Remembering Ziggy

Back in the early 70’s, I taught a seminar at the C. G. Institute of Los Angeles, entitled something like, “The Value of Pop Culture for Depth Psychology.” What I tried to examine was the question of what depth psychology could learn from Pop Culture. This I contrasted with the idea of interpreting and explaining and otherwise understanding Pop Culture using depth psychological methods.

My main idea stemmed from my valuing the creative arts as sources of new and developing mythologies that would become new dominants in the contemporary culture.

At the time, I focused on three figures: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Laurie Anderson. Each of these figures seemed to me to have  tap-roots in the deeper regions of the psyche and were each in their own way story tellers of what they found there.

It’s now 50 years later, and each of these figures have been icons in their genres for decades. David Bowie died at 69. Leonard Cohen at 82. Laurie Anderson is now 75.

This set me to remembering how in that early seminar we worked with David Bowie’s first major album: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was the story of the end of the world because the world had run out of natural resources and how aliens were coming who were “black hole” jumpers, jumping from universe to universe. It was a musical version of welcoming the Coming Guest that Jung described in his 1960 letter to Herbert Read.

I talked about this story as a “new” myth. I talked about how the mythic potential of the psyche did not stop with Greek myths, but is always creating the stories of new myths both in our individual psyche and in the collective psyche.

I listened again recently to Ziggy, I felt the deep loss of David Bowie.

What he said about dreams is important.

“I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives…the fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes.” (Roberts 1999 NYT Interview “David Bowie: Critical Perspectives”).

Here is a brief interview with David Bowie on the theme of “Life is a Finite Thing.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03f5cyt