David Bowie by Davanna Cimino

Author:Davanna Cimino [Hyperink]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperink
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’ll survive your naked eyes

In an era when there was more shame attached to mental illness than there is today (although we still deal with this stigma up to the present day) there was little meaningful help for David’s half-brother, Terry who suffered from schizophrenia. The streak of mental illness that ran through David’s mother’s side of the family cast a shadow in David’s life from his youth onward.

in 1967, David experienced one of Terry’s full blown bouts of schizophrenia. He had taken Terry to see Cream at the Bromel Club. The loud music induced a bad reaction in Terry. David took him outside to the street to get some relief. David recounts that Terry fell to the ground. There was fire coming out of cracks on the street, and Terry was trying to hold onto the road to keep from falling into the sky. David recounts this experience, and Terry’s illness in this VH1 “Legends” (part 1) documentary on YouTube.

Terry was institutionalized at Cane Hill mental hospital. Eventually, Terry took his own life in 1983.

It was nearly a decade before David could deal with his brother’s death in terms of coming to grips with it as a source material for his work. In “Jump They Say” on the album Black Tie White Noise, Bowie seems to be trying to understand what happened. He is also empathizing with the feeling of being on the verge of self-destruction — having been on the edge himself in his days of cocaine addiction in the mid-seventies.

The feeling or idea conveyed by “Jump They Say” (and its video) is the helplessness of watching a loved one deteriorate into madness and self-destruction. There is an inevitability about the end result. Family members and clinicians watch impotently. Figures take pictures (the prying eyes of the media?) and look on with morbid interest. The man who self-destructs in the video is part David, part Terry. The overwhelming sense one gets is of onlookers contributing to, or just doing nothing to alleviate the anguish of the sufferer. At the end, the mother, the father, a man in a conductor’s hat (Terry was killed by a train), and another woman grieve. A priest makes the sign of the cross. Nothing changes the fact that this man did away with himself, and there was nothing anyone could do.

In the song, ”Survive” from the 1999 album, Hours, David addresses his brother. It is a song filled with regret at not having been “a wiser kind of guy.” He tells Terry “I should have kept you/I should have tried” and ”I love you.” It is Bowie coming to grips with a terrible tragedy in his life. His honesty and emotional openness make it a very moving song.

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