What Matters Most

Some good conversations have come up after the post I made just before this one and I kept thinking of the perfect Bukowski line [and subsequent book title] ‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’ This is as good of a mantra as you could have, I’d imagine, and I think that it’s sort of been ringing louder and louder as I’ve been thinking about the whole art thing. And it’s not just art but it’s literature too and, most importantly, it’s about life in general and as a whole.

Everybody has their own fires to walk through and what’s hard to you might be easy for me. What’s hot to me might be breezy for you. What’s art to you might be crap to me and what’s good solid work to me might be kid scribbles to someone else. I mean, really, I can’t hardly navigate through until the end of some of Allen Ginsburg’s writings. And I know plenty of people that find Salinger more ponderous than poetic. It’s all subjective, of course. And all we can do is just do our very best work and leave it at that.

But, in the interest of being contrary and while we’re on the subject of Bukowski, I cannot understand how anyone could ever just simply dismiss Bukowski as being little more than a misogynistic drunk. Have you ever really read any of his work or is that just some point of view you learned to express is your Womyn’s Writing Workshop?

[Why does all of this stuff always get me so goddam excited anyway? Sorry. Sort of.]

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