#4 'I breathe with my eyes closed'
On looking up and finding air and listening, obsessively
On Tuesday, my daughter and I went with my friend Susu and her daughters to Tate Modern and, after an age spent in the Expressionists show, we all got lost with Yoko Ono. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an audience as engrossed as this one was. Us two adults ended up sitting outside the show for at least half an hour, waiting for the girls to finish.
The two littles spent an especially long time playing white chess and I’m not sure they even noticed the pieces were all monochrome — it didn’t seem to impede their play or confuse them at all. Even when they did emerge, they weren’t ready to leave. They spent another half an hour writing wishes to hang on Ono’s Wish Tree (the below wasn’t one of theirs, but it Spoke Volumes).
I love the scores Ono began writing in the 1960s. Lauded as an early example of conceptual art, they are instructions for imagined artworks, that she composed by typewriter, then bequeathed to her viewers.
She first published them as a book, titled Grapefruit, in 1964. There is a gestural poetry to these diminutive texts that is perfect (you really do want to do what they tell you to) and then there’s the cumulative joy of having them all in book form nearby, to sit and dream with. Not that far removed from what optometrists and physios tell you to do, in order to keep your eyesight and limbs healthy: look away from your screen every 20 minutes, close your eyes, look out the window, get up and go outside.
In their tautness — their formal concision and expanse of meaning both — Ono’s scores remind me of Venezuelan photographer Suwon Lee’s series, How to Measure Time: clocks which measure not hours or minutes but emotional and experiential increments of lived time or endured time. Clocks that measure feelings and identity and perception and encounter.
Ono’s Painting to see the skies and Send a hole to see the sky through also remind me of Solzhenitsyn’s poem, Freedom to Breathe (from Solzhenitsyn: Stories and Prose Poems, 1973), a French copy of which I’ve carried around in my pocket all summer. I’ve found this English translation for you:
Freedom to Breathe
A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain.
I stand under an apple-tree in blossom and I breathe. Not only the apple-tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance that prevades the air. Inhaling as deeply as I can, the aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open, I breathe with my eyes closed – I cannot say which gives me the greater pleasure.
This, I believe is the single most precious freedom that prison takes away from us: the freedom to breathe freely, as I now can. No food on earth, no wine, not even a woman’s kiss is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance of flowers, of moisture and freshness.
No matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-storey houses like cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backfiring, the radios whining, the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh air to breathe under an apple-tree after a shower, we may survive a little longer.
To breathe in air steeped in the fragrance of flowers. I love the wording in French: cet air ivre de floraison.
Ono’s imagined artworks predate Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s one liners by several decades. Katie compiled the first collection of these galactic sentences, which she has described as “artworks to exist in the imagination”, for her end-of-year MFA presentation at the Slade, a few years after I was there. She then published a book of them, A Place That Exists Only in Moonlight, in 2019. Here’s an excellent, relevant example:
Church domes painted with views of other planets’ skies
Katie’s book sits, a treasure, on my shelf right by my computer. Next to it will now go the set of Ono’s Grapefruit postcards that Susu got me. Each pack comprises a random selection of eight scores. The one I like best in mine is Collecting Piece II, which I think makes a neat alt description for this here newsletter, don’t you?:
Break a contemporary museum into pieces with the means you have chosen. Collect the pieces and put them together again with glue.
In June, my friend Avery was using glue — and glitter and beads and sparkles — to bejewel things ahead of the Eras Tour train coming to the UK. She had tickets and she asked me which track I hoped Taylor Swift would play — so she could report back.
Avery says I’m a secret Swiftie and she’s not wrong. I had never sat down to listen to any TS until lockdown, but then her collaborations with Aaron Dessner (The National) and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) on Folklore and Evermore brought out something in her music that I’d never paid attention to before. It made me look up.
Another friend, Laura, made me a Older Tracks to Listen to If You Like Folklore playlist and, well, four years on, I still do, most days. So I asked Avery to tell me if TS played Seven. It’s the opening image of this song that I’m always thinking about.
