Change, and the apparent necessity and at least the endless capacity for it, subtends the entire process that was David Bowie. 

Bowie scoffed in interviews that he was a “chameleon”, involved deeply and publicly in a continual process of “self-reinvention.”  In that case, one has to wonder what to make of Bowie’s apparent dismissal of Ziggy Stardust and other personas as merely participants in so many stories about whom there is nothing we need to understand.  Bowie confessed that he put on guises, collected voices and then acted them out. And also that he took from Buddhism the transience of it all. So the so-called chameleon of rock, spiritually impressed by the transience of existence, disdains the transience of his own flow of characters and characterizations.

But what is change?—or, what is fundamental change?  From the early Greek philosopher Parmenides, we hear that change is movement from where something is to where it is-not.  The problem for Parmenides was the status of this “is-not.”  How can one change to what one “is-not”?  In order to do so, reasoned Parmenides, there must be a preexisting state of “is-not” into which one changes, and the very idea of such a state is contradictory and hence impossible. In short there is no such thing as nothingness, no place where there is not being of some sort, no void, no absolute emptiness, no “is-not”.  Hence, no such process as change, much less fundamental change beyond the immediacy of how the world appears to us.