“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“No one has ever come out to say – Christ, I’m sick as hell – Nobody, do you understand?”
The book opens with a long preface by Fernanda Pivano who with expert wisdom explains why and how Bukowski became a giant of literature: if this is what you want to learn more about, read her, which is better. Is she not nice to you? We too, although, far from any sympathy or antipathy, her merit as cultural ferryman seems indisputable to us. You don’t like Bukowski? We can understand it. But if ever in your life you have ever thought, even if only in passing, something like “The next morning was morning and I was still alive”, old Buk has something for you.
Whoever writes here loved it very much, in those teenage afternoons of emotional ups and downs, looking for a mirror to one’s malaise, a handhold, a shred of sensibleness in which to recognize oneself. He went around with “Stories of ordinary madness” in his backpack, decades later he still recites by heart some excerpts from “The most beautiful girl in the city”; reading this interview at the age of thirty is like rediscovering an old friend, smiling at so much naivety, trying to understand a little better who we were then and who, after all, someone like Henry “Hank” Charles Bukowski was.
“I never analyze, I just react.” – reacting to life the way he did, well, it takes guts (in every sense). If you decide to reduce him to a coward, chauvinist, alcoholic, you choose not to understand the greatness of a concept such as that of the eternal return. The high school philosophy teacher explained it to us like this: life is shit (textual) but I choose to relive it all over again, just as it has already been. Without avoiding disgust, pain, sadness, dirt. I wallow in it without trying to figure out why or how, and while I’m at it, if my name is Bukowski, I throw out a thousand poems that spit in the face of grandiosity, turning into hyperbole of beauty.
He wanted to write, at the end of that he cared; and he was afraid enough of dying not to give up. He did it, writing, when he felt full enough to have something to tell (he hadn’t lived long enough before, he says, and to the good connoisseur…). For those who have spent their lives with a fermenting brain and at the same time with the feeling of never being able to get anything good out of that bloody ferment, reading Bukowski is equivalent to an accelerated course in Zen Buddhism. The gears slow down, the pulse calms down, the breath becomes regular. When at fifteen we read “Le 3.16” and we too fall asleep, when we hear him swear and we would like to do it too, when we realize that all he was trying to do was not be “trapped to say something grandiose or unusual” and we don’t feel great either, and we just can’t think that maybe that’s okay. “Wouldn’t it be heroic not to be heroes?”, the Afterhours sang, and perhaps every little boy in need of life should hear it , as well as the twenty-year-old who fails his first love test, and even the thirty-year-old bent on job insecurity and so on .
Bukowski wrote, he had his raison d’etre there, in those words that in a thousand ways repeat to the reader “OK, okay”. We find our hope in the things that make us feel good even when we feel bad – and hope is “the only thing a man needs”. You can address any moralistic objection to his hangovers, his fucks, his vulgarity, but a wise man said that life is not a school for learning good manners, and yes, not even reading Bukowski goes too far in that direction. Literature should not go in that direction: how nice it is to disagree, how nice annoyance, disgust, discord, how nice even anger. If what you read in Bukowski seems like a list of ugliness, think that everyone has his faults but we probably spend most of the time trying to avoid them.
Instead he wrote.
“Wisdom is in the darkness, sweep in the darkness like brooms, I go where the summer flies have gone, catch me if you can.”
Written by Delis
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Charles Bukowski, Fernanda Pivano, What matters is scratching under my armpits, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2013 (prima edizione Sugarco, 1982)