Stella, My Dear

Martha my dear, / Though I spend my days in conversation, / Please remember me.

At roughly 12:30am this morning, the fog and pain and confusion and frustration that Stella, our pet for over 9 ½ years, has been moving through since at least last October was taken away. She’s gone.

I have an old and dear friend, who is both far more adept at all things technological than I (I mean, he builds robots for a living), but also far more adept at connecting with the flora and fauna of God’s creation than I am as well (despite my pretension to being an actually skilled gardener). Not long ago, he and his family lost a beloved family pet to cancer, an English Sheepdog named Mieka. (Martha, the nominal inspiration for Paul McCartney’s composition “Martha My Dear,” was also an English Sheepdog, who lived to the ripe old age of 15.) Mieka, my friend wrote, despite her pain and weakness in her final days, would still try to lick the hands of those who sat beside her, “reaching across vast distances of brain architecture and genetic selection to make a direct emotional connection.” Mieka, my friend wrote, “is teaching me how to die....We were created to leave our mark on the hearts of others and for them to leave their marks on us....When my time comes, I hope I'll be strong enough to follow her example.”

Stella, unfortunately, was not blessed with a death that allowed her the cognitive power to follow through on whatever buried instinct, the fruit of perhaps 40,000 years of social selection and evolution, had previous impelled her to love and want to connect with her humans. She was a rescue dog, so we never knew for certain how old she was; when we brought her home on December 4, 2015, her handlers put her age at 2 or 3 years old. So when her end came very early this morning, she was perhaps around 12 years old. She’d been slowing down some for a few years; she couldn’t jump up on our bed any longer, and her hearing may have been far enough gone that the summer fireworks no longer terrified her as they had every year before. But she was still mostly the same animal we’d known and made part of our lives for most of a decade. 

But then came her first seizure last September, which terrified us. Then came another, and then came the anti-seizure medication (phenobarbital) which dulled her senses even further and completely changed her personality. She became a dog that slept frequently, didn’t respond well, and wandered the house, following the same circular path over and over; she still ate, but she couldn’t control her bowels very well any longer, and when we’d get her to take walks outside–once her favorite thing, but increasingly harder as the months went by–she’d often be listless, leaning to one side and going in circles if we didn’t pull her along. The last walk of her life, last Sunday, she moved so slowly, her hindquarters often giving out underneath her, with even stepping up on a curb posing a challenge. And then yesterday afternoon, when I helped her outside to do her business after work, it was almost impossible to get her to move; she seemed to have no sense of her location, and she tumbled down steps and walked into walls as though she could no longer see. In a single evening, she had three seizures, and her breathing was labored. She struggled to stand, and couldn’t; she had no interest in food. We decided it was time, and called the emergency hospital after 10pm. We waited until Kristen returned from work, and then off we went, after first allowing our other children, in Wisconsin and New Mexico, to Facetime with her; I hope she could at least hear their voices. In the end, at the hospital, she lifted her head and turned toward us as we hugged her goodbye; I want to believe she knew we were there.

She was, from the beginning, a hyper-territorial and defensive dog. We didn’t know what breed she was until one day when she–after I foolishly left the backyard gate unrepaired and capable to being pushed open by a strong 60lb. animal–heard a lawnmower in the field behind our house, jumped against the gate barking furiously (her barking was always furious!), pushed through to the field, and attacked (though, I suspect, never actually broke the skin of) the man on the mower, which resulted in a visit from animal control and Stella having to spend a week in the city pound, during which she got a genetic test. A Pointer and Australian Cattle Dog mix, it turns out, which explains some of the aggressiveness. What a hysterical, overflowing creature she often was back then! Her licks, her insistence on getting the right number of pets, her ability to go completely still and focus entirely on whatever squirrels or bicyclists or dangers lurked right outside our living room window, ready to explode in deafening barks if any human being or rabbit or loud car or, sometimes, anything, came into her sight. Having guests over to the house was all but impossible for years. 

