JOHN LENNON: Essence and Reality Part 10: “# 9 Dream”

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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John Lennon & May Pang

“# 9 DREAM”

I once had a dream where I was sweeping the cloistered walk of a temple courtyard. It strangely resembled one I had seen in Turkey: ostensibly a school of traditional music, I had suspected that this Turkish school was in fact connected with Sufism. In my dream, as in life, a strong sense of peace of security possessed the scene. Across one of the cloisters there were hung brightly woven curtains. I was quite light-hearted, and was almost finished sweeping, when someone asked me if I would like to have my fortune told. Across the courtyard garden, others were having their palms read by women who were barely more than teenagers. It all seemed a bit of a hoot, so, in a spirit of fun, I said yes, I would have my fortune told. Directly, someone said that the fortune-teller had arrived, and I felt a slight tremor. When I saw her, something inside me drew back. She was a tall and noble African, with high cheek-bones, a multi-coloured turban, and something of that impersonal, hierarchical presence which Nina Simone commanded. She seemed to displace the air rather than to walk, and she was accompanied by two men, one a bearded man in middle age, and the other an unshaven and demented youth. Somehow, I knew that they meant business. This was the real thing. I was in two minds about going ahead with the consultation, but I found my courage. I sat cross-legged, opposite her, while the two men looked on. She took my left hand with her right, and drew my arm forward. Then she laid the fingers of her left hand on the flesh of my left forearm, placing a slight pressure on the veins. Immediately, sensation filled my body and flowed over into an electric sensation, which took me into another state.

I know how far short these words fall of communicating the experience, and its present significance for me. Yet, the dream is a source of confidence. Perhaps the most I can do is suggest something which you can then relate to a similar dream you may have had. However, some poets and musicians have had more success in communicating these sendings. Samuel Taylor Coleridge managed to evoke an eerie power in “Kubla Khan”, his account of an opium dream. Interestingly, he was moved by the music he heard played and sang by “an Abyssinian maid” with a dulcimer. However, the music had passed from him, as it were, causing him to say that “If I could revive within me her symphony and song”, it would make him a man of altogether different capacities and powers.

I feel that in “#9 Dream”, John Lennon fulfilled something of Coleridge’s yen, and has fashioned a fantasy-ruby, an auditory vision of roughly four and a half minutes’ duration. The first time I heard this song, even though it was on a battered old radio with knobs and switches falling off it, I was entranced and physically affected, I could hardly stand. As is the way of things, no subsequent listening has ever had the same effect, but maybe now the experience goes deeper, to a place which is not so easily overcome by shock. Certainly, the song has benignly haunted me for 35 years. Frequently I sing to myself the opening words: “So long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?” Even now, it conjures in me a different focus, as it were. It reverberates with echoes of a far-away time, a far-away place, of people and spirits separated only by a veil dancing just beyond my finger tips. The tempo of the song is neither slow nor “dreamy”, and is all the truer to dreams for taking a pleasant walking pace. The nice tread of the music contributes to the sense of visionary reality – there is nothing hallucinatory about this song, unlike “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. Yet, the melody line takes its time; the words are not hurried. Some of the key words are subtly sustained, or given a light stress. It sounds as if Lennon is singing the following:

So-oh long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?
I-hi know-oh, yes, I know, seemed so very real
Seemed so (un)real to me –
Took a walk down the street,
Through the heat whispered trees.
I thought I could hear, hear, hear, hear
Somebody called my name – “John, John”,
As it started to rain – “John”,
Two spirits dancing so strange,
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Dream, dream away – magic in the air, was magic in the air?
I believe, yes I believe,
More I cannot say, what more can I say?
On a river of sound,
Through the mirror go round (round),
I thought I could feel, feel, feel, feel
Music touching my soul, (whispering)
Something warm sudden cold,
The spirit dance was un-fold-ing,
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say.
Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say (continued)

May Pang, Lennon’s then girlfriend, whispers his name and some other words I cannot quite make out after the words “music touching my soul”. There is nothing dramatic about Lennon’s delivery or the music, they are almost understated, and yet they leave an impression. “So long ago: was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?” I cannot imagine these words being sung to any other tune, or the tune having more appropriate words. In fact, all the words come out as naturally as if he were speaking them with the unpractised emphasis of everyday conversation.

