Born Into This: Bukowski at 100
“Born into this” is the refrain of one of Charles Bukowski’s most enigmatic poems, Dinosauria, We. It is prophetic and dark; it seems like it was written for today by one who saw the future more clearly then than we do now.
— The Editors
Published shortly before his death in 1994, it describes a world where “the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree,” “where the jails are full and the madhouses are closed,” where “fist fights end as shootings and knifings” and “where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes,” all before graphically showing the earth’s final destruction, which today seems more real and probable than when the poem was written.
In Dinosauria, We, Bukowski is descriptive and predictive, sensing numerous rumblings that would become future cataclysms. It is written in the spare, haiku-like style that he had evolved to by the end of his life. It is annihilation and beauty, all at once.
The fact that Bukowski recognized horror when he saw it perhaps goes back to the world that he himself was born into: one where he was neither understood nor loved, enduring weekly beatings by a tyrant father, while his mother looked on (for Bukowski’s full account, read Ham on Rye). And what model of reality might this create in the mind of the child, and later, the adult? The kind where you’re comfortable with conflict but not intimacy; where aggression and depression come easily; where you’re wary of others, preferring to be alone; and where, beneath the surface, there churns such a constant, grinding feeling of unease that you’ll opt for anything — booze, sex, gambling — just to feel good again. This was Bukowski’s reality and one that many of his readers also know.
Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
What Bukowski was born into certainly shaped the writer he became. When I interviewed John Martin, Bukowski’s publisher, he commented that if Bukowski had been raised in a more stable family, he might have become a successful Hollywood comedy writer. For an artist, a brutal childhood might be what can separate the hard-edge of a John Lennon, who was abandoned by both parents, from a more even-tempered Paul McCartney, who grew up in far less turbulent circumstances. If Bukowski’s journey looks like many of our own, his genius was that he could tap into the type of feelings and experiences that most of us keep locked away in our unconscious and hold them up to the light in a way that makes us say, “That’s me!”
Given what Bukowski was born into, it’s also not surprising that throughout his career you see the same pendulum swing — from tremendous compassion for the suffering of people, to disgust for their almost limitless cruelty and ignorance. The same Bukowski who lamented “the proud thin dying” also stated, “People are just not good to each other” and “Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.”
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Bukowski called himself “a photographer.” This means he tried to capture the truth, both horrible and beautiful, as with Bluebird or Roll
the Dice, later poems that inspire and touch us so deeply. In today’s society, where the government’s strategy amounts to a combination of magical thinking, corruption and deceit, voices of truth like Bukowski’s are more important than ever.
Bukowski died in 1994. His original readers from the 1960s are nearing their final days, too. Despite all the hopes and plans of our youth, when we die, even the best of us won’t have changed the world much.
The analogy of pulling your finger out of the water and creating a few ripples, which almost instantly disappear, is probably apt for most of our lives. As an author, Bukowski’s life had a greater impact than most.
So it’s heartening that his words still have so much punch decades later. It’s tempting to think of what he might be doing today if he were alive: working on his ninth novel? Appearing on podcasts? One thing we can pretty confidently say: He would still be telling it like it is, with a combination of salty directness and style that nobody has yet been able to duplicate. He would be disgusted at the powers-that-be, but not surprised. And, every now and then, he might find himself in a rare mood and grace us with another Laughing Heart, which describes a completely different world, where people can be good to each other.
John Dullaghan is the director of Bukowski:
Born Into This, the 2005 Bukowski documentary that is widely considered the authoritative biographical document on the author.