Planet Earth is Blue ...

Monday January 11, 2016. 

I’m not a morning person but this, particular morning feels easy in a most peculiar way. 

The entrance to the QEW is at the end of my street. I turn the radio up. The song may be melancholic in an objective sense, but it suits the grey concrete barring the highway and I’m delighted as the lanes spread out before me like cosmic sheet music.

“…I’m feeling very skilled and I think my spaceship knows which way to go.” 

I slide into the left lane with no traffic behind me and little traffic ahead. The sun is barely yet over the water. It radiates the orange wavelengths of an oven burner on low, cradled by reds with a slightly thicker stage presence. I think of HG Wells’ description of the world’s end in The Time Machine.  

A shudder of mortality shimmies up my spine. I remind myself I still have rhythm and spark up the seat heater. The DJ says it wasn’t so long ago that he saw Bowie’s glam rock fashions displayed at the AGO. 

“Ah! Bowie’s new album is coming out today.” I remember reading about it in The Guardian. 

The day is crisp, without wind. My small car stays its course, gliding over the Skyway. I retune the radio as I often do, when the click-clack of inane chat interferes with my driving beat. Over an hour later on campus, and our class is waiting to get inside a locked rehearsal hall. 

“Now that David Bowie’s dead-” Claire says, in conversation. 

“Is that true?” I ask in a muffled space of suspended animation. Or, perhaps, more like a cartoon cow whose routine narrative purpose is to get hoofed in the eye, except the resulting stars look very different today.

I make it through class a poor man’s Prometheus. Perhaps Bowie is in galactic earshot now, so I pray that I might nab a slender flame of his unfathomable fire for my own inspiration. 

Maybe it’s only shock, but the notion of slicing through sadness seems better suited to the daring poses of Bowie’s earthly incarnations far more than might stoic eulogy. My inner voice bellows, “Let’s dance!” 

“Yes, let’s.” He calmly replies, a dapper improv partner. 

The psychological pay-off is prominent, and I approach the day’s work with more joy than usual. Either my prayers are answered, or I’ve simply smiled more, imagining myself in close proximity to a former song and dance superhuman now undoubtedly gone supernova. 

Musician, actor, visual artist, designer ... Bowie was many things and seemed, often, to be many people. Much has been written about his various personas, particularly in relation to mental health issues. Of particular resonance, is the extent to which Bowie’s artistry was in formation to trauma.

In an episode of VH1’s Legends, Bowie spoke of “a dark cloud … of mental instability” on his mother’s side. He noted that two or three of her siblings had died by suicide. He spoke of half-brother Terry’s schizophrenia related psychosis, and the hallucinations it inspired. “Most of us (his family) have battled reality and something else, for most of our lives.” he said. In another portion of the broadcast, he mentions his fondness for experimentation, another cornerstone of the creative psyche.   

A Rolling Stone review of 1973’s “Aladdin Sane” points out Bowie’s capacity to harness creativity unto the seeming dissolution of familiar ego states, without disappearing himself, and suggests that in doing so he tackles the bleakest of existential concerns: 

“If by conventional lights Bowie is a lad insane, then as an Aladdin, a conjurer of supernatural forces, he is quite sane. The titles may change from album to album — from the superman, the homo superior, Ziggy, to Aladdin — but the vision, and Bowie's rightful place in it, remain constant. The pun of the title, alternately vaunted and dismissive, plays on his own sense of discrepancy. Which way you read it depends upon whether you are viewing the present from the eyes of the past or the future.” (Gerson)

Psychiatry often discourages the romanticizing of mental illness in relation to creative ability. The two states, however, have long been anecdotally and empirically linked. 

The capacity for divergent thinking that shaped Bowie’s expansive creative universe, may well have been the result of attempts to escape a harsh emotional landscape. His tendency towards experimentation, an internal search engine seeking to rebalance perceived instabilities—both in himself and the world. 

