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A commentary below notes: “They were all prepared or desiring to move in different directions; they all really kind of wanted their own thing. A fitting, if depressing ending song. It’s about selfishness…” That is my analysis too of the following song:

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• General CommentI think it’s commentary on the breaking up of the band more than anything. Sure, it applies to Paul, but it really applies to each of them. They were all prepared or desiring to move in different directions; they all really kind of wanted their own thing. A fitting, if depressing ending song. It’s about selfishness and how it can build things (Desire for wealth and fame makes many bands) but destroys them just as well (Major fame makes them think each is the reason they rock, so they want their own gigs).

  DavimusKon July 24, 2007   Link

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For George Harrison’s autobiography, see I, Me, Mine.

“I Me Mine” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1970 album Let It Be. Written by George Harrison, it was the last new track recorded by the band before their break-up in April 1970. The song originated from their January 1969 rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios when they were considering making a return to live performance. Written at a time of acrimony within the group, the lyrics lament humankind’s propensity for self-centredness and serve as a comment on the discord that led to Harrison temporarily leaving the Beatles. The musical arrangement alternates between waltz-time verses and choruses played in the hard rockstyle.

“I Me Mine”
Cover of the original Hansen Publishing sheet music
Song by the Beatles
from the album Let It Be
Released	8 May 1970
Recorded	3 January and 1 April 1970
Studio	EMI, London
Genre	Rock
Length	2:25
Label	Apple
Songwriter(s)	George Harrison
Producer(s)	Phil Spector

The song reflects Harrison’s absorption in Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and their denouncement of ego in favour of universal consciousness. When Harrison presented “I Me Mine” at Twickenham, John Lennon showed little interest and instead waltzed with Yoko Ono while the other Beatles rehearsed the song. Footage of the couple dancing was included in the Let It Bedocumentary film. In January 1970, by which point Lennon had privately left the group, the three remaining members formally recorded the song at EMI Studios in London for the Let It Be album. When preparing the album for release, producer Phil Spector extended the track by repeating the chorus and second verse, in addition to adding orchestration and a female choir.

Among music critics, several writers have identified “I Me Mine” as a powerful final performance by the Beatles and an apt statement from Harrison. The song has been referenced by some religious scholars in their commentary on egoism. Harrison titled his 1980 autobiography I, Me, Mine after the track. The original recording, lasting just 1:34, appeared on the Beatles’ 1996 outtakes compilation Anthology 3, introduced by a mock announcement from Harrison referring to Lennon’s departure.

Background and inspirationEdit

I kept coming across the words I, me and mine in books about yoga and stuff … [about the difference between] the real you and the you that people mistake their identity to be … I, me and mine is all ego orientation. But it is something which is used all the time … “No one’s frightened of saying it, everyone’s playing it, coming on strong all the time. All through your life, I me mine.”^[1]

– George Harrison, 1997

George Harrison wrote “I Me Mine” on 7 January 1969, during the second week of the Beatles‘ filmed rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios in west London.^[2] The film project – which became known as Get Back and eventually Let It Be^[3][4] – formed part of the Beatles’ proposed return to live performance for the first time since 1966.^[5]Harrison recalled that after spending two months in the United States in late 1968, he was “quite optimistic” about the new project, but the situation within the group “was just the same as it had been when we were last in the studio … There was a lot of trivia and games being played.”^[6] For Harrison, the power struggle between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the constant presence of Lennon’s girlfriend, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono,^[7] created an atmosphere that contrasted sharply with the creative freedom and camaraderie he had recently enjoyed with Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York.^[8]

When writing the song, Harrison drew inspiration from the divisive atmosphere in the band.^[2] The 7 January rehearsal was marked by acrimony, as the Beatles argued over the direction of the project.^[9]Hours were given over to rehearsing McCartney’s “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with little improvement,^[10] and McCartney confronted Lennon over his lack of new songs, drawing a sarcastic response from Lennon.^{[11][nb 1]} Since the start of the project, Harrison had presented several new songs for consideration,^[16][17] only to see them given laborious treatment by the band or overlooked entirely.^[18] That day, he confronted his bandmates about their attitude to his songs;^[19] he later complained that due to their greater experience as songwriters, Lennon and McCartney viewed their own material as the priority and “I’d have to wait through ten of their songs before they’d even listen to one of mine.”^[20] In their study of the tapes from the Get Back project, authors Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt write that Lennon and McCartney regularly overlooked Harrison’s compositions, even when his songs were “far better than their own”.^[7]

The song’s message was partly inspired by the teachings of Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda.

