ELTON JOHN: The Songs of Self-Knowledge (Part 1)

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Bernie Taupin and Elton John

“It is on your own self-knowledge and experience that the knowledge and experience of everything else depend.”So spoke the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing more than 600 years ago, in what is the greatest work of mysticism in the English tongue known to me (see ch 43 of Clifton Wolters’ translation). As I said in the first Elton John blog, it is through knowledge of this life and our selves that we come to knowledge of a higher life and, once more, our selves. But, of course, our experience of our selves on that other level is quite different.

And so it is that I return to Elton John, because I sense that sometimes something sublime comes from beyond and can be felt through the songs Of all their work, perhaps John and Taupin touch the sublime most often on these songs of self-knowledge, such as “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”, “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “The Sweetest Addiction”.

Other than John Lennon, I can think of no other artistes of their era like Elton John and Bernie Taupin for excelling in what I might call “songs of self-knowledge” or perhaps “songs of reflective biography “. Certainly, I do not know of anyone else in popular music who has developed such a sustained corpus of work over a period of 30 years. I think that Taupin’s work is marked by an impartiality and even fearlessness as much as Lennon’s was. After all, Taupin is writing lyrics for another person to set to music and perform, and not just anyone, but Elton John.

Meditating on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album led me to a discovery which really should have been apparent before, but had somehow escaped me. And that is that although we exclusively think of Taupin as someone who writes the words, he is in a very real way, a musician. His instrument just happens to be his words, an instrument few can master, and his great achievement is that he developed his art to the lofty degree where his words sing on the page with an unheard melody. Incidentally, much as I respect Dylan’s achievements, I don’t hear that much self-knowledge in his songs, although there is certainly tremendous insight and his lyrics often have the musicality I find in Taupin’s. But in the end, Dylan seems to me to hide behind his presentation, while John and Taupin reveal, and so whatever self-understanding he has remains in obscurity. Only outside of popular music, for example with Gerard Hopkins, do I find even more self-knowledge and musicality combined than I do in Taupin.

However, we must come back to this fundamentally important question of the search for self-knowledge. If one has been touched by the search, then the questions “Who am I?” and “What am I?” always demand a response, although – and perhaps even because – they can never be answered once and for all. If we speak of self-knowledge, then because it is self-knowledge, we can take no one else’s word for it. Self-discovery is only possible because a higher part of us is impartial. When I see myself, the lower self becomes transparent to a higher part in myself, and that higher part operates under entirely different rules, and has different powers.

Even if I am alone in my room, yet all of my learning takes place within a socially-constructed world, and I am forever learning from and with others. It is not just that we can compare ourselves to others, find similarities and draw distinctions. Neither is it just that we can get good ideas, or follow other people’s methods. We can also, to an extent, recognize ourselves in others. This doesn’t mean seeing that the details of our loves are identical, although this can occur. More deeply, it means seeing the human condition beneath the accidental facts and biographical details; seeing that we all share in this common humanity, and that we make it what it is in all its inexhaustible variety.

The essential self may be approximately described in words, and we can even figure out some things about ourselves with our intellects, but it’s only discovered through feeling, and, of course, there are levels of feeling and hence of self-knowledge. But affirmation of the goodness of life is a feeling impulse which will bring impartiality. This entails seeing myself without undue self-appreciation or self-hatred. Full and complete impartiality, however, is a function of the essential self, the soul. The soul brings something trans-personal in self-knowledge, an awareness of a call, a memory of something always just forgotten.

When I speak of songs of self-knowledge I am not speaking of narcissism. “My Way” is narcissistic and self-congratulatory, but as we shall see, the music I’m discussing is not. It is not spiritual, either, and yet it isn’t divorced from the spirit. Perhaps the first striking feature of these “songs of self-knowledge” is their quantity: John and Taupin entered the field in a convincing way with 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and updated this tour de force on 2006’s The Captain and the Kid. These were albums completely devoted to reflection on their own history as artistes. In addition, there are many songs of this genre on The Fox, Made in England, Songs from the West Coast, and Peachtree Road. The theme clearly means a great deal to them, and has meant more as they grow older, having both more material and more leisure for reflection. To really understand what I am writing about, you will need to hear the music, beginning with Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which for my money (and I’m not alone in this) is their greatest achievement, surpassing even the magnificent Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. In the discussion, I’ll be referring to the tracks as they were on the record, five tracks on each of its two sides. We shall see why a little later.

The first track, the title track, is a good example of Elton John’s originality: it sounds like no song you’ve ever heard before. Until the chorus, it has no almost melody, although it has a sound and a rhythm, and the effect of the song seems perhaps even stronger for all that. You know that this song was not produced in a hit factory, because small clusters of words are broken into islands of sense by a jagged phrasing and oddly placed emphasis: “Captain Fan-tastic … raised and regimented … hardly a hero … Just someone his mother might know.” This works, partly, I think, because he’s telling a story, and an achingly beautiful tune like that of “Your Song” might distract from the narrative, while the strength of the lyrics is quite sufficient to hold our attention and interest. “Raised and regimented”: it is hard to imagine that any three less assuming words could be found to say so much about what in a later song they would describe as a “repressed” youth.

Elton, of course, is Captain Fantastic, while Taupin is the Brown Dirt Cowboy, turning brown in his ‘saddle’ even as the precocious Captain inhabits the stimulating but artificial city. They are painted not quite as opposites, but as contrasts united by a common aspiration for the “honey the hive could be holding”. In a wonderful expression, their pursuit of their art takes them “from the end of the world to your town”. After all, wherever they are seems to them to be the end of the world, while wherever you are, and no matter how small a target, they are infallibly delivered to you through the electronic media. And yet, for them, their careers have been a ‘long and lonely climb’, which they also describe as walking on a wire and as ‘stepping in the ring’.

In an artistic touch of considerable finesse, these two characters, our hosts in this autobiography-for-two, are distinguished by their food. The Captain has cornflakes and tea with sugar: the Cowboy eats “sweet chocolate biscuits, and red rosy apples in summer”. Later in the song, when they are struggling to establish themselves in their chosen careers, they share the same food, “cheap easy meals”, which as Taupin wryly notes, “are hardly a home on the range”. I am fairly certain that readers will be able to point me to many examples of autobiography rock, hitherto unknown to me. And I’m quite sure that some of these will prove to be considerable achievements. But I’ll be very surprised if any of these use simple references to differences in diet with anything like the symbolic force that Taupin does.

There is a lot of history in these lines: one couplet juxtaposes the ‘City Slick Captain’ with the ‘still green and growing’ Cowboy. Then we’re told of “weak winged young sparrows that starve in the winter” and “broken young children on the wheels of the winners”. The Captain and the Kid must have seen a lot of callousness and even bastardry. The lyrics for a song called “Dogs in the Kitchen” were printed with the lyrics, although the song is not on the album, if it was ever recorded. The sentiments seem so raw that if Elton did them justice, the product may not have been a palatable release for the average record company. The very first line is: “All our innocence gave way to lust”. And that was the sweetener:

Poor boys fight to stay alive …
Uncage us, we’re restless, snarled the dogs in the kitchen.
Howling in the heatwave, riding all the bitchin’ ladies.
Who got the first bite in on the greasy bone?
… the vultures belch in their swivel chairs,
And the vampires all wear ties.

It is unnerving to think of writers being likened to greasy bones and quarrelled over by cannibalistic entrepreneurs. This gives us a gritty perspective on the title track, where Elton sings: “We’ve thrown in the towel too many times, our for the count when we’re down”. This is why I say that this is fundamentally a universe apart, and two dimensions deeper than Sinatra’s “regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again …”.

However, even the most powerful missiles need to be launched and guided, and it’s the music which delivers these words. The real magic, for me, is in the combination. To start with, the simplicity of the title track is like innocence made audible. Then, at about 1’ 46” when Elton begins to sing about the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the music picks up. Steady country and western strumming effortlessly evokes an air of ‘childhood at home’ feel, but becomes ‘rockier’ as the song proceeds. This musical development naturally bridges the twin worlds of town and country, the passage from youth to adolescence, the fall from fruit to fat, and the journey from the idyllic woods to wherever we are. The important connection, of course, is between John and Taupin: “hand in hand went music and the rhyme”. One of the odd things is that while Elton is the city-slicker and is significantly called ‘the Captain’, he was, in some ways more vulnerable and innocent than Taupin: one has the feeling that the Cowboy was canny enough for the two of them. This masterly track nicely sets the stage, and introduces its heroes to the challenging world at the same time as it introduces them to us.

The very next track is the knowing “Tower of Babel”. Its first sounds are as ominous and resonant as two tolls on an undertaker’s bell: “Snow – cement – “ and we are immediately submerged in a world of barely speakable cynicism:

Were the darlings on the sideline
Dreaming up such cherished lies
To whisper in your ears before you die?

As with the title track, Taupin is not saying that their early years were tough. He is saying that they were facing starvation, and even the prospect of death. There is not much here about knowing yourself, but knowledge is demonstrated. Too often, we lie to ourselves about the past: we paint it in pictures either too black or too white. In each case we’re really trying to project an image of ourselves (“I understand and forgive all”, or the opposite). But there is no honesty without fearlessness. If someone was a bastard, why not say so? Here, someone has learned a lesson and tells the truth, let the chips fall where they may. Had he said it in those words, it would have sounded indulgent. But Taupin just tells it as it was, so we can take it or leave it. Then we’re into the chorus:

It’s party time for the guys in the Tower of Babel
Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel. …
Watch them dig their graves,
‘Cos Jesus don’t save the guys in the Tower of Babel.

The Biblical terms add a surprising solemnity, and universalise the experience of these two young men. Taupin will open his bible again, for example, on “Just like Noah’s Ark”, from The Captain and the Kid. It’s funny how often non-believers quote the Bible and appeal to Jesus and salvation. It’s also an odd image because the point of the Tower is that it was never completed. The ‘Babel’ here is both the ‘Babylon’ of John’s Apocalypse, the city of the harlot and unspeakable sin, and the Tower which is cast down and has became a symbol of false pride and arrogance. And it also fits the skyscrapers where the captains of industry lurk as if it were designed for them. So, even if it’s a rather anomalous metaphor, it’s nonetheless evocative and multi-dimensional. The crudity of their money-chase is underscored by the fact that, as even more than with the title track, there is no tuneful melodic line : it is as if the omen-like intensity of the words breaks their symphonic chains. But that changes at the chorus “It’s party time for the guys in the Tower of Babel. Sodom meet Gomorrah! Cain, meet Abel!”

So “Babel” is one raw and fiery song. The significance of its first black statement, the stark single word ‘Snow’, is obvious. The second verse opens with the knell of two words ‘Junk – Angel’, and takes us down beneath the floorboards into the company of cockroaches, where the dealers in the basement are “filling your prescription for a brand new heart attack”.

On track three, the tone softens with the beguilingly musical: “Bitter Fingers”. It opens in the voice of an entertainer addressing the songwriters:

I’m going on the circuit, doing all the pubs,
And I really need a song, boys, to stir those workers up,
And get their wives to sing it with me …

It isn’t that the entertainer is insincere, he’s just selfish, insensitive and second-rate. He’s been deeply dyed in the industry. After two bouncing verses of this blarney, the gears crunch, and Elton snarls:

It’s hard to write a song with bitter fingers,
So much to prove, so few to tell you why.
Those old die-hards in Denmark Street start laughing
At the keyboard player’s hollow haunted eyes …
No more long days hocking hunks of garbage.
Bitter fingers never swung on swinging stars.

I had to cite those last two lines if not just for the alliteration. Although it is the first track on side two, I shall deal here with “Meal Ticket”. It covers something of the same ground as “Tower of Babel” and “Bitter Fingers”, but this time, it directly reveals what “Fingers” had only implied: that the songwriters could themselves be mercenary. I take it that, in the very first line, Elton is aggressively addressing music industry power brokers:

I can hound you if I need to,
Sip your brandy from a crystal shoe …
While the others climb reaching dizzy heights,
The world’s in front of me in black and white:
I’m on the bottom line, I’m on the bottom line.

… While the Diamond Jims
And the Kings Road pimps
Breathe heavy in their brand new clothes.

So here are both sides: the boys’ desperation, and the cynical, selfish parasitism which has driven them where they never thought to go. We’re now removed from the innocence of the title track by a margin that can be crossed but not measured:

And I gotta get a meal ticket.
To survive you need a meal ticket,
To stay alive you need a meal ticket.
Feel no pain, no pain; no regret, no regret.
When the line’s been signed you’re someone else.

I took this song out of turn because these last three songs, like “Dogs in the Kitchen”, deal directly with an important issue: how we relate to being abused. Here the abuse is bloodsucking by professionals in suits and ties, but in life we find countless other examples. The starting point is to see it for what it is. Of course we have been taught to love our enemies, but this does not mean to pretend that they are not your enemies or have not harmed you. One can aspire to say “Forgive them for they know not what they do”, although to be candid, one can know that but yet be incapable of feeling anything which corresponds to it. As the late George Adie said, that sentiment is the ultimate in impartiality. We are still learning to be impartial for short moments. The ultimate is not yet within grasp, though we must not give up on that account.

What I like about these three songs, indeed, what I respect, is that Taupin states his disgust in all its bare ugliness without excuse, apology or evasion. He does not indulge in hatred, he just paints what he saw and felt. It isn’t pretty, but it is arresting. It has, to my mind, something of the quality of some of Tennessee Williams’ work, which is noteworthy, because Taupin mentions him at least twice, on “Lies” from Made in England, and on “Old Sixty Seven” from The Captain and the Kid. Of course, Taupin was attracted to Williams’ work because of a pre-existing similarity of disposition, just as Lennon was. You could, perhaps, call it a thirst for the truth, accepting that someone may be hurt. And I have to add here that I just don’t believe people who urge ‘love’ as if it were as accessible to the heart as money to the hand. This is one area where Taupin has never, from what I can presently recall, slipped in syrup. Even on an early piece like “Border Song” on the Elton John album, he is aware that the love which ends enmities must be sweated and prayed for. Perhaps I shall come to that in a future article. For now, we have the powerful and almost transcendent close of side one: “Tell me when the Whistle Blows” and “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”.

“Whistle Blows” is a story of the country boy going back home for a visit: “And I still feel the need of your apron strings once in a while”. The London railway is seedy, and he himself feels like “a black sheep going home”. Yet, he’s drawn back, and wonders whether the “street kids (will) remember”, whether he can still play pool like he used to, and whether “this country kid (has) still got his soul”. I hear something big in the music, rather as if Elton John also related to it, although it’s really Bernie’s story. What I hear in it, and in its inspired string arrangement, is “moving on to the moment of truth”, if I can put it that way. Has he changed? Who is he now? How will others, his family and his peers receive him? What it comes down to, perhaps, is this: has he been true to himself?

Perhaps questioning yourself is always the first step to seeing yourself, and thus to self-knowledge. This song is Taupin’s record of questioning himself. Great as this song is, it’s greatest value perhaps, is to set the stage and open the curtain for what may be the strongest song this duo ever produced: “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”. On the record, this track closes side 1 with the closure of a red curtain at intermission; and these two tracks are balanced by the last two tracks on side 2, which reprise them in a different emotional key. If “Whistle Blows” is a story of going back home, “Someone” is the same story, but in tragic-triumphant tones, of returning home, to light from darkness. Just quickly, the loss of the two-side album has not only spelled the effective end of the art of record covers, but has robbed the artiste and their audience of the dramatic opportunity to close one side and open another. This is why the record is different from, and superior to the CD.

The piano and cymbals of “Someone Saved my Life Tonight” take us to a world far from that the black sheep waiting at the station, however near it may be in miles: “When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs.”It is not innocent, and its stolid respectability is barely skin deep. The woman Elton almost married is hardly painted in flattering terms: “Prima donna, lord, you really should have been there; sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair”. He gets drunk so that he can’t hear her, and his friends are as legless as he is. We know that this is all true, and that to escape a marriage he felt he could not disavow, he tried to gas himself, but was saved by Long John Baldry. This is the song of the man who came through:

And someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear.
… You nearly had me roped and tied,
Altar bound, hypnotised.
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear,
You’re a butterfly, and butterflies are free to fly,
Fly away, high away … bye, bye!

The lyrics are almost stunning in places: “A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams. … Just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen. … Saved in time, thank God my music’s still alive.”

This last line is the key to the album, that music equals life. Yet, as we shall see, there’s more. There is an odd kind of contemplative interlude, where he says “I would have walked head on into the deep end of the river”, almost as if he is somewhere above his body, watching it move. The same disembodied calm possesses the line “They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home”, the line which formally links this to “Whistle Blows”. Then the music swells until it is would be too intense to bear but for the band’s masterly restraint: “Someone saved my life tonight, so save your strength and run the field you play alone”.

Bear in mind that this is the man whom Bernie Taupin calls ‘The Captain’. And after Taupin wrote him these lyrics, he set them to music of singular potency and sang them. Somewhere or other, I came across that when it was being recorded, Gus Dudgeon asked Elton to put more emotion into his voice, until Davey Johnstone told him to let up: “he’s singing about an attempted suicide”, or words to that effect. That the Captain should submit himself to the ordeal is significant. It had a life purpose, it was written and recorded for a purpose, for fulfilment, not for money.

