Forty years ago tonight I wrote a poem titled “December 1980” as the news of John Lennon’s death bore down on me from a nearby old-fashioned radio. In those days I was in graduate school in Berkeley, during which time I worked at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy. That night I was by myself in its cramped, dark offices and, when I heard the incomprehensible words drift through, I plunked myself down in front of an old typewriter and banged out this piece, all in a rush. I never revised it. Here it is:

December 1980

 Cold, clear night in a sixties city, hunched

over the typing machine, sharing space tonight

with all the obligatory ghosts who pass in and out

and take no notice of my presence.

Old AM box--

sweeping along the radio band no heaven, it's easy if

you if I fell in dragged a comb across--

 

"It's boring yodeling by

yourself," Lennon

declares.  "Yoko

and I are spiritual

advisors.  I don't want to sing if she's not

there."

 

to turn you--woke up, got out Forget

the cult trappings for once

tonight.  Say he died, was

surprised you know how hard it can

 

Involuntarily singing, I'm taking the high notes

 

all by myself.  No Big Ideas now--no capitalized

pronouncements.  No Finitude.  No

Contingency.

 

Shot seven times. 

 

"Russian troops are in a high state of readiness," the box declares between reports of the other madness.

 

Surprise, surprise.

 

"I'm going to tell the world about you, John," the fictional fussy road manager blurts out in that first movie. 

"Just watch--I'll tell them."

 

the world's at your commandAnd All Efforts to Revive

 

we'd love

 

We'd love

Some time later I wrote another poem called “Light Green,” which was ostensibly about an old dance hall on the outskirts of Olympia, Washington where I grew up, but was really about John Lennon discovering “supreme joy” just months before his death. I had read a newspaper article where Lennon said he had experienced this while lost in a crowd in Hong Kong. Here is that outing:

Light Green

 

I am thinking of the

Evergreen Ballroom, a rambling, cavernous barn,

thirty miles from the nearest town, once a

must stop for struggling bands.

Before they were famous,

Jefferson Airplane played here once. 

Buffalo Springfield.

Carlos Santana.

(But also The Surprise Package and Merilee Rush.)

 

Ancient lore.  Now, it is a lumbering whale

floating under the waves of the

nearby drowned mountains,

floating under the moon.  Now,  only

the soft circles that once passed over the

hardwood floor

of this abandoned bone-white ice-rink of a building

survive,

with the faintest remembrance of faces close,

of magic hands touching.

 

The slightest sensation calls those hands to mind,

lattices where the small and pollenated light re-enters,

fluttering paper-thin birds

quilted together in the

luminous dark sky --

together, then released,

then returning, again and again.

 

(Two months before his death,

John Lennon lost himself in the crowded streets

of Hong Kong and discovered supreme joy.)

 

Now, silence -- no lingering Grace Slick shrill,

no Neil Young whine.  The breath only, and

the creaking slosh of the whale

gliding into a warmer current,

further south.

 

Here it is four decades later and John Lennon, for me and for many, is as brilliantly alive as ever. While the Beatles in one form disappeared in 1970, they (or it — that translucent, culture-bending greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Gestalt they had became) have gone on to have one robust life after another, weaving themselves into the world’s mind more insistently year by year. Who could have predicted this when they called it quits, or even when Lennon was dispatched that wintry night in front of the Dakota?

In 1980 I had just begun to ruminate on nonviolence. I was reading Thomas Merton, whose essays, including “Blessed Are the Meek,” put this front and center, but it was a slow process. Even here Lennon might have been helpful. As forty years of Beatles exegesis has illuminated, Lennon could be violent and cruel. But he gradually came to see that these tendencies were a dead end. Schooled in part by the peace movement of the late 1960s, he even came to see the logic of a creative alternative. “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game,” he is quoted as saying. “The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.”

Indeed.

Nonviolence and humor are counter-signs to the verities of a system mired in domination and power, and this “working class hero” was forever looking for a way out from under it. In the end, this came less from occasional, gnomic statements than from a ceaselessly creative output, upending expectations and opening up bracing possibilities. That’s how his river of songs functioned, slowly remaking the potentialities of the world, one lyric at a time, as it washed over us and carried us away.

Lennon is incandescent. Even if he may have been kidding about supreme joy, I’ve had my own taste of it over and over again these 40 years because of what he gave us all those years ago — and, even now, keeps on giving.