WHEN a multi-millionaire Beatle asked us to 'Imagine' a world with no possessions, for some reason people took him seriously.
Thankfully, however, not everybody did.
The fact that John Lennon died in tragic circumstances has given a sheen of affection and respectability to the man and his music – and to all his cynical politicking.
People are only too eager to smother the memory of the dead Beatle in well-meaning sentiment – forgetting that in life Lennon was an unpleasantly sarcastic man and a wife beater.
And he abandoned the country (this one!) that gave him everything – which in my book is unforgivable.
Lennon’s most famous song 'Imagine' conjures up a supposedly ideal world where there are no countries and no religion. Frankly, I can’t thing of anything worse.
Given that human culture, in most parts of the word, has always been formed and nourished along national lines, a life without a nation to call your own would be bland beyond belief.
The 'brotherhood of man' is no substitute for belonging to a country.
And, of course, religion is vitally important to all human societies. Without God, actually, there can be no humanity.
For us in the West, Judeao-Christian beliefs built our civilisation – and our civilisation is a great one by any standards. Worth fighting for? Yes, without doubt.
Anyway, I was thinking about all this and the issues of justice raised by the song the other day, when somebody was banging on about what a great anthem 'Imagine' is.
Now, the woman who was praising the song is highly intelligent and a friend of mine.
But I just can’t understand why anyone who has given serious thought about what it means to be human could possibly admire 'Imagine'.
I can quite understand people who are dim / bewildered / drug-addled liking the song, however, because it is so cheesily simplistic.
And to be fair it has a pleasant, soothing melody that can even seem beguiling … if you are drunk.
But I just didn’t feel like arguing with my friend about the song.
Instead, I decided to write a poem, which I am calling Imagine Revisited.
I wrote the poem yesterday (Mon 4 June, 2007) and later in the evening I read it publicly at the poetry club I run in New Brighton.
Here is the poem…
IMAGINE REVISITED by Steve Regan
Look at all the detail in a single insect’s wing.
Consider all the love and lust that makes you want to sing,
And all the loss and compromise that being human brings;
Not to mention all the injuries, the piercing and the stings.
And while we’re in reflective mood, let’s think of what can be.
‘Imagine there’s no countries…’ No thanks I’d rather not.
‘And no religion too…’
Bad grammar. It rocks
The ignorant heart
And creates naïve world view.
Imagine there’s no religion … that means no point to life
No force that built the western lands
No joy, no culture, no strife
No way of telling that things are wrong
No wit, no wisdom, no sacred song
No hope, no courage, no battling souls
No heart, no hearth, no burning coals
No love for her, no help for him
No one to blame for original sin
No running mascara, no panda eyes
No piss-take sniggers, no cunning lies
No richness to life … for dreamers like John
When all that makes us human … is gone
Imagine there’s no suffering and so no hope of death
In Lennon’s eternal fantasyland, we’ll all breathe out tinned breath
But we’ll Imagine, we’ll Imagine, we’ll Imagine …
Well no. We won’t.
Because imagination will be dead.
*** We regularly get quite a good crowd at the Bards of New Brighton poetry evenings, held on the first Monday of each month in the enclosed front parlour of the Little Brighton Inn, Rowson Street, New Brighton, starting at 8.30pm.
If you are a writer, please do come along and read your stuff. I am hoping to collect the best pieces and produce them as an anthology, so please bring spare hard copies for possible future publication. The next meeting of the Bards will be on Monday 2 July.
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Lord Vino du Matin wrote...
You're lucky you have not been shot for this. I think the greatest tragedy srrounding John lennon was not his death, not his misguided hippiness, not his struggle with his own working-class, misogynistic nature, his violence, but the fact that, after Jeff Lynne and ELO spendng years trying to sound like the late Beatles, Lennon's last record, Double fantasy, sounded like ELO....
*** REGAN REPLIES: All those years you spent writing about politics, Lord Vino, you should have spent writing about music. It is definitely more fun being a Hip Young Gunslinger than a Westminster village boozehound. Take it from me - the hottest young writing talent to hit Merseyside in decades!
Posted by: Lord Vino du Matin | June 6, 2007 11:21 AM