Cold Harsh Truth 3: Even if you think life is meaningless, you must do your part.
Sometimes, we feel like angels whose wings have been clipped by the universe.
Other times, people make us feel like the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
But are we that bad?
Charles Bukowsky, for example, has always been the archetype of the cursed and evil poet. But behind the character is the person. — And the same thing happens to us. There is a person behind the mask.
I removed Bukowsky’s mask by reading his correspondence with Sheri Martinelli: Anne Nin’s muse, Ezra Pound’s ex-lover, Ginsberg’s friend and queen of all the Beatniks.
Their correspondence began because Bukowsky wanted to publish his poems in Sheri’s magazine, Anagogic & Paideumic Review.
Sheri rebuffed Bukowski by metaphorically spitting at him in a letter, saying that his poetry lacked verve.
Bukowsky, far from getting pissed off, started a friendship by letter with Sheri, which I fell in love with and taught me great lessons.
Here are three of his best pearls.
Cold Harsh Truth 1: Don’t buy advice from someone who doesn’t lead by example.
“You don’t fool me, you’ve been in my hell and you have no right to tell me to get out when you’ve got half a foot in, half an ass out.”- Charles Bukowski (Los Angeles, California. July 2, 1960)
All this comes because, in the letter in which Sheri Martinelli rejected Bukowski’s work, she told him that his poetry needed more stamina, that we all have problems since the world has been a world, and that it was necessary to leave a positive legacy to the new generations, not such a dark vision of the world as Bukowski had.
The devil knows best from the older man, and Bukowski knows that Sheri has been Ezra Pound’s mistress/keeper/protege while Ezra was 1) married and 2) locked up in a mental institution to avoid jail.
And that some secret vices will indeed remain from those times because although Bukowski was an alcoholic, good old Sheri was not far behind and had given in other times to heroin and marijuana.
Lesson: don’t believe everything you hear from those self-righteous people who look like they have never broken a dish. The more perfect someone pretends to be, the more imperfect they become.
Cold Harsh Truth 2: Neither the bad guys are that bad, nor the good guys are that good. Everyone in this life is improvising.
“When you are the light it is most natural for it to be dark around you, but that doesn’t mean you are in the dark. You are in the light. You are the light bulb that the cosmic electricity is burning at a terrible rate.” — Sheri Martinelli (6/July/1960 Lynch St.)
Sheri Martinelli was the queen of the Beats and had seen so much that she knew — as she wrote — that “Heaven and hell are a fraction of a second away from each other. But it is not possible to remain in one or the other for more than a fraction of a second”.
We are consciences that turn on and off like dying stars in the middle of the night of the times.
But we must remember that everything that shines also burns, and what burns hurts.
We are ambiguous. And the times accentuate ambiguity. Not only are we not 100% bad or 100% good, but the times also change what is evil and good.
Lesson: paradoxically, one can be considered a good person today, and 20 years from now, looking back, be regarded as an absolute monster. Because what is good or bad changes culturally with the times.
Cold Harsh Truth 3: Even if you think life is meaningless, you must do your part.
“It seemed to me that if I could make just one person happy in the world my life would not have been pointless. I failed.” — Charles Bukowski (late July 1960)
I can think of no more significant act of love than transforming tragedy into art. To make something constructive out of all the pain a soul can experience.
And Bukowski, despite his character as a cursed writer, tried to recycle all the rage of his time and turn it into poetry so that it would stop stinking.
In the sentence that begins this last point, Bukowski wrote concerning his wife when she left him and presumably went off with another poet that Bukowski knew.
Ultimately, Bukowski and Sheri were much more alike than they thought.
Sheri was Ezra Pound’s beloved, but when the moment of truth came months before being released from the psychiatric hospital, Pound went to Italy with a lover he had just met, leaving Sheri behind.
Bukowski asked to marry Barbara Fry (editor of Harlequin magazine) by letter when she confessed to him that she had a physical defect (she was missing two vertebrae in her neck) and feared that no one would marry her. But after a year, She left Bukowski.
Bukowski and Sheri were each addicted to their own thing,
Both gave their lives to making this world more livable with their art.
Both were born around the same time, 1918 Sheri, 1920 Bukowski.
Both lived through the midlife crisis simultaneously and shared their existential emptiness in their letters that began when Bukowski was about 40 and Sheri 42. This correspondence lasted seven long years (from 1960 to 1967).
Finally, they both died in the same decade.
- Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994.
- Sheri died in a motorcade parked in front of a local supermarket where she used to go to watch people pass by on November 3, 1996.
Lesson: life often doesn’t seem to make sense. Only one thing is sure: that decay and pain will come into our lives. But still, you have to try to see the beauty in the cosmic horror you face for being alive so that your love will help someone else to pass through the dark places you also passed through.
A virtual hug
AG
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