Name: What Matters Most is How Well You
Rating: 4.333333333333333 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9781574231052

Charles Bukowski

This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s.

What Matters Most is How Well You

Tem Nugmanov

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

Gavin

all theories
 like cliches
 shot to hell,
 all these small faces
 looking up
 beautiful and believing;
 I wish to weep
 but sorrow is
 stupid.
 I wish to believe but belief is a
 graveyard.
 we have narrowed it down to
 the butcherknife and the
 mockingbird
 wish us
 luck. 


In one sentence: Just a man in a room - odd, then, that this is enough to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all contemporary poetry with their bigger brains and better politics and more eventful stories and uplifting messages.

 To be read when: you can't sleep and it's 2am and tomorrow's going to be a pain in the arse and you're alone in the house; no better book then.



Unbeatable at sliding through the mind with zero friction, depositing emotional silt and cheap, warm style from a previously insane and helpfully hopeless man in you – whatever you want that for. More than any other poet, he just literally talks to you. You can roll your eyes at his gaucheness and despise his chauvinism and feel nothing all you like: that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's not the point.

So it's barely art, but he knows it. Pity any academic working on CB: these poems don't invite analysis; they are worn on their own surface. They mean just what they first mean. Many of them are just about writing poems, but I cannot resent their hollowness, since emptiness is his brush. Its main virtue is complete honesty.


  
 ...so much has gone by for most of us,
 even the young, especially the young
 for they have lost the beginning and have
 the rest of the way to go;
 but isn’t it strange, all i can think of now are
 cucumbers, oranges, junk yards, the
 old Lincoln Heights jail and
 the lost loves that went so hard
 and almost brought us to the edge,
 the faces now without features,
 the love beds forgotten.
 the mind is kind: it retains the
 important things:
 cucumbers
 oranges
 junk yards
 jails.
 ...there used to be over 100 of us in that big room
 in that jail
 i was in there many
 times.
 you slept on the floor
 men stepped on your face on the way to piss.
 always a shortage of cigarettes.
 names called out during the night
 (the few lucky ones who were bailed out)
 never you.


 ...when love came to us twice
 and lied to us twice
 we decided to never love again
 that was fair
 fair to us
 and fair to love itself.
 we ask for no mercy or no
 miracles;
 we are strong enough to live
 and to die and to
 kill flies,
 attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack,
 live on luck and skill,
 get alone, get alone often,
 and if you can’t sleep alone
 be careful of the words you speak in your sleep;
 and
 ask for no mercy
 no miracles;
 and don’t forget:
 time is meant to be wasted,
 love fails
 and death is useless 



Everything that people mock Leonard Cohen for is much more true of Bukowski (misery, drawling, self-obsession, archness, chauvinism, treating the whole world as your confessional); he is just more direct and macho about it; that fact, and the very different crowd surrounding his medium is enough to earn him contempt rather than mockery. (And contempt is a kind of involuntary respect.) Backwards analogy: Bukowski is Tom Waits minus gospel, minus FX pedals, minus Brecht and Weill, minus one steady Kathleen peer. And minus metre of course. A grumpy adolescent old man; a sensitising misanthrope; a beautiful lech.

He has only two modes: midnight countercultural raving and laconic woke-at-noon observation. Neither would work without his lecherousness and/or meanness and/or arrogance; they are the absolutely necessary breve before he blares out his concern.


  
 moments of agony and moments of glory
 march across my roof.

 the cat walks by
 seeming to know everything.

 my luck has been better, I think,
 than the luck of the cut gladiolus,
 although I am not sure.

 I have been loved by many women,
 and for a hunchback of life,
 that’s lucky.

 so many fingers pushing through my hair
 so many arms holding me close
 so many shoes thrown carelessly on my bedroom
 rug.

 so many searching hearts
 now fixed in my memory that
 i’ll go to my death,
 remembering.
 I have been treated better than I should have
 been—
 not by life in general
 nor by the machinery of things
 but by women.

 but there have been other women
 who have left me
 standing in the bedroom alone
 doubled over—
 hands holding the gut—
 thinking
 why why why why why why?

 women go to men who are pigs
 women go to men with dead souls
 women go to men who fuck badly
 women go to shadows of men
 women go
 go
 because they must go
 in the order of
 things.

 the women know better
 but often chose out of
 disorder and confusion.

 they can heal with their touch
 they can kill what they touch and
 I am dying
 but not dead
 yet.



(That ^ might have gotten your back up, because it pattern-matches to modern whining about women's choices. But it isn't that: remember, from above, that he is calling himself a pig and a dead soul.)

This is three books written over thirty years, one sentence per ten lines as always, stapled together to give the impression of a late-life opus. It covers the whole lot: his Great Depression origin myth; his meaningless, crabbed middle years; and his long, long late period spent in contempt of the arty people who pay and applaud him.

I am nothing like him, except maybe in sense of humour. He is not anti-modern - grew up through the Great Depression, a simulation of pre-modern subsistence; loves shit cars; lives for late night recorded music - but science, growth, and the expanding circle give him nothing of the sense of direction, transcendence and hope that it gives to me and mine. But still I "relate", as the disgusting verb puts it.

I have read this a half-dozen times in a dozen years. (It isn't hard; it takes an hour.) I know of no better poet to begin to explain why poetry is good and unique and feeds life. This surely says something about my character, but I don't expect to stop reading it.


 
PS: Bukowski's epitaph is "Don't try". On the face of it that's mean and funny and fine, but it also means what Yoda means by it: Don't force it; Don't betray your nature; Do only what you are absolutely aligned behind. Is that good advice? Maybe not, but it is epitomises the man more than the nihilistic joke.

 
    Galef type:

Values 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside.

What Matters Most is How Well You

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