Bukowski Heaven

I have discovered Bukowski for myself this summer and am reading everything I can get my hands on. I am remembering what it felt like to be ten and read as much as possible, drink in the text, and breathe in the words of some book, only to crave more from that author or one like it.  I have not felt so keen on an author in sometime, nor moved to think about a person's work in this way.

So far, I have read Post Office, the third volume of his letters, Factotum, and am about to embark on some of his poetry soon. Last night I watched a film called Born into This with amazing footage of him and Linda Lee drinking, smoking, and talking about writing, women, and woes. He describes his childhood, which I have been reading about in Ham on Rye this week. He is most disturbed by the razor strop beatings and his boils which plagued him for a long time and left his face and body scarred for life until he died. Linda Lee says when he died he had skin smooth like a baby, that everything relaxed and was freed. 

Why have I become so absorbed. Perhaps, the reason he became so popular and so valuable. Some may hate his work, I wouldn't understand why. Perhaps only fundamentalist Puritans would despise his works. His raw truths and harsh sorrows are bound in tales of sloppy, drunk slapping of bodies, eager bets at the tracks, lots of cigarette lighting and slurping from glasses and bottles, and the clackity-clack-clack of the type, which we hear silently when he reads from the catacomb-expansion of words. Some might feel plunder or beaten up by his verbal lashings, or tickled by the sounds, sights, and texture. 

Personally, I feel revived by the pain and humanity. I appreciate he howling, the wounding, the screams.

It's all in there, they are all in there. Artaud, Bataille, Laure, Rimbaud, Abe, Kakfa, Dostoyevsky, Nabakov, Plath, Wolf, Stein, Rumi, and others. Screams and howls come in many forms, and I know that is where the essence of our life lies, this is why the thinkers, writers, composers, and artists and others who take risks and express the scream are often smothered, shut down, with a great pillow of society on their heads. But not for repose, for the denial of our animality, our baseness, our endless lament, which gets in the way of productivity as constructed commerce would have it. 

Bukowski's chain of useless work and day jobs, or night jobs, where he assembles or loads, carries or hauls things for others to consume is a wonderful metaphor for the cycling futility and ridiculous spin we have placed upon our existence. What is this productivity, what is the economic boom's result upon our souls. Can we ever recuperate our selves at the end of grueling hours where we give our time away to others. In Factotum, this is depicted in many ways, and in many ways does he try to convince others the work is aimless, and that drinking is a much more productive work as it leads to writing, getting it out, living, freeing the bluebird inside.

Bowkowski wants to drink and release, drink and release. It is the drinking paired with the release that was important his whole life. He lived during prohibition, what stupid thing, which apparently started right here in Maine. How ridiculous that we continue to have rules around liquor its consumption and purchase, which only cause it to be more interesting, and certainly does not stop people from finding it or worse, damaging alternatives. Humans will always be self-destructive, and that self-loathing is inherent. It is the very skin we live in, that makes us so uncomfortable and is so essential to our survival, our ability to contain our insides and not spill into the streets, physically and metaphysically. But we spill into the streets anyway, and our societal structures cannot bind our contain our humanity, our will to spill, leak, and become raw sewage that infects our clean pathways.

When will we accept the raw footage of our lives, the blisters and boils of our unsavory thoughts and decay of of desire. It's a struggle everyday. Bukowski, you said it.