The Cynical Idealist
THE CYNICAL IDEALIST
Highlight of an innovative peace campaign. John Lennon and Yoko Ono confer with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, December 23, 1969.
THE CYNICAL IDEALIST
A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY OF
JOHN LENNON
GARY TILLERY
Learn more about Gary Tillery and his work at www.garytillery.com
Find more books like this at www.questbooks.net
Copyright © 2009 by G. G. Tillery, L.L.C.
First Quest Edition 2009
Quest Books
Theosophical Publishing House
PO Box 270
Wheaton, IL 60187-0270
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Cover photo © Bob Gruen / www.bobgruen.com
Cover design by Kirsten Hansen Pott
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Photo: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono
© Library and Archives Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada. Source: Library and Archives Canada/Credit: Duncan Cameron/Duncan Cameron fonds/PA-175744
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tillery, Gary.
The cynical idealist: a spiritual biography of John Lennon / Gary Tillery.—1st Quest ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8356-0875-6
1. Lennon, John, 1940-1980—Religion. 2. Lennon, John, 1940-1980—Philosophy. 3. Rock musicians—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.L38T55 2009
782.42166092—dc22 2009025756
[B]
ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2026-0
6 5 4 * 12 13 14 15 16
Dedicated to
Aung San Suu Kyi
for her long struggle
to bring light
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: The Roots of Rebellion
1. Nowhere Land
2. Rock ’n’ Roll
3. Help!
Part Two: The Long, Dark Cynical Night
4. God
5. Love
6. Meditation
7. Cynicism
Part Three: Life as a Work of Art
8. Reborn Artist
9. Peace Advocate
10. Social Activist
11. Househusband
Part Four: Cynical Idealism
12. Superstars
13. Mind Games
14. Imagine
15. Shining On
Epilogue
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It would be foolish not to let John Lennon provide the soundtrack to a book about his creativity and thought. Certain songs stand out as key moments in the development of his philosophy and need to be discussed, but song lyrics lose their magic when freeze-dried and printed on a page. The written form will never be able to convey the nuances—for example, the pathos in Lennon’s performances of “Mother” and “Cold Turkey,” or the dark irony of hearing “Help!” delivered at an exuberant tempo. The key songs addressed in the text are listed at the end of each major section of this book and you are encouraged to listen to them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the authors whose research into John Lennon’s life and work gave me a rich mine to work in the creation of this book. Deserving of special mention is Jon Wiener, whose long struggle to obtain government documents through the Freedom of Information Act (aided by the American Civil Liberties Union) should be applauded by all admirers of Lennon. While I didn’t discover Wiener’s Come Together and Gimme Some Truth until I was more than half-finished with this work of my own, I found his biographical material and retrieved documents particularly helpful in analyzing Lennon’s views and activities during the years 1970–75.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the dearly missed Richard Lerner for his insightful comments on the first draft, to Seymour Shlaes and Will Marsh for their excellent editing, and to Sharron Dorr, Idarmis Rodriguez, and Nancy Grace at Quest Books for their diligent efforts to make this a better work.
INTRODUCTION
The catalyst that transformed this book from a daydream into a serious project was the reply to a question posed to a couple of college students. I happened to ask how John Lennon was perceived these days. Their response: of course he was well known as one of the Beatles, but—as with all pop superstars—he probably didn’t deserve the level of fame he enjoyed.
Time may be clouding the image of John Lennon. If subsequent generations feel free to categorize him as just another celebrity, they need to be reminded of how extraordinary a person he was.
At the close of the 1960s, this pop superstar was recognized—in the company of world statesmen John F. Kennedy and Ho Chi Minh—as a “Man of the Decade.” Lennon was the first rock star ever to hold an issue-oriented meeting with the leader of a nation. His opinion was so influential that an offhand comment during an interview in England sparked religious demonstrations across America. In fact, Lennon was such a highly regarded figure that when he moved to the United States from England Attorney General John Mitchell, Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, and the heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service all worked in concert to attempt to deport him in advance of the 1972 presidential campaign. Nor did his influence end with his death; some of the songs he wrote as a pop superstar are considered so politically charged that they still get removed from airplay at times of crisis.