British psychoanalyst Oliver James has written extensively on Bowie’s use of creativity and persona as a bulwark against childhood trauma:

Bowie often wondered why he was chosen for greatness and Terry for madness and wrote of his fear of mental illness in a series of albums. While his brother’s childhood was a textbook case of the causes of psychosis, Bowie had the right mix of emotional neglect and entitlement to create a man who could face his childhood demons through creativity. Through Ziggy Stardust and his subsequent personas, he engaged in an internal dialogue played out on an international stage.” (James)

It is not certain that shifting identities always made a smooth passage for Bowie in his life offstage. He reportedly suffered psychotic breaks himself at various points, the result of drug addiction. The analyst’s mention of healing through persona, however, hints at Jungian psychology, in which one is must integrate various aspects of the self and ego to achieve wholeness. Bowie was long interested in Jung’s work and incorporated the terminology into his own writing:

Symbolic and specific references to Jung abound throughout Bowie’s career. Arguably beginning with his 1967 song ‘Shadow Man’ that poetically encapsulates a key Jungian concept, in 1987 Bowie tellingly described the Glass Spiders of ‘Never Let Me Down’ (1987) as “…Jungian figures, mother figures” around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour, but also created an enormous onstage effigy (Swayne 1987).” (Stark)


Bowie was widely lauded for blurring the line between masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche, touching on the concept of anima—Jung’s idea that men have an active, underlying feminine aspect to their personality, just as women have an underlying masculine aspect to theirs, known as animus. 

“If she says she can do it, she can do it, she don’t make false claims.” he hiccups in Queen Bitch. One wonders if he is not, in this instance, projecting his own highly developed feminine perspective.  
  
January 11, 2016 - Epilogue

Not everyone has the luxury of spending the day in transit. As the morning wanes, I dash off a Facebook post aimed at consoling friends who feel trapped in the void of Bowie’s absence:

“He’ll tell you all about it on the next bardo.” 

It is a reference to a Buddhist plane in his song “Quicksand”— the song's lyrics are a laundry list of philosophies. It is a rock lament with a chamber music vibe. 

Like Bowie I've have long been interested in the dharma, and I feel no desire to rush out and grasp at his last album. But it’s an eerily slow evening at work and I leave early. When I get in the car, Blackstar is being played in full, on the radio. 

I go to the A&W and get a root beer float. 
Sitting in the parking lot of a strip mall, between the dive bars and the car wash bays, I turn the radio up, up as wide as the clear winter sky.  

Snippets of Bowie's earthly life are tossed into a futuristic abyss. The title song begins with chanting, engulfed in an aura of compressed air that is slowly leaking from a ramshackle vessel. An erratic techno heartbeat interjects alongside a panting sax, giving way again to the chants as they soften. 

Suddenly, it’s stardust tossed over a disco lick … “How many times does an angel fall?” What could have been a cliche pickup line at Club 54, is now profoundly rerouted. There’s a call and response between himself and “the Great I Am!” All his former selves: film star, pop star, ‘gangstar’ are denounced.“I’m a Blackstar.” insists Bowie. 


“Stardom is the means towards attaining a vantage point from which to foresee, and an elevation from which to lead." wrote Gerson in Rolling Stone. "The awesome powers and transformations civilization associates with heaven and hell will be unleashed on earth.” 

The review of Aladdin Sane, seems astonishingly prescient when considering Blackstar’s denouement some 43 years later.  

“Look up here, I’m in heaven.” Bowie sings in Lazarus. Beginning with a deep, elongated pull on the sax, the pop potential of the song distorts into muddy, existential jazz, and finally flutters to cosmic, release. 

“Just like that blue bird, I’ll be free.” And the song bird escapes through the holes of a wind instrument, with its mechanics on the fritz. 

Dollar Days could well be a Buddhist mantra on letting go of earthly attachments before death: “If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me. it’s nothing to see.” And the artist runs downhill in an attempt to let go, only to hit a wall in, I Can’t Give Everything Away. 

The album floors me. Over the next two years, I come to recognize the cumulative pull of Bowie’s influence on my own creative drive.

As a kid, I fell hard, fast and head-on with the music of Bob Dylan. Nonetheless, Bowie seems to have had always been hovering in my creative blind spot. I often incorporated him into my visual art, sound cues and written work automatically, yet not obsessively, as though my unconscious mind were doing it for me. 

