Bukowski
Like
the Golem
the
"Buk"
is
mythical too:
an
Ubermensch
from
out of the shadows
of a
sunny city;
out
of the rooming houses
with
torn wall paper
and
toilet down the hall
and
cum-stained walls;
out
of the bar rooms,
those
dungeons of time,
and
last-call fiascos
and
pickled keilbasas
in
Philly or East Saint Looie
or
the Big Easy;
off
the bus with a beat suitcase
with
the word attached,
seared
by his old man's strap
his
mother's failure to protect;
his
scarred face reflects
sensitivity
behind snarled fists
and
beatings taken and given:
beer
bottles pressed to mouth,
smoke
from the narcissist's
dragon
lips; a monster who
meant
no harm, he was woman-
bound:
slipped envelopes into
each
box on his route; slept in
the
drunk tank a time or two;
sought
love from whores and
life
from alcohol and found
a
little of both but never
enough,
and wrote an epic
of
survival, unrivaled in
modern
poetry.
Charles Bukowski -- Larry Caveney
Heinrich Karl Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920, the son of an American soldier who remained in the country after World War I as a building contractor. Three years later the family relocated to the US and eventually (1930) settled in Los Angeles, California. Bukowski claimed his father beat him with a razor strap 3 times a week from the time he was 6 years old until he was 11, and his mother did nothing to protect him. In his early teens he became an alcoholic. In his 20s he started writing and traveled extensively, finding odd jobs in St. Louis, Atlanta, and elsewhere; the International House Hotel in the Big Easy (a popular nickname for New Orleans, Louiisana) a panel on the 3rd floor is dedicated to him. He spent 17 days in Moyamensing prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for draft evasion in 1944. In his 40s his broadsides and poetry in small presses began to establish his reputation as a "laureate of American lowlife" (as "Time" called him in 1986). He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and 6 novels -- over 60 books altogether.
ReplyDeleteIn Psalm 139 "golmi" (my golem) was used to refer to the unfinished human before God's eyes. The Talmud's tractate "Sanhedrin" portrayed Adam as a golem created from mud and kneaded into a shapeless husk, but only true humans had the ability to speak. The tractate went on to claim that Rava (Abba ben Joseph bar Ḥama) created a golem but another rabbi Rav Zeira easily discovered its true nature and ordered it to return to its dust. In the 11th century poet/philosopher Shlomo Ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol espoused the doctrine that everything, including soul and intellect, are composed of matter (golem) and form (tzurah); perhaps that belief led to the reports that he created a female golem to perform household chores. The oldest surviving text on how to create a golem was written in the late 12th or early 13th century by Eleazar ben Judah ben Kalonymus, a Kabbalist who used the letters of the Jewish alphabet to perform miracles. In the 17th century Eliyahu ben Aharon Yehudah (the 1st rabbi to be known as Ba'al Shem) created a golem with a combination of letters from one of the names of God. The golem protected Jews from assault and performed manual labor, including housework, but it continued to grow, causing Ba'al Shem to believe it would destroy the world. So he erased the Hebrew letter aleph from its forehead, thus changing the word for truth ("emet") to the word for dead ("met"). As the golem fell to pieces it hell on the rabbi, killing him. Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bezalel) created a gholem in the late 16th century to defend the Praha ghetto from attacks. It was able to make itself invisible and summon spirits from the dead, but it fell in love and went on a murderous rampage after being rejected.
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