Four John

(Setting: "It was 35 years ago today…" It is the evening of December 8 and I am watching back-to-back John Lennon specials on Star World with a cold and clammy void inside whatever passes for a heart.)

John Winston Lennon never really died that fateful day. If you think about it closely, could anybody who admonishes the world to imagine, give peace a chance, and dream up a solution to all the world’s ills ("Love is the answer, and you know that for sure…") ever depart from us? For us simpletons, death is the existential epilogue. To die, according to the philosophers in Monty Python, is to push daisies and be recruited to the choir invisible. To pass away… To face the final curtains… For other cultures, death is merely a transformation. Another station in our karmic trip that our frail minds could never fully comprehend. Nothing ever dies or dissolves away. There is only – for lack of a better word – "alteration." John Lennon the flesh-and-blood musician (with human, all-too human qualities) has changed into a peace symbol with wire-rimmed spectacles, an image on the TV screen (in a white room, playing a white piano), and a voice on vinyl forever telling us, "Let me take you down ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields..." And we follow him, past the acres of his sad/happy childhood where no one was in his tree, where it was hard to be someone but it all worked out, where living was easy with eyes closed, and where nothing was real. Our own alienation found a song, sadness became flesh.

Ono, oh Yoko, changed Lennon’s life. Sure, John was the wisecracking sourpuss activist of love before he met the Japanese artist. But when Yoko (with her avant-garde ways, her artworks that espouse affirmation and acceptance) entered the picture, John started looking at the bigger picture. His little truths became universal verities. "I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics/All I want is the truth, just gimme some truth…" (from Gimme Some Truth). And then there were two: "Just a boy and a little girl trying to change the world" (from Isolation). With Yoko as his muse, John created eternal hymns for our age: Imagine, Working Class Hero, I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier, Mind Games, Power to the People, Happy Xmas (War Is Over), Woman, Instant Karma, and – during that famous bed-in in Canada – Give Peace A Chance. The myth: Yoko was this weird chick from the East who broke up The Beatles. No. Ono was the ocean child who made John Winston Lennon whole again.

Help me if you can I’m feeling down. There was a time I was living with my relatives in a cramped Blumentritt apartment suffused with cockroaches, rusty pipes and sadness. My brother Dennis brought home a Beatles record one day and it changed my life forever. I found myself taking a tour with Beatle John in "a day in the life" of Everyman, reading the news and meditating on the nature of mortality and infinity. Taking stock of all faces and places, friends and lovers in our existential gallery (In My Life). Ruminating on those tricky concepts such as revolution, evolution, destruction, solution and Chairman Mao (Revolution). Spewing some literary gobbledygook about old flat top, toe jam football, monkey finger, walrus gumboot, spinal cracker, Coca-Cola, etc. (Come Together). And just blurting out one’s emotions as straight to the point as possible, without artifice: "I want you, I want you so bad, baby…" or "Don’t let me down…" Imagine John’s words flowing out like endless rain into the paper-cup ears of this lonely scrawny kid in a lower middle class apartment, changing his whole universe. In 2002, the BBC held a vote for the 100 Greatest Britons Of All Time. Lennon placed eight. An uptight panelist scoffed at the Beatle’s strong showing, saying that Lennon changed pop music but didn’t really affect the whole world unlike, say, Winston Churchill or Isaac Newton. My friend joked, "Newton discovered gravity, big deal… as if gravity weren’t there in the first place."

Nutopia is where we all are. Nuts like Mark David Chapman make the world a sick, sick place. J.D.
Salinger made them do it. Jodie Foster made them do it. A dog made them do it. A chorale group inside their heads made them do it. Insane reasons for insane acts. "I shot John Lennon," Chapman said after pumping bullets into the Beatle. No shit, Sherlock. What a terrible loss. Imagine all the songs John could have shared with the rest of humanity. Imagine his reactions to 9/11, devastating calamities and all things screwing up our wayward world. Imagine the scathing diatribes he would hurl against today’s music industry. (Where pop stars are churned out in droves by the idol factories, where style has kicked the daylights out of substance, and where songs don’t mean anything anymore.) Imagine all the artists he could have collaborated with (from institutions like Bob Dylan to upstarts like Ryan Adams or Rufus Wainwright). But all these are conjectures. We could only imagine. No matter.

We never really lost John Winston Lennon, anyway. To us, he will forever be playing a white piano in a white room hoping the world will live as one. Imagine that.

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