THE CYNICAL IDEALIST: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon

JOSEPH AZIZE BOOK REVIEWS

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Book Review:
: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon, by Gary Tillery (Quest Books, 2009, 6” x 9”, 169 pp. plus chronology, notes, bibliography and index.)

The cover photograph of a wintry Lennon, with the Statue of Liberty ghostly in the background, is appropriate and eloquent for this excellent book. Its subject, John Lennon (1940-1980), was one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, and, beyond any sensible argument, one of the most profound songwriters ever known to us. Its author, Gary Tillery, is intelligent, well-informed, sympathetic, and writes very well indeed. I could have greedily finished it in one day, had I had the leisure.

The contents are methodically laid out in four parts: the first three mix biography and philosophy in a readable blend, while the fourth part weaves all the philosophical strands together. This way, we’re introduced to the concepts in a narrative setting before they’re briefly reprised in a more abstract manner. So, although the last section is more recondite, the ideas are familiar. The effect of Part 4, then, is not of density but of convergence.

Reading it, I entered into Lennon’s world. I couldn’t help but engage with the issues Lennon engaged with: life in society, life as a child and as a parent, wanting and giving love, our responsibility to use our influence and power constructively (we all have these, to various degrees extents), religion, politics and art. It’s a book to make and to help you think, thanks in no small part to the quotations from Lennon.

Tillery’s thesis is plausible: Lennon correctly saw himself as a philosopher (as well as a rock’n’roller, a writer and an “artist”). His philosophy was more a developed outlook, based on his experience, than it was an academic philosophy drawn from reading and University discipline. It was not expressed in treatises, but in music, a few short books, some sketches, and perhaps most importantly, his life. Yet, as Tillery notes, Lennon did some serious reading, especially in English nonsense, literature and poetry (and, we should note, history). So far as I know, he didn’t read philosophers like Plato, Aristotle or those in the Western tradition subsequent to Descartes.

Lennon never sat down to work out a consistent system, the way a modern academic like, say, D.M. Armstrong does. Nor did he develop his philosophy by reference to classic problems such as materialism, or the problem of universals. The issues he dealt with were delivered to him as he rose from the lower middle class to the privileged caste of super-wealthy celebrities and tried to make sense of his multiple worlds. Having said that, Tillery finds five principles in Lennon’s philosophy:

(1) it was fundamentally humanistic and secular (p.50),
(2) with a faith in individuals to find their own best natures,
(3) through their love to combine,
(4) through their power to change the world, and
(5) through their altruistic aim to give life meaning (p.101).

That is Lennon’s philosophy in a nutshell, and along the way we have a fascinating account of his life and intellectual development. I could have started with the three principles on pp. 7-8, but they come to the same thing. The account is necessarily brief, but Tillery has a spaniel’s scent for the essential, and the very conciseness of the biography brings out some critical features in sharp relief. Lennon realised he was responsible for his actions, in fact responsible for his influence, and struggled to becomingly discharge that responsibility. Tillery is not the first to grasp this, but his understanding of it is extremely clear and well put (“we owe it to ourselves …”, p. 7; and “Lennon came to see it … as their responsibility to make a positive contribution”, p. 56, see also pp.100-101).

I am most impressed by Tillery’s ardent desire and ability to sum up large issues in pithy statements, e.g. in speaking of how Lennon came to rock’n’roll, Tillery says “he was groping to define himself” (p.23). At p.80, in respect of the Maharishi and Janov, he summarises Lennon’s conclusions by saying: “Leaders were substitute fathers” (p.80). At p.130, he observes that Lennon learnt, from his “lost weekend”, that “… freedom without a foundation is an abyss”. These lapidary phrases don’t come about by accident: a writer has to work to coin them. It is so much easier to just throw words at your subject. Tillery can be justly proud of his achievement, especially in this respect. It is one of the engagingly Lennonesque features of his style. It’s almost a book to hold a conversation with, and the comments below can be taken as my side of the discussion.

Tillery coins a Lennonesque phrase, “cynical idealist”, to describe Lennon (see the explanation at pp.71-4). Personally, I would have said “street-wise” or perhaps “hard-nosed”, and described Lennon as a “songwriter-philosopher”. There is something harsh or dismissive implied in the word “cynical”, and, for me, importing that nuance is rather a high price to pay for the pleasure of the paradox.

Overall, I would be inclined to see Lennon as “sceptical” rather than “cynical”. Yet neither word is really correct, because, whether sceptical or cynical, he was also, by turns, trusting, extraordinarily optimistic, and even gullible (as with some of his advisers). Steven Stark quotes an unnamed critic as saying that of all the celebrities interviewed in a series of t.v. shows in 1969, only Lennon had “a gospel, a hope and a belief” (Meet the Beatles, p.272).

