Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Just two days after meeting with a friend who was at my wedding in 1976, hence forty years ago or nearly, David Bowie died. That was a very hard shock that reverberated in my mind and my heart at once and forcefully.

Forty years ago and even earlier the world for me was a vast trip around the continents that led me to Africa and America just as often as to East Germany or England and Asia. I was discovering the world in all its contradictions and its blind alleys. I was shivering and even shuddering at times at the sight of the most beautiful things or experiences mixed up to and at times crushed by the most ignoble and gruesome things or beings;

This world was following the rule Stephen King was going to edict some time later: “First try to horrify the reader. And if you can’t second try to terrify him. And if you can’t then third try to gross him out.” In fact the world was grossing us out as often as it was terrifying us and even more often than it was horrifying us. What banality to speak of the greyness of Borna in East Germany where I worked in the brown coal mines and to experience the friendship of this engineer-to-be who had such a nice family and was able to take care of my deepest fright, the fright of a young man full of hope that seemed so out of pale, pent up, blocked out of sight.

That’s where David Bowie represented the salvation I was looking for, a salvation that gave us some kind of peace of mind in this world of contradictory desires, impulses and pleasures always intertwined with suffering, deception and disappointment. He was that artist that could see beyond simple divides and just reach out for love and nothing but love for and from anyone possible because there cannot be any divide in the world of love. We love for the pleasure that love gives the people we love and we do not even require them to love us back because our pleasure is in our own love because it gives pleasure to whoever can understand and accept that love.

When I met Pierre Ngeyitala in Kinshasa that was love too, an ancient and primitive form of love for me who was from a family where love was not exactly the standard norm, and that is an understatement. Love was the sudden desire and impulse to do things with this young man and his own friends, with the young people of his parish, to do things and to learn while sharing my own knowledge that they transmuted and expanded everyday. The fact they were black was not even a question. I more or less felt lost at times because I could not step up to them. David Bowie teaches us that love is able to bridge any silly social divide that our culture imposes onto us, our western and Christian culture. Some will say that this is twisted and hijacked Christianity but nevertheless there is nothing more hateful and ugly than Christianity turned into a pillory of segregation, gallows of color hatred, and at times this color hatred is more the hatred of any shade of white that may not be pure and bleached down to colorlessness, tastelessness, soullessness.

David Bowie was with me all along in the USA no matter where I was. In Harnett County in Dunn, North Carolina, he was with me any time and every time I saw the big sign on the side of the highway by the exit to the city that declared this place “a sanctuary of the Ku Klux Klan.” David Bowie was the voice of all those who have been rejected, tortured, ostracized, beaten or simply spat at in this world. My Jewish grandmother came up from her tomb – lucky she since she died in 1938 – lucky us since we escaped the last trains to Auschwitz in 1944 since she was the only Jew in the family – and she danced with David Bowie because with him she knew we are all equal, both in our love and in out hatred, because unluckily we all can love as much as hate.

David Bowie taught me hatred is evil not because it is one commandment of some table of some law but because it makes us sour, bitter, limited, locked up on ourselves, unable to recognize, integrate and assimilate the beauty, the depth and the imagination of all those who are around us and we don’t want to understand, with or without empathy, since understanding has to be with our heart, our soul, our mind and that is a lot more than just empathy. It is love, man, love indeed. And here David Bowie when he is “Dancing in the street” finds an echo in Leonard Cohen and his “Don’t pass me by.” And we learned this love from him, in fact from both of these artists and a few more, and this had a lot to do with his ambiguous style, his hermaphrodite gender that we accepted at all levels, or for some of us only at mental level, because we felt deeply moved by this expanding ourselves beyond all possible limits. We were kind of living in a dreamlike bed in which we could love everyone in total purity, as if intercourse were maybe for some minds not as clean as it should be, and yet we tried to cultivate a concept of purity that could be both black and white because if Black is Beautiful, White is also very full of Beauty, and all shades of grey and of all possible colors are full of all kinds of blazing and blinding magnificence.

So for us the extraterrestrial beings Bowie was singing so often were first of all the extraterrestrials of our own social life, those we were not supposed to see or look at in our suburbs, ghettos and other projects or county housing complexes. They were also all these beings that we could not grasp because they had different ideas, religions or simply habits and customs.

David Bowie was with me in Sri Lanka where Buddhism held its hands out for me to rise and just walk on the path of mindfulness. David Bowie sang in my mind that the mind is also the soul or even simply the eyes that behold the world and find the marvelous nature of this world beyond our wandering standards, in the wonders that are fascinating all our senses. We became able to lie down, to recline on our side and to let ourselves walk into the land of beyond materiality, the world of ethereal and spiritual power and infinity.

