The Bends

 A friend called me up yesterday afternoon to tell me he was working on his letter of resignation from work. I warned him to watch out for "the bends." "The Mercedes-Benz?" he asked. "No," I repeated, "the bends." I explained that minutes before he called, I had just finished reading Charles Bukowski's 1971 novel, Post Office, and that this book ends, appropriately enough, with its author submitting a letter of resignation to the post office. It is here Bukowski introduces the concept of "the bends."

"The bends" are what Bukowski calls the blues that follow the withdrawal of any employment, no matter how hated. Even as he loathed the U.S. postal service, after all, and describes his twelve years there as a purgatory, Bukowski (thinly disguised as Henry Chinaski in the novel) nevertheless slips into a depressive funk as soon as he leaves. He compares this feeling to the bends, because it is as if he had just emerged from the deep ocean, and his body has trouble adjusting to the change in pressure.  

He also analogizes his state to that of a couple of parakeets whom he encountered earlier in the novel, and whom he released into the wild because their noise was driving him crazy. The birds, he observed, had at first not known what to do with themselves, when he had opened the cage door. They had long flapped their wings in an effort to escape; but now that the path was clear, they merely stood in confusion. 

So it is with the newly-resigned employee; at first they have a great nostalgia for the prison they have just escaped. 

The lesson, I suggested to my friend, is not to despair. The bends will come, but they are only temporary. They are the anticipated side-effect of a sudden release of the enormous pressure of work, and they will eventually recede. Do not act upon the bends to retreat in terror to one's former employment, therefore. Rather, trust that they will eventually expire on their own, or with a little help from a new project. For Bukowski, release from the bends comes from writing the novel itself. 

Few people have ever written as well about the misery of working for a living as Bukowski has. ("Frankly," he writes, in a memorable line from Factotum, "I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, keep himself clothed.") And few have written as well about the misery of not working. 

For, after all, not working means sitting on a pile of savings that is gradually dwindling. And so, not working merely establishes the conditions for eventually having to return to work. It is not a true release, therefore; merely a stay of execution. It is a brief glimpse of the sun, made all the sadder for knowing it must be withdrawn.

This, perhaps, is part of the reason for the bends. During the time of employment, one looks forward to the unemployment as the promise of freedom. When that freedom comes and proves not be freedom after all, the prospect is doubly gloomy: one finds that one is just as unfree as before, but now without even the hope of future release. 

Years ago, I shared with my friend a copy of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Wages," and ever since then, its imagery has become a byword with us whenever we seek to analyze this dilemma. Lawrence at first compares life in full-time employment to a prison (think Bukowski in the post office). But he then observes that leaving work, and "living on your income," is not release so much as it is "strolling grandly outside the prison walls/ in terror lest you have to go in" (think the post-employment "bends"). 

Who would not feel "the bends" when even relative freedom is ever-haunted by the fear of its loss, the fear of making a forced return to the grind? 

But how then does one eventually overcome the bends? Why is the bends temporary? Bukowski offers not so much the promise of release from this closed circle of economic necessity, as he does redemption within it. This may seem paradoxical, as Bukowski is at first glance the least redemptive novelist there is. His whole mission appears to be to divest modern life of its last shreds of romantic illusion, exposing the horrid truth of nothingness and degradation. 

And yet, Bukowski actually discovers a romanticism within the void, which is what makes him such an entertaining read. He finds in the very confrontation with nothingness and despair the twin salvific balms of humor and self-expression. One is reminded of the poet James Thomson's words, in describing why he was moved to write his chronicle of depression, "The City of Dreadful Night": Because it gives some sense of power and passion/ In helpless innocence to try to fashion/ Our woe in living words.

Thus, it is no accident that Bukowski's release from "the bends" comes via the written word. He writes his way out of the impasse, and the result is the novel we have before us. Of course, he is far from the first to do so. The history of literature is replete with struggling artists and poètes maudits. There have been other authors before who found the source of their muse and inspiration, paradoxically, in the very fact of their failure (Beckett, e.g.) 

Yet Bukowski carried the principle further, perhaps, than anyone. As John Roderick once observed on a podcast, Bukowski embodied more fully than any other writer the ideal of the artist as absolute self-destructive "wreck." In so doing, paradoxically, he created a mythic archetype—an aspirational hero—for postmodern life. He showed that the way out of the "bends" is not to avoid it, but to embrace it—to find in the bends, in the depression, in the misery, the very means by which to subvert them.

This appears to have been what Bukowski got from other books before him, and so in this novel he was merely paying it forward. He describes at one point his relationship to a volume of composers' biographies that he read. "Most of these men's lives were so tortured," he observed, "that I enjoyed reading about them, thinking, well, I am in hell too and I can't even write music." 

He must have known, in penning the line, that the same would be true of his works.