JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE & REALITY: Memory

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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John Lennon: Essence and Reality  Part 16: “Memory”

In this unreleased piece, it sounds to me as if Lennon sings:

Memory, oh memory, what you do to me?

Today is all I really need to know.

Why do you have to haunt me when I thought I’d let you go?

I hear voices whispering through the cold and lonely hall.

Memory, memory, release me from your spell.

Why do you have to haunt me always?

Why do you have to haunt me when I thought you’d run away?

Lennon doesn’t sing much else, here, and of what he does, I can only pick up the odd word. What’s this all about? The song obviously has to do with psychological entrapment and freedom. Lennon feels that he’s haunted, under a spell. He is bewildered: “what you do to me?” The spell is purely within his own skull; it’s the flip side of the liberating magic he conjured in “#9 Dream”. Significantly for the total feel of the song, Lennon uses the noble music he originally wrote for “Tennessee”. What’s going on, then?

As I said in respect of “Tennessee”, my guess, for what it’s worth, is that Lennon felt that his homage to Tennessee Williams might come across as over the top, or perhaps even as inaccessible. If that is right, then he decided to rewrite it with lyrics which might mean something to more of his audience: after all, many more people could relate to a song about memory than to the abstruse lyrics Lennon had written in honour of a playwright.

The “Tennessee” lyrics were not, as a whole, a model of clarity. Although the first verses were luminous and powerful, the latter ones remind me of Hopkins’ more impenetrable poems, such as “Harry Ploughman”. Another factor, too, is that the first stanza of Lennon’s original lyrics referred to the USA. This might be work well in the USA, but would Lennon have been concerned about his international audience? In any event, the original lyrics seems to me not only better as lyrics, but also more appropriate for the music. Overall, I have a hunch that Lennon was dissatisfied with both the “Tennessee” and the “Memory” drafts, and that this is why he left the piece unfinished, although it boasted a truly stirring melody.

Yet, there are organic connections between the “Tennessee” lyrics and those he wrote for “Memory”. In terms of feeling, “Memory” is not so far from “the sadness of your soul”, the “spirit mind”, and the “echoed harmony of the cold and lonely naked human being,” of which he sang in “Tennessee”. More precisely, the reference to an “echo” in “Tennessee” evokes the echo of memories. Another connection between the two sets of lyrics is found in the connection Lennon made between pain and artistry. In his Rolling Stone interview, Lennon said that it was pain which had made the great artists what they were.

So both sets of lyrics deal with human pain and freedom. The “Tennessee” version focuses on the role of the artist in expressing even the bleakest reality so clearly that it shows a way forward for the future. In “Memory”, at least in the rough draft we have, which would not have been its final form, the emphasis is on the pain.

That makes the music anomalous, as Lennon so often was. If the music of “Memory” is deep, the lyrics are puzzling. What is the point of saying: “Today is all I need to know, so stop bothering me, memories?” The memories serve a purpose: they call me to be present before them. They call me to be the adult for myself, to use the Gurdjieff’s language, as preserved in Solange Claustres’ important book Becoming Conscious with Mr Gurdjieff. When I was about four year old, I was trapped in a house by a wild sheep. By myself, frightened child, I could do nothing but wait for it to go away. Fortunately, my father came along and tied it up. Now I have to do that sort of thing for myself.

And so it is with memories. There are very different sorts of memories; each centre has its own proper memory. The memories Lennon is speaking of here sound to me as if they are associations in formatory apparatus, and that the painful feelings they evoke are negative emotions. Negative emotions, of course, are not sourced in the feeling centre, but are a sort of growth drawn from the perversion of instinctive centre (for details of these terms and references to the authoritative sources, meaning Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, see Sophia Wellbeloved’s Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts).

If “I am present”, again in Gurdjieff’s sense, life is real (or “responsible”), and these associations and negative emotions lose their power. But that is not enough. It is not enough to displace them for a time. They need to be seen, acknowledged, and my responsibility accepted, my suffering sacrificed, and my lessons learned. They need to be digested. Precisely here, I think, is Lennon’s problem.

Lennon wants to escape the pain: that is understandable. The pain is a providential arrangement to make us take action. But what action? Sometimes all you can do is to wait in the house until the animal goes away. However, not in the case of memories and negative emotions. There we can take action. In one of the Paris group meetings, Gurdjieff said “I am bigger than my associations” (p.50, Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941-6). And that is the truth.

