David Foster Wallace once defined "Lynchian"--a reference to the style of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director David Lynch--as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."
A Lynchian situation is one in which the grotesque and/or violent breaks in on everyday life. Such as when you encounter a severed human ear crawling with ants in a field on a summer day.
Or perhaps when a 14-year-old girl, practicing soccer in a city park, is struck in the leg by an arrow--more precisely, a crossbow bolt designed to kill large animals such as deer. The arrow is relatively heavy, just over an ounce, and is tipped with a hinged razor (someone identified it as a Rage, which is a brand name) just behind its point. The razor remains closed while the arrow is flying (for accuracy's sake) and pops out on contact. This happened on a Friday, around dusk, down the hill from my house.
She was with her family; her father said at first he though the blood on her shin was the result of a cleating.
The girl, it is said, is all right. She pulled the arrow from her shin. It was reported that she was still planning to attend her fast-approaching homecoming dance. She probably missed a soccer game or two.
Police are looking for information and for the person who fired the arrow, and I have heard a lot of speculation about the incident. While a few people seem to think the girl was targeted, the consensus seems to be it was an accident. Maybe someone was target shooting on top of the hill.
That seems unlikely because while I know next to nothing about bow hunting, I know that most archers would not use an expensive point on an arrow meant for a target. Broadheads like the one on the arrow that wounded the girl can cost as much as $50 apiece. (You can get two dozen reusable target points for about $8.)
And carbon composite crossbow bolts (pointless) sell in a six-pack for around $40. So the idea that someone idly shot an arrow up into a clean patch of sky seems unlikely. People do strange things sometimes, but that would amount to throwing away around $55.
On the Forbidden Hillcrest site that first reported the incident some bow hunters took issue with the account, saying that the girl must have somehow been wounded by an arrow lying on the ground--that had it been shot she wouldn't have been able to pull it out herself.
It would have penetrated too deeply. The razors would have acted like a barb on a fishhook.
And of course there was one commenter who claimed it was "fake news" designed to denigrate hunters.
Others, who say they were there, dispute this. The arrow came from the sky, they say. Maybe it was shot from quite some distance away.
There are deer in Allsopp Park. About a year ago I watched eight of them scamper across the street 20 feet in front of my car. We see them often on our walks around the neighborhood. I've been told there are people who hunt them illegally in the park but I'd never seen evidence of this.
Until now. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that someone shot the arrow at something--a deer or a squirrel or a rabbit or a feral cat--and missed. And the arrow flew a long way and came down in an unlucky way. (Though luckier than it might have.)
I don't know what the police know, or whether they've identified a suspect. Someone said they stopped a shirtless man walking down Kavanaugh Boulevard a couple of hours after the incident. They spoke with him for a few moments and let him go. It is not illegal for a man to walk the streets shirtless on a warm late summer night. It might or might not have concerned the arrow in Allsopp Park.
Somewhere I imagine there is someone who is following this story nervously. Someone who probably never intended to hurt anyone. Maybe he is thinking of confessing. Maybe he has drowned his bow and bolts in the river. I almost feel sorry for him.
I suppose we've all been hit by arrows at one time or another, times when the inexplicable and unforeseen explodes in our lap to remind us of our fragility. We are at the mercy of an indifferent universe, bound by rules that lead to our inevitable extinction. Never mind our protests, our existence doesn't register. Our world is but a speck of cosmic dust.
And what goes up comes down somewhere. Celebratory New Year's bullets may mainly rattle on Third World roofs but sometimes find a softer spot to land. Even atmosphere-piercing rockets come to rest, maybe light years away, but eventually something larger than them will pull them into its orbit and they will be crushed or burn up or crash into some inky sea or alien rock. So Shakespeare will be forgotten. So will our kind.
We forget this in our bustle, our comic striving to set up our lives the way we think we'd like to live them. That's probably just as well, for what is the alternative but so much useless existential angst? Why bother to pull the arrow out? We're just waiting for the next one, and the one after that, until the world is done with us.
The people horrified by the story of the girl shot by an arrow in the park have a point: Reckless people put us all at risk. We ought not shoot our arrows around playgrounds, or text and drive, or take for granted any moment where the sun shines on our face. Girls should not have to worry about being tracked by arrows. It's scary to think that we might be hurt or killed by the universe.
But isn't there is some magic in this Lynchian moment? Some inspiration to be had in the notion of this bad-ass teenage girl carrying on? Pull out the arrow and go to the dance. That's an ethic to embrace.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/26/2017