Peter Lamarque, Heather Höpfl, Keith Owens, Steve Brie, Lynn Hilditch, Mark ..... confines of the racetrack mirrored that of Absurdist dramatist Samuel Beckett.
Book Title:
The turn to aesthetics: An interdisciplinary exchange of ideas in applied and philosophical aesthetics
Edited by:
Clive Palmer and David Torevell
Contributions from:
Peter Lamarque, Heather Höpfl, Keith Owens, Steve Brie, Lynn Hilditch, Mark Wynn, Donna Lazenby, David Clayton, Tim Prentki, Margaret-Catherine PerivoliotisChryssovergis, Leila Hojjati, Patrick Carr, Graham McFee, Doug Sandle, Alexandra Mouriki, Mark Titmarsh, Nikolaos Gkogkas, Avril Loveless, Cordula Hansen, Peter Jordan, John Lindley, Neil Campbell, Joel Rookwood, Matthew Thombs, Clive Palmer, Val Sellers, Stephan Wassong, Karl Lennartz, Thomas Zawadzki
Author(s) and Chapter:
Steve Brie The lightning flash of hope - aesthetics and absurdity in the racetrack poetry of Charles Bukowski
Publisher:
Liverpool Hope University Press, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK.
ISBN:
978-0-9515874-3-6
Date:
September, 2008
Reporting on an international conference held at Liverpool Hope University 5th – 8th June 2007. This was a wideranging inter-disciplinary conference which encouraged submissions from three general strands of study including; those subjects which have enjoyed a substantial history of involvement in the field such as Theology and Philosophy, those relatively new to the study such as Sports Studies and Management, and those which focus upon such applied dimensions as the Arts and Education. The overall aim of the conference was to learn from interdisciplinary debate and to encourage an exchange of ideas on research of the highest quality. To reference this chapter: Brie, S. (2008) The lightning flash of hope - aesthetics and absurdity in the racetrack poetry of Charles Bukowski (Chapter 4: pp. 41-50). In Palmer, C. and Torevell, D. (Eds.) The turn to aesthetics: An interdisciplinary exchange of ideas in applied and philosophical aesthetics. Liverpool Hope University Press, UK. ISBN: 978-0-9515874-3-6 Other research web host: https://www.academia.edu/3512727/Palmer_C._and_Torevell_D._2008_The_Turn_to_Aesthetics_An_Interdiscipli nary_Exchange_of_Ideas_in_Applied_and_Philosophical_Aesthetics
Paper 4
The lightning flash of hope - aesthetics and absurdity in the racetrack poetry of Charles Bukowski Dr Steve Brie (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Poetry is, arguably, the most aesthetic of literary forms. To a greater degree than the prose writer, the poet engages with and manipulates the aesthetic and linguistic possibilities associated with syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes - that is, the way in which words are structured on the page and the selection of words from a set of all its inflected forms. The poet’s utilisation of literary devices such as metre, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, enjambement, personification, pathetic fallacy, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche is aimed at producing a specifically aesthetic composition in relation to both content and structure. Another difference between the writer of prose and the poet, is highlighted by Alexander who suggests that ‘the poet places himself within the subject itself and works from within outwards, while the prosaist describes relatively, from without.’1 In terms of the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, it can be argued that words, particularly when presented in a poetic form, hold a privileged position over the visual image in relation to the expression of feelings, for, as Lyotard argues, they can ‘evoke matters of the soul without having to consider whether they are visible.’2 Paraphrasing Burke, he goes on to suggest that poetry occupies a privileged position over painting because ‘painting is doomed to imitate models, and to figurative representations of them’ and that this figuration by means of images is ‘a limiting constraint on the power of emotive expression since it works by recognition.’3 In poetry, he argues, ‘the power to move is free from the verisimilitudes of figuration.’ It is thus in the poet’s power to ‘effect with word combinations what would be impossible by any other means.’4 Burke himself highlights this difference thus: What does one do when one wants to represent an angel in painting? One paints a beautiful young man with wings: but will painting ever provide anything as great as the addition of this one word – the Angel of the Lord? And how does one go about
1
Quoted in W. Hotby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart & Company, 1932), p. 186. J. F. Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ in C. Cazeaux (ed.) The Continental Aesthetics Reader (Routledge: London, 2000) p. 460. 3 Ibid. 459. 4 Ibid. 460. 2
41
The Turn to Aesthetics painting, with equal strength of feeling, the words ‘A universe of death’ where ends the journey of the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost?5