It seemed so very real, Lennon sings, and then he seems to say that it “seemed so unreal to me”. Perhaps he was only taking an audible breath before saying “real”. But it has always sounded to me as if he were saying “real” and then “unreal”. He both said and unsaid himself in an unreleased version of the Beatles’ song “Revolution”. which was faithfully shown in the movie Imagine, so it is not impossible. The song seems to imply that reality and unreality are two sides of one coin in this dream existence. Indeed, the difference between them is only a question of realisation. Once it has been dreamed, once it has been imagined, the concept or feeling can be realised, even if the realisation is itself an act of imaginative recreation.

I recall that Lennon was interviewed by a Sydney radio station when the album Walls and Bridges was released in 1974. He said that in the song he had described the dream exactly as it happened: so he will have seen himself walking down a familiar street, in hot weather, as trees whispered to him, and someone called his name. The DJ asked him about the spirit mantra “Ah! bawawaka, po-say, po-say”. Lennon answered with disarming simplicity that this was what it sounded to him the spirits were saying.

Was magic in the air? he asks. And he replies, yes, he believes it was. As I have indicated, dreams can comfort, they can console, teach and inspire belief. Thus it was for Lennon: as Lennon fans scholars well know, “nine” was for Lennon the number of destiny, it was his number. For many years he had taken drugs to break free from “the straitjacket of the self”, as he said. Now, through a dream, he was able to go through a mirror and around: through the image, coming back to reality having seen the other side of his perception.

Finally he asks, what more could he say? And what can he say about this mystery? What can be said by anyone about any mystery? Yet, he has described something almost beyond description. Could you imagine a song with the lyrics “I went through the image and came back to reality having seen the other side of my perception”? This is what he has done with the simple words “through the mirror go round”.
It seems to me that Lennon did receive an intimation of something high, I might say “sacred”, in this dream. First, however, we must say a few words about dreaming.

Dreams are the work, in Gurdjieff’s terms, of the “moving centre” (“moving brain”). This centre, which is in charge of our learned movements such as walking, talking, playing guitar, cleaning dishes and so on, continues with a certain consciousness while we are asleep. Generally, and especially during deep sleep, it is not connected with the intellectual or emotional brains, and so the next morning we do not recall the dreams. But if we are not fully asleep, then a faint connection between the centres may subsist, and the intellect can recall something of a dream the next morning. The moving centre, unlike the intellectual centre, is not logical, it does not have a sense of non-contradiction. Therefore, Gurdjieff said, it allows illogicalities and impossibilities, the dreamer can speak with people who are dead. To the extent that the moving and intellectual brains are disconnected during dreams, dreams can be illogical. Gurdjieff told this to Mme Lannes, and she passed the information on to Mr Adie, which is why I can confidently attribute it to Gurdjieff.

I extrapolate from this that to the extent that the moving and the feeling brains are unconnected, our dreams can have emotional aspects – even fearsomely emotional aspects – but the moving centre does not know this, so it blithely goes on creating dungeons and other tortures for us. Meanwhile, the emotional centre is being racked by torments, but is unable to convey this to the moving centre. It may, however, succeed in getting its message to the instinctive centre (which controls the work of the organism one does not have to consciously learn, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion and so on). And when the message gets through, we awaken. What Gurdjieff does not tell us is why the moving brain dreams, and whether all dreams necessarily come from moving brain.
George Adie’s view, with which I agree, is that the moving centre dreams as a form of digestion. Impressions are received during the waking day, and these impressions are not necessarily fully understood or grasped by the other centres (see the diary note of 4 February 1987 in George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia, 283). Some impressions are fairly unimportant, and leave little trace. So little trace do they leave that they appear in dreams only as background. But the concerns of our moving centre, and hence our dreams, tend to be things which are of substantial importance to us. Generally, I find, they relate to two fields: (a) matters where our ideas and feelings are as yet unresolved, and (b) the transfer of patterns from intellectual centre to moving centre. First, unresolved matters. If I have a bad conscience about something (using that phrase in its ordinary sense), if something has disturbed me, or, on the other hand, if something caused me pleasure or an intense hope, it may reappear in dreams. It is as though the moving centre has to file everything away into the tidiest possible place. We are made for order. Significant matters need extra filing, as it were. They demand extra attention, and if they are not given satisfactory attention during the day from the intellectual centre, then they demand it, so to speak, in sleep. So the connection between the moving and intellectual centres is re-established, albeit weakly, the prominent event is gone over with the help of the intellect, and it is given new associations in the psyche – it is acclimatized, as it were.

