillingly assumed the alt-dimension's identity of Linda on the parting missive.

Laura-Now-Carrie: Although Laura has effectively helped rescue herself, her saving isn't what Dale or she expected. When Dale shows up at Carrie's house in Odessa, she pauses at the mention of Sarah Palmer's name. There's a frisson of recognition that occurs, and in part for that reason goes with Dale on the road trip up to Twin Peaks. After finding the Palmers' house occupied by the Tremonds instead, that frisson increases to a disturbing remembrance of her previous parallel existence as Laura when that realization evokes a momentary overlap of dimensional reality and we hear Sarah Palmer calling for Laura on the morning of her death.

Not Who but What is Laura?: The White Lodge creates Laura as the firestopper response for Bob. She's the irresistible attractant so Bob doesn't wreak a worse havoc in the greater world (as seen by Bob/ersatz Dale's globally spanning criminal activities after Laura's death). This irresistible attractiveness manifests in her becoming prom queen and her ability to win and manipulate the suitors/lovers/clients in her life. Being such a being made flesh also has its stresses, by which Laura copes with cocaine & other base distractions.

Sarah Palmer's Temporal Cul-De-Sac: Sarah Palmer is Jiao Dai/Judy. Her killing the redneck at the bar unveils this. The repeating fight scene on the TV and looping moment where Sarah tries but cannot damage the iconic picture of her daughter shows that Jiao Dai's machinations have become undone by Dale/White Lodge/Laura's changes to reality and trapped the angry spirit in a looping temporal pocket.

Jiao Dai: The dugpa black lodge wizard otherworld being behind all the misery gains a toehold in the world through a dimensional rip created by the atomic bomb test. As fission destroys matter on a fundamental level, such action allows this dark being to seed Bob into our world, along with the tulpas, the thought construct doppelganger replacements for people, who act as further agents of misery. This misery is what Jiao Dai and many of the other Black Lodgers feed on, which in turn gives them more power. The stalking horse that is Laura draws Jiao Dai & Bob into the Palmer household, and ultimately this attraction to Laura puts them both in a position from which they get defeated.

Institutionalized Audrey: There was always something off about Audrey -- her non-sequiturs, the easy immersion into jazz music, the overconfident near-delusion that she could easily run the hotel or become Dale's intimate assistant. Note her father's mental slip into an imagined Civil War alternate history, her brother's special needs state, and her uncle's manic social disconnect and descent into drug abuse. Given that fragile genetic background (and probable brain damage from the bomb), when waking from her post-bank explosion coma to find herself pregnant from ersatz Dale's hospital visit, her breakdown & father committing her probably came soon after. Audrey's last scene shows her facing a makeup mirror reflection in a white room, revealing that she never was at The Roadhouse. This implies that Charlie is a delusional stand-in for her therapist, given his detached attitude toward his "wife" and her infidelity. The Billy she mentions being involved with is another patient at the asylum, who's passingly talked about by a pair of girls at the club earlier on as scaling a six-foot fence and subsequently bleeding from his nose & mouth from his recent escape, which is why Audrey's worried over his absence and keeps plying Charlie with questions as to where he is.

Richard Horne's Father: Ersatz Dale reveals this when Richard is electrosploded at the false coordinates with his line, "Farewell, my son." While we spend most of the show presuming Richard to be John Justice Wheeler's or possibly Charlie's offspring with Audrey, he's a truly badder breed of seed.

Dead Becky Briggs: We see bombed out of his mind husband Steven Burnett in the forest holding a gun, being held by his lover Gersten Hayward. Gersten tries to absolve Steven by saying "it" wasn't his fault, it was his wife's, and he was stoned. He's inconsolable and when Gersten hides herself to conceal her affair from the other trailer park resident walking his dog, Steven takes the opportunity to kill himself. The why of "it" all is that he killed his wife Becky sometime before this scene in retribution for her shooting through the door of Gersten's apartment in trying to kill them.

The Poor Bagboy: Sarah Palmer keeps Deputy Hawk firmly outside the door, while we hear a few noises from inside the house in the background. Later we see a thick line of dark fluid across the TV room's carpet and alot of miserable noise coming from offscreen. While some of this is Sarah Palmer/Jiao Dai, some of it doesn't sound like her at all. When Sarah has the episode at the grocery store checkout line, she leaves her groceries there. The bagboy haplessly decides to take them after the event to her house ... where he is tied up & gagged in the kitchen and subject to the untender ministrations of Jiao Dai!

Probable Happy Endings: Big Ed & Norma live happily-ever-after. Witnessing this influences Shelly to reunite with Bobby. Nadine's fangirl hookup with Dr Amp/widower Jacoby becomes something more. Josie lives and ends up with Harry. Reunited construct Dougie & Janey-E continue far better off than when they started. The Mitchum Brothers enjoy being beneficent to others with their settlement money and share the polyamorous dedication of their girlfriend trio under one roof.

[Zoom in to the detail on those individually decorated doughnuts!]

Final Explanations: In David Lynch's Mulholland Drive & Lost Highway, identities become a malleable construct, and characters becoming unmoored from who they are is a mechanism in the Lynchverse. Lynch originally drafted Mulholland Drive as a spin-off from TV to movie where Audrey goes to Hollywood to try her luck as an actress, and the film uses a very shadow hobo-like figure of dread to provide a box that unlocks an alternate dimension where the main character's situation is distinctly different. A Lynch interview mentions that Lost Highway takes place in the same world that Twin Peaks is in. Lost Highway's protagonist at a certain point in the film passes through a doorway and becomes another person, but at film's end is aware of his dual identity. The one identity's wife and the other identity's girlfriend are both played by Patricia Arquette as two different characters, which also illustrates the overlapping realities of those identities. Also a Mystery Man shows the uncanny ability to be bi-located at a party in front of a protagonist and on a landline phone from that same protagonist's house. Maddie & Laura as "twin cousins" and Maddy's feelings of identity-displacement also support the above. Lynch draws heavily from dreams, an experience where one often is themselves but also not themselves at the same time. Lynch also runs an organization for transcendental meditation. Given the Buddhist context of meditation, plus their karmic wheel of existence where one expunges attachments in order to find enlightenment, leaving behind the ego of identity to become one with the divine, or reincarnating to try again and forced to forget ones previous incarnations, follows. Also moving away from secular explanations in general is perhaps Lynch's punchline as "jiao dai" literally means "to explain" in Chinese. Lynch applies these possibilities of polyvalent identities/realities to expand the boundaries of narrative, to make us unsettled at our own valued sense of self, to evoke the fear of the unreliability of perceived existence, and to make us listen for the divine secret that can be whispered into our ear if we only know how to hear it.

[Afterword: Thanks to my wife +Michelle H. for staying up last night after the finale to talk for four hours (since we weren't going to sleep anyway until we figured it all out), thanks to Mitch +George Proctor for hosting us this whole season and sharing our love of Twin Peaks and forwarding the Chinese translation to add to this piece, and +Natalie Carey  for theming out the dessert tray & coffee that fueled this Black Lodge explanitory fire. Also to Óðinn & Baldr who inspired that last line with their story and its secret.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.