On Bukowski

I have just finished a Charles Bukowski binge. That’s a fitting word, binge. Because to read Bukowski is to forgo a climb to higher plains, greater realms of discovery and moral growth. Bukowski is a plunge into the bowels of the earthly beast. The discovery limited to the grime on the underside of a barroom table, the filth on a crowd of drifters in a per-week rental, or the scars on a rotting alcoholic gut.

You sit and read Bukowski and the night falls around you like a shroud. The day never comes, hunger persists. You are immobile, a dog with your face held smashed into the mess you’ve made, to teach you a lesson. He leaves us to confront all our messes, the ones we all make. He doesn’t let us see the beauty brought on by sun light, because for him the truth lies under the glow of the moon, in a dizzied state of excessive drinking. A place where people speak of their most primal desires to punch the people they don’t like, fuck ghastly strung out women, and lick the sticky residue on the soles of their boots to show how low they can be.

His writing is not pretty—it’s horrid at times, and there’s little wonder why he hasn’t entered into the American literary canon. While the romance of the greats is inspired by beauty, or at least horror set against beauty, Bukowski shuns it all together, finding as his muse the cockroach’s search for a nesting place. He’s no more interested in the importance of a hero as he is the animal instinct itching in his pants. He maybe saw nothing beautiful in his life. You don’t read him in a comfortable place; he’ll make you squirm. Hang over a toilet bowl puking your drunken guts out one night. As that fowl drool hangs from your unhinged mouth, the stomach bile stench burning your nostrils, when you feel your body crumbling with you still in it, a sinking ship you’re glad to see go down, when no moment can feel more pathetic, you may see what he’s talking about.

To quantify his contribution to words, to measure those words, is difficult, if not pointless. While other writers have sought truth, in places or people, sought to understand humanity in at least one of its forms, then bring it to light, he never bothered to look. Bukowski reached into his own asshole, and what he brought out was truth enough. He looked for nothing more than the pocked, withered, run-over face he saw in the mirror each morning.

Bukowski may not teach us anything new; he may only be a conveyor of those non-ideas that occupy most of our time, those embarrassing bodily functions it takes a few beers to talk about. But his uninhibited style forces us to confront what we’d sooner sweep under the rug, where the great poets and writers see little worthy of immortalizing in words. And maybe it’s true these beasts, odors, base pleasures—the lower tier of human function—are not worthy. But Bukowski, if not admired for his gift with words, can be admired for reminding us who we really are, the way a journalist enters war to bring back words and pictures of our murderous, violent tendencies. And the man himself? He is humility in extracted form. A man who saw the worst our species could offer, and decided it was good enough for him. You could say he was idle, base, did nothing and advocated lethargy. And certainly you’d find enough lost twenty-year olds out there reading Bukowski, as if trying to find a religion to support their desires, as evidence of that legacy. But you could also say that he took even less than he contributed, reducing his needs, distilling his take from the world down to nearly nothing, choosing to slowly wither without complaint. And what he gives back, while maybe not wisdom for young men who know nothing except that they like booze and women, is at least a taste of something more challenging than many let on. It must have taken discipline to live his life. Bukowski was an urban monk, his monastery the seedy back alleys where flow the earth’s wastewater rivers. He drank from them, and was satisfied.

Read Bukowski. Read him the way you would look at a train wreck as you pass, the bodies lying bloodied on the ground, knowing you should look away. Don’t look away. Look closer.