When things come at us in pairs, we must stop, we must worry, we must wonder. We must wonder how to answer the deaths of public figures that have posed for us an impossible question.
Let us not confuse psychologies. Long has it been said that suicide is not the answer. Or, more adorably (annoyingly): ‘Suicide is a permanent answer to a temporary problem.’ But still, let us not confuse psychologies. Suicide is not an answer at all. It is, beyond the capabilities of language, the largest question we can collectively be asked — not asked in a humanistic sense, not in a what-drove-him-to-that sense. The question is colored differently by each self-destructive act, but the question is always there. That existential drift. That timeless wait. That bottomless now-what. That depression.
Let us not confuse psychologies. In recent days, with the passing of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, depression has stalked our conversations. Depression has, devoid of trial and almost by definition, become the culprit, and, in so being, depression has also been the answer to the very question it is said to have posed, which is at once fitting, given the complexities of existence, insidious, given the cleverness of the riddle, and, well, fucking depressing, given the natural circle into which the question and answer being one-and-the-same (or at least echoes of each other) spins us.
(It is at this point I feel I should pause to admit that lately I’ve been reading J.L. Borges, whose stories, without fail, even those that last a mere half-page, throw us like chum to the vacuous unanswerable, but that do so with love and with hope, which the author modestly claims “does not lie within” him.)
Let us not confuse psychologies. Our to-days are immediately consumed with ‘get help’ messages and well-intentioned links to suicide hotlines, with warnings to understand depression (although, anyone who has scraped the bottom of that barrel knows is a notion as tangible as, say, gravity or dream), with gurus who teach us in our own languages of impermanence, of anicca, of this too shall pass. But let us not confuse psychologies . . .
Impermanence is a solution. Understanding depression is a solution. Both are preferable to killing oneself (understatement), and we should exhort ourselves to either every day. However, each solution lives within time, and therefore each is a temporal (temporary) fix — which is a good thing; the best outcome at the end of a diplomatic talk is a plan for another diplomatic talk, even if we talk infinitely — but which will lead us in that circle once again, the circumference different for each of us, question and answer and question and answer and question . . .
What, then, if we stop asking? (He says while asking a question.)
A travel magazine posted a Bourdain quote shortly after his death. Bourdain had said, the more he traveled throughout the world, the larger it became, and the more he knew he knew nothing.
On the sad day of his death, on the sad day he asks us the largest question he can, a question impossible for those of us alive to ask ourselves, I find myself looking at the end of a wonderful story. A story that has thrown me steeply into the vacuous unanswerable. A story told by a life. A story punctuated with a question mark. I find myself choosing to face that question with a lesson taught since Socrates, taught by Bourdain, and that must be taught always. I find myself choosing to face that question and saying with all happiness, joy, hope, gratitude: I don’t know.