He was all of those things on a cinemascope scale, and as Maharishi experienced, the turn from suggestibility to hostility could come very quickly. In that instance, Lennon had surely been seeking a father figure whom he could trust (p.80), and when Maharishi disappointed him, he lashed out. Is this cynicism, scepticism or something else? Henriette Lannes once said that no one can be adequately described by reference to one characteristic. Such as we are, we’re too divided, too psychologically diverse for that. Shortly before he was murdered, Lennon said that he knew that he wasn’t always positive, but that when he was, he tried to project it (p.155). Lennon’s insight and frankness is touching, and because he saw his fluctuations, it meant that he had the possibility of becoming more consistent.

So although the title is witty, I would quibble with it. Even the sub-title: “A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon”, raises an issue: while Tillery does deal very well indeed with Lennon’s attitude to religion, his use of meditation, and his approach to the book Mind Games, the emphasis in this book is on philosophy rather than spirituality. That is, the primary thrust of the book is with Lennon’s ethical and political philosophy. Spirituality is really the secondary stream here, as the five points of Lennon’s philosophy show.

While Tillery’s approach to Lennon is not at all like mine, neither is it inconsistent. I think that, by comparison, I probably pay more attention to what I hear in the music. The difference in methods is, I often found, stimulating. Tillery looks at what Lennon said in his songs and elsewhere, and deduces a philosophy from that. I am oversimplifying a little bit, because Tillery is quite aware of the need to consider Lennon’s life as an expression of his philosophy: he even quotes Lennon as saying: “Our life is our art” (p.100), referring to Yoko and himself, but also, perhaps, to every human being. To me, this is critical. As Gurdjieff showed, one cannot really divorce a person’s philosophy from their life. They are two related aspects of the one larger reality: their being. I shall return to this below.

Tillery nicely brings out how Lennon was concerned to be able to reach people, all people, and not just a large audience. Lennon did not see himself as over and above the working people he had come from. He never lost his sympathy. I recall an anecdote from the Beatles years, where he was being driven in London, and they’d stopped at traffic lights. Some girls who noticed him perversely scratched the paintwork of the car (I think it was the Rolls). The driver got angry, but Lennon calmly said: “It’s alright, they paid for it”. That is impartiality. Lennon was also his own most perceptive critic. I hope to get to this in the forthcoming blog on “Memory” and “Living on Borrowed Time”.

Lennon was an extraordinary mix, and this book is so interesting partly because Tillery communicates his own broad interest in Lennon’s life and work. This sympathetic interest provides many incidental reading pleasures. For example, I appreciate the story of how Lennon told the students of a university, who were protesting the University’s refusal to turn a vacant lot into a “People’s Park”, that there was no park “worth getting shot for”. Although they had sought his opinion, they rejected it, and in the event, one hundred were injured, one fatally and one blinded. Lennon’s response was equally incisive: the students had been used by an administration which had provoked them into protesting so that it could come down hard on them (p.103)

Not only was Lennon an “extraordinary mix”, he also had something of the English eccentric about him, a type Tillery may not have mixed with, but which is far more benign than the American version which becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories and the Federal Government. This English eccentricity showed partly in Lennon’s faddishness, his love of the exotic (I think this partly explains his fascination with Maharishi), and in his puzzling willingness to entertain weirdos and weird ideas.

One of these was fads, and a weird one, too, was the book Mind Games. I did read it a few years ago, but I can’t say I found anything deep or even interesting in it. Despite Lennon’s quondam enthusiasm for it, I am unpersuaded that it had any lasting effect on him. I thought it might shed light on the powerful song, but it didn’t. The imagery of “Mind Games” the song is not at all drawn from the book, from what I could see. I suspect that Lennon projected into the pretentious volume things which weren’t there, and then lauded what he saw in his fertile brain. So, although Lennon once said that it ranked with Yoko’s Grapefruit and another book, perhaps Janov’s, he seems to have moved beyond it by the time he wrote the song of the same name ( see pp.144-8). The excellent Lennonism which I quote below from p.148 did not need Mind Games, it is a well-known idea which he could have deduced for himself, and would have heard from Maharishi and, especially, from Yoko Ono. As pellucidly expressed by Mr Lennon, it reads:

If you speak, what you say doesn’t end here. … vibrations go on and on infinitely, and therefore every action goes on and on infinitely and has its effect. If you think carefully about the effect you’re going to create, there’s more chance for all of us. It’s hard to think of your every move. But your attitudes to life will have an effect on everyone – and thereby, the universe.

This, of course, dovetails with Lennon’s philosophy as expressed in “Instant Karma”, “You Are Here”, and “Imagine”, to name but some.

