Anthony Bourdain, knight of faith
It’s not often you see Anthony Bourdain rendered speechless in his CNN series Parts Unknown … so when it happens, it gets you thinking about why.
So Anthony Bourdain's sitting with Iggy Pop at a restaurant in Miami, forging a connection over their parallel back stories of debauchery, drugs, wild living — what they call freedom. This is what Bourdain does, and does very well. He connects with people over food. And if they’ve experienced something of the crazy, if painful, life he's lived, all the better. Bourdain, who embodies the dialectic between connection and isolation like no one else. Not to mention his omnipresent wrestle with the conflicting impulses of authenticity and performance. A man for whom contradiction is the very point. Who was famously caught up in the war in Beirut in 2006 while shooting a show about food and travel and protested about making something so trite as entertainment while there were people actually suffering around them — but was ultimately over-ruled by his creative partners and so embraced the ambiguity of the conflict and didn't even attempt to tie a bow on the experience, so that later one of those partners would say of him, "That ambiguity, that's what he embraced. F--king open-endedness is where the answers are."
This Bourdain's sitting with Iggy Pop, his musical hero. The godfather of punk. In his bestselling book Kitchen Confidential Bourdain lists Iggy Pop alongside Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs (and Bruce Lee!?) as his idols, back in the day. But this is years later — around 2015/16. Season 5 of Bourdain's CNN series, Parts Unknown. Episode 3. Miami. I've been bingeing them all. Why? Because I like Bourdain. I like food, and what Bourdain says about it. And travel. I like that too, especially when it’s other people doing it. And I like ambiguity. Contradiction. Open-endedness. Paradox.
Bourdain says to Iggy Pop: "In a lot of ways, as far as looking out for my health, your music early on was a negative example. In looking at my own life and career I'm pretty much known for travelling around the world and recklessly drinking and eating to excess. What does it say about us that we're now sitting in a healthy restaurant — I just came from the gym — and we're in Florida?"
This is Bourdain's craft, how he shapes the encounter until there's common ground, shared heritage, an authentic dialogue around lived experiences.
Bourdain continues: "You're the template for the rock star, meaning other rock stars sort of look to you to figure out, how should I behave. Along with that, look, even at its worst, even if you're broke, you're a guy who pretty much, one way or the other, has been able to have a lot of things ordinary people would never have. You've had many, many adventures. Given that … what thrills you?"
Pause for a second. Note how the question is posed to the person asking it as much as for Iggy Pop. This is also what Bourdain does. Rarely is there an encounter with people where he is not reflexive, self-analytical, posing questions that are as much a search for his own identity and meaning as they are about discovering something about the other. In this moment, across from Iggy Pop, Bourdain may as well be asking himself what there is left that can thrill him, this man (Bourdain) who's circumnavigated the world several times over, met extraordinary people in often spectacular circumstances, who’s already fulfilled many of the desires that have always driven him, such as sailing the Congo like Marlow in Heart of Darkness — but whose actual life, behind the scenes, has taken something of a dark turn.
Iggy Pop pauses. Thinks. Then says, falteringly, "The nicest stuff right now is just very embarrassing ... it's really embarrassing ..."
And what he says next leaves Bourdain speechless, with an awkward, discomfiting smile on his face. And I'm staggered. After watching Bourdain over five seasons (so far) acting so self-assured, I can’t believe that it's that response that undoes him.
Why am I drawn to Bourdain? I ask myself that question at some point in every episode. Parts Unknown is my current go to distraction — at lunchtimes, or late at night when I have the TV to myself. There are almost 100 episodes available on a streaming service I’ve discovered (they’re also on YouTube), so the show has kept me going for a while. I used to watch Parts Unknown, sporadically, when it was shown contemporaneously on CNN. Back then it was about the food, for me, and how, together with the location, it revealed stories about the people who both created and consumed it. But when you binge the show, you realise that apart from the first few episodes in season one, the show was actually less about the food and more about Bourdain’s confrontation with aspects of the human drama. That drama is manifest in both what Bourdain encounters out there in the world — out there meaning anywhere from Las Vegas to Laos — but also what he confronts in himself.
I think it's the latter that keeps me coming back — Bourdain's own contradictions. Consider them: he’s a man who connects so wilfully and easily with so many people in so many contexts, but carries his own isolation into every encounter; a natural performer in front of the camera, he also cringes at and rails against the disruption of the camera’s presence to the authenticity of a moment or a setting; a man whose life is in constant motion, and who has willingly embraced that life, but always seems to be yearning to belong more completely to any or all of the contexts in which he finds himself.