The following journal entry from May 2007, is one example:

Well, I’m reveling in seventies sex sax as  composed by David Bowie ...“sex sax” so-called,‘waz’prominent in a lot of seventies music ... I think that may have been why I came about in the first place...my memoirs beginning late one night, with the recollection of thoughts filtered through the dent riddled sieve of pubescent angst, further fuelled by identity issues and while listening to the local radio station, golden light glowing through a massive silver stereo receiver. 

I wondered why seventies music was so melancholic, and why the radio station hadn't bought any new records since 1979. This impossibly vague and intense familiarity with rhythms … can only be the merging of unconscious memories of death and rebirth; blue breaching the air, becoming red, merging briefly in space dance slow-mo, turning purple, and all of it set to music and repeating, until the fear has been expunged" 

The entry began as an attempt to offer some parody of a Dickensian introduction, of being born on one's back with hands in pockets. But Bowie’s music inspired introspection of greater depth. Interestingly, the language of the passage hints at another quote from the Aladdin Sane review:

"Bowie's program is not complete but it involves the elimination of gender differences, the inevitability of Armageddon, and the conquering of death and time as we know them.” (Gerson)

When considering Bowie’s masterful exit—from his last album to the final photo shoot, in which he projected himself as a person playfully at ease in the midst of what must have obviously been great pain, it’s hard to imagine his program wasn’t as complete as is humanly possible and his psyche fully integrated. 

At Home, With Monsters

At Home With Monsters. 

When I was small my mother said we would have a Halloween party. We bought decorations. By now, I only remember the cardboard witch. We hung her in the closet. We slipped the bag of party favours onto that same hanger and, over time, as the handles began to sag,  the witch’s belly grew bulbous. There she waited for years, her accordion legs dangling. Her spells cast aside. 

When I was a little older, my mother told me she’d had a fight with her sisters one Halloween. My grandmother became irritated and sent the three girls to bed without partaking in my mother’s birthday cake. After a time, my grandmother relented and invited them down to celebrate. My aunts joined the party, but my mother remained in her room perhaps preferring her mother stew in that same cauldron of guilt she had stirred. 

If I really think about my mother’s life or even my own, these events seem relatively small losses in comparison to others. Or, at least they seem small enough that I should have long been able to offer some compensatory action against the angst they caused. 

For three decades now, I’ve been trying to invite our inner children to a party, with spiders made from black liquorice and enough Jack-O’Lanterns to light up a cathedral. For three decades, something never works out just so, so it seems. 

Despite celebrating her own birthday with scant semblance of visible joy, my mother has always embraced the iconography of the Halloween season with some satisfaction. She often wore a sweatshirt imprinted with Frankenstein’s image, simply captioned, “Frank” in bloody red font. She often wore it all through the year. As she seldom ever stepped fully into her runners, her step sometimes mimicked the gait of Shelley’s great man-child, depicted on her chest. 

When I met my father for the first time, I immediately noticed his limp. Back then, I liked to imagine it as his karmic comeuppance for my Oedipal issues unbound. Of course, it was only the result of a football injury. But now, I often wonder what my mother made of it, on a conscious or an unconscious level. 

Currently, I am taking a course in Jungian psychology at the University of Toronto. We were assigned to go and view Guillermo Del Toro’s “At Home With Monsters” exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and to record our emotional reactions to two monsters in the show. 

In the spirit of embracing one’s shadow self, I thought perhaps this could be the impetus for making good on bad in some lasting, communal sense.  I sent my mother a text, inviting her to attend.

Her response was sparse. Our schedules conflicted. Well, the exercise obviously had a deadline. I resolved to go alone and write the paper, but offered that we could go back next week and celebrate all ‘Hallows-birth.’

I was somewhat relieved we could not coordinate. Examining a sliver of promotional material for the show online, and I was quite honestly flooded with associations for which no sandbag would cease. 