At this point, I should mention a matter which can be corrected in future editions: Tillery often cites Lennon interviews, but rarely dates them. For example, the above quotation is referenced, and so I can check the date if I can find the book he drew it from. But the deeper point is that Tillery does not seem to think that the interview dates are important. As a historian of some feeble description, I think that they are: when did key themes emerge, and how did Lennon’s philosophy develop? What twists and turns did it take? It isn’t so easy to conceive things in a sound historical perspective and to soberly evaluate one’s sources. But Tillery is not an amateur writer, he has all the intellectual tools, and wrote the first three chapters in chronological order. As stated, I hope that this book sees a second edition where Tillery can revise the book upwards, so to speak.

Another example of Tillery’s sometimes ahistorical approach to Lennon, is his reference to fasting, prayer and meditation, without noticing (or so it seems to me), that Lennon’s fondness for them was sporadic (p.70). I am unaware of any evidence that Lennon fasted in his Dakota years, although he did to some degree follow a macrobiotic diet (and yet, he also smoked and drank coffee). The question of meditation and prayer is trickier. Lennon referred to meditation in Skywriting by Word of Mouth, but I know of no evidence that he did more than endorse meditation at that time (pp.69-70), or that he ever meditated consistently, except when he was in India. And if he did meditate in the 1970s, how did he do so? Did he use a method, no method, or a mixture? Did he continue to use TM?

As for prayer, Lennon redefined it in pantheist, almost occult terms (as David Katz uses that word in The Occult Tradition). Also, as I mentioned in the “Beautiful Boy” blog, prayer is an important concept in that song, and impromptu prayers turn up, for example, in “Grow Old With Me”. But Tillery refers to prayer in the context of Jesus, Buddha and Milarepa and “time-tested methods of inspiration”. I do not think that that sort of prayer was significant to the mature Lennon, much as I might like to think it was. Indeed, as Tillery notes at pp.4 and 11, Lennon had tried prayer as Jesus recommended, and nothing productive came of it. (As Gurdjieff said, Jesus was speaking to his apostles, people who had been prepared. The effectiveness of prayer depends upon who is praying and how, and the attitudes of certain people upstairs.)

I don’t wish to make too much of this, it’s maybe a good fault to have, but a conscientious reviewer should mention it: Tillery seems to me sometimes to be too positive about Lennon, almost excusing his faults. Thus he downplays the self-indulgence of Lennon’s impertinent letter to the Queen returning his MBE because among matters “Cold Turkey” was slipping down the charts (p.106). I cannot credit, when the short letter is read as a whole, that Lennon was really trying to “lighten” its tone. The tone of that letter was all of a piece. Further, however Lennon may have rationalised the full frontal on Two Virgins, it carried eccentricity to a point which was bizarre, despite Tillery’s best defence advocacy (p.94). Lennon’s modesty before Mintz establishes nothing: he may have changed, he may have been shy in person, or had some personal reason for being apologetic before his friend – anything. Again, it is ahistorical to take incidents separated by the years and say that that was Lennon, as if he were a monolith. And one cannot seriously say of Lennon, by any criterion, that “perhaps he was a Buddha we can all relate to …” (p.137). Yet to be fair, Tillery does mention Lennon’s notorious violence to women (p.115).

As I said above, I don’t wish to make too much of this, because it is only a minor aspect of the book. But precisely because of the extraordinarily high opinion I have of Lennon, I feel that we must be careful not to lost perspective and slide into idolatry and identification.

The true point of my study of Lennon is that sometimes, perhaps very often, it is easier to see reality in the lives of other people than it is to see it in our own. Because of the depth of his insight, and his candid expression of what he learned at each step, Lennon’s life is the richest field I have come across of any figure in the second half of the 20th century. One of the things we see clearly in Lennon’s life is that simply wanting to love is not enough: we cannot love on demand. Something else must come first before the commandment to love can be reliably fulfilled. Just before his death, Lennon himself said:

The hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one. (p. 124, and that interview is dated!)

Earlier in the book, Tillery sums up this attitude, saying how Lennon came to realise that we have to act both “individually and in concert”, but that the “first key … is self-transformation. When considering how to improve the world, people almost always focus their attention outside themselves, which too often leads to resistance, confrontation, frustration and defeat. Actually, the only thing over which we have control is our own attitudes and behaviour” (p. 7).

This is true, at least as I see it. I mean both that Lennon’s insight is true, and that Tillery has correctly formulated Lennon’s view. So Lennon saw that we must begin with self-transformation, and he made some sterling efforts in this direction. It is an art which is expressed in and over a lifetime. But how can this insight be made practical? Tillery suggests meditation, prayer and fasting. Apart from the question of whether Lennon did use these methodically and consistently, it would be even fuller and more practical to say as Gurdjieff did, that if this is our aim, then our being must change before we can achieve that aim (what Gurdjieff calls “doing”).

