Wisdom by Lennon

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
(John Lennon, "All You Need is Love")

This is one of my favourite John Lennon lines, because it's meaning is very ambiguous - it might be an incredibly life-affirming statement or just a bit of deliberately confusing language. John Lennon was a big fan of Lewis Carroll, the mathematics scholar and author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Caroll used a lot of puzzling wordplay in his stories (for example, at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, the characters spend a full page debating whether "I mean what I say" means the same as "I say what I mean"). Lennon employs similarly maddening wordplay in the above quote.

If we read the line literally, it is saying: If you can do something, and demonstrate that to me, then obviously it is possible. For example, if you can juggle two tennis balls, it can be done. It would not be logical for me to say "it can't be done," because you've shown me that it can.

So it's actually a bit pointless to say "there's nothing you can do that can't be done" - it's a statement of fact so plainly obvious that most of us would never bother putting it into words. And that's why we're thrown off by it when Lennon sings - he's being deliberately playful. On top of that, he's set this line to one of the most upbeat melodies he ever wrote - in fact, the melody is so shiny and heart-warming that when we listen to "All We Need is Love," we instantly assume that the line carries a life-affirming, positive message. Grammatically, it doesn't - it's a very obscure bit of literary wordplay by a Lewis Carroll fan. However, set to Lennon's melody and to the unequivocally joyful chorus, the line does take on a positive connotation: you can do anything that you can dream of. And I suppose that's an argument that can be proven.

Sidenote: Lennon's vocal for "All You Need is Love" was recorded live for one of the first global satellite television broadcasts, a special entitled "Our World" seen in twenty-four countries.