The musicians who recorded Bowie’s last masterpiece once asked him how they could manage such a complex work on stage. Knowing that he was close to his departure David answered: “No way, we won’t.”
The reason is that Blackstar is a powerful catharsis renewed each time this song perform, and it embraces each person who is open to it. David says this clearly: only women (sensitive beings, given the gift of childbearing and birthing by nature) kneel and smile. Because the true revelation is that Blackstar is not about death but about being born. It is an initiation song and a prelude to reincarnation: David’s or anybody else’s. It is a sort of instruction booklet made of vibrations, to step on a path we all walk too often unaware of it.
- That’s the message that I sent. I can’t give everything away - but I can give you a hint… I’d add.
David sends Blackstar -this clear and hopeful message- without mediations. It is an open letter to everybody. Perhaps a letter reaching at first the ones who pay attention, the ones who loved him, to then arrive like a rain also to everybody else. Blackstar is a tool to awaken the awareness in every slumbering person on this lazy but fast planet, a means to awaken the sleeper that is in each of us. It is like the seed of rebirth, a seed dormant for a very long time but that has energy and life, a seed waiting for the rain to come it to life (this is the real power of life… waiting for the right moment).
The album, released two days before his departure from the only form of life and existence we all know, it is but the whistle of a train that has just left (David literally added the sound of this whistle in the track of No Plan). It is the very beginning of a new trip and Blackstar is not only the ticket for this trip but also the instructions for use. The key to understand this is in the chanted mantras, in the hypnotic rhythms: they break down the normal neural patterns; they crush and crumble them. During our whole life, through our consciousness, we form habits that become heavy weights on our shoulders, impossible to lift. The human being, in a hasty and effortless manner, categorizes as “music” anything that vibrates in a coherent manner, but there is more to it in this case and it is accessible and reachable by anyone. You only need to be able to listen or better, to look where nobody is looking.
I’d like to clarify that there are no secrets or obscure tricks. Everything is transparent, verifiable and explicit. You only need an act of willingness and break the comfortable automated ritual.
Now, however, I would like to make you reflect on a premise, necessary to reasoning. We are used to seeing a "before" and an "after" in the same way as tall or short, big or small. That is, we tend to represent time as any other quantity by reducing it to a line proceeding from A to B. This is not entirely correct: not always. Quantum physics dictates alternative parameters to explain the dual quality of the matter-vibration matrix, but incredibly two millennia before, in India, man had come, without technology, to contemplate experiences quite similar to cosmic unification with the whole. I understand that this assumption is unfamiliar since our senses apparently testify to something else. I am sorry, but I am here to tell you that in the conditions in which a mantra is active, it often happens that an "after" precedes a "before". Imagine a time that does not flow in any direction: a time that reveals the cause and effect on a single plane, the birth of a project and its practical application, a plan where success and failure are present at the same time: an idea that radicalises the concept of reality itself.
All this where it leads us, you will ask me. He takes us back to Blackstar, in particular to some very interesting passages emerging in random order, like jewels from the empty skull in the Blackstar video.
- REVIEW OF THE TEXT. Insights.
Let's go back to Blackstar video. A jewelled skull is found, which immediately “the sacred relic” becomes. Bowie dwells on a question repeatedly addressed in his texts, namely the functional error of the great monotheistic religions, which prefer the exercise of the liturgy rather than the search for the sacred (i.e. of the separated). Once again, people ignore the ideas (i.e. the jewels), at the expense of a useless sterile liturgy… the ceremony, the tremor, the initiatory circle, the hegemony of the clergy of all confessions.
Seeing more and feeling less. Saying no but meaning yes.
This is all I ever meant. That's the message that I sent.
I want eagles in my daydreams, diamonds in my eyes.
Which translated not literally means discerning from an eagle's flight (from above) what is true from what is not, and being able to preserve the precious difference without contamination (such as having diamond eyes).
I can’t answer why, just go with me (don’t look to the filmstar, to the popstar…)
I’m a take you home. I can’t answer why, but I can tell you how (don’t look to the filmstar, to the flam star …)
We were born upside down. Born the wrong way around. (this is the natural position of the foetus in the mother's womb. At the time of birth, it is upside down… but we are born again!)
On the day of execution… (of fulfilment at birth)
Only women kneel and smile (they give birth, but the pain immediately becomes joy).
At the centre of it all, your eyes… your eyes… (at the center of love here it is you open your eyes ... and you are born conscious, because now there are diamonds in your eyes ... do you remember?).
David was reborn on January 19th 2019, exactly three years and nine days since January 10th 2016, and today he’s a healthy, beautiful European four months old baby girl.
I can’t give everything away. We all owe him a lot.
© Ambra Mattioli
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