I'm not going to write a full eulogy here or anything but I'm sad about Anthony Bourdain's suicide. Reading about it has made me reflect on a particular angle of Jack's: the impossibility of knowing someone else's internal life, even when they are in extremis. Apparently Bourdain was with a friend, working on an episode of his show, until evening, when he went back to his room and did whatever he did to kill himself. Similarly, Jack was in a supportive place, in the office of and talking with the staff at the program that he was part of in Manchester, until he just up and walked out to his death.
It's hard - not to say impossible - for me to imagine the degree of internal suffering that someone must feel who takes their own life. And not just the degree but the persistence, the unshakeableness of suffering. Surely there must be some acute surge at the end but of the suicides I'm familiar with the suffering was long-term. So it must have been with Bourdain. My heart aches for Eric Ripert, the friend he was with at the end, who could not have had any idea what his dear friend was about to do. Maybe Bourdain seemed a little down, or tired, but by the accounts I've read there was nothing out of the ordinary.
And that's the bit that's getting to me today. The obvious truth that we cannot ever really know what's going on inside someone else's head, that in some deep way we are only ourselves and can never be someone else. That the insight of the anonymous painter of "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Auden put so beautifully into words, applies to us all every second of every day. When Icarus is someone close to us, we may fly to the source of the splash, we may feel anguish at the boy falling out of the sky. But most of the time we are the ploughman, the sailors on the expensive delicate ship. And even when we're Daedalus, off-frame, we can't follow Icarus down. We have no choice but to keep flying, wishing we could have entered Icarus's mind and kept him steady but knowing that that was impossible, that we'd done our best and it was not enough.
This analogy may have gotten slightly tortured but I don't care.
It's hard - not to say impossible - for me to imagine the degree of internal suffering that someone must feel who takes their own life. And not just the degree but the persistence, the unshakeableness of suffering. Surely there must be some acute surge at the end but of the suicides I'm familiar with the suffering was long-term. So it must have been with Bourdain. My heart aches for Eric Ripert, the friend he was with at the end, who could not have had any idea what his dear friend was about to do. Maybe Bourdain seemed a little down, or tired, but by the accounts I've read there was nothing out of the ordinary.
And that's the bit that's getting to me today. The obvious truth that we cannot ever really know what's going on inside someone else's head, that in some deep way we are only ourselves and can never be someone else. That the insight of the anonymous painter of "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Auden put so beautifully into words, applies to us all every second of every day. When Icarus is someone close to us, we may fly to the source of the splash, we may feel anguish at the boy falling out of the sky. But most of the time we are the ploughman, the sailors on the expensive delicate ship. And even when we're Daedalus, off-frame, we can't follow Icarus down. We have no choice but to keep flying, wishing we could have entered Icarus's mind and kept him steady but knowing that that was impossible, that we'd done our best and it was not enough.
This analogy may have gotten slightly tortured but I don't care.
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