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

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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