The filing carried out by the moving brain is not at all conducted in the way the intellectual or the emotional centre would carry it out. It seems to be performed according to a method of random associations or, if not entirely random, of associations possessing a similar intensity, and not necessarily of similar concepts. The result of this is that strong impressions often produce strong dreams where one cannot say what the dream message is, except that the impression was considered important.

The second major function of the moving centre in sleep seems to me to be to allow it to acquire skills learned by the intellectual centre during the day. As Gurdjieff correctly pointed out, I learn typing with the intellect, I have to. But eventually the moving brain takes it over, and does a better job: it does not have to think about every little thing. Well, I suspect that sleep is when the moving centre has a clear field, in which it can learn these things without being crowded out by the head. This would explain why the better we sleep the better we learn.

All this suggests two things to me: one is that we are made to understand. I can hardly insist on this enough, because at the moment there is, in some circles, a sort of exaggerated enthusiasm for non-understanding. It is true that some things cannot be understood, but that hardly means that we should not try to understand them. The very attempt may bring more understanding, or a grasp of other matters. Indeed, I suspect that the allure of the mysterious is a providential arrangement to arouse our curiosity, to evoke a pure love of knowledge and discovery. To anaesthetize that impulse, so readily observed in children is, it seems to me, criminal. I repeat, the fact that our organism knocks out our intellect in order to use dreaming to arrange and organize the day’s events seems to me to be evidence that we are designed to seek understanding and the harmonisation of our various impressions.

Also, and I add this to the blog because the idea may prove useful for some people, I have found that by carrying out the exercise of reviewing the day, I have fewer dreams, and those I do have tend to be less intense. I refer here to the Gurdjieff exercise whereby one casts one’s mind eye over the events of the day, and pauses when one comes to anything important or worrying. It is not necessary to think about these things, let alone to conduct an amateur psycho-analysis. In fact, that may cause new problems. All that is necessary is to put oneself before the memories, and then, I often find, a clearer understanding starts to appear.

To understand “#9 Dream”, and something of the process of art (higher art), I also think that some dreams come from other centres than the moving brain: they can be the products of higher emotional centre, and therefore speak in a natural symbolism – and this is emphatically not the symbolism of dream dictionaries. The higher emotional and higher intellectual centres are the two faculties, existing in every person, which are the means of receiving and transmitting influences from beyond this sensory world. When contact is made between the intellect, and the higher emotional centre, said Gurdjieff: “man experiences new emotions, new impressions hitherto entirely unknown to him, for the description of which he has neither words nor expressions.” However, because we are so rarely in such a state of connection, ” we fail to hear within us the voices which are speaking and calling to us from the higher emotional centre.” (P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 194-195).

My view is that Lennon heard these voices of the higher emotional centre calling him in a dream, and hence we have this marvellous song. As May Pang said, when Lennon woke up the morning after the dream, he had the words and the music together. If there has been a gift from the gods in modern music, this, I would say, is it. So the mystery of dreams is, or at least can be, related to the mystery of the life of the soul, the spiritual life. And Lennon made the connection.
As I said in the last blog, Lennon invites us into mystery. He does not make the mistake of trying to strip away the wonder by saying too much. He displays the magic, as it were, by presenting it, highlighted, in his own river of sound (and it should be added that Phil Spector was probably the perfect producer to work with Lennon on this piece). “#9 Dream” marks the high water mark of a tide which had begun with “There’s A Place”, on the Please Please Me album. Between these two points, there is a reasonably substantial body of work which forms a connecting trail. I cannot cover all of it, but in the next Lennon blog, I shall deal with one central concept: the use of creative imagination. I am referring, obviously, to what is Lennon’s signature tune, the classic “Imagine”.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY 9: “Here We Go Again

