markus heuger's
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Beabliography

Summary 0109

Heinonen, Yrjö (2000), "In search of lost order. Archetypal meanings in Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." Paper for the Third National Symposium on Music Research. Jyväskylä, 16-17 April 1999. Published In: Yrjö Heinonen, Jouni Koskimäki, Seppo Niemi and Terhi Nurmesjärvi (eds.), Beatlesstudies 2. History, identity, authenticity. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä (Department of Music, Research Reports 23), 2000, 207-255.

In this article Heinonen criticizes the views that take the connection between "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and LSD for granted, without trying to understand the consequences of long-term usage for the personal identity of the consumer. Heinonen shows that, in the case of Lennon, these long-term effects were further enhanced by the advice from Timothy Leary's book The Psychedelic Experience, which presented LSD as a means to "liberate" oneself from the "imprisonment" of his or her ego. According to Heinonen, the fantastic lyrical and musical images of "Lucy In The Sky" cannot be fully understood without comprehending what it meant "to get rid of your ego," as Lennon himself put it. At the moment of ego-loss — whether due to fatigue, LSD, or death — the mind seems to spontaneously create a hallucinatory order that may be interpreted as an escape to an imaginary paradise from the distress felt by the individual.

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", released in June 1967 by the Beatles, is commonly associated with drugs, especially with LSD. There is no reason to deny this connection. The purpose of this paper is, however, to demonstrate that "Lucy In The Sky" is not an apotheosis of drugs — rather it reflects a search for inner order, lost due to the use of drugs.

In common parlance the term "image" refers to a mental picture of something not actually present. Images are products of imagery, or imagination, both meaning simply the art of making images. According to Jung, an image appears in consciousness somewhat in the manner of vision or hallucination but never has the quasi-real character of these. Jung makes a distinction between primordial images (archetypes), which are common to all people in all times and are thus based on the collective unconscious; and personal images, which are to a great extent unique and express the contents of the personal unconscious. In a broad sense, musical imagery covers all aspects of forming auditory images of something not present to the ears. Here the emphasis is on the synesthetic, kinesthetic, and amodal musical imagery. Synesthesia is subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated. Kinesthesia refers to sensory experiences stimulated by (bodily) movements and tensions. Amodal perception is perception of such qualities as shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns in any sensory mode from any form of human expressive behavior. These qualities are represented abstractly in supra-modal form, amodal representation, which can be transposed to any modality. Pictorial imagery in music is possible because of these amodal representations.

There are two main sources of inspiration for "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" — a drawing by four years old Julian Lennon and the boat rowing scene from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". The opening words of "Lucy" ("picture yourself in a boat on a river") simply ask the listener to tune in to the world of the boat rowing scene. The kinesthetic image of the movement of the water and the boat is produced by the lilting triple metre — a basic characteristic of the barcarolle (Venetian boat song). The synesthetic image of the shimmering sunset sky — as reddish-yellow as tangerine marmalade — is produced by the ethereal, celesta-like sound of the Lowry organ and the buzzing sound of the tambura drone. The archetypal quality of the verse is still enhanced by Lennon's lead vocals, which imitate natural speech by reciting mostly on a single tone, inflecting it by raising or lowering the pitch only at the ends of phrases. In Julian's drawing, "Lucy" — a girl located on the left side of the paper — is drifting in the reddish-yellow sky that forms the background. "Diamonds" are two groups of stars ("solar systems"), each with a large star at the center and smaller stars in the periphery, located on the upper right side of the paper. Below the two "solar systems" there are some musical notes. The relation between Julian's drawing and repeated title-phrase of the song resembles the relationship between the mandala and mantra in Tibetan Buddhism (which Lennon was familiar with). The "solar systems" in Julian's drawing are very much like mandalas, with their clear representation of the center and periphery. The title-phrase has a clear mantra-like quality — it even resembles the "Om Mani Padme Hum" ("jewel in the lotus") mantra, the most oldest and sacred mantra in Tibetan Buddhism. The connection of the drawing-as-a-mandala and the title-as-a-mantra is further enhanced by the musical notation written below the two "solar systems".

Lennon has admitted that during 1965-67 he was destroying his ego with the use of LSD. The first verse of "Lucy In The Sky" represents an escape from this chaotic and anxious reality to an imaginary paradise, whereas the chorus, based on the title-phrase, represents the desired order. According to Jung, the mandala is the archetype — the primordial image — of inner order of the universe or psyche. Whenever there is a great disorder and chaos in a man's mind, the mandala appears spontaneously — in a dream, or fantastic drawings, or something like that — as an order-bringing archetype. This is what happens in "Lucy". Although there is no reason to deny the connection of "Lucy In The Sky" with LSD, regarding it as an apotheosis of LSD — or drugs in general — is not only misleading but simply wrong. If the song is about drugs, it is about bringing order to the drug-distorted mind. In this sense it is not a drug-song but an anti-drug song.