David Bowie and the Art of Death
David Bowie turned everything into art, even his own death. I was put in mind of that again while watching the recent documentary Bowie: Moonage Daydream, which is kind of a sound and vision, well, daydream. The documentary puts you in Bowie's strange and beautiful head (was there any human creature so immensely variable, switching looks and musical styles on artistic instinct?), down to his very end, which was not bitter. "Life is fantastic," Bowie's disembodied voice tells us near the end of the documentary.
Did Bowie, who died of cancer in January 2016, believe in an AFTERlife? It seems that way. He left us an album, Blackstar, released the same month of his passing, that contained these lyrics:
"Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a meter
then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I'm a blackstar, I'm a star star, I'm a blackstar)"
The album also contained a song called "Lazarus," after the man whom Jesus miraculously raised from the dead, that featured these lyrics:
"Look up here, I'm in heaven...
Dropped my cell phone down below
Ain't that just like me?"
The man always had a sense of humor. He played with life... and death. I get it. As I wrote in my stroke memoir, Between Heaven and Hell, getting in touch with the great unknown heightened my sense of the absurd.
Bowie's songs on Blackstar comforted and discomfited me. That's what great art does. It's also what the onrush of our finality -- at least on this earthly plane -- does to us.
As I get closer to the end, I dwell more on death. It's not morbid -- although our youth-oriented, acquisitive culture drums that idea into us. Death is the great mystery. The looming Blackstar. Maybe it's the ultimate extinction, in which case we don't have to fret any longer. But, like Bowie, I choose to think, to feel, it's the beginning of a new mystery.
I don't exactly look forward to it. After all, life is still "fantastic," even in my debilitated state. But I'm more and more ready for whatever comes next...