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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It is mesmeric: two notes hypnotically roll over each other for 30 seconds, sinuously moving higher, while in the increasingly textured background we faintly hear chimes in the sky, until all sounds are resolved into the audial clarity of one simple guitar chord. The chord fades, and then, unaccompanied, Lennon quietly announces “Here we go again”. The magician has appeared on stage. Almost speaking, he sings in a matter of fact way:

Here we go again and again.
Wonderin’ how it all began?
Wonderin’ will it ever end?

For the next 20 seconds or so, you can hear guitars jabbering like Chinese monkey spirits through your headphones, until the hypnosis theme is restated, the singer becomes more animated, and the volume builds:

Round and round we go,
Where it’s going, nobody knows.
Though I know we’ve been this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

Here we go again, here we go again,
Here we go again, here we go again.

There is a sense of wonder here, but it is not the pure and affirmative child’s wonder exemplified by someone like Thomas Traherne, or the tender, washed-by-rain clarity of “Oh, My Love!”, which we discussed in the first Lennon blog. There is something in the music which is almost sinister, or at least, one senses, liable to turn dark. Once more, the music ceases, and the narrator reintroduces himself:

So I say hello again,
And nobody gives a damn,
And nobody wants to hold your hand.
Everyone’s an also-ran.

Round and round we go,
Where it’s going, nobody knows.
Though I know we’ve seen this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

And now, at the refrain “here we go again”, there is more intensity, accented by a dramatic brass and drum arrangement. The song was, I believe, prepared for Walls and Bridges in 1974, and was produced by Phil Spector. Why the colourless “Going Down on Love” should have opened that album, I don’t know, unless this gem was cut too late for inclusion. This song sounds to me like the perfect curtain raiser for an artist of Lennon’s calibre. To her credit, Yoko Ono released it in 1986 on the posthumous, under-appreciated Menlove Avenue with its striking Andy Warhol artwork. Listening to it in the context of other songs of loneliness and sorrow from Lennon’s “lost weekend” in Los Angeles adds context and resonance, one might say, to the experience.

On first listening, I thought that when Lennon says “here we go again”, he was, as a matter of course, referring pretty much exclusively to the process of song writing, recording, presenting an album to the public, and the give and take which occurs after release. But I soon came to think that although this may well have been the point of departure, it does not do justice to this piece. Lennon, I think, fashioned something more open-ended, more inclusive: the first lines refer to “wonder”, and wonder is something which involves and invites an expansive response. How did it all begin? Not only his song writing, his stardom, his performance, but our being here to listen to him? And where will it all end?

To many, these questions will not matter, but I think that there are some questions which can be made to matter if they are put in the right way, yet if posed in a different fashion, they will sound like inanities. And Lennon, I believe, raises the question into a mystery: “Round and round we go,” he says, and it is true. We do become fans of various performers, and many things work together, contriving to produce habits; things like our expectations and theirs, their personal commitments, the recording industry, and the surrounding culture. It was Lennon’s habit to record, and it was ours to buy and listen. Such habits make up much of our lives. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with them: some habits such as eating and cleaning regularly are perfectly good, provided we are able to modify them in accordance with reason.

When should we apply reason to habit? Jane Heap used to say that the only difference between a groove and a grave is the depth (as the late John Lester told me). When we shrug our shoulders and say “that is the way I am”, are we losing an opportunity to liquidify our bony rigidities? The only answer which seems satisfactory to me is that to the extent that we are present to ourselves, we are present to our habits; and to the extent that our reason partakes in our presence (not something which it obviously does), our reason is active, it stands alert before our habitual manifestations. If we are not present, then it is, I would have thought, only by good luck that the groove is worn no deeper.

