JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY PART THREE: BEAUTIFUL BOY (DARLING BOY)

I will open this blog with a personal reminiscence: when a certain person was born into the family I felt a love so pure that it attracted to my feeling, and not to just to intellectual recollection, memories of parents, family and close family friends which all held that purity in common. All these associations were available at once, together with the very feeling itself fresh and undimmed, if not in fact brighter. I knew that what I felt and had felt on all those occasions was the one love. That is how I learned that real love (to use the title of another Lennon song) exists in essence, the real I, the soul, and so can never be taken from us, and can never be changed. As Gurdjieff and Mr Adie did, one can even speak of “essence-love” without any unease that one may have betrayed something sacred.
As I wrote last week, “There are not many loves, there are not many lovers. In so far as we love, we participate in the one ineffable all-enfolding mystery.” This week we take that a little further, with one of Lennon’s last songs, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” from Double Fantasy.
With “Julia”, “Because” and “Oh, My Love”, this is one of Lennon’s “Yoko Ono” songs. “Beautiful Boy” opens with the sound of the beach, as Yoko rings a triangle three times, to ward off evil spirits, I believe. The sound effects cleanly cease, and after a split second of silence, the instrumental line descends. The bass guitar sounds a heartbeat, and the melody tumbles down in an oddly staggered phrase, but as it falls, it seems to lightly catch itself, and to briefly ascend before turning back to rest. Many instruments are heard, each seemingly playing something different, yet melding into a seamless backdrop. And this backdrop, with its halting melodic line allows the evenness of Lennon’s singing to emerge all the more clearly:
Close your eyes. Have no fear.
The monster’s gone, he’s on the run,
And your daddy’s here.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.
Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer.
Every day, in every way, it’s getting better and better.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.
Out on the ocean, sailing away,
I can hardly wait to see you come of age,
But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient.
‘Cos it’s a long way to go,
A hard road to hoe,
Yes, it’s a long way to go,
But in the meantime,
Before you cross the street, take my hand.
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
The refrain is repeated, and then the verse beginning “Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer”. After the refrain Lennon sings “Darling, darling, darling, darling Sean”, then we hear Lennon whisper, “Good night, Sean, see you in the morning”, and in a sound collage, featuring whistling, and children playing at the beach, it fades out.
The big thing about this song which is so easy to miss, is that it is a lullaby. The opening and closing words make that clear. But what a lullaby! Here is no ode to sleep, no “golden slumbers fill your eyes”. This a lullaby in which the child, once comforted and reassured by his father’s presence, is primed with thoughts on life, growing up and the virtues of patience – and it works, triumphantly.
“Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” may be the only lullaby ever written which celebrates waking and hardship rather than sleep and rest. A lot of art which passes for “realism” is in fact pessimism or cynicism: but not this song. That life is a “hard road to hoe” is acknowledged, but not indulged or overstated, and is set in its context by a supportive father who, one can sense, has hoed that hard road himself, and come through to say that it was all worthwhile. When one listens to this song, the sense of the affirmation of life with all its trials is tremendous.
It is also, in a way, something of a sea shanty. The sound effects at the opening and the close, the reference to being out on the ocean and sailing away, all combine to produce a mental vision of the sea, and I think this contributes in no small degree to the overall freshness, the sense of beckoning life horizons, and even freedom.
Oddly, as of 2 September 2008, the entry for this song on Wikipedia said that Lennon “passionately describ(es) the love he has for his son and the joy Sean gave him.” This is probably what people expect the song to do, and their expectation may well be based on the subject matter, and the tremendous positive feeling in the song I have described. But it is obvious, once it is pointed out, that although there is love, passion and joy in “Beautiful Boy”, Lennon does not actually describe that passion and joy – he expresses it in a rather sophisticated mix of music. From the Wikipedia entry, one would expect something like Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely”, or Kate Bush’s “Bertie”, where these two extraordinarily talented artists do indeed passionately describe their love and joy. Kate Bush even sings “You give me such joy, then you give me more joy.” As Sophia Wellbeloved, one of the few Gurdjieff scholars to take seriously Gurdjieff’s relation to magic and hypnotism, tells me, magicians set up circumstances where they take advantage of the human propensity to see what we expect to see.
