Losing David Lynch is so awful that it’s hard to know what to say or how best to say it.

Though he’d stepped away from feature film directing after Inland Empire (2006) and left as his long-form swan song the stunning return of the television show Twin Peaks (2017), as long as he lived there was always hope for one final Lynch movie. And just knowing he was there — alive and odd and chipper and liable to release at any moment some mad short film or weather report or cartoon featuring The Angriest Dog in the World — was cheering. If there was room in the world for David Lynch to be successful and widely admired, maybe there’d be room in the world for your peculiar self as well?

No single tribute — millions will inevitably be generated in the coming days — could possibly convey the dazzling worth of Lynch’s films. Or, more personally, of certain experiences he gave those of us who were there to see his work emerge as it was first released into the world, bursting into a deathly sick culture that was already sliding downhill fast. His bracing vision made you feel that he knew it, too, and defied it. He refused even to acknowledge that anything was over, not if you were willing to look at it squarely and represent it fearlessly as you saw it.

This quiet defiance linked his work to film noir, that scathing genre reckoning with the modern American experience as one long living nightmare. Lynch would always have at least one foot in film noir, but he expanded the bounds of the genre as well, living a life of visionary creative expression that he called “the art life.”

Lynch’s noir vision was all the more impressive when you consider his simultaneous gee-whiz love of Americana, the naive aspects of the culture that he always embraced. David Lynch’s square side found full expression in his films as well, which only added to the wild frisson of his most discombobulating moments.

It’s important to point out that there are idiots who regard Lynch as some random weirdo who only appeals to pretentious cinephiles. Lynch was one of the few directors who took up the film noir project of seeing American life as a cratering disaster through an appropriately dark and disoriented lens. He found a way to meaningfully continue that necessary vision without sinking into the weak pastiche that’s typical of so much so-called neo-noir.

Nobody other than Raymond Chandler and Mike Davis ever nailed down a vision of Los Angeles as beautifully rendered and terrifying and complete as David Lynch did with Mulholland Drive (2001). I saw that one while I was living there, working on the margins of independent film, and I felt as if someone had infiltrated my mind and seen what I’d seen. Like those velvet-black night rides up winding roads in the Hollywood Hills on the way up to a party in some lit-up modernist masterpiece of a house, drives that always felt simultaneously as beautiful as a dream and as menacing as one’s own inevitable, and probably violent, death.

That burn victim/monster in the dumpster behind the coffee shop where film industry meetings were forever taking place? A brilliant way of concentrating into a single figure the pervasive feeling of dread and doom in LA moviemaking circles.

That’s the thing about Lynch. He wasn’t generating arty symbols; he was looking at the world around him, our world, and trying to find a way to convey what it’s like to live in it.

Many found and still find incomprehensible his amazing first feature film, Eraserhead (1977). But we Lynch heads didn’t find it incomprehensible. We saw it at some midnight movie screening, most likely, and felt as if we’d met a friend, a rightly disturbed but highly astute friend who pointed out what we’d felt ourselves but couldn’t articulate. That is, the dominant quality of our young lives, wandering around in a state of helpless alienation in the brick-and-pollution hellscape of postindustrial life in this country and trying to imagine ourselves in a meaningful system, even one ruled by the melancholy, lever-pulling, apparently diseased “Man in the Planet” and offered consolation by the sweet, cosmic ”Lady in the Radiator.”

Lynch based Eraserhead on his own frightened experiences living in a rundown neighborhood in the crumbling Rust Belt city of Philadelphia as an impoverished young man with a wife and baby and no secure financial or career foothold anywhere. He called it “my Philadelphia Story.”

I saw Blue Velvet (1986) at the cineplex in a mall, along with masses of other people whose box-office dollars made it arguably the biggest hit avant-garde film ever produced in America. I still remember it vividly, the afternoon matinee screening, the sensory overwhelm, the throbbing silence afterward. It seemed as if, somehow, such filmmaking wouldn’t be allowed in mainstream theaters. Yet there it was.

My friends and I left in a daze as shoals of indignant people passed us carping about the film’s vast sadomasochistic strangeness. I still remember how we turned to each other hesitantly and mumbled, “That was great, wasn’t it?”

But we couldn’t immediately say why, which is a hallmark of Lynch’s work. His films always tended to go beyond the smarty-pants rhetoric of cinephiles. And what a relief that is! Not to be generating yet another slick summing-up of a masterpiece that reduces it to our small, would-be clever notions of film art. I read Letterboxd postings that make me want to weep — everything’s a masterpiece, with three masterpieces per week getting churned out by your Christopher Nolans, your Denis Villeneuves, your Greta Gerwigs, your Luca Guadagninos, to judge by the relentless upbeat chatter of those who are wowed by every third movie that gets made.

Good luck with Lynch. His films don’t sum up easily or cleverly.

I watched Twin Peaks (1990) on TV when it first came out. Again, the shock — they actually let him make this TV show? We were mesmerized. Peers showed up the day after each episode to check with each other on the absolute basics, which amounted to asking, “Did you see that?”

And then we would describe it to each other. It was like a paranormal vision. The stiff inhabitants of the red room, the zigzagging floor design, the whispering, the strange speech patterns that seemed just on the verge of becoming comprehensible to you. You had verify with others that it actually appeared and try to come to terms with why it affected you so profoundly.

There are other wonderfully talented up-and-coming filmmakers, of course, but nobody who can in any way approximate or appropriate Lynch, or even try to follow in his footsteps. At a time when the old auteur theory, which argues that the director is or should be the sole “author” of a film, is largely dismissed, there’s Lynch to consider. He’s irreplaceable, a filmmaker who could be named as a countering force to the juggernaut of banal mainstream movies, whose confounding and sensational films could reliably find an audience even among those totally bewildered by what they were watching. That’s the rarest power in filmmaking, the power that makes people cinephiles and film critics in the first place — they want to understand why they’re so overcome by visions they can’t immediately grasp in rational terms.

So we salute you, David Lynch. And it goes without saying, we’ll miss you terribly.