PART 1
I have met Charles Bukowski.
Not in person; let me be clearer.
He was dead long before I had been delivered to this world, in a torrid night of May 2002. And I can only insult, praise, or ignore the dead. Not summon them back to life. I’m no necromancer of sorts.
No, I have met him spiritually, through a handful of other people.
Mostly derelicts and bums, passersby with unparalleled street erudition who had a thing or two to teach and a 6-pack in their stomachs, which made them far from lucid and tedious.
Not only that, I came to believe that if you squint your eyes hard enough, you’ll see his trace in all things describable at their lowest, crudest state.
And, provided you are a bit of a nihilist yourself, and you ask the right questions, you’ll find his scowl nose and pockmarked face within your own self too. I cannot guarantee it’s going to be pleasurable, but it surely will be a journey you’ll tell someone someday.
It takes some guts to truly LOOK around ourselves, let alone to take a long look at the reflection on the mirror, and be painfully honest.
Not everybody can sustain it.
Almost none can.
He could. And he wrote extensively about all he saw in his mirror.
Many readers mistake his prolific literature – I believe innocently – for some sort of gigantic monument of self-glorification – of perverted, unambitious basking in mediocrity and of all the ways to get there. Many superficially describe him as a Trash-Zen Monk.
Reality, I suspect, is far from that.
If for no better reason, because one would expect a monk to look at the stars above in abstraction. Buk, instead, looks at the sewers.
After I had read a couple of books of his and almost all his poetry two years ago, I remember distinctly associating their author to Saint Therese, who once wrote of a beggar panhandling for a living in the town square, right at the gates of a sumptuous palace, adorned by statues and marbles, of chimneys and standards, without ever realising the palace is his.
Bukowski’s sensibility, I thought back then, allowed him to know the castle was his and within his soul. I reckon that he found it to be a place too obscure and painful to live in. So he chose to be a bum yet again, hopping from job to job, drinking and smoking to forget, for some hours, of his wounds, only to find out he was still wandering in the castle’s meanders all this time.
Nonetheless, he’d have never seen the world with the same eyes ever since.
On his notoriety
Allow me to pen an assumption of mine, yet not disproven by my own statistics. As with any anecdotal generalisation, take it with a grain of salt.
- People are first exposed to Buk by peers, generally boys, for all the wrong reasons, before having read a single page of his.
The first time I heard the name was in a Literature class somewhere around 2016, by a girl named Rebecca, who had posted some pictures of her lavish summer holidays, and the caption read as something along the lines of “I have no time for things without a soul”. Later, I found out through a simple google search that whatever the girl wrote was blatantly a misattribution to the German-American writer. The funniest part of it is that she concluded the citation with “- Bucoski”.
I had a good laugh and moved on with life.
But she earned the credit. She was the first that made me ask from time to time:
“Who the fuck is Bukowski?”
Therefore, the annex to my daring postulate is:
- More often than not, in such instances, he is regrettably misquoted and misinterpreted.
We are undeniably bestowed with a certain prejudice towards him.
Finally:
- Bukowski is what I friendly label as a ‘Moby Dick’.
Everyone knows Moby Dick is a whale, that it is white, and that it is a blood-thirsty monstrosity out there in the sea, tormenting some grudgeful limp captain aboard a crooked old vessel.
Most know little else.
The everlasting metaphor of nature’s resistance elopes some people’s characterisation of the whale, and even fewer folks mention the ambiguity of ‘whiteness’ in nature. Forget about entertaining conversations about the interpretations of what the cetacean truly symbolises, and reflections on the limitations of human knowledge altogether.
The same people probably ignore the fact that the giant of the sea really existed (several did, actually) and we have proof in the nautic registers of past centuries.
The persistent, yet poignant, misapprehension of Moby Dick as wholly albino still endures a ruvid testament to the power of collective imagining over the precise, recurrent detail of Melville’s description of a white head. The rest of the body was normal, albeit gargantuan.
I’ll stop boring you with menial details, getting to the brass tacks:
There is so much to know below the surface.
Yet we dive elsewhere, because we falsely feel like we already know the harbour and its pointy rocks. The same happens to our pockmarked old curmudgeon.
Charles Bukowski’s a Moby Dick.
He’d have a good laugh about the comparison. I feel like it’s somewhat explainable and natural, given his bigger-than-life legacy.
And, speaking for myself, upon delving into his work and life, the surprise I got in acknowledging it was nothing like I expected dwarfed all my expectations.
On his style
Style is to Charles Bukowski what a paintbrush was to William Turner, naturally sitting in his palm and clenched hand.
He even wrote a poem, once, on style.
