Walden? Perhaps a Trip to the Northeast By Way of Book

Starting to read Walden and some other writings by Thoreau. So far, a few bits and pieces that strike me in a right-like fashion.

"Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?"

"By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life"

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind"

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers."

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

I'm drawn in on this one. Not quite as much so reading "On Human Understanding" by John Locke. This one will take a bit of time, methinks (unless it starts to get more interesting then the first few books have made it out to be). Also currently reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Very interesting thus far, and a great follow up after re-reading Jack Copeland's Artificial Intelligence. And to top all of that off, I'm shimmying through Leaves of Grass a few verses at a time (I've had the book for 3 years now, and haven't so much as picked it up, but it provides some nice short bursts to interject between the longer bits of the above). Four books at once, which I haven't done in awhile. Also upcoming:

Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, Prinicipia Mathematica (to *56)
Ian Glynn, An Anatomy of Thought
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essential Writings

and, if I can find a copy:

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

In conjunction, I'm also slightly interested in getting some biographical information about the various authors (especially Thoreau at this point). Which all likely starts at work with some ferocious wikipedia-ing.

New apartment coming soon. Perhaps the new location can provide some additional focus.

As for the new place, it's just a hop skip and a jump away from my current location. The apartment is in the basement of a house, that has been sectioned off as a duplex. My portion of the house includes a large living room (with wood stove, amazing lighting, wood paneling), a smallish kitchen (nothing spectacular, but should suit my needs), a smallish bed room, access to non-coin-op laundry facilities, and (the real kicker) a sauna and hot tub, with a glass partition looking out on the living room. I am joyously awaiting mid-winter reading sessions by the wood stove, and post ultimate weekends in the hot tub. Need to start looking at stereo systems and means of getting speakers installed in the hot tub/sauna area. Once settled, methinks the environs will be cozy enough (hopefully not so cozy as to make me a recluse).

Because Short Term Mermory Protests

An e-mail notice! Library books overdue. And what with having finished them, I see no reason not to return them. However, as the offending items are two books of poetry, I thought it might be prudent to jot down the poems that stuck out for me in some way shape or form. Looking back, some of them must have appealed based on context, or based on a growing understanding of the underlying character of Bukowski. One line that is interjected between the parts of Sifting Through..., doesn't quite fall in below, but I liked. Here is that:

real
loneliness
is not
necessarily
limited to
when
you are
alone.

And here comes the rest:

The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski
begging
days like razors, nights full of rats
air and light and time and space
pulled down shade
confession
spark
in the bottom
darkness & ice
sitting with the IBM
the aliens
splashing
get close enough and you can't see
them and us
luck was not a lady
oh, I was a ladies' man!
creative writing class
cool black air
Dinosauria, we
the area of pause
my first computer poem
it's a shame
hangovers
classical music and me
an invitation
batting order:*
the open canvas
in the shadow of the rose

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way by Charles Bukowski
so you want to be a writer?
work-fuck problems
observations on music
unblinking grief
houses and dark streets
the joke is on the sun
like a polluted river flowing
warriors in this place
a sickness?*
who needs it?
the significance was obscure
working through it all
Los Angeles
excuses
written before I got one
little poem
regrets of a sort
misbegotten paradise
nobody but you

And as an afterword on all this, before I move on to reading something else, I'll throw in a quote about Bukowski that seems pertinent to how it all seemed to align for me:

From Modest Mouse's song, Bukowski - "Went to bed and didn't see why every day turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read. But God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole?"

Like Gasoline Poured on the Fire

Wednesday night I made an unanticipated trip to the library. Wandering through the stacks, a familiar but unread name popped out at me. Bukowski. I jumped from page to page for a few minutes and decided that I'd pour a little bit of time into his poetry. I checked out two books of his, and have been finding half- and quarter- hours amongst the flotsam of the past few days to read The Last Night of the Earth Poems. This was one that I liked quite a bit:

days like razors, nights full of rats

as a very young man I divided an equal amount of time between
the bars and the libraries; how I managed to provide for
my other ordinary needs is the puzzle; well, I simply didn't
bother too much with that- if I had a book or a drink then I didn't think too much of other things-fools create their own
paradise.

in the bars, I thought I was a tough, I broke things, fought other men, etc.

in the libraries it was another matter: I was quiet, went
from room to room, didn't so much read entire books
as parts of them: medicine, geology, literature and
philosophy. psychology, math, history, other things, put me
off. with music I was more interested in the music and in the
lives of the composers than in the technical aspects ...

