Absence of the Hero (6 page)

“
Y
ou
are, honey boy, and ya don't need any more
development
! I never met this Homer guy, but I know he can't hold a candle ta
YOU
, honey boy!”

I
closed the door and went bar-ward to seek the solace of my ex-con friend.
He
could have it: Homer and Helen, Helen and Homer,
and all the development it implied. With D.H. Lawrence thrown
in.

The insurgency of criticism from a nosography on poetics to a censorious dictum by certain university groups who write the laws of poetry, and spawn, with sumptuous grace and style, their own
puppeteers
—these, and their half-brethren and their purlieu, form a most deadly and snobbish poetic fixation. They create, record, and argue their own history, charmed with the largesse of their chosen circumference.

What the university critics have lost in pulling
down the blinds around their little ivy world they have
gained in direction and prestige. To the remainder of us,
the unwashed, the loiterers in pool halls and back alleys,
there remains a frustrated and discordant yammering. In order to
inculcate a more heuristic force, perhaps a manifesto, a gesture . . .
a gestation . . . is necessary. It is difficult for a single
poet to stand against the university coterie. Perhaps we too
must invent our own history and choose our own gods
if our portion of American literature is to receive a hearing on some tomorrow.

Our writers should acquaint themselves with the claustral intent and exorcises of the campus groups—and let us be fair here: many of our imprint are not only pretty well unwashed but rather damn shoddily read as well (damn shoddily read as readers and damn shoddily read as writers). Our saving factors are our lack of monstrous clannishness and a more hybrid emergence. Yet this eminence should be both shaped and amorphous, with its own critics guide-wiring and giving form and numerical integration, cultural insertion, to our writers. This does not mean confirmation or confinement but a transelementation of mixed voices into a more
visible
shape. The fresh air of a new culture, the magnetism and meaning and hope, the exactness of our energies—these things haven't, in any sense, been harnessed or realized. And until they are . . . five or six old men, craggy and steatopygous in university chairs, will be the hierophants of our poetic universe.

Dear John Bryan:

. . . Look, on the war-thing, I can
give you nothing in poem form since I just wrote
something about how I ducked the shells (WW2) for another
magazine and rolled off with banana leaf and used car
oil off a duck's back, and now, after this, my
pecker hangs limp. If you keep poeming about the same
thing and in the same way, you become the same
thing and the same way, which is—nothing.

I can bullshit you a little about the subject, though. (There's nothing like the oscillation of the balls in quiet complication.) How do you begin? I imagine it hurts like hell to be torn to pieces and die for something different . . . every century, every 50 years,
every
20 years. I read someplace where Man will eventually be replaced by
robots
he builds that will be more intelligent than he. It about figures: all they've got to do is stay out of the rain and the lightning and replace the parts as they wear . . . they don't have to worry about toothache or hemorrhoids, or fucking. They'll just go on walking around the place looking for things to do, and there won't be much to do because they won't have to worry about eating and they won't be stupid enough to pay rent, and if they make the drunktank, they'll be smart enough to enjoy it. But I wonder if these babies, these unlamentable babies who will not know pain, pity, tenderness, the meaning of a lover walking away and into the arms of another, I wonder if these babies will be
intelligent
enough to avoid
war
? I'd like to think so—that these tin shadows of our past could sweep out the last disease. But I don't know why—I've got pictures of these grappling masses of tin . . . crushed electric eyes . . .
beautiful
silver brains spread amongst their copper flowers. . . . Christ, what's wrong? What's wrong?

Now, I'll start right off and try and tell you why I have this vision and why it is so hard to stop
war
. This mainly being the rusty side of the coin, the portico of recant, and it works badly, always has,
because it is hard as hell to get emotional about peace
, or religious about it, or sexual about it, or wave it around on the end of a flag, or whatever. You furnish the words; I am tired. I mean, padre,
peace
is as propitiatory as a Sunday bell. They don't write national anthems about
peace
and girls don't strip in front of you for
peace
, and you don't see countries and waters and hills and sunsets and whores that you never would have seen, and you don't get drunk in some tongue that is a town you do not speak and pinch the mayor's wife because you've got nothing to lose.
War
even makes
art
. Without
war
, Hemingway would have been a wine-drinking pink-eyed picador for a fat and farting matador.
War
gave him the golden gate to point up some fairytale about guts for the cockeyed bats of the occident. Salique seems
peace
.
Peace, baby, is hard sell
. Why, why, why, why, hell, why???? Adjust your jock, and I'll tell you. People don't
know
what
peace is
because people (most people) have never had
peace
in times of so-called
peace
. Figure it yourself. Take a kid, a child. As soon as he gets so he can walk around pretty good, they shove him to a school while his brain is still soft and
they get to him
—they tell him that
his country is the country
. If he lives in Mexico, Mexico is the country. The beans are hard to take, but better things are coming. If he lives in Brazil, O.K., Brazil, what the hell ya think they're going to tell him: Bermuda? They need their jobs. Germany equals Germany. Russia means Russia. Despite world ideology . . . Russia means to be the head, the rest the legs. . . . Just as we mean, through monetary control of other national industries. . . . We give them their
freedom
by letting them
work
for us. But let's let go of this for awhile. Let's get back to the punk kid. The nail we're driving home that will end up in a juice joint slavering into a mirror wondering where he went. Next, the church grabs his soft little ass and tells him about
The Man Above
. Friend, this is a pretty
frightening
thing. Most of us have to go with it . . . strictly on under-the-table percentages . . . but on top of the table we spread our cards and call it
faith
. Now, then, this child, this kid, baby, small chunk of bologna is already spun out into the open plateau where they've got him dizzy, hardly a chance . . . he's, frankly, out of the
peace
area altogether: his loyalty is sanctioned and his spirit is set along the rails where it is
supposed
to go. (You can shoot a barracuda between the eyes and it won't go to hell because it doesn't know where or what hell is. On the other hand, we've fixed ourselves fine. Finely. Fuck it.)

