Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY – PART ONE: OH, MY LOVE
Lennon once told someone that he had been in Japan, sitting alone in the bath one evening, when he realized that he had forgotten something for a long long time. And suddenly it came to him – he knew what he had forgotten – it was himself. He had been busy with externals and had been oblivious to himself. The significance of this will be apparent to readers of this blog: but what an extraordinary insight to find, how precise and penetrating. Even typing this now helps me to remember.
This anecdote may have been in some notes by Eliot Mintz, about the very last years of Lennon’s life, but I have no access to my library now. If anyone has the exact quote, I would appreciate it if they could forward it to me. This insight is of a piece with his line in “Beautiful Boy”, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” And yet, no other commentator has, to my knowledge, remarked on it, and I read a good deal of material on Lennon.
Lennon also said, and I’m pretty sure that this is in the posthumously published Sky-Writing by Word of Mouth, that most great forms of art, as well as the abuse of drugs and alcohol, were an attempt to escape the strait-jacket of the self, meaning, I believe, the ordinary self. If anyone had learned this in the school of his own blood, surely it was Lennon. No artist in 20th century popular culture that I know of had his depth. Further, to my taste, he is by a wide margin the greatest songwriter I have heard. His songs, especially the later ones, usually blend tune and words in a seamless whole. Most of his work is strikingly original in the sense of individual: it is not contrived but always inimitable and unique. He wrote what is perhaps my all-time favourite melody, “Jealous Guy”. In the last five years of his life he turned out a series of songs of unmatched hymnic power: “Grow Old with Me”, “Tennessee” (revised as “Memory”), “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”.
My own sense is that after a rough and turbulent life, full of pain and idiocy – but perhaps idiocy as a blind reaction to pain – Lennon had finally found a position of emotional and intellectual equilibrium and was now turning out the greatest achievements of his corpus: e.g. “Watching the Wheels”, “Woman”, “Beautiful Boy” and “Living on Borrowed Time”.
And yet, let us not gloss over the idiocies. Together with his depth and genius, Lennon had often been hard, acerbic and even cruel. He was capable of acts of bastardry (such as his sabotage of McCartney’s “Let it Be” and “Long and Winding Road”). He was hypocritical: he preached love of humanity but didn’t practice it with his own first family. A vicious remark he made to his son Julian about his laugh caused Julian to become afraid of laughing. His treatment of Cynthia was, apparently, malicious and even mean in a small-minded way, pressuring her to accept an absurdly low settlement. Lennon was frequently egotistical to a degree which was almost pathological. He was intensely and selfishly competitive. I could go on.
I have to declare, too, that I incline to Gurdjieff’s view that the quality of a person’s work is a function of their being. If their being is low, so is their work. So how to reconcile the contradictions of John Lennon?
Briefly, we are not just one person. The small person in Lennon was not, I think, capable of great music. Tuneful, even striking music, yes. “How Do You Sleep?” is evidence of that. Lennon was an extraordinary talent, but he was, like all of us, a jigsaw puzzle held together by a box. As with a jigsaw, our unity is only the theoretical unity of a camera angle until the pieces have been assembled as intended by the puzzle-master. All of the great Lennon songs I have mentioned above are full of positive emotion. We are all made up of elevations and depressions, like the mountains and valleys impressed on a relief map. And as no one can remain in a state of stasis forever, we are bound to either develop under the inspiration of our better selves, or degenerate under the opposite influences. Lennon, I believe, was unmistakably – over all – developing.
I shall have more to say about Lennon on future blogs, but let me now just take one song: the ravishingly beautiful “Oh, My Love”. The song is attributed to Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was released in 1971 on the Imagine album.
Oh, my love, for the first time in my life, my eyes are wide open.
Oh, my love(r), for the first time in my life, my eyes can see.
I see the wind, oh, I see the trees.
Everything is clear in my heart.
I see the clouds, oh, I see the sky.
Everything is clear in our world.
Oh, my love, for the first time in my life, my mind is wide open.
Oh, my love, for the first time in my life, my mind can feel.
I feel sorrow, I feel dreams.
Everything is clear in my heart.
I feel life, I feel love.
Everything is clear in our world.
“Oh, My Love” has also been released on the John Lennon Anthology set. That version is, if anything even more stately than the one on the Imagine album, and, as I hear it, there is more tenderness in Lennon’s voice. Lennon did not like the sound of his voice, and often tampered with it (witness McCartney’s parody on “Let Me Roll It” from Band on the Run). In my view, the engineering effects were often counter-productive. Incidentally, I would say much the same about the version of “Imagine” on John Lennon Anthology, and an unreleased rendition of the stunning “Out the Blue”. My guess is that, more than anything else, something in Lennon was afraid of displaying his sensitivity. Perhaps sensitivity was felt to equate with vulnerability. The young Lennon’s efforts to portray himself as a “Ted” are well-documented. This is something Yoko helped him deal with, as he often mentioned, not least in “Aisumasen” from Mind Games.
But for just under three minutes, these doubts and hesitancies are dispelled by the clear shaft of morning light which is “Oh, My Love”. It opens with a willowy melodic line, gently picked out on acoustic guitar, like a soft breeze visiting a Japanese garden. It almost alights in your head. Then there joins an unassuming piano, which follows the vocal, when that enters, like a brook running by a country road – just as we have here in the mountains of North Lebanon. So calm, so ordered, so sober are both singing and playing, that it approximates to silence. But what it really is, of course, is an art so pure and effective that, to an attentive listener, there is no space for, and nothing to attract, the ordinary noises which fill our heads. All of its associations are clean. When the lyrics have been once sung through, the guitar and piano wordlessly sustain the enchantment until the guitar folds down the piece with a graceful three note flourish.
To me, there is something redolent of the Zen culture which Okakura, Hoover and others write about. I can well believe that Yoko Ono contributed to it, even if only “air”or “atmosphere”.
Both in simplicity of lyrics, melodic grace, and content, “Oh, My Love” reminds me of “Because” from Abbey Road, and, to an extent, “Julia” from The Beatles (“The White Album”). All three are “Yoko Ono” songs: “Julia” reflects on his relationships with Yoko and his mother, while “Because” was inspired by Yoko’s playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Lennon started by playing the right hand back backwards, but then amended it, creating a new and striking piece:
Because the world is round it turns me on.
