All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.
This day trip works fine on its own. In fact, it’s a pretty good introduction to Beautiful Possibility. 😎
Hi everyone,
As I mentioned at the end of the last Rabbit Hole, this week we’re going to do something a little bit different — we’re going to go on a little day trip.
I hope I’ve shown you in the past few episodes that one of the many gifts the possibility of John and Paul as a romantic couple offers us is the opportunity to experience the music of The Beatles — of Lennon/McCartney — for the first time all over again, and in a deeper, richer and more complex way that we may have experienced that music in the past.
It's that beautiful symmetry that I pointed out a while back. Paying attention to the lover's possibility reveals new complexity in their songs, which in turn reveals new traces of the lover's possibility — along with other previously hidden layers of their story.
This week, I want to show you one more example of that before we move on — for now — from our consideration of the songs of Lennon/McCartney. And to do that, I want to tell you about a night several years ago, when I was sitting in front of the fire in my little house in the Maine woods, thinking about the love between John and Paul, and listening to “Yesterday”
Like all of us, I’ve heard “Yesterday” so often that I tended to take it for granted, in the way that often happens when we become so used to a piece of great art that we stop being fully present to its power.
But that night, enfolded as I was in the beauty of the lovers possibility, I found myself somehow hearing “Yesterday” — this song that was so familiar that I could have sung it in my sleep — for the very first time. And that night, in what felt like a small and quiet miracle, “Yesterday” gave up some of its secrets, as it unfurled itself — in the context of the lovers possibility — into its richer, deeper, more complex form.
I’ve shared with you my story of discovering the possibility of John and Paul as lovers, and how that discovery filled me with the ecstatic joy that comes from direct contact with a sacred story that carries the lifeforce love of the Grail. And how I felt that lifeforce love begin to heal a wound I hadn’t consciously understood had been bleeding — invisible and unacknowledged — deep in my psyche for as long as I could remember.
Listening to “Yesterday” again for the first time, it revealed to me the source of that wounding. The sense of dis-ease that I’d been feeling all these years, the sense that the world wasn't as it’s meant to be, that something had gone terribly wrong in some way I didn’t understand.
That night, I started to understand in a felt sense that my dis-ease had at its source the Fisher King wounding of the breakup of The Beatles, of Lennon/McCartney, and of the subsequent collapse of the Love Revolution of the Sixties — all of what we’ve talked about in those first few episodes of Beautiful Possibility, as the reason why the lovers possibility matters so much in the healing of this story.
I wrote a piece for The Abbey that same night, trying to capture the insights that “Yesterday” had offered me. I wrote it in a single sitting. And in one of those all-too-rare experiences that every artist longs for, it felt not like I was writing the piece, but like the piece was writing me.
And when I finished, I had the beginnings of what eventually became Beautiful Possibility.
This week, before we begin the final three episodes of part one, I want to share with you that piece of writing in its fuller context. It’s a piece that I published on The Abbey several years ago, not long after I wrote it, titled “Unscrambling Yesterday.”
Most of you have not yet read “Unscrambling Yesterday,” and even if you have, I want to offer you the opportunity to experience it in the context of Beautiful Possibility —which is its true context, but that I could only include subtextually at the time. If you have read the piece before, I think there’s a good chance you’ll experience it in a more complete and meaningful way then you might have been able to experience it prior to Beautiful Possibility.
But before I send you on the day trip away from Beautiful Possibility to read or listen to “Unscrambling Yesterday,” there are a few caveats.
Unlike Beautiful Possibility, “Unscrambling Yesterday” is not intended as a scholarly work, but as a piece of lyrical storytelling, in which intellectual precision is sometimes sacrificed in favour of poetry. As such, it’s not footnoted, and there is no research presented in it. And to retain its lyrical quality, it’s often missing the “maybe” and “possibly” and “probably” qualifiers that I’m careful to include in Beautiful Possibility.
Also, as inevitably happens in the course of intense, serious, long-term work to understand a particular subject, “Unscrambling Yesterday” includes some perspectives that have significantly shifted for me since writing it.
