Hello! I absolutely adore your blog, your analyses are so interesting, you always manage to bring a new perspective to songs I've been listening to for ages so thank you! I would be very curious about hearing your thoughts on the song mind games, I feel like there's more there than meets the eye but I can't quite grasp what that is
Hi anon, thank you for your kindness and for the ask <3 Many apologies for the looooooong reply time. It looks like you sent this on May 20th — are you still around? Do you still care?
Either way, I think there is most *definitely* more to Mind Games than meets the eye...or ear? I do not, however, think that I (or any one of us) have all of the necessary context to make total sense of the song, as we are not (necessarily) “players” in this game. Although…we might be! I have Many Thoughts about all of this. Put on your tin hats, everybody!
I’ve written a lot about John and Paul’s shared game of songwriting — I’m thinking about their invented language, the back-and-forth of it all, the way ideas are passed between them, sometimes for years and years and years. I wonder if Mind Games might provide an interesting framework for considering that theory more seriously.
John borrowed the title of the song from Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, in which “mind games” are quite literally exercises in shared consciousness/imagination/symbolic thinking/altered states/etc. (the people who take part are called “players”). Masters and Houston are especially interested in what can be created through shared imagination, through experiences that don’t exactly belong to either individual, bc they only emerge through the act of players participating together. And………..well! I assume you see where I’m going with this.
Here’s a curiously useful quote from Lennon Remembers: “They [businessmen] play the game the way we play music… first they have a ritual, then they create.” So, John is explicitly connecting music with a game, and the game with ritual and creation. Ritual is not separate from the creative process, but essential to it.
This feels awfully close to the way J and P talk about their songwriting process. Two people enter one imaginative space, passing words and images back and forth, repeating them and rearranging them to create a secret third thing that doesn’t belong completely to either one of them alone. (In fact, one might argue that Lennon-McCartney *itself* is a product of that ritual, but I digress!)
One of the exercises in Masters and Houston’s Mind Games makes this structure especially explicit. Two players enter a shared imaginative state to undertake a quest. Together, in that space, they seek something neither possess on their own: the Holy Grail. Ofc, that brings us back to John: “Some call it magic / the search for the grail.” Here, ‘magic’ is the possibility that this process can actually produce access to something beyond the ordinary limits of either participant.
Now, bear with me, bc I’m going to pivot to an excerpt from my very favorite entry from The Lyrics (The Kiss of Venus). I promise it’s relevant!
“Speaking of magical, when I played the Glastonbury Festival in 2004, I loved the idea that we were probably on the confluence of ley lines, the lines that crisscross the globe and along which our ancestors are thought to have set up significant sites. I like that kind of history. Glastonbury is also said to be the place where King Arthur is buried. So, one way or another, it's a very special place and it has a very definite vibe. There's simply no denying that it has a distinct aura.”
(A brief aside: The Guardian described Paul’s 2004 set as “an all-encompassing sing-along with the sense that the audience were part of a genuine event rather than mere spectators.” Paul doesn’t just produce something and hand it over to the audience for consumption, but performer and crowd occupy the same space and make the magic together. What is that, if not a ritual?)
Anyway, even beyond the obvious Grail/Arthur connection, Arthurian mythology is itself a product of the kind of process I’ve been describing. There is no single, fixed Arthurian story transmitted (intact) across time. Its mythology is collective, accretive…different writers inherited the same characters and images and objects and places from one another, altered them, made new associations, and passed them forward. The Grail is part of that tradition and changes within it, the mythology exists through this continual process of repetition and transformation, therefore “the search” is eternal.
That is *SO* similar to what I mean by a “shared game” between John and Paul. An image begins in one song, reappears in another context (and another, and another…), connecting to new associations which have histories of their own. The image is part of the same game, though its meaning isn’t fixed at its origin. Meaning grows through repetition and transformation.
And, actually, on the podcast Song Exploder a few months ago, Paul described songwriting as “a sort of quest.” One embarks on a quest without ever fully knowing what they might find, bc the meaning is only produced through the journey toward it. (“Nobody knows this song ‘til I’ve written it.”)
“Faith in the future, outta the now” carries that idea quite well, I think. The present is generative rather than self-contained. What the players do now produces meaning, or maybe an effect, that belongs (at least in part) to a future they can’t yet occupy. And, in that context, “projecting our images in space and in time” is almost ridiculously literal. The Grail and Arthur and Avalon and Glastonbury and the Beatles and JohnandYoko and Lennon-McCartney — all of these images and mythologies persist bc they are projected from one imagination into another, then projected again, and again and again and again, constantly changing. “Absolute elsewhere / in the stones of your mind” contains that same paradox, “elsewhere” is also within; it’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. It’s a tradition we’re participating in at this very moment. “So keep on playing those mind games forever”!!
