Bukowski
was a misogynistic, juvenile, posturing relic of an image of meaningless
masculinity. But so what? The true juvenility is in failing to segregate the
morality of the man from the quality of the art; it’s in trying to judge
literature by the racial/sexual/ethnic enlightenment of its author. Or maybe
that’s just liberalism. I say ‘literature’ and I almost feel myself scoffing. This is the snob part
of me who has moved onto the subtle and reserved in tone. That is the natural
response, of course. To scoff. Every morning we wake up in complete horror at
the ourselves of the night before. In a frantic rush we burn all evidence.
Disavow all ties. And if we are to disavow juvenile interests, what better than
fantasies of alcoholic, wife beating, and oh so free existances?
Or perhaps
we just pretend it’s that. Sometimes I wonder if I disavow Kerouac and Rimbaud
and the like out of maturity, or disappointment—pontificating the
superficiality and pretention of the clichéd bohemian ideal, only out of
bitterness and spite that either they lied to me, or worse, I lied to myself.
No matter
though. The point is that in disavowing the past, we limit our sense of sight
to that of ourselves at 17. We block off the idea that perhaps there is more
there. Upon adult inspection, Bukowski was
a juvenile misogynist, and at least 9/10s of his poems reek of posturing. But
that is exactly the point. That is why he is one of the most important writers
of the 20th century. Bukowski wasn’t merely an archetype of
miogynistic, hard drinking masculinity; he was a man obsessed with the image.
Amidst the endless tough guy stories something seethes underneath. I flip
through his books and just as I begin to tire of his neverending sexual and
alcoholic adventures, I find bluebirds that wont be let free and old men,
driving around, alone and confused, wondering what they did wrong.
What
Bukowski presented to the world was the character he created. And it’s not that
it was a lie. No doubt, he was an angry, misanthropic alcoholic, but in opening
his mouth, in writing his poems, in finding the comfort of an image that he
found extremely attractive, he destroyed himself, and became the character he
both loved and hated. The fact that he chose the character he did is
irrelevant. The comically crass misanthrope, the sincere intellectual, the
heady neurotic, the fun loving partier, whatever. The moment we open our mouths
and create an image, even if just to ourselves, we limit ourselves and deny
something realer and truer, and a rage grows, a longing, that is only quelled
to quietism by the realization that what we desire is impossible. At each
moment, in each person there is love, hatred, rage, lust, jealousy, pride,
goofy humor, bemusement, irritation, and more than I could possibly name, but
in our heads and in our social actions, we pick and choose which genuine truths
and emotions and impulses to follow based on the most suspect of criteria. We
ease ourselves into personalities, built upon linear cohesion. We are defined
by them; we rely on them; we lose ourselves in them. And yet some part of us
hates them because the truth that they represent is the most dishonest in the
world when compared to the sum truth of every complexity within us.
We know that we wear them out of
weakness. We wear them to shirk the unimaginably difficult task of discerning
from which self each of our impulses springs from in our day to day actions and
decisions. Abstract bullshit, I know, but take any real world situation. Do you
forgive your girlfriend for an action that could, in all good conscience, be
grounds to break up with her for? An initial impulse may say yes, but from
which self does it spring? Does it spring from the self that is filled with
love and can truly forgive or does it spring from the self of degregation and
shallowness that in self-hate would sacrifice any shred of self respect for a
warm wet cunt to have every night? Or is it the self that is merely concerned
with the way others view oneself and the desire to be viewed as forgiving and
kind? Or is it the self of passive agressivity that hates the girlfriend, and
would conceive acts of grandiose kindness merely to make her feel less worthy?
There are a thousand other possibilities, and this is what the self aware
person goes through every day, in every moment, with every decision and word
and interaction—that need to sort out from where their impulses spring, lest the
person become something that they fear. And so they form personas, premade and
highly attractive, to lift the weight. The persona sets a track that is easily
followed and therefore the responsibility is no longer on the psyche.
Jesus, it’s
no wonder that alcohol played such a huge role in his writing. There is no
greater gift to a man obsessed with his own self-definition. For just a few
dollars worth of liquor, the cringing stops at the opportunistic, child-like
sketchings of self-definition and the genuine ideal. I look at college parties
of FUN at all cost and shake my head. From Bukowski’s view, and mine for that
matter, they’ve completely missed the point. Alcohol’s not about being made
happy; it’s about being able to stop being something, and just be. You’re happy, goofy, sad, angry,
bitter… As Bukowski once wrote, it’s better to be happy if you can, but make no
mistake, being able to just be sad is
infinitely better than being happy by arbitrary choice and suspect omission.
But along
with alcohol, perhaps the biggest motif (well, besides pussy) to be found in
his writing is isolation. Bukowski’s declarative stance on the issue can be
found in the script for Barfly, where Chinaski says “I don’t hate people. I
just feel better when they’re not around”. This love and glamorization of
solitude is found throughout his writing.
“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt
suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I
never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was
bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other
words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've
always had this terrible itch for solitude,”
That itch for solitude and irritation at the company of
others is indicative of the conflict of self definition and persona found in
his writing. The desire for the comfort
of persona is irrevocably mixed with the desire for isolation because the
balance of a persona is a precarious one that must be carefully controlled at
all moments. Alone, pacing and thinking and drinking and chainsmoking and
writing, one can be the master of their self-image, one can mold themselves
into any unseen, grand and tragic hero they desire, but the complications and
pressures of social interaction jeopardize that completely. In social
situations, in actively seeking human connections, compromises must be made,
and as in all situations, the tree that grows too stern risks snapping in
brutal winds. Again though, the human and the genuine in Bukowski’s writing
rages against the comfort of dehumanization, and the conflict manifests. This
resistance comes throughout his writing, often in ways so small and seemingly
insignificant that they could be passed unnoticed, like in ‘Women’ where he
shows the Chinaski character validating the importance of human connection by
weeping over a lover, or in ‘The Crunch’ where he writes of “a loneliness so
great that you can see it in the movements of the hands of a clock”, which
leads to “the terror of one person aching in one place alone”, only to find
hope and a refusal to retreat into quietist isolation when looking upon young
girls who “stem flowers of chance”.
What can be gleaned from his
writing is a search for the genuine in the fight against the narrow
dehumanization of self-definition. It is the internal conflict between the
cocoon of a persona that deflects pain and the desperate need for human
connection and true humanity.
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