Lennon adds: “Where it’s going, nobody knows.” This phrase, reminiscent of a spruiker on a chocolate wheel, adds to the sense of theatrical magic and stage-mystery evoked by the opening. But the point is valid, and it was more than just an appropriate filling line: shortly after recording this, Lennon retired from show business for about five years in order to have and raise his second son. He really felt that he was on a circus circuit, and that even if he was one of the star attractions, he was trapped by success. He did not know where he was going, and he decided to make a plan.

Whatever the man’s weaknesses and faults, he was strong enough to run away from the circus, and make what was effectively a more conscious life with Yoko Ono in New York. However, there is more to harvest from this song.

Though I know we’ve been this place before,
Someone keeps on moving the door.

Later, he will repeat these lines but instead of “been” we will have “seen” this place before. What can it mean but that when he is songwriting and performing (let us say, “being creative”), there is a familiarity: he had written hundreds of songs by now, and was one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. He had been one of the Beatles, easily the most culturally important musicians of their time. And yet, an imaginative beginning is always an entry through a door which had not previously been there.

Beyond even that, I doubt that I am alone in having had the sort of feeling Lennon refers to here, of being in a situation which does not seem new, and yet, the key of comprehension seems strangely misplaced. It is as if I should know something, but that this precious something has been occulted. I use that word in preference to any other, because Lennon’s music suggests that the misplaced secret is in the realm of the occult.

However, it does not end there. Lennon turns away from this mystery, as the next verse brings to sight the darker current I found subsisting beforehand: it is the verse about how “nobody gives a damn” or even wants to “hold your hand”, and we remember that this song was written about the same time as “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out”. I must confess, I find these lines self-pitying and self-parodying, after all, with Paul McCartney he had written one of the most positive, energy-charged songs I have ever heard: “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, a song which has rarely been covered, because, I suggest, the original recording was unmatchable.

There is serious disillusionment here: the statement that everyone is an “also-ran”, is profoundly cynical. After those lines, it is fatalistic to sing “round and round we go, here we go again”. It is a sort of cursing of destiny. Anything positive in the sense of original sense of wonder is effaced. “Round and round again” – it has completely assumed the fearful spectre of tedious, frustrating repetition, of endless courses of existence. It is enough to make one long for Nirvana. When one considers the self-pity of this second verse, the line that “someone keeps on moving the door”, takes on a sharper shape: Lennon was indulging in sorry victimhood.

The hypnotic melody which opened the song, and which occasionally reappears is the same melody Paul McCartney used in the word “you”, in the phrase “I’d love to turn you on”, which appeared in “A Day In The Life”, one of the last joint Lennon-McCartney compositions. If it had a dark side there, and I think it did, it has a blackness, here, too. There is a touch of the snake-charmer about it.

And yet, for all that, we are indebted to Lennon for something which is truly rare, a rock musician’s insight into the psychic drama and the occult dimension of his craft. A few years after this, Kate Bush would write “Symphony in Blue” from the Lionheart album, a precocious effort, spiritual and sexual, which may deserve to rank along with this grimmer song.

This song tells me something about how we can approach Lennon’s songs. He was the instrument of something which he did not fully understand. While he was clearly central to the process, he also saw it as collective: it is here we go again, and we’ve seen this place before. It is legitimate to emphasize the first person plural: Lennon accepted Yoko’s ideas of art as something created in the interaction between both artist and audience. Many of her avant-garde pieces needed the audience to progress them: for example, by hammering in a nail as in the famous Indica Gallery piece.

Lennon invites us into a sad mystery. He is saying here that there is a mystery in his work – an irreducible mystery which belongs to us as much as it does to him. And the exploration of it is now our privilege. As stated, I do not think he was exclusively speaking about music: the mystery is a mystery also of life and existence. To take this further, we shall next consider another song from this period, the numinous “#9 Dream”, which did appear on Walls and Bridges.

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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY PART 8 “REMEMBER”

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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“Remember”

This song, the first on side two of 1970’s John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band may be the most uncompromising, direct, hard-hitting lyric Lennon ever penned. Writing this reminds me why I find this album so powerful, so confronting, that I do not play it through from start to finish more than once every couple of years. I would invite you to actually try and remember the things Lennon mentions:

Remember, when you were young,
How the hero was never hung,
Always got away.

