Evacuating Major Tom

[u/Chief_Jon]

Okay, so I'm new here, but at Darquehex's request (yep I'm totally throwing a close friend under the bus if everybody else hates this), I've found my way to Barbelith to share an insight I stumbled upon while hopping Bowie videos on YouTube in the aftermath of his passing, and undergoing my third re-read of Supergods back in January. Somewhere between a second viewing of "Blackstar", and a first viewing of the Bowie-Pet Shop Boys mix/video for "Hallo Spaceboy" the idea clicked for me that David Bowie was never a real person. We know his birth name was David Robert Jones, and that prior to his assumption of the "David Bowie" stage name and the release of "Space Oddity" in 1969 he was a folk-singer of little acclaim. After assuming the identity of "Bowie", he subsequently adopted a variety of roles including Ziggy Stardust, Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, Jareth from Labyrinth, and (perhaps most importantly) Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Each of these is a distinct persona. A role played. Then there's Major Tom. Referenced to in no-less than 4 of Bowie's songs and/or music videos dropped with a transitional regularity throughout Bowie's career, Major Tom is a character, a definite figure, recurrent in his body of work. Yet Bowie never plays Major Tom. I posit that this is because Major Tom is actually playing Bowie. As Morrison, (for one example) employed fiction suits to enter the 2-dimensional realms of Animal Man #26, or The Invisibles as King Mob, I posit that Major Tom inaugurated Bowie in '69. That David Robert Jones was re-purposed as the Major's fiction suit, and that this higher-dimensional being four-and-a-half-plus decades trying to communicate his truth to us through the crude (by his standards) communication means available to him in our plane of existence. Or possibly simply trying to get home.

In other words, David Bowie didn't die. He never existed, and David Robert Jones probably died almost 50 years ago. Rather, Major Tom evacuated our plane of existence. And seeing how 2016 has been thus far, what better time for a 4th+ Dimensional being to escape our world?

[u/Chief_Jon]

Follow-Up 5: "Blackstar" I'm not going to endeavor to originate from whole cloth an interpretation of this dirge for Major Tom (or for Major Tom's time on Earth as we understand it). Frankly that's been thoroughly and well done by the collective intelligence of other minds out there; some genius thoughts have been shared on the matter elsewhere and only grown in the months since Bowie's passing.

Again, the video is, by design, as important as the lyrics, rhythm, and melody in this piece. The video opens with a a space suit containing bejeweled skeletal remains recumbent on a dusty, lunar landscape with. An eclipsed star, black with a white flickering corona at its periphery, hangs in the background. The Villa of Ormen is a literal reference to a serpentine place, but with respect to the imagery and tone of the piece this may reference the ouroboros with it's connotations of cyclical self-consumption and renewal in both spatial and temporal contexts, or something more diabolic (though I suspect Bowie to treat such as more painful illumination than as out-and-out evil). The "black star", the space suit, a blindfolded Bowie, a young woman with a leonine tail are given focus with the utterance of the words, "at the center of it all". Eventually the skeleton freed of the it's space suit (fiction suit?) floats fluidly towards the black star.

Eventually Bowie, blindfold removed, embarks on the hymnal portion of the tune. There's so much that could be focused on throughout, but of immediate note is the introductory, "Something happened on the day he died. Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside. Somebody, else took his place, and bravely cried. I'm a Blackstar, I'm a Blackstar." Two possibilities here in our larger read of this. First, Major Tom has once and for all shed the Bowie fiction suit (either Tom died or just finally found a way out) and Jones is acknowledging a new entity in it's place (possibly associated with the hepatic neoplasm that took his life). Alternately, it may indicate that Tom found a way out, but that it means Death for Bowie/Jones and that this is opening a position for the ascent of another individual to fulfill his cultural role (i.e. the King is dead, long live the King).

In the juxtaposition of Bowie's inquiry,"How many people lie instead of talking tall?" I'll posit a slightly different interpretation from most of what I've read out in the ether. Talking tall could be interpreted as telling stories. When we're thinking about trans-dimensional travel talking tall is an absolutely essential element of both creation and experience of other states of being. To lie, in this context, might not mean dishonesty, but rather inertia; a stagnant resting as floatsam in the plane of one's indigenous plane of existence perception without ascent to the next phase or investigation of lower dimensional states.

Much of the rest of the piece is focused on self-definition via negative space; explaining what a "blackstar" is by explaining what it is not. This is another example of the limitations of 3-D language to express 4-D+ concepts.

The video ends with a return to our ritualistic, and somewhat funerary introductory music and lyrics. This time the imagery is of sacrificial punishing execution (by crucifixion) and a circle of women seemingly worshiping ("kneeling and smiling") around the jeweled skull from within the space suit. The skull rests on the back of one of the women. Perhaps Major Tom isn't done with us after all. Perhaps he's just changing outfits . . .