Oh, These Maudlin Manuscripts

Poems of the bland.

Oh, these maudlin manuscripts.

The grey men’s journals.

Hidden in dusty attic chests,

imprisoned inside their hearts.

Henry Charles Bukowski.

How does one express the banalities of one’s existence? How to make sense of the mediocrities of two-decades lost to an office job at the same desk, with the same dull colleagues, commuting via the same grey roads, smoking the same brand of cigarettes, performing the same dreary tasks over and over again? A robot’s life no less. Human cattle being shunted from home to factory, then back again, only to wake up the next day to repeat the same meaningless charade all over again.

Shit, no wonder I lost myself in a cloud of marijuana smoke in order to weather my gradual spiritual decay. Seriously, what can one say about such an absurdist riddle? How does one produce so-called literature in the face of such lifeless waste? Working at a god-damned printing company. Can you get your head around that? Churning out brochures, flyers, annual reports, packaging and counter displays. Making more junk mail for the multinationals, more propaganda for the political parties. In other words, creating evermore land-fill in order to keep this abject Australian economy pottering along for a few months longer. Preventing that long-feared recession. Blowing more hot air into the housing bubble that still refuses to burst. Oh, and let’s not forget making more money for the boss. After all, his Mercedes-Benz needs an upgrade and he’s just received a margin call from another failed investment deal. The poor guy always needs more cash, doesn’t he? Ugh. It makes my stomach turn. You’d think they’d be able to spare a few reams of paper and a few tubs of ink to print something valuable for once. Maybe even one of my manuscripts, for heaven’s sake, instead of letting them sit in my bottom drawer collecting dust. Honestly, and how did I come to this? I perform a role any dullard could perform. I’m as replaceable as a takeaway coffee cup. The once textured grey desktop I sit at is now polished a smooth white by the ten thousand movements of my computer mouse. The wheels of my chair have worn through the carpet, the upholstery is threadbare from the weight of my buttocks, the armrests stained brown by the sweat and dead skin from my forearms. Even the roads to and from the factory have been imperceptibly worn down by the rubber of my car tyres. My once youthful mind having been ground down at a similar, imperceptible rate.

One year, two years, five years, ten years … 17 fucking years! How many more years will I decay until I wake up to my reality? 17 years actively participating in my own slow murder? 17 years scratching the same scab. Not only did I plait my own noose and construct my own scaffold. Now I’m putting that same noose around my neck and adjusting it for the hangman. Let it rip, Mr Executioner! Oh yes, 17 years, and still I sit at that same desk each weekday, my shoulders a little more stooped, my hair a little thinner, my hopes sinking a little deeper into a lower middle class morass. I swear, it’s an absolute miracle that I’m still here writing this very second, trying to keep my dream alive. 17 years, god damn it! That’s well over 4,000 days at that same desk, performing the same tasks as if I were a one-trick pony. The same man who once nurtured ambitions of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Fuck me. Who needs Dante’s pen to describe it? This is a purgatory of the soul right here on earth. I’ve been living it for 17 years straight. And for what, damn you? To what end? Mere survival? To keep me from starving? It’s as if I have been hypnotised by the daily routine, institutionalised by my superiors, and quite simply, broken on the rack of gainful employment.

So yes, how does one produce great art from the small, tedious, seemingly insignificant tragedies of a lower middle class life? A cowardly life of consumer conformism and suffocated self-confidence. It’s nothing unique. This invisible everyman of which I speak—a fraternity of which I am card-carrying brother—dosses down in countless cities and towns across this crooked globe. Yet, despite our number, our voices are rarely, if ever, heard. Oh, and don’t worry, I get it too. After all, who wants to hear our lukewarm laments or the details of our mediocre struggles? Believe me, it makes sense. It’s not like we make for uplifting reading on the one hand, or Shakespearean tragedy on the other. We’re even poor sport for comedians. Our pains don’t produce sighs of empathy, let alone pity. Our pains are an infinite series of pinpricks, a slow death by a thousand cuts, a form of Chinese water torture. Our glories are grey and our loves lacklustre. Our ambitions have died on the vine and our sociability suffocated. Naturally, I’m not speaking of the life of those snug with their wives and mortgages, their luxury sedans and their certainties. No, no, I’m speaking of those pressed in between abject poverty and middle class self-satisfaction. Those cursed to reside in that grey area of anxiety, solitude, indecision and exhaustion. Neither poor nor wealthy, yet definitely poor in spirit. Cursed by an inability to climb the rungs of the economic order, or worse still, damned by their disinterest for the accepted wisdom regarding how to find satisfaction in life.

Yes, there are millions of us … hiding in our dens, licking our wounds, remaining tight-lipped. We know that nobody wants to hear it. And yet, deep down inside, still that yearning to express myself refuses to perish. It wants to speak. It needs to speak. Even an audience of one would suffice. Just one fellow human being who might understand me. As Henry Miller once said, give me just one good reader. Ah, but how to express the seemingly inexpressible? How does one find their voice after decades of remaining silent?