However, this book is not a panegyric. John Lennon had his share of faults, as anyone who has read about him knows very well. For much of his life he overindulged in alcohol and drugs, tended to be abusive both verbally and physically, and existed in a self-centered fog that left him inconsiderate of the feelings of those around him. What he expressed as the “chip on my shoulder that’s bigger than my feet” was mainly the result of a troubled youth, and to his credit Lennon frankly admitted his own defects in interviews (his passion for truth distinguishing him from almost all of his contemporary celebrities).
Although he was far from being a paragon, what deserves admiration is the tenacity with which he struggled to become one. He never gave up trying to transcend the type of person he had grown into and become something better. He kept reaching toward the ideal and along the way he left a string of creative achievements that resonate with others who struggle to improve.
This book focuses on those creative achievements, as well as on Le
nnon’s comments and revelations in interviews. The purpose is to discover in them the underlying structure of his worldview and to present, in an orderly fashion, the insights he drew from life, the values he found important, and the principles he came to espouse. In short, it is an attempt to summarize the philosophy by which John Lennon lived.
The word philosophy is laden with the weight of twenty-five hundred years. We find it difficult to use without mentally conjuring the Wise Old Heads of history—from Plato to Kant to Sartre. We picture them musing about how to define reality and leaving us with exhaustively reasoned frameworks for understanding the “Truth.” Unfortunately, we often feel that it takes an IQ of three hundred to understand those frameworks.
John Lennon’s philosophy was that of a man of the working class who happened to see the world through the eyes of an artist, a man of restless intelligence who was willing to question everything about the foundations of his life and his society. He came up with his own insights, and, unlike the Wise Old Heads, he had a gift for communicating them in a direct way that we can grasp not only intellectually but also emotionally.
Lennon was attuned to his own time; thus his thinking encompasses postmodern isolation and anguish. The good news is that it also offers a way to reconnect. In the last years before he was murdered, he found a path out of the labyrinth of meaninglessness and rediscovered a measure of sunshine. He left a record of the process in his artistic creations and interviews. The aim here is to follow that process and examine the self-generated philosophy he managed to fashion out of a conflicted and turbulent life—a philosophy that elevates the human spirit and encourages us to take charge of our individual and collective destinies.
One early and revealing signpost of the process was a song he wrote in late 1965. Having enjoyed phenomenal success atop the entertainment world for two years, the Beatles released Rubber Soul, an album hailed as a creative breakthrough for the group. They had mastered the skills required to reach the top of the pop music charts at will and in their self-confidence felt comfortable striking off toward new horizons.
John Lennon contributed several memorable songs to the project. One was arguably the most self-revelatory of any song he wrote as a Beatle. He acknowledged to Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies that it came straight from his subconscious—after five hours of struggle. “I’d actually stopped trying to think of something. Nothing would come. I . . . went for a lie-down, having given up. Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man—sitting in his nowhere land.” The song suddenly came to him, both words and music, complete.1 In stark lyrics about an unimpressive man confused about life, lacking any orientation and making meaningless plans, Lennon revealed inner turmoil that none of his fans could have imagined.
The twenty-five-year-old with fame and adulation enough for a lifetime, with worldwide respect for his creative genius, only days before a ceremony in which Queen Elizabeth II named him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and awarded him a medal coveted by the establishment, thought of himself as a “Nowhere Man” with no point of view, not knowing where he was going.2 Lennon had fought his way to the top of society only to discover that the zenith was merely the nadir in a nicer neighborhood. He had eluded the “system” that molded young minds into useful parts of the socioeconomic machine, only to realize that rebellion against it had given him meaning while freedom from it left him directionless. He had escaped the angst created by an absent father and a sometime mother who finally vanished completely from his life, only to stumble into the cold embrace of nothingness.
Like the character in Edwin A. Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” Lennon was growing more alienated at the same time millions went to sleep envious of him. He confided to his close friend Pete Shotton: “The more I have, the more I see, and the more experience I get, the more confused I become as to who I am, and what the hell life is all about.”3
Fellow Beatle George Harrison had developed a fascination for Eastern religions, and at his suggestion Lennon tried to find answers in two of the sacred books of the East: the Bhagavad Gita, which crystallizes the essential beliefs of Hindus, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist guidebook to the interim period between physical death and reincarnation. He also began a serious study of the Bible.4 He had been an indifferent Christian when a boy, singing in the choir until he was finally banned from services for his irreverent humor and disruptive behavior. But now he needed something to believe in, a structure to make sense of his existence.
