One of my favourite books is Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Set in Los Angeles, it’s a thinly disguised biography of his own brutal experiences delivering mail. Every day he was hungover, given all the crap jobs, forever late and grew to hate every minute of it.
Bukowski wastes few words, and quickly drags the reader into the grime of his day in such a way that we never want it to end. It’s a comedy in the true sense of the word, a tragedy. And true to the roughness of his real life, Bukowski keeps lifting the hero (Chinaski) back off the canvas to slug out another impossible day. For such a short book, it’s a classic. A documentary about Bukowski can be found on YouTube, named after one of his most famous poems, ‘Born Into This.’ It runs for an entertaining hour and twenty minutes, and captures the brute force of his lyrical prose, confessing a low life indulgence that most of us would never dare.
As a struggling writer living in cheap rooms, he’d wake up and start drinking, smoking cigarettes and type poems on an old-fashioned ribbon machine. He’d be at it for hours before scraping a few coins together for a stamp, mailing his work to any publisher he could find, then clocking-on at the post office for more of the nightmare. He kept going until it nearly killed him.
One part of the documentary that always grabs my attention whenever I see it, comes early. Filmed in black and white, he’s drinking beer from a bottle, leering at the cameraman and drawls, “I tell you something else that occurs to me now, if you guys wanna listen to the shit. I feel like throwing this beer right in your face.” He wasn’t angry or wild, but sinking into a reverie of thought.
“Why?” asked the cameraman, a little surprised. “I’ll tell you why,” Bukowski answered, “I always thought that a time like this would come.” Then looking toward the camera, “Like guys marching in on me with cameras and all that shit.”
In those moments he realised that the success he was now enjoying was something he’d always deeply known, as if he’d seen it in advance. “Somehow, I almost felt it, and KNEW it,” he continued. Then after a long pause, in typical Bukowski fashion, finished by saying, “I was always gonna crash it all down, and say, jam it up your ass.”
He was both funny and vulgar, playing to the camera, but at the same time deeply truthful and honest. In my book, Another Kind of Knowing, that kind of ‘knowing’ that Bukowski spoke of is the central theme. Most of us experience it to a greater or lesser degree. I call that kind of realisation, ‘Another Kind of Knowing,’ because it’s not generated from the mind, but arises from the heart region, with a certainty that cannot be explained. Bukowski ‘felt it’ and ‘knew it,’ but probably would not have spoken openly in advance for fear of it sounding like an empty boast. After all, he spent most of his life living like a drunken, brawling bum. Instead, like many of us do, he kept it to himself. The reason why we struggle to hear more of those amazing assurances from deep within is because the mind is forever busy grabbing all the attention. However, inside each and every one of us is what I call, a ‘reservoir of pure life.’ That ‘life’ is unrestricted by time and well able to reveal far-reaching pictures of how things will surely be; things that the mind can never see. When people meditate, their primary purpose is to spend time outside the clamour of the mind. It can also be done while falling into a daydream whilst working in the garden, washing dishes, sitting by an open fire or simply listening to one’s own breathing. One of my favourite ways of escaping my mind is to walk along the lanes near my house and start naming everything I see. ‘G is for the grass, and B is for the branches, and S is for the sky. R is for the road beneath my feet, and C is for the clouds that pass me by….’ On and on I go until my attention is completely focused upon the moment in which I exist. Escaping the busy mind gives the loving voice of the ‘reservoir’ an opportunity to arise and be heard, and that can be very reassuring. The human mind has a tendency to fear the future, and conjures all manner of things to be insecure and afraid about. However, the ‘reservoir’ is the opposite, and without any criticism or judgement, will assure us of things that will most surely come to pass.
Image: Courtesy of Karl Kohler/Foundation of Bukowski's painting.