“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
“I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room — I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve
been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt
that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering
me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words,
loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve
always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at
a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel
loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, “The strongest men are the most alone.”
I’ve never thought, “Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and
give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good.” No, that won’t
help. You know the typical crowd, “Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you
going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out
there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let
them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to
rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in
factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been
lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s
drink more wine!”
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should
make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened
by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
Bukowski is my kind of people.
But I look at Buck Owens, too, and I see courage. This is the show I’m watching at the moment, that I have on pause. He, too, had a rough life in his own way. He went hungry as a child, was moved away from his home in Texas. Despite the conventional need for smiling, he does not do it very well. He tries, but he can’t quite pull it off. And his guitarist, his best friend Don Rich (whose death in 1974 shattered him) smiles too much.
People lived in smaller houses then, led much more modest lives. True poverty was still quite common. The Catholic Church was still effectively facilitating pedophilia, and men could still demand sex of women at the work place without much risk of censure.
Owens music seems innocent. I think to myself that Jimmy Hendrix was warming up in 1966. The whole culture was getting ready for a rupture from which it still has not recovered.
I see on the one side, the wholesomeness of Owens music. Looked at more carefully, though, it is quite often about heartbreak and difficulty, too, with the important element that it aims to transcend heartbreak, to transform emotions, to help people carry on.
Owens himself, though, was married 4 times. Quite often, it seems country music is not so much cathartic as descriptive.
Here is a, to me, very interesting interview with George Jones, in which he freely admits his cocaine habit, that he nearly killed himself, that his promoters took out a life insurance policy on him (using a complicit doctor to commit fraud in the application) and that one of his big backers was killed by the mob: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJoQZRbbYr0
So often it is easy to sentimentalize the “good old days”. We see human stupidity, evil, laziness, corruption, greed, lust, and the thought that human life has ALWAYS been like this–and in fact for most of history has been far, far worse–is really hard for us, in our easy living conditions, to accept. It is hard for us to accept how hard the physical–and often cultural–living conditions are in much of the world. We find it hard to accept that in the Islamic world men can beat their women with impunity. We find it hard to accept the open pedophilia often on display there.
Just yesterday, I was reading about a man put into a labor camp in China, after being blinded in one eye trying to stop the rape of a woman by Communist Party connected sadists. I had a dream some time ago about the atmosphere of fear in Cuba, where women are regularly raped by Party officials, and for which there is no remedy, no justice. Think about it: how could there be, when “truth” is controlled centrally, and sadistic prisons (which among other things contain cages the size of dog crates) prisons exist where people can disappear indefinitely?
Can we not look forward? Can we not take the idea of Liberalism, and continue to try to actually bring it into being, to generalize it?
For me, I take comfort in Buck Owens. I don’t remember, but I suspect he was on the TV when I was very little. But I agree with Bukowski that we need madness, too, and not the sort seen in alcoholic binges. His alcoholism was only part of his character. Countless people drink their lives away and create nothing. He had a creative core.
I am rambling, as I do. I am thinking aloud, as I do. Perhaps there is something useful here, perhaps not. But in my own way, I am trying the ENGAGE with the contents of my consciousness, to connect in a syncratic (idiosyncratic minus the idio) various threads of thought and meaning.
Can I not ask, of the wider world, more of this? From all of you?