"Feeling the Space" by Yoko Ono

At YOKO ONO: Lumière de l'aube (Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, 16/04/2016)

        A man came up to me and said "May I shake hands with the hand that shook hands with John Lennon?" 

        I said, "Well, we've done a lot of things in our time but we haven't got around to doing that yet . . . so what are you going to do about that?" 

        He just mumbled, sort of, and shook my hand anyway. Hey, yoke, yoke, yoyo, yoho! A is for Anger, B is for Brute, C is for Cunning, D is for Death. Actually, I'm a Lenny Bruce married to Greta Garbo, if you must know. Two people in love never shake hands. 

        The shortest distance between two dots is a direct line. Direct line is out of order. Snow in New York City—in our heads. Central Park is still summer. The air smells wise and tender. It surrounds me without giving me any pressure—like a kind friend. It makes me feel innocent again. 

         I was never able to get hold of my mother without touching her manicure and fur. My father had a huge desk in front of him that separated us permanently. There was always such a space around me. I would play sitting in the deep gaps between tall and fat chairs. I never liked ringing the service bell because it often made me realize that there was nobody at the other end. 

         In the middle of the night I wake up in the dark. Is this Tokyo, London, where is it? It doesn't seem to matter as long as it's on this globe. Would I care if it was on the moon? Yes, I think I would be lonelier then though I don't know why. Sometimes the moon looks closer than Tokyo. What would happen if I called my mother now. Would I hit her manicure again?

■

         The phone is glowing in the dark like an entrance to a mysterious space. Is there anything that is real I would hit if I reached into space through that wire? Shall I call my cousin? What time is it in Paris? I might wake up the woman he is with. Curse the day when I was taught to be considerate—it's so much like death. But that was decades ago. Now there's nobody in Paris to call. 

         I think of this friend and that friend. I want to call them and tell them how beautiful they are, how much I love them, how much I care for them . . . and, that when I said this, I actually meant that. What I really wanted to say was . . . but I just couldn't . . . and if I had . . if I had . . .

         Why is calling somebody such a difficult thing to do? They say if you write your thoughts down on paper you don't have to send it. They get the message anyway. Shall I do that? I doze off for awhile. I'm up again at dawn. I feel something strange is happening that I can't put my finger on. At the breakfast table, I find that one of the friends I wished to call had died during the night. What if I had called and spoken to her? Would it have changed anything? Things that I wanted to tell her . . . they'll never be resolved now. Never is a long time. Maybe death has resolved it all. 

         Don't leave me words, they haunt me. Leave me your coat to keep me warm. I like secondhand clothes because that is like wearing a person. 

         I miss you. I've written twenty letter to you in my mind but never mailed them. Anyway, I don't know your address. I don't even know your name. And if you do exist, why should you care about me? —an electric fan. 

         A musician came up to me and said he was very glad to work with me, because he liked foreigners. 

         "Foreigners?"

         "I mean, foreign people, specially the Oriental people." 

          I was going to snap back and say, "Well, I like to work with foreigners, too," but then the whole thing suddenly hit me as being so funny, and I just said something to thank him for liking to work with foreigners. It's hard to remember about you slanted eyes and your skin in the melting pot of a recording session, but I suppose that is the first thing that hits them when they try to communicate. "That Jap. you never know what she's thinking.” Next time you meet a "foreigner," remember it's only like a window with a little different shape to it and the person who's sitting inside is you. Anyway, in my mind I'm a singing Sylvia Plath, half her head out of the gas stove still looking for a pencil to write her last beauty. 

          In the evening I watch the city lights from my apartment that hangs in the air, and become overwhelmed with the incredibility of it all. Behind each shining dot, there is a room, an apartment, a person or people who are all having a life show of their own. Every person's life can be a book thicker than an encyclopaedia and still you couldn't explain all that they took to survive. I would probably not meet even one-thousandth of those people. The odds of not meeting in this life are so great that every meeting is like a miracle. It's a wonder that we don't make love to every single person we meet in our life. We take meetings like riding a cab. You know that you would probably never meet the driver again. Yet if the car crashed, that driver is the person you are going to die with. In fact, your life is in the driver's hands while you're in the car. But when you get to the destination, you give a bit of metal and slam the door behind you.   

■

          When I'm on the stage, I freak out thinking about the strangeness of the gathering. In four hours or so all the seats would be empty again. In ten years nobody would remember that these people were here, or it wouldn't matter to anybody. In a hundred years, they would all be dead. 

          People say that for the last five years I had been a hate object of the world. It was sort of fashionable to put me down. You don't hurt me though, because I know you and I love you. I can take hatred, because I don't believe that people are capable of real hate. We are too lonely for that. We vanish too quickly for that. Do you ever hate a cloud? How could anyone hate people who are on their deathbeds? That's where we all are since the day of birth. 

          Hate is just an awkward way of love. We spit on people when we want to kiss them. We hit them when we only want to be held. We talk about misunderstanding and hurt. But how could we hurt or misunderstand each other when we are so much alike, when we are the only people who share this world for this decade, this year, this day, under the same sky? Deep down inside, and far outside, none of us really misunderstand anything. We don't miss a trick. We know. But we all pretend, to ourselves and to others, that we don't. 

          All we have to do is admire each other and love each other twenty four hours a day until we vanish. That's what we really want to do. The rest is just foreplay to get to that.

          "I told 'er she should quit working' now, ya naw, now that she's married. An' you know what that bitch said, she said, 'would you quit working if you ever got married?' I mean, what's gonna 'appen to the music industry?" In my mind I'm really an eternal sphinx. 

          Shake my hand for what it's worth. There is a wind that never dies. 

(Published in The New York Times, August 24, 1973)