The memories which hurt the most are, I find, those where I myself have done something I feel is wrong, or I feel that I’ve failed. And I doubt that other people are too different in that respect. Sometimes the failure is purely imaginary: sometimes something in us feels to blame or regretful, as if we could or should have done more. It may be absurd or it may be quite right. But the real work begins when we can acknowledge it for what it was, whatever it was, and if I don’t know what it was, to acknowledge that, and to study.

There are, as Gurdjieff said, two types of suffering, conscious and unconscious suffering. The first has a future, it’s the key to our human potential. Incidentally, it’s intimately related to joy, the one can call the other. But to focus on our present concern, the pain Lennon speaks of is unconscious suffering. The trick is to make it conscious. That is, to turn regret into remorse. Mr Adie put it almost perfectly in “It’s A Painful Truth”, from his book (George Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia). Mr Adie said to someone who had raised just these issues we’re discussing:

… be with it, to face it; not to try and change it. If you can look at it long enough, and remain present before it, you will understand. It will make you suffer. Intentional suffering is there; and eventually you will repair that. You will see. You will have seen the causes. You will weigh it, see its proper level, so that in a way, it could not happen again, because you will know how it happened, why you went wrong, and how useless this unconscious suffering is. Perhaps I even sense something like remorse, or at least something in that direction. But you will know all that.

It isn’t so very difficult to get a grasp on this, but it is almost impossible to master it, because it’s the work of a lifetime. To repair the past is really to repair myself, because I am the past, a past which is present in some mysterious way to the ever-manifesting moment, and is always opening onto the future. So much is involved in this concept of repairing the past that it’s mind-boggling. But the temptation to retreat before the challenge should, I feel, be resisted. I think the thing is to set out some principles, and in doing so, to take the baton, as it were, from Lennon, and to run with it, even if only for a few steps. So let me try and put out some general ideas.

First, remorse is a feeling of myself. I feel myself in relation to my manifestations. Of course memory is involved, but the memory of formatory apparatus is seasoned, as it were, with the memory of the feeling centre. It’s very difficult to describe this, but when it happens it’s as the old man in a black and white photo has suddenly taken on colour and sat down to talk with you. Gurdjieff described this remorse as washing, soaking and cleaning. In one of the group meetings he gave the example of tangerine. It’s salty and must be purified before it can become jam. And so it is for us, human purification is remorse (p. 94, Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941-6).

Second, we need to keep our past, our faults our virtues and all, in perspective. We all have a tendency to dramatize and exaggerate the importance of our own joys and sufferings. This is something where we mutually aid each other. We catch theatrics from each other, as it were. If we can look at them, we often recognize that our lingering associations have something of the “beat-up” about them. In this respect, Lennon’s philosophy of the importance of the “artist” worked against him. But to be fair, the press did treat all his actions as media-worthy. Here the achievement would have been to shrink his perception of the newspapers and radio back to size.

Third, when tormented by painful memories, it often seems as if the other people are inside me. This subliminal sense that other people – and even my old self – are inside me is a common and relatively mild form of possession. It is, if you like, possession by one’s own associations, and so Lennon’s reference to haunting is terribly accurate. (A good example is found in Bernie Taupin’s lyrics for “The Boy in the Red Shoes” from Elton John’s Songs from the West Coast album: “It’s all inside my head, the boy in the red shoes is dancing by my bed”). I should add that although it’s usually what I call a mild form of possession, it’s none the less a serious matter for all that, because it’s a function of our lack of being.

Fourth, related to this, something in us believes that everything has to be someone’s fault. And there’s a lot in us (our accursed mirage of justice) which does not like to see someone get away with it. Here it’s particularly important to learn how to sacrifice one’s (unconscious) suffering. Again, we mechanically moralize everything. We say “it wasn’t the ten cents, it was the principle.”

Fifth, the relationship with parents are often paradigms. The memories and associations around parents are often difficult to deal with because difficult it’s difficult for us to not to believe at some level that they were conscious. I dealt with that and Lennon’s contribution in the “Mother” blog. But I feel there’s much more to explore. The next Lennon blog will look at “How” and “Jealous Guy” from the Imagine album.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

1 June 2010

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.

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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY PART 8 “REMEMBER”

Joseph Azize Page
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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“Remember”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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

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

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GEORGE ADIE on GOD-IN-ME and REPAIRING THE PAST

Calm Ocean

From Joseph Azize:

At a meeting of 25 February 1985, Mr Adie read the pieces in parts 1 and 2 of this blog. They have been lightly edited, and references to his biblical allusions have been added. The quotation at the start of the first piece is Mr Adie’s own.

