by Jonah Lehrer
LaBour’s article was syndicated in dozens of other student publications, including the Harvard Crimson. As Andru Reeve documents, students began placing classified ads in underground newspapers, asking strangers for additional information about Paul’s death. “How do you know Paul is dead?” began one spot. “What raps and clues have you heard? Will exchange clues.”27 Hundreds of letters were mailed in response; the evidence was everywhere. Did you know walrus is Greek for “corpse”? Or that the chirps on “Blackbird” are actually a grouse, which is the bird of death in English folklore? Or that reversing the mumbles after “I’m So Tired” reveals a voice saying, “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him”?
The conspiracy that emerged was persuasive in its precision. The story went like this: On November 9, 1966, after a late-night recording session at Abbey Road Studios, Paul spun out in his Aston Martin and smashed into a light pole. He was “officially pronounced dead” at the scene, which is why he’s wearing an O.P.D. badge on Sgt. Pepper’s. However, given the huge value of the Beatles franchise, the three remaining band members decided to keep the death a secret, sublimating their grief into secret hints and backward recordings. To keep up public appearances, they hired the winner of a Paul look-alike contest. John Lennon went on to write “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” in the style of Paul. Linda McCartney married someone else.
On the one hand, Paul’s death was a ridiculous rumor, started by a part-time radio DJ and mischievous college student.VI Nevertheless, the “Paul Is Dead” story became a cultural phenomenon. Life magazine devoted a cover to Paul’s purported demise—they sent a reporting crew to his Scotland farm—while defense attorney F. Lee Bailey hosted a “mock-trial” television special on the “controversy.” Hundreds of radio stations regularly debated the story, playing every Beatles record in reverse, while mainstream newspapers covered its viral spread, quoting credulous teenagers such as Pat Rogalski, who told Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, “There’s so much evidence that it couldn’t be coincidental. I believe Paul’s dead.”28 Years later, McCartney explained to Rolling Stone why he didn’t do more to disprove the story: “They said, ‘Look, what are you going to do about it? It’s a big thing breaking in America. You’re dead.’ And so I said, ‘Leave it, just let them say it. It’ll probably be the best publicity we’ve ever had, and I won’t have to do a thing except stay alive.’ So I managed to stay alive through it.”
The viral spread of the “Paul is dead” rumor exposes the dark side of ambiguity. It highlights the way our aversion to uncertainty can create a cascade of misreadings, just like with the Voynich manuscript. By the late 1960s, the Beatles had become auteurs of the abstruse. They’d always enjoyed the clever allusion—was “Norwegian Wood” about “knowing she would”?—but their discovery of THC and LSD led them to experiment with ambiguity to an unprecedented degree. So tracks about girls and sex gave way to lyrics about Polythene Pam and yellow submarines. These were chart-topping pop songs that were also silly and surreal. As the Beatles sang in “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”
Yet, the Beatles were also immaculate artists. It’s easy to create gibberish—what’s much harder is to write lyrics that are both cryptic and evocative. We might not understand “The Fool on the Hill” or “You Never Give Me Your Money,” but we’re still filled with feelings, which we try to explain. The ambiguity begs for an interpretation, just as with the duck-rabbit illusion. As Lennon later reflected, “In those days I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan, never saying what you mean but giving the impression of something, where more or less can be read into it.”29
Consider “I Am the Walrus,” a Lennon masterpiece born out of his amusement that an English teacher at his old high school was having students analyze Lennon’s songs in class. The song begins with some imagery borrowed from acid trips and an old playground nursery rhyme:
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come
Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you’ve been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long
The song gets weirder from there, breaking down into a verse about “yellow matter custard” and “crabalocker fishwife.”
The music echoes the obscurity. The opening melody was inspired by a passing police siren. Swirling strings give way to bellowing static, snippets of a King Lear radio play and the background shrieks of Paul and George. “I am the egg man,” chants John. “I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.” After he’d finished writing down a line about semolina pilchards and the Eiffel Tower, his boyhood friend Pete Shotton recalled Lennon uttering one of his signature taunts: “Let the fuckers work that one out.”30
Of course, the fuckers began working it out as soon as “I Am the Walrus” was released as a single. Critics noticed the allusion to the Lewis Carroll poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” about a devious walrus who befriends a crew of oysters only to devour them. They speculated about his “elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna” line—Lennon later said he was mocking those who put all their “faith in one idol”—and tried to understand his references to Edgar Allan Poe.31 (Lennon would also put Poe’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.) And then there was the Lear fragment: What did that have to do with cornflakes?
