Blackstar: David Bowie, Existential Dread, and Dark Humor
- Lavavoth
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
That tension, between knowing and not knowing, between control and surrender, is part of what makes his song "Blackstar" feel so unsettling. Whitaker (2016) reads Bowie’s work as a way of moving through existential anxiety rather than resolving it, aligning the song with a kind of Sisyphean struggle.
Let’s face it. We’re living through dark times. The possibility of extinction, whether through AI, nuclear war, environmental collapse, a supervolcano, an asteroid, a deadlier pandemic, a genetically engineered pathogen, systemic collapse, or fertility collapse seems too plausible to ignore.
I don’t want to die, that is, I don’t want to experience the process of dying, but… and as fucked as this may sound, I’m kind of fine with having cancer and that my end may be near. I’ve written about this before, but when David Bowie died, I knew the end of civilization was imminent. I get how that sounds. But for me, Bowie carried a kind of mystique that placed him somewhere between human and demigod. He felt like an evolved being who chose to incarnate here and express himself through music and art in ways that felt otherworldly. When he exited, it marked a shift. Shortly after his death came Trump’s presidency, then the pandemic, then climate change accelerating faster than expected, then AI.
Do I really believe Bowie’s death unleashed all of that? No. But I can’t shake the sense that his departure marked the beginning of something more catastrophic. And maybe his body knew, even if he didn’t, that it was time to leave.
That tension, between knowing and not knowing, between control and surrender, is part of what makes his song "Blackstar" feel so unsettling. Whitaker (2016) reads Bowie’s work as a way of moving through existential anxiety rather than resolving it, aligning the song with a kind of Sisyphean struggle. Becker (1973) similarly describes human existence as fundamentally paradoxical, suspended between the bestial and the divine (as cited in Temple & Gall, 2018). It’s this split that gives rise to dread. If we were only one or the other, there would be no tension to navigate.
"I've always known. I tend to be a little cunty sometimes. And I have pretty good fashion taste..."
Temple and Gall (2018) describe anxiety as emerging from that exact condition, from having to live within both dimensions at once. Heintzelman and King (2014) extend this further, suggesting that meaning is both necessary and increasingly difficult to sustain. In that sense, existence becomes a constant negotiation between meaning and its absence. As Heery (2015) puts it, paradox is the experience of holding opposites at once, loss and meaning, presence and absence. And it’s within that tension that something like understanding, or at least endurance, begins to take shape.
I see that tension in my own body, which seems to know something I don’t. Despite my efforts to stay healthy, it’s produced not one but two cancers. Since my diagnoses, things keep breaking down. I got Covid for the first time. I broke a bone for the first time. I hurt everywhere, especially in my heart and mind. I need hip surgery, hand surgery, a thyroidectomy. Each day, life takes a little more of me. My reproductive organs. My breasts. My thyroid. My hope. The version of my life that once felt self-actualized, fulfilled, even a little privileged, is being stripped away piece by piece.
Incidentally, I just came across news that may alter my ability to complete my doctorate. Piece by piece, my life comes undone.
Despite all this and moments of utter hopelessness, I live as fully as I can until it’s my time to go. For me, that means carving trails on my property, making art, writing blog posts, spending time with my cats and with the wild birds who migrate here for the summer and those who stay year-round, and hopefully finding part-time work again in my field, supporting others through education.
It’s become clear to me that the only evidence I ever existed may be this blog, my little legacy, tucked away in a quiet corner of the internet. Maybe someone stumbles across it, lingers for a breath, unsure what to make of it. Is it a prank? A strange experiment? A lonely woman inventing realities? And so I slip into the inevitable void of obscurity, too inconsequential to register any statistical significance.
Thankfully, I can quell some of the existential dread with a little dark humor. I love to laugh at the absurdity of life, at my egoic self, at my eventual death, and with others. Not too long ago, I came across former model turned comedian Mario Adrion. Originally from the small town of Eisenbach [1], Germany (the same German state where Hans is from), he now lives in California with his “Jewish wife,” as he often calls her, which, coupled with the fact that he’s from Germany, gives his Nazi jokes an edge that’s hard to ignore. His comedy is unapologetically brash, explicit, unleashed, and well-timed, though he occasionally tosses in a “jokey, joke” as if to put the audience at ease. It's comedy gold. Not surprisingly, Hans approves.
Notes
[1] Or as Mario calls it in a rapid "Hitlerish" voice "Eisenbach im Hochschwarzwald (!),"
References
Heery, M. (2015). A humanistic perspective on bereavement. In K. J. Schneider, J. F. Pierson, & J. F. T. Bugental (Eds.), The handbook of humanistic psychology: theory, research, and practice (2nd ed., pp. 535-548). SAGE Publications.
Heintzelman, S. J., & King, L. A. (2014). Life is pretty meaningful. The American Psychologist, 69(6), 561–574. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035049
Temple, M., & Gall, T. L. (2018). Working Through Existential Anxiety Toward Authenticity: A Spiritual Journey of Meaning Making. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 58(2), 168–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167816629968
Whitaker, A. (2016). David Bowie: Transience and potentiality. NeuroQuantology, 14(2)