Having made a case for poetry as a particularly aesthetic medium, I am now going to discuss a poet who’s work shuns the aesthetic in terms of form, but which, in the racetrack poems discussed below, takes a turn to aesthetics in relation to subject matter.In terms of sensibility, Charles Bukowski has more in common with The Sex Pistols and Eminem than with Keats, Shelley or Wordsworth. He is the Johnny Rotten of poetry, a literary punk, writing anarchistic portrayals of despair and betrayal with an ironic twist. He was Born in Germany in 1920, and moved to Los Angeles in 1923. He wrote more than 45 books of published poetry and prose which were translated into 14 languages. After struggling to make a living in dead-end jobs for much of his life, he became a rich man in his later years living comfortably in California on the royalties from sales of his books. He died in 1994. After initially gaining little attention from both critics and readers, Charles Bukowski’s fiction and poetry now attracts a large, world-wide readership, mainly consisting of two demographic types; young working-class males who relate to his tales of low-life culture, and older middle-class males who, from the safety of their suburban armchairs, can view what might be termed the exotic ordinary as depicted in Bukowski’s seedy urban landscapes, landscapes populated by the unemployed, by drunks and by prostitutes. His work falls into the category of what has become known as ‘dirty realism’, a sub-genre hardly known for the subtlety of its aesthetic palette He concentrates on realist subject matter and employs the language of the street in his poetry and prose works. His work presents a logical relationship between cause and effect; he focuses on materialist, rather than supernatural or fantastical subject matter, and strives for verisimilitude and mimesis, in other words, to represent ‘real life’ through the medium of the written word. In terms of content, most of his poetry focuses on the un-poetic aesthetically challenged aspects of existence. Bukowski specialised in attacking society which he believed, condemned the individual to accept humiliation and failure as the norm. He saw society as an ugly creature, as a complex system of lies and coercion that inevitably beats the individual into submission. He found an antidote to his depression in the excitement he found on the racetrack. He immersed himself in the world of the track, a world in which he was able to shut out what he saw as the absurdist existence experienced in the outside ‘real’ world. Bukowski saw the entire spectacle associated with racing as aesthetically sublime. Like the artists Stubbs, Munnings and Degas he saw the thoroughbred racehorse as the epitome of elegance and gracefulness, as a fitting subject for artistic representation. Bukowski’s concept of escape through the aesthetics of nature is echoed by Adorno in his suggestion that, ‘Happiness in the presence of works of art is a feeling of having made an abrupt escape.’6
5
Ibid. 460. See Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1972) p. 22. Hereafter cited as Adorno (1972). 6
42
Steve Brie
For Bukowski, that ‘abrupt escape’ operated as ‘a trick to dull [his] bleeding.’ What he found on the racetrack, which is essentially a fantasy world, a Disneyland offering a rollercoaster of emotional highs and lows for grown ups, was a form of truth which he felt was somehow absent in his everyday existence outside of the world of horseracing, a form of truth recognised by Adorno in his claim that, ‘Art may be the only remaining medium of truth in an age of incomprehensible terror and suffering’7, and more specifically in relation to the poetic form by the Buddhist scholar Rabindranath Tagore in his claim that: Clothed in fact truth feels oppressed In the garb of poetry It moves easy and free.8
Bukowski’s auto-biographical and semi-autobiographical poems, novels, and short stories foreground and celebrate what Smith terms an ‘ethical, psychological and economic estrangement from the goals of mainstream society.’9 For Bukowski, the everyday world was anathema, a place populated by conformist zombies governed by restricting life-dulling rules, a physically unpleasant place with which he failed to develop any aesthetic alignment, a place to be avoided whenever possible. Not surprisingly then, he spent a great deal of energy in attempting to detach himself from it. It is thus paradoxical that it was amidst the crowded racetrack grandstands that Bukowski seems to have been most at ease. Surrounded by a multitude of people, he utilised racecourse therapy as an antidote to the loneliness of existential existence, ‘To get your horse to come in first’ he wrote, ‘is much like controlling the pain of the universe.’10 Like many of his characters, Bukowski habitually frequented racetracks near his home in Los Angeles where, throughout the last thirty years of his life, he regularly attended up to three meetings a week.11 Again a paradox is clear; the man who consistently railed against routine appears to have been attracted by the rhythmic, regimented patterns of behaviour associated with playing the horses. How then, can Bukowski’s consistently expressed dislike of crowds, and his disdain for regularity and uniformity, be reconciled with this seemingly gregarious and highly ritualised habit? In essence the answer lies in aesthetics rather than with the Tote Machine. Bukowski had been introduced to the world of horseracing by a girlfriend, Jane Cooney Baker, and he was, initially, far from impressed ‘It sounds kind of stupid to me.’ he railed, ‘All these people, mindless masses of people, hovering together,
