Three Things: David Bowie - Heroes
Just For One Day
As part of therapy, I've been tasked to write more, specifically about music. The task is to write three things I love about a piece of music I deeply enjoy.
There’s a lot to unpack here and I don’t want to diminish the East/West Berlin issue, but I’m going to. Lovers on either side of the Wall. Got it. Luminaries Tony Visconti, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp. Blah blah blah. Bowie’s Berlin years. Noted. Covered extensively by a brutally long list of writers. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO YEARN? Do you? That’s the crux of Heroes. It is about longing for and being compassionate about a person, a human being, alive and also yearning in their own space and time. If the fickle finger of fate will allow, that person also yearns for you. That’s what Heroes is about - yearning, in the hardest, deepest, possible way, while also knowing it wasn’t meant to be, in the star-crossed, Willie Shakes sense. Bowie is asking for One. More. Day.
“We could steal time, just for one day.”
It’s about love, THAT love, ever ethereal, that finds us at our most vulnerable, our most giving, our most thoughtful because it is both deliverance and transgression. It is a delight in the coming and agony in the going. It is born of the most intimate and exalts in the sad truth that nothing can keep us together. Because of this, because of all THAT, we know our lives don’t have a soundtrack, and there are no award-winning screenwriters dictating what happens next, and we’re filled with melancholy because of it.
Even if we’re waiting for one more day, that day, all those possibilities in that day, it may never come. The lovers don’t want hard truths but perhaps only the hardest of truths. It’s here between these sheets and within this skin and in this strong drink. Let the Wall come down. Let all the walls come down. Let those walls crumble between you and me and all the deliverance and transgression, between all the delight and all the agony. Let us exalt. Let us be heroes.