There Is No Try

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college I spent in Los Angeles. I had somehow persuaded Film Threat magazine, at the time one of the coolest (also only) outlets covering the world of indie cinema, to give me an internship, and I spent my days in the Larry Flynt Publications¹ offices on Wilshire Boulevard, not really doing much of anything at all. It wasn’t their fault, nor was it mine. We just weren’t ready for each other.

Outside of work, though, I explored L.A., eating in Thai town, catching double-features at the New Beverly Cinema, and reading till the wee hours at Insomnia Café, where a kind barista told me she’d once slept with Crispin Glover and that he reminded her of a worm. Because I was 20 years old, I was reading a lot of Charles Bukowski—Post Office, Pulp, Hollywood, Tales of Ordinary Madness—and fantasizing about his strain of rough, downbeat L.A. existence: drinking, whoring, fighting, and turning misbehavior into poetry. To be clear, none of those actually appealed to me (especially not the poetry, yuck), but it was amusing to imagine and it fed my fantasy of what it might mean to be a writer. All summer long I wondered if I should seek out Bukowski myself. He had to be around here somewhere, right? And he seemed like the kind of guy who, if you showed up on his doorstep with a bottle of whiskey, would let you in and talk at you for a while until you realized he didn’t want you around. I could live with that.

But, sadly, I never took the initiative to look him up, and for years afterward I regretted my laziness. How hard would it have been to check a phone book or call 411? (We could do those things in those days.) Instead, I let the opportunity pass me by—I waited, and wasted time, and then I had to return to Baltimore.

The thing is, if I had gone looking for him, I would’ve failed: He’d died several months before I ever landed in Los Angeles.

But maybe then I would have found his grave, which is a thing of beauty:

“Don’t try” is the best thing to have on your tombstone². The quote is from a letter Bukowski wrote in 1990 to his friend William Packard, in which he discusses, well, writing. There are those who write for the wrong reasons, he says—”to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with bluebells in their hair”—and there are those wait and wait and wait for the right moment. But writing, when it happens for real, happens, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Don't try,” Bukowski wrote. “Don't work. It's there. It's been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.”

Failing!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had cause to think about this quite often, as every day I’ve stationed myself in front of the computer, sometimes in the early morning, usually after dinner (and a couple glasses of wine), and tried—”tried”?—to figure out what to say, and what to say it about. So far, I’ve been able to get out the semi-publishable piece I’m aiming for. But there’s always an element of chance in there. What if I’ve got nothing? What if my long list of potential “Trying!” topics fails me?

The idea of trying has itself become muddled. After all, if you succeed, you didn’t try—you succeeded! It’s only when you fail that you say you “tried.” And if you did nothing? We won’t even talk about that.

And so I don’t try. I sit down and think a bit, and then I write, and I extract a memory and roll it around and see what it can bear, what it can be made to mean, to accomplish. Maybe I keep it, or maybe I toss it aside and extract another from my brain. There are a lot of them in there! In either case, it doesn’t feel like an attempt—it feels like the raw and honest process itself, and by this point, 25+ years in, it’s as familiar as, say, a warm slug of whiskey would be to Bukowski. Now I can just do. If it works, I did, and if it doesn’t, at least I tried. In that sense, trying is failing.

Which is why, I suppose, Master Yoda echoes³ Bukowski when, in The Empire Strikes Back, he instructs Luke Skywalker, who is whining about being unable to levitate his X-Wing fighter out of the swamp, “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Just let the Force flow through you, Luke, and get it fucking done—the same way Bukowski could write when writing “chose” him: “It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.”

This all sounds very wise, but maybe this is just what we olds love to tell the youth. I know it’s what I tell my daughters when they kvetch to me about homework or chores. Just do it, I say. Don’t think about it, don’t worry about it—start the process and follow it through to the end. Naturally, they hate this, and they see right through it: that each new task is an opportunity not for accomplishment, or for a step toward mastery, but for failure—the kind of failure that reminds them how little they know, how little they’re capable of. For them, infinite delays are preferable to struggle and confusion. And maybe they’re right! Who wants to engage in a potential calamity, to discover one’s talents can never measure up?

As kids, though, they don’t know what the rest of us have had to learn, which is that failure is the default, that talent and skill are unicorn-rare, that we’re all just flailing most of the time, hoping for a tiny bit of luck—except when, finally, after months or years, we get it right, the pieces sink into place without effort, and we move and think as if guided by divine madness. It happens; not often, but it happens: The dishwasher will be properly filled. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. Alas, we were across the street from the main Larry Flynt building, whose entry corridor lined with porn-mag covers was known as “the walk of shame.”

2. Thanks to reader C., who told me about the tombstone.

3. Technically, Yoda spoke these lines a decade before Bukowski’s letter.

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