When discussing “I Me Mine”, Harrison said he was addressing the “eternal problem” of egoism^[21][22]and that his perspective was informed by his past experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.^[1][23]He said the concept was in keeping with Swami Vivekananda‘s teaching that an individual’s goal in life was to realise their divine qualities by transcending ego concerns, which Harrison called “the little ‘i'”, and seeing themselves as part of “the big ‘I’; i.e. OM, the complete whole, universal consciousness that is devoid of duality and ego”.^[21]Author Jonathan Gould describes the song as a “commentary on the selfishness” of Lennon and McCartney,^[24] while musicologist Walter Everettsays that after Harrison had written “Not Guilty” in 1968 as a “defense against the tyranny of his songwriting comrades”, “I Me Mine” was his “mocking complaint about their stifling egos”.^[25]Harrison wrote the song at home that night.^[26] The melody was inspired by the incidental music on a BBC television programme he watched, Europa – The Titled and the Untitled,^[19] played by an Austrian brass band.^[25]

CompositionEdit

The verses of “I Me Mine” are in the key of A minorwhile the chorus is in A major.^[27] This technique of parallel minor/major contrast is common in the Beatles’ songwriting and had been employed by Harrison in his 1968 songs “While My Guitar Gently Weeps“^[27] and “Savoy Truffle“.^{[28][nb 2]} Everett likens the melody of the verses to the European folk music typified by Mary Hopkin‘s debut single for the Beatles’ Apple record label, “Those Were the Days“.^[25] He views this folk aspect as “well suited” to Harrison’s use of the same “F-against-E7 sound” he first adopted in “I Want to Tell You“.^{[25][nb 3]} The composition originally included a flamenco-style instrumental passage^[30] but Harrison subsequently replaced this section with a chorus repeating the line “I me-me mine”.^[31] In its final form, the structure comprises an intro, two combinations of verse and chorus, followed by a verse.^[32] The verse and chorus are also differentiated by their time signature: the former is in 3/4 time while the latter is in 4/4.^[32]

Musicologist Alan Pollack describes the song as “an interesting folk/blues stylistic hybrid with more than just a touch of the hard rocking waltz beat”.^[32] The verse begins with two repeated phrases, each consisting of a shift from the i minor (Am) chord to a IV (D7), emphasising the Dorian mode,^[33] followed by ♭VII (G), V7 (E7) and i minor chords.^[32] The verse continues with a minor iv (Dm) chord for two bars^[32]before shifting to V7 (E7), after which a ♭9 (F natural) melody note results in what musicologist Dominic Pedler terms the “dark drama” of an E7♭9 chord and an example of the Beatles’ employment of an “exotic intensifier”.^[34] There then follows a chromatically descending bass line over the i minor chord, leading to VI (F7) and the transition into the 4/4 chorus.^[32] The latter presents as a heavy rock^[35] 12-bar blues but is abbreviated to 10 bars since the V chord functions as a re-transition to the verse.^[32] Pedler also comments on the unusual aspect of the song concluding on an ♭VI (Fmaj7) chord in A minor key.^[36]

The set of pronouns that form the song’s title are a conventional way of referring to the ego in Hinduand Buddhist philosophy.^[37] The lyrics reference the Bhagavad Gita 2:71-72,^[38] part of which advocates a life “devoid of any sense of mineness or egotism”.^{[39][nb 4]} According to spiritual biographer Gary Tillery, the song targets McCartney and Lennon “for being so fixated on their own interests” but also laments all of humankind’s propensity for egocentricity.^[8] The lyrics state that this self-centredness is constant and in all actions and desires.^[41] Tillery says that the message is both ironic and tragic from a Hindu perspective, which contends that ego is merely an illusion; egocentricity is therefore akin to a single drop of water focusing on its own course at the expense of the ocean surrounding it.^[8]

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(Francis Schaeffer pictured below spent a lot of time in the 1960’s analyzing the Beatles’ words and music and below he sums up the Beatles search for meaning and values in a letter that I mailed to Paul McCartney on March 20, 2016.)

March 20, 2016

Paul McCartney

Dear Paul,

I love the song THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD for several reasons. I hope you put it in your set list for Little Rock on April 30, 2016. Wikipedia noted: 

“The Long and Winding Road” is a ballad written by Paul McCartney (credited to Lennon–McCartney) from the Beatles‘ album Let It Be. It became the group’s 20th and last number-one song in the United States in June 1970,^[1] and was the last single released by the quartet.

While the released version of the song was very successful, the post-production modifications by producer Phil Spector angered McCartney to the point that when he made his case in court for breaking up the Beatles as a legal entity, he cited the treatment of “The Long and Winding Road” as one of six reasons for doing so. New versions of the song with simpler instrumentation were subsequently released by both the Beatles and McCartney.