First, as we talked about in a prior Rabbit Hole, I’ve come to realise that “Yesterday” isn’t just, as I wrote in the piece, “a Paul McCartney song in which there is no room for anyone but Paul McCartney.”
Despite my own life experience working with a creative (not romantic) partner, I failed to consider the “entangled form” that evolves when two people write together for a long time as intimately as John and Paul. That “entangled form” means that — even absent the lovers possibility — everything Paul and John wrote, whether literally together or separately, is in an important way a Lennon/McCartney song. (And understanding that is going to be important to episode 1:7, so if you have not yet read or listened to that Rabbit Hole, I definitely recommend doing so.)
Even so, what’s important for understanding the role that “Yesterday” plays in the relationship between John and Paul and thus in the story as a whole — including the breakup — is that John didn’t experience “Yesterday” as a song that had room for anyone other than Paul.
Second, “Unscrambling Yesterday” was written during a time when I was struggling with my anger and pain relative to John’s breakup interviews, and when I hadn’t yet done the research to discover John’s extensive retractions of what he said during his Breakup Tour, or the way the story has been twisted away from the truer and more beautiful love at its centre.
I considered rewriting “Unscrambling Yesterday” to erase the traces of that anger before re-sharing it. But in the end, I chose not to. It exists essentially as it was written that night, because as the legend of the Grail teaches us, to heal a wound, we first need to notice it’s there. And “Unscrambling Yesterday” is a piece that documents my first noticing of the Fisher King wound of the breakup as I’ve experienced it relative to this story — and the grief and anger that went along with that experience.
In this sense, “Unscrambling Yesterday” is the true beginning of Beautiful Possibility, well before the first episode. A prequel, if you will. Or a prelude. And as such, it feels incomplete to leave it out on its own, when it belongs — if not as a formal part of Beautiful Possibility — then at least snuggled up next to it in some way.
So I felt it was important to link it more directly — if informally — to Beautiful Possibility by including it here, as a conclusion to our extended consideration of the songs of Lennon/McCartney through the frame of the lovers possibility, and before we tie everything together in the final three episodes of part one.
That last part is important, because it’s the other reason we’re doing this relatively short day trip instead of a regular episode this week. Because if you haven’t yet caught up on the first four episodes of Beautiful Possibility, the final episodes — and especially the next one — are likely to make very little sense to you.
By now, most of y’all have hopefully figured out that Beautiful Possibility isn’t a traditional podcast, in which each episode is its own separate thing. It’s more of a serialized book, in which each chapter lays the foundation for what comes next. And beginning with the next episode, we’re going to put all of the pieces together that we’ve talked about so far. And again, the next episode is really, really not going to work without those first few episodes, because you’ll be missing most of the important pieces.
So this week is our day trip, and next week will be another Rabbit Hole. And hopefully between the two, it gives those of you who aren’t yet caught up a little extra time to listen to or read those first four episodes, along with the “Beatlemania” Rabbit Hole that’s really the second part of episode 1:3 — because otherwise, you’ll almost certainly miss out on the larger context for why restoring the possibility of John and Paul as lovers to the story matters so much. And that reason is really the heart of Beautiful Possibility. (You can find the episode list in sequence here.)
If you prefer to listen to “Unscrambling Yesterday,” rather than read, stay tuned and you can do that right here in about twenty seconds. If you’d prefer to read rather than listen, the link to the original written piece is below.
Before we go off on our daytrip, a heartfelt thank you again to everyone who’s been telling friends about Beautiful Possibility. That’s how we’re going to heal this story — by reclaiming the love at the heart of it, one to one, friend to friend, heart to heart.
And if there’s someone in your life you’d like to share Beautiful Possibility with, but maybe aren't quite sure how to do that, “Unscrambling Yesterday” might be a good introduction to send to a friend. It introduces most of the themes we’re exploring in this series in an accessible and contained form. And it’s written, albeit subtly, in the language of the lovers possibility (because everything on The Abbey is written in the language of the lovers possibility, whether explicitly or not).
Peace, love and strawberry fields — and now here’s “ Unscrambling Yesterday.”
Faith
Unscrambling "Yesterday"
“I don’t really want to make too much of it, except to say that I think songs have a way of talking into the future.” — Nick Cave
