Puritanical Flavors in Behavior + Combustionary Letter Writing

Fosterings of The Immaculate and The Absurd

Focus veers towards the immaculate... certain times. Where the absurd enters in thru? Relationship, with a sudden tripling of sullenness, ridiculous stubborn behavior. A kind of demonically pious sanctimony…

Does Kafka get into this in his letters? He goes there. Yes. He can be demonically cathartically pious in his sanctimony. Its kind of a blast to read… Flaubert is even worse.

I mostly found Kafka’s letters to be : byronic, in which he is blandishing others. And declaring his intent unloading declaratives with raging puritanical glee.

I myself have a letter writing pathos, that in turn, was Emily spurned, writing as ingrowth toe and nail of certain athwart maniacal puritanical behavior ?

Pun slingers languor lingers on language for a lustre gobang:

BUKOWSKI’s letters are overtly literary —

Letters selected that I read of Bukowski’s, were written mostly to editors, in which he is trying to get himself published full stop. His letters engage in a kind of mash up with all things literary, as a blessed squabble with what writing can be. Its quite lovely, impudent, feisty and determined — he too a fooking pure I tan scan ram a lamb.

I could see his letters as an outgrowth of what Hemingway gets into in his letters to Fitzgerald. Which I betcha he read.

I am not screaming from the balcony anymore, I am not I am not…

I try to allow for tenderness, which is a tricky business for some — One comment on my site, basically insinuated, that trying to befriend me for real as an artist, was some kinda “sissy training.”

Am I sissy — well — I cant get away from the tenderness thing, as an obligation —

So appealing to tenderness is also a form of puritanical fussiness?

No — I tend to think of it more as a place I got to with Emily — She has a tenderness that cuts through “existential” boredom with what used to be known as the divine, with shades of beauty. Which I still find relevant as part of our timelessness despite living above bar at end of the world, and begetting myself cleansed of righteous totalistic gods rigid curse, as a modern dilemma. Fem in niz fizz. Straight down street from Parker.

Bukowskis letters are not sissy letters - not at all.

But his poetry does get to tenderness — thats the thing about him, his poetry gets there, and all the time…

Kafkas books published in his lifetime: 0.

A plunger under the volcano — The metaphorical pressure of living under a volcano, but to see it also as treasure, as plunder, helps me to undisease it from the whore for resistance, and her doodling dumb show where Miss Otis regrets, again and again, certain wretchedly hunter the punter mining puritanical behavior.

Tho, in truth, I also see puritanical behavior as akin to an attenuated sense of wretchedness exhumed from under the volcano, that is like a pressure cooker in dalliance with death and horror, folding in again and again against the shock of just being another walking animal skin.

And so what.

Only to let the writing stand on its own, yes yes, and crawl all over me, day and night — let in all openings ? sure, like Beethovens variations, sure, as blood off the stone, sure - even if palpitates like a vampire endlessness - biting into audacity of perspicacity, as to say - the tenderness of others’ otherness shimmering around in pool of life - As price for having ones own. However might make y’all groan.

Bukowski Letter from 1986

8–12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

https://lawlit.net/lp-2001/images/corrington-bukowski-correspondence.pdf

Letters Between Bukowski and Corrington