This is one of those songs where I feel that although the spirit is never mentioned, yet the music bears within itself something of the sublime. In the first blog, I wrote: “I call the ‘sublime’ that precious, subtle feeling of myself as if on the cusp of touching the mystery of eternity. It is the life of what Gurdjieff called the “higher emotional centre”, and its music is, as it were, music delivered through the flesh, but heard by the ears of the soul. … For example, when I listen, with quiet attention, to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” or “Funeral for a Friend”, I feel that there is something majestic swelling in and above the music, which calls me on and upwards.” And I’m not alone in that.

Now, as mentioned, side two opens with the visceral “Meal Ticket”, but from there, the mood of the record changes. Track two is the startlingly original “Better Off Dead”. Driven by the piano, Elton sounds almost derring-do. If a song were to be written for the Scarlet Pimpernel, this could be it. It’s early morning in the grimy city, people are being arrested as the fag end of the night plays itself out: there’s vandalism, and there’s trouble. And yet, here is life! As in “Someone Saved”, music and life are linked:

‘Cause the steam’s in the boiler, the coal’s in the fire!
If you ask how I am, then I’ll just say ‘inspired’!
If the thorn of the rose is the fire in your side,
Then you’re better off dead and you haven’t yet died.

Life is acknowledged, accepted and affirmed with its thorns and all. The means to affirmation is the music, or to be more precise, the feeling of self which comes through their music. This feeling comes through clearly and warmly on the next track: “Writing”:

Inspiration for navigation of our new found craft.
… Will the things we wrote today sound as good tomorrow?
Will we still be writing in approaching years?
… Don’t disturb us if you hear us trying
To instigate the structure of another line or two,
‘Cause writing’s lightin’ up,
And I like life enough to see it through.

I don’t think the music of this song is particularly wonderful, but it’s pleasant, and it allows one a nice breathing space between the precocity of “Better Off Dead” and the symphonic triumph of “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”, which really form one sustained statement. Here, the love we all happen to fall for is their music. Now not everyone writes music, but music here is a symbol of realising one’s potential, and love for what we have made of ourselves.

This is, I think, the manifesto of the album, if it has one. If the music is alive (not prostituted to the highest bidder), if it is your music, and you are true to yourself, everything life sends you can be accepted. We have seen how the preceding songs have provided the material of this ‘manifesto’, and it all comes together now on “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”

The song opens with some simple descending piano lines. It’s as if someone has walked into the room. Then Elton starts singing, describing the two of them, late at night on a subway station, tired and aching, but believing that “it’s all worth it, we all fall in love sometimes”. Accidentally or not, Elton’s accent falls equally on the three words “all – worth – it”. Exactly what it conveys, beyond the intuition that ‘it’ is something special, is hard to say; yet I feel meaning in it. Now comes the romance:

Full moon’s bright, starlight filled the evening,
We wrote it, and I played it,
Something’s happened,
It’s so strange this feeling.
Naive notions that were childish,
Simple tunes that tried to hide it.
When it comes, we all fall in love sometime.

The melody is simple, and has a subtle sway which comes more to the fore in the chorus: “Did we, didn’t we, should we, could we …”. The evocation of close-of-day fatigue married with the discovery of the wonders of their “newfound craft”, is as accomplished as it is – to my best knowledge – unique. In a funny way, such is the achievement of this song that there I have very little to say about it. To my ear, at least, these songs of self-knowledge are amongst the greatest songs of the last hundred years, and “We All Fall” is perhaps the jewel in the crown. It segues straight into “Curtains”, once more, a strikingly original song in melody, lyrics and format. Like the total track, it practically has no tunefulness, and yet, as chimes softly toll, its slowly paced incantation gives the lyrics an almost oracular status:

I used to know this old scarecrow,
He was my song, my joy and sorrow.
Cast alone between the furrows
Of a field no longer sown by anyone.

As with the previous song, there are no illusions that everything they wrote was brilliant. Yet, the old scarecrow is not disowned, and in one concise phrase we have a generous spectrum of feeling: “He was my song, my joy and sorrow”. The next words are given poignancy by the bells which have been unobtrusively sounding:

I held a dandelion that said the time had come,
To leave upon the wind, never to return,
When summer burned the earth again.
Cultivate the freshest flower
This garden ever grew.
In between these branches
I once wrote such childish words for you.

We have seen these motifs above, the country imagery, and the naivety of some of their earliest songs. But the themes are now drawn together and bring a coherent, almost convincing power, as Taupin refigures them. We have come now from summers in the saddle to summers which will never be repeated, from aspiration to achieving. Yes, the lyrics were naive:

But that’s okay, there’s treasure children always seek to find,
And just like us, you must have had A Once Upon A Time.

This is an important insight: we can punish ourselves for the mistakes of childhood and adolescence, but we were learning and, we can punish ourselves beyond any sane reason for our ignorance. This understanding is allowed its full weight by the evenly chanted spell which Elton John casts. Finally, there is a lengthy “outro” in which Elton and the vocalists compete in bursts of “o-o-o-o-o” and “lum-de-dum-de-day-do” while the drums rumble and the bells ring. No wonder Elton John’s output went into a slump after this. Where else could he go? If it is a law that every force has an equal and opposite reaction, then the law applies to output (which makes me think of how the Beatle’s greatest triumphs, Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper were followed by the mediocre Magical Mystery Tour, and the splendid John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine by the barely listenable Some Time in New York City).

Captains Fantastic is the most perfectly executed concept album I have ever heard, forming a satisfying thematically unified whole. I mean that it makes a better album because, being integrated, it leaves one with a sense of the whole which rounds out any uneven spots along the way. It’s as if the weak points are effaced by the strengths, because after the title track, no song is beginning from zero point. There is a building, an accumulation, and it’s all gathered and harvested in the almost spectacularly brilliant “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”, two limbs of one musical statement.

More than I can recall in popular music, John and Taupin demonstrate the continuity between childhood and adulthood, acknowledge it, and understand that with the development there come also lawful changes. It is an album of metamorphosis. Although it’s never stated, there is something of the story of the Ugly Duckling here about Elton John: the nerd who grows up to reveal a soul of heroic steel.

The album is a statement of metamorphosis: the album cover, the work of Alan Aldridge and Harry Willcock, but conceived by Taupin, I believe, evokes a world of chimeras, unearthly combinations and familiar monstrosities. Once again, I have reason to mourn the passing of the album cover. Perhaps if CDs could be released within record sleeves? It is a manifesto of metamorphosis, because the message is that only if you are true to yourself and do not compromise on the music inside you (whatever form that music takes) can you realise your potential. This message is rather more explicitly developed on The Captain and the Kid, so I’m fortunate to have the advantage of hearing that music in my head as I consider this one.

While Captain Fantastic is about the lives of John and Taupin, it is also of almost universal relevance: it deals with ambition, love of life, sacrifice, great sadness, triumph, realism, creation, manipulation, excess, generosity of spirit, perseverance, and human existence. Ultimately, everyone can relate to its forceful artistic statement that life is worth living, despite the pain. And the statement is put all the more powerfully for not being put directly. If you let the music in, the enlightenment rises upon you, in all its splendour, and lives inside your feeling. Considering Captain Fantastic from that perspective, it’s clear why it is, at least in conception, superior to Yellow Brick Road.

But that’s not all. When I said that the message is that life is worth living, despite the pain, I think that there’s something else implied. And that is that you have to make it worth living. I would say that an aim is needed, and in Gurdjieff’s terms, this would be an aim to discover and develop your essential individuality. In Taupin’s terms, speaking about Elton and himself, it was the development of their musicianship. When he said “thank God my music’s still alive”, what was his highest gratitude for: himself or his muse? And yet, perhaps the two come down to the same thing.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

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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.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

John Lennon: Essence & Reality Part 14: “Tennessee” and “Real Love”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

John Lennon

Tennessee Williams

Lennon took a rather high view of the artist’s role and mission in society. He not only preached it, he indulged himself (and his second wife) in living the life of the socially-conscious avant-garde artist, and living it rather expansively. There was a rationale, if not an ideology behind it. One could conceive Lennon producing a manifesto to the effect that the role of the artist is to animate people by mediating a cultural influence, and, in rare cases, at the tip of the flower of culture, a spiritual influence. This influence comes through in the artist’s work, but as the Lennons saw “art” as a river without banks, it also flowed through their lives. If artists have the privilege of being opinion makers, leaders and teachers, there are also responsibilities and prices. Artists are responsible to use their public profile to spread a positive message. But this profile exacts a price, the notorious down-side of living in the public eye, and being vulnerable to misunderstanding and abuse, especially from the jackals of the media.

As one would expect, Lennon’s relationship with his public and journalists was highly charged and strongly polarised in both directions – attraction and repulsion. He wanted people to love not just his work but also himself. Sometimes this was manifested in absurd extremes of self-importance, as, for example, when returning his MBE in protest to the Palace, he cited as one of his reasons that “Cold Turkey” had slipped down the charts. Even if this was meant to be humorous, it was a significant humour, because it is spun out of nothing but vanity. I doubt that it would occur to the average person to suppose that Her Majesty, or even the government of the UK, could have done anything about chart performance of 45 rpm records, let alone be rebuked for not having taken measures to ensure that “Cold Turkey” peaked at the metaphorical Everest. Much as I admire Lennon, he himself was the only butt of that joke, if indeed it was a joke. It was egoism to a delusional degree; and part of the reason I do admire him is because eventually took himself in hand and become humbler.

This conception of the artist’s noble social calling is a contributing explanation of many if not most of Lennon’s more bizarre actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the bed-ins. They said that they knew that they were going to get publicity whatever they did, and decided to use it in a manner which they saw as positive. We all see the point they were trying to make: the desire for peace should be a major value in everyone’s real life, and not just a camouflage for a profound apathy, or a tonic to placate the last remaining vestiges of conscience while engaging in war. At the time, important nations in the Western world were fighting the war in Vietnam, which, for everything I can see, was not a just war. Those who resisted the war must have felt frustrated to a point of madness. However, the self-importance and extremity of John and Yoko’s actions were of doubtful value, they were perhaps even counter-productive. A more measured protest, I suspect, would have been more effective. I think that, at that point and until his 1975 reunion with her, John and Yoko were so addicted to publicity and preaching that they did not consider that the wrong type of publicity could do damage to their causes.

After the tour de force of raw revelation which was the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, Lennon cut the Imagine album. He once described the title track, his hymn for a believing atheism, as “sugar-coated”. After its critically acclaimed predecessor, yes “Imagine” does sound rather tailored for radio. And its sales far surpassed the previous one’s, which will not have displeased Lennon. It is
possible to entertain and spread a positive message at the same time. In itself that is not a serious problem: from what I can hear the very best music is played over radio together with everything else. Having fame and solo success, Lennon wanted to use it, and he and Yoko reverted to their favoured style: aggressive and preachy. And so they came to produce the disastrous Some Time in New York City album. Its chart and sales failure deeply upset Lennon, who was always competing with other musicians, especially, of course, Paul McCartney. I never heard, however, that he had acknowledged the record’s patent artistic failure.

But Lennon, being Lennon, could not sit still for long. Three years later, if you can credit it, these are lyrics Lennon was working on in the mid-70s, for a song in honour of Tennessee Williams, which showed how far he had come from the strident days of Some Time in New York City:

Tennessee, O Tennessee, what you’ve shown to me:1
Your words like water, pure and clear.
The sadness of your soul reveals the music of this sphere,
Conceal it behind your spirit mind, your poet’s love and feel.2

If I hadn’t heard Lennon singing these words, I wouldn’t have believed that he had written them, because nothing I’ve read about Lennon (and I’ve read whatever I can get my hands on) discloses the least reason to think that Lennon entertained such an exalted opinion of Williams. Lennon never finished this song, although he spent a lot of time working on it. When Lennon writes about “your words like water, pure and clear”, it is hard not to think of this of a case as one soul calling to another like soul, because Lennon too, aimed at clarity and directness.

On one take of “Tennessee”, the one I’ve most often heard, the opening verse is:

America, America, your heroes are alive.
Your faded men and glory will survive.
The madness of your soul supplies the all-consuming fire,
Beneath your spreaded chestnut lies A Streetcar Named Desire.

As with “Instant Karma!”, the writing is so intense, it is difficult to digest it. The final verse is no less compressed:

Tennessee, O Tennessee, your southern bell will ring.
Music travelled far from New Orleans.
Sling an arrowed mirror in the magic of your dreams
Reflect echoed harmony of the naked human being.
Reflect echoed harmony of the cold and lonely naked human being.

I am indebted to Peter Van Schie’s “Between the Lines” page for the lyrics. I must admit I could not make them all out from the recording. I have also heard another version of the song, where Lennon sings “Memory, O memory, release me from your spell”, and says that “today is really all I need to know”. I wonder whether Lennon wasn’t concerned that a song of homage to Tennessee Williams (who was then still alive and being covered in glory) would sound a little strange, and tried to find other lyrics. But these words, in homage to Williams and to the USA, are the only ones which work for me.

And they do work. The sentiments are so strange and almost forced as to be unsettling: what does it mean to sling an arrowed mirror, let alone to do the slinging in the magic of someone’s dreams? Yet, the anthemic quality of the music, the solemn almost gospel piano, and the patent unforced sincerity in his voice produce, in my opinion, one of Lennon’s greatest achievements. If Yoko Ono is reading this blog, it is the ideal moment for her to release every available version of this jewel, and in return I shall see to it that masses are offered for her and her intentions in every cathedral where I can have incense burned.

One of the important points here is that he seems to have learned something from Tennessee Williams: remember, Lennon’s opening sentiment is “Tennessee, O Tennessee, what you’ve shown to me” (my emphasis). What I think he learnt is that it is possible for the artist to be a poet, and to have a “spirit mind”, and to show people what their lives are like, without hopelessly antagonizing them and ridiculing himself as a fool.

Of course, in the past, Tennessee Williams had suffered more than his fair share of muck-throwing, and Lennon doubtless knew this. But by the mid 70s, Williams had come through, and his star had risen, fixed to if not in the constellation of the revered Marlon Brando (who had starred in the famous film version of A Streetcar Named Desire) and many other major stars with real credibility (e.g. Orson Welles) who had appeared in film versions of his plays. In his ability, in his mastery of his craft, his public penetration, in his history as a subject of abuse, and in his hoped for rehabilitation as an American icon, Lennon partly identified with Williams. Why else would he twice speak of Williams as producing “music”? One can wonder, too, whether Williams’ homosexuality and consequent outsider status may not also have appealed to Lennon.

But I think that the almost startling intensity of this song, and perhaps the fact that it was never completed and released, is eloquent of Lennon’s personal life in the last six years of his life. The significant elements are that Lennon sings of William’s words being “like water, pure and clear”, of the sadness of his soul, that this sadness reveals the “music of this sphere” (which I take to mean that as an artist he had access to higher level of insight), and that Williams could “conceal” the raw perception by virtue of his spirit mind of the love and feeling of a poet. All of these points are important. Lennon stated in one of his last interviews that many people were discomfited when he sang about himself, but if he made it a third person saga, such as Tommy, Ziggy Stardust or Sadie Schmuck (so it sounded to me), that could be accepted.

Could it be that at this point of his life, Lennon was starting to realise that sugar coating could be quite a useful commodity for a pill-maker? Sometimes I think that the vital fact is that both Williams and Lennon were appealing to America. Williams seems to me to have cherished an almost idolatrous love of the USA, after all, he changed his first name to “Tennessee”. But, it is also reasonable to suggest that Lennon’s reference to the country cannot be lightly dismissed. Lennon calls America by name, twice, almost like Elijah summoning the dead to rise. He boldly declares, prophet-like, that “your faded men and glory will survive.” By now the Vietnam war had been lost, and I think that this is Lennon’s theme. But he is not hooting in triumph: did he not mean that although he had opposed the war, he had never opposed the country and its people? He adored America, and he worshipped it partly because “the madness of (its) soul supplies (an) all-consuming fire,” and Lennon wanted fire (as perhaps we all do at some deep level). Be that as it may, the song abounds with soul, love and the value of honesty.

In these lyrics, Lennon see humanity on the slab, as it were, and declares that what Williams “reflects” and “echoes” is accurate. Lennon endorses Williams’ vision that on the marble is “the cold and lonely naked human being”. Can there be any doubt that Lennon saw himself and everyone he knew in Williams’ lines?

Incidentally, two images from this song were also found on the Walls and Bridges album. First, the liquid image (“all we need is water … cool … clear … water!) also recurs in “Old Dirt Road”, which he co-wrote with Nilsson not long before he began working on this song. Second, the “mirror in the magic of your dreams” reminds me of “# 9 Dream”, and the line “through the mirror go round”. Indeed, that song with its references to magic and spirits is close to “Tennessee”, in that both are visionary recitals.

This leads me, at last!, to the chief point of this blog, and that is this: while it is easy to criticise Lennon for not living his philosophy of love, he was, in my view, trying to transfer what he felt deeply as a reality in one state to his life when in another state. The higher, and truer state was, for Lennon, the one he experienced making and writing music. And yet he did not despise the world. Consider these words from the matchless “Real Love”, which he was working on about the same time as “Tennessee”:

All my little plans and schemes pass like some forgotten dream.
Seems that all I really was doing was waiting for you.
Just like little girls and boys playing with their little toys.
Seems like all we really were doing was waiting for love.
No need to be alone, no need to be alone.
It’s ree-yal love, it’s re-e-e-e-eal, yes it’s ree-yal love, it’s re-e-e-e-eal.
… No need to be afraid, no need to be afraid.
Thought I’d been in love before, but in my heart I wanted more …

Like “Tennessee”, the piano version has the simple dignified quality of the best of church music. The film “John Lennon: Imagine” opens with him playing it on acoustic guitar. Each has a disarming directness about it, and the Beatles’ edition from the third volume of the Anthology has an energy which adds an endearing vim, redolent to me of the early classics “I Want to Hold your Hand”, “She Loves You”, “I Feel Fine”, and so on. “Real Love” could, I think, well have fitted onto Rubber Soul or Revolver.

