The Weight We Carry

The silent knowledge, brings whispers of Reality.

There is something unsettling in the air, the damp smell of nothingness, the bitter taste of reality, that has been going around. A few weeks ago I was in one of these moods, but now I been on the other side of it. This was all before the Bourdain news hit. When I first heard it, it shocked me like getting ice cold water getting pour down your back.

There is a recent and important portion of my life that can be told in relation to Anthony Bourdain. Just about 7 years ago I decided to become a cook. A couple of years before that, a girl that I was dating got me hip to No Reservations. I usually hate "reality tv" shows but it was her and I respected her taste. And of course I fucking loved it!

So when I had a mini existential crisis 'What am I doing with my life?!?!' came in the middle of the night working on a commercial in a downtown LA alley. I thought to myself, well I really enjoy cooking, maybe there's something there. It was some sort of cocktail between my love of my grandma and her cooking, my admiration of Bourdain, and spending a weekend stone out of my mind watching every episode of Chopped and thinking to myself I can fucking do that! Shortly after that, I made decision to give this cooking thing a try.

Like every good and strange young cook, I read Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Its On The Road for life in the back of the house:

So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something-be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here.

And its this diamond cutting sutra of life in the back of house, that connects all of us pirates of the kitchen to Bourdain. That rat bastard wrote the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner. We all loved and hated him for it.

But to hear one of your heros couldn't make it out the otherside, in real time, on fucking CNN. It was a truly surreal moment(and still is). There is an emptiness, a deep emptiness inside, its bittersweet, something sublime. We all know IT, even if we choose not believe it, maybe belief is a bad word, feel it? And it's that felt experience, that I really want to write about. Because I can see and feel IT. That we are always wrestling with IT, whether we will admit it or not.

(A scene from the film Loving Vincent.)

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The other day I got a message from Nikki, my partner in crime, and core member of Imaginarium:

Listen homie I can’t talk in a hangout but I’m not in a good place and I miss you. I’m quite private about stuff but I’ve been living with the bipolar artist since just before Xmas...I’ve been trying to help him but he’s not coping well.

She is one of the few people that I do this ancient practice of baring your souls with. I didn't attempt to give her some bullshit advice, I just want her to know that I feel her and just a click away if she wants to vent, rant and rave, or just have some shits and giggles.

And then I read something from another friend of Imaginarium:

The first time I played around with the idea of suicide, I was 12. I tested the idea by scratching HL into my wrist. Hate -- Love. But, I told someone about it and claimed it meant hate life. She panicked. Her aunt was a cutter who took her own life. I asked the right person for help, but we were children and my adult didn't know how to offer the help I needed, or accept the help she needed.

And yesterday as well @kimberlylane wrote a interesting post titled On Depression, in it she refers to something @valued-customer wrote:

The push to make suicidal efforts a mental health problem, which it usually isn't, as folks are ravaged not by insanity to the point of despair, but rapine reality.

If one really listens, feels and is aware this, it's happening all the time and all around us. It's the rapine reality. I think Allen Ginsberg wrote IT best:

The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love.

And its this weight I feel, as I sit at the edge of the abyss.

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One of my favorite definitions of Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. These concepts of Universal and/or Eternal Love can be said to be the felt experience of everything. It can be really hard to function in this state; chaotic and overwhelming to most, blissful and toxicing to others, but it's the rare few that dance in the center of this. Perhaps peace can be seen as being in the center of this cyclone.

I do think and feel word usage is important when talking about such complex things. I find great usage of the non dualistic approach of eastern philosophy. And there is a concept of Don't Cling. There was this famous Tibetan Monk, that told the acid heads of the early 60s, when you see hell rising up your legs Don't Cling, when you see the bliss of heaven above Don't Cling.

It is a modern re-interpretation of many of the ideas of the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is about the timeless final passage into the dreamtime or the underworld which all of us must take — and which, in a manner of speaking, we have already taken. And which we are taking right this very moment. This is the only true hell, which results from clinging to the things of this world as they are stripped away, one at a time. The beings we encounter there, they too will be demons should we resist them.

And you know there is something to this deep nature, going back to rapine reality can't be squared with the western mindset. Deep nature seem to me non dualistic; pain/love & bliss/fear just like death/life & space/time, they all seem to be at their core the same. The phrase I like is the Luminous Dark, when the abyss shimmers, giving life to everything. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.

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I want to make some really clear, it's something I hold on to from Jack Kerouac; I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. I will not even pretend that I understand or have the answers. If anyone tells you they know what's really going on, they are probably full of shit or at the every least lying to themselves.

This is just me piecing together these mix feelings, fragments of thoughts, shattered mosaic of memories, and some perennial concepts that I have worked for me.

Another concept I find useful is Detachment, in the eastern sense as I understand it. Its doesn't mean you don't feel anything, but rather you feel everything so deeply that it dissolves back into the abyss and you ready for the next felt experience, you don't cling....

This peace or balance can seem dam near impossible. But maybe we are missing the point, when we frame it this why, as if it was some fix or final state. Rather than a process, a verb not a noun, a felt experience, the timeless, endless moment of NOW. As the Toltec say It's not the dream that is real, its the dreaming

Lastly I will leave you with John C Lilly, who I stole the phrase center of the cyclone from, it's the opening of his book Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space:

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also see a poem about being in my mood: Please Humor Me For A Moment