On Bowie

by Simon Critchley

  Oblivion shall own you

  Death alone shall love you

  I hope you feel so lonely

  You could die

  My initial reaction to Blackstar, between January 8th and 10th, was very simple: it sounded like a Bowie album. I remember thinking simply and stupidly, “this is really good”. Sure, it was jazzy, it was melancholic, it featured new players, but it was in no way a total break with the past. For the fan, Blackstar offered the mixture of novelty and continuity that is characteristic of many of Bowie’s best records.

  I watched the video of the title track countless times after its release on November 19th, 2015. I knew some of the tracks on Blackstar already, like “Sue (In a Season of Crime)” and “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”, albeit in different and, I think, inferior mixes (both these tracks are much more visceral and powerful on Blackstar). The harmonica part of “I Can’t Give Everything Away” was a clear nod back to “New Career in a New Town” from Low. “Dollar Days” put me in mind of “Thursday’s Child” from Hours…

  So, what did the knowledge of Bowie’s death on Monday 11th January change? After dealing with the initial shock, and writing a piece for The New York Times, I spent the entire evening of that Monday alone, listening repeatedly to Blackstar. It simply sounded different, and (although this is obviously absurd) it sounded like Bowie was speaking directly to me. The address of Bowie’s voice seemed to have undergone a change of aspect; it sounded uncanny. The words that I had been listening to obsessively for the past three days suddenly had a different set of connotations.

  This was most striking on “Dollar Days” and the searing and repeated lines,

  Don’t believe for just one second

  I’m forgetting you

  I’m trying to

  I’m dying to

  Suddenly, listening to the last words of the song, it was clear that “I’m dying to” also meant “I’m dying too.” The phrase at the beginning of the song, “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain”, resolves into the song’s final words “I’m dying to(o).” The words seemed to undergo a shift in meaning as I listened to them. He too knew that he was dying and he was telling us: “I’m falling down.” Bowie was also telling us that he wouldn’t forget us, his audience, his fans, those who had loved him.

  I had spent a lot of the previous two days trying to decode the cocktail of Anthony Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, from A Clockwork Orange and the Polari London gay 1960s slang on “Girl Loves Me”. But at the close of the day on Monday 11th January, the message of the song was simple and crystal clear: “Where the fuck did Monday go?” Nothing had changed in the music of Blackstar, but somehow everything had changed. Bowie’s art would sound different after his death.

  This shift in meaning is perhaps clearest and most painful watching the video of “Lazarus”. It was released on January 7th and I watched it a number of times before his death. It was powerful. But after his death, the video became almost unbearable to look at. Bowie seems suddenly so old, his skin yellowed and wrinkled, sagging and loose under his chin. He seems so physically fragile. But, besides any tragedy, there is still so much self-deprecating humour on display: notice the cute little show-tune, song-and-dance step Bowie throws when he sings, “By the time I got to New York”, and the comedy of his jerkily shot body, writing, hunched like a Kafka character, over an old-fashioned writing desk.

  What is he writing? A long suicide note? A shopping list? Thank-you notes for birthday presents? It is not clear. Although Bowie seems to be addressing us directly from beyond the grave (“Just like that bluebird / Oh I’ll be free”), he is also still ventriloquising, still working indirectly, still speaking in character until the end. For example, Bowie sings, “I was looking for your ass.” I hate to break it you, but I doubt that David was looking for your, or anybody else’s, ass in his final months and weeks. He is speaking through the persona of Lazarus. The clue here is the repeated line, “Ain’t that just like me?” Sure, it is just like Bowie, but it is still not Bowie in some pure metaphysical essence. The strategy of his art is, until the very end, oblique. He just can’t give everything away.