These lyrics, seemingly so naive, yet reveal so much: his plans and schemes have vanished like the merest of dreams. The occupations with which he kept himself so terribly busy were the pleasant bubbles of childhood. By stressing as he does that he has found real love, he is stating that there is an unreal love. He had always known it was possible, he says. It is as if he had been fooling himself. But no more. Beyond shadows to realities, as so many have said in different ways.

This, I think, is the key to both songs. Lennon was questing for the road to reality, and sometimes he found his feet on it. The way to the road lay, for him, through art and through love. So Lennon had had glimpses of this, but how to make it a part of his life? In a way, I feel that this was the theme of Lennon’s life and striving. What he wanted was reality.

Sometimes Lennon knew that reality lies not in personalities (as he sang in “God”), or in occupations or callings (such to the avant-garde), but in a change our internal states. As he sang in “Revolution” to all those agitating for political change, “you better free your mind instead”. But precocious as this understanding was, Lennon often forgot it. In fact, even when he wrote “Revolution” a part of him was not convinced of it.

One of Gurdjieff’s great insights was that we can know the truth, but the level of truth we can know depends upon our state. We cannot really speak of ourselves in an absolute way: to be more precise, and so freer of illusion, there is myself in this state, and myself in any one of the endless number of states we move from. Our state is always changing, but the range through which it changes can be higher or lower. The speed with which our state can fall is so bewildering that it can lead to despair. But with time, one can learn to raise one’s state just as quickly. And with time, too, our state will cease to fall so low as to sink into danger.

So that was John Lennon: he knew that there were certain states where love was real. That is what he wrote of in “Real Love”, and it supplied the fire that he then projected onto the USA and one of its greatest playwrights. The tragedy was that he was murdered while he was learning to bring something of this state to all the rest of his life, and to spread “The Word”, as he sang on Rubber Soul.

Note: Since I wrote the piece on “Imagine”, I have come to see one important matter: the song is actually addressed to believers. The famous opening words “Imagine there’s no heaven” can only make sense if spoken to those who believe in the existence of a heaven. “Heaven” is often a way of referring to “God”, just as “the White House” can often mean the President of the USA. Throughout the addresses those who also believe in hell and religion. Lennon does not outright invited us to imagine no God, but it comes to the same thing.

So what follows from this? To my mind it strengthens the impression that “the song aspires to ideals usually associated exclusively with religion.” Lennon was correct to say in 1980 that he was a religious person. It strengthens my sense that a spiritual or even mystic interpretation of Lennon’s life and work is fitting, and is potentially productive of good clear light.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
27 September 2009

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.

GEORGE ADIE on the Creator-in-me

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

George Adie on the Creator-in-me

[These two pieces were read to us at a combined meeting in Newport. Mr Adie simply read them one after another, yet I feel that he sensed a connection between them. He made an ex tempore comment, which appears at the end, in quote marks. I have added the titles (Joseph Azize, Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com, 18 September 2009)]

I. The Sense of the Creator-in-me

So I go about, greatly occupied by turning thoughts. Yet, as I attend to my many duties, am I aware of the great unknowable, the infinity of the Creator-in-me?

“I waited on the Lord. He inclined unto me. He heard my complaint.”1

What can be more important than this? But for my field of consciousness to receive the ceaseless influence of this divine level, I have to be aware of my aim, of the purpose for my life on the level of the external world. I must both contribute and receive on that level also. After all, it is my life, the very life in which I must actualise my possibilities of becoming conscious.

As I go, as I work, let me not allow this awareness to be merely a background, obscured by every occurrence or influence. Let me primarily be aware of the Creator-in-me, of God-in-me. Let the Creator-in-me not be forgotten, so that I may enter the great realm of knowledge and self-certainty.

And now as I remember myself, I increasingly sense a strange self-certainty. I direct attention outwards as may be necessary in payment for my life. I voluntarily manifest this process in me with all that it implies. So let me also live and fulfil my external duties so as to benefit my fellow creatures.

This is the great life of the ceaseless sunrise of creation: may the sense of the Creator-in-me as I move leaven my being, and may my labour be also for my neighbour.
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II. Lost Loves: Repairing the Past

When I look back I see a wasteland of lost opportunities, and of repeated failures to understand life’s offerings. There have been so many moments offering possibilities for the rarest exchanges: possibilities lost through indifference, self-importance, coldness. The lost love of friends, of people who made sacrifices on my behalf. All moments of flowering love, but without response from me, so that they withered and died in pain and disappointment.

I collect myself, and I attempt to stop thought, and yet these recollections come and distract me. In the past, it seemed, I could stop thought. It seemed I could turn inside, and find myself. Then I had refreshment so as to continue, but now? How can I understand what is necessary?

Life and creation never cease. I must find my way anew, in this fresh creation of the present moment. I have often proved for myself that the way always mounts before me. It is always there and it always demands more of me, by lawful demand. And so now, more effort is necessary.

Now I have to repair these very bitter past failures which are pressed upon my consciousness in continuing process. I repair them now: now in the present.

In this state I can see and realize with an unimagined clarity that the ghostly pictures which lie behind the recurring memories, just because they still return, can be repaired now. So now I can and must recompense for the past.

At once time vanishes.

I AM, and time is no longer. All is One and I am That.

I look on the ocean, calm after endless days of storm, stretching now blue and serene to the horizon, and I hear in me the words: “Peace, be still, I AM”.2

Now I give thanks for my present pain, which awakens me and tells me just how to fill the void through reparation. I deal with present deeds in the presence of the all-merciful presence, the all-merciful present.

“You know how he spoke about the merciless Heropass? In the now, it’s merciful.”

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Editor’s Comments

Mr Adie assumes that we know both what he means and what he does when he “repairs the past”. This was a reasonable enough assumption with that audience. Besides, if someone did not understand, they could ask. These pieces can possess the power that they do only because so much background material is lift unstated. To fill it in, where necessary, only adds to one’s understanding.

I have already gathered some of his more detailed material on repairing the past for the book George Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia. To try and put it simply, without suggesting that this is the only way to approach this mystery, I can repair the past because I am the past, although I am not just the past. The past lives on in me, but it only dominates and determines the man-machine. In so far as I am conscious, I can introduce a new element which is not utterly determined by the past into myself. So, in a way, my direct effort is to repair myself, and yet there is still this indirect result that the past is no longer as it was, because I am always emerging from it, and I am now more conscious.

I can experience states where I stay present before memories. I do not run away or “squirm” – a word Mr Adie used more than a few times, with artistic justice. I remain, and I cognize with the whole of myself, that it could not then have been different. I acted as I did because that was how I was then: less responsible, less understanding, less capable. I feel pity for those whom I have pained (pity, I would say now, is a form of love in which we share the sufferings of others through the legitimate faculty of imagination). In, through and by my presence, the pain is received consciously. Perhaps this is something of what Gurdjieff meant by being-remorse.

Even in ordinary life, past events are seen differently depending on the long-term outcome. In Shakespeare, for example, no good came from Lear’s impulsive and short-sighted actions in Act I. In Cymbeline, however, the king’s folly, and with it the past, was redeemed by the acts of true and faithful Imogen and others, who, although not on her level, yet possessed something of these virtues. They never deserted King Cymbeline’s best interests, although he thought all three of them to be his worst enemies. In repairing the past, Leonatus and Belarius, in particular, worked both for themselves and for others. Perhaps it must always be that way: so bound up are our lives with those of others.

Next, I am particularly struck by the truth of Mr Adie’s saying: “In this state I can see and realize with an unimagined clarity that the ghostly pictures which lie behind the recurring memories, just because they still return, can be repaired now.”

This, to me, is a perfect truth. Usually, I have a painful memory, and I identify with the pain. I react emotionally when I should be using my reason. But, as he says, precisely because the past recurs it can be repaired. After all, I cannot repair the past if I am oblivious of it. Perhaps one can even say that these painful past memories bring a certain “consciousness” with them. If so, okay, let me expand that consciousness. And then, as Gurdjieff said: “By as much as one is conscious, there is no more suffering.”

When Mr Adie says “… now I can and must recompense for the past”, he is referring to another truth, that I am responsible for what I have received. It is the parable of the talents.

Finally, at the Prieure, Gurdjieff taught a movement known as “Lost Loves”. Some notes of it have been preserved. The movements as drawn are very evocative. This fortifies me in the feeling which I have received from this piece that there is something in this concept which is not just silly sentimentality. It is really very hard to face this sort of personal tragedy. But the example of people like Mr Adie both urges those with sufficient understanding, and proves that it is possible.

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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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Reveiw of JANE HEAP/NOTES

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Jane Heap

Jane Heap / Notes, Jane Heap, anonymously edited by Annie-Lou Staveley and David Kherdian, 1983 and 2002, Two Rivers Press, Aurora, ISBN 089756023X

Overview
This is an edition of the notes Jane Heap prepared before delivering her talks to her pupils in the Gurdjieff ideas and methods. They are not ‘to introduce the ideas’, but ‘towards practical application of the ideas’. Her pupils had already learned the theoretical outlines, and were now participating in groups (the Gurdjieff schools generally organize pupils into ‘groups’ for collective study of the applied methods). The fact that these notes were not written for publication makes them more valuable, because we eavesdrop, as it were, on Jane thinking to herself about how she can address the practical needs of her pupils.

Gurdjieff’s ideas can only ever be superficially understood without an attempt to apply them to oneself. One finds in this volume, to an extraordinary degree, evidence of knowledge and practice united in work – which I would define as ‘informed action directed to a constructive aim’ (see George Adie p. 28). Although written as a number of chains of thought, not as one thematic exercise, the contents of this book are probably the greatest exposition of the ‘technique of techniques’ we will ever have.

Details
There is a table of contents, a two page introduction by Michael Currer-Briggs (whom Dr Lester, Jane’s pupil and physician, described to me as Jane’s ‘right hand man’), a large number of extracts from Jane’s private notes, with minimally intrusive editing by Mrs Staveley (one of Jane’s pupils, whom Jane effectively ‘graduated’ from her group before her death), and David Kherdian (Mrs Staveley’s pupil, and an acclaimed literary talent). Pages 87-95 comprise a collection of Jane’s aphorisms. The text is organized into readings of between one and ten pages, with italic sub-headings at various points. This is good, because the presentation is intense and compressed, so the sectioned layout assists the reader to select and study integrated units of related thoughts.

The volume is an attractive hard cover, with thick paper cover and plastic protection, approx. 6 ½ by 8 inches, with oil print on the endpapers. It comprises 95 pages printed on a slightly creamy, textured, top quality paper. The original 1983 edition was handset. Except, I think, that the first edition had leather trimmings, the 2002 edition is an exact facsimile reproduction of the first. Information about Jane, her style of teaching, and the publication of these notes and others, is found on the fly-leaves. The excellent choice of the paper, print and binding were the work of David Kherdian and his wife Nonny Hogrogian, a celebrated artist. However, the entire group at Two Rivers Farm were concerned in various aspects of its compilation and printing. To see and hold it, one feels that one is in the presence of a product of respect and careful attention, even down to the good use made of the fly-leaves.

Background
At the outset, I should observe that there is another book of Jane Heap’s notes, The Notes of Jane Heap, which, although also published by Two Rivers Press, was edited by Michael Currer-Briggs and others of Jane’s London pupils, not by Mrs Staveley. That is different from the book I am reviewing, although almost everything I say about the contents of this volume would apply to it, too. There is a significant overlap between the contents of the two books. The chief difference is that the ‘London notes’ lack even the subtle editing of this volume, and that, I think, is advantageous in that the notes are even more concise, but then, sometimes they’re almost impenetrable. That volume is a nice hard cover, but as an artefact, it is not in the same league as this masterpiece.

I have seen the typed transcript of all Jane’s notes, and it’s fairly apparent from their contents that some of them, especially the “Black Book”, can only have been meant for her own purposes, and not even in preparation for addressing her groups. But this book does not include those most private notes: this volume consists of notes which Jane wrote in longhand when preparing to give talks to her groups.

In August 1973, some nine years after Jane’s death, some of her pupils, having already provided Jeanne de Salzmann with a complete copy of the typed transcripts, met with her in Switzerland to discuss what use they might make of the material. And it is fortunate that they did, because Madame challenged them to produce their best. I do not just mean that she issued a challenge: anyone can do that. De Salzmann helped them probe deeply for their truest, best effort, as is apparent from the extracts below. It must have been an intense two days for these people. The notes of the meeting with Madame de Salzmann record her as saying on the first day:

This is something none of the other books have. There is plenty published about Ideas but not about How to work. Perhaps the thing to do is to prepare a small volume on this. Then Mme Salzmann will show it to the older ones – Tracol, Mme Lannes, Deselle – to see if it would help. We must be more DYNAMIC.

The capitals are as in the notes of that meeting, provided to me by the late Dr Lester. De Salzmann went on to say:

We must remember that what we do will be for the benefit of Jane – editing and shortening – and not hold back or hold on to the old memories because we were there – were taught by her. We must remember that the book will be read by people who never knew or saw Jane. For this reason we must remember that we have to insure that the book has IMPACT. (Jane’s sayings – need to be worked up and brought on).

I am not sure whether this last sentence represents de Salzmann’s aside, or was placed there by someone else. She made the point, which I feel the London notes bear out, that unedited, these notes incline towards being too dense. Thus, while I do not know if Madame ever gave approval of Mrs Staveley’s and Kherdian’s book prior to publication, it is that one which more closely accords with her advice:

As they are – Jane’s Notes – we would have to shorten them – edit them for reading. When they were given they were spoken – they were for that group to hear – for that moment – that meeting. They were spoken to be listened to. At a meeting – when spoken – the formulation does not matter so much because of the people there – they could be explained – elaborated – questions could be answered. But for reading by other people – people on their own – at home and not in meetings or groups – it would have to be different – and very carefully formulated – absolutely right.

One can sense the high demand which de Salzmann made, and the quality of thought which she brought (I am told she used to quote Gurdjieff as having said: “Very good is not good enough”). Other of de Salzmann’s comments, as recorded in these notes, illustrate the initial impulse which went into the production of this volume:

We must remember there is never enough MENACE in ourselves – never enough hard confrontation. If there is a true confrontation there is an agony – a horror – in that moment of balance. This way or that? Whichever way we go is an escape. We have to pay. If we give up then we are lost. … We meet someone – read a book – it arouses our interest – we feel that person has something. Even at a very early age that possibility of interest is there. This arousing of interest happens in our ordinary lives. We become aware that there is a hunger in us and because of that we follow that interest – we put our energy into that and no longer just as always before on everyday things. In doing that we put our energy onto a new and different level in ourselves.

We meet someone – like you met Jane – who has something different – that meeting raises your interest to this other level – it calls you to give your interest and energy in that direction. That person remains special for you – will always remain so – has become permanent. They have altered the direction of your life. Then later you will meet something else which will do the same and again raise you to another level. Gradually something becomes your own – what you have received is available to you. And you are in danger. There is a menace for you – a trap. You do not go on – you stay there. It has become too easy and you fall down and allow life to take you away. You do not stay there with that danger, that menace. You do not find your place. If you lose that position of danger it is hard to come back again.

Then there is TIME. Gurdjieff used to give work of a certain kind, for a time only. And just when people were getting used to that work – beginning to be able to do it – to find it easy, he would sweep it away – destroy it – because of that danger – the danger of it becoming too easy. Life changes – some of the things we still hear about – read about are now old fashioned. The time has gone for them, and this is inevitable and according to Law. There is a different way to call people to work now – a way that has to be used today. This we must always be searching for – and at the same time we must remain faithful to the Work – the Ideas – as we received them.

It is easy to make grand efforts – big efforts – to work extra hard on this or that, with terrific energy. This also can be an escape – can be a danger too. But if your work is related differently – if it is not just in one part – your mind or your feelings or your body – if everything in you is related and related to that danger – that menace – so that a true confrontation can take place – a confrontation that brings you up with a jerk – then that is different.

That, then, is how Jeanne de Salzmann came to be the godmother, as it were, of this volume. Now for the two other key players. Jane Heap and Annie-Lou Staveley were two of Gurdjieff’s most accomplished, and most faithful pupils. Unfortunately, there has not yet been any study of either of these most redoubtable persons which does them justice. Jane (1887-1964) was with Gurdjieff from about 1924, I believe, although at some point he sent her to London to commence her own groups. Initially, I understand, he asked her to join Ouspensky’s London group, but he refused to accept her. If I remember correctly, Moore says that his stated reason was that she was an ‘incorrigible lesbian’. Apart from wondering what a ‘corrigible lesbian’ would look like, and how Ouspensky would go about correcting one, I would need to see some evidence before I could believe that Ouspensky had made the comment: it seems an odd thing to say knowing that it could be reported, and that she had been a pupil of Gurdjieff’s.

