Charles Bukowski

[toska]

SEE-Se: Charles Bukowski

"...that's all that interests me, the next poem, the next fucking line. What's past is past, I don't want to linger over it, read it, play with it, jolly it up. It's gone, it's done. If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter."

Needing to constantly move to the next thing and working in spontaneous bursts suggests EP temperament.

"What hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want, but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out, their bodies were fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye, the voice becomes ugly, and the body, the hair, the fingernail, the shoes, everything does. As a young man, I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex, TV, an automobile on monthly payments, or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did."

These issues are directed towards the problems with logically systemizing your life and the futility of Si, oriented towards the ethics of what's worth doing and putting yourself into in a way that is stimulative and fulfilling rather than tenuous and draining. As he states in other accounts, anything that's truly worth 'trying' for doesn't require effort. If you are going to try for something, then it must be in harmony with your values and you must put your entire self into it.

"Generally speaking, you're free till you're about four years old. Then, you go to grammar school and you start becoming demanded, solved, orientated and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have if you have enough, of course, you retain some of it but most don't have enough so you become watchers of game shows, things like that. Then, you work the eight-hour job with almost a feeling of goodness, like you're doing something. You get married like marriage is a victory, you have children like children are a victory. It's something they have to do because there's nothing else to do. There's no glory in it, there's no steam, there's no fire. It's very flat and the earth is full of them. You're doing some dumb thing over and over again, you get caught into the structure of what you're supposed to be and you have no other choice. You're molded and melded into what you're supposed to be. I didn't like this and I didn't like the eight-hour job. I decided I'd rather starve and live on the edges of nowhere than do anything at all or become anything labeled. For 50 years, I was a scarecrow, unlabelled, and now I'm supposed to be a writer."

Hated his routine job and would rather starve than continue in monotony. Towards the end, he talks about not wanting to be labeled or put into a structure and moving instead to live on the edge. He walked away from a reliable course of action into an unpredictable situation that he viewed as necessary for his preferred mode of being. This is probably one of the most obvious examples of Extraverted Perception (Pe) > Extraverted Judgment (Je), where Je looks to determine the conditions of their environment to properly navigate through it, Pe needs to live unconditioned and open to arising opportunities; consequently, he ends up wandering aimlessly without internal objectives or a system for operating (PoLR Ti).

"We don't need new governments, new revolutions, we don't need new men, new women, we don't need new ways, wife-swaps, waterbeds, good Columbian coke, water pipes, dildoes, rubbers with corkscrew stems, watches that give you the date. People are not good to each other one on one. Marx be damned the sin is not the totality of certain systems. Christianity be damned the sin is not the killing of a God. People are just not good to each other. We are afraid, we think that hatred means strength, we think that New York City is the greatest city in America. What we need is less brilliance, what we need is less instruction, what we need are less poets, what we need are less Bukowskies, what we need are less Billy Grahams. What we need is more beer, a typist, more finches, more green-eyed whores who don't eat your heart like a vitamin pill. We don't think about the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched, unspoken to, watering a plant, being without a telephone that will never ring because there isn't one."

The excerpt above is from his poem, The Crunch, very Fi/Se heavy imo. In a lot of his writing, you'll find a more sharply distinguished good and evil (who's being honest and who's telling lies, etc.) with hints of the sensory pessimism/realism characteristic of Gamma SF's. As he stated in interviews, the art that he created is a reflection of his lived experience. He wrote in a direct way about harsh realities incorporating violence and sexual imagery with a darker sensibility and humor that doesn't appeal to everyone.