Because the world is round. Ah …ah!
Because the wind is high, it blows my mind.
Because the wind is high.
Ah … love is old, love is new. Love is all, love is you.
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.
Because the sky is blue. Ah … ah!
Perhaps I shall return to “Julia” in a future blog. But in these two instances, the combination of the utmost simplicity and the direct receipt of impressions is almost mystical. In each piece, the arrangement is minimal, and wordless exclamations are used to great effect. To open this song not with a word but with “Oh”, was inspired. What lifts both “Oh, My Love” and “Because” to another level is that Lennon interprets his thoughts only by reference to love. Other writers have covered similar territory: I might mention Thomas Traherne and Herbert Vaughan, who explicitly speak of love, but also of God. Traherne, in particular, stresses that he had such insights when he was a child. Lennon, too, makes some interesting comments about childhood, particularly in the classic “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Once more, the previously unreleased versions available on the Beatles Anthology vol.2 make evident what is really behind this song.
Why does the wind blow his mind? Because, he says, it is high. But why “because”? It is a poetic way of expressing an impression of the ineffable reality of existence: the very fact that there is a world at all, that the sky actually is, the wind really is. The same wonder comes through in “Oh, my love”. There is no more intricate reason, no more complex explanation. These things are, but only now does he see them lucidly (literally, ‘with light’). And of course, that invites us to try and see reality by our own best light.
Perhaps the main point of Gurdjieff’s teaching is that any advance towards a direct apprehension of reality, that is, towards the vision of God, begins with the direct apprehension of the simplest and closest aspect of reality: the fact of our existence in flesh, with emotion, intellect and soul. Then, from there, if all our conditioning, all our static interference can be cleared for long enough, the perception of these subjective realities will enable us to perceive objective reality: God in His Creation.
And Lennon had started upon this road for himself. In “Oh, My Love”, we hear the wonder of the world being reborn in him. It was a hard road and a curving one. At points he seemed to have lost everything he had gained. But he persevered, and that, to me, is his greatness. Despite everything he had been through, all the mistakes, all the controversy, all the thick-headed stupidity, he was emerging into reality, and his feeling, his art and his mind were becoming deeper and clearer.
This is the mystery of Jesus’ injunction to become like little children. As Orage said, it means to start growing up in essence, because in essence we are not even children, we are babies. To become a child is not to retreat, it is to finally start maturing in the one place where it counts: Real I. And behind Real I, as Gurdjieff said, lies God.
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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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART TWO: JULIA
“Julia” was released on the double album, The Beatles, in 1968, being, apparently the last track prepared for it. It is also the only Beatles track where no one else, not even another Beatle, sings or plays. No one else contributed because nothing was needed beyond Lennon’s voice and guitar – anything further would have been a distraction. That it was a solo Lennon track is also rather fitting; this is perhaps the most intensely personal statement Lennon ever made as a Beatle. And, to my taste, it is a supreme achievement, relying on nothing but its superlatively brilliant melody and lyrics. Eschewing simple formulas, Lennon opens with a couplet which is later recycled with different lyrics:
(couplet) Half of what I say is meaning-less,
But I say it just to reach you, Julia.
(verse and refrain) Julia, Julia, ocean child calls me.
So I sing a song of love, Julia.
(verse and refrain) Julia, sea-shell eyes, windy smile calls me,
So I sing a song of love, Julia.
Her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering in the sun.
(verse and refrain) Julia, Julia, morning moon touch me.
So I sing a song of love, Julia.
(couplet) When I cannot sing my heart,
I can only speak my mind, Julia.
(verse and refrain) Julia, sleeping sand, silent cloud touch me,
So I sing a song of love, Julia.
Mmm, calls me.
So I sing a song of love for Julia, Julia, Julia.
The unpredictable format, departing from the verse, choruses and middle eight formula, working with the regular and tranquil guitar picking, effectively holds the song together as one thought.
As I said in respect of “Oh, My Love” and “Because”, two other “Yoko Ono” songs, “the combination of the utmost simplicity and the direct receipt of impressions is almost mystical.” Here the mystical, that is, the sensing of a higher dimension present in this one, is augmented by the relation of Lennon’s illuminations to the purest impressions of vibrant nature: the sand is sleeping and the cloud is silent, but they touch him. The woman who calls him is not just Yoko (apparently meaning ‘Sea Child’) but “ocean child”, conjuring the endlessness from which all come and to which we must return. Her eyes, her smile and her hair are all transfigured as elements of this serene lightscape of white and blue.
Some of the lines are said to have been reworked from “Sand and Foam” by Kahlil Gibran. I do not have my books with me, but the borrowings are said to be in the sea-shell eyes and in two other places: first, “When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind”. This is apparently a fairly straight steal, but it is a strong and powerful statement which belongs in this song, so full of feeling that he is aware of the limitations of intellect. But the other borrowing is more interesting for Lennon’s departure from his model.
Gibran apparently wrote something along the lines of “half of what I say is meaningless but I send the other half to you.” Lennon has made quite a different statement from this. Gibran’s line means that the meaningful half communicates. Lennon’s line means that the meaning-less (it is spoken as two words) is the communication. He is aware of the inadequacy of words, but also that his truth is blazoned in that limitation. This is perceptive and it is poetically true to an extraordinary extent: much of what we say is indeed meaningless or even silly and irrational, but we express it as we reach out and touch.
To reach out to whom? Here, to his mother, Julia. There have been songs to mothers, ditties like “Put your hands together, all together, join in one by one, ‘cos I’d like to say ‘I thank you’ to the world’s greatest mum.” But I am not aware of one single song to a mother which can stand beside “Julia”. Perhaps if I had to select one, it would be Bing Crosby’s “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra, an Irish Lullabye”, but I don’t think that really compares, being rather sentimental. There is no sentimentality here (“sent” or “emotion” inappropriately coming before and muddling “ment” or “thought”).
Who has not wished to understand their relationship with their mother, to crystallize it as a simple truth, to just feel it without intellectual reflection? There have been any number of convincing songs to children, Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy”, to which we shall return in the next Lennon blog, being one of the greatest of the genre. Parents, however, have been too difficult for songwriters. But Lennon, I think, succeeded.
