“All I have is my love of love “– Bowie from Soul Love

1994. My first David Bowie album – Outside. Before Diamond Dogs, before Ziggy Stardust, before Space Oddity, or Aladdin Sane; before hearing changes, before becoming obsessed, before memorizing every song .  Outside.  Our soccer team stopped for a loud lunch at a forgettable place with a memorable record store nearby.  I evaded lunch, danced my fingers down CD cases, and spent all my money on an album.  Music was my food.  Back on the school bus in a seat alone, a panoply of modulating voice tones etched my mind.   I did not understand what I heard, and so the beginning of love.  Like Edgar Cayce’s books at twelve, things I didn’t understand were the things I came to cherish.  In my 20s, I remember thinking that it would be a difficult moment for me when David Bowie died.  I’m glad I made it into my 30s before he decided to leave.   Bowie was my fist pseudo granduncle stardust spiritual motherfather.  He stood a vessel of valiant, rebellious love.  He crafted a strange and inviting platform for me to sort out feelings of being born with the wrong body, time and place – flipped the world upside down – made feeling wrong, right.

In these last couple weeks of swirling words, album retrospect, and friend inquiries – pieces of my Bowielife mandala have risen to the surface.  Certain days feel completely normal and then like flash an ‘oh yeah’ moment sets in:  the college house on Smith Ave, David Bowie dance parties, rewatching  “I am a DJ” music videocassette over and over, meeting my second boyfriend by asking “do you like David Bowie?”   But before his passing, it’d been several years since I’d thought of him.  I’m not sad that he will no longer be here in physical form – or make any new albums.  Metaphysical Bowie is just as fascinating as embodied Bowie to me.  It’s only perfect of him, to continue his path of influence and magic even without a body.   I have a funny feeling we haven’t seen or heard the last of him.

I think this is part of what he was expressing with Blackstar:  when those who are loved disperse into non-physical those who’ve been touched with their soul love are forever marked in some way.  I’ve only been close enough with one other person who has died to have experience with this type of soul life transmission.  Although I feel more joy and celebration in his transition, I do wish I could remember more details about the two times I saw him live in person.   Both were difficult passages in my life where the toxins in my body clouded my ability to remember except once I was outside and once I was inside.  There are some other fuzzy details that come together as I trace the images of myself back through the glitter costumes and platform shoes I wore in his name.   When I think back, it’s clear that even the shaky moment when I paused playing rock and roll in pursuit of Zen Buddhist studies was highly influenced by Bowie.  Bowie would never compromise his truth.  He was a teacher of impermanence after all.

It seems fitting the way he left was much like ascended Zen masters and yogis who are conscious they are leaving or about to leave the physical plane.  The practice of writing a death poem has its origins in Zen Buddhism.   In Zen, it is tradition for masters to construct their “final verse” upon knowing their death.  It also seems fitting that the thunderbolt (or Dorje) is addition to the symbol for Ziggy Stardust is also the Tibetan Buddhist symbol for enlightenment – awakening.  “The Tibetan Dorje represents firmness and power of spirit; a symbol for the nature of reality, or sunyata, indicating endless creativity, potency, and skillful activity.”  Although the Dorje looks symbolically different than the lightning bolt – I like to draw my own mystical conclusion – that inside of Bowie was the soul of some enlightened gem.  There’s already been much research about David Bowie and his connection with mysticism – – but then again Bowie was a type of being that was connected with everything.  A physical being living as indra’s net, a nexus of interdependent origination.

I think the greatest legacy of Bowie will unfold over time as more stories emerge.  How did this one figure serve as nourishment to so many people transcending race, gender, class, countries, income brackets and status?  His life held a space for generations of people starving for something they could not name.   He existed simulataneously as himself and exactly what people needed to see in a performer.  He was like the devotional fire art dog to tribes of hungry human beasts.    And we’re all hungry for things we cannot name.

Allison for The Poplar Grove Muse