7
Ibid. 27. Quoted in Lama Anagarika Govinda. The Way of the White Clouds (Rider: London, 1988). P. 3. 9 J. Smith, Art, Survival and So Forth: The Poetry of Charles Bukowski (Wrecking Ball Press: North Cave, East Yorkshire, 2000) p.31. 10 See C. Bukowski, Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, Vol. 3 (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 1999) p.81. Hereafter cited as Bukowski ( 1999). 11 His favourite track was Del Mar, Hollywood Park. 8
43
The Turn to Aesthetics
watching these animals go round the track. I don’t quite get it.’12 Soon, however, Bukowski became obsessed with the world of the racetrack, with its rituals, its tribalism and its idiosyncratic aesthetic. His attitude toward his fellow race-goers remained, however, condescending. He figured that their opinions were invariably both predictable and misguided, and concluded that if he watched the odds changing on the tote board in the final minutes before the race, by opposing the consensus view he might pick the winner at reasonable odds. He liked to bet on long shots because he felt it separated him from the rest of the herd. He regularly bet 10-40 dollars on each race and by 1982 estimated he had lost 10,000 dollars. Bukowski claimed to hate the thirty-minute intervals between races because they necessitated passing amongst his fellow gamblers, ‘the lowest of the breed ’13, and he would often put cotton-wool in his ears to drown out the inane babblings of the crowd. In essence he saw the crowd as an ugly creature, bound to the wheel of conformity. For Bukowski, the representatives of humanity he encountered on the racecourse were both physically and behaviourally aesthetically repugnant. Bukowski’s love affair with the racetrack was a masochistic relationship. By his own admission, losing his money at the track was a form of self-flagellation: ‘I lose the money I have and am further nailed to the cross.’14 ‘I go to the track’ he wrote, ‘because it’s like getting in the ring and slugging it out with some son of a bitch.’15 When a winner did come, however, it was a beautiful, sublime, if transient moment of exultation, ‘like a magic trip.’16 Like most punters he harboured the dream of the big win which would make him financially independent, and thus free from the daily drudge of mind-numbing work in slaughterhouses, in post offices, and in factories. His poems and short stories, however, betray the fact that, deep-down he knew that like the rest of ‘the poor’, he would ultimately be disappointed, ‘the racetracks’ he wrote in ‘horse and fist’: are where the guts are extracted and rubbed into the cement into the substance and stink of being.17
hardly the most aesthetically attractive descriptions. While inhaling the ‘stink of being’, Bukowski witnessed day after day ‘the faces of greed’ before each race, and those same ‘faces later when the…nightmare returns.’18 This inevitable defeat at the hands of the ruthless tote machine was also the subject of his poem ‘the beggars’:
12
Quoted in N. Cherkovski¸ Charles Bukowski: A Life (Steerforth Press: Vermont, 1997) p. 92. Quoted in H. Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (Rebel Inc.: Edinburgh, 1998) p. 202. Hereafter cited as Sounes (1998). 14 Quoted in P. Long (ed.) Bukowski in the Bathtub (Raven: Venice CA, 1997) p. 85 15 Bukowski (1999, 28). 16 Quoted in F. Pivano, Charles Bukowski: Laughing with the Gods (Sun Dog Press: Michigan, 2000) p. 46. 17 Published in Play the Piano Drunk Like A Percussion Instrument Until The Fingers Begin To Bleed A Bit (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 1979) p. p. 108-9. 18 Quoted in Sounes (1998: 34). 13
44
Steve Brie the poor in the grandstand section playing the daily doubles the exactas the pick-6’s the pick-9’s they have horrible jobs or no jobs they come in beaten to take another beating… and as race after race unfolds they are routinely sucked of money and hope then the last race is over and for a few there’s the liquor store a bit to drink and a lottery ticket. for the others: nothing… thanks to the Days of the Living Dead. well, the horses are beautiful anyhow.19
19
Published in C. Bukowski, The Last Night Of The Earth Poems (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 1992), pp 254-5.