In 2011, Rolling Stone ranked “The Long and Winding Road” number 90 on their list of 100 greatest Beatles songs of all time.^[2]

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Later came psychedelic rock, an attempt to find this experience without drugs. The younger people and the older ones tried drug taking but then turned to the eastern religions. Both drugs and the eastern religions seek truth inside one’s own head, a negation of reason. The central reason of the popularity of eastern religions in the west is a hope for a nonrational meaning to life and values….

Beatles in India

Then the Beatles gradually came home. The last thing we find them doing is the YELLOW SUBMARINE. I am sure a lot of parents thought this is much better than the old hard rock, but I thought it was a very sad thing because it really wasn’t a children’s story at all, but what it was in fact was a romantic statement and the fact is that is all there is. Just the same as [Ingmar] Bergman after he makes the movie SILENCE [1963] then he makes a comedy [ALL THESE WOMEN in 1964]. It is the same as Picasso when he pictures his child as a clown [Paul in a Clown Suit, 1924]. So we find the Beatles making the YELLOW SUBMARINE, but there is something more to it than this because Erich Segal made his reputation by writing the script for the movie version of YELLOW SUBMARINE and then he went on and wrote LOVE STORY. So what we have done is we have come around in a big circle. There was the destruction of the romantic. Students in the 1960’s said we are tired of the romantic of giving us optimistic statements with no sufficient base.

[Paul in a Clown Suit, 1924 by Picasso].

LOVE STORY

So the Beatles destroyed that and then they went through these various trips into non-reason but when they came out they had nothing left but the romantic. This is the tragedy of the young people starting with Berkeley in 1964. How right they were in saying we have largely a plastic culture.    This is something the church should have been saying. These students said give us reality. Then the students tried those trips and they weren’t trips based on reality but they were separated from reason. It was trying to find answers in one’s own head whether it was the drug  trip or the Eastern Religion trip. Then they came around in a big circle and what do we find–we end up with Segal’s LOVE STORY, just the romantic thing as one can imagine but with no adequate base at all, yet giving us a lovely romantic answer, which just like the YELLOW SUBMARINE is very, very sad because the Beatles and young people were giving up the search and just accepting something like this. 

(Joan Baez sings at Free Speech Movement rally in Berkeley. November 20, 1964)

YELLOW SUBMARINE

If we are going to understand the line of despair we must understand that it is an unit saying that reason is not going to take us anywhere. After Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard and the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Immanuel Kant there was an unity that bound all these fields of expressions together. First, it was the philosopher expressing this. Second, it was the artist. Third, it was the musician and lastly it was expressed in general culture. The giving up of hope that on the basis of reason one is going to have optimistic answers is the mark of our age. Any kind of answers to the purpose in life, love morals have nothing to do with reason for modern man. It can be expressed in John Cage’s music or in certain forms of rock music.

Chance is the king of our age and John Cage’s music best demonstrates where chance has brought us

You scientists out there who say man is only the atom but a big more complex then you come home to your wife and you say, “I love you.” You want something more than merely sex. Those of you who look to your children with some tenderness and those of you who believe in some morals but you have never settled your score with Marquis de Sade  who said it so well WHAT IS IS RIGHT.

Modern man lives in a dichotomy. Downstairs there is reason which leads to man only being a machine and upstairs there is a some kind of hope against all reason. That great high boast coming out of the Enlightenment that man beginning from himself would gather enough particulars to make his own universal to give adequate answers for life, but it has failed.

de Sade portrayed in recent movie

Karl Popper seen below

Alfred Kinsey seen below

Rationalism fails because man is finite and limited. Karl Popper in England can falsify a few things but he can’t verify anything. Alfred Kinsey tells us that all sexual behavior just comes down to sociological statistics. There is not going to be an answer for modern man unless there is something more than modern man beginning from himself, namely that there is a God there and He is not silent.

In another place Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnote #94)

Consider, too, the threat in the entire Middle East from the power of Assyria. In 853 B.C. King Shalmaneser III of Assyria came west from the region of the Euphrates River, only to be successfully repulsed by a determined alliance of all the states in that area of the Battle of Qarqar. Shalmaneser’s record gives details of the alliance. In these he includes Ahab, who he tells us put 2000 chariots and 10,000 infantry into the battle. However, after Ahab’s death, Samaria was no longer strong enough to retain control, and Moab under King Mesha declared its independence, as II Kings 3:4,5 makes clear:

⁴ Now Mesha king of Moab was a sheep breeder, and he had to deliver to the king of Israel 100,000 lambs and the wool of 100,000 rams. ⁵ But when Ahab died, the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.

The famous Moabite (Mesha) Stone, now in the Louvre, bears an inscription which testifies to Mesha’s reality and of his success in throwing off the yoke of Israel. This is an inscribed black basalt stela, about four feet high, two feet wide, and several inches thick.

