The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  because what happened to levy could happen to me. i earn about 30 cents a day writing poetry. think of it. them busting down my door and ripping a poem from the typewriter and taking me in and setting a bail i couldn’t pay. i’ve been pinched for drunk, for drunkdriving, and once for causing a traffic jam in the city of INGLEWOOD, i believe. i think i was in Inglewood. anyhow I went to a Culver City court. i had stretched out on the top step of a very well-lit mortuary at 2:30 a.m. in the morning upon one of the main streets. i was charged among other things with “blocking traffic.” i took all this with a kind of fear and yet a good-humored resignation. but think of them busting in here on top of my poems? “Bukowski?” “yeah?” “come with us.” SOUNDS LUDICROUS LIKE A KID OF KATZENJAMMER NAZI MOVIE SCENE. yet if you try to run away they’ll club you with a stick or shoot you in the back. when it happens to somebody else it is kind of mathematic, kind of a mistake, but when it happens to you it is very damn real VERY FUCKING REAL, and you leave that place, your typewriter sitting there, one bottle of beer in the refrigerator some old clothes on the floor, 3 days left on the rent, and you walk along between them and wonder what it is, you even make up vague things of safety for the puzzled mind: JUSTICE PREVAILS; THIS IS AMERICA; I’VE DONE NOTHING. only the last two thoughts are true, and then you get it—the thing, all the things going on, the neat little brutalities, the sluggings in dungeons, the internment camps. . . . where? somewhere in Oregon? in Arizona? no need to get dramatic only Hitler shines an apple in Argentina and smiles. you walk down the stairs between them, trying to look like a young George Raft, a living H. Bogart. you already feel guilty and you are guilty BECAUSE THEY CARRY THE GUNS. WHERE IS THE JUDGE WHO WILL MAKE THEM GUILTY? WHEN WILL HE SHOW?

  obscenity? god, you should see what they do to their wives! these big fat clean-clothes boys i walk between.

  what else can I say? where are we? levy, i once wrote a little book you published called THE GENIUS OF THE CROWD. I’d like to read it at your trial, but never mind, I’ll probably read it at mine. —if they let me.

  from D.A. Levy: A Tribute to the Man, an Anthology

  of His Poetry (Cleveland, OH: Ghost Press, 1967).

  Charles Bukowski on Willie: Introduction to The Cockroach Hotel by Willie [William Hageman]

  Willie is a guy you can’t hate. Willie is having a look around. He’s no phony hippy, he’s no phony anything. Willie is all the way there. How long he will stay there, I do not know. But I am very happy that you are doing a book on Willie, I mean a book of Willie’s poems, which is the same thing.

  A lot of these guys come off the road with a chip-on-the-shoulder I know it all bit. I’ve made the road and I know that there’s not that much to learn out there. It’s death and a drag and hot and cold weather and not feeling so good, but nobody comes in with a new concept of human values. I didn’t. Willie doesn’t pretend to. He drinks his beer and scratches himself. And not saying it, he says it more than ever. Willie’s got a book coming. Willie is a miracle in a time of very little miracles. When the damn thing comes out bill me for a copy, and feel that we will both collect.

  —Buk

  Los Angeles, Aug. 12, 1967

  Willie, The Cockroach Hotel

  San Francisco: Black Rabbit Press, 1968

  Introduction to Doug Blazek’s Skull Juices

  It is not easy to realize that you are dying in your twenties. It is much easier not to know that you are dying in your twenties as is the case with most young men, almost all young men, their faces already oaken slabs, shined puke. They only imagine that death might happen in some jungle war of nobody’s business. Blazek can see death and life in a shabby piece of curling wallpaper, in a roach wandering through the beercans of a tired and sad and rented kitchen. Blazek, although he would be the last to realize it and is not conscious of it at all, is one of the leading, most mangling, most lovely (yes, I said, “lovely”!) sledges of the new way—The Poetic Revolution. It is difficult to say exactly when the Revolution began, but roughly I’d judge about 1955, which is more than ten years, and the effect of it has reached into and over the sacred ivy walls and even out into the streets of Man. Poetry has turned from a diffuse and careful voice of formula and studied ineffectiveness to a voice of clarity and burnt toast and spilled olives and me and you and the spider in the corner. By this, I mean the most living poetry; there will always be the other kind.

  The Poetic Revolution has also passed the Muse down to the dishwasher, the carwasher, the farmer, the x-con, the grape picker, the drifter, the factory worker. The safe and sterile college professors have begun to look more like their poems, and their poems, more like them. They have been found out and even now their plan is an attempt to understand on the one hand and to degrade on the other. These gentlemen have much more leisure time than we (thrice, four times ours) but they have no heart to sort out the minutes. Their work reaches no one but themselves. Allow me to enter with a short and recent personal experience: This last week I received a letter from Germany from a street-sweeper who had seen a poem of mine in an English-printed magazine in Germany and he showed the poem to a postcard seller in the streets, and the postcard seller read the poem to a group of young people he had been conversing with, translating as he went along, there, in the city of Munich. I hope it doesn’t sound too thick or romantic to you, but this means that, at last, poetry has grown up, has become a force, a tool, a thing of love and wonder, an explosive concept of Art, instead of a quiet dull little boy in the corner, told to come out and do the tricks for mamma’s friends and then go to bed and never be heard from again. That day is over; the little boy is now a man and is done with jumping through hoops. If you are a lady, he’d just as soon run his hand up your skirt, and if you are a man, he’ll take you out in the alley if necessary. This does not perforce mean hardness; this merely means an end to nonsense.

