… more of a possibility with the death of Anthony Bourdain in France.

*******************

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

*******************

A 2016 New Yorker article about the suicides of two high-profile French chefs.

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Reading and thinking about Bourdain, I find myself recalling August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27:

He wasn’t designed for the long haul. Not everyone is.

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I am fucking furious with him.

This reaction, from one of Bourdain’s friends, rings very true to UD, since the same sort of anger was certainly her first reaction to her father’s suicide.

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In line with my two recent posts on horror:

“Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition,” wrote Graham Greene in his second autobiography, Ways of Escape, a book which the chef, author and travel show host Anthony Bourdain, who died on June 8 at 61, kept on his nightstand.

END THE ERASURE OF WOMEN.

Now back from Green Man, where UD ate a lunch (spiced chickpeas, cucumber, roasted beets, housemade pickles, lemony herbed yogurt [they substituted tumeric-tahini sauce] over organic farro) she only a short time ago would have considered, well, a horror (she’s on a health kick), I return to my sermon on horror.

Where were we? … People will flock to Hereditary, says a reviewer of this brutal horror film, because they “want to be fucked up.” No sane, rational person (you’d think) would pay money to sit through the hideous relentless dread, and the extremely gruesome visuals (I won’t describe them, but having listened to a detailed spoiler, I know what they are), this film features. But given the hype – and given the amazingly great reviews (94% on Rotten Tomatoes) – millions of people will indeed pay money to sit through this film. Many of them will want to watch it repeatedly. Because they want to be fucked up.

But what does this mean?

Put aside the obvious somatic pleasures, for some people, of lurid excitement, voyeuristic bloodlust, etc. This film transcends routine horror film payoffs. “Hereditary is far more upsetting than it is frightening.”

UD would put it this way: People want their intuition that life is a horror (ja, ja, life is much more than a horror; we’re talking here about the horror) actualized; they seek opportunities to feel the sharp actuality – visualized, narrativized, aestheticized – of what they sense to be true of human existence. They want this because most people want to feel that they are living reasonably lucid and undeluded lives – that they are not denialist cowards in the face of very difficult human realities.

There are high and low, reputable and disreputable, orderly and disorderly, ways to achieve, or feel, this actualization. UD wouldn’t be caught dead at Hereditary, but she’ll pay much more than ten bucks to attend a performance of King Lear. So maybe part of this is snobbery on her part, but more interestingly I think it’s about preferring orderly expressions of disorder, Apollonian openings onto Dionysianism, to the messy horror plenitudinis of offerings like Hereditary.

The first half of Hereditary feels like its own thing, while the second is a kind of highlight reel of things we’ve seen before, with [the director] conjuring up the specters of a half-dozen horror classics and letting them take over; by the end, the movie has become an empty vessel for its references rather than a fully inhabited drama… It’s ambitious to try to make something that balances psychodrama with paranormal activity — to draw from the DSM-V and the Necronomicon — and the ratio here is off. It’s frustrating to watch the intricate psychological architecture of Hereditary’s script collapse under the weight of gory, aggressive schlock — or else reveal itself as nothing more than a pretense for that shlock in the first place. By sacrificing subtlety and suggestion for a blunt-force attack, Hereditary reaps a cheap sort of reward.

Its intricate psychological architecture having been successfully built into a provocative and even – disturbingly – plausible house of horrors, in other words, Hereditary collapses into a wreck of genre cliches and gratuitous scary bits, or, as another review of the film puts it, a “patchwork-quilt concoction of ghoulish clichés.” Which of course the audience is ready for, because our sense of life as nothing alternates with our sense of life as far, far, too much (see my Rilke quotation in Part One). But throwing all that muchness at people risks aesthetic failure.

********************

I think that the special horror of a high-profile suicide like Robin Williams’ or Kate Spade’s resides in our sense that their act of self-destruction somehow comprehends both nothing, and too much of everything, and thus gives us a double jolt of horrible clarity. They were blessed with over-rich lives (success, adulation, money, beauty galore galore galore), but this very over-richness maybe was part of the problem – the pure too-little (Rilke’s language) insidiously tipped over into the empty too-much, and they were drowning in it. Maybe what I’m talking about gets diagnosed as mania.

… has had UD thinking about horror. So here is her sermon on horror.

This is Part One, because Les UDs are going out for a meal soon.

She begins with this text, from the novelist Harold Brodkey’s memoir, written as he was dying of AIDS:

Life is a kind of horror. It is OK, but it is wearing.

