Sárospataki Füzetek 1. (1997)

1997 / 2. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: How can we go forward? (Hogyan tovább?)

DR. FRANK SAWYER

real progress. It functioned as a counterculture critique of technology, religion and the modern capitalist/socialist dilemmas. But where does such radical peace and a new world unity come from? The search for meaning in the music of Lennon is combined with psychological searching, for example in STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER. This hazy song looks at the playground park experience of a child’s memory; it is a landscape not of reality but of the mind. Indications of the search for a new reality and new values, and perhaps the transvaluation of known values, are found in such expressions as nothing is real’, and ’I think 1 know, I mean, uh yes, but it’s all wrong...that is I think I disagree’. This lyric challenges surrounding social assumptions: ’Living is easy with eyes closed’, and 'it’s getting hard to be someone’. Personal identity and basic definitions of self, world, and God or ideological direction have been standing on wobbly legs since the 1960’s counterculture changes. Of course, the philosophical background to all this goes back much farther, as for example to Fichte’s idea that the ego (self) is absolute: "Das Ich setzt sich selbst" (the ego posits itself). The music in STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER has some elements more eastern than western. The song mixes child hood memories, and seems to speak about an escape into the past, hinting at a parallel psychedelic trip and the irreal world of drugs.

Let me take you down, cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields, nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about - Strawberry Fields forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see; it’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out, it doesn’t matter much to me.

Let me take you down cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields, nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about - Strawberry Fields forever.

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