Perhaps in retrospect we should have always suspected that something just wasn’t quite right with the poor creature’s brain. We would laugh at and take delight in her strange way of thinking (or unthinking, as the case may often have been). If we had been a different family–a wealthier one, perhaps, or a more disciplined one, or one that managed our time better, or a dozen other things–maybe our too often desultory efforts at discipline and training in her early years with us might have stuck better. But then again, perhaps not. She quickly figured out a job–protecting the house from intruders, meaning everyone who wasn’t us–and sometimes including us, as Caitlyn, who slept in the downstairs bedroom during these years, discovered; she was convinced Stella forgot who she was overnight and accordingly responded defensively whenever she came upstairs in the morning. When we’d load her in the car to take her on walks or expeditions elsewhere–Buffalo Park, Swanson Park, Pawnee Prairie Park, even El Dorado Lake–she’d calm down slightly, but only slightly. Holding on to her leash tightly, to prevent her from leaping out at passing cars or charging other dogs (or, of course, any other small mammals) became necessary, both for her own safety and to save us from lawsuits. When we first brought her home and Kristen was the one who most often held her leash, there were times when Stella would win out, and nine-year-old Kristen would be dragged along behind her.

Stella was always, first and foremost, Kristen’s dog. She had begged for some sort of pet for years; it really almost didn’t matter what (at different times, she was infatuated with gerbils, rats, ferrets, and more). Once Megan had moved out, Melissa and I became a lot more receptive to the idea that the family had passed its peak in size, and as it shrank the youngest, Kristen, would always be tagging along behind her older sisters. So one December, despite our resistance–mostly because of the expense–we finally responded to her pleas; we would get a dog. And Kristen was (mostly) great as Stella’s companion; she was responsible for her food, and she and I would walk her together around the neighborhood, twice a day, so regular that on a couple of occasions folks whom we didn’t know would call us out while driving by the house or seeing us walking home from church, complementing us on how good we treated Stella. Kristen attempted to teach Stella tricks, with very moderate success (she would put together obstacle courses for Stella to navigate in the backyard; with the appropriate treat incentives, she would). She stayed in Kristen's room for years, frequently joining her on her bed (in some ways a frustrating choice, since Stella, when she spread out, could take up a lot of space, and Kristen got used to sleeping curled up in a ball).

Time changes everything, of course. The Covid-19 pandemic upended our household, and then changes in daily schedules–Melissa working full-time, Kristen in high school and then working herself–upended them further. In later years, it was far more common that she’s sleep on our bed, especially if there were a storm or people blowing off fireworks or anything else that made her nervous or concerned or scared. Stella truly became a family dog, one more of our children, rather than, as she had been originally, something of an appendage to our youngest. Melissa had always been the Alpha, the one most capable of getting Stella to respond and obey, particularly when her behavior got really egregious. Stella mostly respected that (though getting her to stay behind an invisible line and not enter the kitchen or dining area until we were finished eating was a constant struggle, one that, for some years, resulted in a successful detente between Melissa and our garbage dog, though even then her waiting behind the line or beneath the table, staring at us, waiting for permission–or for us to waver in our attention, which was really the same thing–to start eating any scraps she could find on the floor or, when we weren’t looking, on the table or counters themselves, was a constant as well.

Over the last few years, it was basically I that was walking Stella once a day, feeding her, taking her to the vet. I actually don’t think I was ever her favorite, assuming she even had one, but we got along well. I was the goofy male in the household–well, the only male, actually, which I guess allowed me to be ridiculous with her whenever I could. She was relaxed around me. When we walked, she no longer pulled at the leash to chase squirrels or threaten to leap into traffic to confront some noisy garbage truck or innocent cyclist; instead we would just walk together, wandering all around our neighborhood, following the Cowskin Creek runoff or intruding on the Rolling Hills County Club’s golf course. It came to be an important part of my routine, in humid summer heat and bitter winter cold. Like I did with the cows I milked long ago, I would talk to Stella, run through whole conversations with her as we walked. I could never tell if she was listening, but the whole arrangement felt agreeable to me. I hope she felt the same.

