Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

I wonder about my brain. It (you should pardon the expression) seems to have a mind of its own.

For months now I have been focused on poetry and books of essays about poetry, mostly written by famous poets...poetry theory, you might say...and then one day, in the middle of a book, I threw it down and started to watch films and paint. There was an almost visceral need to escape the written word and seek out the visual image. It is not something I understand. It bothers me. But there it is. I have just stopped reading and writing, and started watching and painting. The image is still at the heart of the matter for me, but I wonder about my brain. I wonder about the needs of artists too.

I watched a documentary about Charles (Hank) Bukowski who was never a favorite poet of mine, but mostly because of his tough-guy, heavy-drinking, womanizing image. He looks like a longshoreman, and it's hard for a wuss woman like me to identify. But the film was truly an eye opener about being an "outsider." His terrible acne scarring him at a young age, plus being beaten almost daily by a sadistic father-- molded Bukowski into a man who was truly remarkable, given what he did with his life. He devoted it to poetry. He drank and brawled and was a general pain in the ass bad guy, but he poured out his heart in words. It was a remarkable documentary. He broke the mold (again). The formalists (people trying to get rhymed and formal poetry forms back in vogue) were a target of his "plain man" poetry. He wrote:

"When the spirit wanes, the form appears."

I had to laugh. A pretty good take on formal poetry. When you run out of true passion and self expression, write a sonnet or a sestina! But there's more to it than that too. And here's the part that bothers me. Art IS a form, even when your poetry is free verse and your painting is abstract. So our efforts to express what's inside us are just that...efforts, because the spirit really cannot be translated into form of any kind. And that is the real cosmic joke...that the "whatever it is" we have (spirit, soul, muse) inside is so personal that we can only do our very best but it is never good enough. It is the unsayable, the unnameable in our private experience. It is the thing that makes people turn to obsessions, to religion, to art. But Bukowski says it much better than this in his poem "Bluebird."

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?


Here's a link to a wonderful article on Bukowski, if you're interested. Thanks to
Jilly Dubka's blog for bringing it to attention. Jim Harrison on Bukowski
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