In reading the Gospel of Matthew, Lennon must have lingered over verses five and six of the sixth chapter, leading up to the Lord’s Prayer: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” One night in the winter of 1966, unable to shake off the pall of meaninglessness that ironically had settled over him with his success, Lennon decided to follow the advice of Jesus. He locked himself in the bathroom at his home in Weybridge, outside London, then got down on his knees and begged for an acknowledgment, a sign, a revelation—from God, Jesus, or whatever form the deity might take—some hint that his appeal was being heard and some clue as to what he should be doing.5
But there was no response.
That unanswered appeal marked the beginning of a search lasting for a decade, an anguished search for an alternative foundation on which Lennon could orient his life. One of his defining attributes was a completely open mind, and his far-ranging existential quest generated the various images we now associate with him: dreamy-eyed proponent of love, flowercovered disciple of a guru, loudmouthed peace advocate, angry radical, despairing drunk, feminist. As a freethinker and iconoclast, he was bound to upset those who accepted the beliefs they had been handed while growing up. They found it hard to disagree with his goal of planetary peace and love, but they recoiled at his behavior, his contempt for accepted social norms, and his blunt opinions about religion, sex, marriage, nudity, racism, and other delicate subjects. Many dismissed him as a fool who had let unprecedented success go to his head.
John Lennon was no fool, although he didn’t mind playing one if it called attention to his agenda. He was simply someone who saw the world through different eyes than most of his contemporaries—a genius. He struck out along his own path, paid the heavy price required, and left an influential body of creative work.
Throughout his search, and particularly after his union with Yoko Ono, Lennon never accepted the easy labels most of the public preferred to apply to him—a pop superstar or writer of popular music. His aim was much higher. While other songwriters of his era were satisfied with coming up with good, strong commercial songs, Lennon aimed at writing anthems. While others tailored their lyrics with an eye on mass appeal, he tried to express profound and personal insights drawn from the ongoing experiment of his life. His openly stated goal was to be measured against Shakespeare and Van Gogh and the other cultural giants who communicate across all borders, across all times—and he thought of himself as a philosopher.6
Can we consider John Lennon a philosopher?
If being a philosopher means systematizing one’s thinking and conclusions into a unified whole, he doesn’t qualify. But then, neither does Socrates. If Plato had not reconstructed his teacher’s probing conversations with fellow Athenians into meaningfully arranged written dialogues, the philosophy of Socrates would have remained half-remembered bolts of lightning that had dazzled his supporters and infuriated his verbal sparring partners.
Like Socrates, Lennon did not leave behind a grand philosophical project of the sort produced by Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, or Sartre; he was a philosopher in the sense of being an independent thinker who did not hesitate to question what his culture expected him to beli
eve, to arrive at other conclusions, and then to challenge his fellow citizens about their assumptions. Also like Socrates, he preferred to stimulate people to think for themselves rather than strive to teach them something they did not know.
From his own experience, he realized that our contemporary civilization puts little emphasis on independence of thought in the school years. The intent, by and large, is to educate new generations about the culture they live in and prepare them to be productive members of the system—not to create members of the working class who will enjoy breaking out of harness and challenging the status quo. According to Lennon, most adults continue on in their oblivion, “doped with religion and sex and TV,” accepting the beliefs they have been handed and never attempting to find their own foundation. In the stark interpretation of Stephen Holden, they go about their lives “degraded and terrorized by institutions until they become self-deluded cogs, numbed by fear.”7 The only road to freedom most people appear to perceive arcs upward—that is, toward social and financial success, getting to the top.
Referring to himself, sardonically, as a “working class hero,” Lennon shone a light on this process and asserted that he had found another path to liberation, even though he had suffered terribly for his refusal to conform. How much did he suffer, being a multimillionaire and one of the most famous and pampered men in the world? Bear in mind that at the time he recorded “Working Class Hero” Lennon had recently passed through excruciating heroin-addiction withdrawal and four months of Primal Scream therapy prompted by media ridicule and public condemnation for his unconventional lifestyle and quixotic efforts to bring world peace. In an echo of Jesus (“take up your cross and follow me”) that most likely was conscious and deliberate, he ended the song by inviting listeners who were willing to pay the price of being a hero to do as he had done and follow him.