The Contents
This book is direct and powerful to an extent I have never seen matched: “Only what we actually experience is valuable” [page 8]. As De Salzmann said, these notes tell how to apply the Gurdjieff method. They do not expound the ideas, but they operate from the ideas in such a way that certain important ones are highlighted; and when they are, their setting, which is a practical one, illuminates them in fresh ways. For example, she says that ‘I’ is a ‘power of emanation’ [12], and that it is a ‘potentiality of essence’ [13], and so opens a new perspective on these ideas. Then, the piece “I Am my Burden” draws on the Law of Seven, and yet develops it in a direction contemplated, but not executed, in Miraculous:

To finish everything you begin! We rarely finish anything completely – always something is lacking. How to see clearly in ourselves the cause of this! I may be unable to finish because I have decided but have not understood. … Or you may take the habit of finishing – but it will not give anything because the same habit may turn into something else. [3]

From these notes we can glimpse something of the teaching, and of the ‘technique of techniques’. I first heard this phrase from George Adie: both he and Helen Adie had been close to Jane, and they perhaps learned it from her. Mr Adie used it as a description of the Gurdjieff method, a technique which is not like any other we have known. It’s a technique which comes from a higher level, so that even in its form it is under fewer rules than our ordinary methods. The heart of this ‘technique of techniques’ is the preparation, and so, the preparation itself can also be called the ‘technique of techniques’. And yet, Jane says that “Every time I have to remind myself that it has to be the first time I ever tried the exercise” [16].

Can the use of a technique and the imperative to continually reinitiate fresh efforts be reconciled? They can be, and they often are, in practice. We see this even in the world where employing techniques in trades, arts and crafts, far from inhibiting freshness, makes it more possible. The great innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and J.S. Bach devoted great attention to the fine details of their arts. They can be reconciled in theory, too, because mastering the platform skills requires that the three platform functions (intellect, feeling and organic instinct) are trained, as a vine is trained to a trellis, and harmonized at least in respect of that art, which may explain why many people who master a craft, an art, a science or a skill, come to appreciate it with something in the direction of love.

The technique of techniques is under the laws of a higher world: it is based on the understanding of higher mind. In addition, the preparation is done in quiet, away from electro-magnetic fields, in the light and air of morning, which, as Gurdjieff said, possess special properties. Very few principles are required to do the preparation, either for the contemplative part, or to complete it by making a plan for the day or, in the evening, to review it and perhaps make a sketch for the following day.

Although the preparation is made in a special environment, with special knowledge, nonetheless its fruits must be expressed in this world: which means the formulation and the fixture of plan, and the wish and resolve to keep one’s word to oneself. So there is definition and decision, and it has to be that way. To refuse to use any technique is idiocy, a recipe for delusion. This is true whether we’re speaking of carpentry, gardening, painting, music, or inner development.

This point deserves emphasis: this book presents the authentic Gurdjieff teaching of the ‘preparation’ (not the ‘sitting’), thus Jane says “All depends on your preparation” [63] , but see also pp. 10 (mentioning divided attention), 14-16, 31, 34, 38, 46, 48-9, 52, 54, 63, 69 and 81. It helps that Jane refers both to the evening preparation and to the connection between the preparation and one’s plan for the day [pp. 14, 55 and 70]. The Adies brought all of these methods, and I have concluded that they are critical to any possibility of accelerated development. I would say that I proved this to myself, because after their deaths, I gradually let those good habits run down, but I’ve returned, thankfully, to them just in accordance with the principles they gave.

The preparation is a sort of bridge between worldly and spiritual life, what Mr Adie called ‘life under the sun’ and ‘life under the stars’. Both lives go together, as Jane said: “We transport into work what we are in life. If I behave like a pig in life, I behave in the work like a pig also …” [58]. Another practical concept uniting the two lives in practices is the teaching of the good householder, whom she says is “the man who neglects nothing. The man that is faithful and accurate in small things and, at the same time, remembers that he has another life to care for and who tries to relate them” [21, see also p. 15].

So, Jane points us to a unitive discipline [39], pursued for an aim [80]. To speak of discipline, today, invites resistance. Dr Lester often said that Jane understood the importance and lawfulness of resistance. He said, for example, that if someone in their craft shop The Rocking Horse was hammering an object which was not sufficiently steady, she would call out “Not enough denying force!”. The same wisdom inhabits this book: “The No is to make the Yes remembered. No and Yes have to become more inseparable – one without the other is not profitable. … Yes without No – the angel without the devil – is impotence. … If it were not so it would not lead you to something. It would be romance – fallacious.” [10-11]. Later, we find this powerful comment: “Gurdjieff says the word ‘passive’ meant something very strong and concrete” [66].

Negative emotions can be used: hence her succinct advice: “Look over the top of being negative” [26]. And not only negative emotions: Jane understood the value of fasting, [73], something which one can harmlessly experiment with by following the traditional fasts of the Eastern Christian Churches (modern Catholic practice is arguably better than nothing, but it does not compare to the Eastern traditions).

A special feature of this volume is that Jane preserves in an organic context many sayings of Gurdjieff, some of which would otherwise have been lost. Here is my list:

“Try to be responsible for what you have understood” [19]
“We are always making requirements” [24]
“To believe is to make sheep” [36]
“Revalue your values” [40]
“Everyone has a dog in himself” [41]
“Not even an apparatus in us for negative emotions – but they use every part of us”[42]
“Your work is cheap” [44]
“You are a very naive person” [46]
“A good egoist is something very big – a man who becomes concerned for his own reality, then begins to be concerned for the reality of others” [50]
“Try to do what you do – just what you do – but do it!” [58]
“Use little reminding factors” [59]

At the end of the volume, as noted, are her powerful aphorisms. An earlier draft of this review cited some, but there were so many I ached to include that it became unworkable. So I have, instead, selected lines from the other part of the text which strike me as profound with an almost unearthly profundity: “A picture formation in the mind is one of the foods for attention. Think what is meant by this food – food for voluntary attention” [53]; “What you have lived in dreams is etched in you …” [26], and with that, “As long as you accept to feed on deception you will not be given better food” [17].

There are so many such master-teachings that I cannot do them justice. I will give a subjective list of a few: see [44] for her comments on blood and instinct, [45] on worry, [76] on death, and pp. 19, 22-23, 28-29, 32-33, 50, 69, 71 and 76-77 for her comments on reality, unity aim and cause and control. It seems to me that she gives the clue to a theoretical understanding of reality and unreality in oneself. One of Jane’s famous sayings about death is here, too [76]. Dr Lester was there when a woman, in a state of mild anxiety, asked Jane what death was like. Jane replied: “Don’t worry. You won’t notice much difference.”

Finally, the Notes of Jane Heap ends with a few extracts about death and recurrence. And that is a good way to end. But this volume ends with something I think is even better: a chapter titled ‘Here – Now’ which seems to me to sum up the entire book in a tour de force. I will end with just one sentence from that chapter:

Do not fear – it is stupid. Quieten your emotions – this is the first step – then collect a little.

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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JOHN LENNON 13: Instant Karma

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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John Lennon: Essence and Reality
Part 13: “Instant Karma!”

“I’m only beginning to understand what this record was about”, said Lennon in 1972, more than two years after it had been released. I am sure that Lennon could have said the same thing in 1980, the last year of his life. “Instant Karma!” is, I feel, a song so large that it is difficult to take it in. I mean this the way that sometimes, by grace, one has a moment where one is struck with the reality of something: an animal, a person, the sky, the clouds, the wind, a reflection, or a street sign. Buddhists have referred to these illuminations as seeing the “suchness” of reality. It is a big thing when one can sense the “suchness” of one’s own reality, because to the extent that I can, I am able at will to sense myself in relation to other realities.

Such experiences need to be borne, meaning that they involve both “birth” and “bearing”: it is as if a new man is coming to birth, and an inner health or strength is needed to be able to bear the vision. When, in time, such moments have brought some quality of soul to birth, they can be supported for a longer period, so that the soul can do more than blink in the sunlight for a moment or two. The results of the experiences then work together, as Gurdjieff said, and one can even perhaps sense the face of God in creation, at once instantly immediate, yet also transcendent.

We shall return to this at the end of this piece, but I have said this much now because, grandiloquent as it may sound, I feel that some sort of experience along these lines is needed to receive the impact of “Instant Karma!”. Forget words like “heavy”, although for my money, it is far heavier than anything Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple or Judas Priest ever conceived. It may well be the most powerful song of the rock and roll era. For spiritual magnitude, the best polyphonic Western music to which I could compare it, would be the “Requiem Aeternam”, “Kyrie Eleison” and “Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem, where, of course, he availed himself of words from the sacred tradition.

The secret of the power of “Instant Karma!” is not far to seek: the music and the delivery correspond with raw fidelity to its urgent message that judgment is sure, and glory is possible; that as we sow, we reap; and that we are responsible not only for our own lives but also for the lives of all those we affect and who we can affect.

The production of this song is now legendary: Lennon awoke on 27 January 1970, wrote it on the piano that morning, recorded it that evening with George Harrison (guitar), Phil Spector (producer), Klaus Voorman (bass) and Alan White (drums). On 6 February, it was available in stores, and on 11 February they performed it on Top of the Pops. For Lennon, the entire process was immediate, and this comes through in his voice and in the playing. Lennon keenly felt that he could, and even should, communicate directly with his audience. This idea was encouraged by Yoko Ono, whose own art sought, among other things, to forge an imaginative partnership between singer and audience.

Part of their thinking was that by producing topical singles like “Give Peace A Chance”, “Power to the People” and “Karma!” with a minimum of fuss, music could be as alive to the moment as a newspaper. Personally, I am not fond of “Give Peace A Chance”; to my ear it aims high but delivers low, especially in the verses, which are self-important when not meaningless. Yet, formidable critics such as Johnny Rogan relish it, so perhaps there is something in it I cannot hear. However, in the case of “Karma!”, I agree with the critics that Lennon struck gold, if not platinum. Like newspapers announcing the outbreak of war or the signing of peace, this is a bulletin of permanent value.

Two steely notes on piano into the first words, delivered by a man who sounds like he means them: “Instant Karma’s gonna get you!” This means, of course, that the results of what we have done remain with us. It means that there is justice, and that we will get our just deserts. For most of us, the outcome will be mixed. As Newman, I think, once remarked, most of us are worse than we could be but better than we might have been. And so it is that for almost each one of us, the reckoning will be bitter-sweet. As an aside, this fact of life demonstrates the sheer good sense and realism of the teaching of Purgatory – a teaching shared by Gurdjieff and mainstream Christians. This is yet another reason why, the more I study Gurdjieff, I see the main influence on him as being Greek Christianity, which holds the concept of Purgatory while rejecting that Latinate word.

This is not such a detour from Lennon as may seem, for in “Karma!”, the law of cause and effect works as a sort of Purgatory. First, in the verses, there comes the judgment, and then in the chorus, the exaltation. This, it seems to me, is how the song hangs together. The verses are chiefly, but not entirely, given over to warning and admonition, until they invite the addressees to believe that they are superstars – if they believe it:

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right on the head:
You better get yourself together,
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.
What in the world are you thinking of?
Laughing in the face of love!
What on earth are you trying to do?
It’s up to you – yeah you!

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna look you right in the face,
Better get yourself together, darling,
Join the human race.
How in the world are you going to see,
Laughing at fools like me?
Who on earth do you think you are?
A superstar?
Well alright, you are!

And then comes the chorus, almost deafening in its intensity:

Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Ev’ryone! come on!

The third verse adds force to the message, by declaring that we cannot possibly be here to spend our lives suffering. And then, asks Lennon, why do you limit yourself to one small place, one groove, one role, when you are made for greater things? He says:

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right off your feet
Better recognize your brothers,
Everyone you meet.
Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear.
Why on earth are you there,
When you’re everywhere?
Come and get your share.

Never before have I quoted much by way of repetitions, but I do so here so that one can at least see on the printed page how the hammer strikes the anvil:

Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on,
On and on and on, on and on.
Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.

And then, in a masterful touch, at about 2’ 56”, the song softens rather than fades out:

Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on …

Why masterful? Because the power is not lessened. One hears the decrescendo as a controlled performance. I repeat, it does not sound to me like a gradual fade: at the word “like”, Lennon lowers his voice for the rest of the piece. To me, the effect produced is, fancifully perhaps, as if the moon and the stars did not fade so much as they withdrew further back into the deeps of the sky.

My interpretation of the song as referring to judgment, justice, and mixed deserts, at least has this to commend it: it makes sense of the otherwise inexplicable gap between the condign punishment promised in the verses, and the celebratory chant of the chorus. Otherwise, surely, it would be contradictory to hurl thunderbolts, but then announce a general human apotheosis.

Commentators have noted that the chorus is based on the “Three Blind Mice” motif of three descending notes, which Lennon favoured in some of his greatest works, such as “All You Need Is Love”, “Imagine” and the poignant “My Mummy’s Dead”. The simplicity and the endless interest of the theme seem to me to be typical of Lennon’s genius. But there are more than just tricks in this song: there is depth. As Lennon explained later on:

… it occurred to me that karma is instant, as well, as it influences your past life or your future life. There really is a reaction to what you do now. That’s what people ought to be concerned about.

This insight that our actions affect the past as well as the future is an extraordinary one, involving as it does, the understanding that in each moment, our actions not only comprise the present, they determine the future by laying down the tracks upon which it will run, and they are the ever-changing connection with the past, for one knows the past by its effect, and we are that. To try and explain this, one could take Gurdjieff’s concept of “repairing the past”. I have dealt with this in George Adie, but to give an example which may clarify things: let us say that we have a neurosis, and we can say that the neurosis can be traced back to our parents’ behaviour. One could then say, “what the parents did was bad: it caused this neurosis”. But if the neurotic is healed, so that he is no longer neurotic, or at least not such a neurotic as he was, then one could say: “what the parents did was bad, but not as bad as we first thought, because the neurosis it caused was curable.” And so on: in this way we repair our past and even our parents’ mistakes, which is, as Gurdjieff said, an honour.

And so Lennon had this tremendous insight, that by taking action now we can remedy the crimes and errors of the past and build a better future. Taken as a whole, the song is a century of thought and wisdom in three minutes and about 23 seconds. It takes us from judgment and condign punishment to justification and exaltation.

But there is one more matter to mention before leaving: karma. Is karma in fact the notion of cause and effect, that one is one’s past and cannot escape it? What karma initially was, I don’t know, but Gurdjieff had an interesting view of it, retained (so far as I know) only in Ferapontoff’s Constantinople notes. This perspective states that the doctrine of karma was originally this:

Absolute conditioning of the smallest action. You have thought so far that you can do something. You can do absolutely nothing. You must understand that you are not, that you can change nothing (p. 29).

But, as with Lennon’s admonition that instant karma will hit us right in the face, this grim perspective is not the whole of the story, because if actions are totally conditioned, understanding is not:

To understand the situation is already a great thing and it is the first necessary step. Such understanding already includes a certain freedom. … What you call inaction would have been precisely a real possibility of action. In doing one must not create a new Karmic chain. … Unity means isolation from karma (pp. 29-30).

Now this was not quite Lennon’s understanding of karma, but it is, I think, a fuller one, and corresponds more perfectly to reality. We can see how the concepts are related. If karma is the conditioning of even the smallest action, then each action is the result of the past. If some freedom from karma is achieved by not starting a new karmic chain, then there is some sense in speaking of “good karma” and “bad karma”. But it is not so simple a thing as people imagine: good karma consists in consciousness, being, and doing for an aim, without identification. Bad karma is mechanical doing. So, in the end, while Lennon may not have understood all of this, he grasped, and he felt, that we are as we act, and this is a necessary corrective to an unbalanced emphasis on “being”.

Now, to return again to where we started, I had noted that even Lennon did not understand “Instant Karma!”. He was fortunate that something very fine came through him, that he was faithful to it, and served it. Something the same is possible when we have these moments of suchness. If I can sense my presence, I can bear the moment. If I cannot, it unsettles me, which is what I think happened with Van Gogh: he did not possess the inner strength to sustain what he saw. It is not enough to express these illuminations, although that certainly will help. They must be lived. And so the question is, then, how do we live?

This is an appropriate time to stop, but I shall pursue this in the next blog, when I look at two of Lennon’s uncompleted masterpieces, “Tennessee” and “Real Love”.

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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DON’T TRY TO ESCAPE – Wake up in it!

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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George Adie

Don’t Try to Escape – Wake up in it!

Don’t Try to Escape – Wake up in it!

On 29 July 2009, it will be 20 years since Mr Adie died. These extracts are from a group meeting of Tuesday 26 February 1980.

The first question was from Anne, who was pregnant: “Looking back on my work through the break, I see there’s a sort of wave like process. I go up and down. And I find that I really seem to need a practical approach. I seem to get in a slump where I don’t know; where my days are all the same, and I don’t know how to work in a practical way. I’m sort of afraid that this will continue like this, especially since I mightn’t be coming to groups for a while. I just feel there’s that continuing cycle that I can’t get out of. I need a direction, or something.”

“Well, really, you know, don’t try and get out of it. Why not, why not wake up in it? Then you could use it. We’re always trying to get out of something, you see. Something presses on us. We don’t seem to think there’s actual value in this difficulty. Try and accept this wave-like motion. If it’s truly so, it’s useful. I know I’m going down, brakes are required; I’m going up, take the brakes off. I mean, different inclinations require different types of effort, don’t they? Sometimes I need to lie down and go to sleep. Other times I need a little bit of force, I need to try and work.”

He turned to Mrs Adie: “Well, I’d like Helen to help me on this question.”

“I think you’ve covered it very completely!” she said with a humorous emphasis.