45
The Turn to Aesthetics
Here Bukowski depicts the ritualistic pattern of hope and loss, of optimism and disappointment which constitutes the life of the small-time punter. The ‘poor’, the ‘Living Dead’, those unemployed or trapped in dead-end jobs cannot risk the big hit on a short-priced runner like the big-time players, and so they gravitate towards the dollar-stake high-accumulator bets which have little chance of paying off. The compensation for Bukowski is an aesthetic one. For Edgar Allen Poe, the appreciation of art was indelibly linked to the appreciation of nature; for Poe Art constituted ‘the reproduction of what the senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’20 For Bukowski, the equine athletes, the products of hundreds of years of selective breeding, their coats, as in a degas painting, radiant in the afternoon sun, are’ ‘beautiful’ works of art, displayed within the galleries of the racecourses of Los Angeles. What he describes as ‘The flash of lightning of hope’, relates to the aesthetic spectacle of the racehorse in motion, a spectacle centred on grace and elegance, a stark binary opposition to the ugly vulgarity of the outside world. In many ways Bukowski’s pessimistic philosophy of life outside the comforting confines of the racetrack mirrored that of Absurdist dramatist Samuel Beckett. Both, for example, consistently sought to foreground the pointlessness of everyday human existence and the way in which humanity attempts to disguise and/or repress the idea of inevitable physical degeneration, of ‘dancing in the face of Mrs Death.’21 This Sophoclean acceptance of the connection between living and suffering is succinctly highlighted in this exchange between Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame: Hamm: What’s he doing? Clov: He’s crying. Hamm: Then he’s living.22
Many of Bukowski’s poems echo Beckett’s sense of life as a pointless, habitual, cyclical trial; in ‘the way’ for example, Bukowski laments: Well, I suppose the days were made To be wasted The years and the loves were made To be wasted We can’t cry, and it helps to laughIt’s like letting out Dreams, ideals, Poisons Don’t ask us to sing, Laughing is singing to us, you see, it was a terrible joke23
20
E. A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (Penguin: Santa Rosa, 1967) p. 498. 21 See C. Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1992) p. 204. 22 S. Beckett, ‘Endgame’ in The Complete Dramatic Works (Faber and Faber, London, 1986, p.107. Hereafter cited as Becket (1996).
46
Steve Brie
A philosophy which is reminiscent of a scene in Beckett’s Endgame where Clov and Hamm consistently try to articulate the absurdity of their lives: Clov: ‘Why this farce, day after day?’24
And: Hamm: ‘What in God’s name do you think you are doing?’ Clov: I’m doing my best to create a little order.’25
This craving to make sense, to discover some ‘truth’, whether in relation to the absurdity of life as ritual, or to the nature of aesthetics underpins Bukowski’s poem ‘12 minutes to post’ as we stand here before the purple mountains in our stupid clothing, we pause, look about; nothing changes, it only solidifies, our lives crawl slowly, our wives deprecate us. then we awaken a moment – the animals are entering the track: Quick’s Sister, Perfect Raj, Vive le Torch, Miss Leuschner, Keepin’ Peace, True to Be, Lou’s Good Morning. now it’s good for us: the lightning flash of hope, the laughter of the hidden gods. we were never meant to be what we are or where we are, we are looking for an out, some music from the sun, the girl we never found. we are betting on the miracle again there before the purple mountains as the horses parade past so much more beautiful than our lives.
And again in ‘the horseplayer’26: sitting in your undershirt, sucking on a cold beer, going over it all once again, getting ready for next time when everything you bet on comes in, just to put life straight… this endless search for the 23
C. Bukowski, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1963) p. 165. 24 Beckett (1996: 122-3). 25 Beckett (1986: 120). 26 Published in Bone Palace Ballet (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 1997) p. 155-6. 47
The Turn to Aesthetics ultimate truth that still can’t be stopped.
