I am generally not a fan of Charles Bukowski’s writings. A thought-provoking essay on the man, his life and his work, some years back in the New Yorker, pretty much summed it up for me: “Bukowski’s poetry,… is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive.”  The underground poet was born in 1920 in Germany and moved as a three-year old to Los Angeles where he died of leukemia in 1994. He has one of the largest following of readers in contemporary American poetry although he was never accepted into the official canon. He lived a rags-to-riches life, fueled by drugs, alcohol, and general defiance of societal restrictions, prison stints included. “The secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.“

However, the poem I would like to introduce today is one I rather like: The Man with the Beautiful Eyes is from the poem collection, The Last Night on Earth. It raises questions that are important, and points to facts that are rarely openly discussed.

The poem is read in the short film clip below, the latter itself a work of art by Jonathan Hodgson and Johnny Hannah. They adopted the style of revered socialist-realist painter Ben Shahn, creating the film with paint, ink and collage rather than digital means and providing visual details that reinforce the ideas – both the direct expressions and the subtle implications – of the poem.

View it here – and then I’ll share my observations.

The poem introduces a group of young boys, told by their parents to stay away from a house with shuttered windows and a gold fish pond hidden behind a bamboo hedge. The film starts out with a view of a poster of a missing child – clearly there is danger in the world and kids do better to listen to their parents. Kids, of course, are drawn to the opposite of what they’re told to do: and so these boys regularly play in the forbidden territory, imbuing it with exotic ambience, Tarzan around the corner. No, they are Tarzan! Unrestrained rulers of the jungle!

One day, and only once, a man appears from the house, with foul mouthed, misogynistic swearing, a bottle of whiskey in hand, a cigar in his mouth, looking completely disheveled. Not only is he friendly, he addresses them in respectful, if mocking (?) terms “little gentlemen,” and hopes they enjoy playing in his run-down realm. They are in awe. They think him, his wildness, enticing. They adore everything they are forbidden to see much less to emulate. In their eyes, he is beautiful.

One day they find the house burnt to the ground, the fish dead in an empty pond, the bamboo scorched. They decide it must have been their parents who killed the man and all that was his. They fear that the future will replicate this assault on beauty, that they will never be allowed to hold it in whatever form.

The film accompanies the narration with images of a suburban father killing every weed threatening his lawn with poison. It ends depicting a storefront with a sign Chinaski‘s – the name for Bukowski’s alter ego in his writings – and a homeless man either dead or sleeping in a dark alley next to the store, people indifferently rushing by.

Do we believe the parents capable of such a crime? They surely didn’t kill a man and left but smoldering foundations? Or did they? Do parents have a right to be afraid for their kids in a dangerous world? Of course they do. Do kids intuit, even if it doesn’t reach the level of an actual crime, that parents want to kill off the other, even if the threat is not directed at their kids, but at the parents’ own well-being? To extinguish all forms of wildness that threatens to throw your own tightly held, and dearly paid-for conformity out of balance?

One of the ways that the beauty of something unruly, unruled, will indeed be taken from you is by making sure that you never trust your own perceptions. Kids intuit what is going on, but are told they are mistaken. Kids, of course, can misinterpret what is in front of their eyes, but their gut interpretation often points to a deeper truth. They, too, must conform and obey the rules (“It is for your own good!”) in preparation for their social acceptance, and if that means to discard subjective assessment of what could be beautiful, so be it.

Deviance, it is taught, is bad, might get you ultimately killed. If you violate established cultural, contextual or social norms, never mind legal ones, there will be consequences. There is not a single culture that does not have negative connotations regarding deviance (although what counts as deviance is malleable, across cultures, or across time within a single culture.) Social control ropes deviants in, maintaining social order with a system of rewards and punishments, some formal, many informal. Children don’t want to be forced into the straight jacket of societal norms, they still crave freedom, but it is a losing battle. Those, like the man with the beautiful eyes, who have not given up on a similar desire, must be wildly strong, but they will also pay a price (if only an accidental house fire caused in a drunken stupor, or the revenge of an abused and mistreated lover, that costs him a roof over his head.)

Rarely mentioned is the fact that deviance can also be positive. It has been a motor for social change through the ages, from behaviors questioning gender hierarchies (think Suffragettes, women’s liberation) to racial injustice (think norm refusals during the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks) to the fight for LGTBQ rights or the protests around fossil fuel extraction. In fact there is a whole area of study in health psychology these days, centered on Positive Deviance, on how to employ it to produce positive change.

Bukowski might have pleaded for acceptance of a self-destructive life style, not exactly an example of constructive change to society’s norms. But the larger truth, that deviance can contain beauty and is a threat to imperative conformity, was clearly understood by the kids in the poem, and feared by their parents. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Music has had its own encounters with the label “deviance.”  Norm promotion has led to labeling certain composers or styles of music as negatively deviant, not worthy of being considered the future of music, a threat to culture, to religion, politically unacceptable, or evil. This has, of course been particularly true if the music was associated with other categories that threatened the status quo, race being among the strongest. The Blues comes to mind. Here are some favorites.