Then Mary brought her difficulty: “Mr Adie, I’ve been trying to evaluate my situation, and to find a way out of this confusion that I feel I’ve been in for quite some time. And I came to see that I don’t really know how to conduct an inner search. And quite practically, it means that somehow I don’t know how to work during the day when I make a plan. And I think that is connected with the confusion, so that my general state is rather low, and I’m so easily taken. I’ve tried to think about the meaning of the term “inner search”, what it could mean, and I’ve had some thoughts, but somehow they don’t connect.”

“You have in fact made a lot of important connections there: what you say is of good value,” replied Mr Adie. “Do you think that you’re more confused? Rather, it’s only now that you see that the confusion. It’s how you’ve always been, except that you were in it so badly that you were oblivious to it. You’ve been racing like a hare after some prey or other, or running to escape from some dog. In that chase there seems to be clarity, there’s no doubt. But all it really meant was that I’m taken, I’m going hell-bent for that one thing. I’m actually hooked. If I am fully identified all the time with one thing, I seem to know, I seem to be in no confusion. But real choice can’t exist in confusion, so immediately I approach a power of choice, it brings the awareness of confusion.

“What you say is absolutely right. But it means to say you’re seeing your confusion, and that rather sets one back – you feel less sure, you feel in query. And then you raise these very important questions which are related to it. That represents a fairly long thought, what you’ve just been saying. So you are not in that sort of absolutely hopeless situation, whatever you might seem to conclude. On the contrary, you are already beginning to pass through a gate, because you feel the need now, you see that in confusion not much is possible, and you begin to see what confusion is, you begin to experience it, there’s no doubt now. Your old certainty was more confused than the new uncertainty.”

At this point, Mr Adie turned to Adam, and asked him with [what] he was following. It was extraordinary how he would be aware of any dreaming in the groups. Adam admitted that he had been lost: he was, he said, “acutely uncomfortable”. Then, recommended Adie, “raise your eyes, and keep on with your practice of relaxing and sensing, and quietly listen.”

Adam made some movement, but it wasn’t enough. Adie prompted him: “Eyes higher still, and then relax. There’s nothing for you outside in that way, it’s all inside. Let everything come in that will come in. Try and centralise yourself. Try and cease from your tense striving. Let all that be passive, let your own central relaxed awareness be your only action, that’s the only thing that’s necessary to you, nothing else.”

Paul spoke: “I feel I’m on a plateau, and I can’t see any real way sort of up from it. I’ve been finding for some time now, my appointments during the day have been very seldom kept, and I used the stone, but now it seems to have no effect at all.” This was a reference to a task which involved moving a stone from pocket to pocket as a reminding factor.

“But that was only for a week,” said Mr Adie. “You had the right to go on a bit longer, but one goes on too long with these things. You want to go and break a window with that stone, and find something quite different.”

Paul moved on to something else: “I was talking to someone the other day, who’s not in the work, but who touched on an alternative way of looking at things. And this was, instead of looking inside, to take the concept of the universal light or the universal absolute, and looking upon myself merely as a receiver, and as a transmitter, that if one could become totally free from all the rubbish, one could then tap into any part of this universal mind.”

“Yes,” replied Adie, “but the problem about all that is this little word “if”.” People laughed at the simplicity of the comment. Paul, however, defended the concept, saying that it “seems to align with the work”.

But Adie did not agree. “In words it aligns. But you started from the fact that you don’t carry out your exercise appointments. What is going to help you do that? You say, “if I could be full of this impression”. But you’re not.”

“There’s no particular harm in what that person said, but what is their method? Looking on higher things, or what? If anybody is really working, they do what we do. There’s only one way to work. The best way is to work a little tiny bit, that’s the right way. There is no other way. If you don’t have attention, what work is possible? If you don’t awake, what work is possible? If you haven’t got some centre of cognition, what choice is possible? With no choice there’s no control. It means nothing. What we have is the eternal, absolute instructions, plus the connection with our lives. The question is work, I need to work. For that I need to relax, I need to receive impressions, I need to not identify.”

Still, Paul went in to bat for this method: “The way I was starting to work was to divest myself of the garbage, to be more free.”

“But how? How do you do that?”

“To see the rubbish, and be free of it.”

“Yes, but how do you do it? This is the question of presence, non-identification, confrontation, objectivity, all these things are necessary in order to see it. And I need to see the actual moments in my life by choice, and these are the appointments. If I don’t keep them, then I am subject only to accident when I get an odd prod from outside. What I need to do is somehow to plan a bit, a little. If I could plan very little, it would make an enormous difference. Then I would get more related, if you like, shocks or prods, or stimulus from outside.”

I will just pause here for a moment to point out the importance of what Adie said about making appointments as part of a plan for use during the day. By formulating a strategy, we exercise, in the form of exercise appropriate to a spiritual discipline, our judgment and our will. We aim to introduce an intentional current into our lives, which runs side by side with the events of the day, and then, at the decided time, we disrupt the established tempo. By consciousness, then, we come to consciousness. But to return to Mr Adie’s explanation to Paul.

“Work is work. That is the whole thing with people. Everything you read in all religions is there, but what is missing is the way to do it: have being, have love, have compassion for all people, be free, tell the truth, honour thy God. But how? And then I find I’m confused, as Mary said, which means that it’s beginning to enter into me. Directly that kind of confusion arises, as a result of seeing something, I begin to have a certain kind of discrimination. I see that this is the position at the moment. So in all this confusion, what?”

“If I understand it at all, I understand it because there is something representative in me that is capable of recognizing, not just theorizing, but actually experiencing confusion, and being present to be unable to decide … and not giving up. And if I can sustain that for a certain time, balanced, the requirement will come to me, there’s no doubt. It gives a chance for higher reason, which works very quickly, to see what is necessary.”

“Whatever you find, try it and see, and then if you find it profitable bring it, but not, not if it contradicts the work. I don’t want to take anything away from you, and if you find those concepts help you, good, then try, prove it – the work. The thing, the important point is, are any of these advices included in the work? Do they have any work in them? You started from a good point: your realisation of a lack of power, of the diminishing effect of the task, is brought about by the little bit of work you have done. None of us have worked enough, but even the little we’ve worked brings some realisation. But then I say, oh, let me find a different way.”

Paul was, apparently, put out, although I must say that he remained with Mr Adie for almost ten years, right up until Mr Adie’s death, so, at some deep level, he respected Mr Adie’s advice. But tonight he was defensive: “It was really the concept of, seemed to bring a breath of fresh air.”

“We don’t accept to resolve confusion through over-simplifications, or talking about something we cannot live. Try and have some practical experience of force in you. If you could have that, there’d be much more fulfilment. See, if I feel that I’m confused, what force can I have really? It’s a very good thing that I haven’t got any, because in confusion what would happen to it? Which way would it go? The very confusion robs me of appreciable force, but there is something of a higher quality, which can respond in a very small degree to the higher forces. If I can only contact that, then the process starts. It’s a very fine process, I need to be as much balanced as I can. I need to have my head quiet, not interfering with my body. I repeat that the head is always cut off, it’s not in control of the body at all, it’s just dreams, my head isn’t fulfilling any proper function, it just dreams, thinks of easier ways and that sort of thing, you see, but go on trying, try and come to the right reasoning yourself, you see.”

The next question, from Ellen, who was, what I believe they call a clinical psychologist, meaning that she gave/administered certain therapies or treatments to people, was rather similar: “Mr Adie, this week I’ve had two experiences which have left me in some confusion.”

“Then take them one at a time. Shortly, start with what the first one was.”

“I was reading a psychology book which presented ways of controlling one’s behaviour either by Eastern methods like meditation or Western methods of self-observation, and they presented the idea of observing one’s focus, either internal focus or external focus, and on Sunday at the work I was reminded of this when I was given a task, I was doing some ironing, and sort of got into it in my usual way, and suddenly I noticed that I was, I don’t know … sort of, probably …”

“Observation. What was the observation?”

“I suppose it would have been identified with the ironing, just rushing into it, I suppose I was lost, but … I thought … I think the idea is that I was identified with ironing, and I was reminded then of the focus, and then I tried to change that, and the next moment I found that my focus had changed to something like identified, and I was even more lost than before.”

“I think it just shows that you’re mixed up with ordinary psychology, the psychology of pathology, and the pathology of psychology and so on, and it’s all a big confusion, it’s partly what Paul was talking about, and the words are very close, meditation and internal focus and external focuses, and all that. So many words. I have to really guard. I’m sorry you’re studying books on Western psychology. In a learned way they go round and round and round and round, and when they’ve done this long circle round, they’ve forgotten where they started, and they start going on again and again.”

While Adie was saying this, people were breaking up with laughter, but he didn’t play it for laughs: “So your job to become a purveyor of psychological freedom, or of administering psychological treatment, or teaching others how to deal with psychological defects is a great danger … it’s all slightly in the realm of head-shrinking of one kind or another. All the words are there. But you see too that
the terminology about internal focus and external focus, doesn’t help you. But in trying to work, we get all sorts of reminders, connections and impressions of all sorts.”

“We don’t want to dispense with any of them, but we do need to sort them out, if we can. There’s no reason why this thought of internal and external focus really should knock me over, but first of all I have to have this experience of my inner focus, and I can talk about it without having it at all. This is the danger. If I have it, then I don’t get trapped in the words. You follow? So I need to have something going on in me that isn’t words. A word may help me tremendously: it touches something, it quickens me. At that point I need to understand the point and not go on with this word, word, word. After three repetitions, it’s gibberish. But if I can remain there, I don’t need the word: I have it, it’s transformed, it’s a force within me.”

“Take an invocation: you call. Once the call is answered, you don’t go on. You call to God, if you like. I find it’s answered. Well then, are you going to call to another God or something, or go on? No. There’s a fine contact made. If I really observe, I receive a certain living experience, very fine, very short, but in ordinary life-time, very long: now I need to be present to everything. Does it mean anything at all, what I’m saying, or does it seem an awful lot of words again?”

“It helps. I don’t let words outrun the experience. ”

“It can help now because you’re a little bit relaxed. Good. If you do a preparation, surely some of you will have had this experience, and say you manage to get a bit quiet; surely sometimes a good idea comes, you either see what you mustn’t do, or what you need to do, or how you need to be. Maybe you even realise that it’s important enough to try and make a note of it so that you don’t forget. So you go and write it down. Before you’ve finished writing it down you’ve lost it, it’s gone into words, if you’re not careful.”

“Yes, I’ve had that experience.”

“There you are. But that doesn’t mean to say you must stop writing. It means that instead of getting lured into two or three pages, we try and allow to come out what will come out while I’m present. I need to see if I’m there or not there. It means I’m continually trying, but not getting tense. Good, it’s a good question, I have to answer it for you.”

The next question was difficult to listen to and to transcribe. And yet there was a sort of serious drama about it. Tonight, Kevin, who brought the questions, contended with Mr Adie, obstructed him, answered him testily on occasions, and yet, he too, remained with him, and like Paul, was a force in the group after Adie’s death. The exchange opened up simply enough, until Kevin referred to “what I’m supposed to be doing at that time”. When Adie asked him whether he was referring to an inner work or an external doing, a very odd mantle of obtuseness fell on Kevin. He would say “I start by doing the work”, and refer to “my planned work”, but never specify which work.

Finally, in respect of this and other obscurities, Adie said: “You see, the fact that I don’t formulate clearly shows me that I don’t think clearly. I need to formulate very simply. If I mix up my inner aim with any sort of life processes, I can’t think properly. You’re inclined to mix it up, and this is what spoils an observation, but it’s good to bring it because this is how it’s straightened out.”

After much more discussion, Kevin said that he had, during the week, been in a position where he realised that he could not think or even make an internal movement. He was shocked by what seemed to him to be, I might say an extraordinary and unique seizure, an internal paralysis.

“Not unique,” said Adie, “it happens time after time. This is what Gurdjieff means by “nothingness”. It goes on more or less. all the time for all of us. What a horrible business. You were lucky, you actually had an experience of no reality at all – you couldn’t function in any way. It’s a very valuable experience. You had to struggle here to try and to say that simple thing. Well don’t leave it go, try and work on that, find out what robs, you find out what stands in the way, make appointments, try and keep them. It’s a good example.”

Kevin now asked, in what sounds to me like a rather truculent way: “My question is, is it better to try and prolong that time, or is it better to have more of them?”

Adie paused, and then replied: “Both – but you can’t do either. If you work, you will get more opportunities, and if you respond to them, they will tend in the end to get longer. But then this is words again.”

“ You see, the kind of understanding that I receive from seeing that I am absolutely fixed and have no choice, is one of these flashes which lasts for one ten thousandth of a second, but endures in my mind for weeks. It can enter into me for weeks as an influence, which I’ve received. I’ve received, let me now not let that disappear. I can’t profit by immediately identifying with that, so it helps me to be brought up to it. It’s a very subtle thing. We want to tackle it with great big spanners and hammers, but it’s not possible to do delicate things with such tools.”

Then Andy brought this: “Mr Adie, during the break period, the efforts that I have made have left me with a feeling that I lack organization, both inwardly and outwardly. The plans that I make in the morning seem to me to be, good value for me, something that I need, but it still doesn’t seem to follow a line, it seems to be scattered. Individually they’re worthwhile efforts, but as a whole, going towards something, I can’t seem to keep to an aim. I tend to go away, I never seem to be able to follow towards something.”

There is a lengthy silence on the tape. Finally, Adie spoke: “You want to go forward toward an aim. Bring it nearer. Best be practical. Remind yourself of the main direction, your main big belief, the belief you started with, that man had a possibility, that there was a path, that there was a noble life as well as an ignoble, and so on. It’s true. And what is the step now? What is the immediate requirement? I have to have these intermediate aims, because if you don’t work now, you’ll never … come to earth. How short is it necessary to make the aim? Could you make an aim for fulfilment in one hour, or half an hour? And possibly choose another moment for renewal, when the circumstances will be such that you can’t now predict. You don’t know what your state will be at lunch time, do you?”

“So, you have your immediate thought, what you’re going to try and obstruct, study, change, use transform. Try and choose something within reach, that’s important for you, and then try and have an appointment at midday, to see what kind of effort you need then. You won’t know exactly what is necessary. In principle, yes, but you won’t know the details. So in order to make it very practical, try and make a fresh near aim at lunch time. See, ideally, if we could renew our aim every five minutes, that would be a marvellous thing. In other words, we would live five minutes at a time. The trouble is that after one or twice we should immediately start to slip into a dream, and we wouldn’t even notice the end of the five minutes for which we were planning. So it’s no good trying to do a thing that we can’t. So let’s have one appointment, a little way ahead, and then an appointment to make an appointment at some time. In this way you can make it more practical, without these unfulfilled appointments and misses. There are things which you need about which you have no doubt, so what about those? And make the connections, all sorts of connections to be made with any plan.”

Now Adam spoke, in a voice I can only describe as very heavy: “I haven’t been on the search for some time. I’ve found I need to overcome negativity, evidenced in certain things that I do, recurrent situations that always trigger off absolutely predictable reactions. Right at the end of last session, the exercise that we were given gave me released energy to help me deal with these situations, but that energy was no longer forthcoming over the break.”

“Did you do the preparation?”

“You bet!” This was emphatic. “And I got more and more depressed because they were having less and less effect.” This was hammered in, and suddenly he expostulated, for no apparent reason: “No! I’m not going to speak.”

The first time I heard this, I was expecting a rebuke to issue from Mr Adie. But I should have known him better than that. He waited just a little, and in his ordinary voice, not even a particularly soft one, said: “Try, try. Just be patient. You have a chance to speak here. If I start speaking and find I’m talking rubbish, it’s a very great relief to find it is so, because then I know that that’s out anyway. Now let me open a fresh chapter and see.”

Now there was a pause, and then Adie became more direct: “You see, you stare at this point there. You’ll get nothing that way. But you could open and relax and try and receive impressions. It’s all buzzing around in you like that, you see? Or do you? Do you accept the whirligig of your own thoughts?”

Adam did open, and told a sorrowful tale of aggressive driving, losing his temper for no reason, and of how his wife was concerned that he was becoming worse, not better. He felt that she was correct. He had said to her that: “It’s stopped being a search, it’s become more like a search and destroy mission.”

“Well, you know, Adam, this search is a very real thing, but it’s a word that can lose its meaning if it’s used without presence. It’s like “wish” – you can get hooked and identified with the word “wish”, and then this sacred word doesn’t do anything for you. “Search” is a tremendous thing: search can mean a conscious presence that has faith, and looks for something higher and corresponding because of that.

“If we have a search, surely the search for us is in here, inside. It’s not going to be very encouraging at times, but that doesn’t matter: we want to come to a truth, and so we need to be open at the same time. My great difficulty is that I think I have a lot of powers and possibilities now that I don’t possess. I think I can search, but I am only capable of little searchings, yet, if I can only do that a small amount, and let the rest go, I’d have a chance. But I have big thoughts, putting the whole of my house into order, making a plan of the work, and so on. I don’t realise that it’s all very efficiently provided for, including all sorts of laws of accidents. My type is provided, my whole history has been provided. Can I alter all that? Can I alter all the people I am going to meet tomorrow, and all the accidents that are going to happen? Of course I can’t. I might as well concentrate on a small area of my being, you see?

“This is the problem,” asserted Adam, “the small things are getting less under control.”

“I’m not sure we’re talking about the same small things. I am not speaking about small outer things, but the small inner reality which is real; it is there. The high ideas and the inner response that is there. And don’t despair, or anything of this kind. But, this attitude: “I must pay attention to this”, or “It needs my determination”. What is that? Adam on the track, you see?

