FIVE

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, always appear together in the synoptic gospels.  As with everyone else in the story of Jesus, we don't learn anything substantial about them as individuals: they serve mainly as plot devices in the narrative of Jahweh's mysterious ways (a story not even Jesus himself always fully understands).  The only real hint as their characters is in the nickname Jesus gives them - the "sons of thunder" - and even the reason for this is obscure.

It's enough for our purposes.  James and John, at the beginning of the New Testament, are a recurrence of the archetypal squabbling sibling motif from the beginning of the Old, which we have with Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael and, of course, Cain and Abel.  The brothers at war; inseparable equals and, at the same time, enemies.  In their most well-known appearance, all spunky cocksure of themselves, James and John ask Jesus to, "let one of us sit at your right hand and the other at your left in glory".  Jesus refuses.  "To sit at my right or left is not for me to grant", he explains.  "Those places belong to those for whom they have been prepared". [1]  Whoever they might be.

The relationship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, about which as much has been written as any creative partnership in the whole of pop culture, has noteworthy parallels as recent history's most obvious instance of this archetype.  The two are namesakes of the sons of thunder ('Paul' is McCartney's middle name - his first name is James) and their partnership was defined as much by ego as it was by altruism.  It's a modern version of the ancient tale and in contrast with the biblical version, is bursting with biographical detail.  The parts of the Beatles, as much as the whole, are the some of the most closely scrutinised human beings in modern history, as the recent publication of the first in a projected three-volume megabiography, running close to 1000 pages in length, demonstrates.

The creative forces that powered the Beatles coalesce in an agreement at the beginning of their career that every song written either by McCartney or Lennon would be jointly credited to the legal entity "Lennon-McCartney", even if only one of the two had even contributed to its composition.  The dual purpose of the agreement, itself, follows the archetypal structure.  The very nature of the agreement is a manifest tension between ego and its opposite:

"Instead of bickering over money, and breaking down each song into percentages of input, they can simply focus on writing the best music possible. More importantly, the agreement serves an entirely different purpose. By banding together in such a manner, they believe that one day their names can achieve the same status as other famous two-name collaborators, such as 'Gilbert & Sullivan' or 'Rodgers & Hammerstein'." [2]

The agreement served to promote a greater good (The Beatles) while functioning still as an intentional act of self-mythologisation: and as Vonnegut said, "we are what we pretend to be".  Prophecies tend to fulfill themselves.

When they wrote together, at least according to legend, the process was symbiotic.  Paul was left-handed, John right-handed; so guitars in hand, they could sit "both playing into each other's noses", mirroring the movements of their fingers on the frets as they hashed out their early hits. [3]

How many Lennon-McCartney songs were 50/50 collaborations is the subject of endless, and largely pointless, controversy.  Creativity is a mysterious thing for the solo creator; for the duo, doubly so (at least).  What's important is the astonishing variety and quantity of pop masterpieces the two created together, still unequaled; the way the two markedly distinct personalities gelled to create so many songs that were so much more than the sums of their parts.  McCartney was the optimist, the light-hearted populist, the babyfaced charmer - think Yesterday, Penny Lane, When I'm Sixty-Four, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Lennon the dark, rebellious rocker; the sad, surreal, sarcastic clown - I am the Walrus, Dig a Pony, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite! - and while these are examples of more or less solo compositions, they're still some of the Beatles' best work.  Witness how comfortably each musician lapses into parochialism (Mull of Kintyre) and sentimentality (Imagine) without his other half to keep him in check once the Beatles have split. (Neither of these are horrendously bad songs, really, but there's no way The Beatles would ever have recorded them).

There's a reason the yin-yang symbol is iconic: it depicts so splendidly to so many things.  Black and white.  Left and right.  Adam and Eve.  Tweedledum and Tweedledee...[4]  Each is what it is but neither is truly complete - neither is itself without the other.

In the Christian tradition, John goes on to writes the gospel that bears his name - arguably the New Testament's masterpiece.  As his life draws to a lonely end, he takes terrifying apocalyptrips into territory few have been able to explore sensibly since.  He pens the impenetrable conclusion to the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, whose lakes of fire, beasts and whores, and horses, have haunted the Christian imagination for better or worse for the millennia.  In an iconoclastic disregard for poetic symmetry, John quite irritatingly refuses to die of anything but natural causes.  His brother James, his influence on the development of the new religion negligible by comparison, becomes its first ever martyr.  Lucky man.

John Lennon's sanctification is a pop cultural given today.  His untimely death was obviously a factor in the attainment of the status he now enjoys, his post-Beatle solo material being almost entirely forgettable.  Paul McCartney, a knight of the realm whose final collapse he was once thought to epitomise, occupies himself with increasingly embarrassing collaborations, vanity projects and pointless capitulations to technology and time, [5] for reasons probably best left unexplored.

When the whole is split in half, each half withers in its own way.  "We want you to do for us whatever we ask", James and John demanded of their God.  And as we all should know by now, when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

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