“I don’t want to save the world. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning”
A friend gave me a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Hot Water Music when I was about 19. People had been telling me to read him for years. “He’s like an old you,” they’d say. People had a grim idea of how they thought I’d end up.
In those days I was both a professional writer and a professional inebriate, and I spent many happy hours posted in various bars around London delightedly devouring the stories in that book, before heading out on more adventures of my own… when I made my way to the USA I took it with me also, and spent many more happy hours in bars up and down the length of Manhattan reading and re-reading, laughing and dropping the odd tear to get guzzled up by the thick, yellow ink-blotter pages of that sturdy paperback edition.
I found great beauty in those short, brutish stories because they did indeed speak to me of what I’d come to learn about the world in my short time in it. The cruelty he’d seen and been a recipient of, well, it was not unlike that which I’d come to know so intimately myself through the years. When I finally escaped the prison of my early life, I found there were things even worse out there, in the gutters, amidst the suicides and the wrecked lives that couldn’t seem to help but wreck the lives of all those they came into contact with, an unending cycle of horror that looped on and on through time forever.
Yet amidst all this carnage, there was beauty, laughter, and true gut-busting love in abundance, and I found that I loved existence ever more fiercely as a direct result of the horror I witnessed, horrors way beyond the scope of those I read about in the thousands of books I escaped into as a child.
“No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell,” says CJ Jung.
“No one’s coming to save you” I used to mutter to myself, in my darkest moments, when everything hurt and it seemed there was no way out. “Only you can save you.” And I’d add, sardonically, but correctly, “Only you can save mankind.”
Then I’d get on with it.
“I’m not interested in solving the ills of society,” croons Hank, through a smile, on our new song. “I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me.”
I remember feeling that way. It’s important that I remember feeling that way. It’s important to remember that so many feel that way right now.
“I think most talk is so boring,” protests Bukowski (sounding uncannily like Mike Stoklasa from Red Letter Media) “I mean, "Save this, do that, do this… We're all so boring saying everything. We don't even want to save ourselves.”
“Who the hell are you to give advice to the world if you can’t even clean up your own room?” demands Dr Peterson, elsewhere across space and time.
In the end, I did save me, and a line from Hot Water Music that I think of almost daily had a lot to do with it. “Life is as kind as you let it be,” wrote Hank, in the context of going back to bed in the early afternoon after a particularly savage night out. Reading that for perhaps the fiftieth time one day over a decade ago was the spark that led me moving my family and I out of the UK, taking control and extreme ownership of my life, my mind, and my body, leaving behind the self-destructive chaos I’d taken for granted as a fundamental unchangeable part of my life and being… and it lead to me creating Meaningwave.
Someone left a comment the other day with regards to last week’s single, BLUEBIRD.
“I really don’t like Bukowski. I don’t think you can learn something worthwhile from a drunken nihilist.”
It has been my experience that everyone has something to teach us if only we pay enough attention. That’s what I’ve been doing all along with Meaningwave, as Alan Watts helped to explain on From a Certain Point of View.
“What we need is the fullness of the view”.
There are some things you can only learn from a “drunken nihilist”. Does not the world of which Bukowski writes exist? Is his experience not one shared by millions? My life is so far now from the hell it once was, but I have not forgotten, and it’s crucial that I never do.
Hank took his pain and turned it into beautiful words, and decades later I’m turning those into beautiful music. His pain remains, and my pain is in there too, and so too my great love of this life.
To quote another Meaningwave masterpiece:
”Now that I know how dark it can get, I truly appreciate the light in world.”
LET IT DIE is out now. Download or stream on your platform of choice now, and enjoy the music video here.
The album, HANKcomes out on September 6th. A third single, PEOPLE ARE NOT GOOD TO EACH OTHER, precedes it next Thursday at midnight.
LOVE TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!
AKIRA THE DON
DSPDC, Mexico, August ‘24