Talented as Stevie Wonder and Kate Bush are, they are not John Lennon the wise wizard: he weaves a spell with love and realism conjoined in a dynamic balance. “Beautiful Boy” is a song for life in the real world, and yet it does not compromise on its idealism one iota. It is emphatically a love song, and a song of passion and joy, although neither those words nor any of their synonyms appear in it.
Interestingly, Lennon said that he had been trying to write a song about his son for a while, and nothing would come, and then suddenly the whole piece came to him. On the John Lennon Anthology, if I remember correctly, Lennon sings an earlier recording of the song, where the only variation is these words:
Before you cross the street, take my hand.
The traffic’s slow but you never know who you’re gonna meet.
And that sounds a lot like life by Central Park in New York City. The combination of slow traffic and unexpected meetings comes together in the most felicitous way: Lennon does not explicitly draw the connection, but leaves it to the listener’s imagination. Hurry excludes the chance encounter. This is a hymn of openness to new experience. The line which replaced the “traffic” one is the justly celebrated “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Again, for interest, I was once with someone who said that he was “interested in folk sayings”, and after praising the saws of the common folk for their wisdom, produced that line. When I mildly mentioned that it was by Lennon, he was quite put out and snapped back, “I think it’s a lot older than John Lennon”. Sagely, he moved the discussion on without pausing for a breath before I could ask him for further and better particulars of his diligent “folk sayings” research, and I was (and still am) much too polite to interrupt. If any of the blog readers do know of an earlier attestation of this saying, please let me know: none of the material I have seen refers to any, although they often have the most abstruse references.
But I mention this because it seems to me that Lennon, and certain other rock and rollers, have not been taken sufficiently serious by the erudite audience. There is a certain snobbery. This character was pleased to present himself as knowledgable in anonymous traditions which he positively feted, but imagine having been impressed by John Lennon … well, Lennon wasn’t even in the work, now, was he?
One of fascinating things about Lennon’s vocal delivery is that Lennon almost entirely overcomes his concerns about his own vulnerability and sensitivity. His voice here is almost naked, but for the echo effect on “ocean” and “patient”. While retaining his softness, as the song progresses, a confidence enters Lennon’s voice: compare his intonation of the key word “prayer” at 0’.58” and at 2’.49”.
Something else is raised by this song which we shall return to in the next blog, when we come to “Grow Old With Me” from Milk and Honey, to my ear, perhaps the greatest song I have ever heard. And that something else is this: Yoko is not mentioned in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” and Sean is not mentioned in “Grow Old With Me”, and yet, neither is really absent from either song.
In the previous blog, I said that just one element was left implicit in “Julia”, which was acknowledged in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, making the vision complete, and that element is God. The reference is small, but it is significant: “Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer”, which he sings twice. I shall expand on this in But the point should be reiterated here, not least because it relates to the reality of relationships.
In a way, our relationships are more real than we are. We have all had the experience of having had problems with people such as parents, siblings, friends and “significant others”. Such problems are natural, even lawful, as we seek to establish our own individuality. But we have also had the experience of feeling that despite any issues we may have, the person is still my father, my sister, my friend, my wife (provided an essence relationship has been established with the spouse, which may be the esoteric significance of marriage and why Jesus raised it to a sacrament). One feels a certain essence tug which is not just self-interest, although that may be mixed in and even predominant in some cases. Something terribly deep inside, something which is part of the real me, is in relation to these people and seeks understanding and concord. This impulse to harmony is not just our own decision, although that may enter into it. This is why the relationships are more real than we are: we get caught up in all sorts of dumps and grudges, but the relationship exerts its essence-influence.
Our relationships are part of a larger network. The pseudo-Ouspensky said: “Light is the basis of all life on earth. … All material forms are threaded through with it, like beads on a string.” In truth, all of our relationships are like beads on a string where the string is the chain of being which begins and ends in God, and God – we know – is light.
This is, perhaps, why all love is one. And it is why any love which purports to exclude God, even if God is conceived as the divine dimension, or a higher power, is only a portion of what it can be. It is why Jesus insisted that love of God comes before and founds love of neighbour.
I am not saying that Lennon has this view: he certainly did not. But I am saying that I think it is the objective reality. My thesis is that as he grew older Lennon was moving towards this objective reality. The divine, which may have been subliminal in “Julia”, is affirmed twice in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” and more so in the sublime “Grow Old With Me”.
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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book “The Phoenician Solar Theology” treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.