It is OK – that is, we can take it, we do take it; or we ignore it (“I have wondered at times if maybe my resistance to the fear-of-death wasn’t laziness and low mental alertness, a cowardly inability to admit that horror was horror,” Brodkey writes elsewhere.), or we – and this is where it gets interesting, if you ask ol’ UD – we cultivate that admission as an important awareness.

Brodkey rightly identifies his inability to admit that horror is horror as cowardly: Keep your mind in hell and do not despair is the epigraph to Gillian Rose’s early-dying memoir, and it goes to the ethical imperative, if you want to be a serious, reflective person, to evolve and sustain the double vision implicit in Saint Silouan’s famous statement.

Even our writers, though, seem reluctant to help us out here. In his essay, “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell points out that “ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit.”

*****************

Taking on board the horror means not merely acknowledging as fully as you can the first noble truth of suffering; it also means (I suppose this is a subset of suffering; but hold on, cuz my sermon wants to focus on our love of profoundly horrifying films) acknowledging how intimately, sickeningly, undone we are by the lifelong spectacle of just how enigmatically grotesque and grotesquely enigmatic are both grounded human existence and ungrounded cosmic reality.

I read somewhere (can’t find the source) that the best way to get through life is engrossed in “reasonably short-term, manageable anxieties.” Your kid needs to get a job; you want to pay off the mortgage in five years; you want to take fifty points off your cholesterol score. If you can manage, for most of your run, to keep your head down and contend not at all with the incommensurable violent isolating madness just over the atmosphere, bravo. Or maybe it’s cowardly. But anyway, it’s functional, and you’ll get by.

Think of all those great books about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Most people would prefer to be John Roebling, totally engrossed for decades in iron probes, than doomed, metaphysical, Hart Crane.

You probably don’t get Chartres or the Brooklyn Bridge built if, like John Koethe, you spend extended time wondering this:

What feels most frightening
Is the thought that when the lightning
Has subsided, and the clearing sky
Appears at last above the stage
To mark the only end of age,
That God, that distant and unseeing eye,

Would see that none of this had ever been:
That none of it, apparent or unseen,
Was ever real, and all the private words,
Which seemed to fill the air like birds
Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds
Without significance or sense,
Inert and dead beneath the dense
Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds.

Horror vacui is a place many of us have been, and fine, because the capacity to entertain the possibility of nihilism is, I think, a mark of a sensitive, educated person.

But there’s also horror plenitudinis, no? That moment in our lives, wrote Rilke, where

the pure too-little

into that empty too-much.

And this is where the horror film comes in.

***************

My opening text on that subject is this one, from one of many excited reviews of Hereditary:

Despite the challenge of watching the film, reviews so far have been almost universally glowing. Critics have lauded Hereditary’s ability to get under their skin, noting that it’s the kind of movie you just can’t shake, as much as you’d like to. The feedback suggests that people turn to films like Hereditary because they want to be fucked up…

Rehoboth.

Photo UD.

— so successfully fashionable that her name is on quite a number of UD‘s things, even though UD is unfashionable — has committed suicide at the age of 55.

Since Spade was a massive success – at least in public, worldly terms – and a very high-profile person, her apparently out of the blue death will generate much speculation.

******************

Longtime readers know that this blog has, for a long time, had what to say about suicide. (Type suicide in my search engine to read my thoughts on the matter.) In the very early hours of this particular case, I’ll venture only the following: We are most likely going to discover that Spade had long suffered from severe depression.

Other possible reasons include a recent diagnosis of a bad disease, despair at a relapse into an addiction, or a sudden psychotic onset either in response to a family tragedy, or in response (most frighteningly) to absolutely nothing that anyone is able to discern.

*****************

She was found fully clothed, her 6ft 3in frame slumped on the floor, having hanged herself with a black silk scarf.

That was wealthy New York fashion designer L’Wren Scott, in 2014. Spade also hanged herself with a scarf.

******************

The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable.

***************

UPDATE:

Kate Spade Suffered Years of Mental Illness,
Sister Says. Suicide ‘Not Unexpected’

Seen on this morning’s walk
through Rehoboth Beach.

A startling poll released on Friday by public broadcaster ARD showed 81 percent of Germans support banning the most conservative types of Islamic veils from schools and government institutions. The garments they want banned are the burqa, which covers women from head to toe, including the face, and the niqab, which does the same except for a narrow slit instead of mesh square to see out of.

