In 2013 I travelled to London to do two things: visit the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and amble around Northwest London for an afternoon. Both activities constituted pilgrimages of a sort. My insatiable appetite for pretty things Bowie made visiting the exhibition a necessity, and while in London, I noted that the manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s avant-garde Murphy (1938) was due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. So, I resolved to travel to the English capital, spend a day communing with Bowie bric-a-brac, and then the next day, old Picador copy of Murphy in hand, undertake my walking tour of Beckett’s West London traipsing ground by heading down the King’s Road from Sloane Square, once I had emerged from the latter’s tube station.
The Irishman’s novel, written in the borough of Chelsea between 1935 and 1936, features squares, streets, and pubs that still stand. The intention was to reread it quickly, in situ, before attending the auction. It was on this afternoon that the seeds of Bowie, Beckett, and Being: The Art of Alienation were sown.
Recalling the day now, my mind was full of David Bowie. The visit to the exhibition the previous day had fired the synapses in a multitude of directions, not least the seismic impact Bowie had in transforming English culture. Although an implicitly collaborative effort by a range of artists in different disciplines, Bowie had been a key player in cultural change, blowing away the post-war cobwebs of Victorian values and ushering in a more imaginative, creative, and vibrant artistic culture through song, stage, and film.
Admiring the depth of David Bowie’s influence, it was hard to focus on Samuel Beckett landmarks as my route took me first to Paultons Square and then to Gertrude Street, where Beckett had both socialised and resided. As I passed the site of Westwood and McClaren’s Sex, the bondage clothing and nascent punk emporium that both had conceived and opened in the 1970s, I was quickly reminded that the locale was not just the site of Beckett’s’ ’30s dolour but had been a charged psychogeography for a host of subsequent artists.
Strides from the mouth of Stadium Street, where Samuel Beckett painted a verbal image of Murphy, horoscope in hand, studying the heavens in perpetuity, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Brian Jones rehearsed in the kitchen of their flat at 102 Edith Grove as the Stones began to roll. A decade and a half thereafter, Joe Strummer looked down on Edith Grove from his fourth-floor flat in Whistler Walk, on the World’s End Estate, built in 1972. From this vantage point, he could also see the Thames embankment, which inspired “London Calling“, the dystopian 1980s masterpiece of urban disintegration and alienation, featuring the line “I live by the river,” which implies homeless necessity but also bespeaks its historical antecedent, council housing.
As I arrived at the Worlds End, these artists were united for a moment in the space of the adjacent Themes embankment in my mind: Joe Strummer in song, The Rolling Stones in Crispin Woodgate’s famous embankment photo shoot, and Samual Beckett in his admiration of poet Nancy Cunard’s “Parallax“, which features the lines:
“By the Embankment I counted the grey gulls
Nailed to the wind above a distorted tide.”
Here, the young Samuel Beckett identifies with Nancy Cunard’s windswept sentiment as he endures the misery of his long gray London sojourn in which he “drifted, acquiescent”, fearful for his future with no direction home. For my part, I realised that although the immediate creative energy of these multifarious artistic interventions had long since dissipated, the spirit of their composition persisted in image, song and poem. As I juggled the temporally distinct yet spatially proximate artists in the grey matter, I understood that they all remain perpetually present in an atemporal psychic space nonetheless determined by a shared timely concern: the insipid and soporific drain of middle-class conformity.
Moreover, they were also at one in their collective resistance to urban gentrification and their shared awareness of its role in accelerating capital fetishization. The Rolling Stones’ dour demeanour, Joe Strummer’s rasping provocateur, and Samuel Beckett’s fictional misanthrope all represent codes of resistance to urban renewal that also seeks to remove and erase the subaltern. Yet the vitality of these figures, fictional and real, who had once epitomised a thorn in the side of the clean dream of consumer culture, had by now certainly waned.
At the same time, however, I understood that their art continues to trace the contours of an unresolved conflict: all bespeak an antagonism that still requires redress. At that moment, alive by the river, Murphy’s rejection of normative life, The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” (written on the occasion of the Grosvenor Square riots protesting the war in Vietnam), and the Clash’s entire catalogue came together in my mind in psychic proxemics of alienation and collective rejection of five decades’ worth of the English status quo.