Let’s be clear: this isn’t the razor-sharp ambiguity of a Shakespeare sonnet or Salinger short story. Rather, it’s messy and free-form; the allusions are an atmosphere, not a map. “ ‘I am the egg man’? It could have the pudding basin for all I care,” Lennon declared, when asked to explain the ambiguities of the song. “It’s not that serious.”32 Lennon would later admit that he hadn’t actually read “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” or else he would have realized that the walrus was the bad guy, an evil symbol of capitalism. He should have called the song “I Am the Carpenter.” (“But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?” John quipped.) He also wasn’t trying to say anything with that Lear excerpt—it was just playing on the BBC when he was in the studio with Ringo and Lennon liked its trippy mood. Was “Semolina Pilchard” a sly reference to Sergeant Pilcher, the London cop who sent the Stones to jail on drug charges? Or was it just a gibberish reference to a fried little fish?
At times, Lennon grew cynical about this process, the way the audience insisted on finding the secret meaning in every verse. “We’re a con,” he told Hunter Davies. “We know we’re conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They’ve given us the freedom to con them. Let’s stick that in there, we say, that’ll start them puzzling. I’m sure all the artists do, when they realize it’s a con. I bet Picasso sticks things in. I bet he’s been laughing his balls off for the last eighty years.”VII
But John exaggerated his cynicism: he loved creating ambiguous music. The Beatles used to be a boy band singing songs about holding hands. Now they were quoting Shakespeare and trolling the cops. They also discovered an astonishing talent for the suggestive line. Hunter Davies was sitting with Lennon during the writing of “I Am the Walrus.” According to Davies, Lennon was improvising lyrics as he worked out the rhythm. He originally sang, ‘Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.’ Davies, however, thought he said “van to come,” so he wrote that down in his notebook. But Lennon preferred the mistake—it was weirder, less obvious, more ambiguous. It made Davies think about “when someone thought to be potty or mad would be told that a van would come and take them away. John liked the image.”33 And so a potential cliché about The Man gave rise to a much darker allusion to mental illness.
It was a typically brilliant move. During the Beatles’ unprecedented run of greatness, John and Paul consistently chose the more mysterious possibility when crafting their songs. It was “van” over “man,” and “hold you in his armchair” instead of “hold you in his arms,” or the strange assurance that “the movement you need is on your shoulder” in “Hey Jude.”VIII In their late masterpieces, the Beatles expressed the belief that understanding was overrated. The pleasure
was in the mystery.
This creative approach worked splendidly until Tom from Ypsilanti decided to play the White Album backward. Although the Beatles had experimented with so-called backmasking during the making of Rubber Soul—while stoned, Lennon listened to “Rain” in reverse and fell for the strange sound—they’d never engaged in phonetic reversal, which is far more difficult to pull off. (Among other challenges, it requires the singer to learn how to speak backward.) Nevertheless, the human gift for linguistic interpretation ensured that the occasional Beatles track would still sound like real speech, even when played in the wrong direction. It might even include morbid references to Paul.
But here’s the problem with this interpretative approach—it removes the ambiguity. The layers of potential meaning have been stripped away, replaced by a code that can be decrypted with a phonograph. Instead of accepting the mystery, the song becomes a confession of a cover-up. We forget about the duck-rabbit and only see the duck.
As such, the “Paul is dead” rumor remains a cautionary tale about the combustible relationship between mass media and ambiguity aversion. Tom and his followers didn’t have Facebook or Reddit—they just had radio stations and student newspapers and classified ads. But it was enough to convince strangers all across the world that these ambiguous lyrics could be solved, that they didn’t have to live with not knowing.
It’s a tragic misreading. The real meaning of those Beatles songs is that there is no single meaning, just meaningful interpretations. Even John couldn’t explain the egg man, or why those kids on the cornflake were waiting for the van.
Certainty is certainly easier. But what keeps us coming back to the White Album and Salinger and Shakespeare’s sonnets is not some secret Delphic message. Rather, it’s the pleasure of their possibilities. Their truth is alive and ever-changing, just like us.
The art is a mirror.
I. Fabyan was a leading proponent of the so-called Baconian theory, which held that Sir Francis Bacon was actually the author of Shakespeare’s plays.
II. Children, interestingly, don’t show an aversion to ambiguity—they accept the uncertainty of the universe.
III. As the art historian Ernst Gombrich observed, we can “remember the rabbit while we see the duck, but the more closely we watch ourselves, the more certainly we will discover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.”
IV. A meaningful poem, writes Donald Hall, is like a house with a secret room at the center. “This room is not a Hidden Meaning, to be paraphrased by the intellect,” he says. Rather, “the secret room is where the unsayable gathers.”
V. Beatleologists would later discover additional clues in the imagery of Sgt. Pepper’s. There’s a bloody driving glove, which alludes to the car accident that killed Paul; an open palm hovers over his head, as if he’s being blessed before interment; if you hold the album up to a mirror, the “Lonely Hearts” inscribed on the drum spells out “11/9 he die,” which must be the date of McCartney’s fatal crash.
VI. In many respects, the “Paul Is Dead” story was an early warning for our current age of mass disinformation, in which tens of millions of people fell for the Obama birther hoax and 9/11 truther conspiracies.