Here we find the same absurdist ideas which had been articulated by Beckett, the same sense of life as something to be endured. However, unlike Hamm and Clov, for Bukowski’s persona the darkness is periodically illuminated by the perfect form and idealised beauty of the thoroughbred racehorse. In ‘12 minutes to post’, Bukowski is also dealing with an idea similar to one expounded by Wordsworth in The Prelude.27 Bukowski may have in mind the Wordsworthian concept of heightened aesthetic experience, intensive moments of being which Wordsworth termed ‘spots of time.’ Bukowski’s narrator experiences a ‘spot of time’, a fleeting aesthetically-stimulated awakening from his crawling life. This momentary enlightenment operates as a binary opposite to what Bukowski describes as the ‘Days of the Living/Dead’ habitually experienced by the narrator in ‘the beggar.’ In ‘12 minutes to post’ normality is depicted as ‘stupid’, a state in which ‘nothing changes’ but merely ‘solidifies’, as ‘lives crawl slowly’ towards the inevitable abyss. The equine embodiments of the sublime provide an ephemeral ‘out’, a chance to engage with the ‘miracle again.’ Although the narrator awakens momentarily to ‘the laughter of the hidden gods’ when the horses enter the track, he instinctively understands that this is an ephemeral aesthetic escape, the sun only fleetingly provides the desired ‘music’, the beautiful idealised girl will continue to remain elusive, but, like a narcotics or alcohol addict, there will always be the need for another fix, a fix transiently provided by the horses who will forever be ‘so much more beautiful than our lives.’ The fact that this beauty is understood to be fleeting and that realty is waiting to pounce makes it even more desirable, a fact acknowledge by Virginia Woolf who argued that ‘Beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.’28 Bukowski’s narrator must inevitably acknowledge and live with the ‘ultimate truth’ of human existence – ‘to live is to suffer’, a condition highlighted in ‘a last shot on two good horses’’29 where, after a losing run, he realises that once the aesthetic anaesthesia wears off he is once more left exposed to the pain of living: I only had a dime left and coffee was then 15c. I went into the crapper and I wanted to flush myself away, they had me…
Similarly in ‘the condition book’,30 like a narcotics addict coming down from a trip, after the euphoria of the spectacle of the race, his character is worn down and devoured by the mechanics of the track:
27
W. Wordsworth, The Prelude in Abrams, M. H. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 (Norton & Co: London, 2000) p.p. 303-383. 28 V. Woolf, The Waves (Penguin: London, 1992) p. 132. 29 Published in The Days Run away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 1969) p.p. 116-7. 30 Published in The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, 2001) p. 289.
48
Steve Brie the long days at the track have swallowed and consumed me… I am decades and decades of races run and won and lost and run again… I am the racetrack, my ribs are the wooden rails, my eyes are the flashes of the tote-board, my feet are hooves and there is something riding on my back, I am the last turn, I am the home stretch, I am the long-shot and the favourite… I am humanly destroyed, I am the horseplayer who became the race and the track.
In the racetrack poems discussed above, Bukowski clearly identifies absurdity as a central part of the human condition. Like Beckett, he illustrates the way in which such a philosophy grows naturally out of the clash between an individual’s imagined sense of centrality within the world order, and the meaninglessness of human existence which, he argues, constitutes reality. Within these poems the exquisite form and beauty of the thoroughbred racehorse provide Bukowski’s characters with a respite from the torment of everyday existence. Unfortunately, yet inevitably, the aesthetic fix proves to be ephemeral, ‘the lightening flash of hope’ quickly disappears with the setting sun and the bleeding resumes once more. References Adorno, T. (1972) Aesthetic theory. Routledge, London. Lama Anagarika Govinda (1988) The way of the white clouds. Rider, London. Beckett, S. (1986) ‘Endgame’in Samuel Beckett: The complete works (p.89-134). Faber and Faber, London. Brewer, G. (1997) Charles Bukowski. Twaine Publishers, New York. Bukowski, C. (1963) Burning in water drowning in flame. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (1969) The days run away like wild horses over the hills. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (1979) Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (1992) The last night of the earth poems. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (1996) Betting on the muse. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (1997) Bone palace ballet. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Bukowski, C. (2001) The night torn mad with footsteps. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Cazeaux, C, (2000) The continental aesthetics reader. Routledge, London. Cherkovski, N. (1997) Charles Bukowski: A life. Steerforth Press, Vermont.
49
The Turn to Aesthetics Cooney, S. (1999) (ed.) Reach for the sun: selected letters 1978-1994 vol. 3. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Hotby, H. (1932) Virginia Woolf. Wishart and Co, London. Joyce, W. (1996) Miller, Bukowski and their enemies. Avisson Press, Grennsboro, North Carolina. Long, P. (1997) (ed.) Bukowski in the bathtub. Raven, Venice, California. Lyotard, J. F. (2000) The sublime and the avant-garde. In Cazeaux, C. (ed.) The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Routledge, London. (p.453-464). Piyano, F. (2000) Bukowski: Laughing with the Gods. Sun Dog Press, Michigan, USA. Sounes, H. (1998) Charles Bukowski: Locked in the arms of a crazy life. Rebel Inc, Edinborough. Smith, J. (2000) Art, survival and so forth. The poetry of Charles Bukowski. Wrecking Ball Press, North Cave, East Yorkshire. Wordsworth, W. (2000) The Prelude. In Abrams, M.H. (ed.) The Norton anthology of English literature Vol. 2. Norton, London. (p. 303-383).
50
