Riesling and Marlowe and Bukowski

I believe it happens on one of Chandlers’s, the dry poet of our own decadence. There is a platinum blonde deprecating another woman, and Marlowe’s hears her, hears her whole rant. At the end, when she has said all that what a woman has to say about another one, when none of it was exaggerated or untrue or kind, Marlowe sights. “But she also could take one good and harsh look at herself” he says. Or perhaps that is what Marlowe himself says of Terry Lenox, the ultimate heroe, who at the end, isn’t. In any case, that is a phrase that has stuck with me. 

Can you take a harsh look at yourself? 

Right now I sit at the garden of the house I live in, torturing the keyboard of this ipad, chasing for few sentences that will mean something to somebody. There is a glass of Riesling, and there is the online company of A., making fun of the possibility of writing drunk. It is too much of a cliche to think in Chandler’s “The long goodbye” but that is what I do, thinking in his drunk bestseller writer, Roger Wade. A., more ambitious, makes fun of me refering me to better goals. “Not everybody can be Bukowski” she says. Yet I do not aim to be much more than Roger Wade. 

Do I now? 

I one of his gallic exagerations, not less true because exaggerated, Camus tells us that the only relevant question is suicide. I believe that his argumentation is about deciding to live, every other day, deciding to embrace both the pain and the pleasure of being alive. So it might be. Yet now and then I wonder if the one question that matters is if we can, really, look at the mirror. To give one good and harsh look at yourself. 

I think it is funny, for lack of better words, that in the instant at which I start trying, the first words that come to my mind is “I know, I know, yet I am also like this”, as if right of the first second of self evaluation I am already trying to find excuses to my flaws. And flaws I have, and I know them. But can I look at them peacefully and calmly? Or am I a cheap version of Tom Waits, scared of exorcising my devils and loosing my angels in the process? Or am I just not strong enough to accept who I am?

 

The last drop of riesling has gone from the glass to my throat, warmer than optimal and showing the metal that these grapes have at the wrong temperature. A thrush sings in the trees of the garden. I wonder at how to describe myself as harsh and as fairly as possible, wine and keyboard and garden and trees and birds. A success and a failure, both and none. And perhaps it does not matter neither, not that much in any case. In few more revolutions of the earth around the sun I will be gone too. In some few more nobody will remember me.  And all this is a good thing. 

Perhaps the best description that we can give of ourselves is that, when all is counted and done, we are not that important. That all this thing of figuring out who we are, if we are good or worth, is just not relevant.

And perhaps that, as harsh as it sounds, is a good thing too.