Yet the song also acknowledges his new love for Yoko, his wife-to-be, a different love from that of child for mother, although they can be analogically equated, and men, Lennon included, often refer to their wives as “mother”. Lennon had travelled a little of this road before, on the Rubber Soul album, in the classic “In My Life”. There he sang:
There are places I remember all my life,
though some have changed …
All these places have their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall.
… But of all these friends and lovers,
There is no one compares with you,
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.
But a new element enters in “Julia”. Lennon has foreshadowed it in saying that he sometimes thinks of love as something new – that is, something in the present. When one is present, meaning is immediate, not discursive. Hence it is very fitting to write that when he cannot sing his heart, which is what he wishes to do, he can only speak his mind. The truth of the present moment is greater: it is a dazzling light. In this effulgence, nostalgic “photo-album and a glass of red wine” type memories lose their meaning.
This may partly explain what some have heard as Lennon’s faint, if not, dead-pan delivery. That is, he is unsure, being in between heart and head. Then, there is also the factor of Lennon’s fear of his own vulnerability and sensitivity, which I mentioned in the first Lennon blog.
If performing any song would stimulate this inhibition, it is here, for something almost unexampled in rock’n’roll is evoked in the four-times repeated line: “So I sing a song of love, Julia”. Significantly, when it is sung for the fifth time, as the final line of the entire song, Lennon adds “for”, singing: “So I sing a song of love for Julia”. It is as if he could not have opened with that little word in the line: it was too poignant. He had, first, to tell his story. As we are, the relationship with one’s parents is explosive: it is made of the very finest feelings, it touches us in our essence (in Gurdjieff’s sense), which means that it includes Hydrogen 6; its energy is one step removed from the divine. Really, only the soul, not the emotions or the mind, can bear the power of these feelings with serenity.
The unexampled height which Lennon reaches is the height where love is one. There are not many loves, there are not many lovers. In so far as we love, we participate in the one ineffable all-enfolding mystery. Even as we are, we sense the immensity of love, and when we are in higher centres, we can sense that it is omnipresent.
Love in itself is impartial, and all are equally embraced in it. In La Vita Nuova, if I recall, Dante has the figure of Love appear to him and sadly say that Dante’s partial love is not really love, for love is a circle wherein all points on the circumference are equally placed from the centre. And yet, I would add, while one senses that this is true, we do seem to come to this transcendent love through particular loved ones. And paradoxically, when we have had a sense of transcendent love even our particular loves become deeper. We see them transfigured, as it were.
I think that is what Lennon was moving to here: from love of his mother, to love of Yoko, to love in its immensity, and then back, illuminated to where he began, although he could not say it directly then, with a song of love for Julia.
As we all know, Lennon did not always live on this level. I mentioned that in the first Lennon blog. But he had glimpsed it, he wanted more, and he strove for it with the only material available to him: his life. My assessment is that Lennon was purifying himself in accordance with his best vision. Just one element was missing in “Julia”, or at least it was not explicit. That element is acknowledged in “Beautiful Boy” from 1980’s Double Fantasy album, and makes the vision complete, as we shall see next.
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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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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Joseph Azize Page
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Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART THREE: BEAUTIFUL BOY (DARLING BOY)
I will open this blog with a personal reminiscence: when a certain person was born into the family I felt a love so pure that it attracted to my feeling, and not to just to intellectual recollection, memories of parents, family and close family friends which all held that purity in common. All these associations were available at once, together with the very feeling itself fresh and undimmed, if not in fact brighter. I knew that what I felt and had felt on all those occasions was the one love. That is how I learned that real love (to use the title of another Lennon song) exists in essence, the real I, the soul, and so can never be taken from us, and can never be changed. As Gurdjieff and Mr Adie did, one can even speak of “essence-love” without any unease that one may have betrayed something sacred.
As I wrote last week, “There are not many loves, there are not many lovers. In so far as we love, we participate in the one ineffable all-enfolding mystery.” This week we take that a little further, with one of Lennon’s last songs, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” from Double Fantasy.
With “Julia”, “Because” and “Oh, My Love”, this is one of Lennon’s “Yoko Ono” songs. “Beautiful Boy” opens with the sound of the beach, as Yoko rings a triangle three times, to ward off evil spirits, I believe. The sound effects cleanly cease, and after a split second of silence, the instrumental line descends. The bass guitar sounds a heartbeat, and the melody tumbles down in an oddly staggered phrase, but as it falls, it seems to lightly catch itself, and to briefly ascend before turning back to rest. Many instruments are heard, each seemingly playing something different, yet melding into a seamless backdrop. And this backdrop, with its halting melodic line allows the evenness of Lennon’s singing to emerge all the more clearly:
Close your eyes. Have no fear.
The monster’s gone, he’s on the run,
And your daddy’s here.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.
Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer.
Every day, in every way, it’s getting better and better.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.
Out on the ocean, sailing away,
I can hardly wait to see you come of age,
But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient.
‘Cos it’s a long way to go,
A hard road to hoe,
Yes, it’s a long way to go,
But in the meantime,
Before you cross the street, take my hand.
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
The refrain is repeated, and then the verse beginning “Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer”. After the refrain Lennon sings “Darling, darling, darling, darling Sean”, then we hear Lennon whisper, “Good night, Sean, see you in the morning”, and in a sound collage, featuring whistling, and children playing at the beach, it fades out.
The big thing about this song which is so easy to miss, is that it is a lullaby. The opening and closing words make that clear. But what a lullaby! Here is no ode to sleep, no “golden slumbers fill your eyes”. This a lullaby in which the child, once comforted and reassured by his father’s presence, is primed with thoughts on life, growing up and the virtues of patience – and it works, triumphantly.
“Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” may be the only lullaby ever written which celebrates waking and hardship rather than sleep and rest. A lot of art which passes for “realism” is in fact pessimism or cynicism: but not this song. That life is a “hard road to hoe” is acknowledged, but not indulged or overstated, and is set in its context by a supportive father who, one can sense, has hoed that hard road himself, and come through to say that it was all worthwhile. When one listens to this song, the sense of the affirmation of life with all its trials is tremendous.
It is also, in a way, something of a sea shanty. The sound effects at the opening and the close, the reference to being out on the ocean and sailing away, all combine to produce a mental vision of the sea, and I think this contributes in no small degree to the overall freshness, the sense of beckoning life horizons, and even freedom.
