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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.