I've been ruminating over John Dullaghan’s Bukowski: Born Into This for a few days now. Sitting in the stinky, messy brew. Letting it seep into my pores, live with me as I go on about my days, my nights, my life. I've found that all of it -- my days, nights, life -- is newly transformed after seeing this documentary. After letting it do its quiet (and with Bukowski, let's be honest, not so quiet) work.
I read all of Bukowski when I was a lit major and over analyzed the hell out of his work as all lit majors require of themselves and others. The shock of it was fresh, his vulgar sex talk was irreverent enough to render him taboo and therefore made him endlessly hip among my poet friends. Such misguided analysis, frantic marginalia scribbles and over-highlighting of passage after passage, quote upon quote, can lead to a total lack of appreciation for the work. Or, in my case, a total lack of comprehension of it on any real level. Bukowski became the quotable go to whenever we had enough wine and felt ourselves to be brilliant, witty, somehow representative of the "everyman" plight -- no matter that none of us were anything close to representing everyman and none of us could properly understand or appreciate his work.
As a result of my obvious depth of knowledge on Bukowski, I expected this documentary to do little more than light up a few dark corners, add texture to the truth I already memorized (rote, in many cases.) I could not have been more wrong-headed in my approach. I'm now acutely aware of many things, namely:
- The dangers of an undergraduate lit education, wherein a student matriculates from said education under the false impression that reading all works by an author makes them somehow specially equipped to comment on (or at least feel quite proud of their knowledge about) said author at any time (other authors that I would have to file under this heading include: Faulkner, Hemingway, Proust & Whitman)
- No amount of "reading when younger" substitutes for the divine pleasure of re-reading when older and hopefully wiser; having pulled the books from the shelves and revisited whole sections, I've seen Bukowski anew and while I still bristle at some of his intentionally shocking passages, I am bowled over...and this time, I believe, for real
- While I cannot relate in any substantial way with his specific life experience, his words as I re-read them now strike me as so spot on I get chills. The truth of the human condition & the desperate need (and subsequent hope) to find a way for life's experiences to be better than average, for people to be better than average to other people, and so on...it is so prescient, yet accurate for the time in which he was writing as well. Prescient & present.
- He worked his ass off -- there is no other way to say it. If there is an example of a writer's work ethic that one would do well to follow (minus the excesses of drink & smoke & shouting matches) it is his. He wrote every day. He got itchy when he did not. He mailed stuff out prodigiously, faithfully, always.
- He kept working a day job (or night in some cases) that suited his writing schedule and as much as he hated that job, he knew it allowed him to write. So he kept on. Kept on. And kept on until he could sustain himself with his writing.
- The world needs more publishers like Black Sparrow. Plain & simple. While Black Sparrow is now splintered a bit and not functioning as it was up to 1992, the work John Martin did in seeking out, appreciating, and ultimately supporting the work of visionary poets and writers is so commendable it almost brings me to tears.
- Bukowski lived in and documented Los Angeles in all its ugly glory. For as much as I feel like a crabby transplant (i miss you San Francisco, city of my soul...i miss you so much more than you will ever know...), I realize that embracing, rather than ingoring, the ugliness around me could open many heretofore unlocked writing doors for me.
- In the words of the writer himself, "If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start."
I cannot think of a better way to begin a year that, for me, will be filled with writing. Say what you will about his work, admire it or not. Say what you will about the man, love him or leave him. Say what you will about all that has been said of him, sensational or no. The volume of work, the consistency with which he produced it and his dogged belief that he had to -- above all -- keep writing, is something any writer would do well to keep in mind.