We could go on: his raw cynicism about the world, and its people, and his embrace of it and them; his openness to places that have been ravaged by conflict, but his search for situations of normality, if not mundanity, in the heart of them; his discomfort with cultural practices that involve the ritualistic slaughter of animals, but his willingness to participate fully in those rites for the sake of empathy and authenticity; his ongoing (and oft confessed) battle with depression, amid the full-throated enjoyment of every morsel of food that he consumes, whether it’s a luxurious dish cooked by a Michelin chef, or the most basic street food made by someone who is barely managing to keep their family out of poverty.
Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary philosopher whose theories I leaned on for my PhD, speaks of unfinalisability (unfinished-ness) in dialogue and character, and, by extension, human experience. There's something of the unfinished or unfinalised man in Bourdain — I keep coming back for that very open-endedness, the unresolved nature of every encounter that he has.
In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes the first time he ate a raw oyster, and the experience is a window not only into what turned him on to food, but how unfinalisability — the next thing — would steer his life.
This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents' shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life — the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation — would all stem from this moment.
The shadow of Bourdain’s suicide is never far away, of course. It saturates many of the episodes’ most profound moments with an emotion that wouldn’t have been there when the episodes first aired. But it also reinforces the impermanence of his experiences. It brings into stark contrast the sense of isolation that he brings into each encounter, and which is still there when he exits them. It highlights those moments in which he truly seems to experience peace, but also renders unmistakeable his fleeting enjoyment of it.
And in all that, there’s something else that I believe keeps pulling me back, as a kind of witness to something unique in him: Bourdain's willingness to pierce the core of the contradiction, to embrace the paradox of the human situation, simply because that path is available. He doesn't shy from the absurdity of life, he confronts it. He's like Dalmiel, the angel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, coming down from his lofty perch above Berlin so that he can experience the paradox of the human condition for himself, in full knowledge that for all the joy he’s about to experience, there'll be at least an equal amount of pain.
In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard calls this the absurd — the acceptance of an unresolvable paradox in the belief that there’s meaning and fulfilment in the paradox itself. It’s an irrational belief for most of us watching from the outside, but the person who embraces the paradox is, for Kierkegaard, a knight of faith, a concept he draws from a brilliant retelling of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac — Abraham being Kierkegaard’s ultimate knight of faith. Kierkegaard also says that in actual life he’s never met a knight of faith. I wonder what he would have made of Bourdain.
Bourdain is no man of faith in the traditional sense. He has a low view of religion and faith generally. But Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is not necessarily a religious figure. And as someone who heads into the absurd with no thought of resolving the contradictions he discovers there, Bourdain is very much a knight of faith.
Which is why it’s so surprising when Iggy Pop renders him speechless, with a response that, in hindsight, is a paradox not even the knight of faith can embrace.
Bourdain says: "You're the template for the rock star, meaning other rock stars sort of look to you to figure out, how should I behave. Along with that, look, even at its worst, even if you're broke, you're a guy who pretty much, one way or the other, has been able to have a lot of things ordinary people would never have. You've had many, many adventures. Given that … what thrills you?"
To which Iggy Pop, the former godfather of punk, says: "The nicest stuff right now is just very embarrassing, it's really embarrassing ... being loved. And actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me."
Silence. Awkward smile. Cut away.
My own ‘encounter’ with Bourdain is not unlike his with Iggy Pop. It’s cool for Bourdain to connect with his rock idol by reminiscing about wild living; and for me, It’s cool to categorise my attraction to Bourdain in terms of existential philosophies, just as it's tempting to romanticise those philosophies themselves. Contradiction, paradox, absurdity, the search for belonging in a world of isolation, the yearning for freedom and a life in motion. Blah blah blah.
Enter love. Which is like the rock that falls on your toe while you're musing about whether meaning is found in the journey or the destination.
Love just is. And while Bourdain's busy about the business of forging a connection with his idol based on the dialectic of their self-destructive pasts versus the mundanity of their healthy living in the present, Iggy Pop shuts the contrivance down with the simplest, and most authentic, and least performative, declaration: love is the most important thing.
What's so sad in that moment is that Bourdain doesn't appear to even know what Iggy Pop’s talking about. His awkward smile looks like … disappointment. With so much absurdity to embrace in the world, surely it can't come down to something so normal as love.
I watched the Bourdain documentary Roadrunner again on the weekend again, and was surprised to see that this very scene is used in a poignant sequence in the film during which Bourdain has chosen to leave his wife (and daughter), and fully embrace his alternative life of motion (and isolation). This is the backdrop of his encounter with Iggy Pop. Clearly the chef anticipates a connection with a kindred spirit, perhaps some affirmation of the life he’s chosen. Instead, the godfather of punk prizes open the absurdity of his decision like an oyster shell.
Is love a paradox like those others? Does it belong to the realm of the absurd?
I don’t think so. I think it’s from somewhere else entirely. If Bourdain’s encounter with Iggy Pop tells us anything, it’s that love isn’t some raw oyster that triggers a lifelong desire for the next thing. It’s more like the irritant that produces the pearl inside the shell of the mollusk.