To change our being, we need to transform negative emotion (a major part of the second conscious shock). That transformation begins not with a direct attack upon hatred, or a direct incitement to love, but with self-consciousness, with the first conscious shock, which comprises: “Efforts to remember oneself, observation of oneself at the moment of receiving an impression, observation of one’s impression at the moment of receiving them, registering, so to speak, the reception of impressions and the simultaneous defining of the impressions received …” (In Search of the Miraculous, p.188). And Lennon had one of those rare glimpses of the reality of self-remembering: I referred to this in the first Lennon blog.

That Lennon did not come up with a practical system like Gurdjieff’s is not a criticism. That he had so many elements of reality in his philosophy is stupendous. Lennon’s insights were astounding. But we cannot without violence separate a person’s philosophy and their behaviour: both express their being. Some of these issues are difficult, and I don’t raise this to condemn Lennon, but I feel that his apparent cruelty to Cynthia and Julian should not be swept under the carpet. It seems to me that Lennon’s cool and aloof paining of Cynthia is typical of someone who knows that he has acted unconscionably, and, incapable of making amends, transfers the blame to the other. No one behaves so maliciously as someone with a guilty conscience.

What Lennon knew and even what he felt, he could not always put into practice. This is one of the morals of Lennon’s life, rather like the lessons of Aesop’s fables.

Along the same lines, Lennon was almost fanatically competitive, especially with Paul McCartney first, and Bob Dylan second. Tillery’s comments at pp.32, 57 and 155 seem to me to be much understated. I think that it’s in MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, where Lennon’s sabotage of McCartney’s music on what became the Let It Be album is documented. If I remember correctly, MacDonald called it an “act of bastardry”. The first time I read it, I didn’t want to believe it. After all, the motive was clear enough. I think few would dispute that Paul’s songs on that record (especially the title track, “Long and Winding Road” and “Two Of Us”) far outshone John’s. No, I think that if one is going to give an overview of Lennon’s life by way of background to his spirituality, his treatment of his first family, his insecurity and egotism, should probably be acknowledged.

Another possible example of being overkind to Lennon is the way that Tillery mentions philosophers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein. Is that praise by association? I am not quite sure. Tillery doesn’t mention Nietzsche, so far as I recall or as the index discloses. But if any philosopher should be mentioned in the company of Lennon, I think that it’s Nietzsche. Of course, he was not so respectable a philosopher as Kant, but then neither was Lennon. Even if it is right to mention Hegel and so on, yet I feel that Tillery pays disproportionate attention to those academic philosophers, as compared with others of an artistic variety like G.B. Shaw, Tennessee Williams (whose work Lennon idolised, see my “Tennessee” blog) and, of course, Bob Dylan.

A few books are missing from the bibliography. Goldman’s book is dirty, but it should be read, even if only to critique it, which, incidentally, I would like to do, but I lack the time. If you are a John Lennon fan, and know Yoko One, persuade her to pay me a stupendous amount of money to write a critique of it: she will be so satisfied she’ll wish she’d paid me more (and I won’t knock it back). Similarly, Dakota Days by John Green should be considered (from fallible memory, Green was one of Goldman’s sources, but he is not responsible for that). Green may have exaggerated certain matters, but I am by no means convinced everything he wrote was inaccurate. His diagnosis that Lennon had a sort of writer’s block during most of the Dakota period may be at least partly correct (see p.130). Once more, I don’t think he should be ignored.

Cynthia Lennon’s book John, is much fuller than A Twist of Lennon, which Tillery does use, and was, I would have thought, available in time for Tillery’s research. It presents a decidedly less flattering picture of Lennon, but my sense is that she has been scrupulously honest. Julian Lennon made some important points in the foreword to his mother’s book. I did not notice them here.

When books present negative images of Lennon one can try and maintain a dignified silence, lest they be given undue credibility by paying attention to them. Or one can answer them, squarely and analytically. I think that given Lennon’s fame, and the nature of the world, the first option is, finally, counter-productive. People will be coming back to Goldman (and even that weird book by someone who’d interviewed him once, and whose name I thankfully forget). If their views of Lennon are not answered, later critics will take this as a sign of their unassailable veracity. Sometimes silence can encourage, or at least facilitate, shouting.

But then, May Pang is positive about Lennon and the “lost weekend”, and I don’t recall that she’s even mentioned in this book. I find that odd, because she was an important figure in Lennon’s life. As I recall, she says that the LA period “wasn’t so lost”, and I found her memoirs intelligent and sensitive. Of course there was a personality clash (if that word is not too weak) with Yoko.

Another book which was missing, is Steven Stark’s Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender and the World, published in 2006. It could have added another dimension to Tillery’s treatment, because it shows, to an extent I had never appreciated, how the Beatles’ popularity was related to their fresh approach to youth and gender, an approach which Lennon developed as he grew older. Which reminds me that the role of the female in Lennon’s spirituality, as opposed to his politics, seems to me to be missing from Cynical Idealist. Stark could also have helped Tillery to an increased appreciation of the importance of the Lennon/McCartney rivalry.

