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| David Bowie, EmilyinChains714 Photobucket |
At home it was difficult to communicate with his parents, young David had a particular hard time discussing emotions with his dad, and he was a precocious child sensitive and talented child.
Yes David was anything but original, intriguing and perhaps disturbing and one can’t help but smile while reading his earlier school reports:
Between 4-6yrs old - “a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler”.
At 9yrs old – “an adequate voice for the choir, above-average musical ability for recorder playing, and strikingly imaginative dance routines which impressed his teachers as vividly artistic and astonishing for a child.”
Also aged 9yrs old he heard Little Richard for the first time, he says about the song Tutti Frutti: “I heard God!”
Bowie decided he wanted to be one of Little Richard's saxophone players. At 13 years old he got his first saxophone and began working as a butcher's delivery boy in order to pay it off. He also took ten lessons from jazz player Ronnie Ross who lived nearby, by then he quit going to see Ross because he felt that “he was ready to become a rock star.”
Bowie’s eyes are both blue, the trademark of different colour eyes: is the result of a dilated pupil. He also suffers from faulty depth perception resulting from the same injury, caused by a punch in the left eye by a school mate wearing a ring during a fight over a girl. David nearly lost his sight and had several operations over a period of four months but he and George Underwood remained friends, and worked together in several albums at the beginning of his career.
Described himself as the “Chameleon of Pop”, he named himself after Jim Bowie, a Victorian North American frontiersman, a controversial figure who is credit amongst other things with the invention of a large hunting knife – the Bowie knife.
David’s career took off in earnest with Ziggy Stardust an androgynous alien from Mars, a character he impersonated when playing with his band.
Bowie is a remarkable man, a multifaceted artist, who has excelled himself in several fields: music, art, and literature. His style is also eclectic and has covered many variations throughout his life.
In music he his style has ranged from, Pop, Glam Rock, Jazz, Disco, and House…he’s collaborated with rapper Snoop Dogg recently, and I believe we are still to see more of his irrepressible talent and adaptability to new musical styles in the years to come!
He has been almost as prolific in the creation of characters both on the musical scene, and on real life, when realities got mixed up, and David found himself living in a parallel reality of bizarre personality changes.
Although most of Bowie’s personality disturbances were fuelled by a cocaine habit that at some point threatened to take over his life and saw him overdosing several times and causing his mental and physical disintegration, some of his personality changes were also induced by a stage act gone too far: Bowie, a method acting student, took his dramatic creations to such an extent that they took over his real persona at times.
His various alter-egos caused some trouble at times: Ziggy stardust was bisexual, Thin White Duke was a sympathiser of totalitarian regimes…Bowie admitted being a robot off stage and only lighting up once he was able to incarnate his showbiz personas, but they certainly caused him some trouble as much as they have catapulted him into the limelight.
Throughout his career there have been many references to Space, and cosmic travelling - “Space oddity” with his Major Tom trying to contact ground control, Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars, “The man who fell to Earth” with his character Thomas Jerome Newton, the extra-terrestrial, and so on…
We get a sense that at some level David is really a traveller of the cosmos, landed here on earth temporarily but still channelling cosmic awareness, leaving in a space between heaven and earth: a “Lodger” as he calls himself in an album made just after his extensive tour of Europe, Asia and Africa.
David is impulsive, emotions hit him fast, inspiration is not on short demand and it happens fast too. And we cannot help but stared with fascination at his kaleidoscope of unstoppable creative impulse.
Some of Bowie’s quotes
On people who influenced him:
About meeting and working with bizarre dancer Lindsay Kemp:
"He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus."
Lindsay Kemp returned the compliment: "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ...I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside."
Elvis Presley’s music:
"I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that."
About his dad:
"I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn't talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten." "a classic case of British reserve."
About Little Richards:
“I had heard God”
About his characters:
"I know now for a fact that so much of my ambition and drive came from wanting to escape from myself and from feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability and not feeling I was loved by anybody in particularly. I would drive those feelings out by throwing myself not only into work, but eventually into characters."
About his sexuality:
Bowie seemed to be as undecided about the effect his revelations had caused to his career as much as he was about his sexual ambiguity itself:
In 1972 while launching” Ziggy Stardust” he declared himself bisexual.
By 1976 he said: "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me.”
In 1983 he said: "The biggest mistake I ever made … was telling that … writer that I was bisexual. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting."