There was laughter at Adie’s take on Adam’s manner of speaking. “Our position is tragic-comic, there’s no question. If you could take it quietly, and put this massive fist down, and just relax it.” Adam was a large man, and probably did have a large fist.

“I hope that is something for you. And also, to take a thought on behalf of your wife helps. Think what she’s suffered. Poor woman.”

The final question of the evening came from a young woman. Her question was not so remarkable, but there was something in her way of speaking which was unusual. Adie asked her: “Do you ever hear yourself speaking, the kind of intonation? Do you hear yourself now, what kind of person is speaking?”

“I think so. I think I’m pleading with you.

“And yet, you have what you need. No plea or request or prayer can possibly be answered if I haven’t done what I myself can do. What is here will help you somewhat, in your work. And if you can listen carefully to your voice, you could hear a certain self-pitying tone about the plea, and as long as that’s there you won’t receive what you seek, because you’re sorry for yourself, and that fills the space. Yet, you haven’t got to be sorry for yourself. I have to be more there in order to get what I am asking for: then your efforts will help you. Listen to your voice, listen to how you ask.”

Finally, he turned to Adam, and made a reference to the passage in Matthew 12:43-45 and Luke 11:24-26: “You know what is said about the one who had the devil cast out of him, but after it was cast out, the devil returned with seven others worse than himself? You remember that, in the Bible? Well this is the thing: we get a moment of recollection, but then we become proud over that, and we become worse than we had been before. We don’t bring ourselves to receive it in the right way, somehow. To bring myself to it, to benefit from my experience, I have to be very simple, surely. I have to long to be humble, not puffed up. Try sometimes to come, without words to such a state, where you’re present, being, collected. It is just being: you’re not trying to sell anything, or prop your picture up. A great trouble isn’t it, propping a picture up? Well, it’s for everybody, nobody’s excluded.”

He turned to Mrs Adie: “Any advice?” he asked.

“No, no.”

“Well, goodnight.”

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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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KATE BUSH (2) Lionheart

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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Kate Bush (2) Lionheart

After the arcane glories of The Kick Inside, the record buying public
found 1978’s Lionheart to be a disappointment, perhaps even a
substantial disappointment. Although I would place the title track
“Lionheart” in the same exalted class as “Wuthering Heights” and “The
Man with the Child in his Eyes”, I have to agree with the popular
assessment, for the album as a whole was too patently a rushed
follow-up. However, it had the good fortune to be released in the
golden afterglow of Kick Inside, and went platinum in the UK. It is
not just that people were keen to hear what Kate Bush had produced:
music actually sounds better if we are well-disposed towards the
artist (or to adapt Gurdjieff’s terms, if we are favourably identified
with the artist). This phenomenon of “the golden glow” is an
interesting one, and I shall return to it at the end of this blog.

To my ear, the stand out track on this album, and one of Kate Bush’s
greatest triumphs, is the title song “Oh England, My Lionheart”. This
under-rated piece strikingly, even poignantly, conjures up “merry
England”, once more evidencing the Englishness we saw on Kick Inside:

Oh, England! My Lionheart!
I’m in your garden, fading fast in your arms.
The soldiers soften, the war is over,
The air-raid shelters are blooming clover.
Flapping umbrellas fill the lanes,
My London Bridge in rain again.

Oh, England! My Lionheart!
Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park.
You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames,
That old river-poet that never, ever ends.
Our thumping hearts hold the ravens in
And keep the Tower from tumbling.

Oh, England! My Lionheart! Oh, England! My Lionheart!
Oh, England! My Lionheart!
I don’t want to go.

Oh, England! My Lionheart!
Dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge.
Give me one kiss in apple blossom,
Give me one wish and I’d be wassailing,
In the orchard, my English Rose,
Or with my shepherd, who’ll bring me home.

Oh, England! My Lionheart! Oh, England! My Lionheart!
Oh, England! My Lionheart!
I don’t want to go.

The song tells the story of a Spitfire pilot who has been shot down.
As his plane hurtles towards the earth and his death, he sings his
love to the green land beneath him (hence, although it’s a little
macabre, he serenades England that he is “in your garden, fading fast
in your arms”). Through this story, an esoteric idea or reality is
touched: the transcendent reality and preciousness of conscious
experience. Later in her career, Bush returned to this theme, notably
in “Some Moments of Pleasure” from The Red Shoes, and on record two of
Aerial.

The insight, an insight which I think can only ever come from
experience, is that in a moment of self-consciousness, our experience
is transfigured. There is a sort of scale of conscious experience: it
can range from a slightly more vivid sense of oneself through to an
illuminated state where it is as if heaven is present right here, as
if the supernatural breaks through into and illuminates the natural
world. The reality of the moment is often felt to have a quality which
is more than the reality of other moments, hence it is often called
“transcendent”. However much we may have read or heard of this, the
understanding of it can only come through experience: otherwise, even
if we read about it, we do not comprehend what we read. This is the
realisation which Hopkins referred to when he wrote that: “The world
is charged with the grandeur of God.” I am not saying that Kate Bush
expresses this concept in what I might call “all its fullness”, but
then who could? Yet I do find that there is, to a substantial degree,
an approaching to the transcendent in her work.

We tend to have experienced something of this as children. Usually, it
is when we are children that our lives are lived at their most vivid.
To children, there is magic in the night time and glory in the
daylight. In childhood we are more prone to the simple, direct vision
of the joy of creation and the universal adoration offered up to God
by all life (see p.26 of the George Adie book). It is not just a
question of the “being-ness” of life, one can also sense its goodness.
This, I think, is why children so often bring an affirming force of
feeling in the face of really big hardship.

I can add that, as a child, and I do not believe that I was alone in
this, I had an inarticulate sense of human tragedy. In fact, my feel
for sadness and pain was at the same time both clearer than it is
today, and also less given to melancholy. As children, we are not so
hampered by judgmental attitudes, or by guilt, self-accusation or
self-pity. Thomas Traherne described the mystical insights of
childhood very well in some of his poetry which resonate with most of
us:

All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and
delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my
entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable
joys. … Everything was at rest, free and immortal. …. I saw in all
the peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator’s praises …
All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. (from The Third
Century, pt. 2).

I have elsewhere suggested that, in Gurdjieff’s terms, a further part
of the reason for this is the fact that in children the work of the
centres or brains is less demarcated: feeling, thought and sensation
are far closer together. The intellects of children are not so
divorced from their feelings and instincts, and not having yet fully
learned the gamut of negative emotions, their positive feelings enter
into their perceptions – and so they should, for it follows from
Gurdjieff’s ideas that the natural state of our feelings is positive
and affirming. Being more in the higher parts of centres, children
also have a different experience of time, closer to what Traherne has
described. And most importantly, in children, the feeling of being
present to oneself (an ineffable but unmistakable feeling with no
colour of changeable emotion), is more common than it is among adults.

I am not suggesting that Kate Bush’s “Lionheart” stands on the same
level as Traherne or Hopkins. Yet, consider some of the lines, such as
the one about flapping umbrellas and viewing London Bridge during
rain, and when I say “consider”, I mean to experience their poetic
impact in the song. As adults, we’re too bothered to really take these
impressions in. But children do, and these impressions feed them, as
Gurdjieff said, surely under inspiration. When I was young, I was
almost entranced by the reflection of traffic lights on wet roads.
Even the being-reality of residential lanes, which Kate Bush mentions
here, possesses a fascination for children. This “being-reality” of
objects, a sort of inherent wordless affirmation of their reality,
nourishes, I feel, an unsophisticated sensitivity in children. In
“Lionheart”, Bush refers to umbrellas in the lanes, not the streets,
but lanes, those humble, human and unhurried passageways. That small
touch is the touch of art. The song possesses clarity, and yet one can
peer deeply into its crystal simplicity, rather as if one were looking
into a stream of bright water which ran a hundred feet deep, and could
see to its bottom.

Now, before I read of what was undoubtedly Kate Bush’s own intentions in the narrative, I simply took it as the poignant declaration of a young woman, in love with England, and with the idea of romance in England. She sounds wistful yet not sentimental; romantically
possessed by the green land which Shakespeare celebrated. Something
about the light and optimistic attitude to rural lovemaking makes me
think of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Read as lyrics, “Lionheart” is
good poetry. Whether she was the first to call Shakespeare an “old
river poet” or if she only aptly used the phrase, it seems perfect
here. Those three words evoke iconic aspects of English life:
Shakespeare, poetry, the Thames and a cultured life on the river
banks. Even the little word “old”, more than just a term of affection,
reminds one of the enduring English tradition, its continuity and its
depth.

I refer to the pilot of “Oh England, My Lionheart” as a male, but I am
not sure I should. There is a video clip, now available on YouTube,
where Kate Bush sings this song dressed as a sort of air pilot. I say
“sort of”, because, but for the goggles, the coat looks rather
feminine to me. But who am I to dictate anything to Kate Bush? If she
wants to recast the expected male pilot as female, or if she makes
herself the sole female Spitfire pilot in history, and to sing about
wassailing and her shepherd, that is her prerogative. That the song
was about a pilot at all was not obvious to me: after all, in the very
first verse, she sings: “The soldiers soften, the war is over, the
air-raid shelters are blooming clover.” To go on later to mention a
black Spitfire and the funeral barge, would seem odd. Further, it is
difficult to imagine a pilot addressing England as “Oh England! My
Lionheart!” But then, she is Kate Bush, an Englishwoman avowing that
she wishes to stay forever in the heart of “This precious stone set in
the silver sea … this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this
England”, to quote John of Gaunt from Shakespeare’ Richard II (2:1).
Who are we to dictate to her?

The music is simple, and yet it sounds like the only music which could
have gone with those words. There is nothing antiquarian about either
the melody or the sound, yet the woodwind and the simplicity evoke the past, and a quiet style of English folk music. There is a sadness, but also a strength in the dignified line of the melody. Kate Bush has
been accused of “over-singing” on occasions: she does not do so here.
The gentle movement of her voice is just right for the piece. Overall,
as I have said, I find it one of her masterpieces. It strikes me as
flawless in itself. But, to my taste, at least, it stands head and
shoulders over every other track on this album.

There are good pieces of music here: I would single out “Symphony in
Blue”, “Wow” and “Kashka from Baghdad”, and there is one song which is in parts excellent, and in parts all too mediocre: “Hammer Horror”. I
only wish that this album had been an EP. “Symphony in Blue” opens the album, and like “Lionheart”, but unlike most of the tracks, has one
even tempo throughout. “I spend a lot of my time looking at blue”, she
sings, referring to blue in her room, her mood, in the sky, and “the
sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about”. She goes on to
speak about red (“the colour of my heart when she’s dead”), and sex
(“the more I think about sex the better it gets; here we have a
purpose in life”). But the heart of the song is the second verse and
the chorus:

When that feeling of meaninglessness sets in,
Go blowing my mind on God.
The light in the dark with the neon arms …

I see myself, suddenly, on the piano, as a melody.
My terrible fear of dying no longer plays with me,
For now I know that I’m needed for the symphony.

She was not more than 20 years old, and yet she sang of her “terrible
fear of dying” and of rising above it. Is this a sign of remarkable
maturity, or of pretentiousness, or of both? When one listens to the
piece and its assured, steady tempo, one would be harsh indeed to
accuse her of over-reaching.

But what is more remarkable about the contents, is that there are two
polarities in the song: the personal and the impersonal, or
transcendent, and these are brought into artistic balance. There is
the acute receipt of impressions and also the sense that she is a part
of a larger harmony: this is why she ceases to feel accidental and is
liberated from her personal fear. Something of this polarity can,
perhaps, also be sensed in “Oh England, My Lionheart”, which is a song
about the individual and their relationship to something larger than
themselves. This precocious woman managed, on her second album, to
say something new about the relationship of the small-s self to the
capital-S Self of the organic cosmos, and to express it in a fresh and
convincing manner.

The only reason, perhaps, that “Symphony in Blue” is not one of her
great songs is that the melody, competent as it is, does not little
more than present the lyrics. The melody, in itself, lacks power.
“Wow”, the third track on side one, boasts more power, but its
deficiencies run deeper. It seems to be made up of two different
songs, both addressed to an older actor by up-and-coming actors. The
pairing is held together by the chorus, a simple “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!
Wow! Wow! Unbelievable!” The first song within a song describes the
mixed feelings of the younger actors for the formidable veteran with
whom they are working. The second half is to an actor who will not
achieve the success he years for. As she sings: “He’ll never make the
screen … or be that movie queen, he’s too busy hitting the
Vaseline.” This actor is feted with insincere praise (“you’re amazing,
we think you are really cool”) but he is denied a role, because he’d
have to “play the fool”. The lyrics are clever, and the pocket
portraits from the world of acting are, I am told, accurate. The music
of the chorus is quite strong. Each “wow!” leaps out at you, aided by
the vocal gymnastics, where Bush sings low at just the right time. The
music of the verses is good, and the shift of tempo and feel at the
chorus brilliantly sets up and illumines the hyperbolic exclamations.
This is an instance where the gear change in a song works. Sad to say,
I do not think the same tactic works too well on the rest of the
album, and is, to my taste, overdone. The effect of the time change is
jagged on “In Search of Peter Pan”, “Don’t Push your Foot on the
Heartbrake”, “Fullhouse”, “Kashka”, “Coffee Homeground” and “Hammer
Horror”, fully six songs on an album of only ten.

Also noteworthy is the evocative “Kashka from Baghdad”, the third
track on side two. It tells the story of a man who lives “in sin” with
another, but has no other apparent friends or acquaintances: he lives
alone, visited by his lover, and remains inside the light of their
love (the metaphor she uses). Kashka’s Middle Eastern origin is nicely
conjured by the initial music, which is mysterious without sounding
like a caricature. The sentiments are beyond sympathetic:

I watch their shadows, tall and slim in the window opposite.
I long to be with them, ‘cos when all the alley cats come out,
I can hear music from Kashka’s house.

When the verse stops, the chorus erupts in a different tempo:

At night they’re seen, laughing, loving.
They know the way to be happy.

The track closes with a fade out. I cannot make out the words, but
they seem to something like: “Don’t you recognize? Don’t know you know the scene? … Let me in your love.” However, a lyrics web-site
offers: “Watching every night. Don’t you know they’re seen? Won’t you
let me laugh? Let me in your love.” Mmm. Overall, the piece is
something of a success, even if the sound of the chorus seems a little
contrived. It is not a great song, but it is a good one. I only wish
that I could have said the same for her “Gurdjieff” piece,
“Fullhouse”, which opens side two:

I am my enemy, mowing me over, and towing the light away,
… Imagination sets in, then all the voices begin,
Telling you things that aren’t happening.
(But they nig, they nag, ‘til they’re under your skin).

The rhythm is disrupted, as she hurries: “You’ve really go to ..”, and
then does she shriek: “Remember yourself, you’ve got a full house in
your head tonight! Remember yourself, stand back and see emotion
getting you uptight.” To “remember oneself”, in Gurdjieff’s terms, is
to be present to oneself as a whole: one’s thoughts, emotions and
organic instinct. The effort to remember oneself allows one to be
present to the turning thoughts which make up so much of our psychic
life, and to make them passive, so that they no longer bother, and
even cease. Despite the pointless screaming, the ideas here are good.
In verse two she sings:

My silly pride, digging the knife in,
She loves to come for her ride.
Surely by now I should know I can control my highs and my lows
By questioning all that I do, examining every move …

Once more, she is too accomplished to be pretentious: she is, as I
suggested in the first blog, the true prodigy of modern popular music.
But here, also, is the problem: the ideas are way too good for the
music. It just does not work as a song. The sudden change of pace at
the chorus does not help the song, as it does in “Wow”, it interrupts
and fragments it; and the singing is too fierce, almost hysterical,
for the chorus’s message.

Later, on The Dreaming, she attempted what may well be another
“Gurdjieff” song, “Sat in your Lap”. That effort was more successful,
at least to my ear. The last track to mention in any detail from
Lionheart is another worthy failure, the first single, and the last
track on the album, “Hammer Horror”. The opening is splendid, almost
scarlet with grandeur. The massive piano and synthesizer theme lasts
only 15 seconds, but it almost justifies the entire track. Then a
high-pitched vocal appears, eldritch and unearthly:

You stood in the bell-tower, but now you’re gone.
So who knows all the sights of Notre-Dame?

Just as the lyrics make a puzzling detour to the second line, the
music now changes completely: “They’ve got the stars for the gallant
hearts”, and then, after another 15 seconds, another complete change
of pace for the chorus: “Hammer Horror, Hammer Horror, won’t leave me alone.” The music never continues in one course, or at one tempo long enough to get into the feel of it. The song makes a picture of an
actor who has taken someone else’s role, and is now shadowed by the
former star. But the picture is a shattered one, it is too diverse to
even be a mosaic. It sounds jack clever, but clever as it is, it
doesn’t cohere. The other tracks on this album make me wince,
especially “Coffee Homeground” (which to me is pantomime of an
unconvincing type) and “In the Warm Room” (like an attempt to milk
“Feel It”).

There are some themes on this album: for example, film and theatre
appear in “Wow” and “Hammer Horror”, and “Coffee Homeground” is a
variation on the theme of Arsenic and Old Lace.