Granted, some writers in a similar situation might pen novels set in the middle ages or among a magical milieu not their own. Believe me, I’ve done that very thing. I have several crime novels under my belt and even a few psychological novels written in the same vein as Georges Simenon. But were they honest expressions of my unique spirit? Were they communicating my deepest feelings or my unspoken observations regarding life and mankind? No doubt, like many an amateur before me, I’m still caught in that trap of literary language, artistic posturing, and the emulation of the so-called greats who have come before me. And meanwhile, my own individual voice continues to elude me. It’s smothered beneath the expectations of the market and my misconceptions regarding what constitutes literature.

Ah yes, literature, he says? The mention of such a stuffy word reveals the source of my struggles in a mere ten characters. Fucking literature, he says … as if it might actually mean something. Literature? Bah, if only I could take an axe to it right this very second. Better yet, a blow torch. Just put it to the flame once and for all. Hack and burn down all the sacred cows of my imagination, those inherited from both popular and high culture. Spitting in the face of the critics and masses. No more kowtowing to the Mandarins of mass culture. No more restraint and self-censorship. Just a direct line to the source within me, whether abject or artistic. I wonder, where might I find that gag that has been stifling me for so long? Where is the blockage in my pipes that keeps the unadulterated truth from gushing forth from within me?

Literature? Phooey! You must be kidding me. The way I’m feeling right now, I’d say the same thing to art and culture too. Phooey, phooey, and fucking phooey! I’ll even go so far as to misquote a Nazi propagandist on the matter and say,

“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.”

Not the brightest idea, quoting a member of the SS to make one’s case, but I’ve found one can sometimes find a shared sentiment even in the most unlikeliest of places.

Ah, but where was I again? Oh yes, how does one produce great art from the small, tedious, seemingly insignificant tragedies of a lower middle class life? Questions, questions, an infinity of questions. Answers, answers, an infinity of answers. Yes, returning to the drawing board after more than a year’s hiatus from writing, I find myself at a crossroads. Indeed, the fire in my belly has been kindled in direct proportion to my recent physical recovery, so this coaxing back to the keyboard seems as if inevitable. However, with that being said, I still struggle to find my voice. Not that I have ever had one to begin with, unless as a toddler I once uttered profundities before society silenced me. No, everything I have written until now lacks authenticity. The words ring false. The orchestra is out of tune and the conductor is either drunk or absent. Even a madman standing in the street, frothing at the mouth and cursing the gods, has more honesty in his deranged words than I do with these dry characters sitting dead on the page before you.

Tell me, is it a fear to say what I really feel inside? Is it the inability to find the appropriate words, phrases, and tones to express this dull conformity in which I have been imprisoned for far too long? Am I weary of opening up truth’s floodgates for fear of drowning? Does the thought of unlocking the beast in my cellar frighten me? Perhaps, once he’s let loose, I am worried he might enter the main household, cut us all down in a violent rage, and finally take his rightful place at the head of the table?

This shadow-self. This stifled personality, smothered by conformism and cowardice. How many people are out there who share in this false existence? Millions, tens of millions, even more? Unable to speak their minds, whether in simple conversation or with paper and pen. Their youthful dreams worn down by a society with little patience for dreamers and visionaries. Born lazybones, ill-suited to the drudgery of meaningless labour. Social outcasts, incapable of being themselves, knowing that their inner reality is anathema to the wider world. It’s like we speak a different language, drive on the wrong side of the road, pray to heretical gods, and follow a different timetable. When the big band starts playing, we’re always out of step, off-beat, and dancing with two left feet. We’re forced to become actors, to don the masks society has moulded for us without our input. Hell, at times, I fear I’ve worn this false mask for so long that it is now stuck fast to my face, having eaten through and replaced the real face hiding behind it.

Strange to think I once dreamed of literary success. In hindsight, I must admit, it does seem a little laughable. Like a boy dreaming of being an astronaut or one day becoming king. Really, can a life such as mine produce anything worthwhile? A fellow writer friend in similar but not identical straits, often laments the fact that he hasn’t had enough interesting life experiences to produce any literature of any worth. And only now do I wonder, if he’s correct. Is the mediocre nature of my existence my downfall? Wringing out the old sponge that is my life’s experience, I’m more likely to produce a few dirty suds than I am a rich red wine the readers are rearing to swallow.

