“#imablackstar”
On his birthday on January 8th, 2016 David Bowie released his final album Blackstar, and died two days later on January 10th, at the age of 69. The album possessed the lyric “Where the fuck did Monday go?” on the fifth track, “Girl Loves Me”, -which was the morning of his death. The album’s two video releases arrived in tandem the two months prior, with “Blackstar” premiering on November 19th, 2015, -and the harrowingly predictive “Lazarus” arriving on December 17th. In tandem with these releases David Bowie launched imablackstar.com, which worked as a constellation that formed itself into the star on the album cover, where each star contained the image and/or links of anyone who participated by providing any artistic input they chose with the hashtag #imablackstar on twitter and instagram, by uploading their twitter statement or instagram post to randomly appear as tiny points of light in the star scape. To become one of these stars, people could choose any of the star reliefs provided and apply them to their own image upload. These points of light were curated and had a limited life-span to appear on the imablackstar html page; -they were constantly changing. The general public using the hashtag uploaded their own artworks, and the site became either a contingent declaration of their own artistic identity and/or fan affiliation, or homage to the man himself. What follows is the requisite impact that fan feedback art format had on one participating individual, for it was a reversed feedback based on fan input, commemorating the artists’s output, -a reversal on the purveyance and function of the artist where his audience produced back.
Everything is perspicuous in hindsight…
As a birthday gift to David Bowie, someone self published and launched a book for him as a gift on his #imablackstar page, totally unaware, since David kept it a complete secret from both press and public, just how close to death from liver cancer he was. As a silhouette dancer who existed as her own book site wallpaper, the screenshots she could upload as artistic expression were literally endless; -a perfect image accompaniment combined with the stars to the promo page link that provided a free upload of the book, every time she tweeted the hashtag.
-And, she was off, getting the book converted and posted as an iBook for David’s birthday. There was a 24 hour delay for the book to appear in iBooks; -the book was part of her promotion and available as a free download from the #imablackstar page January 9th. She continued the launch until it was announced on Monday morning that David Bowie had died, after which the curation of the site graduated to becoming purely for memories of David and dedications allowing the fan base to pay homage and grieve.
On the day he died, David Bowie was presented with a book. It was up for perhaps 24 hours before he died. A review of “Blackstar”’s lyrics in combination with its visual accompaniment shows that this is exactly what he predicted would happen, that an individual would appear that day to replace him and that the advent would be a revelatory book. The video’s symbolism meshed to nigh perfection with the book’s symbolism and events, which is what precipitated the author to act.
It was an effort in contravention of her own situational circumstances and artistic intention, -for it meant self publishing a first draft that had never been subject to outside editorial, and as such shouldn’t have been published yet. All of which was redundant when it came to David Bowie’s deliberate combination of an album launch with his birthday, that actually allowed her a means to present him with a book already replete with the allusions inside his harrowing video, -a video that nearly made her too afraid to present at all. But fear is not new. It is the combative agent that furnishes and refines courage. Courage was nothing new. Her courage had been quenched and tempered in a manner that would kill most people. (Nonetheless, she persisted.)
David made the event of his death the ultimate work of death as art. He planned it meticulously. In that light the confluence of symbolism and such a conjunction with an actual tome that presents life as art, the conjunction is worth examination and inspection. In the “Blackstar” video, David appeared with a book he treated as revelatory, with a star on the cover. She already had painted that cover herself, the same five pointed star, -with a woman emerging out of it. It was incumbent on her to follow through.
It was around seven in the morning when the announcement of David Bowie’s death appeared on twitter. She was there because she was re-commencing the book launch using the site in earnest; it was Day 2. She really had hope that if she continued with multiple posts daily the fact that a book had been published and launched in tandem with the album for his birthday, -one that possessed so many linking elements to the “Blackstar” video itself; -that circumstantial array would be enough for whomever was curating the #imablackstar posts (only what was chosen appeared on the page, and hers appeared at frequency), that David Bowie would probably get wind of the book.
She had delivered the book personally to one other individual before this: Bono. She was fairly certain that when she delivered the book at the halfway mark that he had acknowledged it, using her “sincerely” line in her opening letter word for word as the title of track ten on Songs of Innocence. She had emailed it to one other individual who figured prominently in the book by way of his archive site email address (Billy Corgan), and had no idea if that had reached the intended recipient.
David Bowie contrived his album launch in such a manner that he became her third intended. But before that she planned to give the final draft to the book’s first recipient for Christmas (her second Christmas present to him). It would arrive, if Andy kept his promise to her, as a gift delivered by way of Andy. It was a fair certainty that Bono and Andy would see each other over the holidays, for Bono spent his Christmases in Dublin, and Andy was Guggi’s brother, brother to Bono’s best friend in the world. There was even a strong indication that Bono had read the book by way of Andy’s surprise appearance on U2’s tour within a month or so of her delivery, literally on the day she said she’d return to the United States. If Bono had read her book, he would have known it was Andy she met in Dublin, by way of his description. It was Andy who had given her the secret location of U2’s then studio, and that is how she’d first met Bono in 1999, -which she’d done to present him with a potential God proof using art theory and song lyrics, -that expressed God in the Feminine. He was her first stop because her observation had all begun with the dawning awareness that Bono was expressing his belief in a feminine Holy Spirit back in 1991 and 1993. It appeared to her that Bono’d named both his sons after her father beginning with the first mere days after their encounter in 1999, but who was to say?
At the halfway mark in 2011, her book draft ended where she’d met Bono personally, though the last chapter had been pre-written and there were other insertions for chapters using previous writing to show what they would likely be, and chapter summaries for every one else. It was all laid out. It was her priority that upon completion, Bono should be the first recipient of the final draft; -naturally. And once again, it was Andy who provided a way. The delivery made it to Dublin on December 23rd.
Bowie’s album release date appearing in tandem gave her the time to fulfill both goals. She could finalize the delivery to Ireland (which actually went to naught), then work on the self-publishing of her book in time for David’s birthday. The draft would be satisfactory thanks to the final review she’d made in order to send it to Bono. It all went according to plan. And then less than 24 hours after she launched her iBook, David Bowie died.
Bono’s opening letter that time ‘round was a rather depressing one, for it had a full explanation of how Andy had ended up being her sole delivery option. The events leading to that circumstance were not kind; -they’d involved being pinned to her own bathroom door with a nine inch knife blade puncturing the skin at her temple, January, 2015, six days after she received her copyright for the book.
She was, ironically (if irony sublimates itself to the point of keening pain), referencing “Blackstar” in her last missive to Bono, with this forewarning:
"We have her encountering the dead space man to start and (more or less) canonizing him. Sadly for me this points to a sense of culpability, i.e., Bowie's mortality and the what-ifs and whether he never encounters this book before he's dead (the headless skeleton gravitating towards the eclipse). I feel this more strongly with David Bowie than any other artist walking.”
Bono had first met her twelve days after a solar eclipse hit over 98 percent totality over Dublin, an event that would not be seen there again until September 23, 2090, nearly 100 years away. The lyric couplet Bono had written that precipitated her being in his presence eight years after it was released, and indeed precipitated the writing of the entire book was “They say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by the moon, y’know I don’t see you, when she walks in the room.”
"Bowie's themes haven't played out in the short run, they are long, -very long. They are recycled, with elements from both Heathen and Reality. Since they're already the purview of Chapter 27 you may as well read it, then you'll understand the significance in full. He was expressing those themes with the same sense of desperation then. He has only honed his target since. It would be nice (a boon or blessing) if you could take such signals from someone you respect, if you could register they might dually apply? Maybe you don't recognize what forcing me to bypass you has in its potential consequences, but it certainly ups the ante I won't be 'seen'. I wish that had some prospect of culturing a sense of culpability in your sensibilities the way it does in mine, in terms of what it might mean to [Bowie] to remain blind.” -Letter quote from the letter to Bono that Andy received with notice on a flashdrive December 23rd (he was her friend in Facebook, and he'd rpomised to deliver it).
"Bowie has played out the precise elements that were his pivotal play in the feedback loop in the book, perhaps the greatest play in proving it to Billy." - ditto.
The moment she saw that David had died, what she’d expressed intellectually only days earlier struck her as a tsunami of unremitting emotional pain that stayed with her for over a month. She sobbed at his death as she’d never cried for anyone, for she’d failed to reach him on time. All she could murmur through her tears was “I’m Sorry”, over and over. She felt she’d been warned much too long ago, her prescience spawned by his words thirteen years earlier: “Soon there will be nothing left of me, nothing left to release”. The import dawned then as fear that she would never reach him before he died. Never reach him after the pleading earnestness to reveal all that she was; -the ocular observer whose existence performed as a little relief tapestry to implicate a feminine God. -After all the obligation she felt to his two albums that had formed the final substance of her proof to Billy from the greatest pulpit on high, she felt indebted to him beyond her ability to express. She had worked feverishly for the release on his birthday. But her priority had gone to the wrong person. She’d had it within her capacity to launch the book almost as soon as the imablackstar page had launched. Had she given that priority, instead of waiting over a month to commemorate David’s birthday with precision, he might have had over a month to read it. Instead he was clinging to his last 24 hours. She’d appeared too late. It beyond blew her mind that it had boiled down to a miss spanning 24 hours. It was 24 hours as the worst lapse in existence.
It proved no boon to her emotions to arrive at the consideration that Bowie had intentionally staged his death, announcing the appearance of a book when he died with too much precision to ignore, while he’d kept his dying to illness a complete secret.
"Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
I’m a blackstar, I’m a star's star, I’m a blackstar"
-Exactly what he’d gotten his audience to do with the #imablackstar hashtag, declare the blackstar as themselves. Only one of those audience members, however, had used it to launch a book. David was nothing if not prescient. He’d released “Valentine’s Day” on The Next Day, -a song about a high school shooter five years before the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting took place on Valentine’s Day in Florida, though it really is a chicken or the egg question as to whether the song’s existence was incorporated into the shooter’s intention as per his choice of the day.
Bowie’s impact on her with that album was incalculable. It was the furthest he ever delved her, though these were by and large tucked away on the B-sides’ subsequent release, The Next Day Extra. “The Next Day” was not. With the title track video (the third video release for the album, with “Valentine’s Day” arriving second), he’d impelled the writing of perhaps her book’s darkest chapter, the final one (“Cocoon”), right in the middle, -right after the chapter depicting the ritual sacrifice of her soul. He’d succeeded, with that video, in implicating her killer on an arch-typical scale, expanding to implicate the religion that had produced him, and in doing so, brought the implication to that scale.
Her upbringing was so unique as to make it 1 in 7 plus billion odds. The bifurcation began on this one point: her father believed he was a living prophet in the Jewish/Christian tradition. In fact he believed he was both Elijah and John the Baptist, for Jesus had implied these two individuals were one and the same, and there is a body of theology that believes this same prophet will presage Jesus’ Second Coming at The End of the World. The only individual she was aware of in recent history to believe himself to be the same was the revolutionary Louis Riel (whose flag of Metis identity became the infinity sign, blue on white -Lewis was her father’s middle name). He also regarded himself as the Sun of Malachi. (Imagine having to make that your opening statement for sake of explanation to the most famous singer in the world for why you have the perspective that you do, and live with the outcomes. Really Bono couldn’t have been more generous in his way.)
That is who her father raised her to believe he was, and by the time she reached adulthood, it was her father who executed her in ritual sacrifice she realized much later may have been naturally impelled by his faith, as perhaps even the only outcome one would expect from an individual of such despotic purity their forbearance excluded even blood. If one were to recognize The Garden of Eden as the theological treatise that gave us the male Yahweh to replace El and do away with his goddess wife Asherah (an Oedipal author incentivized switcheroo), -a cosmic divorce requited in total feminine subjugation that did away, one by one, with her symbols (the sacred tree of life, her very place of worship being the high places as tree groves with a sacred tree, so ridding Canaan of the religion was not really different than ecological holocaust), repositories (the Garden), and knowledge (the serpent of wisdom being her totem), where, in fact, did it have to go?
Did her father really have no clue when he named her the sea dragon, Chaos? Did he equally have no clue when he ritually destroyed her? Did he have any clue of the implications in naming her after a Biblical prostitute?
Your accompanying soundtrack to set this stage is PJ Harvey’s trifecta (performed as the encore in Moscow in 2016 at 01:01:02), which I suggest you listen to in this light. And when the book is over, I suggest listening to it a second time, which will compress more than a couple millennia of religious arch-types into a lifetime. The trifecta of the submergence of the feminine’s true voice is “Down by the Water”, “To Bring You My Love”, and “River Anacostia”. I suggest that you interpolate that juxtapose with a term you are going to learn eventually and then see until you tire of it, the universal unconscious sea.
-So what was impressed upon her looking at Catholicism’s true economic stock and trade (the only stock and trade there is, and as such, the reason we have dogmas), the commodification of reproduction by the harnessing and control of female sexuality as commodity, that is graphically portrayed by David Bowie’s “The Next Day”?
“The video depicts Bowie performing in a bar called The Decameron—reference to the Boccaccio's masterpiece known also for its satirical depiction of clergymen—and populated with religious figures and half-naked women.” -wikipedia
That his target was not actually Catholicism, but Christianity’s inversion by the ultimate secular force, inversion of a religion to service the economy with wage slavery via over-reproduction enforced by ideological dogma absent everything to do with faith, seemed missed by most people. Is there any recognition that the commodification of reproduction to enforce over-reproduction is the very inversion of creation and procreation? That it reduces the subjugated sex to prostitutes? Are you ready to register yet it bequeathed us CAFOs and the end of the world, and was founded with the Garden of Eden?
When Marion Cotillard collapses and suffers the stigmata as one of these prostitutes who only exists to sexually service the priesthood (virtually the only population of women existent in the film apart from the three apparently canonized, and all three appear to hearken ritual sacrifice of the feminine, either by being Joan of Arc, or a woman in Spanish garb close to the period of that apex of religious witch hysteria, the Holy Inquisition, in its geographical/temporal heyday, -or the eyeless incarnation of St. Lucy, who by tradition was executed after being outed as Christian by a suitor who felt spurned because she wanted to remain a virgin); -when Marion collapses in her own blood after being obliged against her wishes to dance with Gary Oldman’s priest, he turns upon the prophet/singer Bowie portrays in the church cum brothel entertaining the whole affair and shouts in sheer outrage: “You see this?! This is your doing! You call yourself a prophet!” The light goes on, the jig is up, and the participants all join in flogging the culprit prophet.
“I can't answer why
I'm not a gangster
But I can tell you how
I'm not a flam star
We were born upside-down
I'm a star star
Born the wrong way 'round
I'm not a white star
I'm a Blackstar
I'm not a gangster
I'm a Blackstar
I'm a Blackstar
I'm not a pornstar
I'm not a wandering star
I'm a Blackstar
I'm a Blackstar”
What ultimate inversion did her father perpetrate? For that, you will have to read the book, for it is unbearable to utter otherwise.
“On the day of execution
Only women kneel and smile
At the center of it all
Your eyes”
For only the woman will survive to resurrect, as only in woman is the perpetuation of man, a perpetuation based on regeneration through bleeding every month.
“In the villa of Ormen
Stands a solitary candle
At the center of it all
Your eyes”
David, dear David, first wrote this verse as “in the villa of all men”. The villa of the Catholic priesthood, the priesthood of all three Abrahamic monotheisms that spring from the Yahweh tree. Ormen is a real village, and the closest translation of the word is “serpent”. And again, as per the ritual’s permutations of subjecting the dragon sea serpent, Chaos, equating Creation as the introduction of Order (Jewish mythic tradition, among others), and St. George and the Dragon, and St. Patrick’s introduction of Catholicism to Ireland equating with the banishment of all of Ireland’s serpents, the name of this Norwegian village is rooted in a myth of forced conversion to Christianity where the victorious missionary king shoved a serpent down down the esophagus of a heretic king’s belly. It ate its way out of his insides, killing him. So the victorious king then names the defeated king’s longship he then took for his own “Ormen”, perhaps as close as Vikings got to irony. Basically the story is the final permutation, arriving at the ultimate inversion of the original symbolism of the serpent, -so fully inverted now it’s the killing device for refusal to convert from the old religion. That’s her location, the location of Bowie’s subject in this song. And yes, it bears a canny resemblance to being born backward.
The video opens on a jagged moonscape with the deceased astronaut whose bejeweled skull is found by a woman with a tail, who returns it to her all woman seance to be venerated, homage to the canonized dead, -David Bowie himself. The bereaved skeleton floats through space, gravitating towards the eclipse. The trance like jittering of the group reflects on dance as meditative trance, its basic stimulation of the limbic system that rejuvenates and produces longevity, the real reason we do it. But it is also juxtaposed with Bowie’s buttons for eyes, which seem like a fairly straight reference to the movie Coraline, where the buttons for eyes represent an enchantment that is entrapment of the soul divorced from its body. Like a silent film absent sound, the dance is evacuated of meaning. -The trance dance is all you have left to you, without the book, that is. Bowie’’s heralding of the Blackstar book is not signified by the appearance of the Golgotha scarecrows, the moment of enlightenment is connoted in seeing eye to eye with the brunette who could be his daughter age wise, the woman with a tail. (She even has some similarity to the woman depicted on this book’s cover.) This after all is the substance of the chorus, the center of it all is the eyes of a feminine subject. By timing and situation the lyrics are tied to the visual implication of the video that the eyes are those of the woman who came to procure the skull, -hence a feminine object. The scarecrows present a misrepresentation of the truth.
“The book's entire development depicts the arising of a form of collective consciousness (presumed to be largely unconscious) inside the vehicle of one person's perspective, -again, that of the book's central female character. This means that it is only her perception (her sight) that imparts any sense of collectivism at all. This is depicted as a third eye as of p. 792 (lyrically it also appeared at p. 1022). The concept really comes into itself in Chapter 23 (p. 1355), where "I of the Mourning" (coupled with Vasily's Plate XI) -deftly conflated the feedback loop occurring inside the artists' work (which only its object was capable of observing (hence her eyes at the center of it all)) with what she presumed was its implication, namely the God Proof, which was only apparent from her singular perspective observing the collective feedback loop that was occurring in so many artists' lyrics. Here in Vasily's depiction we have the ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail with the all seeing eye in the center, as a depiction implicating or stating God. The "I of the Mourning" is the 'I of the Radio", i.e., it is coming through the radio, -while the image of the eye of the radio is the all seeing eye/ouroboros/God.” - Pamela Williams
-Yes, that’s me, describing what this book is designed to do, and did to one individual as a proof exercise, -whose name was Billy Corgan. It’s why we have the declaration "I'm the great I Am", -given the transpiration of the God Proof in between via the feedback interaction and what it articulated (YHWH literally advents in Chapter 23, 25 (p. 1596 (hyperlink)) and subsequent in the feedback at Chapter 27).” In his position as an inspired medium, Bowie was performing an integral function in the existential living God Proof that this book attempts to lay out. And that integral function, performed by a spectrum of artists without them knowing it, was the form of her resurrection.
