The MYSTERIOUS SECRET of Death's Door Bring Me The Disco King , Jimmy : Tanja Stark

From Tanja Stark's Bloombury Essay "Confronting Bowie's #Mysterious Corpses" http://tanjastark.com/2014/10/20/conf... In “Bring Me The Disco King” Bowie laments his slow drawn-out ending, addressing one who had lead him through trails of money and sex to an impotent dark ending. It was arguably the same crumpled winged Angel of “Look Back in Anger” watching over a life reduced to a worthless crumpled paper in “Bring Me The Disco King”: "You promised me the ending would be clear / You’d let me know when the time was now / Don’t let me know when you’re opening the door / Stab me in the dark, let me disappear … Life wasn’t worth the balance or the crumpled paper it was written … Don't let me know we're invisible ... Spin-offs with those who slept like corpses … Close me in the dark, let me disappear / Soon there'll be nothing left of me / Nothing left to release …”. A hauntingly beautiful film clip accompanies the track; #bowie standing over his lifeless body in a dark twisted forest after a desperate search for water. Often mystically associated with the spirit (living water, baptism, rebirth, chaos) this quest for water is a recurring symbol for spiritual sustenance or thirst in his oeuvre, a theme exemplified in “Looking for Water”: “Take my hand as we go down and down / Leave it all behind nothing will be found / I'm looking for water” (2003), in the frantic search by Bowie’s tiny #GlassSpiders for spiritual nourishment in the face of maternal abandonment - “Gone, Gone the water's all gone / Mummy come back 'cause the water's all gone / If your mother don't love you then the riverbed might” (1987) - and Mishima’s black dog that blocked the flow of the waterfall in “Heat” (2013) – a stunning metaphor for the dark psyche that can impede spiritual nourishment. Bowie’s search for water in the chthonic earth is a stark counterpoint to his ungrounded space jaunts. Frustratingly, the water he uncovers quickly transforms into a thousand fractured “Reflectors” - a mirrored disco ball, its shards of light tauntingly hinting at gnostic release of the pneumatic sparks of life… but not quite. It is a concept that will reappear visually and conceptually a decade later in his collaboration with #arcadefire another band navigating the turbulent seas of mystic spirituality. Intriguingly, in the closing moments of the film clip to “Bring Me The Disco King” we see Bowie in a recording studio, candidly remarking on an apparent paranormal experience around #death with knowing assurance: “…you hear all these sounds that have just emerged since we started talking about the supernatural? That’s the sound of death ... that’s what it sounds like when you’re dead … doors opening.” ** Shortly after the release of the 2013 album, I noticed a curious detail in an image by Jimmy King, taken in the Magic Shop studio in New York where the album was covertly recorded. It’s a stunning portrait of a glowing, white shirted Bowie full of vitality, standing over the mixing controls. But this image too, continues the theme of the eternal cycle of life and death, for if one looks closely behind David’s left shoulder there is a ghostly pareidolic image of a skeleton formed by the grain of the wooden door, Shroud of Turin-like, with a claddagh crown. It brings to mind Bowie’s iconic rendition of Belgian Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ the night he killed #ziggy – a song sung by one who lives in the knowledge of mortal fragility and the other world behind the door. Tanja Stark 2015