By the way, Quest Books please take note: I performed a spot check of the index, and found an error one of the 30 tests: where the index has p. 172 for the film Hard Day’s Night, it should be 170. That error was the only one I found, but the index should be revised if you go to a second, revised edition.

And I hope you do, because this book, deep and thought-provoking as it is, was a damned good read (to use a phrase Americans gave to the world).

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.

“Maronites” is pp.279-282 of “The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia” published by Cambridge University Press and edited by James Jupp.

John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 15: “Mother”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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John Lennnon c 1948

Part 15: “Mother”

Mother. “Mother” is the most harrowing song Lennon ever recorded, and
is the most harrowing piece of rock’n’roll I have heard or could
imagine being put down. There is even something confronting about its
stark title: it isn’t “Mother, You Had Me”, or “Goodbye, Mother” or
“My Mother”. It’s just plain “Mother”. It bears a mute challenge: what
does “mother” mean to you? The word utters a primal reality. Four
other songs on 1970’s classic John Lennon-Plastic Ono Band album also
had one word titles fired point-blank: “Isolation”, “Remember”, “Love”
and “God”. With nothing but single words, Lennon evokes divinity, a
parent, a terrifying state of existence, a poignant faculty of the
psyche, and the most powerful feeling-impulse we know. This is a
record of essential experiences. All artifice, all glossy surfaces,
are sanded back, and the heart, the raw matter of life is presented
through the vehicle of an art so perfectly mastered as to appear
artless. On this album, Lennon means and does business. Yet, it is
also the moment of his greatest apparent hypocrisy, his most signal
failure to live up to his own standards.

Mother. Our relationships with our parents are always in flux, even
after they have died. Nothing seems to remain static for very long:
not how we feel towards them, not what we think of them, not our
dominant memories, and not our overall assessments of them. And it
must be so, because our relationship with our parents is essential,
and as long we change, so will that relationship. This is neither good
nor bad; it is simply a fact. Good and bad become meaningful only when
we have an aim, and so a set of principles. If we are aiming for
conscious growth, then we must aim to become more loving, and this
will mean – at an absolutely fundamental level – to love our parents,
whatever issues we may have had. Until we can find love there, in that
relationship, we can only know passion and obsession mixed with
appreciation and esteem in varying degrees (and passion, I think, is
what passes for love with us).

When we speak about Lennon’s life a little further below, his mother
Julia and his father Fred, I shall mention the distortion which seems
to inevitably affect our memories of our parents. But just to briefly
make the point here, one cannot love while we are subject to these
distortions, irrespective of whether they are “favourable” or
“unfavourable” distortions. Love is impartial, or more accurately, it
includes impartiality, as George Adie said.

Of course, we cannot love anyone, not even mothers, on demand, and
anyone who thinks so doesn’t know. But we can do something in that
direction, and the need to do so becomes more urgent each day we have
not reached that state, because the longer it’s left, the harder it
gets. What we can do is prepare the soil for love by forming attitudes
which might foster or welcome love, by cultivating understanding, and
by striving to make negative emotions passive. Perhaps most
importantly of all, we can strive to acquire being, and with that,
individual will. As Gurdjieff is reported to have said: “Sometimes ‘it
loves’ and sometimes ‘it does not love’. … In order to be a good
Christian (and so to love) one must be. To be means to be master of
oneself. If a man is not his own master he has nothing and can have
nothing.” (In Search of the Miraculous, 102)

Being stands above emotion, and individual will is not just a power of
decision-making, but a manifestation of the real self which is based
on and understands my own unique makeup (so this will is not
experienced as tyrannical or even as an imposition, but more as a
return to home, to where I should be). Making effort, any effort for
being and individual will, allows more emotional control, so that we
can play a conscious role in forming the attitudes we want and need.
There are no guarantees, but we can make honest attempts. The road is
one of self-education, or self-agriculture. We know that if we want
anything to grow in a particular field we need to prepare the earth by
working it, adding substances to it, and removing impediments. And so
it is with loving our parents.

At some point in life, everyone will have issues in their
relationships with their parents, or so I see it. I am not speaking
about resentments, but about issues: ongoing attempts to reconcile
difference of opinion on important matters. I do not believe that it
is possible not to have some sort of serious issue, provided only that
you know your parents long enough and are sufficiently honest with
yourself. The more anyone argues otherwise, the more they convince me
that they’re in denial. So it is not just you, and it isn’t just me:
we’re all in the same position.