David Bowie was more than the Punks of those old days for us. The Punks were like a machine gun shooting galore of bullets and rounds at the sick and sickening world of violence, sadism and slavery. David Bowie was declaring peace to the world provided the world could listen five minutes to his song without shooting one single bullets. Five minutes of peace are probably worth our patience but David Bowie also taught us there is no future without a fight, there is no struggle without some stamina, and there is no stamina without a victory even if it is only a victory over our own selves and our own hatreds

So get into these three CDs of songs from these forty or so long years we have lived with David Bowie who died at the ripe age of 69 years, thus casting in his own death the best of all symbols of love in any understanding possible. If I do not speak to the soul of other people, if I do not embrace the minds of other people, if I do not let other people hug my mind and kiss my soul, the world will never change and what we all want most of all is that the world should change and there is no change if we do not fall into that reciprocal mental and inspired intercourse so perfectly symbolized by that number 69, and for me that is the acme of perfection because 6 + 9 = 15 and this number 15 has ordered and structured my whole life. No one can reject this symbolism that David Bowie brought us when he put his red shoes on. Let’s dance into the night with our friends, especially when they are on the point of leaving us.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

A testament is always full of light, black light of course from a black star in a black sky full of black holes and with skulls or death’s heads on the five points of each star as a welcoming glimpse and smile to the newcomers.

And we will all be these newcomers one day sooner or later.

A welcoming nod to you on the other side of the moony life of ours, the other side of us who are staying behind and have always cultivated the front face of this life.

Death is not that male hermaphrodite bag of bones that is castrating us all with his/her/its scythe but he/she/it is our closest friend on this side of the living divide and our guide to the other bank of the over-boiling hot river of the end and the beginning, the last step and the first stride on the ever lasting and never ending road of existence, telling us the basic truth that we have always ignored, refused, rejected: the road of existence does not end with death because our existence is not in our flesh, so much, but it is in the minds of other people.

We are what people think we are, no matter how many or few people are having some kind of an image or a recollection of our deeds, a remembrance of our actions, a void blank forgotten ghost of our inexistence, vacuity, empty fullness of nothing at all.

Follow the impulse.

Execute the plan.

Finalize the transmutation.

Achieve the full renaissance.

Reach out and grasp the rebirth into an ever lasting and never forgotten symbol in the minds of generations of fascinated and mesmerized, hypnotized and entranced disciples, followers and faithful believers.

We are seeing through the blind and quarter-sealed eyes of Lazarus because seeing is not so much in our eyes as in the eyes and brains of the beholders.

He beholds us with his words, with his notes, with his music, with his voice too casting the color of it onto our vision of the universe.

The color of his voice is golden and it casts a shadow on all the bright illusions that we call life and reveals the dark inside of the specters that are roaming and dancing around us.

We believe this dancing puppet, this waltzing android, this sublimated sexual temptation is some Salome calling us to behind her seven veils to the bed of perdition, condemned to lose our heads there like John the Baptist, heads then served on platters at the big banquets of the cannibalistic masters of the world.

Yes Sue I will touch your face and you will cut my head off like a ripe apricot on an apricot tree, or fig on a fig tree in the Garden of Eden.

I can always imagine you are Babylon, the red harlot, the vermilion whore that is nothing but a deep abyss surrounded by hairy forests and animated with our sole impulses and desires.

That Babylon that is appealing our blind penial lust to come, penetrate, sink, spit its fake saliva into her/his/its cleft shaft of our concupiscence, of our nympholepsy, and we are not even able to see that the nymph is nothing but a phantom projected onto the screen of white smoke of this social upheaval that carries us beyond realizing the immateriality of this here nymphomaniac drive that jumps from our hormonal brain desiccated to its hypothalamic nightmare like some Jack in some box.

Oh! Yes we are living in a season of crime and we are leaving that season behind with the pleasure of at last peace, at last quiet, at last eternity in the back of the sensual shuddering shivering of androgynous females and gynandrous males who are attracted up and down, yes and no, AC and DC, right and left, front and back, under and over, on top and underneath.

Eternal evanescent images of sexually undetermined extraterrestrials emerging from our skins, surging from our eyes, erupting from our ears, discharged from our bellybuttons, the famous and eternal windows of Jimi Hendrix, and here becoming the prodigal sons of some bible that has lost its divine intention to the sole profit and unique benefit of some devil ejected from our most intimate back door.

He sure can’t give everything away our Black Star because it all comes from inside our temple of a body, even if we do not know that.

It is the full and extreme form of self-polluting onanism that we practice night after night, day after day, looking at the silhouettes that pass us by in the street, nearly touch us in the underground, hardly press against us in the bus.

Oh! Please don’t pass me by, and yet they do pass me by and we do not find the force to reach out, the power to grasp, the unethical courage to capture, embrace and hug all those outlined figures, forms in their skirts in their pants, in their shirts in their bras.

Oh! yes where has the Monday of our rejuvenation gone, the Monday of our craving week of blissful cupidity between the sheets of two skins, on top of a geyser, inside a cave of dreams and sensations that could make me drunk with plain orgasmic death till death us parts and in fact rejoins us in virtual reality.

And the music is just as innovative and creative as the words that oscillate between Lewis Carol and Shakespeare, between Metropolis and Babylon, between Salome and Empress Theodora, between the Harpies and the Erinyes, between T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane singing the bridge of Pocahontas, or Walt Whitman singing the song of the Calamus plant of manly love.

There is jubilation in these words, along with like the masochistic satisfaction of removing himself from among us who maybe do not deserve his art, his mind, his sensual spirituality.

Enjoy that trip to the end of the world and do not hope to be able to come back from it.

Just know that you will not be the same after that trip.

You will have nothing else to lose when you will have lost him and loosened your attachment to this iconoclastic pagan idol standing for the god we all procreate in our dull boredom.

Fare Thee Well David fighting for the last time against the Goliath of love and the Leviathan of outer space eternity.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU