2018, a Brief Literary Eulogy for One Nerd
Happy New Year. My only traditions I maintain for New Year’s Eve are watching When Harry Met Sally (or at least the ending) and listening to Auld Lang Syne (Rod Stewart version on youtube, thank me later) and trying not to get weepy.
No holiday evolves more over your life than New Years. I have embraced the intense melancholy that has replaced the bacchanalian revelry; end the year exulting in what you have and mourning what you have lost.
I have much to celebrate, most importantly continued health and happiness for much of my family. To mourn, this was a year for loss for some of my formative literary icons. Ursula K Le Guin, Anthony Bourdain, Stan Lee.
When my sister died I dreamed and grieved for her in Ursula Le Guin’s words. I was Ged, a Wizard of Earthsea, bathing her body in rainwater and when that failed to revive her, chasing her spirit “running fast and far ahead of him down a dark slope, the side of some vast hill. There was no sound. The stars above the hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen. Yet he knew the constellations by name: the Sheaf, the Door, the One Who Turns, the Tree. They were those stars that do not set.”
Years later, and after Marta was born, I read a quote from her on parenthood, “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. [It’s the writer’s] pleasant duty is to ply the reader’s imagination with the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”
For being a prolific consumer of fantasy and writing, I am no wellspring of personal creativity (and fail at imagination). Unbeknownst to me consciously, In my youth I trained myself as Le Guin described pouring over her diverse and moralist works masked as science fiction.
For a writer like Anthony Bourdain, whose works I equally voraciously consumed, this “training” leads me to naturally analyze and sequence his writings into a mental/personal hagiography (whether accurate or not) that after his sudden and tragic death by suicide fails under any level of scrutiny.
Understanding suicide and depression to me is a struggle, much as depression is a singular very real state-of-mind for many, I often feel like I am on an island floating as far away as possible from that abyss. Over my life I had embraced and co-opted so many of Anthony Bourdain’s self-professed virtues, the marvelousness of food and cultural discovery, the intense personal need for curiosity, never complaining and embracing adventures. As I embarked on my own fatherhood journey I read and re-read his reflections on his own father:
“I was shucking oysters at a raw bar in the Village when my father died. He was 57 years old, an age I’m rapidly approaching. I think about that a lot — and about my father, whose face I see in my own more and more with the passing of the years. There’s a picture of me with my then four-and-a-half-year-old daughter that was taken at a food festival in the Caymans last January. She’s sitting on my lap, eyes closed. I’m holding her tight, my face sunburned and blissed out with the joys of fatherhood. I’ve never looked so much like him.”
I have a two-and-a-half year old now and a second on the way, and if anything can describe me in form or in heart it is “blissed out with the joys of fatherhood.” Where my deification of Anthony Bourdain fails is how to join the reality of the same introspective writer, blissed-out father and eternally curious world explorer with the stark reality of suicide.
Life (and death) can appear to be a choice, or as Ursula Le Guin more eloquently wrote “For Either he must go down the hill into the desert lands and lightless cities of the dead, or he must step across the wall back into life”
But the nature of dualism is that for every part of my natural being that says to keep fighting no matter what, climb back over that wall, so it must exists the inevitability of someone else being so uncontrollably pulled down that hill, no matter the shared experiences or positive similarities.
Heavy stuff! I am always thankful for having been born with the natural disposition of pulling myself ever towards the light, or as Stan Lee, comics Grandpa extraordinaire put it, “the greatest superpower is luck.”
I am a generation too young to have had an intense literary relationship with Stan Lee proper, but I could bore you for hours with the moral development his living characters impressed on me growing up. In short: “With great power comes great responsibility” says Uncle Ben to Spider-man, Magento and Xavier: Best friends and philosophical worst enemies, The Hulk and every existential crisis ever. But instead I will just close out 2018 and this literary remembrance with another quote that I can’t say I have lived by, but leaks through in every comic creation he had a part in.
“That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed, without a doubt, a real superhero.”
Excelsior! everyone and hello 2019.