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.