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.