VII. As Ian MacDonald observes in Revolution in the Head, Lennon began leaving mistakes in his recorded lyrics. On “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” for instance, Lennon sang “feeling two foot small,” instead of “two foot tall.” When the studio engineer suggested a fix, Lennon “laughed and said, ‘Leave that in, the pseuds’ll love it’ ” (312).
VIII. It really is “armchair,” as the demos reveal. Paul tells a candid story about the first time he played “Hey Jude” for John and Yoko: “I was in the music room upstairs when John and Yoko came to visit, and they were right behind me over my right shoulder, standing up, listening to it as I played it to them, and when I got to the line ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ I looked over my shoulder and I said, ‘I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy. I was just blocking it out,’ and John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’ ”
CHAPTER 6 THE INFINITE GAME
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
—JAMES BALDWIN, “THE CREATIVE PROCESS”
When James Carse was growing up in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, in the 1940s, the neighborhood boys played baseball in an empty lot. “You’d wake up, have breakfast, hear the crack of a hit ball, and couldn’t wait to get out there,” Carse remembers. Although the game followed the basic rules of the sport—three strikes and three outs—nobody kept track of the innings, or even the score. “All day long we’d be out there,” Carse says. “People would come in and out and the teams would change depending on who was around. But we didn’t care about that. We didn’t care who won. We just wanted to keep playing.”1 In the evening, the boys’ parents would join them in the empty lot for a hot dog dinner.
Forty years later, when Carse was a professor of religion at NYU, he would remember how much he loved playing baseball in that sandlot. These memories, along with a close reading of Wittgenstein,I would inspire Carse to a write an academic book about the nature of games. His essential insight was that there are two kinds of games: finite games and infinite games.II
Finite games are everywhere. They are those activities, Carse says, in which the participants are bound by rules and regulations, and there are clear winners and losers at the end. These games are finite because the goal of the players is victory; they definitely keep score. It’s eighteen holes of golf, Monopoly, forty-yard dashes, and Call of Duty. There are strict regulations in finite games—to break them is to cheat—and clear conditions for winning. The game ends once those conditions have been met.
The infinite game, in contrast, is more like sandlot baseball: it’s a pursuit in which the only goal is to keep playing. While finite games have fixed rules, the players in infinite games often bend their rules to keep going. (In that sandlot game, for instance, players would switch teams to ensure competitive balance.) The play isn’t a means to an end. The play is the means and the end.2
Carse believes in the beauty of infinite games, whether it’s players in a democracy—elections are a game without end—or the process of evolution. (There is no perfect species.) He’s convinced that games played for the sake of playing are the best kind, and that they can bring out the best in their players. As a religion scholar, known for his work on Christian mysticism, Carse is particularly drawn to the theological implications of infinite games. “The great religions have been around for a long time,” Carse says. “Hinduism is six thousand years old. Judaism is four thousand years old. Within each of these religions, of course, there are powerful finite elements. You’ve got people who want to win an argument, create a cult, people who insist that they’ve finally got it all figured out.” These people, Carse says, are playing finite games with God.
But Carse argued that these finite games could not explain the endurance of the great religions. “The sages, the big ones, the ones that matter over time, they know that when you think you’re finished with the religious text, all you’ve really done is open another chapter,” Carse says. “The argument goes on, which is a good thing. Look at Judaism. The Jewish people never had a powerful army or empire. They were scattered for thousands of years. But they had this text, the Talmud, that kept the rabbis busy, and that was enough.” We turn to religion for answers, but what sustains religion are the infinitude of questions.
And it’s not just religion—Carse believes that infinite games also explain the endurance of the best culture, whether it’s Shakespeare or Sgt. Pepper’s. “The best literature is never solved,” Carse says. “You might see Hamlet once and think you get it, but then you see it again and you realize you didn’t get it, or that you got it wrong. So you keep returning, you keep playing.” The canon isn’t composed of tex
ts with clear takeaways. It’s composed of texts whose meaning is mercurial and unstable. Such infinite games probably sound frustrating. Why bother with a mystery box that can’t be opened? Why read a whodunit that never tells you who did it? Why believe in a religion that keeps changing the rules?
Yet, as Carse points out, there is joy in such eternal pursuits. “You try to describe an infinite game to a grown-up and they get this skeptical look on their face,” Carse says. “They can’t imagine playing a game you can’t win. But then you look at a child, at when they’re happiest, and it’s usually when they’re playing in their own world, making up their own rules, engaged in an activity that has no stopping point. They’re happiest playing in an infinite game.”
This chapter explores the techniques of the best infinite games. How do they hold our attention? How do they keep us playing pursuits we never win? The key, it turns out, is to use multiple mystery hooks, creating a work of culture that keeps confounding in different ways.
The Game Is Afoot
In the summer of 1998, Jason Hallock was working as a reader for a movie production company. He devoured multiple books and scripts every day, looking for content that could become the next big Hollywood hit. He rejected the vast majority of his reading. “You see enough and you learn the tells of the derivative stuff,” Jason says. “Most stories are a copy of a copy, and the original was better.”3