FIND WHAT YOU LOVE?
EPISODE 027: FIND WHAT YOU LOVE?
Poet Charles Bukowski says “find what you love and let it kill you” But that advice, edgy as it sounds doesn’t sit right with me anymore. But there’s another poet, also named Charles, and I like his life advice much more. Charles Baudelaire says “find what intoxicates you and let it give you life.” Or that’s how I read it. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In an effort to get my nearly 50-year-old body back into shape, I returned to the pool this week, after a short absence of only 25 years. I went because I need it, and chose the pool specifically because I love being in the water. I love the weightlessness. I love swimming. The rest of it I can do without, specifically swimming around other people which, in even the most modest swim trunks, feels a little closer to public nakedness than I like. Yet I went. And as I cranked out my first modest dozen laps, I kept thinking about the quote so often credited to poet Charles Bukowski, “find what you love and let it kill you.” It seemed like good advice for the guy sputtering away, gasping for breath, and wondering what happened to make swimming so damn hard. Ok, maybe it wasn’t good advice, but it felt like it was going to be prophetic. Find what you love and let it kill you. I love swimming, but if Bukowski wasn’t dead already, and if I weren’t so close to drowning, I’d have pulled my wrinkled ass out of that pool and killed him myself.
The advice to “find what you love and let it kill you” is interesting advice. It sounds so raw and edgy, like something you’d tattoo onto your arm just beneath the one that says “It’s better to burn out than fade away, man!” But like so many of these existential sound bites, it’s a little too short and too shallow to contain the larger truths and deeper wisdom it hints at, and I’m wondering if there isn’t a better way.
I’m David duChemin, and this is Episode 27 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Let’s talk about it.
Music/intro
I’ll admit, when I first read that quote from Bukowski, it resonated with me. It felt defiant and made me want to strap on the boxing gloves and put Eye of the Tiger, the theme song from Rocky, on a loop on my iPod. It just rings so loud and true. Even more so when you read it in context. Here’s the fuller quote from which the “find what you love” line is so often plucked.
"My dear, find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it's much better to be killed by a lover.”
What he seems to be saying is this: The choices we make in life will ultimately bring about our end, so much better, then, to choose things we love. Much better to run out our days doing something we love and giving it our all, letting it preoccupy us and being the thing to which we give our strength. I can get on board with that. What I can no longer get on board with, at least most days, is the exhausting nihilism of this beleaguered and suffering artist who seems to be at the centre of this admonition. Yes, I know art is hard. Life is hard, too. But isn’t this all just a little dramatic? Don’t get me wrong, I love a good "Dead Poets Society”-style pep talk, and the concept of momento mori–or remembering our mortality–is an important one to me, but “better to be killed by a lover”? I don’t know. Really?
What about "find what you love and let it give you life and joy and meaning”?
What about "let it make you more alive and not less”?
What about "let it light you on fire and make you a hot bright burning ember from which others catch heat and light”?
What about, instead, "find the thing that intoxicates you”?
I know we’re just using metaphors here, but Bukowski isn’t the only poet named Charles who’s got an admonition for us on how to live well. French poet Charles Baudelaire would, I think, have looked Charles Bukowski in the eye, raised his glass, and told him to lighten up. In the poem Enivrez-Vous, which means “Get Drunk", Baudelaire’s advice was this:
"You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk!
So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
It would make a hell of a long tattoo, but as far as life advice for the creatives and the artists, I think it serves us better. He’s saying celebrate life, be wildly intoxicated with what we’ve got. Find something to love, whether that’s wine, poetry, or virtue–whatever–find something to love and to celebrate and to pursue to the ends of the earth and let it make you a little head-fogged and heart-twisted. Let it make you alive and give you joy and bring you laughter. Because the alternative, to be the "martyred slave of time", is otherwise inevitable. And it doesn’t sound like much of a life.
Find what you love and let it consume you like a flame. Let it generate light and turn you into a burning ember. Let it bring warmth and light your days. Let it change you and make you bright. It doesn’t matter, in the end, what kills you, a lover or otherwise. It matters what gives you life. The dying will happen without much say-so from us. It’s more likely that we’re taken out by cancer or a drunk-driver than by our so-called lover. And then where will we be?
