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I was in junior high school when John Lennon died, and I was an absolute wreck. I grew up on my Mom’s old Beatles albums, and by the time I reached adolescence, my personal classification system went: Billy Joel–John Lennon–God. So after that fruitcake son-of-a-bitch emptied his revolver into this consummate musician’s chest on the corner of Seventy-Second and Central Park West on the eighth of December, 1980, I wore black to school for a month. I traveled all the way to New York and waved a candle till my arm fell off and sang “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” so many times that it really was all I was saying. Meanwhile, back home, I was suspended by the principal due to an unrelated bum rap (it was Aaron Mittleman, not me, who locked our French teacher in the closet and evacuated the class), and so was conveniently able to initiate “Stay in Bed and Grow Your Hair” week—soon joined, to the principal’s (and my mother’s) chagrin, by some fifteen classmates—at my house in John’s honor. I even went out and spent good allowance money on two Yoko albums, where she intermittently shrieks and imitates whale sounds for some eighty-five minutes straight. Now that’s a true fan.
I tell you all this in order to establish my credentials as a veteran, fanatic and peerlessly loyal Lennon lover, because now I’m going to kill him all over again.
John was at his best as a team player, but there’s no question that his preeminent pièce de résistance, the composition that will be for all time immediately associated with his name, is “Imagine.” And justifiably so: I don’t care what the idiot editors of Rolling Stone think, it’s a great song. Gives me gargantuan goose-bumps from the introductory adagio. The man was a genius, and this was his masterpiece. Even the words themselves are enough to make you weak in the knees:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for todayImagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion tooImagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
(Tell me you didn’t at least hum the melody while you were reading just now. If not, you’re a freak.)
Those words, those words! They’re so beautiful, so encompassing, so right. We agree with them viscerally, adopt them instinctively. They strike some of our deepest, most primal chords, they produce (at least for a moment) a kind of nebulous but heartfelt longing, a yearning for something better, for something perfect, for something beautiful. Everything we’ve been taught—indeed, a decent amount of what we human beings are made of—is passionately stirred by the simple yet incredibly compelling message of John’s poetry (actually, the words were originally inspired by Yoko’s verse, if you can believe that).
I know what you’re thinking: Oh, how predictable! Now he’s going to explain how “Imagine” is just a pipe dream, an unfeasible, quixotic, idyllic fantasy that’s nice to sing about but has no place in our individual or collective practical planning for the future. Well, if that’s what you think I’m up to… you’re dead wrong.
I am not challenging the wisdom of John’s enterprise because I think it has no chance of succeeding (fact is, many aspects of it are coming truer every day). If I believed in his vision, if I truly desired that it be realized speedily and in our days, I would join up regardless, and struggle against all odds toward our common goal with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my might.
But I don’t want John’s vision to be fulfilled speedily and in our days. I don’t want it to be fulfilled—ever. John’s beautiful ballad is a death march, a requiem mass for the human race. His seemingly lovely lyrics constitute in truth the single most hideous and most unfortunate combination of syllables ever to be put to music. The realization of his dream, or even just a large part of it, would perforce entail the wholesale and irreversible destruction of the dreams, hopes, happinesses and very reason for living of yourself and every single person you know. If we, who for so long have unthinkingly admired and warbled Lennon’s words, were to live to see his wish come true, the result would be more staggeringly horrific and more devastatingly ruinous than you could ever possibly—imagine.
Although some readers have no doubt long ago reached their own conclusions on this score, permit me to share with you my own personal take on this exceedingly crucial matter.
IV
Why do you get up in the morning? Please stop and think very seriously for a moment about this matchlessly significant and yet for some reason rarely broached question. What is the juice that gets you going every day? What motivates you to pursue … anything? Why, ultimately, do you do … pretty much everything you do? What are you really looking for? What have you always really been looking for—just between you, me and the page?
What is the end goal, direct or indirect, of the vast majority of your activities in life? What is the one thing you need more than anything else, the one thing you just couldn’t live without, the one thing you probably wouldn’t want to live without? What do you live for? What do you work for? What would you die for? In the immortal words of the Spice Girls: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want….
You’ll agree it’s not any of the basic necessities—food, shelter, clothing, Hewlett-Packard Office-Jet-Pro 1150C multi-function scanner-printer-copier-fax—you already have these. Know how I know? Because you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t. You’d be out somewhere purloining bread like Jean Valjean.
You think maybe it’s your health? Look, I know that when two old Jewish men pass each other in the locker room on the way to or from the schvitz, it’s a biblical precept that at least one of them has to rasp, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have nothing.” Granted. But we don’t live for our health. Our health is only one of the things which allow us to pursue our true desires in life. So once again: What is it, that deepest, most powerful, most true desire of ours?
“Success,” you say, or “fulfillment.” Okay, what on earth are those? Of what elements are they comprised, and which are their most important and indispensable component parts?
“All right—happiness!” There you go again! You’ve managed once more to beg the question: What is it, more than anything else, that makes you happy?
All right, here’s the final clue, a Beatles clue: All you need is …
LOVE.
And if you think this is a cliché, then it is the single most powerful cliché ever known to humankind, the one that pervades our thoughts, directs our actions, makes us move, runs our lives. We live for love. Love of parents, love of children, love of husband, love of wife, love of sisters, love of brothers, love of girlfriend, love of boyfriend, love of family, love of friends. That’s what we want and need most of all, and such a vast percentage of the things we do throughout our entire lives is ultimately connected with and geared toward achieving, maintaining and increasing that one incomparably precious treasure: Love.
Sure, there are other objectives and experiences we may strive to attain—the fascination of scholarship, the rush of artistic creation or scientific discovery, the thrill of the fight or the game, the various hedonistic pleasures—but tell me you wouldn’t give up any of these before you’d give up love, tell me you wouldn’t give up the entire kit-and-caboodle of them for the sake of love, and I’ll say it again: You’re a freak. “Without love” (to enlist the Doobie Brothers), “where would you be now?”
Okay, so we’re agreed: No one with enough brains to read this piece will deny that love is at least one of the primary motivating factors informing human endeavor.
So let’s talk just a little bit about love, shall we?
