David Bowie's Quicksand

Recorded in 1971, Bowie’s song Quicksand represents a desperate striving for knowledge and from it derives a resonant, sophisticated and accurate conception of our place in the world. The song demonstrates Bowie’s eclectic learning at the time. He references Nazi history, Mysticism, Buddhism and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Quicksand brilliantly expresses how humans can drown in their thoughts and lose sight of reality. To me, this is the most significant and common human phenomenon, that can grip people in delusion throughout life, until "death's release". This is what makes the song so emotive and affecting. Using quicksand as a metaphor for this is perfect, because the more you struggle in thought, the deeper you sink. Thus the song also addresses the necessary resignation that one must achieve in light of this, “And I ain’t got the power anymore”. To achieve clarity, the desperate striving must at a certain point cease.

Bowie realises that he is limited by his animal mind “I’m tethered to the logic of homo sapien”, an insight particularly prominent in Nietzsche’s thought. There is a limit to which we can consciously grasp the world, which is why Bowie feels true, full knowledge will come with death, the ultimate transformation, "knowledge comes with death's release". Aldous Huxley explains such human limitation very clearly in The Doors of Perception. As biological entities surviving in the world, we must filter our experience of the universe, we must set limits.

I can see why one would interpret the lines “don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief, knowledge comes with death’s release” as nihilistic. But, I think, this would be a superficial and simplistic interpretation. These lines are saying that only when we abandon naïve belief will we start to live genuinely, fully and in accordance with reality. They are saying we must humble ourselves to the mystery of the world and realise our own limitations, and only by doing this can we live truthfully. 

The fact that Bowie could perfectly express these deep and mystical insights at the age of 24, with such a beautiful song, is impressive. I knew there was a reason I intuitively loved this song from an early age.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalise;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."" (Edmund Spenser)

Spenser's sonnet is a meditation on the ephemerality of existence and, at the same time, on the eternal endurance of love. He writes "her" name on the strand, hoping to make last his love, but his attempt is washed away. He makes another attempt, the word "again" emphasising the repetitious act, but is thwarted, again. 

One feels that Spenser is trying to come to terms with the passage of time and the eventual erasure of his most cherished feelings and moments. In a resonant way, his attempts at eternalising his love seem vain and represent the struggles we all, most likely, go through during periods in our lives. There is a certain desperation and pain in his repetitious attempts, with the illimitable sea of time his seeming enemy.

But from the sonnet emerges the realisation that, though death can subdue the world, and on one level everything fades, love will fundamentally continue, and will be the force that eternally renews life and it's transformations. In the sonnet there is thus a profound marriage between the transformational nature of existence and the eternal force, that we all embody and experience, that renews such transformation.

"Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew"

I also admire the way that love isn't clearly defined in this sonnet. It points strongly to romantic love, but also indicates a deeper kind of love, as a universal force, thus suggesting an inclusive conception of the word.