Sitting here, writing this, almost exactly 12 hours after we’d decided that the time had come to ease her out of her misery, I’m sad, as I think everyone in the family is, but also content knowing that her life, which had been irreparably changed by a tumor or synapse or congenital defect that could only be controlled by medication that could calm her mind, but not prevent the continued deterioration of her body, had run its course. It was terribly, terribly hard last night, as anyone who has ever put a pet down knows. But this morning, after waking with a headache, and feeling drained from our late night, I wandered the neighborhood, following some of the same paths that Stella and I (and Kristen, and Melissa, and at one point or another everyone in the family) had walked hundreds of times before. I was listening to some somber music, when to my surprise Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” came on, with its long, slow, mellow sax intro. And though the songs have nothing to do with each other, I thought of McCartney’s simple ode: 

Hold your hand out, / You silly girl, / See what you've done. / When you find yourself in the thick of it, / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl. 

Stella was a silly girl, a dog who, when she was in the thick of her life, would happily, aggressively, determinedly, with a complete lack of guile or reservation, leap in to help herself of some of it. For nearly 10 years, we were able to give her a home to live that life in. She may not have been as brave or kind or wise as some dogs, like Mieka, have been. But she was ours, and we were hers, and for a good long time, that arrangement felt just great. Everyone needs a silly dog; thank God we had this one. I hope somewhere, while chasing a squirrel, she agrees.

 

Listening to Lennon #2: Imagine

By the spring of 1971, Lennon's confused mess of anger, resentment, and frustration had a focus: his oldest and truest friend, Paul McCartney. Macca's own frustrations had led him to sue the Beatles as an organization in order to force a break-up of the legal entanglements that were, in his view, preventing any of them from moving forward either artistically or financially. This had, obviously, infuriated the other Beatles, with his formal announcement that The Beatles were no more--something that Lennon had made clear nearly a year and half earlier but which the band had agreed to keep quiet--compounding the (not inaccurate) controlling image they'd developed of Paul. And then there was the release of McCartney's second solo album, Ram which (deservedly) enjoyed much more commercial success than did his first, and which (undeservedly) generated immense ire on the part of John, mostly due to "Too Many People," a song with a couple of Lennon-aimed snarks that was, as I wrote before about this slight but enjoyable album, "probably about as close as McCartney can ever get to building up righteous indignation." So as Lennon went into the studio, similarly determined to make his second solo album less artistic and more accessible, he did so with at least one additional goal--give it to Paul McCartney but good. But he didn't get around to that until most of the way through the album.

Imagine is most famous, of course, for its masterful title track, which opens the album. Some people will go to their deathbeds insisting that they hate "Imagine" or at least find it vapid or saccharine or somehow quasi-totalitarian, but I think these people are being driven political hang-ups, whether they acknowledge them or not. Yes, lyrically the song is ponderous and self-important--and this is where the Yoko Ono haters note her influence on the song--but its melody is sweet, its piano gorgeous, and its overall vibe, weighted by over a half-century of invocations, is exactly what album producer Phil Spector aimed for it to be: anthemic. Steve Martin has gotten 15 years worth of laughs out of his gag number "Atheists Don't Have No Songs," but of course Lennon proved him wrong decades before. "Imagine" is a damn hymn, a reverent paean to a worldview that has moved tens of millions, and must be respected as such.