One can, of course, form theories about this: for example, that in
growing up in a world different from that which our parents knew they
must inevitably, to some extent, misunderstand us. Or one can theorise
and say that in acquiring our own individuality there must be a
reaction against our parents’ individualities. That is, there is an
inevitable tension between the infant’s natural impulse to imitate the
parents and the adolescent’s urge to become independent individual. We
could say that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and
there’s a lot of truth in all that. However my assertion is not based
on either theory: it’s just an observation. But the observation is
good enough for me. It is based partly on introspective observation,
and also, wherever I’ve been close enough to someone to tell, there
have been issues.

I am not speaking about dislike. I am not saying that we are bound to
dislike let alone hate our parents. On the contrary, I think that what
is real in the relationship is the love. An essence relationship is
always and can only be one of love. My position is that the
differences and issues arise in personality, and can be handled
without rancour. It is an indictment of us that they too infrequently
are. One does sometimes see cases where beneath even the disagreements
and misunderstandings there is a current of certainty in love. True
affection is not given on condition or subject to recall.

The issues are more or less serious, and are more or less harmonised
or aggravated by the passing years, but they’re always there. To take
an example which struck me quite forcibly, one of my friends had the
not a-typical match of the “perfect mother” and the “perfectly awful
father”. In this case, I always found the beauty more puzzling than
the straight-forward beast. One day, when he was already in his 40s
and his mother had been dead for several months, my friend suddenly
said to me, in what was a mildly depressed explosion, that his mother
had silently consented to his father’s rages. She had effectively
collaborated with him. As stated, I think everyone has issues with
their parents.

More importantly for this article, John Lennon thought so too. When he
performed “Mother” at Madison Square Garden, he introduced it like
this: “… a lot of people thought it was just about my parents, but
it’s about 99% of the parents, alive or half-dead.” I only wonder why
he made an exception for one per cent. Was it just optimism? Yet, the
song itself is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Lyrically, it is
almost clinical in its concise, naked statements of fact:

Mother!
You had me,
But I never had you.
I wanted you.
You didn’t want me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Father!
You left me.
I never left you.
I needed you so bad.
You didn’t need me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Children!
Don’t do what I have done.
I couldn’t walk,
And I tried to run.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Mamma don’t go!
Daddy come home!
Mamma don’t go! Daddy come home!

I have allowed a separate line for each line of the song as it’s sung.
The lyric sheet doesn’t do justice to the measured barrage of short
addresses. The entire sound of the piece is funereal. It sounded like
that to me the first time I heard it, and it has never sounded any
other way. But the lyrics, when I set out then like this, read to me
like an indictment. Except for the emotion in Lennon’s verse, one
could imagine a clerk of the court reading them, methodically
ploughing on (so too, in “God”, the list of people and things Lennon
does not believe in sounds like a list of convicts read in a
Dickensian criminal court). And who does it indict? Lennon’s parents,
of course, but equally, also himself. Lennon does not preach at his
family from some easily assumed superiority. Even his singing of the
opening word of each verse – Mother! Father! Children! – sounds more
like a calling from island to island.

Another feature of the song is its extreme economy with words. Even
when Lennon sings: “I just got to tell you, goodbye”, he’s being
minimalist. He means that he has to say it, and that’s all there is to
say. He’s driven to impose finality. Even the word “just”, which I
recall Lennon and McCartney once said was a “filler”, to be avoided
where possible, is exactly the right word for the poetry.

Yet, there is no finality. After the prose of the verses bidding
farewell to mother, father and children, Lennon yells: “Don’t go! Come
back!” Which is it, goodbye or come back? It’s both. His mind and his
heart sing that he has to take his leave, and move on. But his
feelings scream that he wants more  of them, not less. The song is
made by this tension between the two poles of departure and return,
burying and retrieving the past. The tension cannot be maintained in
life, but only in the song.

The third verse is the key to the whole piece: he accepts that he is a
failure as a parent, and can do nothing more constructive than to warn
his “children” (although he only had Julian, at that point) not to
follow his example. The children are not part of the banshee grief.
Yet, we feel that this verse is related to the rest of the song. There
is a hope that the children may succeed where Lennon and his parents
have not. Lennon tells the children to learn from the pitiful examples
before them, and to this end, he’s prepared to let us see that he had
never recovered from his painful childhood. Was Lennon perhaps saying
that he tried to run too soon because he was running after his
parents? Maybe. Parents spend a bit of time encouraging their children
to take a few steps towards them, and anyone who has ever done this
knows how deep and purely joyous are the feelings evoked in both the
adult and the toddler by this simple play. No parent would dream of
coercing the child to run towards them, and yet, perhaps, they make
the demand that with their emotions the children race the wind. So
Lennon warned the children, and showed them where the dangers are. Of
course, we are the children, and so too, I think was Lennon. After
all, he did try again with Julian and later with Sean.