  Douglas Blazek, poet, worked in a foundry anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day or night, depending upon the whims of business and his bosses. Any man who has faced the continual grind for years of going to a dull job day after day, watching the hands of the clock curl in like knives, each minute shot, each hour mutilated beyond all reason, each year, each day, each moment, shit upon as if it didn’t count at all, any man who has faced this knows how it goes, how many of us there are, little Christs nailed forever to their goddamned cross and with no way to let go (almost)—choosing between this and suicide and madness or starving in the streets or watching your children starve. Any choice you make will be a wrong one. And how many of the workers do go mad! Actually. They hit the clock and go on in, but they are deliriously mad, insane, insane . . . they jest with each other throughout their work—dirty mean little shitdog jests, and they laugh; their laughter is mad and unreal and vicious, depraved, gone, poor devils! And sports! What SPORT-FREAKS they are! They’ll argue baseball down into fits of actual anger. And what lovers! God, they get fucked night and day. They get fucked, all right.

  And coming home from a 10-hour shift, there it is again. Your body and mind kaput, hardly able to drive on in, she is in front of the TV, and the kids are whirling, balling it up, yeah, and they are innocent, the whole batch, you need them, their eyes and bodies are yet living. But you see, there had been no space between the factory-factory and the home-factory and it’s dinner and bath, the baseball scores, and bed, trying to sleep through muscles and nerves that dart like arrows of fire, and the faces still there, the laughter, the hatred—the bodies gone mad and striding cruelly. Everything stinks and hangs and the whole city sleeps except you; and then up and at it, again.

  Can you expect us to fuck with polished verse and rhyming couplets?

  Can you expect us to be interested in the history of the Peloponnesian Wars?

  Can you expect us to get excited over Yeats?

  Do you wonder why the educated critics call us “savage”?

  Do you wonder why we often have to drink ourselves to sleep?

  Trapped into combat

  like a c
ork in a tank muzzle

  I drag my James Cagney

  tommy-gunned body

  out to the car—

  on the way to work

  I pass a thousand convertibles

  while a hunched seed of bitterness

  grows along the stubble of my wings—

  Blazek’s writing is cleaned and cleared by an almost uselessness of experience that only shows him more of the same death, not only a death that claims him but which claims a whole goddamned nation which doesn’t have guts enough to admit it.

  my feet lift out of the Chevy

  as I groan a little

  dying from old age in my twenties.

  claimed by the nightshift

  & when the back finally

  breaks I’ll know

  it wasn’t from straw, but

  from answers.

  There may be some gentle weeping here but no self-pity, no denunciation of some Enemy somewhere. The fact, the poem, is stated and let go. Such men are very hard to kill, even in foundries. Such men have the touch of the bullfighter or the game little bantamweight fighter I saw the other night. Such men have the touch of the gypsy. Such men can make you feel good when you watch them walk across the room or light a cigarette. Such men are poets, like Blazek, and there aren’t very many of them. Such men are caught between the razor blade, a bloody rotting bit of dead meat on the half-clean sheets; such men are caught between this and an impossible love for life. Not a glowing hot-shot and ridiculous shouting of Life—Yeah! but small things, miracles, like a can of beer at midnight, sitting in a kitchen alone, smoking cigars, watching the smoke. The Blazeks are not bitter or vindictive, just the unholy sadness, present agony, the pitch of the electric light, the love of a woman who is wise enough not to hate you.

  For instance, Blazek speaks of an old love couch that must be thrown into the basement:

  Such a couch!

  I love it so entirely

  That sometimes

  I don’t know whether I’m loving

  You anymore

  Or perhaps this couch

  Is you

  With crumpled haunches,

  A swayed back

  & breasts like a laundry bag stuffed full.

  I love it

  The way things

  Are always loved: the way a beggar

  Drinks a cup of hot coffee

  At the Salvation Army,

  The way a teaspoon

  Floats thru cereal in the morning—

  There can be no greater affirmation of life, sweetheart, than love for a broken-down couch.

