I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write. And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it. We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared. People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated. Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss. We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!” Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul. He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen. Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me. But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford. And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable. One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar. That’s bullshit. You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves. So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’” Maybe so. Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock. Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you. Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul. I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared. I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am. The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me. It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation. I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings. Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage. Nothing. No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation. You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work. There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions. Turn up the amp. Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right. Too bad for you. You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Happy Birthday to Me and a Bunch of Ruthless Killers

Regarding certain meaningful coincidences in time.

The grand synchronicity of life is at all times mysterious. This morning, I slept in, as I usually do on my birthday, and I woke up around the time of my birth, which in this zone, comes out to be 6:10 AM. I’ve done this as far back as I can remember. Why does it happen? There’s a secret here that I prefer not to dismiss in terms of subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition because it’s more satisfying to think like a poet than like a reductive psychologistic materialist. It’s my birthday and I can engage in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and irrational, intuitive, a priori assumptions if I want to.

I subscribe to the Poetic Outlaws newsletter. So, of course, the poem today was “Growing Old” by Matthew Arnold, in which the author describes the subjectivity of aging in melancholy terms: “It is to spend long days/ And not once feel that we were ever young.” To this, I must respectfully answer, “That is complete bucket of tosh, Mr. Arnold.” Still, the synchronicity of receiving such a poem today is palpable and I should at least celebrate Matthew Arnold for wishing me a ghostly happy birthday.

But what is synchronicity? I’m using it colloquially to indicate ostensibly disconnected or only slightly connected events that seem to correlate in a surprising way. Deciding to sleep in and waking up at the approximate time of my birth on my birthday is curious. Perhaps it is simultaneously more and less curious that it seems to happen this way every year.

Receiving a poem by email the same day, entitled “Growing Old,” is even more curious. The strange feeling that accompanies synchronicity would have been even more powerful if I’d received the email at 6:10 AM. Unfortunately or fortunately, it arrived at 2:04 AM—no doubt, automatically scheduled by Erik Rittenberry, who runs Poetic Outlaws, and with whom I’ve never spoken. (Buy the man a coffee. He does good work.)

In Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle (taken from volume eight of his collected works, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung describes it as “the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time.” He adds that it can take three forms:

a) the coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.

b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a “synchronistic,” objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.

c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.

Whereas in the first case an objective event coincides with a subjective content, the synchronicity in the other two cases can only be verified subsequently, though the synchronistic event as such is formed by the coincidence of a neutral psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision).

Phantasms, dreams, and visions. This is why I love Jung. For me, the most significant language comes from the first item on his list, the quality of perception in the person having the synchronistic experience. This is because, in order to write this blog post and have it be meaningful to you, it first has to be meaningful to me. I have to look inward and, much like Guy de Maupassant’s character standing before the grave of his loved one, say, it’s curious what I felt. Back to Arnold’s subjectivity, if not his melancholy. Back to the self, suggesting that synchronicity may depend, to a large extent, on whether or how much we’re paying attention.

Jung died in Küshnacht 12 years before I was born 5,973 miles away in San Diego. I find the fact that he can speak to me across time and space also profoundly mysterious—more so than current A.I. reconstructions of dead intellectuals from history. I try to read their works, where the real intelligence rests. Nothing more artificial than a book is necessary. But no matter how much I read and how many synchronistic experiences I have, I wonder whether there is some first cause, some transcendent unity in which all synchronicities could be reconciled.

In his critique of Schopenhauer, Jung dismissed this idea, noting that the former “thought and wrote at a time when causality held sovereign sway as a category a priori and had therefore to be dragged in to explain meaningful coincidences. But, as we have seen, it can do this with some degree of probability only if we have recourse to the other, equally arbitrary assumption of the unity of the first cause.” In other words, grand unities are baseless suppositions. So let’s not start talking about god unless we’re reading Lord Byron.

But what about DNA? If we go back only a few generations, say 300 years, we have thousands of ancestors. We all know this, but looking at online charts that approximate the average size of a 10^th ancestral generation is sobering. Given the range of genetic diversity it implies, doesn’t it seem at least somewhat likely that perceptual states (and, by extension, the depth and breath of synchronicity in one’s life) might emanate not from god but from heredity? Another baseless supposition, maybe, but one that might be a little more persuasive and more than a little unsettling.

This is especially true when I think of my Welsh, Italian, and Armenian ancestors. I suspect they didn’t survive to reproduce and pass on their genes because they were noble and loving children of the cosmos. I think it’s far more likely that they survived because they were tough, many of them ruthless, hard-edged killers (especially on the Welsh side), able to persist, generation after generation, through war, famine, plague, persecution, imprisonment, transportation, exile, and genocide. This gives me pause and makes me wonder who I am, in a genetic sense, and whether, if I were to meet one of my 10th-generation grandfathers, I’d live through the experience.

DNA cannot replace god; god cannot replace uncertainty; and uncertainty seems to be at the root of synchronicity. This morning, before I sat down to write, I looked at the news and saw an image of Pope Francis paying his respects to the remains of Padre Pio at Santa Maria delle Grazie.

You will not find a more quintessential Catholic image. But without an a priori grand unity, it’s just a preserved corpse, just another Lenin. Maybe so. And without either a metaphysical, genetic, or somehow transcendent cause, maybe birthday synchronicity is nothing more than subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition, nothing mysterious about it at all.

Thank goodness I’m a fiction writer and not a scientist. I get to rely on the spontaneous overflow of inner feelings (instead of inner plumbing), speak with angels and the ghosts of poets, even the ghosts of scientists, and make the mysterious great again. So happy birthday synchronicity to me and to all those who survived so that I could say, it’s curious what I felt.