The Day Before

The first thing I found out on the day before, was that David Bowie had died. I read it first in a tweet by a friend and then went to a newspaper site. The shock announced by my friend’s message came to full expression when I read the news article.

Mind you, it was not a shock that paralysed me, or brought tears to my eyes. It was a feeling of contraction in my breast, an immediate notion of sadness. I read the news with the same nervous expectation that I have, when looking at a replay of a match lost by my favourite soccer team, but the news didn’t curl back on itself. He died.

I sang for the rest of the day. I didn’t sing in a loud voice, though sometimes the songs in my head bursted into loud hums and lalaas. They were all Bowie songs. I felt surprised at this reaction. It made me also realise how big an impact the man must have had. Or should I say how big an impact FMradio and MTV had on my auditive memory? Name a band or a singer and I immediately sing one of their songs.

He died when the earth casted a shadow on the Moon, and made it invisible. It was a black Moon night. Probably elsewhere on the planet people were looking at the sky and thought of ‚starman’ and ‚major Tom.’ In the reactions I read, people expressed how important he had been in their lives. Such confessions told me more about the social and emotional backgrounds of the places where those people grew up. Their world must have been a grim place back in the early 1970s.

Of the songs I sang in my mind, no song was made after the year 1983. Maybe he had been innovative and spearheading a generation before that time. I can hardly imagine that the more obscure artists, that emerged in the post-punk era, and those who started experimenting in the outer margins of that genre, thought of David Bowie as a source for inspiration. After the year 1983 the name ‚David Bowie’ became a brand and rightfully so. It was time to cash in. Before those years Bowie became an icon, because his fans hoped that he would be the voice of a generation, and as such add sense to their existence. The invitation to dance defined the end of that era. He lived on in his greatest hits, and sometimes somewhere along the line of life that proceeded slowly to the year ‚NoW!’ I read, saw or heard that he was considered a great artist, which, obviously, he was not.

But his fans and followers who through all those years had been waiting at his door like a hungry dog were convinced. And that’s how surprise number two started shining into the day, as I read how everybody bowed in reverential respect at the way he had chosen his moment to die. It was the perfect ending; it turned his whole life into a work of art. And my surprise grew even bigger, when a lot of people started to see signs and messages in the videos and songs of his last album Black Star. Suddenly it was very obvious that he had been dying. I think David Jones got seriously sick of ‚David Bowie’ before everybody else would. If you create a fictional character then you can also get rid of this fictional character. That’s why ‚David Bowie’ had to die.

Those songs and videos also tell a different story. Have a look at a short film, especially the first minutes of it. It is called SYMPTOMS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA and it was made by James D. Page in 1938. It is archived at the psychological Cinema Register of the Pennsylvania State College and on the web at Archive.org.

The abstract tells us that this film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.

In an extra note it is said that the patients were blindfolded to safeguard their privacy. David Jones has always been very careful about his private life. The fact that he appears blindfolded in his videos, might indicate that he appears as Jones alongside to his alter ego ‚Bowie’ who is not blindfolded in the videos. Both Jones and the Bowie character mimic gestures of the patients, and even transport some situations into the videos, like the man at the window, who brings his hand to the nose and makes the gesture ‚thumbing the nose.’

Is there something to explain when it is so evident that the videos show the schizofrenia of the Bowie/Jones construction? There is only one cure. He has to liberate himself from the fictional character ‚David Bowie.’

If you know that he has been married to a muslim woman, who never gave up her belief, it is easy to assume that David Jones must have expressed some interest in the Quran.

Compare the quotes from the Quran down here with fragments from Lazarus and Black Star, and discover what I have been doing on the day before, apart from singing Bowie songs in my head, while sweeping the terrace and read some news articles.

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star”

a solitary candle”… „at the centre of it all” … „I am a black star” – in Black Star

Or [they are] like darknesses within an unfathomable sea which is covered by waves, upon which are waves, over which are clouds – darknesses, some of them upon others. When one puts out his hand [therein], he can hardly see it. And he to whom Allah has not granted light – for him there is no light.”

… describes the situation of the blindfolded man who suffers from schizofrenia.

Do you not see that Allah is exalted by whomever is within the heavens and the earth and [by] the birds with wings spread [in flight]?

Look up here, I’m in heaven” … „Oh, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird” – in Lazarus

At the end of the day I wanted to believe that David Jones had converted to Islam.

His father-in-law was a diplomat for Somalia. To change the name and get a new passport must have been a piece of cake.

Maybe Sean Penn will trace him on his 80th birthday so that on 8. January 2027 The Rolling Stone will have only three words on its front page:

HE IS
ALIVE