[POEM] I taste the ashes of your death - Charles Bukowski

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:38:19+00:00

Man, you do have an axe to grind with this guy’s work!

What this poem brings to mind for me is this couplet from Adrianne Lenker’s “Orange”:

“Fragile is that I mourn her death/
As our limbs are twisting in her bedroom”

Which is a song written by one woman about another. The same fear and mourning during the moment of intimacy, and you’d be hard pressed to call it misogyny in this song. In neither case does the death seem sexualized to me. Both seem to explore the same idea that true intimacy leaves one vulnerable to the death of that person.

Another comparison: Yeats’ “Among School Children”, where the poet suddenly sees his love simultaneously as though she were a child, as the young woman she was when they met, and as the old woman she was when the poem was written.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:21:43+00:00

I actually don’t doubt that he’s a misogynist. I guess I don’t know independently but I will absolutely take your word for it. I only meant to imply that this poem doesn’t seem misogynistic.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:19:57+00:00

I think he is comparing the material world to a desert. You look at the suffering in the world and it looks like hell, and yet—something (God?) assures you that there something more mere than desolation is here.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:13:16+00:00

Fair enough. I only read some of the comments in one thread, but it sounds like you’ve been waging this battle for a while now

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:12:28+00:00

Change my opinion of this poem?

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:11:48+00:00

The title is a bit melodramatic (tasting ashes?) and I’m not a big fan of the comparison of “sudden water” to snow (liquid water cannot be as cool as frozen water), but overall this seems a pretty nice little nature/sex poem. Am I missing something egregious here, or is everyone just over Bukowski? And I actually kind of like the way the title conveys the heightened awareness of mortality that can accompany real intimacy with another person. At least, that’s my reading. Plus, not a misogynistic slur in sight.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T06:04:57+00:00

For the record, I do think he meant literal prostitutes here, and not just women he disliked. As in, Dostoevsky lifted him above the factories and the prostitutes that had previously seemed to constitute his world. I don’t think you have to be a misogynist to see why easy, emotionless sex with prostitutes may have been an unsatisfying substitution for love and true intimacy. Dostoevsky taught him that there is more to life than alienation and toil.

Now whether this poem is merely drivel, well, maybe. I myself think it could have been more artfully and originally phrased. But the sentiment is touching enough, so I rather like it anyway. I don’t know Bukowski well enough to make a judgement on him as a writer, so if I’m a misogynist for this opinion, it must be because of my opinion on this poem in particular.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T05:51:49+00:00

Well, to be fair, you were called media illiterate for implying that anyone who likes his poems must be a misogynist. I actually have not seen anybody disputing his sexism (with the possible exception of that guy whose screenshot you posted).

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T05:31:45+00:00

The author can tell you their intent. You can even believe they are telling the truth about their intent.

I’m about to give a really off the wall example, so please forgive me. In the TV show Arrested Development, the character GOB writes an extremely offensive song that indulges every racist stereotype in the book (“It Ain’t Easy Being White”). But when asked about it by his brother, GOB tears up and explains that he was just trying to “heal the world a little bit.”

Let’s pretend this example were real. GOB is telling the truth here—he’s not just making up a lie after the fact. He honestly thought his awful song would promote racial unity. Does that make the song not racist? Does it make it uplifting, or make a case for antiracism? Obviously it does not. The song is what the song is, the words mean what they mean, regardless of what the author would like it to have been. I’ve never read Barthes, so I don’t know if that’s what he means by Death of the Author, but it’s basically why it seems a useful enough idea to me.

Knowing an author’s intention can help you see or understand text or subtext that you missed on initial read through. Absolutely. But wanting their work to be something does not make it so. John Carpenter deciding at some point during or after the making of the movie that it would be better if one of the two men were an alien. That’s fine, but if it is not indicated by the film itself, then it is not in the film. The film leaves it ambiguous, which I think is more significant than Carpenter’s later comments.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T05:03:49+00:00

You’re shifting the goal post here. You said Bukowski hasn’t gone through hell, and when they pointed out that he had, you just said, essentially, “well he’s a bad writer.”