It's not, I think, the best or most beautiful song on the album though. For that, I would nominate "Jealous Guy," which is just an astonishing gem, one I'd never really listened to over all the decades (the decision not to release it as a single was a crime). I can see the argument that the song's lush, haunting arrangement is overproduced, but to my ear the strings and percussion are properly placed in the background of Lennon's vocal, which is, in my opinion, equal to any of his best Beatles ballads, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" or "Dear Prudence." And lyrically it's fascinating: obviously autobiographical, yet also open-ended. Ian Leslie, writing in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is convinced (mostly by the whistling break in the song; he sees that as a give-away) that while Lennon was, thanks to the intensive therapy he'd subjected himself to, plainly thinking about Yoko, he was probably also thinking about Paul. McCartney himself agrees, or at least did at one time; Leslie quotes him in his book: "In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say 'Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.' He wrote 'I'm Just a Jealous Guy,' and he said that the song was about me." I don't know if I believe that, but I want to.

So two absolutely great, and eminently listenable songs on this album; what else? "Crippled Inside," another obvious product of Lennon's therapy, is to my mind a spiritual cousin to McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a song with lyrics spelling out interior ugliness while being accompanied by a delightfully jaunty--in this case rockabilly rather than musical hall--tune. "It's So Hard" is a short, solid blues song, perhaps a little too prettified by the album's production, but worth listening to a time or three. The propulsive beat of  "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Want to Die" hides the fact that the song is as underdeveloped as any of Macca's lazier tunes; Lennon's just vamping here. The same can be said for "Gimme Some Truth." "How" is a perfectly fine love ballad, though after listening to it over and over, I'm convinced McCartney stole from it for "So Bad" on Pipes of Peace. By contrast "Oh My Love," which Lennon co-wrote with Yoko (he actually acknowledged her contribution on this song, unlike on others), is a genuinely searching and loving song, with George Harrison's gentle guitar accenting Lennon's voice wonderfully. And the final track, "Oh Yoko!," is a head-popping, hand-clapping charmer, a bright and hopeful tune with a harmonica finale that finishes off the album excellently.

What did I skip? "How Do You Sleep?," of course. What do say about this musically compelling, lyrically embarrassing song? It's a huge, burning, sweeping number, funky and intense in its groove; with a better subject matter it might have been one of Lennon's greatest recordings. But as it is, this awesome musical set-up just perversely provides listeners with a bunch of cheap shots. Some of the lines are admittedly quite sharp ("The sound you make is Muzak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years"), but mostly what Lennon spilled out about his former songwriting partner was childish and mean. (It's not to George Harrison's credit that he got into the recording with such gusto; one the other hand, it is to Ringo Starr's credit that, when he stopped by the studio, he was nonplussed by it all, and told John it was time to stop.) John later dismissed the song, and apparently Paul was able to get past it as well. Again, Leslie situates the song in John and Paul's long, complicated relationship, quoting Lennon as simply stating that "How Do You Sleep?" actually "isn't about Paul. It's about me."

How to rank Imagine? It's better than Plastic Ono Band, though not by leaps and bounds. The best stuff on it is some truly world-class pop music; the worst stuff on it drags it down. I give it an A-; a genuinely great album, but not quite as great as it could have been.

Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.

Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”

Regarding John (and Paul, and the Beatles too, but Mostly John)

Paul McCartney has been my favorite Beatle for years, as the long journey I took in 2019 through Macca's then-nearly-50-years' worth of solo, non-Beatles recordings should prove. The man is simply incredible, as a musician, performer, arranger, and instrumentalist. He's got an uncanny ear for melody, and his elastic appreciation of different sounds and styles, along with his incredible (however inconsistent) work ethic, has meant that he's built songs for decades that demonstrate a mastery, or at least a partial mastery, of the capaciousness of pop music. I can't think of any English-speaking artist besides Bob Dylan whose influence on popular music in the 20th century (and more!) can compare with Sir Paul, and it frustrates me to no end that while I was able to finally catch the former in concert, I've probably missed my chance to ever see the latter. 

