literally stories

Buk the Philosopher by Dale Williams Barrigar

The very titles of his poetry, short story, and essay collections are modern sayings, proverbs, and philosophies, ways of being, ways of dealing with it. IT meaning the endless problems and complications of life, the nonstop challenges and endless changes, the approaching finality of death for each and every one of us, the sense of isolation we all feel deep in our core if we’re ever brave enough to stop and think about it. If his work as a writer is about anything, it’s about being alone here, and why that’s OK, and even preferred. It’s about the individual versus the herd and the mob, which he called the continual condition. In a mostly urban world of nearly eight billion people and climbing, there couldn’t be a more relevant concern.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “One bitten by the true doctrines needs only a very short and commonplace reminder to lose all pain and fear—for instance: The wind scatters one year’s leaves on the ground…so it is with the generations of men.”

While it’s highly beneficial to do so, you don’t need to read farther than the titles of many of Buk’s works to find these reminders, phrased in such a way that they can inscribe themselves on your memory with ease so as to be in reach whenever needed.

The title of his first book, from 1960, “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,” parts of which first appeared in the short-lived but widely influential avant-garde literary magazine “Nomad,” tells the reader everything that happens on Planet Earth, has always happened, and will always happen here.

In five words, Buk manages to compress and express the growth and beauty, conflict and struggle, and the mortal reaction of life itself to all of the above. Like a little stoic poem, this title consoles as it explains. These five words alone are an amazing beginning to a literary career that was already going strong although largely unseen and was about to explode, even though Buk, already 40, would write hard for another decade before being able to leave his fulltime job at the USPO as a lowly clerk.

Buk’s second book, from 1963, borrowed a line from Whitmanesque California poet Robinson Jeffers, a writer who celebrated beauty with grace and also never shied away from the horrible truth. “It Catches My Heart In Its Hands” expands on the bestial wail as a commentary on all of life and how we feel while we’re here, if we allow ourselves to feel.

“Crucifix in a Deathhand” and “At Terror Street and Agony Way” are other early book titles that expand Buk’s sense of a world willing to terrify and crucify all of us. Like Jeffers, Buk knew that you can’t get over the pain until you look it straight in the face for a very long time until it flinches. You look into the void until it looks back, as Nietzsche explained.

Other early Buk titles are equally simple, profound and easy to remember.

“Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8-Story Window” sounds bad at first, until you consider that we’re all going to die and this poet is writing for his life before leaping.

“Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts” throws us back into the ancient world of John the Baptist, the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

“Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit” expands on images of the poet writing and gives us a picture of the half-mad Buk at the typewriter he considered a piano as in his favorite musician Beethoven, who he was so familiar and intimate with that he called him “The B” and imitated many of his most salient behaviors, like staying up all night drinking and writing and wandering the streets encased in his own private madness which was his art. 

Another favorite artist of Bukowski was Li Po, the famous Chinese Taoist sage, poet, drunk, drinker, and thinker who, it’s said, drowned when he, wildly intoxicated, fell out of a boat while trying to embrace the reflection of the beautiful moon in the water. Buk’s early book title “The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills” captures the gorgeous evanescence of life in ten words, reminding us again of the beautiful shortness of all life: not just beautiful, not just short, but both together, inseparable in that yin and yang way life has. When you go through your days ignoring the deepest truths, Buk seems to be saying, you are laboring under a life-denying delusion that will make your time in this world a lot more shallow and meaningless for yourself and others, but mostly yourself. Always start with yourself.

Many of his titles have their obvious double meanings for you to chew on and digest, like “War all the Time,” “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame,” “Maybe Tomorrow,” “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town” and “Love Is a Dog from Hell.”

The titles culled from his work for his posthumous collections include these gems: “Betting on the Muse,” “What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire,” “Slouching Toward Nirvana,” “The Pleasures of the Damned,” and “On Cats.”

Probably his most representative line/title is: “You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense” from 1986, in the middle of the Reagan years, when Buk was 66. About modern depression and isolation and frustration, this saying also means that solitude, introspection, self-searching, self-expression (NOT self-promotion) lead to, and create, inner, individual vision, a seeing like the third eye of the wise Hindu mystics.

He died almost exactly thirty years ago at the age of 73. He accepted his death like a Buddhist. Looked down upon to this day by the academic elites and so-called mainstream literary culture, who often shamelessly label him a “bad” writer, he may be the most universal writer of our time. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were also looked down upon until well into the twentieth century, decades after their deaths.

Leonard Cohen said of Bukowski, “He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels.” This quote also means more than one thing. One thing it means is that the angels are already here, if we allow ourselves to see them.

Bukowski saw these angels, in the old drunk at the end of the bar, in the old drunk prostitute on his arm, in the stray cat searching for his latest meal in the alleyway dumpster outside the bar. He said he liked Jesus and Socrates because they had style. He took the profoundest truths this world has to offer and boiled them down into poetic phrases that can help you make it through your own dark night of the soul no matter how often it comes back for you. Just like Marcus Aurelius said.

Dale Williams Barrigar

Image: A mixture of different coloured leaves petals and seeds in orange, pink and red from Pixabay.com