But the oddest theme on this album is that of blurring gender
boundaries. I have already noted this in respect of “Lionheart”. She
seems to be male, too, on “Hammer Horror” (it is easier to imagine a
man in the role of stalking another who has taken his role) and “Peter
Pan”, a fitting song for such confusion, for he, too, was somewhat
androgynous. Peter Pan also appears in the title track, and on the
liner notes: “Special thanks … especially to Mr. P. Pan whose tricks
keep us on our toes.” Does that mean that Our Kate, the doctor’s
daughter, was flirting with transgendering? “Wow” and “Kashka” both
deal with gay culture, and on “In the Warm Room”, a sort of an ode to
a seductress, she speaks of the woman in terms such as:

She’ll touch you with your Mamma’s hand,
You’ll long to kiss those red lips …
You’ll fall into her like a pillow,
Her thighs are soft as marshmallows,
Say hello to the soft musk of her hollows.

I cannot imagine what the masculine equivalent would be of “Say hello
to the soft musk of her hollows”, but could you imagine any male
singer, say Bruce Springsteen, saying something similar about another
male, even if he were addressing a female? There is something so
voyeuristic as to be discomforting about this song. Even its lack of
crudity adds to this sense: when Kate Bush uses measured phrases like
these it’s as if she’s serious.

Yet, this theme fades out from her later work. It is as if the album
were not only hurried, but also transitional. This brings me back to
the question of its initial reception, which I think was warmer than
deserved: how is it possible that we like one song, or several songs
by an artist, and then hear the rest of their work in what I have
called “the golden glow”? To an extent, it is a question of acquiring
a taste: it may take a while before one becomes used to hearing
something like, for example, the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
But once one has acquired the taste, it is as if one hears emotional
nuances one was previously unaware of.

Surely, however, there is more. Surely, the main feature in this
phenomenon is what Gurdjieff called “identification”, where we
associate our own self-image with the music. To the extent that we are identified with an artist, we have no objectivity. I recall being
identified with Bowie when I was younger, to the point that I
purchased Lodger when it came out, and persuaded myself that I liked
it. Now there are only two tracks on it which I can even bear to
listen to (“African Night Flight” and “Move On”).

It is not just that our taste changes. I am asking why does our taste
change? Why do we sometimes like the work an artist produces to a
certain point, but are fairly indifferent to them after that point? I
recall one reviewer who was a big fan of Bowie’s earlier work, but
wrote that they wouldn’t serve pizza on his latest offerings. What
happens?

There are two obvious answers which, in the case of Lionheart, we can
dismiss at once: first, there was no change of idiom or style, such as
when an artist switches from, say, playing rock and roll to playing
jazz. Second, Kate Bush did not simply re-record Kick Inside with
different lyrics. By that I refer to the way that certain artists
repeat their first triumphs, sticking to a safe formula. For example,
I personally find that from the time of Zooropa, just about everything
U2 have produced has been virtually the same songs with minor, barely
significant, variations. Bono continues to metaphorically position
himself in the imagined abyss between being and nothingness, and to
sing about love as if the idea were entirely original to himself.

Why is it that we tend to like the songs by one artist more
consistently than the songs of another? It could be, for example, that
one artist sings big ballads, or country and western, and we don’t
like that style. To an extent, this is a question of what one is used
to , the way that Vietnamese music sells well in Vietnam, and Arabic
music is popular in Arabic countries, but not so popular to those who
were not raised in a Vietnamese or Arabic culture, respectively.
Again, some people cannot stand a certain singer’s voice, or the speed
at which they sing, or their orchestral arrangements.

But I think that there is something deeper than all of this. For
example, I like much of the music Stevie Wonder produced between
Talking Book and Hotter Than July, but, five or six songs apart, I
don’t like Michael Jackson’s music. Yet, their styles and arrangements
were similar enough, although of course there were differences, and my
distaste is not based on Michael Jackson’s voice or his tempo. I just
like Wonder’s songs better than Jackson’s, the way that some people
like Paul McCartney’s music, but not John Lennon’s. Why is this?

We tend to think, and to talk of, one writer being better than
another, but “better” in what respect?

In future blogs, I shall explore this in more depth later, but to
anticipate: I think that we are assessing not only the music but the
person who is manifested through the music. This is not necessarily
illegitimate. Music is like the eye: just as one can tell something
about the whole of the person and their state just by looking at their
eyes, one can do something the same with their music. The state of all
of our being-functions (intellect, feeling and physical) is subtly
mixed in and apparent in the visible state of the eyes. So, too, music
is a mixture of these three functions. Even if there is not a single
word in three minutes, there is a sort of thought behind it, and of
course it is obvious that music includes emotion and physical
instinct.

One feels that one comes to know the person behind the music. The
feeling of contact is even greater, perhaps, in the case of
singer-songwriters. Although, in the case of artists like Bing Crosby,
Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley who wrote little or none of their
work, this is qualified by the way that the music they chose to sing
was tailored to them, their style and their image. In other words, the
relationships we have with recording artists are akin to the
relationships we have with acquaintances.

These thoughts arose not from Lionheart, but from pondering it, and my
response to it. Next, we will consider Kate Bush’s third album, Never
For Ever, which did, to a certain extent, rehabilitate her reputation.
Yet, I have to say, that I do not think the promise of The Kick Inside
has yet been realised, or at least satisfactorily realised, in her
career. She is still, I feel, underachieving, and the reason is a
certain self-indulgence, which we shall further explore in the next
blog.

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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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE & REALITY Part 12: “Cleanup Time”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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John Lennon: Essence and Reality

Part 12: “Cleanup Time”

“Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear.” Thus spake Lennon in 1980. In this blog, we’ll look at why Lennon said this, and its context, both personal and musical. They’re good words to start with, because they suggest the largeness of Lennon’s endeavour when he was working on Double Fantasy, from which album comes “Cleanup Time”.

Melodically, “Cleanup Time” is by no means Lennon’s strongest song, but it’s one of his most lovable, and it’s deceptively deep, at least in my view. I recall that at one time I was taking singing lessons from a pleasant, well-fed nun. She was treating me, musically that is, to a diet of her favourites, which were mostly Broadway standards. One day she very kindly asked me to think about what I might like to learn, and so the next week I brought along the sheet music for “Cleanup Time”. She had never heard it before: neither had her pianist. But as she came to know the song, Sister started to tap her fingers, and then her feet, and soon she started to do a little jig. “This is a joy”, she said. And that sounds right.

I think of “Cleanup Time” as being one of the “Yoko Ono songs”. It not only paints a humorous thumb-nail portrait of her, but it’s inspired by her approach to life: hard-headed and romantic by turns, with positive affirmation, and lots of talk of magic. This is part of Yoko’s worldview, that to speak and think and to imagine positively is to make a positive future. She sees the connection between imagination (what I might call “creative visualisation”) and reality. This willing of the positive into reality is what she calls magic, which is why in “You’re the One” from Milk and Honey she describes John and herself as “a wizard and a witch”. This belief that we are making our present and future right now, and can make them better right now is an example of “instant karma”.

Now to apply this to “Cleanup Time”. At the outset of the song, as a guitar picks at a loose line, Lennon seems to mutter an incantation. It sounds to me like: “Bubble, bubble … toil”, a reference to the famous spell from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with its refrain “Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” As Lennon’s mumbling fades out, the band comes together and sweeps us into a burbling brook of sound, while Lennon begins, half speaking rather than singing:

Moonlight on the water, sunlight on your face,

You and me together, we are in our place.

The gods are in the heavens, the angels treat us well,

Oracle has spoken, we cast the perfect spell.

The queen is in her counting house, counting out the money,

The king is in the kitchen, making bread and honey.

No friends and yet no enemies, absolutely free.

No rats aboard the magic ship of perfect harmony.

And then with a surge of energy, and even a bit of growl on the words “now” and “let”, he sings:

Now it begins, let it begin: Cleanup time!

Cleanup time! Well! Well! Well!

However far we travel, Wherever we may roam,

The centre of our circle will always be our home.

Cleanup time! Cleanup time!

The third verse is shorter, as, instead of the last couplet, a saxophone plays a solo. It is worth listening to it through headphones: the musicians clearly had a lot of fun, and the guitars, in particular, emit almost random screeches in the background, but the randomness of the sound has an effect that is complementary to the song. The piece is only just under three minutes long, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and as it is, it is totally satisfying.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, it is odd that Sean isn’t mentioned. I don’t feel that he’s excluded, and he does have a song all to himself, so to speak, later on the album, in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”. But still, the omission is odd: I can’t imagine that Lennon left Sean out because he felt that Julian might be hurt.

The real issue is, when Lennon speaks about, cleaning up, what is being cleaned? I think the answer is a large one: it is their lives. I think he means their drug taking, their approach to each other and to others, the food they were eating, and even financially, that they were getting their act together. So the references to the king and queen were humorous but it was the humour of a happy truth. Then, by implication, he was perhaps admitting that in the past he may have forgotten that his home was central, but now he would not. The way he sings “Now” when he sings “Now it begins” demonstrates that he felt he had come to a significant and fresh point. About this time he was writing a song with the words “life begins at 40″, because that was how he felt. Further, the opening references to moonlight and sunlight remind me of his insight in “Oh! My Love” into the transformative power of the simplest and clearest impressions (see the first Lennon blog). He is to remain centred in reality, and reality, as we saw with “God”, he identified with “Yoko and me”. This is why he sang: “You and me together, we are in our place.”

Doggett sees a little dig at Yoko and her tarot readers and psychics in Lennon’s reference to an oracle and a spell, (The Art and Music of John Lennon, 297): I must say, I don’t interpret those lyrics that way. Given Lennon’s habit of travelling all over the world in compliance with the advice these people gave Yoko, the lyrics are more likely to be celebratory (he flew to South Africa and then travelled to Bermuda in accordance with “psychic” advice: see John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman, 789). Over and above that, I don’t sense any irony here. However, Doggett is correct to see in the reference to the king and queen, an allusion to “Cry, Baby Cry” from The Beatles double album. That song had something magical, perhaps redolent of “Alice in Wonderland”, and that is what I hear here, 12 years later.

It is funny, but while the line about having neither friend nor enemy and being absolutely free is bracing in its clarity and cleanness, I don’t believe it expressed the whole truth, and I never did, even before the assassination. Yet, I feel that this is one aspect of the truth, and was Lennon’s genuine experience: he felt that he and Yoko made a self-sufficient pair. It smacks to me of his words from “In My Life” about how his dear memories lose their meaning when he thinks of love as “something new”. It isn’t cold: there is something impartial about it, but still incomplete. The words “magic ship of perfect harmony” may even have been inspired by an event which occurred not long before the writing of this song.

In 1980, Lennon made an important sailing trip to Bermuda. I will not attempt to retell the account told by Chris Hunt (“Just Like Starting Over: The Recording of Double Fantasy”, first published in Uncut Legends, December 2005, by Chris Hunt, retrieved from http://www.chrishunt.biz/features26.html @ 16 May 2009), but it is well worth reading. If, as it seems, the story is true, then when Lennon sailed to Bermuda, he alone of the crew, was well enough to assist the captain get through a six day storm (the story is accepted by Philip Norman). The captain quoted Lennon as saying the following about his feelings when he (i.e. the captain) was obliged to leave Lennon alone to steer the boat:

Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience, and I began to sing and shout old sea shanties in the face of the storm, feeling total exhilaration. I had the time of my life. … I was so centred after the experience at sea that I was tuned in to the cosmos – and all these songs came!

Little wonder that the captain went on to say that when he returned to the deck several hours later, Lennon was “just enraptured”. Interestingly, Lennon was also supposed to have said that the reason he seemed immune to sea-sickness, when three experienced sailors were laid up with it, was that as a former heroin addict who had made it through withdrawal, he had learned to control his urge to vomit.

And I think this is the clue to the deep if subdued joy of “Cleanup Time”. Lennon had been through some difficult times, some hard times, and some dirty times. But he had come through. When I first heard Double Fantasy, I formed the view that Lennon had started writing songs more radically original than any in the history of modern pop: he had started writing the songs of the householder. This is Gurdjieff’s way of referring to the person who is on a road of spiritual development simply by their manner of living ordinary life.

The concept of the householder is quite important: Gurdjieff said that the spiritual way could not begin at a lower level than that of ordinary and competent life (Miraculous 154). This means that unless you can organize your life: your food, clothing and shelter, in a competent manner, and care for your children if you have any, your chance of organizing anything at a higher level is nil. Of course, this is a principle: there are also issues of accident and even fate to take into account, so that someone, anyone, of whatever level, living in Afghanistan, may find circumstances overwhelming. But Gurdjieff’s valuation of the householder is inimical to the romance of the “bohemian” (Miraculous 362-4), or as we might say today, the “beatnik” or “hippie”. Bohemians and hippies, according to Gurdjieff would be “tramps” (people with no values). Equally remote from the spiritual way are “lunatics”, people with wrong values. Interestingly, Gurdjieff said that we have elements of all three within ourselves, but there is still room for one type to predominate.

Lennon did not put it into these words: so far as I know he had not read or even heard of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. But if he had not, this would make his achievement all the greater. It would mean that he had tried a certain way of life, found it failing, and amended his ways. This is why I think of some of the songs from those last years as being “householder songs”. This concept also shows the significance of how Yoko and he became more and more concerned to eat nourishing food, and the importance of Lennon’s learning to prepare brown rice and bake good bread. These are good, simple householder tasks.

There is much in the later Lennon which can be explained from this perspective, but I’ll close with his statement “something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear.”

There is something greater than us, and it’s manifestation in our lives is related to our acceptance of the situation, whatever that situation may be. It is, ultimately, related to accepting that we are as we are. But that does not mean congratulating ourselves, for as we are we have a possibility of developing, of becoming better, perhaps even more godlike. I would say that a good first step is to remember ourselves more often and more deeply, and perhaps this is what Lennon experienced when he spoke of being “so centred”. But self-remembering is only the first step, and few “householders” have ever heard of it or conceived anything like it. No matter, they progress through their own way of life. The goal still abides, the spiritual life, the life grounded in reality for God.

John Lennon 1980

These issues shall all be revisited and new layers of depth will appear. For example, we shall need to consider “Living on Borrowed Time” which also relates to Lennon’s Bermuda experience. But for the next blog, I’ll go back to January 1970 and “Instant Karma!”.

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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KATE BUSH: THE SONG OF SOLOMON (1)

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Kate Bush: The Song of Solomon (1)
The Kick Inside

There should be an annual holiday in celebration of her birth, when the community allows the springs of business and commerce to wind down, and the machines of industry to lie idle for 24 hours. On that glad day, families will be reunited to their ancestral hearths from all ends of the lands, and after feast and thanks, will gather around their stereos, in communal silence before their heirloom recordings of the exalted one, she who was sent to us in the evening of the world, Kate Bush.

But such a holiday there is not. Popular as her work is, it is still not esteemed at its true worth. To a significant extent, her music is still, as Shakespeare said, “caviar to the general”. Yet, for my money, of all the contemporary recording artists whose work I have heard, she is among the very greatest and the deepest. Interestingly, she is also the only modern “pop star” I know who has referred approvingly to Gurdjieff in recorded song (“Them Heavy People” from The Kick Inside). But it isn’t as if I think she’s insightful because she has referred to Gurdjieff: it’s because she is deep that she has been interested in his ideas, if not his methods (I shall return in future blogs to “Full House” from Lionheart, and “Sat in your Lap” from The Dreaming). I am not simply identified with her music because she wrote some “Gurdjieff songs”, to coin a rebarbative phrase. Indeed, I think that “Full House” fails not only because the melody seems pedestrian, but because it is too much a frontal assault on something which is too subtle to survive such an approach; and those songs which I consider to be her very best (“Wuthering Heights”, “Lionheart” and “Some Moments of Pleasure”) do not seem to be at all indebted to Gurdjieff.

She is extraordinary for another reason: she is the greatest prodigy I know of in modern music. Stevie Wonder was younger, and even more talented as a musician, but not even he, or Donovan, ever matched her for the extraordinary work of art which was her first album, The Kick Inside, released in 1978 when she was 19 years old, although some of the songs were written when she was yet younger. In fact, I still consider that to be her best record, rivalled, but not surpassed, by The Dreaming and Aerial. And it’s with that album that I’ll begin.

The striking, almost the stupendous thing about The Kick Inside, is the consistency of its quality, and the integrity of the album. It has an overall sound, an aural signature, based around Bush’s distinctive vocals, and the basic ensemble of piano, guitars and drums. Side one, containing six songs, is dominated by the supernatural. For example, the last four tracks on side one are “Strange Phenomena”, “Kite”, “The Man with the Child in his Eyes” and “Wuthering Heights”. They deal with psychic phenomena, transmogrification from woman to kite, a phantom visitor, and the star-struck Cathy from Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. So, side one effectively closes with two songs about wraiths. Side two, with seven songs, is largely given over to romantic love. However, each side features some of the themes of the other side. For example, while side one closes with Cathy, side two ends with the tale of Lucy Wan, who suicides when she becomes pregnant to her own brother, vowing: “I shall come home again, but not until the sun and the moon meet on yon hill.”

So the last image which Bush impresses upon us, on each side of this record, is a woman desperate in love, whose passion has led her to her premature death, but will also bring her back from beyond the grave. Perhaps teenage life in England was not so terribly idyllic back then.

Kate Bush’s voice was distinctively high at the time of this album: when her voice deepened she re-recorded “Wuthering Heights”. The newer version has a certain depth, but the very pitch of her singing on the original possessed an inimitable natural eeriness. Oddly, when I hear it now, the manner in which that young voice embodies the spectre of Cathy, is reminiscent of a tale she would tell on Never Forever, the possession of a boy and a girl in James’ “Turn of the Screw”. So convincing is her precocious performance on “Wuthering Heights” that it is as if she is haunted.