His considerations are almost universally applicable, if you resonate with it:
Style
Style is the answer to everything A fresh way to approach a Dull or dangerous thing To do a dull thing with style is preferable To doing a dangerous thing without it To do a dangerous thing with style Is what I call art Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art, Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art Not many have style not many can keep style I have seen dogs with more style than men Although not many dogs have style Cats have it with abundance When Hemingway put his brains to The wall with a shotgun, That was style Or sometimes people give you style Joan of Arc had style, John the Baptist Christ, Socrates Caesar, García Lorca I have met men in jail with style I have met more men in jail with Style than men out of jail Style is the difference, a way of doing A way of being done Six herons standing quietly in A pool of water Or you walking out of the bathroom, naked Without seeing me [“Style”, Charles Bukowski, ≈ 1972]
The last lines have stuck with me for a while now.
At first, it seemed inscrutable and drenched in symbolism. I tried to interpret it for a while, with little success I’m afraid. Till now.
As I am writing, it becomes clearer and clearer, I think.
There is no symbolism.
I was on an entirely different plane the whole time. It’s about indifference. It’s what makes style true style.
There’s no pretense, no submission or subjugation to external eyes. It’s done without planning, without any practice at all. There’s no concern for how you appear, no calculated performance. It’s simply you.
Think of a cat. Your cat, if you have one.
He’d behave just the same if he’s in a garden basking in the sun, on your sofa your dad doesn’t let him on, or at a masquerade ball he casually sneaked in. It’d be just the same in every scenario. It would stretch his paws, lay on the ground in an irritatingly perfect ‘u’ shape, and he would lick its left leg to groom its ears.
Surely it doesn’t have a wardrobe, nor an etiquette to follow for that matter.
No bluejeans, no shirt, no white tie ensembles.
Only the one nature bestowed upon him. And it wears it without thinking of its appropriateness. It’s always appropriate, and ever-versatile.
- - this is a message to people who dress cats or dogs: stop - -
So can be herons in a pool of water.
They are CONSISTENTLY themselves.
We can be like cats or herons too, at times.
When we are at home alone, we are back to the Garden of Eden before Eve had the -honestly genius- idea of making that pillock first man eat the Apple, when prudery simply isn’t around. Effortless action, non-doing. Nakedness, no etiquette.
The only difference between most people and Buk is that he put this to paper.
It’s the understanding that true mastery lies in aligning oneself with the natural flow of things, in acting without striving, without forcing. Style, as he presents it, isn’t a performance to seek or to imitate, confident that the more you wear your own nude skin the more you’ll grow in it.
Precisely because of this, he hated imitators.
Well, he hated many things. But imitators in particular.
He hated adulators and fanatics too.
He argued many times that poetry has to come bursting out of you. If it doesn’t, just don’t force it. Maybe wait until it does. Till then, DON’T TRY.
He put this sentence on his gravestone. Don’t try.
Libraries are plagued by dusty, pretentious, self-loving, big names already. For the most part, they are uninspiring and have little to tell.
Buk’s style may not speak to you, that’s perfectly normal. But the core of the concept doesn’t change. He wasn’t trying to speak to anyone but himself in the first place.
I highlighted the word “consistently” for a reason.
The man couldn’t live without writing, according to his own admission.
As a matter of fact, he considered himself lucky he could cash an allowance thanks to his writing. Had he not published anything, and got no money as a result, he “would pay to write, it is a matter of existence”.
Almost every night, he would drink three or four beers (the last stack of a regular day), sit on his typewriter, and fill out at least 10 pages with black ink.
He seldom exceeded the threshold he set, writing 12 or 13 or more pages.
The pages, the stories, the poems he most liked would be marked by an asterisk in the next morning, when he would read with a fresh mind (i.e. after the first beer in the morning).
Although he was very prolific, and writing about what he lived or thought was a matter of survival to him, he wouldn’t have been a true writer had he not experienced many things, had he not had some meat to pick off the bone.
“You can’t write without living and writing all the time is not living.”
Writing, contrary to many of his colleagues, didn’t nobilitate the subject. It simply makes it exist and, coincidentally, vivid for more eyes to picture it. Paradoxically, the less filters, the more the reader sees through the lines.
To conclude, some anecdotal remarks.
Many I know who tried had a hard time reading his work. Even though they liked it, they reported a feeling of aimlessness.
“What is his message?”
“What should I learn from this?”
“A friend asked me why I would recommend Bukowski’s book. I love it, yet I didn’t know how to respond properly”
Bukowski has the answer to these doubtful readers, perhaps spoiled by a romanticised literature:
“I have no message to the world. I am not wise enough to lead, yet I am wise enough not to follow.”