Broken Light

“Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom ... is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."—Bourdain

It is Sunday, a day for me always about stillness: thinking, reading, writing, cooking, wine, reflections, poetry, the NY Times, more writing, naps, light lining the horizon, trees in the orchards swaying like a child’s song, the clapping of jump rope, children prancing in the sea, lines from a novel or poem upon my molars and resting in the rumble of my belly. A day for love and unbending.

Today is no different.

But there is a difference: I am rereading Anthony Bourdain “Kitchen Confidential”. It is even more beautiful and raucous then I remember. The punch is stronger, the lines wiser, the trouble more shadow filled, the love more palpable.

This hurts, entirely.

Two days ago I saw the Documentary RoadRunner. It was more wise and educational and beautiful than I had expected. And for 15 minutes toward the end, more unbearable and just plain wrong as we are treated to a litany of pop psychology and woeful finger pointing toward why Bourdain behaved badly in the last two years of his life which culminated in this horrific and gross subtraction: his suicide by hanging.

He is still unforgiven by some. Their grief and sense of betrayal profound real and at times heartbreaking and humanly genuine. I understand them snd their outpouring.

I too am a survivor. From both my own severe depression, hospitalization and three times somehow making it through 3 suicide attempts.

The reasons for depression, addiction, trauma, suicidal ideation and attempts are both obviously clear and architecturally simple and yet the methodology and taxonomy and underpinning infinite in its complexity and makeup. History and DNA and chemistry and experiential markers that accumulate. A story as ok’d as mankind as the cosmos and new reborn unique and new each time we lose someone to suicide.

I loved Bourdains books, the novels too. I understood him, I believed, a punk and a writer and traveller snd iconoclast and lover of life. Iggy named it a lust for life. So too did Van Gogh, those 3 alliterative words.

What are we to do with this film, the books and the shows and his death? He left behind a daughter and it is one of the underlying indictments in the latter part of the film along with the finger wagging and the implied blame and accusations against Asia A, that actress herself a tourer of perceived madness and real scars.

I too am a father. I too nearly became a statistic. I too nearly left a child and family and a partner and friends snd a career and parents and siblings and students and a son behind. I am grateful I made it. I am profoundly grateful

I understand Anthony. In those moments stretched eternally and in-an-instant, we do not, can not think of anything else other than relief from pain, of anger and exhaustion and lament and ennui. Suicides do leave behind people on purpose, it is usually the people behind are ghostly aberrations, mirages on the desert of our consciousness and our slo mo awareness. I know, I have survived that all.

What to do with all this and Bourdain legacy. That is easy:

Read him

Watch him

Listen to him

There is great wisdom and great humour and great insight there.

And remember he has a daughter. Remember her. And he had two wives and countless friends and students and admirers.

The moving ending gets it entirely right. His friend, the brilliant artist, David Chou, or more anyone else articulates everything right about Anthony and also, as a survivor himself to trauma, depression, suicide, he understoods more than most of the people. And he ends the film in the way that makes the best sense for this documentary and for Bourdain's life.

Anthony was not a god. He was a man who possessed a lust for and of living and eating and travelling talking and writing and above all else, an orgiastic need for love.

To get alive.

And so do I

And so must you, please. ❤️

Celebrate that, not from grief or fear, but from the fact that it is and can only be the possibility of our life. Even when broken

Ps. The breakfast I cooked today for my partner. As Bourdain wrote: eggs are everything

I might add: books, wine and people. ❤️🍷