To an extent which, to my ear, she did not match again until the triumph of Aerial, Kate Bush as a person dominated The Kick Inside. It is as if her very spirit was infused into the grooves of the record. The intimacy commences on the very first track, “Moving”. “Moving stranger, does it really matter, as long as you’re not afraid to feel?”, she sings, seemingly inviting us to drop our fears and open ourselves to an experience of emotion. She continues: “… how my open arms ache … how you move me with your beauty’s potency … You crush the lily in my soul.” In the next track, “Saxophone Song’ she is “a surly lady in tremor”, telling of “the stars that climb from her bowels”. These lyrics are more intimate, by light years, than any vulgar assault with terms for genitalia could ever be.

The extent to which her body and bodily sensations feature in these songs is almost amazing. The list continues: on “Strange Phenomena” she mentions how “every girl knows about the punctual blues”, and on “Kite”, “Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”, while she feels “a rush along my body like a bullet”. In “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”, she is “dying for you just to touch me, and feel all the energy right up-a-me … The thought of you sends me shivering … All the time I’m living in that evening with that feeling of sticky love inside”. And I won’t even bother quoting “Feel It”, but, if you have heard it, you know that she is not referring to a sensory encounter with fabrics and materials.

Bush is fond of the genre of the ‘story song”, where she adopts a persona and narrates a story or a scene from some tale. Sometimes, I think, she is too fond. The most glorious successes of course, were “Wuthering Heights” and “The Man with the Child in his Eyes”, where she turns stories into opportunities for apparently intimate self-disclosure. In “Man with the Child”, the brilliant but simple piano accompaniment conjures the waves rolling in to the shore, while she sings of a man “Telling me about the sea, all his love, ‘till eternity”. Once more, love is not bound within the fence of earthly life. And, as in “Wuthering Heights”, it is ambitious but believable: she has made us believe from the first lines with the most innocuous yet individual of details:

I hear him before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that’s been.

Who else has ever spoken in song of reviewing the day? It is no stock phrase: it suggests a real person. “But I feel him hesitate”, she sings. Once more, have you ever heard that in any other song? However, I have to say, that by the time I come to “James and the Cold Gun”, I am getting tired of the succession of story songs (“Remember Genie, from the casino? She’s still a-waiting in her big brass bed.”) And it is not necessary for Bush to rely on stories: she does first person so well.

Probably the best example of speaking as Kate Bush on Kick Inside is “Them Heavy People”. It opens with a the phrase “rolling the ball (rolling) … rolling the ball to me” tossed around in air, as it were, with her voice and piano, echoing the word “rolling”, to musically establish a sense of the ball being airily passed to and fro. It’s almost a prelude rather than a part of the song. Then the other instruments kick in, and we’re into the first verse:

They arrived at an inconvenient time,
I was hiding in a room in my mind.
They made me look at myself.
I saw it well: I’d shut the people out of my life.
So now I take the opportunities,
Wonderful teachers ready to teach me.
I must work on my mind, for now I realise that
Every one of us has a heaven inside.

Once more, for the chorus there is a change of pace: “Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot, them heavy people help me …” and we’re back to the “rolling” theme, and then the final verse:

They open doorways that I thought were shut for good,
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu,
Break me emotionally, it’s nearly killing me,
But what a lovely feeling!
I love the whirling of the dervishes,
I love the beauty of rare innocence.
You don’t need no crystal ball,
Don’t fall for no magic wand,
We humans got it all, we perform the miracles.

In one place, I believe, Bush described this song as “a prayer”, and one can see that. It is deliberately broad in its scope, including not only the two teachers but also the dervishes and innocence, which I take to mean openness to impressions. This is an important theme in Bush’s work, and shall achieve ever greater importance until it culminates in the triumph of disc 2 of Aerial. However, “Heavy People” does suggest a certain serious personal immersion in the techniques of Gurdjieff which, as I understand it, is not and never has been the case with Kate Bush. In an interview she stated that she had heard of Gurdjieff from one of her brothers, and read some books, but that he was far more concerned with it than she was. My own guess is that she had read In Search of the Miraculous, because if “G.” in “Strange Phenomena” is indeed “Gurdjieff”, then such an odd way of referring to him could only, I imagine, have come from reading that book.

I shall pull further ideas together in future Kate Bush blogs, but for now, I will wrap up on this album. The more I listen to it, the more I am impressed with its artistic unity. In addition to the features I have already mentioned, the very first sounds we hear are ghostly sounds, as if of spirits, presaging “Wuthering Heights”. The sounds which introduce “Moving” are in fact whale calls. And in case you didn’t know it, “wuthering” is an old word for the moaning made by high winds.

A feature of this album, distinguishing it from her others (or so it seems to me) is that even when she seems to be composing songs for the sake of composing songs, she composes good songs. For example, “Oh to Be in Love” strikes me, as it has other reviewers, as rather short on purpose (“I find it hard to face my face … Why did you have to choose our moment? … Why did you make it so unreal?”). And yet, the music is good: to my ear, very good indeed. The chorus with its marked rhythm “oh – oh – oh to be – e – e in love” is memorable and enjoyable, and in the last verse we are sprung a surprise:

All the colours looks brighter now …
Slipping into tomorrow too quick,
Yesterday always too good to forget,
Stop the swing of the pendulum, let us through!

We have seen these two ideas before: the joy of seeing everything with enhanced vividness, and the desire to escape from time (here represented by the clock). And we shall meet them again. That such ideas occur to her mind, however, is a tribute to her natural depth.

Another essential aspect of Kate Bush is her thorough English-ness. The two striking stories which close each side are based on an unmistakably English fiction: Wuthering Heights and the poem of Lucy Wan respectively, although Lucy is not named on “The Kick Inside”.

Then, the final matter for this blog, is Kate Bush’s individuality. She is not affectedly idiosyncratic, nor is she bound to fashion, the twin vices of “music celebrities” which Spinal Tap so accurately parodied. Consider “Room for Life”: she addresses a woman crying on account of her lover, telling her that men don’t care whether her tears are real or not, for the men it’s all part of the game. But, as for you, woman:

Like it or not, we were built tough
Because we’re woman!
No, we never die for long,
While we’ve got that little life to live for
Where it’s hid inside … Oh, woman two in one
There’s room for a life in your womb, woman …

Then, in the second verse, having consoled her friend, she tells her that she needs “a lover to free her desire” and urges her to “get up on your feet and go get it now.” It is unique, it’s personal, and yet it’s also public. I would not call this feminist, or, for that matter, any ideology. To me, it’s just wisdom.

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, Part 11: Imagine

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 11: “Imagine”

Lennon was pragmatic enough to know that, at some point, people who seek freedom will need to act. He was sufficiently experienced to know that music can inspire people to act. And he was wise enough to know that the first act to liberation is one of the imagination. Freedom is, first of all, a liberation of consciousness. But freedom for what? All these issues, and more, Lennon addressed in three minutes and six seconds in his tour de force, “Imagine”.

“Imagine” is, without doubt, Lennon’s signature song, his anthem: a call to an idyllic world of benevolence and peace. But every force evokes an opposite reaction, and so does every torch song. “Imagine” is also his most widely detested song because of its opening line “Imagine there’s no heaven”, which effectively, of course, means no Christian god, for as the Lord’s Prayer says, our father is in heaven.

Lennon himself remarked that the song was anti-religion and anti-capitalist, but that it was ‘accepted’ because it was ‘sugar-coated’. And this is largely, although not entirely, true. Many people who cherish it as an anthem do not really think about what the song says, although they understand what it’s about. While the lyrics could hardly be any clearer, the “unspoken lyrics” of the music, to put it that way, are yet clearer and louder. I am not taking a position for or against the song, but an exploration would repay the effort, because there is something very big, even massive, in “Imagine”. I think that people are attracted to this, the big spirit that breathes through the song as a whole.

First of all, some context. The Beatles had split up only about a year before Lennon started working on this song and the album of the same name. His reputation had suffered: for example, he was variously decried as a ratbag, a hypocrite, a fool, and even naive. Oddly, it seems that the accusation of naivety was the one which hurt him the most. People can disagree on morality, or even on what constitutes wisdom or its opposite, but to call someone naive is to deny them adult status, to refuse to take them seriously. I think that we all doubt ourselves, to some extent and in some areas, and so to be mocked out of a fair hearing is painful because it confirms our secret fears, based as they are upon our own criticism of ourselves.

It’s as if we all have a custom made wound between our shoulder blades, and the knife which fits the wound is “ridicule”. Lennon would pretend not to be bothered by it, but he was, and so, thankfully, he stopped performing “bed-ins”, appearing in a bag in the name of “total communication”, or growing his hair for peace. Lennon adopted all the trendy left-wing political postures, and hob-nobbed with the “yippie” Abbie Hoffman and his ilk. Yet, even during this period he produced what is, to my ear, the rock and roll album without parallel, John Lennon /Plastic Ono Band. Despite the excess of one track (“Well, Well, Well”), it is still easily the deepest single piece of music produced in the last 50 years, at least so far as my knowledge extends and my taste discerns (see my blogs on “God” and “Remember”).

But that record had not met with the popular success Lennon believed it deserved, and for which he craved. So he did what he later would when his Some Time In New York City double album was a spectacular flop: he changed tack to something he fancied would be more in tune with the market. After Some Time, he produced Mind Games, which was received with relief, although not the sales he had hoped for. After John Lennon he produced Imagine, and that was a success. The only track on it that most people find hard to listen to today is “I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier”, a wailing, indulgent anti-war piece, which thankfully ends side 1, so that in the days of vinyl one could simply lift the needle off early.

Now, I am not saying that the song “Imagine” was insincere, or that it was contrived to meet the market. It in fact has roots deep in Lennon’s artistry, and is his authentic voice. But I think that the song was produced so as to maximize its popular success. One could compare it to “Love” from the John Lennon album. There, the melody is almost achingly beautiful, something Lennon was proudly aware of, and it was given a beautiful production which was simplicity itself, care of none other but Phil Spector, who was celebrated for his large productions. However, it was the sort of treatment which only the cognoscenti would really appreciate: for that type of song, the record buying public tends to prefer strings. And so “Imagine” had strings. But it had more: its very first line, considered apart from its soft musical treatment, was either startling or confronting, depending on your point of view:

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try;

No hell below us, above us only sky.

Imagine all the people living for today – ah ah, aye.

At the Catholic school I attended at the time of this song’s release, Brother Terence, our class teacher, played us “Imagine” and “Gimme Some Truth” as contemporary songs we could profitably ponder. He was not threatened by any of its concepts, and what is more, he entered into the spirit of the lyrics. The thing was, he said, to actually imagine it. To stop, get other things out of your mind for three minutes, and try to see it. And that really is the song in a nutshell. But let’s go back.

First of all, the piano lead in is stately, even hymnic. It was intended to, and it does have an anthemic quality. On another version, released only posthumously on the four volume Anthology, this aspect is even more strikingly emphasised, because the chief accompanying instrument there is an organ, on which decidedly churchy stops have been pulled. Given the anti-religious sentiments of the lyrics, this is almost ironic. But there is a point to this, because it means that the song aspires to ideals usually associated exclusively with religion. This, I am sure, is true to the paradox of Lennon. In 1980 he told an interviewer (David Shef) that he was a religious person, and went on to say that he had no problems with what Jesus had taught, but that people were mesmerised by Jesus, not his message. Indeed, during that interview Lennon made frequent reference to Jesus, and his miracles such as the loaves and fishes! Lennon was marked by ambiguity and love/hate. In the early 1970s, Lennon was still in two minds as to whether the real issues were political and social, or psychological and perhaps even spiritual. After Mind Games, he would retreat from overtly political statements and concerns, and turn more innerly.

It seems to me that most criticisms of Christianity and Christians, and Lennon’s is no exception, are in fact taking aim at a lack of Christianity, at a failure to live like Christians. With relatively few exceptions, it is not Christianity that people object to but the lack of Christianity, and this is of course harder to accept when there is hypocrisy in the equation. What Lennon is getting at in “Imagine” goes beyond this: he is not attacking Christianity by name, but rather religion and concepts such as God and hell, anything which takes one away from “living for today”, as he puts it. The song goes on to then erase other fixtures of our mental furniture:

Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do,

Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.

Imagine all the people living life in peace.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.

No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.

Imagine all the people sharing all the world.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.

On a live performance, he would sing in the final verse “a brotherhood and sisterhood of man”. He did not correct his sexism by altering “man” to “people” or something less redolent of machismo.

But all that side of things is a distraction: what is critical about this song is an insight which he took from Yoko Ono, and that is this: envisaging a possibility and imagining its reality are the first steps to making it a reality. This can be a trite statement, but it can also be profound, even revelatory. So many of our limitations are accepted by us simply because we cannot imagine an alternative. It is astounding, even horrifying, in a way, to wake up and realise that we are limited in our reactions and our responses simply because we have never seen anyone react in any other way. That is, we see that “X” always “makes” people get upset, and something in us, something which is so deep as to rarely be in our awareness, has a sense that there would be something wrong if we, too, did not upset when “X” happened. I shall develop this idea further in a future blog, when I deal with “How?”, also from the Imagine album. In “The Daphne Blossom”, also available on this blog by kind permission of Carl Ginsberg, one can read how Ginsberg, a Feldenkreis practitioner, cured a problem George Adie had with swallowing food, by inducing him to imagine the existence of the lung which had been surgically removed almost 40 years earlier: and what is more, it worked, almost like magic.

And perhaps imagination and magic are related. This, I think, makes sense of much of Yoko Ono’s art, although, as I have said before, I do not pretend to understand that redoubtable woman and her approach. Imagination, in the sense of consciously forming an image and introducing it into one’s thought and feeling as an active element, was a stable of her art, as even a cursory glance at her book Grapefruit will show. What Lennon and One were saying is that we receive all sorts of influences through the media and society. Most of these, as the correctly saw, were based on unthinking prejudices and attitudes. Most of these are were needlessly crass and low, hence on “Working Class Hero” from John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band, he sings: “you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”. But, and this is why Lennon and Ono were so excited, one has a choice: one can choose to look for better influences, and what is more, everyone can create such influences by using their minds creatively.

We are forever manufacturing our own present and future through our imaginations. This, I think, is the essence of what Yoko Ono brought Lennon, and it was a lesson for which he had long ago prepared the ground: see my blog on “There’s A Place”. Any comment on Lennon’s relationship with Ono which does not take this into account, is, in my view, hopelessly superficial.

To return to the metaphor of the magician, the wizard and the witch (as Yoko referred to John and herself on “You’re The One” from Milk and Honey) have to visualize what they desire, but then they have to have sufficient knowledge. Some things can be effected merely by thought: methods of self-suggestion work on this basis. But other things cannot be so easily dealt with: and there is the issue. People who have learned of the power of the mind tend to become overly enthusiastic and imagine that there are no limits to it. This is absurd as imagining that nothing can be effected by creative visualisation. Lennon had some insight into this: he saw that it is not just a case of thinking about something like peace. Lennon realised that it needs to be pictured as a reality, and pictured clearly and distinctly desired. That is why he sang: “some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.” What cannot be done by parliaments, or United Nations can be done by people: as he sang on “Only People” from Mind Games: “only people know just how to change the world.”

And for what is this freedom desired? So that the world may live as one, sharing the world, in peace. It would be easy to critique this as naive or as amorphous, and to show that belief in heaven, hell and religion are not the problem, but rather, as I have said, lip-service and hypocrisy, that is, insufficient practice of religion. As for the idea that eliminating possessions would also spell the end of greed and hunger – well this is naivety of an almost criminal level. What could Lennon had been thinking? Was he merely reciting hoary old Socialist opium dreams?

But I do not particularly want to take a shot at “Imagine” today. The deficiencies in the lyrics are somewhat made up in the music, and the nobility of what he was aiming at: the transformation of negative emotions into positive, what Gurdjieff called the second conscious shock (see In Search of the Miraculous, p.191). I have no evidence that is even suggestive that Lennon was acquainted with Gurdjieff’s ideas, and yet, that is what I hear in “Imagine”: the conviction that hatred can be transformed through consciousness, and that divisions can be overcome by a positive impulse. All that is lacking is an understanding of the necessity of the first conscious shock: that is, that we cannot bring a conscious influence to our emotions unless we first of all remember ourselves. But Lennon had started to move towards this insight, realizing that for years he had forgotten himself (see the first Lennon blog). And I think that some form of this insight may lie behind the reference to people “living for today”. Is it too hopeful of me to see Lennon saying that we need to be present?

There is far more one could say, but I shall return to what I see as the crucial points in future blogs, where I shall take other songs as my point of departure. But I shall end this one by pointing out elements of continuity and development in Lennon’s artistic career. As has been noticed before, the first words of “Imagine” were foretold, as it were, in “I’ll Get You” from 1963, where Lennon sang: “Imagine I’m in love with you, it’s easy ‘cos I know, I’ve imagined I’m in love with you, many, many, many times before.” (e.g. S. Turner, The Beatles: The Stories behind the Songs 1962-1966). However, what Turner does not note, is that in 1963 Lennon went on to sing: “It’s not like me to pretend …”. In 1971, not so long afterwards, Lennon saw that imagination was a tool in the technology of consciousness.

He had indeed, come a long way. But he had further to go, and in the next blog, I’ll consider one of his final songs, where he showed that, without any doubt, his feet were finding their place on the earth while he had lost nothing of his idealism: “Clean Up Time” from Double Fantasy.

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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