Please picture me
In the trees
I hit my peak at seven feet
In the swing
Over the creek
I was too scared to jump in
But I, I was high in the sky
With Pennsylvania under me
Are there still beautiful things?
Can you not just feel that? That swinging over water, high in the blue above, wanting to dive in, to just go for it, but also feeling scared? Your throat and shoulders tight, looking for, hoping, doubting too — as she does in the line that follows — what’s good.
Other TS tracks that I’m always either singing to myself, playing on the piano or guitar, or listening to while working, are collated in a playlist I’ve titled Ricochet, which I’d share with you if I were on Spotify, but I’ll just list here for you instead: Exile; My Tears Ricochet; Renegade; Birch; Peace; Evermore; Clara Bow; loml; The Manuscript; The Prophecy.
Early on in the pandemic, in November 2020, I did a big piece on the music people like to work to and I learned that it’s actually about what calms you — achieving focus is about managing anxiety. I spoke mostly to writers. One said they need big bass, another, Richard Skelton; most everyone said no voice. The cumulative effect of listening to the above TS playlist of mine, of course, is that you’ll quickly see quite what kind of chord sequence and melodic structure calms my mind — because they’re all very similar ...
I followed that up with another piece, in 2021, about the person who got me through the second year of Covid. Where other writers variously cited gardening experts, DJs, a sculptor, a Pekingese pup and Awkwafina (we’ll come back to her, the Don of all Dons, at some point), I went with the South African singer, Ami Faku, and specifically, her track, Uwrongo, that I absolutely did loop, for 12 months straight.
Speaking with Faku was a great, great joy. And that song is still up there, along with Aphex Twin’s Tha, Yo La Tengo’s Green Arrow, Yebba’s Louie Bag (live at Electric Lady), Kronos Quartet’s Tilliboyo, Bon Iver’s 666t, Mr Eazi’s Leg Over and the whole of Big Red Machine’s eponymous first album, as the unbreakable stuff other people might say I’ve played to death but which I can still listen to all day long.
Looping, repetition, segments of time on repeat, sounds again and again and again. One of the single-most formative experiences I had at the Slade was sitting in the dark in the basement, with a few other students and our tutor Jon Thomson of Thomson and Craighead, and listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, in full.
Here’s a recording of Reich’s ensemble performing the piece in 1976 while on tour in France, at the Salle Wagram in Paris:
Ever since that basement session, I’ve routinely got out a recording and listened to it in full, every few months. The piece runs for about an hour, and feels like a kind of mapping out of the ocean floor. It is structured in overlapping sections — called pulses — that play a 12-chord sequence in an ebb and flow of repetitive patterns, rolling in and on and over each other for what feels like a full rotation of the earth.
The inimitable music critic Alex Ross was in the audience when Reich performed it with his ensemble at Carnegie Hall in 2006. He described the piece as unfolding “like a dreamscape, its piano and percussion pulses dissolving in a blur, its attenuated melodies shimmering in a haze of resonances, its rich chords suspended for long moments”.
Like watching the ocean or the skies, from wherever you are and for as long as you can.
Notes
Are you a repeat listener/reader/watcher? Do you have tracks on loop for days/weeks/months at a time, or movies/shows you can always — or indeed are always rewatching? I am SO this person that I’ve recently decided we, my kind, we need a name or a label. “Loopy”? I mean, yes I am, but also no, not right. “Looper” would be better if it weren’t quite so Bruce Willis (and yes I am a Die Hard die hard, but still, not the vibe I’m looking to denote).
To loop in French is boucler. But a boucleur is a pair of curling tongs (not something I’ve ever needed); it’s also a bit too close to boucle la, which means shut up — all wrong.
So I’m open to suggestions. What should we (I’m totally assuming you are all just like me here) be called?
World of Echo
Um, I think you’re sorted for tunes this week ⬆️⬆️⬆️. What I’d love is …
Pull up a memory
… for you to send me a song that sounds like the sky. Or like breathing.
Walking instructions