Oddly, as of 2 September 2008, the entry for this song on Wikipedia said that Lennon “passionately describ(es) the love he has for his son and the joy Sean gave him.” This is probably what people expect the song to do, and their expectation may well be based on the subject matter, and the tremendous positive feeling in the song I have described. But it is obvious, once it is pointed out, that although there is love, passion and joy in “Beautiful Boy”, Lennon does not actually describe that passion and joy – he expresses it in a rather sophisticated mix of music. From the Wikipedia entry, one would expect something like Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely”, or Kate Bush’s “Bertie”, where these two extraordinarily talented artists do indeed passionately describe their love and joy. Kate Bush even sings “You give me such joy, then you give me more joy.” As Sophia Wellbeloved, one of the few Gurdjieff scholars to take seriously Gurdjieff’s relation to magic and hypnotism, tells me, magicians set up circumstances where they take advantage of the human propensity to see what we expect to see.
Talented as Stevie Wonder and Kate Bush are, they are not John Lennon the wise wizard: he weaves a spell with love and realism conjoined in a dynamic balance. “Beautiful Boy” is a song for life in the real world, and yet it does not compromise on its idealism one iota. It is emphatically a love song, and a song of passion and joy, although neither those words nor any of their synonyms appear in it.
Interestingly, Lennon said that he had been trying to write a song about his son for a while, and nothing would come, and then suddenly the whole piece came to him. On the John Lennon Anthology, if I remember correctly, Lennon sings an earlier recording of the song, where the only variation is these words:
Before you cross the street, take my hand.
The traffic’s slow but you never know who you’re gonna meet.
And that sounds a lot like life by Central Park in New York City. The combination of slow traffic and unexpected meetings comes together in the most felicitous way: Lennon does not explicitly draw the connection, but leaves it to the listener’s imagination. Hurry excludes the chance encounter. This is a hymn of openness to new experience. The line which replaced the “traffic” one is the justly celebrated “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Again, for interest, I was once with someone who said that he was “interested in folk sayings”, and after praising the saws of the common folk for their wisdom, produced that line. When I mildly mentioned that it was by Lennon, he was quite put out and snapped back, “I think it’s a lot older than John Lennon”. Sagely, he moved the discussion on without pausing for a breath before I could ask him for further and better particulars of his diligent “folk sayings” research, and I was (and still am) much too polite to interrupt. If any of the blog readers do know of an earlier attestation of this saying, please let me know: none of the material I have seen refers to any, although they often have the most abstruse references.
But I mention this because it seems to me that Lennon, and certain other rock and rollers, have not been taken sufficiently serious by the erudite audience. There is a certain snobbery. This character was pleased to present himself as knowledgable in anonymous traditions which he positively feted, but imagine having been impressed by John Lennon … well, Lennon wasn’t even in the work, now, was he?
One of fascinating things about Lennon’s vocal delivery is that Lennon almost entirely overcomes his concerns about his own vulnerability and sensitivity. His voice here is almost naked, but for the echo effect on “ocean” and “patient”. While retaining his softness, as the song progresses, a confidence enters Lennon’s voice: compare his intonation of the key word “prayer” at 0’.58” and at 2’.49”.
Something else is raised by this song which we shall return to in the next blog, when we come to “Grow Old With Me” from Milk and Honey, to my ear, perhaps the greatest song I have ever heard. And that something else is this: Yoko is not mentioned in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” and Sean is not mentioned in “Grow Old With Me”, and yet, neither is really absent from either song.
In the previous blog, I said that just one element was left implicit in “Julia”, which was acknowledged in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, making the vision complete, and that element is God. The reference is small, but it is significant: “Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer”, which he sings twice. I shall expand on this in But the point should be reiterated here, not least because it relates to the reality of relationships.
In a way, our relationships are more real than we are. We have all had the experience of having had problems with people such as parents, siblings, friends and “significant others”. Such problems are natural, even lawful, as we seek to establish our own individuality. But we have also had the experience of feeling that despite any issues we may have, the person is still my father, my sister, my friend, my wife (provided an essence relationship has been established with the spouse, which may be the esoteric significance of marriage and why Jesus raised it to a sacrament). One feels a certain essence tug which is not just self-interest, although that may be mixed in and even predominant in some cases. Something terribly deep inside, something which is part of the real me, is in relation to these people and seeks understanding and concord. This impulse to harmony is not just our own decision, although that may enter into it. This is why the relationships are more real than we are: we get caught up in all sorts of dumps and grudges, but the relationship exerts its essence-influence.
Our relationships are part of a larger network. The pseudo-Ouspensky said: “Light is the basis of all life on earth. … All material forms are threaded through with it, like beads on a string.” In truth, all of our relationships are like beads on a string where the string is the chain of being which begins and ends in God, and God – we know – is light.
This is, perhaps, why all love is one. And it is why any love which purports to exclude God, even if God is conceived as the divine dimension, or a higher power, is only a portion of what it can be. It is why Jesus insisted that love of God comes before and founds love of neighbour.
I am not saying that Lennon has this view: he certainly did not. But I am saying that I think it is the objective reality. My thesis is that as he grew older Lennon was moving towards this objective reality. The divine, which may have been subliminal in “Julia”, is affirmed twice in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” and more so in the sublime “Grow Old With Me”.
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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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART FOUR: GROW OLD WITH ME
John Lennon: Essence and Reality
Part 4: Grow Old With Me
I bought the album Milk and Honey on the day it was released in 1984, having been convinced from Double Fantasy that Lennon had entered the period of his deepest work, and I was not disappointed. Two of the six Lennon songs, “Living on Borrowed Time” and “Grow Old With Me” demonstrated what the title alone had suggested, that Lennon was exploring uncharted horizons: the joys of maturing and finding stability as one grew older. I almost wrote “exploring forbidden territory”, because the rock’n’roll mentality was famously expressed in lines like “hope I die before I get old.” It had always been “sex and drugs and rock and roll”, yet here was Lennon turning his back on that, saying that there were better things in life. I recall that in perhaps his final set of interviews, he said of Neil Young, who had a stated admiration for Sid Vicious, something like: “if he admires him so much, why doesn’t he follow his example?.
