Charles Bukowski, The Phylosopher

if there was a great writer, everyone has a story of their interaction with this writer. Charles bukowski is a person who interacted, influenced, and spoke to a lot of people. Everyone is always talking about their time with this man who cared more for the cat that walked over his typewriter than a person who is going to read his poetry. 

People have always wanted to make Bukowski into an icon, a idealised individual who raged against society and won. They site his poetry and his prose as an example of a man who did everything that wasn’t mainstream and came out as a legend. But that’s not what he wrote. Bukowski wrote the observations of the time, in prose form of poetry that was not suppose to convey anything but the acts of existence, the time of “now” that that specific Poem of Bukowski’s spoke of. In his ability, he didn’t point out a thing, and explain it as a significance to something else; he asked us to be there.  He asked us to take ourselves out of our own life and be where he was right now, watching and having some vested interest in what he was doing and talking about.

He just wanted us to BE THERE!

Be in that one spot, at that one time when that action, that moment, that infinitesimal thought sparked in his brain and he thought what ever he mused upon that one idea, given that one moment. Then, you will move on to the next Bukowski poem, which in turn is another now. That is how Bukowski lived, wrote, and thought. He lived in “NOW”.  The same idea that the transcendentalist, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman would site and speak of for centuries. It is not a coincidence that Whitman and Bukowski are often paired. This idea of Now wouldn’t take hold again in our culture for decades later. When an Englishman by the name of Echart Tolle would speak of The Power of Now.

Then in the end he left his final thought. A thought that was carved on his grave stone. A thought that has been misconceived for centuries: “Don’t try.” A thought that still sits in the realms of the metaphysics and the transcendentalists.  When I have wrote these two words on a board or chalked them into the ground…I am greeted with the ideas of our world. it’s as if these two words are a gift to so many. A gift to all who don’t want to do anything.  A gift to the many who suffer int heir world, and just want to drown themselves in nothingness.  Unfortunately, these are the ones that have missed the mark.  However, these are also the people we live with every second of every day. Ask people for yourself what these two words mean, and you will be faced with the same ideas as I have put down here.

No, “Don’t try” is not a fatalist view of the world. It is the supreme idea given to all people who truly believe that things are possible. As Yoda, from Star Wars fame, reworded: “There is no try, only do.” In other words, yet once again, Do not try to do anything. For if we try, we will never succeed. We will never do. We will only spend all of our time trying to do. Don’t try – Just do!