  BUT WHY LAZARUS? THE THEME BEGAN TO perplex me. It was not just the name of his final video, but also the name of the piece of musical theatre that had opened on December 7th, 2015 at the New York Theatre Workshop that Bowie co-wrote with Enda Walsh and which was directed by Ivo van Hove. The show also features the song “Lazarus”, brilliantly sung by Michael C. Hall (who does a formidable Bowie imitation throughout). I had the good fortune to see the show twice, once in preview, and again after the premiere in mid-December, when I did a talkback with the audience and Henry Hey, Bowie’s musical director.

  The narrative of the show Lazarus is a continuation of the story of The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel. Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 movie adaptation of Tevis’s book ends with Bowie as the alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, living in New York with a rather serious drinking problem. Newton hasn’t aged and cannot die. The show Lazarus picks up from the end of the film, showing Newton in his New York apartment, drinking copious amounts of gin, eating Twinkie candy bars and obsessively watching television.

  Lazarus is the story of an earthbound alien who cannot die and does not age. The inability to die is entirely infused with the memory of love for the character of Mary-Lou, the chambermaid he meets in the motel in New Mexico in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Her image is projected in video flashbacks on a screen that fills centre stage. Bullied by a broken mind, Newton eventually conjures up the ghost or fantasy of a new pretend teenage girl, who is some quasi-incestuous mixture of his lover, Mary-Lou, and his dead daughter on his home planet. Eventually, the girl evaporates after being symbolically killed and Newton submits to a full psychotic delusion of lifting off on a rocket ship and returning to his home planet. But it is clear that in reality he is going nowhere. He is earthbound.

  For his fans, the identification of Bowie with Newton is total. It always was. Still shots from Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth were used on the covers of Low and Station to Station. Roeg had originally conceived of casting Bowie as Newton after seeing Alan Yentob’s 1975 BBC2 documentary, Cracked Actor where Bowie plays himself, whatever that means. What is so odd is the fact that Bowie in his last years should take such an interest in the Newton character as to want to re-enact and extend the story. This time, however, Bowie fills the story with his own music, which permits an even greater identification between Bowie and Newton than the 1976 movie, which used none of the compositions that Bowie had written for the soundtrack. The stage show features about fifteen Bowie songs, four of them unreleased, which included “Lazarus”.

  Of course, particularly in the light of his death, we’re going to read anything Bowie did in his final years as autobiographical allegory, especially when given such a series of seemingly obvious clues as we find in Lazarus. But Bowie is occupying the persona of Newton, mobilising it as a vehicle for a number of constant themes in his music: ageing, grief, isolation, loss of love, horror of the world and media-induced psychosis. Newton is at once Bowie and not Bowie. It is through this act of distancing that we are permitted the deepest intimacy.

  But why is the show called Lazarus? and why did Bowie choose the track with that name for his last video, his final public appearance, his last curtain call? At this point, we need to turn to the Bible. In John’s Gospel, Lazarus is the figure whom Jesus raises from the dead after four days in a stony tomb. At some personal risk, because of the hatred of the local Pharisees, Jesus returns to Judea to the village of Bethany, which is now reputed to be the West Bank town of al-Eizariya. He does this out of love for Lazarus, but particularly because of the kindness and faith that Jesus was shown by Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, who “poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair”. This is the key moment in the narrative and theology of the New Testament, when Jesus declares that “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who belie
ves in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” When Jesus sees Mary’s grief at the death of her brother, John’s Gospel says, “Jesus wept.”

  Mary, Martha and Jesus go to Lazarus’s tomb and Jesus commands that the stone laid across the entrance be hauled aside. Martha complains that “by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there for four days”. But Jesus is messianically undeterred and says to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” Jesus then calls in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” John’s Gospel continues, “The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his eyes.”

  Returning to Bowie, what is so striking is the cloth around Lazarus’s eyes, which is how Bowie is depicted in both the “Blackstar” and “Lazarus” videos. Lazarus is the figure who has been down to the realm of the dead and is brought back to life wrapped in his funeral shroud, his eyes covered. In the video of “Lazarus”, Bowie is shown levitating from his bed, being raised up and resurrected, while a demonic young female figure cowers underneath.