Lennon realized that one needs a solid foundation to build high. One gets a tremendous thrill from the pleasures of the fast life, but there is no future in that thrill, and one soon gets sated, always seeking novelty and needing larger doses (Al Stewart addresses some of this very nicely in “Gina in the Kings Road”). But more fundamentally even than that, fast pleasures are actually less satisfying than the joys of maturity. It is something like how one can set up a pavilion on the grass, and start partying at once, or one can invest the time and effort and build a house. Not only will the house outlast the tent, but one can do far more with it, one can divide rooms, shut out noise, keep in heat, add a second floor or excavate a cellar, it possesses greater possibilities. With due allowance for the Bedouin, one could say: “houses for families, tents for transients”.
Of all the rock and rollers, Lennon was the first, so far as I am aware, to positively, directly and consistently address not just growing older, but maturing, establishing a family, learning from one’s mistakes, and acquiring a new attitude to life. He had done the unthinkable in withdrawing from the limelight and from recording in order to focus on his family, and now he had returned, a deeper person, to speak to his own people as no one ever had before. Indeed, he was attempting to do it over his two projected albums. It seems to me that next to this Dylan’s introducing political folk music to a wider arena was not an innovation but an act of trade: repackaging a product so as to sell it in a new market. This honest, candid approach to maturing, expressed in his unmatched songs, is why, to my mind, Lennon was the greatest and most significant rock and roller of all, and no one else even comes close.
Central to this process was Yoko Ono. I do not pretend to understand her, but it was not by intention that the very first Lennon songs I have studied in these blogs are all “Yoko Ono” songs: “Oh, My Love”, “Because”, “Julia” and “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, songs about her or with her special contribution. No, I started there because I think they are the very most significant of his songs. Yet, as we shall see in future blogs, he wrote many songs in his solo career which I would not call “Yoko Ono” songs, and some of these are among his greatest: “Instant Karma”, “Working Class Hero”, “How?”, “Mind Games”, “# 9 Dream”, “Watching the Wheels”, “Living on Borrowed Time”, “Tennessee”, “Gone From This Place”, “Free As A Bird”, and “Real Love”. Yoko’s influence is also shown in the way “Double Fantasy” were recorded, packaged ad titled. Double Fantasy is the name of a flower which impressed Lennon (certainly the name if not the flower), and “Milk and Honey” is said to be a reference to a mixed Asian and Anglo-Celtic couple. Both albums were conceived as Lennon and Ono singing to each other, hence the tracks are alternately written and sung by one and then the other.
As stated before, to one of my taste, his single supreme achievement was “Grow Old With Me””.
Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be
When our time has come, we will be as one.
God bless our love, God bless our love.
Grow old along with me, two branches of one tree.
Face the setting sun when the day is done.
God bless our love, God bless our love.
Spending our lives together, Man and wife together,
World without end, world without end.
Grow old along with me, whatever fate decrees,
We will see it through, for our love is true.
God bless our love, God bless our love.
Clearly, it is a song of love producing unity: note that he does not sentimentally say that “we are one”, but that “when our time has come, we will be as one”. An altogether more realistic thought which does not deny the reality and depth of what they have; rather it is hopeful. Its realism comes from the insight that the goal, oneness, is far higher than easy romanticism would have it. It is, Lennon sings, the given consummation of a process.
As my reference to “giving” might suggest, I see this as also a song of God, a hymn. Not only is God referred to in the refrain, but the variation echoes the marriage ceremony “I now pronounce thee man and wife”. Little wonder that this song is becoming something of a favourite at weddings, a “standard”, so to speak.
More than this, it directly quotes the Catholic prayer, the “Glory Be”: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.” If this reference to the Glory Be is not intended, then what is the purpose of singing “world without end”? The melody, as others have remarked, has a hymnic quality. It is not just a good song for weddings, it is in fact, whether Lennon realized this or not, an anthem for the sacrament of marriage: it stands that highly.
Lennon is not just saying that he hopes that he and Yoko will be together forever, although he is indeed saying that. He is also saying that he knows they can only be together for so long, but that there is something timeless in their relationship. That is why he sings “When our time has come, we will be as one.” Once more, as in “Beautiful Boy”, he is realistic. He knows that they must die.
This is John Lennon, the mystic. He knows that they must die, but he does not know that they must be separated. Rather, he has a strong feeling, one could almost say a ‘faith’ that they are so close as to be a unity, and that they will remain so eternally. Then, to sing about spending their lives together, and then immediately to add “world without end”, is to imply that their love is as it was and as it always shall be, and what is more, it invokes not only God’s blessing as he has earlier done, but what one could call God’s world-view. This is both a love song and a prayer, or, one could say, it is a love song of so extraordinary a quality that it transcends the genre. In the next Lennon blog, I shall consider “God” from the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, and we shall see how far he has come.
Returning to “Grow Old With Me”, the rhythm is steady (there are only a narrow range of rhythms which make for great hymns) and the melody is simple, but uplifting. Unfortunately, the orchestrated version Lennon was planning to release disappeared after his death. But although Yoko had George Martin score another such version for the John Lennon Anthology, I actually prefer the rough home demo which is on Milk and Honey.
As I mentioned in the last blog, Yoko is not mentioned in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, and neither, conversely, is Sean mentioned in “Grow Old With Me”. But listen to them: do you think that either of them is excluded?
A final word for the Gurdjieff-inclined, in respect of what I wrote earlier about thrills, pleasures and joy, because I can express the concept very much more precisely and more meaningfully in terms of Gurdjieff’s psychology. Maurice Nicoll has preserved for us something of Gurdjieff’s full teaching of the parts of the centres. Each of the three main centres (intellectual, emotional and moving) does work of two kinds: positive and negative. One can, then, speak of each centre having two parts (even the emotional centre has a negative part for legitimate emotions of sadness, e.g. bereavement, although not much is said of it). I do not think that this means that each centre has two lobes: after all, each centre is spread through the entire body and atmosphere, while having a discrete centre of gravity. Across that operational division cuts a subdivision into three parts: each centre can be considered as having an intellectual, emotional and moving part. For example, one can say that the positive part of the intellectual centre has three sub-parts, and that also the negative part of that centre has three sub-parts. Each sub-part is, I suspect, in reality, a specialized function.