Part One

“I waited on the Lord, He inclined unto me. He heard my complaint.” (Psalm 40.1)

I try to open as I go about, but am greatly occupied by turning thoughts. Yet, even so, am I not, even dimly, aware of the great unknowable, the infinity of the-Creator-in-me? What can be more important than this? But for this knowledge to enter my field of consciousness I have to be aware of myself, and to pay for my life on the level of the external world. I must contribute and receive of that level, also. It is my life, and it is in this very life that I must actualize my possibility of becoming conscious, so that I may enter the great realm of self-certainty.

As I go, as I work, as I think, let me also be primarily aware of God-in-me, the-Creator-in-me. Let me have no doubt about it. Primarily, so that it is not pushed aside in me. Primarily. As I am aware, and become ever more conscious of my self-certainty (that is, as I remember myself), as I voluntarily manifest this process within me, with all it implies, let me also fulfill the external work in such a way as to benefit my fellow-creatures.

Let me not miss the sense of the-Creator-in-me, so that this sensing leavens my being. Let me also direct attention outwards, and thus share in the infinity of the great life of the everlasting and ceaseless sunrise of the creation. Let my labour be also for my neighbour.

Part Two

When I look back, I see a vast vacuum of lost opportunities, repeated failures to understand life’s offerings, moments of rarest exchange squandered. All moments of lost love of friends, family, parents, children, strangers. All without response so from me, so that they withered and died in pain and disappointment.

These recollections arise and distract me. Yet, in my past, I have been able to stop thought, and to find myself. Then, indeed, I had refreshment so as to continue, but life and creation never ceases, the way always mounts before me, and now more is necessary. Now I have to repair these very bitter past failures … but how?

Now in the present … here is present suffering, and I am here also, present to accept, then to realize, and to actualize. These ghostly pictures which lie behind and now return can, just because they still return, be repaired now. Now I can make recompense for the past, in an act of acceptance that they occurred, accepting to suffer the pain of remorse without wishing to deny anything. In this voluntary act, they are at once repaired as time vanishes. Time is no longer. All is one, and I am that.

I look on the ocean, calm after endless days of storm, stretching now blue and serene to the horizon, and I hear in me the word: “Peace be still.” (Mark 4:9)

Now I give thanks for my present pain, which awakens me and tells me just now to fill in the present void with reparation.

I now deal with the present needs in the presence of the all-merciful Presence, the all-merciful Present.

Part Three

After the reading the piece in Part 2, Mr Adie added this: “You know he spoke about the Merciless Heropass? In the now, it is merciful.” This ties in with something he said on another occasion, that on other levels of the universe (worlds 24 and above) the Heropass is less merciless. However, eternity is not freedom from time as such: it is an organic unity of different times, which being together in eternity, allow one to choose one’s time.

I think that these two pieces are interesting, not only for the biblical references, but more because of the impact which comes through them. There is a certain unity of feeling and intellect. They are not made up of nothing but new ideas (although some of the ideas were new to me), and yet they are fresh because their very delivery is such as to leave no doubt that this is a man who lived these experiences. He is not just a philosopher or even a philosopher of mysticism: he is a poet and an analyst combined, who is describing his actual realities in an impact-ful way.

The first piece illustrates something I have been coming to, perhaps slowly. Many have tried to align the Gurdjieff ideas and Christianity by “finding”, or perhaps more truly projecting Gurdjieff’s ideas into Christianity. Needleman’s Lost Christianity and Mouravieff’s works come to mind. Needleman’s book could be more accurately titled Reframed Christianity.

Such an approach is neither fair to either system. Rather, the methods of Christianity can be characterised, reasonably accurately, by reference to Gurdjieff’s food diagram. Christianity as we generally know it begins with the second conscious shock (an effort in the feeling, let us call it the transformation of negative emotions into positive), but says practically nothing about the first conscious shock (the conscious receipt of impressions). Gurdjieff goes on to say that the sure path is to commence from the first conscious shock, then one can move on to the second.

Seen in this way, there is no contradiction between systems and the wrong-headedness of projecting Gurdjieff’s ideas into Christianity is apparent. Mr Adie’s approach was quite different. One makes one’s efforts, and one remembers God-in-me. This is possible, because, as Gurdjieff said, “Behind Real I lies God.” Or to put it another way, one makes the efforts we were taught by masters like the Adies, but one dedicates them to God. I am fortified in this approach by recollecting that Gurdjieff said that his teaching was esoteric Christianity.