Nobody Got His Eyes Right

He did not have different-coloured eyes

This is the most-looked-at face in the history of pop music, and the single fact everybody repeats about it is wrong.

Bowie is very widely said to have had heterochromia — two irises of different colours. He did not. Both of his irises were the same colour. What he had was anisocoria: two pupils of different sizes, one of them permanently open.

In February 1962, when he was fifteen, his schoolfriend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during a row over a girl. A fingernail caught the eyeball, and the muscles that contract the iris were left paralysed. From then on the left pupil could not close. A pupil stuck wide is a hole full of shadow, so the left eye photographs darker — and next to a right eye whose pupil is doing its ordinary job, the pair reads as two different colours. That is the whole illusion.

So the correction is not pedantry about a word. It changes what kind of thing the famous feature was. Heterochromia is a variation you are born with. Anisocoria from a punch is an injury, and this one had consequences: a pupil that cannot contract cannot limit the light coming in, and Bowie was reported to have had impaired depth perception for the rest of his life. The look that a million people have called otherworldly is one eye working and one eye damaged.

He and Underwood stayed friends for the rest of his life, and Underwood — a painter — went on to make artwork for Bowie's records. Bowie himself said the eye gave him an interesting appearance and was, on balance, useful to him. Both things are allowed to be true. He made an injury into a signature, and it was still an injury, and neither half of that cancels the other.

And the constellation is not a constellation

The second thing everyone knows is nearly as widely repeated and fails in the same direction.

In January 2016, days after he died, the MIRA public observatory in Belgium and the radio station Studio Brussel announced a constellation for Bowie: seven stars near Mars, arranged in the lightning bolt from the Aladdin Sane sleeve. It is a genuinely lovely gesture and thousands of people posted about it.

It is not a constellation. There are 88 constellations, the International Astronomical Union fixed the list in the 1920s, and it has not changed since. What MIRA made was an asterism — a line figure, a way of joining dots — and to their credit they said so themselves, describing it as an invented Bowie-asterism rather than an addition to the sky's official furniture. Nobody can register a constellation. Nobody can sell you a star, either, whatever the certificate says.

And there is a cost that is not just tidiness. When the story about somebody's difference is more beautiful than the difference, the practical part stops getting discussed. Sixty years of writing about that eye, and almost none of it about light sensitivity, or depth perception, or what it takes to perform under those conditions. The myth is a very comfortable place to stop.

What he actually did was set selves down in public

The argument about Bowie and difference is made at length in Zine No. 12, so this is the compressed version plus one thing the zine does not have.

The zine's claim is that Bowie inverts what masking means for the rest of us. Many of us wear the involuntary kind — kept up to pass as normal, kept up until it costs something. His masking was authorship: selves made, shown in full view, and then put down. Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, Major Tom. Unmasking, on that reading, does not have to mean excavating one true self from underneath. It can mean the freedom to be several things out loud and mean all of them.

The thing worth adding is that he demonstrated the putting down as literally as anyone ever has. On 3 July 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon, he told a sold-out room it was the last show they would ever do — and killed Ziggy on stage, mid-tour, at the height of it. Most of the band found out at the same time as the audience.

A persona you can end on a Tuesday in July is a persona you were authoring. That is the difference between a costume and a diagnosis, and it is why the zine reads his career as direction rather than deficit.

The ending was written down first

And then, at the very end, he did the same trick one last time, in public, with the timing controlled to the day.

★ was released on 8 January 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday. The video for Lazarus — in which he sings from a hospital bed and then backs into a wardrobe and out of sight — went up the day before. He died on 10 January. Almost nobody outside his circle knew he had been ill.

What that means for this collection is specific. The L★S Playlist already notes that Blackstar is not the bright burning kind of star but the collapsed kind — still massive, still present. Set beside the eye, the arc finishes an argument the whole career was making: the parts of you that got damaged, and the parts you decided to author, end up in the same body of work, and you do not have to sort them into the good ones and the bad ones before you are allowed to be here.

That is what we mean by star stuff, said as plainly as we can say it. Not the difference redeemed. The difference included.