Now, happiness, the glad state we know best, is in the moving part of each centre. That is, when we feel happy, the moving part of the given centre is active. There is a happiness of each of the three moving sub-parts of the centres, intellectual, emotional and moving. Each has a different taste.
Joy, something different from happiness, a positive emotion related not to moving functions, but to feeling, takes place in one or more of the emotional parts of the centres.
Then, bliss, which is something higher yet again, is in the intellectual sub-part of the centres. These deeper parts of centres, and thus the feelings of joy and bliss, are close to each other, and to the higher centres. They are, in fact, portals to another state, the third state of self-consciousness. Who knows, perhaps they may even open a window onto the fourth state, objective consciousness? One thing I am sure of is that the more one feels joy and moves towards bliss, the more all-embracing, the more religious, one’s feelings become.
John Lennon, to put it in Gurdjieff terms, advanced from happiness to joy. And in “Grow Old With Me”, I hear something which, I at last, would say is more even than joy.
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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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART FIVE: GOD
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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART FIVE : GOD
By its very nature, real love is a road leading in the direction of God. It is, after all, an emanation of God. It is therefore transcendental: it includes the immediate experience, but always exists beyond it, continually ramifying in unexpected directions. I am reminded of what George Adie Jr once said to me about Gurdjieff: “He was an on-going surprise.” The same is true of love, and more so, of God.
Most of what we believe or even vehemently assert to be love and God is, from a Gurdjieff-educated point of view, in fact obsession and infatuation, delusion and fantasy. In a group meeting of December 1941, Gurdjieff quoted a Hindu saying, “Happy is he who loves himself, for he can love me.” The speaker, I think, is speaking as a manifestation of God, or the Absolute. And when he says “Happy is he who loves himself”, the speaker does not refer to those who are merely self-satisfied. The paradox is based on the truth that everything real is – in God – a unity, and thus love is one, although all we may see are only fragments.
But there is nothing wrong in starting from a fragmentary point of view: the problem is identifying with it to the degree where one denies that there is anything else. Lennon’s journey illustrates this, as he started to make sense of the jigsaw pieces of his life and experience. My last Lennon blog considered “Grow Old With Me”, and how God and religious concepts were central to that song. I described it as an “anthem for the sacrament of marriage”, not just a love song, and pointed out that it directly quotes the Catholic prayer, the “Glory Be” – which is not the sort of thing which happens by chance.
And what was Lennon’s concept of God? It had definitely changed over the course of his life. In 1970, on the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, he had a very different view to express. In the striking, and almost dramatically original song “God”, Lennon sang:
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
I’ll say it again.
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
Yeah … pain … yeah.
I don’t believe in magic.
I don’t believe in I-Ching.
I don’t believe in Bible.
I don’t believe in tarot.
I don’t believe in Hitler.
I don’t believe in Jesus.
I don’t believe in Kennedy.
I don’t believe in Buddha.
I don’t believe in mantra.
I don’t believe in Gita.
I don’t believe in yoga.
I don’t believe in kings.
I don’t believe in Elvis.
I don’t believe in Zimmerman.
I don’t believe in Beatles.
I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.
The dream is over.
What can I say?
The dream is over, yesterday.
I was the dream-weaver, but now I’m reborn.
I was the walrus, but now I’m John.
And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.
The dream is over.
As is apparent, the song doesn’t use the standard verse/chorus arrangement. The music follows and completely serves the lyrics, yet it also adds a further dimension to them, and significantly, it removes any cynicism the naked words might have suggested. In the DVD on this album in the Classics Album Series, Klaus Voormann relates that Lennon said to Billy Preston, who played one of the two pianos on this track, “Come on Billy, do a little of your Gospel piano. It’s about God you know.”
One might say that the song is about there not being a God at all. But this is a superficial view: Lennon himself said that it was about God. It took quite a long while before I realised that in the litany of non-belief, Lennon does not actually say “I don’t believe in God.” Compare these statements from the song “Love” on same album: “Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be.” Do those words mean that Lennon believed that only he and Yoko experienced love and that it was a belief that they could “be”, meaning perhaps “be together”, or “be together without interference”?
What he says about God is similar to those lines from “Love”. Lennon might mean either (a) that God is nothing but a concept, or he might have meant (b) that whatever else God may be, God is as a concept. Either reading is open, but I think he intends the second. Remember, these are the lyrics of a song, not words from a train timetable or mechanic’s manual, and so they have to be read poetically.
If God is nothing but a concept by which we measure our pain, what would that mean? That atheists can cope with pain better? Or that belief in God is like the meter at a petrol station: the more you believe in God the more pain you are trying to sweep under the carpet? This simply doesn’t make sense, and Lennon always made sense or non-sense (splendid examples of Lennon’s nonsense can be found in “I Am the Walrus” and “Cry, Baby Cry”).
I am not suggesting that Lennon had an exhaustive and systematic theology, and expressed it here: I think the idea would have horrified him, or made him laugh, or both at the same time. What I am saying is that Lennon’s song raises these questions. I am not, I think, projecting my own concerns and thoughts into it. Lennon opened a perspective, and would have been glad to see that other people peered through the window. Neither do I think he would have placed demands or limitations on where they might pause or what might see.
This was one of the themes of Lennon and Ono’s avant-garde art: they wished to promote engagement between the artist and the audience. The artist presents something borne out of their reflections on life. The audience responds not just be appraising the artist’s work, but by reflecting on their own lives, and perhaps then presenting something else. For Yoko Ono and also for Lennon, who was – at least in this respect – her disciple, the artist is more of a stimulus than a teacher or performer. Art was not a separate plot in the field of life with neat stone dividing-walls. Thus when Lennon first attended one of Ono’s exhibitions, he saw a display where the clientele were invited to hammer in a nail.
He wished to, but was asked to pay five shillings. He then if he could pay an imaginary five shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail. Yoko was impressed: he had grasped the idea of using he imagination in response to her art, and of thus engaging with it.
In an interview, Lennon once said that he had been considering something different for “God”. The idea was to have a “do-it-yourself-I-don’t-believe-in” verse. That is, Lennon would sing “I don’t believe in …”, and then not sing anything else for the next word. It was to be a sort of “karaoke of disbelief”. However, he decided against it. I can see the point: some of Lennon’s inclusions such as “Hitler” and “kings” do seem odd. Surely Lennon did not imagine anyone but a few crack-pots do now believe in Hitler and kings? A blank line would allow the song to become more immediate to the listener.