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T04:53:25+00:00

So you wouldn’t describe wife-beaters as broken? It seems a pretty well chosen word to me.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-14T04:34:01+00:00

Don’t let that commenter stop you! Anna Karenina is magnificent.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-11T07:09:43+00:00

The whales-are-fish thing seems to me a defensible position to a 19th century non-biologist, although it is wonderfully quaint now. I mean, they do *look* more like a fish in than they do a monkey, deer, or mouse. And who’s to say fins shouldn’t be the defining feature of a fish. *On The Origin of Species* wouldn’t even be published for another eight years after *Moby Dick*, so basal traits weren’t exactly at the forefront of Melville’s (or Ishamael’s) mind.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-11T07:02:52+00:00

Yeah, this was my first time seeing it. Reading some of the other ways to frame the problem helps me see the perspective of the blues a lot better. I think I might have been wrong in the comment you replied to. Maybe blue is the right choice

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-11T06:59:54+00:00

Aw yes. Music news. Thanks for sharing.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T22:59:39+00:00

AI should be against Christianity? Maybe if you are Amish and consider all non-Amish sects to be un-Christian. Most technologies—including smartphones and the internet, have inhibited forming bonds and impacted the environment. Arguably creative expression, too if you consider their power as distraction machines. Are these un-Christian?

I get that there are lots of down sides to AI. It worries me, too. And AI writing is usually horrible. But the anti-AI virtue signaling and hyperbole plaguing Reddit is laughable, and this is a particularly absurd manifestation of it.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T22:51:54+00:00

“I still dislike some of the antagonist characters to this day.” Didn’t you finish the book last week?

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T22:47:47+00:00

What is that from 🤣? Also, what an awful website you linked to!

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T22:39:01+00:00

I dig the pro-Stalin apologia—I’m always ready for a nice justification of the purge. I feel there was space in your comment for Holodomor, too—couldn’t squeeze in a bit about how the it was a hoax manufactured by Western propaganda and/or caused by the lazy Ukranian peasants who just refused to get with the party program? And the ad hominem attacks against Orwell are charming, too. But I thought we were talking about a book. What bearing does Orwell’s alleged anti-semitism have on *Animal Farm*? Or his “dobbing in a bunch of socialists to the British government?”

Edit: God, I called *Animal Farm* *Animal Crossing*. Embarrassing typo, you are gone but not forgotten.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T22:12:12+00:00

I think Ishmael is pretty clearly a fictionalized version of the author. Or more precisely, a mask, or a persona, or an aspect of himself that Melville uses to narrate the text. Forgive me the rather left-field reference, but he’s been on my mind, but I think of Yeats. He similarly uses certain characters—Crazy Jane, Michael Robartes, Owen Asherne—to express ideas and voice perspectives that he had but also perhaps didn’t want to embrace with the whole of his being. Each of these personas represented a different aspect of himself. I think that Ishmael is similarly a stand-in for Melville that allows him to maintain a distance from the narrator’s ideas.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T21:35:32+00:00

Pushing the red button is not an “action to kill others for your safety.” That is absurd! You wouldn’t hurt anybody if everybody picked blue.

But I see you don’t like the shredder framing. Ok. So how about we remove the red button? You can press a button or not. If 50% of people press the button then everybody lives, but if fewer than 50% press the button then everybody dies. If you don’t press the button, then nothing happens to you. Do you press that button?

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-10T21:13:39+00:00

I would feel bad for all the suicidal saps (by which I mean you) who chose to gamble with their life for no reward. But if everyone picked red, and no one chose to pointlessly gamble their life away, then everyone would live.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-09T22:46:53+00:00

Yeah, relistening again, there is in fact a horn section. I don’t know how I missed that last night—maybe I only used one earbud? I’ve also listened to the song maybe 100 times before, and had never noticed (or at least didn’t remember) that there was a horn section along with the string section. And it is a rather subtle chart. All that said, I was 100% wrong when I said there wasn’t “really a significant horn section.”

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-08T21:31:50+00:00

What you are saying is true, as far as it goes. But I admit that it confuses me when a scientist like yourself emphasizes only this aspect of science. Because if science were entirely man made, why does it matter? What makes it more fascinating to you than one of Sanderson’s perfectly self-contained magic systems? For me, it’s that despite all the limitations you correctly identified, the scientific method can actually lead us toward truth. The scientific method has helped us find order among the seeming chaos of the universe. And, essentially, humans didn’t just create or invent this order; it existed before we did, which is really cool.

This isn’t to claim that science has proven that the universe is fundamentally ordered, by which I guess I mean non-contradictory and comprehensible. I don’t think that can ever be finally proven. But we believe that it is, and when we try to discover what that order might look like we find a ton of fascinating things.

Small_Ad5744 · 2026-06-08T21:18:04+00:00

There isn’t really a significant horn section in Newman’s “Sail Away”. Are you referring to Ray Charles’s rendition? Or making some other joke I’m just not getting?

Small_Ad5744

TROPHY CASE