Now onto the buttons for eyes: “[T]he interesting irony (if you happen to derive amusement from the soul crushing varietal), is the manner in which the book's female character attempted to [prove the nature of her existence [to Corgan]]. She asserts, by taking over Billy Corgan's chat forum during his Machina Mystery contest (2000 - Chapter 25), that it will be provable that she is "June" herself in real time thanks to how her advent on his forum will actually get depicted subsequently by the musical artists she has already declared to previously exist inside her existing feedback loop, because actually his much loved concept is universal. Despite the fact that it was a purely intuitive assertion at that threshold, David Bowie was on her list of "connected" artists. Now what's amazing about that, is that there was only one artist with two separate albums where she couriered her subsequent analysis of the albums to Billy personally, meaning that this 1, 2 punch was perhaps the most effective proof of her advent on his forum. These were David Bowie's Heathen (p. 1773) and Reality (p. 1825). […] Now what is heartbreaking about the matter is that his blindness to the existing circumstances, even while he (perhaps unconsciously) became her existing centrality in proving it, was fully depicted on Heathen itself, which means it is fully described and delineated inside the book in Chapter 27, -she wrote this prior to when the theme was revisited in terms of still being trapped with buttons for eyes in the 'Blackstar" video itself, (with the element in “ The Next Day" (0:42) video of a woman carrying her eyes also being a progression that was being written about in real time about this theme's progression in Bowie's lyrics, (interpolated with the lyrics of others))." It is a depiction referencing not just the album artwork on Heathen, but St. Lucy/Lucia. St. Lucy is the Patron Saint of the blind.
The Golgotha three scarecrows in the wheat field also have buttons for eyes over bandages where they have none, and all three are male. The book conveys an actual mission on the part of the female protagonist to contact three male songwriters, Bono, Nick Cave, and Billy Corgan. Nick Cave was sympathetic enough to offer an eloquent public reply letter that she was deluded. That effectively dropped him off the map, -which is a misnomer in the sense that his inspirational current remained the same until the present day. The other two responded quite differently, as the book depicts, meaning they appeared to respond to her, and are still responding to this day. As individuals inspired in a manner very similar to Bowie at the time, unaware that they had a singular object in common, and oblivious of vantage of their feminie object who existed as the eye of the beholder, they also were blind, with buttons for eyes. Yet as the voice of the radio, they are the object of veneration of every listener, and so depicted as substitutes in so hallowed a position as Golgotha. They are a substitution that acts as an evacuation of all meaning, -as perspective is only imbued by the vantage of their unknown object. This is conveyed as being scarecrows not people, mere imitations of life, and mere imitations of the dance as (again) a painful imitative attempt at meaningless sensuality. Their unknown object, however, actually was a dancer, professionally enough to provide her own wallpaper for her website.
We are not finished with the Blackstar yet, as it represents (as it should) the reciprocal duality that lies at the heart of this plot, this dance of ages; -there cannot be one without the other. The God proof lies in between, and only obtains relief in the consent of the other; -or in this particular relief, it only became truly potential when Billy at last affirmed he was, as she’d pleaded to him from the very outset, - when he in turn chose to bear witness to her position as witness of the God proof (a whole ‘nother volume of explanation, but again, this is thoroughly referenced in the communications she made to him historically that are memorialized in the book). It took Billy eighteen years to acknowledge her as his object in a manner other people could see. It took Bono seventeen. - That is a very long time to exist a scarecrow, perpetuating the world of the blind.
In the book, although represented by the eclipse and the blood moon and “star”, the protagonist is not represented by the “black star”; -in the musical feedback the coinage ends up landing on Billy himself, and he himself adopted it, if in a veiled way.
Examine the lyrics to “Tarantula” released on 07/07/07 (which was his joking rejoinder that the “White Spyder” he’d landed on was a big MFer).