I suspect that the point is that Hitler and kings, Kennedy and magic, are major elements in culture. They are magnets for all sorts of fears, hopes, beliefs and outlooks. They are social and cultural monuments. One only needs to consider how often advertisers use adjectives like “royal” and “regal”. Lennon could not cover everything, but he could cover his own experience: hence the inclusion of many eastern phenomena such as yoga, Gita and mantra, and his personal idols Elvis and Dylan. If I recall correctly, Lennon said that he sang “Zimmerman” rather than “Dylan” because “Dylan” was “bullshit”. This all seems, perhaps, conceited, and in one of the demo sessions, he prefaces the song by saying “Hear this brothers and sisters”, that he has a message, and that “the angels must have sent me to deliver this to you”.
The genesis of the song is interesting. Dr Arthur Janov, who was treating John and Yoko in 1970 with his “primal therapy”, said in the same DVD, that he and Lennon had been in Bel Air discussing various subjects, when Lennon had asked him: “What about God?” Janov said that he had then gone on at some length about how people with deep pain generally tend to believe in God with fervency. “Oh, you mean God is a concept by which we measure our pain”, said Lennon.
And I think there is a truth in it, although it is not the entire truth. Pain and suffering are major issues for the human race, and for religion. Many people say, not without some reason, that the entirety of religion is a response to these questions. Now, for some people this may true: their religion may be a way of dealing with suffering, or they may emphasize those aspects which help them.
This is understandable. Further, I cannot see that this is necessarily wrong in those situations. But one does not have to stop there. And this is where I think Lennon went wrong. I think that there is an extent to which Lennon was saying that anyone who used their concept of God to deal with their suffering was on the wrong path. The solution, he said, was to deal with reality. Again, very good advice, it is just that I think God is the very heart of all possible realities.
This brings me then, to the last part of this song, where Lennon sings of dreams, reality and life. Speaking of these monuments as a whole, he sings: “The dream is over.” He has awakened. He then strikes an even heavier note: “The dream is over, yesterday.” In other words, we have been too long asleep. Then comes the hope: “I was the dream-weaver, but now I’m reborn. I was the walrus, but now I’m John.” The artist is no longer performing as someone else, as if in a pantomime. He can speak in his own name. “And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.” There is relationship, and there is practical truth. “The dream is over.” And so at that moment, it was.
Depending on how one listens to it, one can find in this song a concept of dreams and reality which raises one to a level of wonder.
So, I think that Lennon is not purporting to damn God: but I think that he is trying to dip our concept of God into acid, or better, to encourage us to do the work ourselves. He does not propose a new concept: I think that is not his purpose at all. In the final analysis, Lennon does not preach about God. If he preaches, it is about concepts and dreams.
Finally, I once knew something who considered this album to be “boring”. Whatever one may make of it, I would suggest that any boredom one experienced listening to this album must be a defence mechanism, to avoid feeling the enormity of it. Once more, we are dealing with pain and suffering. And in the next Lennon blog we shall look at more enormous issues, when we consider “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”.
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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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Joseph Azize Page
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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY PART Part 6: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”
“A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year. Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” So sang John and Yoko on their December 1971 single, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”. They were then running, as the main aspect of their self-conscious lives as “artists in the public eye”, a campaign for peace. War, they said, is over – if you want it. In other words, if all of us desire peace, we will have it. We just put our weapons down. This was the time of the Vietnam War, when expressing such sentiments was something of an act of defiance against “the establishment”, and we now know just with what serious concern the Nixon government viewed John and Yoko’s activities. Lennon’s Christmas song used the occasion to protest against the Vietnam war, to oppose any and all wars, and to call us to think about our personal responsibility for the state of the world. Could it be true that if I really wanted war to be over, I could do something to achieve that? Could it be that if enough of us, all over the world, wanted peace, we could bring that about?
World peace, is in some respects, a dream. But what if enough people defy the accepted wisdom and dream the same dream? The deeper significance of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is that John and Yoko very shrewdly used the assured interest in the season, and the music and radio industries’ need for new Christmas records, to broadcast their pro-peace anti-establishment message to an audience which might otherwise never have heard it. For that to succeed it had to sound like a Christmas song: and it does. It is something of an anthem for peace, but it is also simultaneously and sincerely a seasonal expression of good wishes.
The single achieves a great aural impact. It opens with whispers: Yoko first with “Happy Christmas, Kyoko”, and then John with “Happy Christmas, Julian”, addressing their children by their previous marriages. Quickly, it soars into what are arguably excessive lashings of elaborately arranged sound, until it closes with explosive cries of “Merry Christmas, everybody”. Phil Spector produced it in his idiomatic style: at times it sounds as if the massed choir is right in your middle ear, singing the chorus “War is over, if you want it”. The last part of the song features a splendid counterpoint: Lennon sings the verses against the vast backdrop of that refrain, sounding crystal clear. The choir, incidentally, was the Harlem Community choir from New York, and they packed a punch. Sometimes, I think, too much of a punch. The chief reason I can only rarely hear this single without losing my appreciation of it is its over-the-top Phil-ification, and not Yoko Ono’s voice, which I know some people cannot accept.
But it is not enough just to wish for a merry Christmas. There is something here which goes beyond anything which Lennon ever explored. Lennon used Christmas for his own purposes, and that in itself is hardly wrong. However, if instead of using Christmas, we learn from it, the situation is different.
If we enter deeply into the spirit of Christmas, we will at some point embrace suffering; we will accept to close our lips on thorns, because we have to evaluate ourselves in the light of the most exacting demands possible. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” taught Jesus. None of us do, few of us try even once in our lives. The feast is glorious only because it celebrates the coming of Jesus the Messiah. To enter the spirit of the feast is to consciously struggle to live up to his teaching.
I have read interpretations of the season by philosophers, theologians, atheists, agnostics, New Age gurus, and journalists. I have seen many festive films and programs. They strive to make an impact, but most of them strike me as more or less sentimental. As I recall, only the efforts of Annie-Lou Staveley and G.K. Chesterton ever touched me deeply and lastingly. In my opinion, the great multitude fail because they lack sufficient sense of reality: they romanticize, present easy platitudes, and conjure cozy visions of a baby in swaddling clothes. But the birth of that baby only has any significance because he was, as the Orthodox say, the theanthropos, the God-Man, and because of what he did and taught as an adult.
