Farewell to a Legend

Published: Jan 12, 2016 by Joe Larabell

I don’t imagine anyone capable of reading these words hasn’t already heard that the musical legend David Bowie is no longer with us. There’s not much I can add to the seemingly endless stream of articles and posts bidding farewell, but I felt moved to ruminate on what his passing meant to me personally.

I never counted myself among the more zealous Bowie fans. Don’t get me wrong… like pretty much everyone else of my generation, I listened to most of his Top-40 hits and several even grew on me after a while (Space Oddity being the one I remember most fondly). But there is no doubt in my mind that David Bowie was a key thread in the colorful tapestry that became not only the backdrop but part of the very foundation of the popular music scene throughout the 70s and 80s. Looking over some of the public statments issued by artists whose music I enjoyed even more than Bowie’s, it became obvious how much of an influence he had on the course of musical evolution and, ultimately, on my own taste in music… regardless of whether I was or was not a Bowie fan, per-se.

One of the signs of getting older is when the artists you listened to as a teen or young adult, artists whom you always assumed would be around forever, start disappearing before your very eyes (or ears). It starts with artists your parents listened to and you’ve only vaguely heard of. Then it’s artists you’ve listened to on occasion but that you were suprised to learn were still around. If you’re lucky (or unlucky) enough, you get to experience the demise of artists you always considered part of your own generation. By then, I suspect, most of us have become accustomed to someone famous passing on from time-to-time. In fact, it almost seems like the rate accellerates as we get older (although that’s probably just because we’re familiar with a larger percentage of them). However, there are still a few deaths that almost force you to take a step back and contemplate your own mortality. The death of Michael Jackson was, for me, one such event and now… zealous fan or not… I feel the same effect from David Bowie’s recent departure. The world today simply isn’t the same world in which I was living last week. There’s been a disturbance in the Force.

At the risk of over-analyzing things, I would say that the difference stems from the fact that Bowie wasn’t just another artist. In many ways he pushed the envelope of what pop music could be… in much the same way that Michael pushed the envelope of how a pop musician should behave. The music was almost secondary to the personality behind the music. It’s the personalities that we seem to remember most vividly. Deep inside, we know it was David behind the characters all along but, in our memories, it’s Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom that stand out. In many ways David Bowie was bigger than life… and that immensity came through clearly in his music.

I suspect that, like many great artists before, Bowie’s music will become even more appreciated now that he’s gone. At the very least, many of us will be re-playing the old hits as we contemplate the onward march of time and come to terms with the fact that nothing lasts forever, including musical legends. If there’s any silver lining in this particular cloud, perhaps it’s the fact that we grew up in an age of high-fidelity recording and digital enhancement. Just this morning I woke to a re-play of a taped interview with David Bowie on NPR and the very first song they played was a re-mastered version of the title track from Ziggy Stardust. We may not be able to keep our favorite artists around forever (and, for their sake, that’s probably a good thing). But we can certainly keep their work alive.

Farewell, Ziggy… you’ve made a lasting impression on musical history and your fans thank you from the bottom of their hearts.

This post was originally published as: https://larabell.org/wordpress/farewell-to-a-legend/

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.