There is a very subtle nuance on the word “hero”, which I hear as a questioning of the very concept of heroism. Certainly, I would say, Lennon means to suggest that when we were young we were fed a diet of stories where the hero always came through. We grew up believing these fictions, and although now we can see that they are not true, that the good guys do not always win, we have never taken stock of the fact that we are living knee deep in the wreckage of false hopes. Remember, he is saying, remember and compare.

Remember, how the man
Used to leave you empty handed,
Always, always let you down.

And this is true. Who is the man? How empty handed? I cannot say, and yet this is true. We grew up with a faith in our elders. We were told so often “we are older than you”, “we know more than you”, “these people are experts” and “they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t know”, that we believed it. It is comforting, after all, to imagine that the people in government, the Treasury, the various agencies and organizations which run our economy, energy, health, military, transport and social systems have an understanding of what they are about. We believe this in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are amateurs, or liable to blinded by greed. Although this was true in 1970, how much more apparent is it now after the Bush years, Enron and the credit collapse? Yet, do we really fathom the depth of this? Do we learn from it, or do we just fatalistically accept it?

Did you ever change your mind about leaving it all behind?
Remember today, hey, hey.

No comment is adequate. Who has not thought of making a big change in their lives?

And don’t feel sorry, (about) the way when it’s gone,
And don’t you worry about what you’ve done.

This always bothered me: how could he say not to feel sorry for this mess, or for our role in the accumulated and intertwined tragedies of society and individuals? Surely, I thought, we should feel remorse, and we should repair the past, as Gurdjieff said. There is no point in crippling ourselves with guilt, but surely we should come to terms with what we have done: perhaps for some people we were “the man” who left them empty-handed? My feeling that there was something wrong here is heightened by Lennon’s expression in an earlier version of this song, recently made available, where he sang some alternative words: “and don’t feel sorry about what’s been said and done”. I shall return to this point later, but for now, let’s just leave it as a question, if you are indeed pondering each of Lennon’s prophetic lines:

Just remember when you were small,
How people seemed so tall,
Always had their way.

People, all adults, seemed to us to be able to control their lives. We can now see what an illusion that was, and of course, if anything, Gurdjieff has added to our understanding of how treacherous appearances are. But still, although Lennon did not have Gurdjieff’s penetration, there is a diamond value in his probing: remember, actually bring the memories back before you.

Do you remember your ma and pa,
Just wishing movie stardom,
Always, always playing a part.

For “movie stardom” one could substitute any number of phrases, “a glamorous life”, or “to be like the rich relatives”, or “to be the big stick at the club”. This shows in so many ways, in the people we fete and celebrate, what and who we talk about, in where we spend our time and money, in what we watch on TV, in what fills our dreams, and so on. Of course, as children, we perceived who and what our parents adored, what they spent their time on, what held their interest and their admiration, and I don’t think we can have been unaffected.

Did you ever feel so sad,
And the whole world was driving you mad?

I hear a profound empathy and compassion in these words. Of course it was not the whole story of John Lennon: he had a terrible, callous side. But he had this as well, and he could express it so poignantly, just by asking a question: “Did you ever feel so sad?”

Remember, remember, today
And don’t feel sorry, about the way it’s gone,
And don’t you worry about what you’ve done.
No, no, remember,
Remember, the fifth of November.

And at these words there is the sound of a bomb blast. Of course, blowing up parliament is not the answer. And Lennon knew that. The blast dies away, there is a silence, and then after more than a minute, one gradually realises that a soft piano has started playing an elegant, understated melody, with a spare arrangement, and as it gently becomes louder, Lennon sings “Love is real, real is love”, taking into the next track, “Love”. Of course, the placement of the song is deliberate. Two tracks later, on “Look At Me”, Lennon plaintively asks about his identity: “Here I am, but who am I?” Nobody, he says, can know but himself and the one who loves him. But then he seems to remove even this hope, by asking “Who are we?”

The song after “Look At Me”, the penultimate song on this album, is “God”, which I discussed in Part 5. Here, as we saw, Lennon disavows his heroes, both personal and social: he will believe not in them but in “me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality”.

