This week, perhaps it was Monday,
David Bowie, on his sixty sixth birthday, issued a new single – Where are we now? – apparently his first for some years. I was never a great fan of Bowie, Dylan and Cohen got there first and latterly I caught up with Tom Waits, but Bowie and I shared a South London childhood – as I understand it he was born, grew up in Brixton and I was born a couple of miles south and then moved slightly further south but later, in the early seventies, I lived in Beckenham where he lived while his music career took off into international stardom. A bit later I was aware of him being a fan of William Burroughs’ cut-up method of writing and aware of Ziggy Stardust but not attracted to that androgynous playfulness with sexual identity; play, yes, but too enamoured of the woman to play beyond the boundaries of heterosexuality – a sense of too many other things to be challenged, unmade and remade. And no rocket like career for me, rather a steady step by step, hardly daring to look at where I might end up, into a professional world . . . well, that is, until the bottom dropped out.
Free fall. Didn’t William Golding write a book with that title? One of his I didn’t read.
And the free fall didn’t end with a bump on some archetypal rocky bottom, rather it was as though the energy of the fall gradually ran out in a sort of floundering to get to my feet and discover the disquietude of failing to rebuild the career.
Floundering? Now that reminds me of where I was on Monday afternoon, lying, tangled up with my bike, in a Devon lane, thick with bright yellow mud – my gentle braking still managing to lock the front wheel and whisk me to the ground. And then cycling back with vivid streaks of the aforesaid yellow mud about my clothing, cycling back the seven or so miles aware of the various bruised bits – hip, shoulder, wrist.
Where are we now? Metaphorically in the favela, the Mumbai slums, working hard to keep the patchwork of canvas and corrugated iron in place, tapping out words, sending them out into the world.
What! Do you want to be (in)famous?
No. Not really but the question touches into the question of a certain sort of recognition – that I may indeed by doing something that could be valued.
Oh I see, you want the money to be rolling in?
Maybe a little but let’s keep quiet about that. A little secret to keep between ourselves. Maybe.
Where are we now?