I read Ham on Rye again, the coming-of-age story of Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski. It's (mostly) brilliant, and it really captures a particular kind of situation: when you're a young male who's more shy and sensitive than most humans, but at the same time, you have a fantasy of being bad and physically powerful, because you've learned to believe that if you were those things, people would see you and respect you, and you could respect yourself. A fantasy of arrogance, superiority and cynical misanthropy that you enact because that's easier to deal with than the quiet, vulnerable reality of your fears and dreams and desires. (I'm not talking about myself, by the way.) That's the mental/imaginative landscape of most school shooters.
As far as I know, that was the mental landscape of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the 18-year-old Finnish student who killed eight people and then himself in 2007... It's odd that physically, Bukowski and Pekka-Eric Auvinen were "like two peas in a pod":
I wonder what the difference between people who become Bukowski and people who become Pekka-Eric is at the end of the day.
Probably it has a lot to do with either having or lacking a sense of humour; the ability to grasp subtlety and complexity, the ability to play instead of being so fucking literal about eveything. And I'm sure it also has a lot to do with the ability to access beauty, and power, through art. You don't have to destroy, when you know what a revolution it is to create.
As a writer, Bukowski also had another quality that interests me: he never sounded like he was _trying to sound smart_. He was smart, but he was different from most smart writers in the sense that it's almost as if he was hiding his smartness. There's something about that willingness to embrace irrationality that I love. It's just fun to read. So viscerally enjoyable. It allows me to breathe out as a reader (and as a humanoid); to take a break from overthinking and just feel the world.
ReplyDeleteAn opposite of that would be someone like David Foster Wallace, another American writer who has influenced me in the past. Reading his books or watching his interviews - or any time spent with him - can be extremely stimulating and even moving in a lot of ways, but I've noticed that he also stimulates some part of me that's very unhappiness-inducing. When I read or watch him, some part of me automatically starts fantisizing about what it would be like to sound and seem as intelligent as he did. Which is exciting, arousing, but there is something unpleasant and unhappy about that arousal.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be seen as competent or interesting. That's just human, you know. Wanting to feel proud of one's abilities and contributions is one of the very important motivators for all kinds of beautiful prosocial and creative behaviours.
Still, in moments when the ego is particarly powerful, the world has a tendency to shrink and flatten; it becomes a lonely disk of endless comparison. After a while, it starts to feel bad.
So while the ego can be helpful - and doesn't have to die -, it's great if something else becomes strong enough to run the show.
As far as I know, DFW really struggled with this himself. He once said:
"[I]t seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”
Yeah. And it's hard. It can be very, very hard. Because it's so easy to fool oneself.
At the end of the day, every coin has two sides. Whereas the other side of DFW's intellectual impressiveness is unpleasant ego arousal, Bukowski's freedom eventually starts to seem like laziness. (But I guess it just makes more sense to enjoy what's _good_ about people, instead of always looking for something to complain about...)