And on other occasions he said that his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than his own feelings, and driven more by "a compulsion to flout moral codes than a real biological and psychological state of being".
In 2002 he said: “I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to neither hold any banners nor be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which were a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.”
About meeting his second wife, Iman:
"I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate."
While launching his live album, and tormented by drug addiction:
David Live, ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory"
On his stage characters:
Ziggy: "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David."
Ziggy: "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity."
Thin White Duke: "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ..."
David Bowie’s homeopathic remedy is Positronium:
“It has been postulated that in the big bang at the beginning of time, matter and anti-matter co-emerged, each having opposite charge, opposite spin and moving in contrary motion, the one from time past to future, the other from time future to time past. It is therefore also postulated that somewhere there may be a parallel universe identical to our own but composed of a preponderance of anti-matter in which events occur in anti-time. Were we to meet with this anti-universe, then we would annihilate each other in one mighty flash!”
Positronium is the smallest particle known, it is not even a full atom, and it’s called antimatter.
It has an Electron and its anti-particle: the Positron, both have the same mass and spin, but opposite electrical charges.
While on collision they annihilate each other.
If Positronium were to be positioned on the periodic table it would be 0 row, 0 column, before the 1st row Hydrogen which at a psychological level corresponds to the baby period.
The Antroposophical interpretation of Positronium:
Positronium is the non being, but as the non-being carries the cosmic blueprint for everything.
It’s a seed for matter channeled from cosmic nothingness. It is the nothing, the void: energy without matter.
This theme ties in with feelings of helplessness, and the feeling of being inferior and insignificant: unloved from those who need Positronium.
Spirituality, the Electron corresponds to Mother energy of divine love, it is bound to the nucleus of the atom by love, the Proton represents Father Will and carries a lot of information about values and concepts, and the Neutron is Christed energy.
Christed energy transcends religion – it expresses inherent morality that bounds us all as spiritual beings stemming from the rightful balance between two existential paths. It is unconditional love to all there is: free from duality between good and bad or from any religious, social or political constraints.
In the spiritual world matter comes into being from the unity of these three aspects, before finally incarnating into the physical world.
Positronium, the anti-matter: only has Mother divine love (Electron) and Father will (Proton) but without the Christed energy (Neutron) these two annihilate each other, causing a vacuum, a nihilistic attitude towards life.
I sense that the remedy has a strong component of split personality due to the absence of a neutron; there is a strong pull of forces, the electron and its anti-particle a positron.
In the spiritual world all vacuum must be filled, leaving the patient who requires this remedy open to entity possession, schizoid episodes or split personality disorders.
In this remedy we have two opposite forces fighting each other to the point of non self, annihilation, in vacuum, with the outcome that light is produced whilst one fights its inner shadow.
This battle of the Electron and the Proton expresses the dualistic issues addressed by the remedy; it is interesting that from their reaction, electron versus positron, the outcome is not just the one photon but two photons: revealing the potential both have to become light, and confirming the Antroposophical principal that evil is just misplaced good.
Positronium and the homeopathic proving:
At a mental and emotional level the proving revealed a need for balance of the right and left side of the brain, with some people wanting to be more creative, others starting to enjoy and understand better scientific theories.
A need for balancing the right and left brain, a great sensitivity to music, which ameliorates most of her symptoms, and with the patient expressing their creativity through dance.
In the proving there are issues about heaviness, of either feeling like a stone unresponsive to other’s emotions or over sensitive to them.
People tend to overeat and then feel that food heavies them.
The have a need for grounding and for being emotionally centered.
They tend to feel oppressed when having to share their space, very paranoid about people listening to their conversations or activities, very aware of other people invading their space.
They showed warmth and motherly feelings towards children, or emotionally vulnerable people.
Other themes in the proving: the desire for structure and clarity.
Empathy with Mother Nature and concern for nourishing and being nourished.
A desire for unity between their masculine and their feminine sides.
Very critical and assertive, trying to be objective and not wanting to make small talk or to be bogged down by social conventions and family obligations.
There is a great sensitivity to music, and feelings of being easily angry and threatened.
People who proved this remedy also had an intense desire for changing physical appearance, changing hairstyle and so on, in order to define themselves as individuals.
One doesn’t have to look hard to find how the keynotes of Positronium connect intimately with the life story of David Bowie!
By the Undercover Homeopath
