On continuous not quite arrival
Is there life on Mars?
We are in a moment where we are experiencing truth as open source. There is malleability in truth.
It’s Wednesday night and we’re sitting together on the couch in the living room. We both have our computers open on our laps. I can just make out a piece of Janyce’s screen over my own as she is scrolling through pages of adoption dog pictures.
“Let me show you Lily,” she says, pointing her screen toward me.
“She’s cute,” I say.
I return to scrolling through my social feed and stop to read an article that catches my eye from People about Iman’s new fragrance.
“Okay, so now I have to have this,” I say. “Listen to this.” I read the words from the magazine out loud to Janyce.
She also found the inspiration for the fragrance which weaves together woodsy vetiver (Tom Ford's Grey Vetiver was Bowie's favorite) and bergamot from Tuscany, where they had married. The result, she says, is "a monument to eternal love."
Janyce looks at me blankly.
“Vetiver!” I say. “You know I love that scent, and then bergamot is in Earl Grey tea- and that’s another one of my favorites. And well, it’s Iman and Bowie, too, so I have to have this.”
“Okay,” she says nodding, while getting up and reaching over my outstretched legs to collect the water glasses from the tray on the ottoman. She walks into the kitchen holding all three of them with one hand.
The bird feeder swinging in view of our picture window is casting long blue shadows onto the leaf-strewn yard. The house is now getting dark, the setting sun flickering weak November rays into the living room like an old film projector clacking away, illuminating the dust in the air through a thin column of light. It’s time for me to get up off the couch and turn on the orange lamps, time to figure out the plan for the evening. Time to get started on dinner.
But I’m still thinking about Iman and Bowie. Growing up, David Bowie was one of my favorite artists. I liked his music, but I was most enthralled by his writing and his performance art, his blurring of the lines of gender identity, his ability to question fixed ideas and so-called truths.
Earlier in the day, I took a break from my computer work to watch a recorded lecture by this year’s MIT MLK Visiting Scholar. Sanford Biggers, standing at a podium, was talking about his work and showing slides on a large screen to a small assembled audience in the Architecture department. I watched the entire lecture. It was a fascinating survey of his provocative interdisciplinary work that touched upon several themes: how objects have power and can be talismans, how nothing really happens by accident, how there are no facts out there — everything depends on context.
I snapped a screen shot from one of the slides of an early and particularly poetic sculptural work from Biggers. “Blossom” is the artist’s reference to lynching: the tree growing up from the piano, the kicked-over bench evoking a hanging, a kind of nod to Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit. And high above on the wall is another one of Biggers’s pieces presiding over the scene. The Cheshire smile takes on a new meaning in the context of this particular arrangement in the space. Is it the Cheshire cat grin from Alice In Wonderland or does it make you think of a black-faced minstrel show?
Right before his talk, the faculty member making the introduction said something eerily prescient that I immediately wrote down. He said: “In this time of continuous not quite arrival.” He was simply referring to our continued need to remain masked from the pandemic, of course. But I thought it framed the whole lecture and aptly described this moment in America.
This time of continuous not quite arrival.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting up in bed drinking coffee. I woke up with the lyrics and music to David Bowie’s Life on Mars playing in my head at the same time that the NPR commentator was blaring out of my bedside radio, talking about yesterday’s full acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse, testifying that he was scared for his own life—albeit while out patrolling the streets searching to stir up trouble and pointing a deadly weapon he had no business being in possession of— ended up killing two other men that night. Some could say that was his intent right from the start. But the jury saw it another way.
I can’t even listen, anymore. I look down at some words I scribbled for my blog post spoken by Sanford Biggers.
We are in a moment where we are experiencing truth as open source. There is malleability in truth.
And with that, I leave you with a few lines from David Bowie’s Life on Mars.
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
This was an awesome blog Kris. There was so much in it, and so well said.