But here we come to the apparent hypocrisy I referred to above. At the
time Lennon wrote “Mother” he had a child, and had run out on him.
Lennon could have done more for and with his son, but it appears that
he was too selfish to do so. My own view is that he knew he could rely
on Cynthia, his first wife, and this made it easier for him to leave.
I am not seeking either to excuse or to condemn Lennon, but just to
state that whatever Lennon’s subjective culpability, there is an
“apparent hypocrisy”, and Cynthia’s book, with Julian’s forward
effectively says as much. This being so, no wonder he was so cool to
her on the few times they met in the 70s: she reminded him of his bad
conscience. You can even say that Cynthia carried the burden of his
self-centeredness.

Lennon did not use the word “selfish” on “Mother”, even though, if one
thinks it through, it’s tolerably obvious that selfishness is the
danger Lennon was pointing to. There are almost no bounds to our
selfishness, and yet, once we have risen above it, selfishness has no
strength at all. People will gladly sacrifice their health, their
money, and their own lives, once they have put selfishness beneath
them. Once again, I think of Dickens, and in particular, of Sidney
Carlton from A Tale of Two Cities. But it is not a case of “once
overcome, forever vanquished”. One of the real dangers in parenting,
as in life in general, but especially in parenting, is that while the
real me, the essential I, will make a sacrifice, personality will come
in later on and claim credit. Personality claims its “due reward”, it
speaks the language of entitlement. Obviously, an act of love can
never come with a demand for gratitude let alone recognition. Such a
demand proves that it is not and never was “love”. This requirement of
reciprocation – love me as I loved you – ruins many relationships.
It’s a commerce in the expression of affection, and it excludes love
because it swallows up everything real with selfishness.

Then love becomes mixed – not in itself, because in itself love cannot
be sullied. But love can become mixed in our psyches by an emotional
entanglement. The mother’s love is forever being offered, and then
withdrawn if her prior unstated conditions are not met. The child
becomes confused and hurt: “I thought you loved me for myself, but now
you’ll reject me if I cannot force myself to some display which to me
feels unnatural?”

And yet, I must admit that people who spend all their lives in
personality seem to be content with this state of affairs, or at least
not to question it. How can such situations persist? Surely one part
of the answer is that we do not confront these questions sufficiently,
and with sufficient being. We do not place ourselves before the
issues: we think about things, and our emotions pass over the fields
of our lives in a more or less intense shadow play. And then, with
time, the ordinary tempo of our existence reasserts itself, and the
tender pink membranes of scar tissue are buried deep. But the
“pondering” (or “being-logical-confrontation”, as Gurdjieff put it),
which could lead to a real change – to maturity – is rare.

If we could ponder, we would see the lies we tell ourselves. By
“lies”, I don’t just mean outright untruths, saying that I was there
at 5 o’clock when in fact I wasn’t. I chiefly mean self-deception and
distortion. These deceits always support a particular judgment: “My
mother was the greatest”, or the opposite, or something different. In
their turn, these moral judgments seem to always be that things were
or were not as they should have been.

It is hard not to judge our parents, after all, they teach us to
judge. The irony is that this lesson which we learn only too well,
then works against them. I knew a woman who effectively taught her
children to criticise and be embarrassed of their father. She did not
do it consciously of course, but that was the effect of her incessant
and vicious attacks. It was as if she thought that her children would
rely upon and esteem her all the more if she could alienate them from
their father. With one child, she succeeded, with another she failed,
and with the third the results were mixed. But what she never
appreciated was that if she taught them to criticise and to be
embarrassed of one parent, they could do the same with the other, and
would become suspicious of and hostile to most of the world.

These judgments support what Adie called “justified by God
grievances”, and as he saw so deeply, the more justification there is
for a grievance, the more dangerous it is. Gurdjieff showed that
negative emotions can never be justified. Further, as he said, many of
our grievances are based upon a false belief that matters could have
been different, when in fact, as he said, “If one thing could been
different everything could been different.” (In Search of the
Miraculous, 21-2).

Clearly, “Mother” is entirely founded on Lennon’s belief that his
parents should not have left him. The recent publication of Philip
Norman’s book on Lennon was important not least because it refocussed
the picture we had of Lennon’s parents. This piece is already long
enough, so I encourage anyone interested to read Norman. But the
bottom line is this: the fact of the matter was not so much that Fred
Lennon ran out on Lennon (although there is some truth in that, he
could have made greater efforts to speak to his son). It’s more that
Fred was weak: “just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen”, as
Bernie Taupin said of Elton. Here the queen was probably Lennon’s Aunt
Mimi more than his mother Julia. Further, Norman also reveals that
Lennon knew that there were two sides to the story: one of Fred’s
brothers, John’s uncle, had written to him, setting out their side of
the story.

