Send The Smell Of The Moon

A Lesson From Yoko Ono (and my one-year-old niece) on the Power of Imagination.

Image: Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer 1967 from HALF-A-WIND SHOW, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photograph © Clay Perry / Artwork © Yoko Ono

On a recent London trip to visit my one-year-old niece, my world grew bigger and stranger as we made giant waves in the bath, twirled in circles until we burst into giggles, gasped at the squirrels flying from tree to tree in the garden and waved at the huge mechanical snakes of the trains pulling up at the station. At the same time, it was hard not to think of the global violence dominating that week’s news while holding out very much hope for the kind of world my niece will grow up in. During the same trip, I also went to the Tate Modern to see a retrospective of work by the iconoclastic multi-media artist, musician and peace activist Yoko Ono. Despite the ninety-year age difference between them, what struck me most was what Yoko Ono and my young niece have in common.

Just as spending time in the company of my niece had pulled me into her deadly serious world of wonder and play, so spending time in the company of Ono and her work had a similar pill-like effect. Amid the crowds gathered around screens and vitrines displaying huge bottoms and tiny apples and the throngs adding messages of hope to the sea of blue graffiti buoying up a lone dinghy and the couples playing non-competitive games of chess with only white pieces, I followed Ono’s instructions, which date back to her 1968 book Grapefruit to: ‘get inside a bag’, ‘put your shadows together until they become one’ and ‘make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around the branch of a Wish Tree’.

The animating pulse of the exhibition, Ono’s instructions are playful provocations designed to help us, the audience, tune into what Ono calls ‘the music of the mind’ in which apparent opposites can co-exist and anyone can ‘send the smell of the moon’ or ‘throw a stone into the sky high enough it won’t come back’. In other words, Ono’s instructions are a practical manual for activating the imaginal world of my one-year-old niece. 

In our first seven years, this imaginal world is one that comes naturally to us. Our imagination plays an important role in how quickly we are able to learn, process and synthesise new information. When we are in this state the brain’s high-amplitude, slow-cycling theta waves, enable a more expansive, creative and flexible way of thinking and being. But as we become acculturated to parental, peer and social conditioning, our mental processing shifts into alpha and beta mode. Over time, our thought patterns become like well-trodden worn paths, deepening until they become increasingly fixed. 

The more rigid our thinking, the greater the risk of becoming stuck in despair, either overwhelmed by the death rattle of necro-capitalism, or numbed by it, living in a state of what film director Jonathan Glazer has recently called ‘ambient genocide’ as if atrocities happening elsewhere are of no concern to us. Cut off from imagination, our worlds become smaller, our perceptions limited, our sense of curiosity and wonder diminished, our capacity for empathy and compassion eroded as our egos take up more and more space, drowning the music of our minds beneath all the other noise.

As whimsical and naïve as Ono’s instruction to ‘whisper your desire to the wind. Ask the wind to take it to the end of the world’ might seem, at bottom it is a functional and pragmatic procedure aimed at repairing our lost connection to the inner music of imagination. Art and not art both at the same time, her instructions do away with traditional ideas of the artist as individual genius and the artwork as sacred.

This is art that undoes itself; art that generously gives away its power; art that is never finished; that can’t be contained inside a vitrine or a frame or a gallery’s four walls. It’s art that is both the wind and the whisper; art that is in a constant, quantum process of becoming; art that is unlimited; that has a life of its own; that makes space for the artist in everyone; that is not an object or even necessarily an action but an energetically-charged creative field.

As Ono has said of her work; ‘Power works in mysterious ways. We don’t have to do much. Visualise the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE. Thoughts are infectious. Send it out. The message will circulate faster than you think.’

In Jungian terms, this mysterious power is the meta-intelligence of the psyche, which encompasses the porous non-egoic part of us that’s behind imagination. Beyond the logical thinking of our rational minds, the psyche doesn’t differentiate between inner and outer reality, imagined music and real music but views them as one and the same, which is how we become co-creators of reality.

In The Imagination Matrix Stephen Aizenstat, founder of the Jungian graduate school, Pacifica Institute and the Academy of Imagination, writes that;

‘Imagination opens new modes of perception and abilities to express that which is beyond the known (so) each of you in your own way can become an artist  - an active participant in your own life… when your imaginal intelligence increases, your curiosity opens, your worldview widens… in other words, a new consciousness evolves.’

Of course, it is entirely possible to imagine the worst; to see enemies and danger everywhere and act out the very catastrophic fantasies we are so terrified of. Which is arguably how we collectively arrived here in a very real age of global poly-crisis and mass extinction. But what Jungian psychoanalysis and the art of Yoko Ono both have in common is not only a shared understanding of the power of imagination in relation to shaping reality. The ideas of both are also influenced by a Buddhist sensibility that views who we are as belonging to a larger, creative, compassionate and fundamentally healing reality beyond the egoic selves of our individual personhood in which everything and everyone is inter-connected. While it was Jung’s embrace of Buddhist thinking that made his ideas attractive to the New Age movement of the sixties which intersected with the avant-garde art world that Ono was part of and which was also an influence on her work.

De-centring her ego to make way for the transpersonal, it’s the invisible, energetically charged subtle body of this larger creative self that Ono invites us to step into. Of her famous performance Cut Piece, which involved kneeling on the floor as audience members used a pair of scissors to cut her clothes, and sometimes even her skin and hair, literally exposing the naked self underneath, Ono has said;

‘I always wanted to produce work without any ego in it. I was thinking of this motif more and more and the result was Cut Piece. Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give, the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.’

Although Cut Piece is about female objectification, it also speaks to the naked humanity we all share beneath the construction of our self-concepts and the ways that intentionally inhabiting this place of vulnerability can be a radical form of power ‘to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back’ as Ono puts it.  

To step into imagination, to see the world with the curiosity and wonder of our creative inner child is how we can navigate despair and become change-makers.

Following Ono’s instructions to get inside a stretchy black bag, at first I shuffled around inside the darkness, not really knowing what to do*. But then I instinctively started to dance as the ‘music’ of my mind began to grow louder and the gap between myself and my young niece began to get smaller. Conscious of the small crowd who had gathered to watch, I felt vaguely ridiculous. I had a choice, then, to protect my fragile ego and make a quick exit or to not care and carry on. I chose to keep on dancing. When I eventually stepped out of the bag, I felt ever so slightly lighter, less burdened, more glittering as if I had shrugged off the invisible exoskeleton of something else along with it.

(* the original instructions invited participants to take their clothes off)

Creative Experiments

1.     Reflect – what is your relationship with despair and hope? When, where and how do you find yourself in these states? What do you notice about your thought patterns? How do they impact on your inner and outer life? Does any particular image symbolise these states for you?

2.     Describe the ‘music’ of your mind. How do you experience it? What does it sound like, smell like, taste like, look like, feel like? When, where and how are you most in tune with it? Has this music changed or evolved over time throughout different stages of your life?

3.     Taking inspiration from Grapefruit, choose one or more of Ono’s instructions from the examples in the text above and below and/or write your own. Write about your imagined response to these instructions and/or act them out and reflect on what happened when you did.

i.                ‘Listen to the sound of the underground water’

ii.              ‘Imagine one thousand suns in the sky. Let them shine for one hour. Then let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.’

iii.             ‘Put the light out. Walk behind a person for four hours.’

iv.             ‘Take the first word that comes across your mind. Repeat the word until dawn.’

v.              ‘Light a match and watch it until it goes out.’

vi.             ‘Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put it in.’

vii.           ‘PROMISE’

viii.          ‘QUESTION’

ix.             ‘BREATHE’

x.              ‘FLY’

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