So what is it about loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us which makes it so difficult for us to make an honest effort to do so? It is urged far more than often that it is implemented. It is preached far more often than it is even meditated upon. As George Adie would say, let’s not waste time saying that it’s difficult, because it is, in fact, very nearly impossible. It does not mean loving or praying for those whom we merely dislike. It does not even mean fair being to those who are unfair to us. It requires freeing ourselves, if only briefly, from the negative emotions to which we are so attached (I might say addicted), and rousing something almost divine in ourselves for the sake of an enemy, which is not just someone who doesn’t like us, but someone who is actively trying to harm us. Most of us have or have had enemies of some degree: bullies at school, people who exploit or thieve from us, people who run campaigns against us at our work, and some few of us have enemies who want to trash our reputation, financially ruin us, or even physically harm or kill us. And then, once we admit to the deeply troubling fact that we may in fact have an enemy, we come to the massive question: can we love them? Whatever “love” may be, it is immense. A feeling of love cannot be a small or a slight emotion. It must be something which humbles us when we feel it.
My point is that unless we start to approach this question, we are not seriously approaching Christmas in anything like its full significance, and that means we are missing the potential experience and even illumination which it offers us. John Lennon’s season was a Xmas, a feast where the Christ is a cultural memory, a syllable in a secular word. Yet, better than many soi-disant Christians, Lennon understood that there is a question for us: “And so this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, a new one just begun.” Lennon then went on to express the usual sort of Chrissy cheer “I hope you have fun, the near and the dear ones, the old and the young.” But he also had a more poignant message: “And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong, for rich and for poor ones, the world is so wrong.”
Lennon had wanted, he said, to write a Christmas standard, and it as it happens, he seems to have succeeded. It was a top ten hit in 1971 and, I think in 1972 in England. In 1980, after his death, it was number 1 in England, and has been covered many times. The song is still played each year, and may even be more widely known now than it was in Lennon’s lifetime. While I find the melody of the verses is particularly apt, for me, the song approaches greatness but somehow falls short. I think that if it is becoming a standard, it is more because of the comparative mediocrity of other Christmas songs. I am not speaking of Christmas carols here: they exist within a definitely Christian context, so their relation to the exigencies of the Christian teaching is always apparent. They express the wonder and joy of Christmas, but they point to Jesus, and hence indirectly to his teaching. Even then, there are those like the Coventry Carol which fully express the antipathy of the world, with its raging Herods seeking to destroy the hope.
But that is a carol. How can one sing about Christmas to a secular world, from a secular standpoint? To my taste, many have tried, but failed, because the associations of Christmas with peace and hope are too strong. Unless these positive qualities are given their due weight, which is quite difficult in a secular approach, the result is liable to be cynical. Everyone who sings about Christmas has to consider how to address its intrinsic nature as a Christian festival. Some writers ignore this, which is never convincing, as it only trivializes what we still instinctively sense is a tremendous religious celebration of spiritual light. Others, like Jethro Tull, bemoan the cheapening of Christmas, but end up sounding unbearably preachy.
When he was with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Greg Lake came close, perhaps, to some balance in “I Believe in Father Christmas”. Lake has a powerful voice, and he produced some magnificent melodies. The song is marked by trenchant attacks on hypocrisy, and its punch line “the Christmas you get, you deserve”. It also features some magical lines: “And I believe in Father Christmas, I look to the sky with excited eyes … that Christmas-tree smell, and eyes full of tinsel and fire.” But overall, its tenor becomes just a little too self-important, too much of a finger-pointing exercise, to succeed as a Christmas song. Unless the secular critique acknowledges the sublimity of Christmas, and includes the singer in its critique, it is perhaps likely to fail.
The fact is that we still feel something innocent, peaceful, silent and charitable in ourselves at Christmas. A friend of mine once said of St John’s Gospel that when you read it, you feel as a reality that love can never be defeated, that it will rule the universe, and that in some mysterious way, it always has. I think that something similar is true of Christmas, but Christmas is not a story you have to read. The wise ones in the church of the fourth century, who used the astonishingly powerful writing of Matthew and Luke to create Christmas, wrote a book which rewrites itself each year in deeds and in thought.
Lennon’s song duly acknowledges the celebration and also the critical ideas and moods that Christmas arouses today. It is much subtler than Lake’s piece. To start with, Lennon includes himself in his critique. He asks “what have we done”? He wishes his audience well, and he includes everyone in his sentiments: old and young, weak and strong, the poor and the rich. Note that the wealthy and powerful are not excluded. To my mind, Dylan’s “Masters of War” blunts its own point by wishing the speedy death of the corporate criminals he rightly excoriates. No, Lennon makes his point not by excluding anyone but by stressing that the disadvantaged must be included, and putting some unobtrusive but noticeable feeling into the line: “the world is so wrong”. According to Jesus’ teaching, we must love even the masters of war.
On my reading, then, the greatness of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is that it is true to the spirit of Christmas, an even more remarkable achievement because it is not written from inside Christianity. It presents both the positive aspects of Christmas and the challenge. True, Lennon’s invitation to peace is not so powerful as Jesus’ instruction to love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute us, but it is in that direction. The over-kill in Lennon’s presentation is in the sound, not the song as written. And Lennon’s question still remains: what have we done for peace? Surely, in some small way, in some situation close to us, we can at least attempt something to bring some people together, to leave some little more understanding than there had been.
Which brings me to my last point, one I shall return to with Lennon. In a way, Lennon’s protest is not against Christianity but the failure of Christians to live up to Christianity. As with so many other critics, he is, on a deeper analysis, not against Christianity but against a lack of it, meaning here by “Christianity” the putting into practice of its teachings.
This leaves us with some interesting perspectives, and of course, it suggests an approach which might fruitfully use to explore the Lennon classic “Imagine”. But before we do, there are some songs from Lennon’s Beatles years which will help us see better how Lennon made the journey to “Imagine”. So in the next Lennon blog we will consider “There’s A Place” from the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, and “Girl” from Rubber Soul.
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 third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.
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