  In the biblical scene, Lazarus doesn’t speak. John’s Gospel concludes abruptly with Jesus’s final words, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” Lazarus doesn’t say “Hey, I’m alive again; thanks a lot, Mr Messiah.” He doesn’t burst into grateful tears or betray any emotion. He just reappears and is allowed to go. Nobody asked Lazarus if he actually wanted to come back from the grave and he does not seem particularly happy to be back with his sisters. Maybe he was happier being dead.

  Interestingly, this theme is explored by Nick Cave in “Dig, Lazarus Dig!” from 2008, which also takes place in New York City. Cave sings of Lazarus,

  I mean he, he never asked to be raised

  from the tomb

  I mean no one ever actually asked him to

  forsake his dreams.

  After his resurrection, Lazarus (or Larry, as Cave nicely puts it) behaves in an increasingly neurotic and obscene manner and

  He ended up like so many of them do,

  back on the streets of New York City

  In a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave, then

  prison, then the madhouse, then the grave

  Ah poor Larry.

  But what do we really know of the dead

  and who actually cares?

  Maybe Lazarus isn’t so much the story of a heroic resurrection that proves Jesus’s messianic credentials, but a sad tale of someone being pulled back to life without really wanting it at all. Bowie’s “Lazarus” is not so much a story of a return to life as the acknowledgment of the inability to die while being gripped by grief over lost love, radical separation from the world, addiction and psychosis.

  So, what might Bowie be telling us with the figure of Lazarus? That he is “poor Larry”? To be honest, I really don’t know. And what do we know of the dead, really? The biblical Lazarus occupies a space between life and death, belonging at once to both realms and to neither. He is at once dead and not dead. If we think back to the character of Newton – and the naming of the stage show is hardly incidental here – then he is also obviously a Lazarus figure, unable to die, but also unable to live because of the ghosts of the past and the lost love that haunts and tears at him.

  Is Bowie Lazarus? Is this why he chooses to use this final persona in order to say goodbye to us? And in choosing the character of Lazarus as the one who is unable to die, is Bowie even saying goodbye? I am reminded of Kafka’s remarkable little story “The Hunter Gracchus”. The hunter dies after falling from a precipice while chasing chamois in his native Black Forest. The boat of death then takes him on the long journey to realms of the dead, but the pilot stupidly takes a wrong turn and Gracchus is condemned to spend the next fifteen hundred years pointlessly drifting from port to port wearing a rotting, Lazarus-like, shroud. “I had been glad to live and I was glad to die,” Gracchus says.

  Gracchus, Lazarus and Newton are all figures who cannot die and cannot live. They occupy the space between the living and the dead, the realm of purgatorial ghosts and spectres. Perhaps Bowie is telling us that he also occupies that space between life and death, that his art constantly moved between these two realms, these two worlds, while belonging fully to neither. Bowie is dead and not dead. And perhaps he always was…

  I WANT TO FINISH THIS BOOK WHERE I BEGAN, with my mother, Sheila Patricia Critchley. It was with her that I first watched Bowie on Top of the Pops in 1972 and who bought me a copy of “Starman”. She introduced me to Bowie and, to be honest, it was one of the few things we were really able to talk about down through the not so golden years.

  My mother died on December 5th 2015. I don’t want to go into details. People say all sorts of pretty uninteresting things about the pain of grief. My feeling in the days and weeks after she died was not just a feeling of aching pain and the inability to concentrate, let alone sleep, but the very clear and very sober sentiment that time had lost its flow. Time just somehow stopped, it wouldn’t budge or shift. I felt caught in its nets. Of course, I thought of Bowie’s words from “Aladdin Sane”, where time’s “script is you and me… he flexes like a whore … his trick is you and me”.

