On Bowie and the Poet in Exile

               

Yesterday I watched an interview with David Bowie.Anyone who reads my book Hell and Paradise will understand why I watch interviews from the 1990s and 2000s now.  That was when I stopped watching American television.
Bowie said that, in essence, he was not a musician. Music, for him, was only a means of expressing himself. He was, rather, an artist. He also painted. Here in America, people in the arts often call themselves artists — and that word includes many forms, not just acting or music.
I began reading his lyrics. At first, I found some awful ones — lines like:
“It’s a pity she’s a whore. I hit her, she stole my wallet and ran away.”And others in the same vein. There’s a little park near my house where addicts and homeless people gather — those songs could easily belong to their world.
But Bowie had many periods. He spoke about them himself in interviews.This morning I read the lyrics of his early songs — and they were different: gentle, romantic. He was a poet. Not a prophet, but a lyrical poet. He spoke from himself, and about himself — and that made him vulnerable.
Recently I watched a Russian talk show where writer Tatyana Tolstaya advised: “Write, write — just not about yourself.”But a poet cannot do otherwise.
Why could I never fall in love with Bowie? Because he was a poet.In life, I do not love poets.A poet is vulnerability — a geography of solitude.And yet it’s impossible not to fall in love with a poet, because he is the soul, love, and talent itself.
In one of his songs Bowie writes that his whole life is the departure of angels,and that he still adores the woman he loved, but they will never speak again.
I too cannot be loved — and cannot be forgotten.People cannot live with me for long or share my everyday life.;All the men I loved never dared to marry me.
Someone once said: when the poet begins, the woman ends.Why?Because she is a queen without a court, without servants, without a country —a queen in exile, in eternal exile.And that frightens men — the strength that hides inside such vulnerability.
Heidegger wrote that the poet is a messenger between God and human beings.Perhaps that is why the poet’s path is always exile.