Strawberry Fields Forever

The December before John Lennon was assassinated outside the Dakota where he lived in New York City, legendary record producer George Martin joined him for dinner at the former Beatle’s apartment.

Martin, who died a decade ago, quoted Lennon as saying at that gathering, “ ‘You know George, if I could, I would record everything the Beatles did all over again.’ I blanched. ‘Blimey, John, rather you than me. Everything?’ He said, ‘Everything.’ I searched my mind for all the wonderful things we’d done, and said, ‘What about “Strawberry Fields”?’ He looked at me over his specs and said, ‘Especially “Strawberry Fields.” ’ ”

Reading that passage in Philip Norman’s 2008 bio John Lennon: The Life set me to wondering why human beings — especially gifted, created types — are so often hard on themselves, remaining perpetually dissatisfied with wonderful works and accomplishments.

Even a puffed-up, narcissistic braggart liked Donald Trump must have moments of self-doubt. If not, why the need for the endless stream of humilating bowing, degrading scraping and self-abasing tributes and encomia from his contemptible court of servile lickspittles, amoral toadies and cynical sycophants (a group that, unlike most people, richly deserves the feelings of worthlessness and torrents of self-loathing that surely wash over whatever remains of their souls when alone in their rooms at night).

To me, what is striking about Lennon’s remark is not merely that he wanted to redo the Beatles’ catalogue — artists are forever wanting to revise, retouch, remaster and otherwise molest their own past — but that he felt particularly dissatisfied with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a song that to many listeners occupies that tiny pantheon of works that seem somehow exempt from criticism. Not merely excellent but complete. Finished. A masterpiece whose existence appears to argue against the necessity of improvement itself.

Martin wasn’t out of line when he described the recording, which devoured an unprecedented 55 hours of studio time, as “a complete tone poem — like a modern Debussy.” That is, I think it’s not too bad.

This highlights one of the least discussed but most consequential asymmetries between creators and audiences.

The audience experiences the work. The creator experiences the process. We hear “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Lennon heard the missed note, the abandoned idea, the version that existed briefly at three in the morning before fatigue or technical limitation or impatience forced a different choice. We encounter the cathedral; the architect remembers every scaffolding collapse.

The gap might be unbridgeable. I mean, it must be high or low.

One suspects that genius often consists not in possessing unusual confidence but in possessing unusual dissatisfaction. The ordinary person finishes a project and thinks, Well, thank God that’s over. What’s for lunch? The gifted person finishes and immediately notices the distance between the thing as realized and the thing as imagined. In fact, the greater the imagination, the greater that distance may become, because the imagined ideal grows ever more intricate, luminous … and impossible.

This would explain why so many creators appear, from the outside, absurdly ungrateful for their accomplishments. A novelist wins the highest literary prizes and remains preoccupied with an infelicitous paragraph on page 312. A filmmaker responsible for scenes that permanently alter the visual vocabulary of an art form lies awake, contemplating a continuity error involving a lampshade. A composer who has moved millions cannot listen to his own recordings without wincing.

The rest of us want to shake them by the shoulders. What are you talking about? Can’t you hear what you’ve done?

Perhaps they can’t.

Or perhaps hearing what they have done is precisely the problem.

The finished work is a fossil of decisions. Every decision implies rejected alternatives. The creator possesses a memory archive unavailable to everyone else. The audience sees one road. The artist sees a map littered with roads not taken. Every tour de force is haunted by stillborn ghosts.

Perfection itself turns out to be such a psychologically dangerous idea. The moment one creates something genuinely excellent, one acquires not satisfaction but a benchmark. The achievement becomes less a monument than a burden. One must now live in relation to it.

This is true far beyond the arts. Consider the Olympic athlete who wins gold at 19 and then spends the next 70 years being introduced as the person who once won gold at 19. The entrepreneur who successfully builds a company and subsequently discovers that success does not eliminate insecurity but merely professionalizes it. The stakes increase. The audience expands. The expectations metastasize.

Even an inveterate, insatiable, trash-talking, bred-in-the-bone, swaggering travesty like Baron von Trumphausen is not immune.

One of the curiosities of vanity is that it is often mistaken for self-love when it may actually be a specialized form of self-doubt. Genuine confidence requires remarkably little maintenance. It is self-sustaining. The need for constant affirmation, by contrast, resembles a furnace that consumes fuel at alarming rates.

This is why public displays of grandiosity can be oddly revealing. The person who truly believes he is seven feet tall does not spend all day demanding measurements. The endless insistence upon one’s greatness suggests that the verdict remains somehow unsettled.

Not necessarily consciously unsettled. Human beings possess extraordinary capacities for hiding things from themselves. But unsettled nonetheless. (That is, I think I disagree.)

The larger question is whether dissatisfaction is a defect or a feature. Civilization owes an incalculable debt to people who looked at perfectly acceptable things and said, No. Better. Again.

The same impulse that torments artists also cures diseases, advances science and sends spacecraft beyond the solar system. If human beings were easily satisfied, we might all still be living in caves congratulating ourselves on the excellent quality of our caves.

Yet there is a cost.

The cost is that fulfilment becomes perpetually deferred. The horizon recedes. Every accomplishment transforms into evidence not of arrival but of remaining distance. The creator’s curse is that the imagination outruns reality. The imagination can always outrun reality because reality must obey physical laws while imagination enjoys diplomatic immunity from them.

The most moving thing about Lennon’s comment is not its perfectionism but its poignancy. Here was a man whose work had already entered history, whose songs had become part of the emotional architecture of millions of lives, and yet he remained engaged in the same private argument that afflicts a teenager staring unhappily at a sketchbook. He never stopped being that conflicted teen in his room at 251 Menlove Avenue.

Greatness does not exempt one from being human. In fact, it may intensify the condition.

The rest of us listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” and hear transcendence. Lennon listened and heard unfinished business. No one, I think, is in his tree.

Maybe both perceptions are true. Maybe every masterpiece is simultaneously a miracle and a compromise. Maybe the audience gets the miracle while the artist keeps the compromise. Maybe that is the arrangement upon which most of human culture depends.

And nothing to get hung about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8