How John Lennon fabricated the Godhead figure we know and love as ‘John Lennon’
John Lennon once said that “reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” He fittingly lingers somewhere between the two. The real John Lennon is subsumed somewhere within the myth that he managed to muster. Now, his legacy may be troubled and turbulent, but it is also pretty much unsurpassable. He remains the Godhead of pop culture—a divine essence by design who continually proves impossible to define. He’s far from the only one to forge their own lore, but he is the only one to fabricate John Lennon.
The man himself was fanatical about myth, from an obsession with the number nine to the notion of your influence outgrowing your own output. He was proved right on the latter. Much of what we attribute to Lennon in the lore of his legacy was never even said by the man himself. Take, for instance, that supposed schoolboy quote from him whereby he tells a careers advisor, when he was impossibly young, that when he was older, he wanted to be happy, and when they said he didn’t understand the question, he told the poor employee simply doing their job that they didn’t understand life.
Of course, he never actually said that. Some of the false reports on this incident claim he was even a mere five years old when he philosophised this mature decree. For some, it would render him just about the most insufferable child in history, but for others, it seems to ordain him as a future deity with knowledge beyond his years lingering somewhere close to divine. In both cases, however, it is a falsehood that builds up the idea of a saintly dreamer with a wisdom so youthful that it proves hard to reconcile.
It especially proves hard to reconcile when you examine the realities that he was also a self-confessed former ‘wife beater’, and his son Julian Lennon famously declared: “Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces—no communication, adultery, divorce? You can’t do it, not if you’re being true and honest with yourself.”
However, in a strange way, even the legacy that doesn’t whitewash these terrible traits still somehow has contradictions implying a sense of truth. It is a truth beyond an ordinary arc of salvation too. It’s not like we see Lennon as a reformed hero—a vagabond who went from wayward youth to a paragon of peace and love. His character curve isn’t linear, it’s an odd spectrum. That is true of everyone, but not public legends—legends usually have an angle, but Lennon’s is a mythological blur that served to only enhance his Godhead status in our minds.
He was always forthright in the extreme with what he felt. He openly mentioned his past misdemeanours. He spoke about seeking to understand his own character as though it was a separate aberration of the self. He was forever happy to contradict himself, to offend and make waves. Even spending a week in bed had a point for Lennon. He would undermine this by saying he had seen UFOs or engaging in angry outbursts that made his long hair and wholesomeness seem like a sham.
It was this, in part, that helped to weave him into the mythic space he now occupies in pop culture. How do you fathom the man who couldn’t figure himself out? How do you pin down a character who adhered stringently to nothing much? How do you place an eternal chameleon who never noticeably changed? When you mix this with his utter transcendence in society, then his place as a Godhead is largely predictable.
His reverence is not because we view him as holier than thou or even an absolute musical genius, it is because he changed the world by never being anything other than himself, whoever that is. As Yoko Ono conveniently proclaimed: “You change the world by being yourself.” Lennon was somehow a paradigm of that, and yet the ‘self’ in question is a complex web unfathomable from the outside.
The Beatles really did change our lives forever. Kids hum ‘Hey Jude’ and come across the concept of a yellow submarine long before they have a clue who the fabled ‘Fab Four’ are. However, we can place the others and, therefore, humanise them, but by both design and virtue of his character, Lennon should really be called ‘The Mystic One’. Albeit the old rule is not to give too much of yourself away, Lennon gave away so much that we could never comprehend of cubbyhole the mass of his mixed-up persona. Add to that the idolatry that surrounds his artistic output, the way he titillatingly leaned into this, and you have yourself a pop culture Godhead.
He was not the messiah; he was a very naughty boy—but that’s just another pithy line of millions that have been attributed to him, and that’s the crux of Lennon, he is a bottomless ever-present who we all have an opinion of, and none of them do anything to define the mess of the man, they merely add to the magic.