So Lennon’s view of the past had become garbled, and he seemed to be
wedded to the distortion. When we are subject to this distortion, we
can remember mostly those incidents which fit the twisted
world-picture. So, if for example, I have a grudge against someone,
then whatever unpleasant things they did come to mind quickly and
forcibly, and when they do, I feel at once the impact of my
accumulated dislike. Hatred is a feast for a glutton, and it is never
satisfied without revenge, which is why revenge seems so sweet. On the
other hand, if while I’m in the grip of this distortion I do manage to
remember the good things my parents did, they tend to come with less
power. In fact, they often call up with them an accuser, who will
explain them away. This is part of the spell of negative emotions:
they have this defensive quality that they attract similar negative
emotions and supporting memories, and subject reality to a selective
canon of interpretation. Being able to curse is a form of revenge, and
the gladness of cursing then seems to justify the resentment. And so
the fatal cycle unfolds.

There are two vitally important things here. First, we feel we must
judge, and in the rush to judgment, we introduce distortions.
Incidentally, U2 capture this very nicely in one of my favourite U2
songs, “Dirty Day” from Zooropa. Second, we are bound to these painful
untruths by the strongest bonds – our sufferings. As Gurdjieff said:
“Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to
anything as he is to his suffering.” (In Search of the Miraculous,
274)

I feel as if I could finish there, but one cannot leave “Mother”
without mention of Janov and the “Primal Scream” therapy he gave
Lennon and Ono. At the opening of this piece, I described the one-word
title “Mother” as a “primal reality”. In the Rolling Stone interview,
the question was raised as to whether John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band
might be the first “primal” album. As I recall, Lennon quite properly
deflected the question as a sterile curiosity about labels. “Was
George’s the first Gita album? It’s that relevant”, he said as I
remember, meaning that what you called it was irrelevant. But while
Lennon may not have been keen about such tags, the album is a record
of a man’s encounter with the first human things.

When I read Janov’s The Primal Scream, I was impressed by certain key
insights, but that was it. It struck me like having a black-tie supper
to celebrate painting the house. I’m not qualified to speak about
Janov’s therapy on Lennon, although I am suspicious. Lennon was quite
enthusiastic about it for a while. He had Janov come to England to
treat him, and when Janov had to return to the USA, he followed him
there. Although he soon left Janov rather abruptly, he retained a
sense of the importance of Janov’s ideas, at least for a while. Thus
in “Aisumasen” from Mind Games, he says “It’s hard enough, I know, to
feel your own pain”. Gurdjieff spoke of “intentional suffering”, but
also of “conscious labours”. There is a lot more to do than relieve
one’s past tortures. From what I can see, Lennon tried to move on. But
primal therapy did not seem to help him tremendously in the middle
term, if Lennon’s experiences in Los Angeles are any guide.
Shouldering the responsibility of raising a child, however, did: it
brought him to the clear-eyed sanity of “Beautiful Boy”, “Clean Up
Time”, “Living On Borrowed Time” and “Grow Old With Me”.

Also, the theory that all traumas go back to childhood, or even to
birth, leases a spurious credibility from a trick of the eye. When we
try to account for anything, we consider its history. An earlier cause
always seems to be a truer cause. So if a problem in an adult can be
attributed to something which occurred in childhood, we seem – by this
trick of the eye – to be really probing the depths. Janov’s idea that
childbirth was causative of later disorders may then seem persuasive
beyond what any evidence would warrant, simply any later conditions or
factors can be explained as derived from, or being potent because of,
the earlier problem – and it is difficult to prove the hypothesis
wrong.

To try and sum it up, I feel that there is a real danger of
identifying with the pain, and of manufacturing it in accordance with
expectations. Perhaps it’s something like the way that if you think
about headaches long enough, you’ll get one. I have a sense that there
is a good idea somewhere in the slick presentation which was Primal
Therapy, but that it was taken to an extreme, and that other good
ideas were blocked out by the seduction of the “primal scream” theory.
I am not saying that Dr Janov never helped anyone. I would be quite
certain that he did. But I cannot help but wonder if this had more to
do with his considerable personal powers than with the theoretical
value of his Primal Therapy.

As one learns to feel one’s own pain, one needs to learn be able to
bear it. One can proceed only by careful degrees. Perhaps this is part
of the reason why a teacher is necessary on the spiritual path, at
least in the beginning. My own view of people such as Van Gogh is that
they could not bear the force of their own impressions. To be able to
bear any influence, especially perhaps pain and suffering, being and
understanding are needed. There is no such thing as emotional
strength: the emotions do not have muscles of any description. If we
have being, then our emotions will not knock us over. But I cannot
believe that it is helpful to relive the pain and lie on the ground
screaming. The idea of being able to feel your pain is good, but the
idea of being able to feel your own presence is even better. As
Gurdjieff said in his last years, “by so much as one is conscious,
there is no more suffering.”

Lennon returned to some of these ideas later on in a song which was
never publicly released, and which I know as “Memory”. We come to that song next time, and continue this train of thought.

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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