Fuck-Ups
I’m an alcoholic, and let me tell you something no one else will tell you: alcoholism is cool. It’s just really, really cool. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac were alcoholics, and those dudes are cool as hell. Jackson Pollock was an alcoholic. Do you know how fucking cool Jackson Pollock is? Ed Harris made a movie about him! His paintings sell for hundreds of millions of dollars! He’s in the Met!
The syllogism goes like this: they’re all alcoholics; they’re all geniuses; I’m an alcoholic; I must be a genius. That’s just the transitive property. You can’t argue with math.
Also, I love cats. Do you know who else loved cats? Philip K. Dick. (And a bunch of others.) The brilliant, bonkers, beloved Philip K. Dick. The dude with three different Library of America volumes.
John Lennon was a bit of neat-freak. I’m a neat-freak! I’m practically John Lennon.
And van Gogh had depression! So do I! I must be as brilliant as van Gogh! I must be. I must be. Please, God, I must be. Please please please. I must be. Right?!
I am not an alcoholic. I hate cats. I am not a neat freak. I am not depressed. Therefore.....
Anyway, the attitudes you mock were quite prevalent in the 60s. Many of the best poets then were self-destructive and irresponsible and people claimed and I believed that being a poet required that kind of bullshit. I think it was finally the examples of Chaucer and Auden who showed poets could be rational human beings with stable lives.
Berryman seems to be a bit of a conversation-topic on Substack lately, and I've been trying to approach him from exactly this sort of angle. He was someone who seemed to think that the fact that he was special made his addiction special... The usual sad story, the same one that you're parodying here.