saint bourdain and cassandra carson

Hello,

I would like to raise a glass to the sensualist, to the hedonist. In the name of Saint Bourdain, I call for the worship of feeling, of sensation, of allowing life to blow right through you. Let it light you up from the soles of your feet to the dome of your skull.

Good food, good wine, good sex. Seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That is the rallying cry of the sensualist. To paraphrase our saint, ‘Do we want to eat without fear? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.’

We are, at the end of the day, just our nervous systems, and we crave full-body shocks. I’m not endorsing the cocaine-heroin-alcohol binges of Bourdain’s youth, but I think a lot of us go about our days waiting to be struck by lightning. We are animal bodies – beast songs. In poetry, we compare ourselves to animals when we experience emotions that blow right through us. When logic fails, we become creatures – like a camel mother crying over its stuffed foal.

The tenets of philosophy, religion, or just pure pragmatism try to reign in the simple fact that we desire base thrills. But what is the point if we can’t experience the dizzying heights of feeling that life brings? The course of living hurts but can also deliver joy sublime.

Meanwhile, Cassandra-Carson has a message for you: ‘To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.’

Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen wanting? I am. I’m embarrassed to admit that I still dream of Paris – the scent of blue summers and black lattices running the gamut, the last time I fell in love. I’m embarrassed to admit that I dream of a lot of things.

All writers are self-confessional. But all writers are also self-censoring, self-sanitizing (Bourdain included, despite what his relish in gritty bacchanalia would indicate). There are very few people, writers or otherwise, that know how to ‘strip naked’. We dissemble, some of us more than others, but it’s what we do. Me, I shy away from most forms of wanting – ambition, hope, love. We are animal creatures, and we are shepherded by the things that hurt us. A dog on a shock collar is only going to try and escape the yard so many times before he starts flinching at the sight of the fence. The hunger lingers, but we leave unadulterated wanting to our artists. Imagine someone said to you, without an ounce of irony, ‘In longing, I am most myself, rapt, / my lamp mortal, my light / hidden and singing.’ They would be laughed out of the room. Eventually, we decide to stop wanting, or at least to stop displaying that want. It is better to be cynical, to be sarcastic, to brace for the loss before it ever comes collecting. And in this quagmire, I turn myself into a closet romantic.

The sensualist argues for the opposite. Welcome what will come when you run full-tilt towards life, even if it means hitting a wall. Thus, heeding the call of the patron and accepting the adage of the prophetess, let’s beckon to the hearth intense experience, and along with it, all the ethereal highs and destructive lows. It’s a balance to strike, but I believe that we do it.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain’s memoir. From a listless kid to a celebrated TV program host, his story takes you through the countryside of Normandy to the kitchens of New York City. If you can, ignore the gruesome details of restaurant life and try to take in what he’s saying about regret and accepting wild experiences of life. That’s all.

Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me. I was hibernating in this long winter. How do you think about this balance of hedonism and pragmatism? Am I romanticizing here?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie