Is Paul McCartney really dead? Again?

Hard to say. But it must be tough for McCartney if that is really him still walking
around. The hair is the same as in 1966, suggesting he is maybe one of those
visitors from the place-where-time-stops on “Buffy,” who we in the real world
call the “undead.” Maybe he is one of them. And anyway, what kind of loser
would still want an award for work he did 40 years ago? Unless it was the
“luckiest man ever by random happen chance come to the attention of the
singular, historic genius John Lennon on a bus” award. I can’t even remember
that far back. Then whenever he appears someplace like the White House people
begin to wonder again if it is really him or if the real him is really dead.

It is just the opposite with John Lennon. John Lennon really is dead. But like
Elvis, people keep claiming that he is still alive.

It is hard to think of another artist in all of history who has the reputation
for being dead. Although some say David Letterman is really dead.

It was a trying time, the ’60s. A time of going up, much as today is a time of
coming back down. In 1964, two years before the real McCartney allegedly died,
the great surrealist artist Rene Magritte painted a famous picture of an
Englishman in a bowler hat with a green apple in front of his face. Apple was,
of course, the Beatles corporation, and a green apple was its symbol. But
Magritte titled his painting “Son of Man” — from the Book of Daniel, indicating
the arrival of the Awaited One; i.e., the Savior. So as you can see, it caused conversation.
Then we went to the moon, which we had never done before, and it somehow seemed
a parallel to the rise of the Beatles arc, which reached crescendo with the
Vedic claim, “I am he” — that man-in-the-bowler-hat/Awaited One thing again. And
everyone was stoned then, which made it all that more confusing.

“I was the Walrus, but now I’m John,” Lennon wrote in pain at the end of the
astonishing journey. It was a journey of enlightenment for tens of millions, a
journey to the East, and a journey back. It was a journey that transformed the
West, for if there was no John Lennon then to find a path, there would be no
Dalai Lama today speaking regularly at Emory University.

William Butler Yeats writes: “What portion in the world can the artist have/Who
has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?”

Such was the lot of John Lennon. He had become the bodhisattva in exile who never
smiled for the cameras again when he returned from India. But on this sacred
journey of transformation McCartney, clownishly scrapping and bowing today
before queens and presidents and milking it for every dollar, wrote a few sweet
tunes, but was only along for the ride.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.