I'm trying to tell you while I am laying here in bed at 3:55
A.M.
in the morning, writing this in pencil in an Empire Wire-Glo notebook with a green cover and lined paper (price 49¢)—out of cigarettes and lighting short butts out of a teacupful on the old chair near the bed, I am trying to tell you that it is difficult to canonize and adore the pity of no-blood; I am trying to tell you why
peace
is so hard to sell, this mainly being because so very very very few so few so few dear christmice and rabbits running in moonlight
know what peace is
!!

Let's get back, if you're not asleep, to our bastard kid. They teach the kid math. They tell him Washington crossed the Delaware. A fine thing, I'm sure. They have separate toilets for boys and girls. They hit his head with Brahms, Schubert, and that great steel fist Beethoven while he's too small to seize it, and he remembers this, these large punches against his unprotected frame and he later goes to jazz in rebellion. It is easier to go to jazz in rebellion than it is to go to another country or another god. It's safer, it's cheaper, and there's hardly any risk at all. They know this; it's planned; they let them have the jazz. If they gave our bastard kid jazz
first
, he'd go to Beethoven later and then they'd have a mess on their hands, a danger. Baby, they know what they're doing. There has been no such thing as
peace
. Now they let him out on a football field and tell him to knock somebody down. They teach him some more crap to narrow him down a niche and then rush him off to
work
—which is not
peace
either. They give him a couple of hours in which to sleep, eat, buy things, and mainly time to fuck, make more babies to keep the thing going, and then back to
work
.

The mind has never been given a chance. You ask the average man, “Do you want
war
or
peace
?” and he'll tell you, “I want
peace
, of course. War is stupid.”

He says he wants peace but he doesn't know what peace is. He's never had it
.

He's bred for
war
, he's shucked into
it, he's shacked with it like a golden-legged whore who
keeps reaching into his back pocket when his ass is
to her face. O, my, he'll go
passionate for war
,
he'll
scream
for
war
!! but he won't fall in
love with
peace
because he's never had it from the
moment he started wobbling on his tiny man-legs. It's a
christ-awful fishbowl pity and makes me so angry sometimes that
I just smash my whiskeyglassfuls against the walls instead of
drinking them; I often curse Man and his scab-blindness, his
smallness, his monkey-sucking away of Everything. . . . But I'm wrong. What
chance has the poor fuck?? And who am I to
take his measure? O, demolished and demon-drained idiot, he argues
with his old lady who gets a roll of fat
around her gut and wears those flat-heeled shoes after the
second kid. He gets fired 2 or 3 or 6
times, he gets scared. He drives with air in his
brain and gets in a couple of automobile accidents. He's
taxed until his balls ache. No matter how much money
he makes, he never has any money. He can never
breathe free from day to day. Always a herd of
horns ready to slash him into some back alley where
they sit and split a wine bottle, unless he talks
fast and fancy. Is this
peace
? Is he supposed to
get excited about
this
? Then, sick with thin light
and lying, he comes home early one night and finds his
wife
(rolls of fat and all) in bed with the gas-meter man . . .
peace
?—he's never had it. He'd been geared like a bull
to ram into somebody or something or somewhere from the
start.

What's the answer? Well, I only know I am out of jail right now (which is good,
and
selfish); but not being a master of phrenology or even a master of the pooltable as is one of my dear friends out of the South who writes poetry like an exalted bull examining fire, the only answer is a breakdown of our normal educational concepts of upbringing into a vaster plane that excludes
less
and gives more choice . . . of gods, leaders, countries . . . music, loves, sports, hilarity, liquors, liqueurs, lectures . . . what I mean is the sea washing down to our ankles and with us . . . with time . . . to think of other things . . . beside fast bread, easy pussy, acquisition, ;;;;I think it's too late for that . . . it's almost too late for this . . . maybe this H. Bomb is
big enough
to scare the shit out of us, all of us, and may we realize that things like
honor
and
country
don't mean anything—dark hymns in an empty chapel, and that we are letting the
tin men
in, the
tin men
of our minds, the
tin men
of a possible future, if we keep letting go to this
war
-thing as we have been trained to do.

It's time we learned to walk and talk like this big thing inside us tells us to do. It's time for better and bigger miracles and talking about them, seeing how we have been wrong for so long . . . this is a beginning, not a
begging
.
Peace begs nothing but realization
.

going now,

peace on you,

Charles Bukowski