Love Bukowski and avoiding the soul crush.

You know what I love?

Good. Fracking Fucking.Writing. See what I did there- crossing out the pseudo expletive and using ACTUAL profanity? I’ve been having this internal discussion as of late about my use of swear words in my posts –Is it too much?- What if people are offended? Blah-blah. I’ve decided that I am going to swear as much as I want because if this space is little box crafted to hold a piece of my brain let it be reflective. I say fuck. I say it a lot.

So again. What do I Love?

Motherfucking good writing.

I know – another post on writing and writers. It’s worth staying on the ride with this one cause I’m going to lay it down in the halls of love with Charles Bukowski and Anais Nin and Saul Williams and who doesn’t dig a womanizer, a poet or a revolutionary? No one that’s who.

I love a poem, treatise or a book that digs in & hooks a little part of my heart. If a writer can craft a life I want to live,express my deepest wants or write me a chalice to hold tears of release… I will love them with my whole being and love their work even more.

Seriously.

I develop soul crushes on books and authors because their words have plumbed my depths. This love knows the pebbled bottom of the deep. This love beds down with Agape and I venture that it simply is – unlike my aware love.

Ego(aware) love is nothing like soul love.

Soul love taps into a hidden reality beyond rational boundaries and I become a part of it – a thread tied into the latticework of the creative universe. Anais Nin (dammit I love that name) in The New Woman nails it:

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Idolatry.

I will be the first to say that I am an Idolater. I idolize words and the spaces that lie in between them. I idolize the worlds that are created. I love books and by proxy the authors – a little bit of gold rubs off from the syntax of a sentence and I crush hard…blinded by the glitter. I can remember meeting certain sentences or writers like one remembers the pivotal moments of a relationship:

Saul Williams? My friend introduced me to him one hot summer in Los Angeles. T.S Eliot? During the Colorado rainy season – with my window open and a sundress on. Ondaatje? I was 14 years old with gangly limbs and a budding sexuality. Tom Robbins? In my early 20’s searching for meaning and finding sweet prose in its place.

Those of you that teach or create might understand loving or being loved in this way. A good book is like teaching yoga or making beautiful art – the process is yours and yet it doesn’t belong to you and the end result enchants others. When I am crafting from my mat it is not me making the magic. I teach yes but there is this unknowable other that spools the lesson from me and gives this grace and depth of meaning to my teaching that I don’t have in real life. In real life I am clumsy and crass and at times shy. On the mat, I am a golden goddess and sometimes I throw down the mad yoga verb as smoothly as Saul in Said the Shotgun to the Head. It’s like I am a mat savant…I like to think that my unfettered soul houses this beauty and because of this … well idolatry  It becomes necessary to place barriers before and after class – it’s not hard – real me snaps back into place, curtains my heart and diverts those with soul crushes…

Yes super cute guy with the awesome practice who comes to my class religiously… coffee sounds great but I am afraid I must decline the offer – you are in love with the golden goddess not Sara… and this will end badly. Sara is not a vegan or even straight veg. She loves disc golf and Halo and sorry to tell you, most of her muscles did not come from a shit ton of chaturanga’s. She runs and strength trains and loves that her body is a tool. She is a fallible creature and uh cannot walk in heels… .. …

I have friends that create art, that write amazingly or who can dance the most sublime seductress dance and all of them have had the same experience – others falling for their beauty through their art…not the beauty that is the whole person. The gold rubs off and when the gold rubs off there is always the chance for the succor or for the fall… The lover, when they realize that art is disparate from artist must choose to accept or fall away and what a shitty eye-opening experience that can be.

Falling away.

I kind of feel like a fraud talking about this from both angles – like I should obviously choose to never develop a soul crush because the logical mind knows that it is….unreal. I should talk about connectivity – human interaction and ego vs. soul love (fierce equal love). I should defend the dual nature of this post but instead I’m gunna talk about Bukowski…yeah that’s right. Charles Bukowski.

In truth I started writing this post to justify my utter adoration for his work. Remember the person that falls in love with the writing is at risk of seeing the creator …sometimes the creator is a misogynistic, alcoholic, spiteful, hideously beautiful man like Charles Bukowski. A man whose headstone reads “Don’t Try” and who lived a dangerously honest life. Lived, lied, cheated and created these brutally honest works that completely obliterate me whenever I read them. Like I said above – the author writes a chalice for my sorrow becomes a soul lover. I made the decision to succor instead of fall away after knowing his character because in black words pressed carefully to rough white paper – I see the god in him.

Check it:

Raw With Love

little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won’t flinch and
I won’t blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won’t blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won’t use it
yet.

by Charles Bukowski

Yeah – I know what I’m doing. I could sup on words like that forever…I know that I love an aspect…that Bukowski’s true personality would curdle my blood upon our meeting…Does that stop me from thinking about what it would be like to lie side by side with him and whisper our dreams to one another? Fuck no. Just like it doesn’t stop me from developing soul crushes on my yoga teachers and artist friends and chinchilla babies. Let my awareness be still for a moment. I want to be in the currents of this sort of love.

-Much love and burning light-

Sara

Related articles

• Bukowski: ‘air and light and time and space’ (guerrillapoem.wordpress.com)
• Bukowski’s City (aucitycultures.wordpress.com)
• Saul Williams on leaving the words behind for Volcanic Sunlight (arts.nationalpost.com)
• So you want to be a Writer by Bukowski (1) (thesubwayspoet.wordpress.com)
• Bluebird by Charles Bukowski (afterhisimage.wordpress.com)

Tagged: Anaïs Nin, Art, Charles Bukowski, poetry, Said the Shotgun to the Head, Saul Williams, Tom Robbins, Writing, yoga

Posted in: Life, Relationships, Yoga