  In the weeks after my mother died, I read as much about grief as my limited powers of concentration allowed. But the only person who seemed to get what I was feeling was the English poet Denise Riley, when she writes a kind of intermittent chronicle about the effects of the death of her son (“Time Lived, Without its Flow”; Capsule Editions, 2012). It’s not even that one feels immeasurably sad or that one is engaged in some sort of mourning process with a series of distinct steps. After my mother died, I felt a very clear, almost contemplative, sentiment of time’s reality, of being simply stuck in the moment and just hoping that it would pass. It was a state of contemplation that was not in my head. It was visceral. Lodged in the body itself.

  The dead give us a grip on the present instant in which we are inserted. We are lodged in the present and it just will not budge. To say carpe diem (seize the day) is nonsense, because there is no day to seize. Time has seized us. And this very carnal feeling of time having lost its flow is not lived in fear and trembling, but with what Riley calls a “crystalline simplicity”. We are somehow just drifting through time before a bereavement, barely noticing its movement, breathing time in and out. Then death enters into our world and time stops.

  Riley writes that this feeling has “nothing to do with ‘mourning’ as you once might have fancied it. Your intuitive fluid of intuitive time has abruptly drained away. Now you live in an unshaded clarity of bright and dry air.”

  The present grinds to a halt, the past drags at your feet and won’t let go, and what of the future? Riley notes that one cannot take an interest in writing without some feeling of futurity. Stuck deep inside bereavement, it doesn’t seem that there is any future. As a consequence, I took no interest in writing after my mother died. I couldn’t see the point. The weeks that followed my mother’s death were the longest in my life. But I was also incapable of thinking about what had happened, or speaking about it, save for a few banalities and trivialities. I was stuck in a wordless, visceral paralysis.

  Then Bowie died. In the morning of January 11th, 2016, my inbox was full of offers to talk and write about his death. Initially confused and repelled, I suddenly decided to throw myself into it. Although I can’t say it was exactly fun (it has been more like pulling teeth), I have spent the weeks since Bowie’s death writing and speaking to my old Bowie friends and making lots of wonderful new ones. Suddenly everyone was in grief and, in some slightly sick way, it helped. Bowie’s death unlocked my inability to talk about my mother. The words began to tumble out. And now I’m writing these words. By being about him, they were somehow about her. What can I say? It helped. I’d like to thank David one last time for this parting gift.

  We have to let Bowie go. To death and to life.

  THANKS

  I’d like to thank al
l the talented people who made the creation of this little book such a pleasurable process: John Oakes, Emily Freyer, Natasha Lewis, Alex Nunn, Justin Humphries and especially Courtney Andujar for her brilliant book design. The idea for the book came up during a lull in an otherwise intense conversation with Colin Robinson about Liverpool Football Club. Thanks Colin. YNWA.

  Thanks to the following for saying something, often inadvertently, about Bowie that either inspired me or that I just plain stole: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Dan Frank, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Marshall, James Miller, Sina Najafi, Maria Poell, John Simmons, Anne Zauner. Many people contributed ideas to the writing of the last chapters, after Bowie’s death. You know who you are. I’d especially like to thank Anthony Downey, Tim Marshall, Christian Madsbjerg, Rick Moody, Ben Ratliff, Ari Braverman, Peter Catapano, Marissa Brostoff, Johanna Oksala and Gisselle Roark.

  I’d like to thank my agent, Nemonie Craven, for making some crucial remarks about the shape of the book. I’d like to thank my son, Edward Critchley, both for love and support (as well as being such an excellent drinking companion). Finally, I’d like to thank Jamieson Webster. She knows why.

  This book is dedicated to my sister, Susan, and my family in England.

  LYRICS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE ART’S FILTHY LESSON

  “Andy Warhol”, “Life on Mars?”, “Quicksand”, “Five Years” David Bowie; “The Secret Life of Arabia” David Bowie, Brian Eno and Carlos Alomar; “Candidate” David Bowie.