Many years ago, I had a conversation with someone who said they’d been receiving messages from beyond the grave—not just any grave: she said she’d been in touch with Chester Bennington of Linkin Park fame. I don’t remember how and why this came to pass in her life, but she’d said that I probably wouldn’t believe her so I didn’t press for answers. She seemed to feel to be genuinely heartbroken about his death and had found some purpose for others like her. She said he wanted them to know that he was okay.
I remembered this story as we binge watched every season Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.” There’s melancholy and piercing clarity in watching these back to back while knowing full well how his story ends, so we stopped after the 2017 episode in Seattle and switched to “Road Runner” for more context on his life before watching the final season. It’s a documentary that aims to answer the question of why he was the way he was—the kind of guy I could relate to in odd ways.
For one, we’d shared a birthday. I found it morbidly entertaining to compare shared characteristics, some obvious (romantic and sentimental) and some not-so-obvious (vicious when provoked). But the more we watched, the more I realized that he’d found himself in a life we wasn’t meant to live. It was obvious that he’d been deeply loved—what was perhaps less obvious was how it may have been like the love of vultures for carrion.
This thought came to me in one scene where his creative partners recounted how they’d reacted when he first told them that he wanted out and became more substantiated in my mind with every scene of his friends grappling with the meaning of his death in increasingly self-centered ways. Maybe I’ll write more about how and why I came to think that at some point—but for now, all I want to say is that, seen from those eyes, I understand his exit.
In “Pandora’s Camera,” Joan Fontcuberta writes about how photography literally gave him life—yes, as his chosen profession, but even more directly, through a photograph of his father sent in a letter to his mother, one of the primary connections in their meeting and courtship. He shares this story in a chapter titled: I Photograph, Therefore I Am.
Imago, ergo sum. This is what makes “homo pictor,” the modern being whose “camera has become one of the vital contraptions that encourages us to venture into the world and traverse it both visually and intellectually: whether we realise it or not, photography is also a form of philosophy.” But Fontcuberta is also careful to note that this proposition has another variant too: imago, ergo sum—I am photographed, therefore I exist.
“It is the presence of the camera that makes an event historifiable.”
That’s what I feel in my gut whenever I see an old photograph of me. My mom just found a bunch, going through my dad’s stuff. This first one, I’ve seen. I think I know why it’s so crumpled too. I think that had to do with my discomfort with photographs throughout my life—can’t you see it in my face? I have a lot of photos wearing that same expression. That furrowed brow is my most defining feature.
But what’s this? Am I actually smiling? I’ve never seen that photo before. I don’t even recognize myself.
Photos make us historical beings, and I think that’s what I, in my heart of hearts, find painful about them. They giggle at the false sovereignty of our selves.
This is a fast food chain I’d seen in Lebanon but didn’t know anything about until I watched Anthony Bourdain eat here 2 or 3 times in “Parts Unknown”—the last time, he ended the scene with: “ugh, I hate myself.”
I could relate to the guy a lot. His curiosity seemed to lead him down winding paths where he tried things on to see things through other people’s eyes the way I often find myself doing, but he didn’t have an exit strategy. Something about his generation and the heroes he idolized and the people he surrounded himself with seems to have narrowed his sense of self, like there was only one acceptable response to the world and the one he so clearly was born with—soft, sensitive, and slow-moving—was never it. You can literally see it in his body from scene to scene; checked out in some, boyish in others, and relaxed with only a few.
But I won’t go on and on. I don’t really know the guy. I’m just one more thin and flaky layer of narrative that tries to make sense of his life, something he clearly struggled with himself. The point here is ultimately what that story reflects back on mine. Isn’t that why we have heroes in the first place?
(BTW, I took and am posting these on my “burner phone”—testing out how it feels to travel with this Chinese Android)