When one considers these songs together, as I think they have to be, what is Lennon’s answer to the emotional desolation and the pain? Is it love? Is it specifically, his love with Yoko?

I think Lennon is aiming at more than that. I am not saying he achieved it in his life, but he was reaching for it, and I think was something like this: the first thing is to understand and acknowledge where you are. That is why he opens side two of the album with “Remember”. The music is a relentless advance of drums, bass and piano, with the simplest of melodies, as Lennon pounds this concise message: remember how many lies and fantasies you have fallen for, and remember today.

This, I think, is true, if not even the truth. As I mentioned in the very first Lennon blog, towards the very end of his short life, Lennon said that once in Japan he awake, as it were , to realize that he had forgotten something for a very long time, and then he remembered what it was: he had forgotten himself. This is the same as Gurdjieff said, at least in this respect, our first problem is that we do not remember ourselves.

From there, Lennon goes on to sing of love, of looking at oneself, questioning one’s own identity, and of reality. If I understand him correctly, Lennon was saying, in a poetic way, that love and understanding go together. Only the lover can understand the beloved as a person. Indeed, he may be going further and saying that only the lover can ever understand (I suggested that Lennon came to this insight the next year in “Oh, My Love”, from the Imagine album).

Mentioning Imagine, I am struck by the directness of Lennon’s insights into our predicament and what we can do: “imagine” and “remember”. These are two simple, gentle, internal acts. Lennon was only ever at best in two minds about political revolution, although he was pragmatic enough to see the point in exerting pressure at key points. He was deep enough to see that the profound issues must be addressed first within, by such efforts as acknowledging reality, and then imagining that it could be different.

Lennon saw that without love our hold our on reality is flimsy: and he saw that this was true of himself. If he had been without love or any genuine experience of reality, he could not have understood this. But this does not mean that his insight was one he lived each moment of his day. It was an ideal the truth of which he had comprehended at some level, even if the truth did not possess him so as to suffuse him.

Now to return to remorse. I can sympathise with Lennon’s sentiments: we can destroy ourselves through guilt. Guilt is identification with our faults and mistakes. It is not a way forward. Guilt only adds new problems and damages us further.

What we need, I would say, is impartiality, and that, I believe, will bring us to remorse. The difficulty is not to rush into remorse so forcefully that we crash over into guilt. If I am impartial, I see myself as I am and have been, I also see what I did, and that, in those circumstances, with what I understood, what I felt and the resources available to me, I could have done and been no different.

But because I see that, I can be and do differently now. My very understanding brings a responsibility with it. I am not speaking of burdens. The greatest reward one can be given may well be the reward of a serious responsibility, although I would not be dogmatic on this. At this point, one can say:

And don’t feel sorry, about the way it’s gone,
And don’t you worry about what you’ve done.

In completing this blog I almost despair at being able to do justice to this song and these ideas and feelings. I can understand better why poets would ask the Muses to help them as they exercised their craft. Perhaps, however, all I can do is sketch some ideas as a pointer to this song, and even more, to this album, John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, without doubt the greatest album I have ever heard – period.

I am sure that if I returned to this blog tomorrow, I would see even more in this song, or find better ways of expressing myself. However, if such a sense was unwisely indulged, one would never write, and this is the dilemma of many perfectionists. It is a sobering thought to me that the very most capable historian I have ever know did not actually publish anything: nothing he has written has ever come up to his own standards, he is too keenly aware of his own limitations. Yet, as I say, I know of no other historian, published or otherwise, with his ability and insights.

Two things occur to me at this point: first, my fine friend may care to consider Lennon’s words. There is no point in (unduly) worrying about what you’ve done. To do so is destructive of life and happiness.

Second, these words can never do justice to Lennon’s achievement. But they can encourage people to hear Lennon, and maybe even to listen to him freshly. For Lennon’s work was not a series of essays with a rhythm track: he wrote songs, little worlds in song. And this suggests to me the next Lennon blog, his own exploration of the artistic process: “Here We Go Again”.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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