Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Feelings about feelings about Bowie

What’s with public grief? I get it, but I don’t. I get that people are sad about Bowie’s death and I suppose I am too. Or shocked. That was my feeling and maybe I haven’t progressed further. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I can’t because I feel strange about everything I’ve seen and read since that references this person but tells a different story to mine. Have I imagined an entirely different man to the rest of the world? Through my shock I realised I couldn’t grieve because Bowie doesn’t die. But (from what I’ve read) that’s an unusual reading of the situation. So I write this to get a better sense of my feelings about these feelings.

All the declarations of crying, feeling loss and anguish, of being inconsolable and distraught, do not sit well with me. Why? Partly I think it’s people vowing to say/share the right things at the right time, to be heard, to be there. “I bear witness so hear my story. I’m going through this.” Partly (and this I’m ashamed to admit), my Bowie fandom feels affronted by the hordes of ‘Bowie fans’ who probably aren’t all that acquainted. Or maybe they’re as acquainted as I am with The Beatles. I know their stuff (I can’t escape it), but I don’t choose to listen to it. Now we all choose to listen to Bowie because he’s dead. Except he really isn’t. (I suppose everyone out there must have some connection to a song/film/image/something, so I suppose I’m too harsh. I suppose I can’t know the depth of the feelings of others).

But I know that Bowie’s not dead. This isn’t denial, it’s me recognising that my Bowie years are not over, that he’ll always have a place in my soundscape which he’s dominated for a good decade or so. I wasn’t born when most of his great stuff was made. Mostly it’s 1971-1973 that are my Bowie years. Then there’s Low in 1977. And all these years will always exist. We have the music and the feelings it brings. And those feelings will continue to exist and change and reshape us.

But should the feelings change because you know he’s dead? Or are you just mourning your own lack of knowledge/enjoyment of this music? Are you sad because you’re discovering someone who’s now dead and realising the extent of their brilliance? Could you not have known that earlier? Am I gloating? (The arrogance of fandom knows no bounds)

I liked his second last album but didn’t love it. I couldn’t love it because it’s overshadowed by his perfect albums. And there have been many. And they say something that can’t be said now. 1970s Bowie did something that can’t be done now. Because it was a time and a place and we’ve moved to new places. And these places can still be good. And there are still living bands and artists who shatter us today. I suppose we don’t have the time to recognise them all, however, because we’re too busy seeking the best things. Endlessly overturning stones, despite the treasures we’ve already amassed. But you can’t be there for everything. Or do we think we can? Do we feel the need? And is this why we cry and mourn and publicly declare our love for the dead man (who’s not even dead)?

The man is Bowie who’s not even a man but an apparition. He’s a series of stories that we project feelings upon and make dreams through. He’s a creation. He’s fictional. And like all great fiction he feels pretty real, but surely we understand this as fiction. The stories were written, the tales told and passed on, and they still circulate today and forever. James Baldwin is dead. Marguerite Duras is dead. Albert Camus is dead. Nina Simone is dead. Many brilliant ones are dead. And they gave us so much that maybe we don’t have a right to be sad about their deaths. Maybe we can be sad about their lives, yet Bowie didn’t have a tough life. At least from what we know. And we don’t know much. From some of the songs it seems there could’ve been struggles. But maybe fiction is fiction and we have to leave it at that. Had he wanted to write a memoir he’d have done so. He didn’t.

So why the tears? At 69 his life wasn’t cut too short. He wasn’t Albert Camus in a car crash with an unfinished manuscript. He wasn’t Michel Foucault dying an AIDS-related death before medicine caught up with that. (Or HervĂ© Guibert or David Wojnarowicz or any of the many others.) This was not an early and tragic death, though granted, it was unexpected. But it’s highly likely that the best of his stories have been written. His legacy is firmly in place and this was the case well before January 11th, 2016. There’ll be some fine obituaries and there’ll be many awful ones. Thousands of awful declarations of love for the dead man.

The dead man is not Lady Di. He gave us 27 albums. At least 6 of these are great. They were made in the 1970s. He was still making good music near his death, but that was different. I know that it’s my story that Bowie is a 1970s man. I understand that many will have loved his new album, released on what we now picture as his death bed. And I guess if I’d listened to and liked it I might feel differently today. But I haven’t. And I’m not going to play it now to conjure the tears to feel the moment to express something real about my sadness.

Some of us feel sad that all of the good people are dead. They’re not. The dead people are just the ones who’ve completed life. They’ve given us everything and we think it necessary and respectful to write their obituary/biography. We narrate a success story or a tragedy or maybe something else. We script their completion. (“2016… 69 years... 27 albums... The greatest...”) We move away from the text to map its general arc. We pick our favourite song, album, era, persona, outfit. We sift through the remains of the celebrity. We’re not good with death.

But is this about celebrity? Or is it about art or something else? And does celebrity have to be the only focal point here? Bowie is not Diana, nor is he Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston. All of these people gave us important things, mostly they gave us tools to work through our feelings. Yet each of them was killed by celebrity. Bowie wasn’t. Nobody knew he was even sick or dying, probably because nobody knew him except his people.

One day my mother will die and that day will be sad. That day will be filled with tears and anguish and all the other objects and feelings that people have been spilling on the internet since yesterday, since #RIPBowie. But nobody (at least in my friendship circle) had regular reciprocated contact with Bowie. Nobody was taking his calls, nor screening his calls, nor going there for Xmas, nor remembering the time they were held by him. We were touched by his music perhaps, but not him. We don’t ever know the artist. I suspect that most artists don’t want us to know them, only their work. And he was good at that. He had many decades to carve a space for himself in which to live and breathe and create and gather with his people. And those people can weep and wail as much as they can because they fucking need to. What just happened is their loss, not ours.

Our version of the man is not dead but still very much breathing. Our access continues. He’s everywhere you want to look, whether that’s YouTube, your record collection, in films, or in the general culture we breathe. Tributes and homage and references are everywhere already because this man owned the 1970s and a whole lot more.

Bowie’s great, but he’s no saviour/hero. If we listen closely, his characters are the prophets telling us things we should probably hear. Stories of rebellion and isolation and pain and the queerness of everyday life. From the spectacular metaphor of space to the streets down below, where we strut, sift, and meander through life. To be lost is to be alive, to have lungs and feet. To be waiting and feeling and exploring the fantasy of otherness. Being everything yet nothing. Being all you ever can be. Forever.