We only know biography through what we know from within enough to lyrically (or not) recreate.  We only can know Shakespeare through our own curiously overlapping experience and similar condition.  Yes, the scholarly details help, of course, knowing that when Will entered London the great bridge was lined with heads on pikes of Catholics and the like.  After the scholarship it becomes imaginative, personal, our own readings of the imaginative work the subject left behind for us to enter in.  Did he face a tendency for alcoholism, or for finding himself quite worn out at the end of a week, such that he felt he couldn't handle it anymore.  Did he find his creativity an island to cling to?

This may seem selfish, or egotistical, but perhaps it's not.  Perhaps it's something similar to what the Buddhists speak of poetically, a knowledge that in a sense the dead are reincarnated such that the child open to whatever it is will indeed recognize the particular personal objects of the dead.  Whatever gives you a sense of a person who lived and breathed somewhere in the deep past is perhaps something not to be afraid of, but even helpful as we consider are own problems.

Personally, I find it not so hard to place Shane MacGowan's created world, created out of a sense of the real matters of life, of a Tipperary farm boy coming to London with all his own country lyricism very close to what Shakespeare would find and similarly create.  There is that feeling of rawness, a bit of that sense of having just been let out of a home.  (I would venture that a fine musical theatrical production could be made of Pogues songs and MacGowan's creative life intertwined upon a stage, a consideration of the obvious depth he has a thinker, 'a spiritual nut.')  The songs wouldn't be so good, so real, so finely interpreted, so coming off natural if there wasn't some scary stuff and misery behind them.  (Like Larkin's poetry.)


Well... I only know what the end of this guy's workweek feels like after being pushed toward the drink's calming effect, and the great sense of betrayal of the fine opportunities that once were his had he handled them better if he looks upon matters in a certain light that thankfully doesn't always shine that way.  The difficulties of handling things, small tasks, feeding the body that likes to be fed in a certain way, let alone dealing with people, indicate a battered psyche of the kind that writers somehow find essential stuff worth writing about, take for example All Quiet on the Western Front.  "No, it's just not worth doing that to yourself four times a week," the guy foundering in the rut of tending bar in a restaurant says to himself, "it's just not worth it."

But, never the less, I will try, take my small steps of doable things.

The laboring part of the week finished I walk down along Rock Creek at dusk, and soon it is dark.  Climbing the grassy hill below the Omni Shoreham I walk across Duke Ellington Bridge and down through the heart of Adams Morgan, 18th Street a construction zone, dug-up sidewalks and street, backhoes, piles of dirt and gravel.  The jazz clubs, the restaurants that come and go, the coffee shop, the jumbo slice pizza place, here and there music welling out onto the street, perfumed air outside of hookah and ethnic clothing shops...  I peer in through the darkened front windows at an old haunt where my friends tended bar, now a dusty shell what once had been an expensive renovation  certain the pull them in, vacant.  Originally a firehouse, then Cities and then something called Left Bank I never went to, my friends having moved on.  An air of sorry illusion hangs over the street, half-hearted partiers, places closed, shabby, just as it always was even on the busiest of Saturday nights.  I think of my own wasted years.

I walk on further, down to the more lively 14th Street.  A glass of wine at Pilar, two at St. Ex, then as I start to head home, a show coming out of Black Cat, a friendly soulful bartender to say hi to, I slip in for a glass of Cotes du Ventoux.  Here the hipsters and the bar workers have a friendly community, a place to find friends and belonging and people like themselves.  I pay my respects to those I know a little bit, then off into the night, the long walk home ripe with a knowledge of the illusory quality of the world's pleasures.



The Buddhist must view my job as a strange one, that odd thing of enabling people as they grasp for earthly pleasures.