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Note: This post came about because my husband told me Bukowski tried to kill himself, and suggested I read Aristotle instead. That pretty much pissed me off, and got me to thinking why I like him (Bukowski) so much. So this came out. –A.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.–Charles Bukowski

Bukowski attempted suicide, but died of leukemia at the age of 73. He must not have really meant it. You mean it, you do it. It’s like, people who wish they were writers. If they really wished they were writers, they would write. They only just wish they were smart, or wish they were respected, or wish they didn’t have to deal with their boring bourgeois jobs, or wish they had that aura of something-important-stirring-inside that writers have so that they could feel special and mysterious and precious and smart. If those people really wished to be writers, then they would write, and if Bukowski really wished to be dead, then he’d’ve killed himself. But Bukowski knew that life is a twisted, sordid parade toward death. He had a robust death drive, one that lead him to flirt with suicide, but that doesn’t mean he wanted to die immediately. No, the truly self-destructive thing would be to draw it out, live out your life as your life must be till Death puts an end to it on its own timeline, and if that means being a pitiful, putrid old bum till you’re 73 then what can you do? Somebody has to be the bum.

I wonder how success felt to someone with so much self-loathing. Or maybe not self-loathing, maybe just loathing in general. Or maybe instead of generalized loathing, misanthropy. Maybe he hated people so much, he was a self-hating person. Maybe, it wasn’t really loathing at all, just the life-pain a sensitive person feels when he’s got asshole parents who treated him like he’s a piece of shit. Maybe it’s the soul-sick sadness we all feel amplified by inebriation and vulnerability. Maybe it’s being completely overwhelmed by society and your place slash lack of a place in it. Overwhelmed by how truly horrible existence is, by how boldly, baldly, bluntly vicious living creatures are and not running away from that; not checking out into some Apollonian Fight Club Disneyland rain forest of the mind but instead staring boldly, baldly, bluntly back, into the depths of the muck and the grime, of the shadow, of the self-hatred, of the sublimated rationalized bullshit, of the “I would fuck animals all the time if nobody ever told me that’s something you shouldn’t do”.

Going so deep into that, that you’re basically on some kinda reverse tantric journey… and eventually you don’t hit bottom so much as you keep going, past irony, past nihilism, through despair and back up again once there’s nowhere darker to go, like you’re going deep down into the core of the earth so that if you keep going, down becomes up and without realizing it suddenly you’ve shot right back up to the surface only you don’t stop there, no, you’ve been to the core, you’ve been around, you’re some kind of wretched pasty subterranean hero, you might as well keep going, up where it’s sunny and crisp and beautiful and perfect, up to the beauty you never could have appreciated so clearly if you hadn’t just been through the crap nobody ever stops to look at, maybe they gawk for a second so they can shake their head about it and make conversation, but not really look at it, the crap that’s so real that when you look at it you can’t believe it’s real, can’t believe an animal actually looks that way smashed on the street, the insides oozing out, organs and entrails and bones and blood and unidentifiable fluids spackled to the concrete, an animal that was running around with plans for the rest of the day 10 seconds ago, and now with a look of utter horror and shock on its face, even though it died too quickly to feel either, but look at that that’s real and so sick its almost funny and if that’s real then it only follows that all the beautiful stuff is real too and love is real too and life is wonderful too so let’s write about that too but not without the crap because let’s not kid ourselves, you know?