But all that said, after recently reading Ian Leslie's tremendous John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, I found myself thinking: have I, perhaps in kind of a perverse refusal of the worship of John Lennon which I saw all around me in pop culture as a young person in the 1980s, purposefully underplayed the role John played in making Paul the musician he became? As a pop radio kid, I was vaguely learning who the Beatles were at a very young age--and yet out of any of them, it was the groovy hits that McCartney put out that I learned first, and that perhaps overshadowed whatever else I was picking up. Despite being a news addict from elementary school on, I actually have no memory of the announcement of Lennon's murder in December 1980 (just before I turned 12). Instead what I remember was the endless reminiscences of him, on every station and in every publication, for months if not years afterward (a sad scene about how devastating many found his murder even showed up in one of my Moon Knight comic books). Perhaps all that--no doubt combined with the anti-hippie vibes that weren't too hard to find in the conservative Mormon milieu I was raised in--made me inclined to just not take John seriously.

If I did, that's a huge mistake, not just because Lennon is an artist worth reckoning with, but because it undermines my own understanding of  McCartney. As all the very biographies of Paul I read confirmed (indeed, how I even noted here when talking about Peter Jackson's Get Back), John's relationship with, his competition with, and his collaboration with Paul is probably incalculable in terms of how they all contributed to Paul's musical genius. I'm not saying the world wouldn't have known Paul McCartney if the 17-year-old John Lennon hadn't have captivated him and then, upon sizing up the 15-year-old Paul's audition for him, invited him to join his group The Quarry Men when they first met in the summer of 1957; I think Paul is just too protean an artistic force to have been kept down by any circumstance or lack thereof. But without his older friend's wit, his anger, his arrogance and his neediness, his mix of idealism and cynicism, and most of all his friendship? Black 47's Larry Kirwan once wrote a play--"Liverpool Fantasy"--that imagined an alternative history where the Beatles hadn't made it (in Kirwan's imagination they broke up, tellingly, because John quit the group when they seemed ready to acquiesce--as did actually happen--to studio demands for them to play something other the rock and roll John was devoted to at their very first recording session in 1962). While Kirwan presented John, George, and Ringo as all still living in Liverpool, Paul wasn't; by the play's imagined 1986, he'd become a massive American pop superstar, singing in Las Vegas and cranking out heavily orchestrated, disposable hits under the name "Paul Montana." I think that's a little cruel, a fiction that leans too hard into the mostly (but only mostly) false image of Paul as a crowd-pleasing, superficial hit-making machine. But still: any honest reckoning with Paul's history and accomplishment simply cannot due without considering what John's drives and hang-ups and delights and hatreds helped make him into.

So that's what I'm going to do for the rest of 2025: listen to John Lennon's solo music--all of it--closely, and see what I think, and how I can put it together with my understanding of the life he led, and what that understanding of Lennon's aspirations and accomplishments says to me. This will be an easier task than what I did with Paul; for one thing, with his life tragically ended 45 years ago, John had far less time than Paul has had to build up a musical library to explore. Thanks to the same friend who encouraged and enabled me to do my deep dive into McCartney's music back in 2019, I have available to me remastered recordings of all eight of Lennon's post-Beatles albums (yes, that means I'm skipping over the three avant-garde albums of experimental music that he and Yoko Ono produced in 1968 and 1969), plus a collection of Lennon's officially released non-album singles and various studio outtakes and home recordings. I'll review and reflect upon one of those albums each month, May through December. For today though, some random thoughts about and reviews of that catch-all collection first.