When Woody Allen was asked if he wanted to achieve immortality through his art he replied, no, he wanted to achieve immortality by not dying. In other words, sarcastic as he might have been, he was saying living was more important than legacy. Legacy is an idea that I’m hearing more about lately, and it’s a hard one for me because I want my work to matter. I want it to echo into the days beyond which I live. But if most of us are honest, we know it won’t. Not for long. Very, very few people will ever have a legacy that lasts beyond one generation. Even fewer will be remembered 100 years from now. The last thousand years is full of astonishing, famous, notorious people that left legacies that are now forgotten.
Yes, in the very short term, legacy matters, if what we mean by “legacy" are the things we teach our children, the way we model a life well-lived, the way we make the world a better place to those around us. That matters and it will ripple out and have more impact than we hope or can ever know. But the longer legacy of books and art and music, or any of our creative efforts? I think I’d lose my mind if that was my hope. I can’t imagine the pressure. Did you notice in both poems that we, because both poets are talking to us, are threatened with the back-breaking burden of time and labour? Bukowski admonishes us to find what we love and let it cling to our backs and weigh us down into eventual nothingness. Baudelaire suggests that we be drunk on what we love as a way to avoid feeling the horrible burden of time that break our backs and bends us to the earth. Perhaps both of the Charleses are, in different ways, saying a similar thing, and pointing to the same eventualities: that we are all under the dominion of time, that we came from the earth and will be pressed back into it over the course of our lives. That is inevitable. And it’s unlikely that what we do will have the kind of legacy that echoes into eternity, or even the next century. But what both Bukowski and Baudelaire agree on is that here and now matters, that we have the agency to choose what gives meaning to the present. They agree that if we don’t choose it, now and in every moment, it will be chosen for us. And they agree, it seems, that no matter what we choose, time will keep moving forward with us in its wake until it leaves us shipwrecked on the far shore, and that it is far better that we, to the extent that it is in our power to do so, we spend that time doing work we love, and that we do it with all our hearts, and drink our days to the bottom of the glass, and to enjoy the making and the doing and the moments in between, and slam the glass on the bar for another until the Bartender cuts us off.
This is probably one of my less helpful episodes. I don’t see it being particularly actionable. It’s nothing more, really, than Robin Williams climbing onto his desk in Dead Poets Society, chanting “Seize the Day" and asking his students to do the same.
But poetry has never pretended to be practical. Poetry, like all art–I think–is a call to awaken. It’s a call to engage life with eyes and heart wide open, to live in the now, to rise up against whatever is not life. It’s a reminder that time is short and ruthless and the greatest thing we can do before we are bent to the earth completely and the bartender yells “last call” is to be mindful that none of us makes it out alive, that all the things we take so seriously will one day pass, or get the best of us, but in this moment, while we still can, we can choose to get drunk, on wine, perhaps, but also on poetry or painting or spinning clay on the wheel, or making photographs, or whatever we wish. Yes, art-making is important, and it can be hard. But perhaps when it is hardest and when we are arms-deep in the most important work of our lives, that is the best time to get a little drunk on the love, joy, and delight of what we do and to take chances we might not otherwise risk, and to be a little more generous or vulnerable with our art. To say the things we might not otherwise say in our sobriety. To laugh a little louder than we usually do, to let all our emotions sit a little closer to the surface, and to be just a little messy and more alive.
I don’t think we get to choose what kills us, whether we love it or not. But what gives us life is up to each of us every moment of the day.
Thanks so much for being part of this with me. I’m humbled by the letters and reviews I’ve been getting. If these short conversations are helpful to you I’d love to hear from you and you can do that by dropping me a note at talkback@beautifulanarchy.com. I release new episodes of A Beautiful Anarchy 3 out of 4 weeks, but if you still want your fix on those 4th weeks, I’d love to send you the latest issue of On The Make, which is my monthly chance to encourage you in your everyday creativity by email. Just go to aBeautifulAnarchy.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and tell me where to send it. I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. Thanks ever so much for being part of this with me.
Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0