  There’s love and madness and a going-on, temporarily anyway:

  the trees are hot

  the grass is hot

  the kids are hot

  & screaming like hideous nightmares

  riding their tricycles

  up & down your sagging spine . . .

  or:

  The garbage men came

  today

  even tho I didn’t go to work

  Magic lines because they are magically true, and simply and beautifully true. Perfect art is the Perfect Truity of the Moment that has never been quite spoken or noticed in that way before. These lines are recognizable as such, and their easy-seemingness is the essence of their miracle. It was not so long ago that I stayed home from work for a couple of days and like Blazek says, sure enough, here they came. They had on yellow steel hats and they dumped their cans into the mouth of the truck while I peered at them from behind my kitchen window. What boys they were, too! Marble tombstones they were. Neither of them pulled out a knife and killed himself before my eyes; the flies, and the garbage crawling the streets. Hell, no, they dumped the garbage, got on the truck, and drove to the next stop. The garbage men will keep coming as we ponder our futility and our love.

  Our being here:

  did you ever

  run your fingers along your arm

  feeling all the hairs

  like threads on an old dishcloth . . .

  if it wasn’t

  for hairy arms

  we wouldn’t

  know

  we were alive . . .

  There are some lines that the college professors will never be able to write. The nature of their small agony is so comfortable that they haven’t a chance.

  When I read Blazek, one word comes to my mind: WARM. Blazek is the warmest poet that I have read. He states simply and clearly and without fear, exactly the love, the thing, the part that gurgles him, makes him see the wall, the heater, his children, his woman, his pants, the milk cartons, his dog, his turds, the shades on his windows,

  poetry is useless

  unless we try to capture

  every second of our existence

  like wild buffaloes, like hummingbirds . . .

  And his use of words is exactly what the moment obviously states instead of some fancy and brightly-polished literary trick sword that will someday rust:

  a ‘good’ poem is written

  with No Control

  the way a ‘good’ woman is loved

  & afterwards, throw away the word ‘good.’

  Perhaps the best thing that has happened to Blazek and the few other young poets of The Poetic Revolution is that they have not been charmed and recognized by the large circulation magazines or even the fancy small-circulation and fancy but snob-literary hound dogs. They are allowed to go on working freely—freely, haha, on coffee breaks, say, scribbling a line on the inside of a matchbox or on the back of an inventory sheet when the high priest of a foreman turns his back, or in that space when the wife goes to sleep, snoring perhaps, and you go to the chair in the front room (if you have a front room) and write it naked across your belly as a million people sleep dreaming of atom bombs and jelly sandwiches. This type never gets a special Grant or any sort of Guggenheim or anything of that sort. In fact, this type doesn’t even know where to apply for a thing of this sort, and if they did, they wouldn’t. Guggenheims are for people who don’t know how to write or for people who have made a racket, a congame out of writing.

  no matter what

  we do

  it seems pretty silly

  & the sea

  doesn’t have enuf sense

  to open up.

  Meanwhile Blazek goes on:

  I didn’t want to be a clown or

  be drunk, I simply wanted to drink this woman

  slowly, all night, like a bottle of wine

  that I keep snug between my legs.

  Perhaps at the age of 46 I grow sentimental, but I can’t help wishing we had a whole society composed of such men of warm and easy clarity, and yes, with agony thrown in. You can’t help thinking when reading this stuff of, say, a cold strawberry icecream cone at the Fair Grounds when the heat is 98 degrees and everything has stopped except the sound and the color and the sun and your heart like a pet chameleon wriggling under your shirt.

  You can’t help thinking, say, of a singer dropping dead on the stage while singing in an opera, there on the floor in his wild costume. We ridiculous clowns that must crap and piss and sing and poem and kill each other and cry at night. You can’t help thinking of a man driving in after 12 hours in a factory, barely able to maintain a straight course on the road, yet breathing in the air from the window, feeling the night all about him like a wonderful whore—seeing the pulled-down shades, the lights, the liquor stores, the wounded and beaten and mad city. You can’t help thinking of dirty undershirts, unwashed water glasses, lions sitting in cages at the zoo, unable to sleep. The courage of us all. If we could only stretch out. If we could only cut across our shame and our pride. Meanwhile, Blazek goes on:

  I know only too well

  how records spin

  how fingernail clippers

  lie like silver fish

  in the ancient swamp

  of a brokendown bed,

  how walls sag when old

  like wet shoeboxes . . .

  It is difficult to stop writ
ing about Blazek and his poems.

  I know only too well

  the uselessness of memory—

  brief moments reappearing

  out of lazy summers

  romantic as legends of Tennyson.

  Memories, formless junk

  In the museum of life.

  You couldn’t mount a machinegun in the forest and punch down a dirty army any better that this. I don’t know what will happen to Blazek, how much longer he can go on, but he has left us a very special poetry already. When he walked back into his foundry, he would just be the pipe inspector or the janitor or whatever he did and nobody would know, but this is what he does best, so very well:

  I will have to start charting things

  a bit rougher

  so when a poem gets published

  I will have to feel to make sure no bones are missing.”

  The possibility of this young man’s death, in any manner, should be enough to make the world weep together, at last, and forever. It won’t, of course. That’s the way it works, and the kid wouldn’t care for it either. Let’s just say, then, that here are some poems that I think wouldn’t hurt you to read.