Having such an august cast of unruly characters in my head, I thought of David Bowie, the arch-English disruptor and genre-bending revolutionary with empathy for the dispossessed equal to that of Irish Sam. Bowie, too, had been in the West London vicinity, abandoning the World’s End before Strummer suggested living downriver was a post-apocalyptic inevitability. In his 2016 article “Bowie’s Unwitting Role“, Paul Gorman relates that before fashion designer and music promoter Malcolm McLaren renamed the boutique he created with Vivienne Westwood “Sex”, it was called “Too Fast to Live”, and one day, in 1974, Bowie wandered in and paused to admire a painting that was for sale.
It depicted the damaged body of a rocker thrown from his motorcycle. McLaren noted that Bowie “looked utterly alone and miserable” and said aloud to no one in particular, “A year ago, I would have bought that” before wandering out of the boutique. When McLaren chanced upon the singer again in Los Angeles in the 1980s, he mentioned their earlier encounter. Bowie confirmed that his life had been in turmoil as he wrestled with the aftershock of the Ziggy Stardust phenomenon while recording what would become Diamond Dogs. McLaren recalls: “he told me that he felt at the time the only way for him to survive was to escape.”
Bowie had been renting around the corner on Oakley Street, but shortly after visiting McLaren’s shop, he left England, never to live there again. Presumably, he forewent purchasing the painting because he knew he was getting out. Always the perennial outsider, Bowie was departing nation and home, Dedalus-like, never to return, the psychic burden of his art of alienation requiring that he take flight to Los Angeles before moving to Berlin and eventually to New York, all the while attempting to articulate the sense of a world teetering towards extinction.
With Sex on my mind, I was reminded of its biggest seller, an outsized splash-paint-customized dress shirt featuring different Situationist slogans, such as “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (beneath the paving stones, the beach!) and “L’ennui est contre-révolutionnaire” (boredom is counter-revolutionary), each embossed with the image of Karl Marx. I imagined Marx arising from his tomb in Highgate Cemetery, his ghost floating across the Thames towards the World’s End Estate, and he responding to Johnny Rotten’s cry of “no future” with the hearty rejoinder, “Ich hab’s dir doch gesagt” (I told you so). In Jacque Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993), he deploys “hauntology” to describe the return of the repressed; the figures, images, and signs that remerge and represent the unresolved conflicts of political economy such that “no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.”
The aural proxemics of Beckett, the Clash, and the Rolling Stones brought a poetic impulse that quickened through my veins, but I remembered that Derrida was now a spectre, that Beckett and Strummer, too, were ghosts. To his credit, Bowie reemerged from a decade’s absence in fine form, excoriating the Church on 2013’s The Next Day and wondering wistfully where, indeed, we were in a world gone awry. But at the time, and although it was a welcome return, it did not seem a particularly important one.
I knew Bowie had gone the way of all flesh when, on 16 January 2016, I saw a text message from my sister that said, “Noooo.” When I studied the video for “Lazarus“, in which Bowie reappears and proceeds to struggle towards Heaven, I knew I was watching and listening to an artistic resurrection, the dead arisen, a star reborn, writhing on his pallet as Jesus on his crucifix. Captured in this magnificent video, he was ghost and yet not; rather a spectre returned to articulate the unfinished business of finitude. His manner of going needed somehow to be witnessed, but how and in what form?
In March 2020, I found myself, like most of the world, in the Covid pandemic lockdown. Unable to leave the apartment and keen to start a project that reflected our collective predicament, I returned to Samuel Beckett and David Bowie. I was drawn to Beckett’s parting narrative, a delicate triptych called Stirrings Still (1986-89) that moves from confinement to release to finally embrace finitude. I realised that although Beckett would not necessarily welcome Covid, he would not be appalled by it either – merely mildly surprised that such an impending man-made catastrophe had taken so long to materialize.
FBowie, for his part, appeared to take his own three steps to Heaven in the form of “Where are We Now?” Blackstar and “Lazarus”; each act in his parting drama suggesting that the sense of dread increasing therein might be universally shared, and his departure but a mirror of our future already gone. As I wondered if Covid would kill us all or if we would pant on until our unsustainable blueprint for living generated one final, unrevivable catastrophe, I felt “poem scum” begin to foment again. Could it be turned into philosophy froth, theory trash, something that could help illuminate the concerns of these creative ghosts, these disaster artists, with whom I remained preoccupied? As Samuel Beckett and David Bowie said their goodbyes to the world, they were also goodbyes to the world, and so a book was born, through word, image, and song, there and here, at the world’s end.