In comparison, I think of the literary greats … Solzhenitsyn writing about his tragic imprisonment in the gulags and his time as a patient in a soviet cancer ward. Orwell, speaking of the Spanish Civil War where he was shot through the throat. Norman Mailer was inspired by his experiences fighting as a marine in the Pacific. Charles Bukowksi wrote poems and prose regarding his life as a drunk on skid row. Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn both spent time in a madhouse. Henry Miller played panhandler on the streets of 1930s Paris. Jean Genet produced poetry from prison cells, and found romance in rent boys, religion and rebellion. William Burroughs wrote hallucinogenic hymns to homosexuality and heroin. Celine worked in Parisian slums and was soundly defeated with his fellow collaborators at the end of the Second World War. Dostoyevsky had gambling, gulags, commuted death sentences, epilepsy, poverty and the ailments of an ailing monarchy on which to draw for his quill’s ink. Indeed, I could go on and on. Examples abound. But what would be the point? That’s barely the tip of the iceberg. So, pray, tell me, what do I have to draw from that might compete with such characters? Indeed, my biography is as bland as another Andy Warhol print. The city in which I live (Sydney, Australia), as dull a western democracy as anyone could find anywhere else on this fast homogenising globe.

Really, is it any wonder that I so despair? A writer with a biography as grey as the skies of England. A writer who has spent the prime years of his life being slowly defeated by what he believed was expected of him. Certainly, some writers, often those with a biography as bland as my own, make do penning exciting fiction the market wolfs down like McDonalds hamburgers. But the fact is, I just can’t bring myself to follow their path. What about artistry? What about truth? Surely there’s an inner truth inside me that’s begging to be expressed. Not detective fiction, romance, erotica, science fiction or fantasy. No, no, no … we need more than mere entertainment. No, I’m speaking of real truth, real emotion, real life experience. Isn’t there a truth inside me worth speaking, worth hearing, worth these past two-decades of maudlin misery?

Ah, where are the poets of the everyman, those broken in spirit, those suffering a similar death by a thousand cuts? Surely I can think of a few examples that might just grant me a tattered little shred of hope. Just a few, that’s all I ask. What about Kafka, penning his nightmarish visions in his solitude, expressing his bureaucratic despair while working in a drab Prague office building as an insurance assessor? How about Fernando Pessoa, that genius extraordinaire, that man of a dozen different poetic faces? He too wasted away his days as an accountant in Lisbon, and yet, gave his evenings to his pointed pen, leaving us some of the greatest modern poems and a book that defies all description. Indeed, both men worked dreary jobs, and yet, they both managed to save enough of themselves to express their truths in those brief moments of free time they could snatch from their gatekeepers. Surely they are examples that might give me some hope yet. Proof positive that even in the face of an insufferable career and their misunderstanding contemporaries, they could still maintain their dignity, still find a few bright gemstones in their otherwise grey European capitals.

As for sincerity and finding one’s voice, I can’t overlook the two most anti-American writers America has ever produced. Of course, I’m referring to Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, both of whom shared a German pedigree, just as I do. Two simple working class men who found their real selves at the limits of their despair, who, with shouting and cursing, finally broke through to the other side. They didn’t write fictions, novels or intellectual clap-trap. They expressed themselves, without apology, without any need to be liked for it or respected. Only when they said, “Fuck it all,”, did their voices ring true. Yes, yes, fuck it ALL!. And I mean everything, from the highest to the low. Fuck saints, kings, politicians and publishers. Screw your snotty little brats, your wives, your houses and your manicured lawns. They wiped their asses on literature and blew their noses on the daily news. If they’d been women, I’m sure they would have used their citizenship papers as sanitary napkins. Oh yes, they had both a belly full of the world’s bullshit. They’d both reached their tipping points, suffered through their false starts and their weak attempts to copy the masters, and it was only then that they wrote their first honest sentences. Apparently Bukowski had packed up his typewriter for several decades until a near-death experience finally pushed him over the edge and made him speak his truth. And as for Miller, well, it was only when he was willing to beg for spare change and throw all caution to the wind that he wrote those fateful first words, “I am living at the Villa Borghese.” And as they say, after he’d spoken that simple, honest truth, the rest is fucking history.

Yes, yes, in my current precarious state, I need to take faith wherever I can find it. Hold fast to my dreams. Find any fragments of divine wisdom I can so as to bolster my spirits. Even if the writers I love and cherish are long dead, and I can find no living contemporary capable of speaking to my soul, then I will just have to commune with the dead instead. Yes, I beg of you, speak to me Monsieur Celine, commune with me brother Bukowski, enlighten me Comrade Bulgakov, touch me Herr Miller, tell me one of your secrets you sex-crazed monk, Ikkyū. Believe me, you have my attention, one and all. I scour your pages feverishly. I devour your words like a man starved for wisdom.

Indeed, it’s just as Henry Miller wrote,

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.”

The question is, how much longer will I stifle my own tender shoots? How many more years will I lack that faith to believe in my own powers and express my own criterion of truth and beauty? Surely, I must be close to my tipping point by now.