Could we please declare a moratorium on this particular startle reflex? I guess the Foreign Policy guy who wrote this 2016 article was startled; I guess he thought gobs of Germans, and no doubt other Europeans, were fine with public spaces full of degraded women. Will he also be startled to discover that a not-small part of that 81 percent is Muslim? Wow. Gosh.

****************

UD has rarely seen so graphic an instance of separation between elites and everyone else as she has on the burqa/niqab front. Each time another European country bans these vile shrouds, startled reporters round up indignant people to talk about how nasty everyone in every European country is.

Maybe we could do better than this. Maybe we could stop reacting like this. It’s really dumb.

Positively spiritual.

Photo UD.

Kris Kobach, whose official portrait in the state capitol reflects his love of mounting guns, said in an interview today that “Mounting guns is something I do and have done since Pops and I mounted guns together when I was a boy of six.”

Asked to respond to the town of Shawnee’s public apology for having allowed Kobach to take part in its Memorial Day parade mounting a huge gun, Kobach commented: “Guns call out to me to mount them. Mount me… mount me now.”

Good opinion piece about how information-mongering and welfare statism generate mediocrity in India’s universities.

[W]e need to exorcise ourselves of our subliminal fear that the spread of liberal education — especially the liberating and egalitarian ideals embedded in it — could nudge the country into unrest.

… along with good food and drink.

Although so much older than all other
patrons that they expect at any moment
to be asked to leave, Les UDs really
like the place.

… UD‘s hometown, Garrett Park.

“Something old, something very new,” an otherwise respectful report on the royal wedding, said, “Bespoke, cut and sewn by hand, Harry was wearing his aviator wings and a medal honoring his service.” Describing a prince as bespoke is appealing, but cut and sewn is unseemly for the occasion even if true. And it sounds awfully painful.

Matt Gillman, Garrett Park

Succession, early on, is more interested in mocking the ridiculous excesses of the monstrously privileged than probing the monsters they’ve become. In the first episode, a family dinner turns into a makeshift softball game outside, as many do — only this one involves multiple helicopters ferrying the [family] to a field on Long Island. Later, [a family member] offers a Latino employee’s son a million dollars if he can score a home run, only to tear the check up in front of him when the kid just gets to third base. In one outrageous (and Veep-like) scene, [a daughter’s] fiancé … encourages [a young family member] to eat a whole roasted songbird. “This is like a rare privilege, and it’s also kind of illegal,” [he] crows.

UD does not suffer from generalized fear of paintings, only fear of several paintings that, until last week, hung in her own wee ‘thesdan house. She acquired them in 2005, on the death of her father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, who had himself acquired them in the form of gifts from his old friend Wojciech Fangor.

By virtue of being Poles who lived through most of the twentieth century, Soltan and Fangor got served up absurd, atrocious, obscene, ridiculous sorts of early lives – picaresque farces where they were always leaping about trying to survive the latest global disaster. It’s a bit of luck that either man survived to mid-century, and even more amazing that both eventually returned to the very privileged lives into which they were born.

The early ‘seventies saw Soltan a Harvard professor and Fangor the subject of a one-man show at the Guggenheim.

***************

Yet not much happened for Fangor after that show; he remained obscure, and during the subsequent years I knew him in upstate New York, was simply one more struggling artist, working hard in his studio, getting occasional teaching/lecturing gigs, trying to sell canvases.

***************

So when Les UDs sat on the floor of Jerzy’s Cambridge studio sifting through his art collection and dividing things up with Mr UD’s sister, they treated the Fangors the way they treated all of the other mildly significant artworks Jerzy, who knew many Polish artists, had gathered. Mr UD put one of Fangor’s circles on his office wall at the University of Maryland, and the other circles went in La Kid’s room.

**************

When did UD start idly checking the prices of Fangor’s circles online? Aucune idée. But it gradually occurred to me that the numbers were going up and up and up, and that articles about his hotness were proliferating. “Take that Fangor off your office wall and bring it home!” UD screeched at Mr UD one day. “And while we’re on the subject, we need to put all of these behind glass and insure them or something…”

Les UDs both became more and more uneasy as they realized they were holding onto, and not taking particularly good care of, paintings that had suddenly become insanely valuable. It was time to sell.

UD sent exploratory emails to Sothebys, Christies, and Bonhams. The first two sent polite form letters asking to see some pictures of her Fangors. A Fangor specialist from Bonhams almost immediately got on a train from New York City to DC and visited our pictures. She spent hours in the house, scrutinizing, taking notes, taking pictures, chatting to me about Fangor and the paintings, and of course offering us a contract.

****************

More to come.

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Photos Tamara Trocki.