Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski discuss philosophy

Thompson looked over the rim of his glass as though the whiskey had just delivered classified information.

“The trouble,” he said, “is that everybody thinks the universe is made of things.”

Bukowski scratched his stomach. “What else would it be made of?”

“Events. Collisions. Delays. Bad timing. Things are what events look like after they’ve persisted long enough for some bastard to give them a name.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“It is. They built civilisation out of it.”

Bukowski drank.

Outside, the night had become enormous. No streetlights, no cars, no illuminated windows: nothing to prevent the sky from making its old argument. Stars were scattered across it in such numbers that neither man felt any obligation to speak.

Eventually Bukowski said, “You know what I hate about eternity?”

“No.”

“People think it means a very long time.”

Thompson turned toward him.

“That’s not eternity,” Bukowski said. “That’s just waiting.”

“Jesus.”

“If the universe is eternal, nobody is travelling through it from one end to the other. There aren’t any ends. We’re just this little bit where something happens.”

“A local disturbance.”

“A local hangover.”

Thompson considered this.

“And death?”

Bukowski shrugged. “Death is where the local fellow gets confused with the whole operation.”

“That is either Zen or brain damage.”

“Same neighbourhood.”

They drank again.

Somewhere beyond the house an insect began making the same small sound over and over. Another answered farther away. The two sounds wandered around one another, sometimes meeting, sometimes separating, producing a third rhythm neither insect possessed by itself.

Thompson listened.

“There,” he said.

“What?”

“That.”

“It’s bugs.”

“No. Listen.”

Bukowski listened.

The sounds slipped in and out of coincidence. A car passed several miles away and briefly entered the pattern. Wind moved through dry grass. A refrigerator motor started inside the house. None shared a conductor. Yet for several seconds the sounds belonged together.

Then they didn’t.

Thompson smiled.

“That’s the whole rotten trick.”

“What trick?”

“Nothing has to contain the pattern.”

Bukowski looked at him.

“You’ve got insects, wind, machinery, distance, different frequencies, different durations. None of them knows what the others are doing. But put them into relation and something appears that isn’t located in any one of them.”

“Music.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Noise.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What then?”

“Organisation.”

Bukowski frowned. “That’s an ugly word.”

“Fine. Rhythm.”

“Better.”

The insects continued.

Thompson leaned forward. “We keep looking for the world inside the objects. We dissect the insect. Measure the wind. Catalogue the stars. Analyse the nervous system. Then we stand around wondering where the significance went.”

“Because we killed it.”

“Because we looked in the wrong place.”

Bukowski nodded slowly.

“A kiss isn’t in either mouth,” he said.

“No.”

“A fight isn’t in either fist.”

“No.”

“A song isn’t in any note.”

“Exactly.”

“And a man isn’t entirely inside his skin.”

Thompson stopped.

“That one will get you arrested.”

“Most useful things do.”

The night expanded around them.

Bukowski lit a cigarette.

“Abstraction causes half the trouble,” he said. “A man sees a horse. Then somebody invents ‘horse.’ Pretty soon another son of a bitch writes a department policy concerning equine assets and nobody remembers the animal.”

Thompson laughed.

“Abstraction is compression. Useful as hell. Dangerous as hell. You throw away most of reality so you can carry something manageable around in your skull.”

“And then forget you threw anything away.”

“There it is.”

“So the word becomes more real than the horse.”

“The map eats the country.”

“And eventually charges admission.”

They sat with that.

After a while Thompson said, “But you can’t get rid of abstraction.”

“No.”

“You couldn’t think.”

“No.”

“You couldn’t even recognise your own beer.”

“I’d manage.”

“The error isn’t abstraction. It’s forgetting what was left out.”

Bukowski looked out into the dark.

“The empty part.”

Thompson nodded.

Every distinction left something outside itself. Every word acquired shape against what it did not say. Every experience arrived surrounded by what could not be experienced from where one happened to stand. A life was no different. Its apparent solidity depended upon exclusions too extensive to register: other lives, other histories, other possibilities, other moments, the immense unavailable remainder against which this particular moment became definite.

Bukowski crushed the cigarette beneath his shoe.

“So ignorance isn’t the opposite of knowledge.”

“No.”

“It’s what gives knowledge an edge.”

“Now you’re becoming dangerous.”

“I was dangerous before. I’m becoming tedious.”

The insect stopped.

The silence it left behind was surprisingly distinct.

Thompson pointed into the darkness.

“You hear that?”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

Bukowski stared at him for several seconds.

“Fuck you.”

But he was smiling.

The absence had entered the pattern. What disappeared remained consequential by no longer being there. The other insect continued calling into a space whose structure had changed. Nothing had been added, yet the whole field was different.

Bukowski poured the last of the whiskey.

“Maybe that’s death.”

“What?”

“Not going somewhere. Changing the pattern by leaving it.”

Thompson said nothing.

“You spend your whole life imagining you’re a noun,” Bukowski continued. “Then death comes along and reveals you were a verb all along.”

“A verb doesn’t persist forever.”

“Neither does a wave. But the ocean doesn’t regard that as a tragedy.”

“That’s suspiciously sentimental.”

“The ocean doesn’t give a shit.”

“Better.”

They looked again at the stars.

There was something obscene about attempting to comprehend their duration. Human thought could write ten billion years easily enough. Eleven characters and a space. The hand barely noticed. Experience could do nothing comparable. A century already exceeded the dimensions of a life; geological time dissolved intuition; cosmic time reduced the entire human adventure to a microscopic fluctuation.

And eternity, if there were such a thing, destroyed the scale altogether.

Thompson said, “If the universe goes on forever, then everything we call permanent is just a rhythm with good stamina.”

Bukowski nodded.

“Mountains.”

“Rhythms.”

“Species.”

“Rhythms.”

“Civilisations.”

“Bad rhythms.”

“Language.”

“Complicated rhythm.”

“Me.”

Bukowski drank.

“Temporary rhythm.”

“And what survives?”

Bukowski looked toward the place where the insect had stopped calling.

“Not the thing.”

“What, then?”

“The consequences.”

Thompson waited.

“The next beat is different because the previous beat happened.”

For once Thompson had nothing to add.

The remaining insect called again. Wind crossed the grass. Somewhere unimaginably far away, stars were being born and others had already vanished, their light still travelling toward eyes that had not existed when the journey began.

Nothing was still.

Nothing was entirely separate.

Nothing needed to last forever for its existence to remain folded into what followed.

Bukowski stood.

“I’m going to bed.”

“You’ve just reduced ontology to a drinking problem.”

“No. Drinking problems have solutions.”

He reached the door, then stopped.

“You coming?”

Thompson remained beneath the stars.

“In a minute.”

Bukowski went inside.

Thompson listened to the night without trying to decide what it meant. For once the distinction seemed unnecessary. The sounds came and went. Some coincided. Some interfered. Some disappeared and altered the pattern by disappearing. No final harmony waited behind them. No hidden conductor reconciled the parts. Differences, separated by distance and delay, entered into relations that persisted for a while and, by persisting, made further relations possible.

Then the insect called once more from the darkness.

Not an answer.

A continuation.