I'm no doubt unfashionably late in my loving remembrance of David Bowie, the man with the cat's eyes and bird's body, who some say died a decade ago. Others, such as panpsychists, argue that David Bowie simply transcended death and returned to outer space, the home of the Starman, where Carl Sagan asserted our origins ("we are star stuff"), ultimately reverting to primordial forms and fractals, including waves and nano stuffs. Boy, the guy sure knew how to come down the catwalk wearing his latest fashions. Remember his MTV music video "Blue Jean" and that one where he's being lectured by his mother down by the sea of ashes, or recall his Aladdin Sane look, or his brash, celebratory androgyny opening wide the doors for the LGBTQ+ element (which promises to keep going through the alphabet until, like a cakewalk winding down, the last person standing outside the circle is a straight dick).
I reviewed Simon Critchley's Bowie (2014) a while back and concluded: What a marvelous read; all that glittering nuance. I tickled my memory and recalled attending a Bowie concert in Foxboro, Massachusetts, during his Glass Spider tour. I was a grad student at UMass-Amherst, newly married, working gigs, reading Harold Pinter, and under pressure. At the concert, Bowie kept rising higher on the stage while the crowd roared its approval. I had a brain fart fantasy that saw Ziggy plummet to what seemed his certain death, and the crowd registered its devastation with a hive gasp. And then ensued a stampede of young ladies rushing toward the fallen angel, or Icarus, with the hopes of administering some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Or God knows what!
Bowie is more relevant than ever. Recently, a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on the Walter Tevis novel, was released on streaming. However, the updated version failed to spark the same level of imagination as the original film. More likely, I could not envision anyone else playing the role of the "birdlike" alien from outer space except David Bowie, whose past, present, and future of promise were stolen by the Deep State, leading to his alienation and a permanent funk driven by streams of classical and jazz music (Coltrane, Sun Ra-- you know, out there, man). Planet Earth is blue, and there is nothing I can do. Dig it.
Bowie's relevance largely stems from the film's portrayal of a spaceman who reveals that Earth, once thought to be the only planet with life, is not alone in the universe. If God were a cat, planet Earth might have been just a furball the p*ssy coughs up onto the fur of the sleeping dogmatist. Which we definitely do not want to wake. I don't know if Bowie as spaceman came before or after this film, and I'm too lazy to put down my bong and look it up. Does it really matter?
Let's briefly examine the plot of Tevis's novel, where Bowie portrays a melancholic figure, Thomas Jerome Newton. Newton is a visitor from Anthea, a world described as a "dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the His mission is a desperate act of interplanetary migration, as he seeks a home among humans whom he views with a mix of awe and horror. He sees us as "apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statues with hammers."
This "ape-like" nature is inextricably tied to our biology. As Jon Lieff explores, we are waterbound vessels whose very consciousness may be a byproduct of ancient viral activity. If our self-awareness is a virus that "fell to Earth," then we must reckon with the profound reality that viruses are neither dead nor alive; they wait in crystalline suspension for a host to reanimate them. Newton, a superior intellect, becomes "infected" by the human condition-- specifically our "drowsy, drunken vitality-- "and finds himself "susceptible to love, to fear, to intense physical pain, and to self-pity."
Tevis was terrifyingly prescient regarding the rise of private monolithic power. Newton's World Enterprises Corporation was the blueprint for modern tech hegemony, amassing wealth to fund a mission that the public never approved. Today, we witness the same "satanic pride" in individuals such as Elon Musk and Meta's AI architects, who recklessly pursue AGI, mind control, and geoengineering without any accountability. There is talk of "seeding the sky" to block the sun-- a gamble that could go catastrophically wrong, echoing the near-disaster of the Oppenheimer project's H-bomb tests. We are rushing into a future where, like Newton, we may discover ourselves blinded by the very "Deep State" forces we allowed to take control.
As the media chatter turns toward the possibility of another world war under the current administration, we see a return to the "iron laws of the world... governed by force." Newton's final retreat into the music of John Coltrane was his ultimate anti-totalitarian act. Coltrane's esoteric chord wheel-- a geometric mandala of sound-- represents a symmetry that the "Deep State" can never co-opt.
Bowie understood the symmetry better than anyone. He was a daytripper of inner space who knew that while "Planet Earth is blue," we are all "star stuff." He lived with a cat-like playfulness, anti-totalitarian to the core, refusing to be a cog in the machine of human self-destruction. As we stand on the precipice of our own "atomic rubble," we should listen to the "out there" jazz that Bowie left behind. He didn't just fall to Earth; he realized that Earth is just another part of the sky.
Dig it.
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