There is supposedly a recreation of Del Toro’s “Rain Room” at the gallery—a window of glass, with rain visually and sonically recreated. The effect reportedly coaxes out the director’s creativity. The mere mention of it had me recalling Sunday evenings in autumn, as a child … a  roast of beef is in my grandmother’s oven. All the trimmings of a feast no one can really afford are bubbling on the stove. Time is mired in a manmade humidity and will not move, but nothing feels warm because we are all already dead.  

Rheumy condensation inside the window panes, conspires with plump, starched raindrops outside, wildly distorting my reflection. Someone brings the wash in from the laundromat, through the long front porch. The cold air brings me back to life. My eyes are drawn down to a corner of the storm window where layers of white paint have chipped and feathered. The effect surely was the result of water damage, but now I imagine a hawk dropping the bones of a dove into the middle of a desert.

My feet are still so small. I could confine them both to a single yellow tile, swirled with deep red and a grey wisp of cumulus. 

I now imagine each of those tiles a monument to the Oracle Sybil … a spot on the ground where the wizened hag cracked open a Robin’s egg and spat on the yolk, before slicing it with a bloodied fingernail and swirling the mixture ‘round, imposing her vision of the future while passing it off as a conjuring … 

And, if descriptions of the exhibit cause this level of flooding, it is possible that, in seeing the entire exhibition of monsters, things might get downright diluvian.

 If the task of the assignment for this class and for this life is to face down my own demons, I decide it is better if I face them alone, so as to be sure they are my demons. 

In the midst of a self-congratulatory lark, where I believe analyzing my emotional response to an art star’s collection of kitsch might make me seem courageous, I happen to discover my father had been dead two months to the day. 

Perhaps shock sets into the living at the same rate rigor mortis stiffens a corpse, creating the illusion that death has the eloquent segue way it seldom does.  

Sometimes the same is true of birth. 

Even by the mid 1970’s, it was still taboo—shameful even—to have a child out of wedlock, and particularly in a small town. I know because the term “bastard” was still bandied liberally about as it applied to me back in the day. Unlike my cousins, my birth was not heralded in the local paper. I know because I went through the archives at the local library when I was 12. 

I also know that, because my father held a privileged position in society—as an upper-middle class, educated, white male, 18 years my mother’s senior—that it was easy, necessary even, for me to use him as a containment unit for my demons. This is especially true in relation to the feelings I shielded from my mother—whose fury and intermittent abandonments are comprehensible within the context of her being a single mother with far less chance for upward mobility in society.  

My mom worked 12 hour shifts at the Goodyear plant for 21 years, and otherwise hoarded herself into a comforting burrow in which to sleep through the serious depressions her own upbringing inspired.

From my mother, I often had to hide not only my anger at life’s circumstances, but also my intense love of life itself. From my father, I hid nothing.  

When I was twenty-one, my mom, somewhat broke her silence to tell me his name. She gave me his business card, folded in a letter. She stood at the kitchen counter and sobbed as I read it in the bedroom.  

He was a Peter Pan, and not an “ogre.” She placed the latter word in quotes as though she herself were still unsure. 

Reflecting on that now, I understand how much of her emotional life is formed or informed by fantasy. Perhaps there is a reel of idealised birthday parties she plays in her mind. Sometimes they acknowledge her birth, and   sometimes they acknowledge mine. 

Ultimately, I couldn’t go to the exhibit this week. I hadn’t the emotional energy left to immerse myself in the themes of a holiday that has so utterly been gutted of joy. I did, however, see pictures of the large sculpture of Frankenstein’s head online.

Every nuance of the bust—from the triangular licks of hair on his forehead, to the equally angular hollows of his cheekbones—point to his eyes. And, although the eyes are sunken, they are highlighted by hollows of skin below them, that ape the shape of the monster’s chin.

All aspects of design on the monster’s face serve to redirect our eyes to his eyes, which are cast down on the world. 

My resilient self would like to say that they are eyes that twinkle with tragedy. I briefly imagine Herman Munster clapping and laughing as he clumsily lurches to and fro. But the head seems purposely disembodied, so as to represent a heft which no shoulders are large enough to bear. It can’t be easy being the sole, physical representative of humanity’s spiritual diaspora, and those eyes are more likely moist with the contemplation of a perceived lack of identity—both for himself and those in his purview.