however, it was with the philosophers that I felt a brotherhood:
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, even old hard-to-read Kant;
I found Santayana, who was very popular at the time, to be
limp and a bore; Hegel you really had to dig for, especially
with a hangover; there are many I read who I have forgotten,
perhaps properly so, but I remember one fellow who wrote an
entire book in which he proved that the moon was not there
and he did it so well that afterwards you thought, he's
absolutely right, the moon is not there.

how the hell is a young man going to deign to work an
8 hour day when the moon isn't even there?
what else
might be missing?

and
I didn't like literature so much as I did the literary
critics; they were real pricks, those guys; they used
fine language, beautiful in its way, to call other
critics, other writers, assholes. they
perked me up.

but it was the philosophers who satisfied
that need
that lurked somewhere within my confused skull: wading
through their excesses and their
clotted vocabulary
they still often
stunned
leaped out
with a flaming gambling statement that appeared to be
absolute truth or damned near
absolute truth,
and this certainty was what I was searching for in a daily
life that seemed more like a piece of
cardboard.

what great fellows those old dogs were, they got me past
days like razors and nights full of rats; and women
bargaining like auctioneers from hell.

my brothers, the philosophers, they spoke to me unlike
anybody on the streets or anywhere else; they
filled an immense void.
such good boys, ah, such good
boys!

yes, the libraries helped; in my other temple, the
bars, it was another matter, more simplistic, the
language and the way was
different...

library days, bar nights.
the nights were alike,
there's some fellow sitting nearby, maybe not a
bad sort, but for me he doesn't shine right,
there's a gruesome deadness there-I think of my father,
of schoolteachers, of faces on coins and bills, of dreams
about murderers with dull eyes; well,
somehow this fellow and I get to exchanging glances,
a fury slowly begins to gather: we are enemies, cat and
dog, priest and atheist, fire and water; tension builds,
block piled upon block, waiting for the crash; our hands
fold and unfold, we drink, now, finally with a
purpose:

his face turns to me:
"sumpin' ya don't like, buddy?"

"yeah. you."

"wanna do sumpin' about it?"

"certainly."

we finish our drinks, rise, move to the back of the
bar, out into the alley; we
turn, face each other

I say to him, "there's nothing but space between us. you
care to close that
space?"

he rushes toward me and somehow it's a part of the part of the part.

The book becomes dog eared as I mark off poems that strike me like a gong. The vibration of dissonance and consonance. The thrill of words trickling, splashing, spurting, and erupting. The guilty pleasure of the word motherfucker acting as punctuation. Filth and obscenity made (if not quite beautiful) aesthetic. This is life. Not idealized life. There is no two car garage. There is solitude. Alienation. People swooping about and caroming off each other like a tank of spastic moths. There's violence. Indifference. But also, simply, life. Fighting for a self-defined existence regardless of what science or religion proposes to tell us. There's something quite right here.

Double Dicho!

A new confessional? A dumping ground for the stray bits and pieces? A short term solution to a long term problem? Or maybe a short term solution to a short term problem? The napkin that I've never written on? Time to get started with all this.

And as good a place to start as any is the title. I read a biography on Hemingway that mentioned a disposition of his for double dichos. From Hotchner's Papa Hemingway, the following is a conversation Hotchner had with Hemingway (who was writing The Old Man and the Sea at the time):

"There is at the heart of it the oldest double dicho I know."
"What's a double dicho" I asked.
"It's a saying that makes a statement forward or backward. Now this dicho is: Man can be destroyed but not defeated."
"Man can be defeated but not destroyed."
"Yes. that's its inversion, but I've always preferred to believe that man is undefeated."

The double dicho does not indicate a fundamental truth, but rather presents a poetic set of non-binding counter-conditions. Can man be defeated and destroyed (the death row inmate, spirit crushed, no defiance as he is led to a premature end)? Can man be undefeated and undestroyed?

Defeat is surrender. It is hanging one's head and giving up. The little quiet death of a dissatisfying life without standing up. It is the fire slowly dying as the night wears on.

Destruction is combat. It is the rage of vitality against any that seek to end it. Destruction is the loud contentious death. It is the inferno. The gas explosion. There for a flash and then gone.

For Hemingway, the encroachment of his aging body on his ability to write was the looming spectre of defeat. His eyesight started to fail. His ability to write faltered. Physical limitations started to impact his ability to participate in the activities he had always sought for recreation. The little ravages of old age, coupled with bipolar disorder led him to choose destruction of the body, rather than the defeat of old age. He embraced his dicho. He chose to wrap himself in these counter-conditions and committed suicide. He now lies in a cemetery in Sun Valley, Idaho.

There is heroism in tragedy. There is tragedy in heroism.

The title of the blog is based on another double dicho of Hemingway's:

"Thought is the enemy of sleep. Sleep is the enemy of thought."