Notes on the Sage

Working the Dream

E n   C l a i r

Sage Falva : Notes

Introduction

As a young man growing up, we encounter the will of the mother, who paints a pretty picture of everything that we encounter and presents it in a socially entertaining way. Beyond this point is the cold hard experience of reality, often portrayed as a chaos of gigantic proportions about the world and the universe. The young man who finds his mother's Tinkerbell assurances to be false will break the will of the mother … and thereafter enters the awesome world of the father.

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Preamble

One of the most popular scientific methodologies is statistical analysis. It applies to a sum total of people agreeing to something or the way a representative sampling of polls points to a certain belief held by the whole country. It may be refined further to indicate an average view or used to predict social behavior on account of its frequency of occurence.

A person may undertake such a survey of social behavior themselves or they could do it a little differently without minimizing the need for a reliable methodology. A sampling of views about the man Charles Bukowski may have returned a response directly from the horse's mouth or we could view the popularity of Bukowski and take an analysis to the life of the man himself to account for why so many people seem to relate to him with their own experiences.

The result is always a guide to what may come close to understanding the man and in the process to understand the society he lived in. In some ways it helps an individual to understand themselves in relation to a peer of his times.

Brief Bio

The salient features of the life of Bukowski are as follows:

• He was born in 1920, 11 years before the great depression. It is expected to have had a devastating effect on the young boy whose sense of the norm about the country he was born was never right from the start. It causes an anxiety in a young mind that is identified as The Bull at the Gate or as the experience of a man whose childhood dreams encountered an interruptus which he could not do anything about.

• The experience leaves many boys speechless but soon they learn to imitate the mannerisms of other kids who dismiss any perceived sense of problems and take to being boisterous and drown out their inner voice of discontent. This is referred to as Snake on the Vine being an expression of the snake in the garden of Eden or more recently as the python of imagination and make believe. The companionship of friends and their undivided devotion to each other creates a collusion to the common belief of what is real.

• In his teens he left the family and began a tour of the US to see for himself that the dreams he grew up with are not a figment of his imagination. Its an act that brought him face to face with his anxieties and doubts. We call it the Shaking Tree. He toured the US and along the way toiled at many jobs to earn his right to his dream. He may have won the fight but it insisted on a persistent daily activity to come up with something new each day to affirm the dream. The American dream for him ceased to be a picture framed on the wall but was a vase he had to brush everyday to keep it dust free.

• Returning from his country-wide trip he must have expected to re-blossom in his neighborhood but the old bull was back and he must have encountered the same attitudes of avoidance he left behind. He could do nothing to change that in his friends. The shaking tree caught fire in the rage of his own failure to whitewash his environment and take out all the stains. It became The Burning Tower. But he had far more success in writing his responses and expressing the re-discovered dream in the ear of the reader by the very voice of the reader.

• At one point he lost faith even in his writings as a way of affirming his own dream as much as it supported that of others. He wrote ' there's a time to kick out the whole sensation of art out on its w***e-a*s.' It may have represented the low in his writing career especially as he was turning the corner to start to really fight. Its the Death Star. Its leaves the individual, any individual, with the last opportunity to get it right and to get it right the first time. There was no more trying.

• And then he became the w***e … of art and realized that its what it takes. A man tries to say he is true in so many different ways … rejecting any conditions as to how he ought to say it … and then he learns … how. We term it the Girl on the Pole. That's a reference to a striptease in a nightclub. That's art … in the way it represents a product … in the way it paces the excitement … the way it makes people wait … and the way it teases and communicates … and to think that it's being done for the good of others … and their understanding.

• With several books out, he was the Sage of the times, the mean times that is .. of the street and streetwise love and life. He was the man on the street fighting to protect his love and his love of the dream. He was the Porcelain Garland around his own neck in a flesh that was founded on silicate. No he wasn't God … just someone who didn't need to be him.

• By then he was coming to receive his affirmation. It took out much of the daily assurances he was giving to himself. He had come to that elusive union he thought he had found on the road in America but could not find it at home in his neighborhood. He was loved and he responded in kind in a marriage that implied a certain responsibility. He was the dream maker and protector … he was Married with Husband.

• With a movie on his story he had in some ways arrived and he must have felt his life come full circle from the young days when he was making stories in his dream … not realizing then that he would want them to come true. But he fought for it … while despising it at the same time … because it made him work for it. Did Charles Bukowski retore the American dream or did he tell people you have to fight to protect it? He was the Barking Bard on the wires of the dream that floated in his visions … he was now the ink he wrote with … the radio waves on the microphone … the face on the magazines … and the electricity that carried his words on the media.

• What would anyone say about Charles Bukowski? Perhaps they'll say he loved his dream more than he did himself. Home at last, Safe and Secure, Bukowski had learnt not only to be a man of independent means but he had also learnt to entertain himself. ' Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show.' It certainly is a statement of someone who had come to know how to take care of himself. That is indeed an important message in these times.

Standardization of Perceptions

In standardizing our view of society, sometimes reducing it to an average, we incurr the error of ignoring individual natures. However it also gives us the all important sense of common identity and personality. We may differ one from another but not that much. A standard creates the experience of norm and we feel that we belong.

No doubt we all share the same dream as well. In a flip of the coin it is not too hard to see how Bukowski's dreams began with him safe and secure in the crib of the family. His dreams must have carried him through the bard, through being married in the home and so on upwards. In taking stock of his life, its the realization of the real nature of the horror we have gone through that makes us throw out plain acceptance without a fight. That tipped the cart and started him again at Bull at the Gate and made him work to get back to safe.

A wise Sage would be particular about ensuring that our realization of the dream should also serve to assure us of life's promises and to create room for them in our acceptance. When it gets too corny is when we find ourself barking but that is a refusal on our part to receive back what we thought was dragged away. We may need to learn how to take back a friend we fought with or how to accept. And we may need to look at our dreams again.