A Sense of Doubt blog post #3636 - BOWIE MONTH: More on "Ashes to Ashes" - The meaning of NOTHING (DAY 3500)
Just to start, acknowledging that it's been 3500 days since my Mom died (see count at the bottom).
Continuing content derived from Adam Steiner's book Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super Creeps that I last wrote about here:
I am working on a novella or short novel (not sure yet as I am not done with it) that I am calling "Unbeing Dead" after a line or a quote by ee cummings, I cannot find out which, and not owning a cummings book in digital form, I am stymied.
I feel the "shrieking of nothing" which is killing him is more of the same.
I always identified with the line. There was a time when my life was full of a great deal of nothing that was shrieking enough to kill me.
Steiner takes the analysis into other realms. The shrieking may be Bowie's own voice or inspired by the tagline of the popular movie Alien.
THE ENTIRE PASSAGE
The bleak emptiness that addiction forces us to inhabit continued to stalk Bowie in his music and is painfully dredged up in “Ashes.” Wandering about on broken glass of painful memories, he revisits long and lonely days: “The shrieking of nothing is killing [me].” What is this persistent “nothing”: the echo of a psychic wound? The lyric resonates with the tagline for 1979’s Alien—“In space no one can hear you scream”—where alienation becomes its own kind of desert, an abyss that stares back at you. Again, even Bowie’s laconic moments speak volumes; in what is otherwise a taut tune, lurching and tripping into semi-consciousness, Major Tom is jarred out of his isolated reverie by the hollow ringing of his own voice.
The illusion of emptiness is present in Bowie’s use of “nothing” throughout the song and elsewhere on Scary Monsters. In one verse, “shrieking/nothing/ killing” chime together, leaning heavy on the hard “K,” sound, before the punctuated “U” vowels of “funk/funky/junkie” dominate the chorus. The subject of this “nothing” is implied only as the line seems to trail off. The assumed “I” of the song, Major Tom, is absent from Bowie’s handwritten lyrics, a ghost figure come back to life once when Bowie sings his name. Though when the signifier “me” appears in the official liner notes, we can see Tom and Bowie together, sharing their fate. In this, the song leaves no great mystery, where letting the line ending hang loose is a typically vague allusion used across the album.
Bowie’s use of “nothing” in “Ashes” also calls back to 1977’s “Heroes,” where
Bowie cries, “Nothing will help us,” his strained vocal carrying a split
meaning: “there is nothing that can help us,” and nothing is what will help
us.” Jun Tanaka connects this to the rhetorical device known as the “paradox of
nothing.” In Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “The Snow Man,” the verses end with a
bleak vision that also implies freedom: at once both snow-blind and lost, we
ground ourselves within the storm:
Steiner, Adam. Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History
of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (p. 92). Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
For the listener,
And,
nothing himself,
beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.177
On Radiohead’s song “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” (2001) Thom Yorke offers the smirking line: “after years of waiting/nothing came.” He makes a similar point where nothing is also something; it becomes present in the absences we feel, where experiences of loss leave behind them a deafening silence.178 Bowie’s “nothing” echoes his frequent use of alienation and isolation as necessary themes in his songs; from the loneliness of a room crowded with strangers, exacerbated by the highs and lows of cocaine, it is a troubling place to occupy for too long.179 Elsewhere, Bowie referred to the celebrity’s curse of being unable to escape the hell of other people—“what happens when a rock star gets surrounded by that particular killing kind of sycophancy”—the way he was in Los Angeles (Burn 1980). Slow death by false friendship and the need to maintain the constant “up” of drug abuse meant wrestling with two sides of fame.180
But what seems like terminal
finality is extended into the next line, which alludes to pictures of “Jap
girls,” perhaps as pinups or featured on postcards of an exotic dreamland (the
mythic “Orient” of East Asia) reaching toward some point of synthesis (but with
what?), a westernized ideal, or getting lost in the clash of cultures whose
ways of life are lost in translation.181 The line seems casually nihilistic:
its own play on the language of casual racism or outsider ignorance, a
subconscious colonial divide that has stricken America and Europe for hundreds
of years, reaching toward blind assimilation where East meets West, trading
non–Judeo-Christian spirituality or leftist ideology for capitalism and social
democracy.182
Steiner, Adam. Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (p. 93). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1637
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70130/john-wilmot-earl-of-rochester-upon-nothing
NOTHING IN KEATS' POETRY
https://jhss.koyauniversity.org/index.php/jhss/article/download/362/79/1472
Good luck getting this one:
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- Days ago: MOM = 3500 days ago & DAD = 156 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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