The singles portion of John Lennon: Singles and Home Tapes consists of six songs, all of which are terrific. This isn't surprising; they all were, after all, studio recordings that the engineers and record company people and John himself all thought worthy of an independent release, and whatever may or may not be said about any of those others, Lennon himself, whatever his limitations as an instrumentalist or solo songwriter, had a deep, intuitive grasp of both the zeitgeist and of American rock and roll as it enraptured him as a teenager in the 1950s--he knew what worked (usually, anyway). Three of the singles are first-rate expressions of that rock and roll sensibility; of the others, one is among the greatest popular Christmas songs written and recorded in the past century, and two more are inseparable from the equally idealistic and simplistic (and "commercializable," if that's a word) peacenik movement of the late 1960s; to criticize them on the level of songmanship, as opposed to the sing-along tunes of protest they were purposefully designed to be, is to misunderstand completely what Lennon, as guided and shaped by his new love and wife Yoko, had determined himself to become. Which is not to say they should be criticized. On the contrary, whether or not they're world-class musical art, the truth is that even John's hippie singles provide more than adequate proof that, at its best, John's talent--mixed up as it was with his anger with himself and the status quo, his deep insecurity about his own accomplishments and relationships, his double-minded contempt for (but also longing for) intellectual and artistic pretension, and his often messianic idealism--could nonetheless still create great music, even without his greatest friend, rival, and partner at his side (or looking over his shoulder).

"Give Peace a Chance," the last of the six on the "Singles" disc, was the first one recorded, in a Montreal hotel room during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" in the summer of 1969, with dozens of hippie hanger-ons and luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, etc.) clapping and singing along; the second to last on the disc, "Move Over Ms. L," was the latest one recorded, from John's drug-addled "Lost Weekend" period in Los Angeles in 1974, a short and quick, delightfully innocent, mostly nonsense rocker, that shows that all hallucinogenics in the world couldn't stop Lennon from approximating Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins when he had a mind to do so. It's my favorite song out of the whole collection, to be honest; comparable to some of the very best of McCartney's straightforward solo pop, I think. I can't listen to it and not think of the rocking gem from the Beatles' rooftop concert, "One After 909," where John and Paul's love for each other and the rock and roll music which made them who they were is just overflowing.

As for the rest, "Cold Turkey," a bluesy hard rock tune, also from 1969, features Eric Clapton on guitar, and would have been a perfect fit with The White Album's "Revolution" (the single version, not the album one), or when Lennon performed "Yer Blues" with Clapton and Keith Richards as The Dirty Mac in 1968. "Power to the People," from 1971, is a strong, quasi-R&B song that no doubt often fired up crowds during anti-war protests back in the day, with Bobby Keys, the Texas saxophone wonder who went on to power so many classic Rolling Stones tunes--and whom I was lucky enough to see perform live back in 2009--giving this song much of its oomph. "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)," from 1970, is a pulsing, insistent number, with the sound just rushing at the listener from almost the first beat; it's not surprising that Phil Spector was in the recording studio for that one. And who can criticize 1971's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"? Sure, self-conscious 19th-century traditionalists can, and so can Christians who insist that not centering the Biblical story in every holiday song is some kind of crime. But other than those sticks-in-the-mud, it's hard to imagine finding any sincere fault with the tune. Lennon managed in this song to channel the spirit of the season in a musically simple, politically pointed, historically grounded, yet entirely inviting and open-ended way. Most other songwriters never come close to that level of accomplishment, and John, in 1971, was still just getting started.

The "Home Tapes" disc of the collection is a mixed bag. It's interesting to hear early and alternate takes of such songs as "Mother," "God," and "Beautiful Boy," but they can't compare to the official album tracks--though perhaps, as I work my way through the albums themselves, I'll change my mind. For now, I think the only track that truly makes it worth owning is the solo piano version it contains of the unreleased "Serve Yourself" (a track that exists in many bootlegged versions, some of them exceptionally profane). I don't consider it a particularly good song--but then, I'm biased, as I consider Dylan's Christian albums mostly strong and powerful music, and the specific song that Lennon found infuriating and was inspired to respond to--"Gotta Serve Somebody"--a masterpiece for both gospel and rock and roll. Lennon didn't agree, unsurprisingly. Which is okay; John followed his own path, one that was tragically cut short far too early. For the rest of the year, I'm going to follow it the best I can.