“He trod the sacred ground, and cried loud into the crowd, I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangsta”
“Billy knew exactly what he was doing, who his persona in white was (that it was a feminine is understood by the full analysis, and targeted the book's protagonist based on her couriers to him prior (Chapter 29, p. 2140)). The closure "if it's a white hot soul they want, it's a black heart they'll get" -implied himself onstage (whereas the white on stage was herself, as expressed as sound via the feedback loop), which is practically unquestionable when you consider "7 Shades of Black" (in fact he explicitly declared in interview that the song was an indulgent personal foray into his dark side). Billy already presented as the black star quite deliberately, since she'd identified herself to him long since as the white one (but also as the personification of the blood moon and the eclipse). In fact she'd disclosed to him as part of her feedback exercise (her deliberate choice of advent as "June" and making it a matter between "Glass" and "June", that the encounter had (if loosely) appeared in the feedback as well, with his persona appearing as the "black star" in "American Gothic" (p. 1671). -Which is what Billy went on to name his next EP, when she resumed contact after a two year hiatus (p. 2188), and he used his music to respond to her personally for the first time. Bowie is, in this perspective, assuming a moniker that already transpired with the "male side" in terms of... (-well to find that out you're just going to have to read the book).”
Last but not least, “it was Billy who came closest to actively and personally engaging the book's female character (which will remain private). The first time they ever met in physical reality and recognized one another, the book's female character was wearing a black and white horizontally striped shirt (p. 1680). This became Billy Corgan's most central wardrobe choice for years afterward, and is still his adoption ’til this day. -Hence the central scarecrow in the field makes rather uncanny (but perfect) sense.”
And finally, thanks to the quest to reach Billy, the book’s subject ended up living in the United States. It was about as harrowing and hollow a promise as this verse in “Blackstar” looks and feels when Bowie performs it: “I can’t answer why (I’m a backstar), just go with me (I’m not a film star), I’ma take you home (I’m a blackstar), Take your passport and shoes (I’m not a popstar)”
Bowie’s death rang through her cosmos like the final death knell of hope, for neither of the others had responded in a way anyone else could see (yet), and there was no sign they ever would. With Bowie’s final recording session coming so closely on the heels of the threat to her life and the torrid, wretched months that followed, it felt like a last step on the threshold of a grave, if that grave was existing, as opposed to dying, a year so harrowing she mistook “Lazarus” as more of an allusion to that happening (did not see it coming). The painful truth was she felt certain that now that he was dead, all hope of ever being able to prove what she was vanished with him. -But upon dying, he finally got to know who and what she was, and what all the obstacles were that had stopped her, -that they hadn’t been her, where the betrayal, to her mind, had lain, -but he’d already told her that: “I know something’s very wrong, the pulse returns to the prodigal sons…”
When her last grandparent died, her paternal grandmother, it had an accompanying sense of peace. She didn’t mourn her grandmother too deeply, because now her grandmother might finally have a chance at awareness that finally got to know her for who she was. The odd painful truth was that she might know her better dead, than she could have ever possibly known her when she was alive. In that respect, the separation actually seemed less. But because she didn’t reach David on time, there was no peace in death, only separation, and the loss only brought immeasurable pain, because he’d died with buttons for eyes, and she’d been so unbearably close to changing that outcome. The only relief was in the thought that now that he’d died, he no longer had buttons for eyes.
Her reverence was no different than the reverence and burden imparted to and by the skull, its retrieval was hers. (As per “Lazarus”, and the burden of the skull put on her back in “Blackstar”, this belonged to the woman under his deathbed, who represented the woman he was never able to reach on his deathbed, -the woman under the bed, -and all that panicked writing.) To her, the implication of his final choice to act in the moment of death in declaration of her truth, to act as those who knew of her had never yet deigned to do with the privilege of their lives before them all those intervening years, the faith to do so with buttons for eyes, was an act that would ring beyond death and time. She was closer to him dead than she was to the ones still living. It was true isolation, and death was her true home.
But he’d tricked her into self-publishing when she was far too scared to do it, and tricked her by turning it into a reverse feedback conjunction with his death. (Billy Corgan's online Machina Mystery/"June" contest in 2000 was also a deliberate reverse engineeering of the feedback where the fans were the object of the exercise, by the way, - with reverse feedback being his term for it.) And because he did that, there is now a chance for the first time that it is possible for others to see.
