Bourdain was a
world adventurer who really seemed excited by and interested in people. I’m
interested only in people’s sickness: There is no awe or exhilaration there. And,
I go nowhere and actually don’t care to: Dysthymia’s grey hole of gravity would
ruin exotic travel. It would blanch every place to: I am still me. All politics
are local; all depression is self-enclosing.
Did Bourdain love
food as life? or as medicine? I haven’t
read his celebrated book or watched his more autobiographical episodes, but my
wife said he talked about feeling crazy and wanting to ‘curl up in a fetal
position for six weeks.’ If you are avoiding your childhood tragedy, maybe the
faster you run from it the more it holds you back, pulls you back. Our past
doesn’t like being run away from. Add that to: The more terminal-feeling the
tragedy, the faster you have to run. “25 rock stars who died before age 40.”
Charming and alluring psychopaths. Bourdain?
I just picture,
very vaguely, that there is a birth or infancy core, almost like the deepest
central kernel in our body, whose feeling is life or death. I’ve cited several
times The Lancet study that
statistically correlated respiratory birth trauma with adolescent suicide.
Maybe this kernel is like a star or a planet: It is vital or fiery, or dead or
cold; it spins on its axis, or is still. Combine these features differently and
they would bring different feelings: life, life not-worth-living but enduring nonetheless;
dead must die.
Where am I? I
am pretty sure my problems pre-dated my parents’ first efforts to be useless
and unnurturing. J. Konrad Stettbacher (Making
Sense of Suffering), if I recall, related caesarian section birth to a
kind of later dead-in-the-water personality, an unconscious nonstarter or non-finisher sense of life. Whatever
I am, there’s a spin. It is a very slow spin where, even if I were left alone
without my wife and in the most suffocating grief, something would feel: Don’t
die.
That’s not very
much, is it? But I can tell it’s as stubborn as the cosmos, which won’t blink
off.
The default mantra regarding pre-birth, birth and very early childhood seems to be “ok, so a lot of shit happened, but hey, here we are now, we need to get over it and get on with our lives”. And get on we do, but oh the weight of that invisible anchor! To “get” anywhere and live anywhere near congruity with oneself, it seems that we have to go back there and unlock the dark dangerous dungeon door. (Something we may have been resisting ((emphatically)) for 50 years or more). And many never do (go back), and it is difficult indeed, to justify the merits. I read many years ago in a Philippines newspaper (religion takes a prominent place there, even on the front pages) where a Cardinal said that most people default to the “bad” position because it’s just too darn hard to be good! ;);) It would be difficult to demonstrate to a person struggling with these questions, of being good and/or bad, just why choosing to be good would be the beneficial option. Could the same be said for going back to the swamp and “fixing” (releasing) yourself? Is it just too darn hard? Like the Cardinal, I would have a hard time convincing someone that that it is the preferred option. Perhaps Churchill’s quip “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” applies here. But most people do not want to look, or they had such a sufficiently calm upbringing that their demons do not push up from the dungeon below. Others, the ones who hurt, their psyche has been damaged in the pristine moments. They must look.
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