A Form of Insanity
Q: In Women, a woman is shacking up with Bukowski, and decides to clean up his apartment. She asks if that will interfere with his writing. He says, "There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity."
A: It is a form of insanity.
Who would do something that costs
money, takes time away from your loved ones, costs you jobs, for decades, with no
reward in sight? It's not rational behavior.
It's compulsive behavior.
Obsessive-compulsive.
You have to be obsessed to do it. For years. Decades.
Over three decades, in my case.
Even Henry Miller only went 28 years. I've
been 33½ years.
Q: With no relief in sight.
A: There's always the theoretical possibility of a breakthrough.
I have a book coming out.
I'm positive about that.
Don't want to
bring myself down.
Maybe the environment has changed enough so that what
wasn't adaptive before, now is. All you can do is keep probing.
Consider
Frank Proffit.
Frank Proffitt was a man of grace and calm, though he and his family suffered great deprivations. About the time "Tom Dooley" was hitting the pop music charts, Frank had left the mountains seeking paying work, had sold his guitar and had given up music. "Tom Dooley" changed his life and returned his music to him; he resumed singing the songs given to him by his father, Wiley, and his Aunt Nancy Prather. He gathered new respect for the old music increasingly ignored by his community, traveled to festivals across the country, and sang at the 1964 World's Fair. He started making and selling the old style mountain fretless banjos which are prized by players everywhere. When Frank died in 1965, at age 52, the New York Times published a six-inch, two column obituary.
Q: I like the part about his music being increasingly ignored by his
community.
A: All literature is world literature.
Literature is increasingly
ignored by the American mainstream. But not by the underground.
Bukowski
went from the underground to world literature before being grudgingly admitted to
the American mainstream, 30 years too late, and so did Henry Miller.
It is
hard to make that happen when you are isolated and alone and get no encouragement,
get nothing but rejection slips and disrespectful reviews, if you get any reviews
at all.
You get down on yourself, you lose hope, you have no faith in anything
good ever happening to you, it takes its toll. It whittles away at your optimism,
your confidence, your belief in yourself.
Q: You keep at it because it's an illness. Because you're insane. Hard-headed.
You can't stop.
A: Something like that.
What would I do if I stopped?
It's
like breathing to me.
I might as well try to stop breathing as to stop writing.
I wake up thinking about it, I think about it all day, I go to bed thinking about
it.
Q: Two good things about it.
One, you have a raison d'être.
Even if nothing comes of it, it gives meaning, and purpose, to your life. How many
men don't have that? How many men's lives are worthless, and empty.
And two,
your break might not ever come. But if it does come, you are ready. You kept your
chops up.
A: And three, there is the work. The accomplishment. It's not going anywhere.
I'm proud of what I did. Especially in the conditions I had to do it under.
I didn't give up.
Many would have. Many did.
Quit, sell out, or
turn bitter.
I didn't.
Q: Maybe that will pay off in your lifetime. Maybe it won't.
A: I just ordered two records produced by Appleseed Recordings, Her
Bright Smile Haunts Me Still and Nothing Seems Better To Me, The Warner
Collection, Vols 1 and 2. The motto of the record company is "Sowing the seeds
of social justice through music."
I have a character, Johnny Potsherd,
who is sowing the seeds of social justice through daily typewriting. And it seems
to me that the five conglomerates who own the publishing companies are uprooting
social justice, poisoning social justice, rooting it up, root and branch, for injustice,
favoritism, a stacked deck, a deck stacked in favor of corporations, and the minions
of corporations.
But there are individual citizens who believe in social
justice, who read books, who are not being served by the War Heads, in publishing,
and they will seek out books, on the Internet, like I sought out The Warner Collection,
because I wanted to hear a recording of "When Sorrow Encompasses Me Around."
Pretty soon they can find Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground
Writer and His Family, from LitVision Press.
LitVision Press is my Appleseed
Recordings.
Maybe I'm not crazy, I'm sane.
Maybe I'm crazy like a
fox.