Moabite (Mesha) Stone seen below

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Actually the answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject and if you like you could just google these subjects: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription.13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

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Featured artist is Charles Lutyens

Contemporary Christian Art – The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth

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Published on Apr 10, 2012

Contrary to much opinion, the current scene of faith-related art is very much alive. There are new commissions for churches and cathedrals, a number of artists pursue their work on the basis of a deeply convinced faith, and other artists often resonate with traditional Christian themes, albeit in a highly untraditional way. The challenge for the artist, stated in the introduction to the course of lectures above, is still very much there: how to retain artistic integrity whilst doing justice to received themes.

This lecture is part of Lord Harries’ series on ‘Christian Faith and Modern Art’. The last century has seen changes in artistic style that have been both rapid and radical. This has presented a particular problem to artists who have wished to express Christian themes.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and…

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website.
http://www.gresham.ac.uk

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Charles Lutyens, 1933

Fire Angel Mosaic, 1968

Charles Lutyens studied at the Chelsea, Slade, St Martin’s and CentralSchools of Art in London and later in Paris. Though mainly a painter he has worked in a range of media and has exhibited widely. From 1963 to 1968 he worked on a commission to produce a mosaic mural of “Angels of the Heavenly Host” on the four long panels high above and surrounding the congregation and altar of St Paul’s Bow, with light flooding down from the large lantern on top. At 800 square feet it is almost certainly the largest contemporary mural in the British Isles. Lutyens was commissioned by the architects of the church because they thought his work consistently revealed “a feeling for states of mind or spirit.” They thought that as we do not know what angels look like it was important that the work be not to too representational and as they put it, they thought the work had achieved just the right balance “between the figurative and the abstract, between severity and empathy, between assertiveness and recession.”[1] Mainly a portrait and landscape painter, Lutyens has turned to Christian themes from time to time as in this recently exhibited The Mocking, 1968. What is interesting about this is the way the tormentors hide behind a great sheet as though they do not want to see what they are doing.

Outraged Christ

The highlight of a recent exhibition, however, was a work which has also just been completed and was on view for the first time. This is the much larger than life, in fact 15’ Outraged Christ, made of carved and recycled timber shaped in the form of slats. The first Christians liked to show Christ victorious on the cross. The Mediaeval period focussed on his suffering for the sins of the world. The 20^th century too focussed almost exclusively on the suffering of Christ but more often than not as a paradigm of the suffering of a terrible century with its innumerable victims.

The Outraged Christ.

The depiction of an outraged Christ is, so far as I know, a fresh addition to Christian iconography. It is a moving, impressive work. Instead of Christ being shown battered or anguished, it depicts him with mouth open, slightly to one side, with his knees pushing forward from the cross, in rage. But here is rage, indeed fury, not just at what is being inflicted on him but at what we humans do to one another.

[1] Charles Lutyens: Being in the World, paintings, drawings, sculptures, mosaic info@charleslutyens.co.uk, 2011,p.64

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From his website:

Profile

Born in 1933, Charles Lutyens has been an artist all his life. He grew up during the war living in Berkshire and discovered his enjoyment to paint when he was seven years old whilst at school in Shropshire. During his time at Bryanston School in Dorset he realised his commitment to being an artist and would use his academic assignment periods to work in the art room. Through later training at the Slade, St. Martin’s and Central Schools of Art, he developed his skills in oil painting and sculpture.

Lutyens’ work is diverse and has always taken an individual direction using a variety of materials including clay, wood, stone, mosaic, as well as drawn and painted images on paper, board and canvas. His images emerge out of his own experience of life, looking inwardly, with a focus on the condition of “Man’s being in the World”.

Between 1958 and 1964, Lutyens lived in London working in his Fulham studio developing his own personal approach to painting. A body of images then painted were exhibited at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, where critics compared his work to expressionists, Munch and Ensor.

From 1963 to 1968, Lutyens worked on a commission to produce a tesserae mosaic mural of “Angels of the Heavenly Host” at the newly consecrated church of St. Paul’s, Bow Common, E3.

Charles moved to Oxford with his family in 1978, where together with other commitments, teaching and running related workshops he continued to explore his studio painting and sculpting as well as his landscape work.

Throughout his artistic life he has exhibited in his studio, partaken in mixed exhibitions and has held one-man shows at St. Martin’s Gallery in London and Hollerhaus Gallery, near Munich.

His work is in private collections in England, Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, Spain and USA.

He has recently moved with his wife to Hampshire and is currently working on a 15ft wooden sculpture, a Crucifixion of an “Outraged Christ”.

Related posts:

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Francis Schaeffer’s favorite album was SGT. PEPPER”S and he said of the album “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.”  (at the 14 minute point in episode 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? ) 

How Should We Then Live – Episode Seven – 07 – Portuguese Subtitles

Francis Schaeffer

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