Please Enjoy this repeat this excer of Madeline Bocaro' s book on Yoko Ono

An excerpt from: In Your Mind - The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono (Conceptual Books)

https://madelinex.com/2021/12/19/my-new-book/

“If you listen to some of my past records,

you will experience songs that touch your delicate nerves as well.

But the harsh ones were really my signature sounds.

I wanted to break the sound barrier with those sounds. 

The world needed to listen to our scream.”

– yokoQandA, March 2016

We are all born screaming. Why do we stop? Because we are pacified; calmed or placated, comforted or fed. We are civilized, sanitized and desensitized. As children we are told to be quiet – to be seen and not heard. 

Although she speaks Japanese and English fluently, why does Yoko Ono often choose not to use words at all? 

BECAUSE THERE ARE NO WORDS!

There is only an infinite scream. 

Madeline: What can you say with a scream that you can’t say with words? 

Yoko: “I think it’s extremely expressive of our emotional life. We sort of censor that, especially women. People don’t want to hear women screaming. They want to hear women sing a pretty song. That’s the idea in the male society. But we’re the ones who have the babies, we’re the ones who created the human race. So naturally women have big power, but we’re supposed to hide the power.” 

– August 2013 

The very first form of music that existed must have been just like Yoko’s avant-garde excursions – millions of years ago, before language and before instruments. The first prehistoric bird call was music. The grunt of a cave man, the first vocal expression of joy or sadness. The music of the future will probably resemble hers as well – whether it be made by humans or aliens. Yoko has explained that she uses her vocal technique to discover metaphysical primeval expressions. She explained on PBS television in 1972…

“In my singing, I think I’m just expressing something that is desperate. That is something that you can’t express in words because it’s too desperate. Just like you scream when you are just drowning and just like you’re stuttering in your mind all the time before you talk... I want to deal with the world that is in subconscious. Not the world in consciousness but underneath the consciousness. That is where I am.” 

Nobody sings the blues like Yoko. She makes Howlin’ Wolf sound like he’s merely whining and complaining over the trivialities of love lost. Big deal if your woman done up and left you. Yoko’s blues are a much deeper blue than we can ever imagine. She sings the wordless truth of her world and ours. 

Yoko’s entire life has been extraordinary. Her extremely lonely and disciplined childhood in a noble Japanese family of privilege was stifling. Showing emotion or smiling was frowned upon. Restriction to abide by rigid social standards greatly affected her psyche. She did not meet her father until she was almost three years old. Left in the care of servants, there were few children of her age to play with. 

As a war child during America’s WWII bombings of Tokyo. Yoko and her younger siblings were evacuated to an abandoned farmhouse, where they survived by eating mulberries from bushes. They were always hungry, until they began exchanging imaginary menus. She told The Observer in 2013…

“I remember, when we were evacuated during the war, my brother was really unhappy and depressed and really hungry because we did not have very much food. So I said, ‘OK, let’s make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?’ And, he said, ‘Ice-cream.’ So, I said, ‘Good, let’s imagine our ice- cream dinner.’ And we did, and he started to look happy. So, I realized even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner and this is maybe my first piece of art.” 

Returning home, Yoko viewed a decimated Tokyo. This instilled in her a fragile sense of instability and impermanence. She became detached, developing a deeper intimacy with things intangible and imaginary. After years of loneliness, abuse by a doctor as a child, a failed marriage and depression, there was a suicide attempt at age nineteen. Then came a failed second marriage and a career as a misunderstood avant-garde artist. She also encountered extreme prejudice from many angles. 

Later in London, Yoko would endure verbal attacks and sudden fame as the wife of a Beatle. As John Lennon’s wife she became a victim of sexism, racism, blame and hatred – which led the couple to drugs. Yoko’s young daughter was taken by her father. She did not see her child again for decades. And the worst was yet to come. 

“The older you get the more frustrated you feel. And it gets to a point where you don't have time to utter a lot of intellectual bullshit. If you were drowning you wouldn't say: 'I'd like to be helped because I have just a moment to live.' You'd say, 'Help!' but if you were more desperate, you'd say, 'Eiough-hhhhh,' or something like that. And the desperation of life is really life itself, the core of life, what's really driving us forth. When you're really desperate it's phony to use descriptive and decorative adjectives to express yourself." 

– Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice Rolling Stone March 18, 1971 

The death of her husband in 1980 – right before her eyes, and the frightening aftermath, including threats on her own life were almost unbearable. She almost stopped recording her 1981 album Season Of Glass when she was advised that it was not the right time. She thought it might never be the right time, so she continued recording. Yoko described the fragility of her voice on the album, released six months after John’s murder. She wrote in the album liner notes, 

“My voice kept cracking while I recorded the songs. I finally thought maybe I shouldn’t put the album out. Then it occurred to me there were probably many people in the world whose voices were choking and cracking for many reasons. I realized my songs were the songs of the desperate. It was all right to show myself as how I was.” 

Sean Lennon told Nero magazine in 2016, 

“She was struggling against so many layers; east and west, avant-garde and pop, man and woman, and such. She was fighting racism against Japanese women and Asian people. It wasn’t just a simple, hateful racism but a lack of understanding and xenophobia. She was also overcoming sexism because the 60s, as liberated as it was, was a boys’ club, especially in rock... she was overcoming and breaking so many barriers. She was opening so many doors. I think it was overwhelming for people because she was so ahead of her time...” 

Yoko loved to play pieces on the piano by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy. She also liked singing along to German lieder, Italian operatic arias and French chansons. She appreciates old eastern chants, Indian and gypsy music from people who have traveled far in life, taking her to mountains and places she has never been to. The first pieces that she recalls having a visceral reaction to, are operas (coincidentally all written by male composers, as there were few female composers at the time) Wozzeck by Alban Berg, The Telephone by Menotti and The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weil. 

John and Yoko discussed vocalizing with composer John Cage in 1971: 

Yoko: “In opera you have to carry your voice and keep it for a long time – like you have to learn to stay for 30 minutes or something, so you learn a way that you bring it up from here (stomach)... 

Why would girls have higher voices than men? I noticed that people like the Japanese emperor... Hitler or somebody who’s is in a very highly pressured situation usually has a higher voice. And it seems like, you know when somebody would strangle you or something – ‘aah aahaa’ and you have to make sort of a higher voice. It’s almost like because a woman is so suppressed in society so that they have no choice but to go higher, you see because you can’t relax. Now if you can relax your vocal cords (your voice goes lower).” 

– Bank Street, NYC 1971 (film by Jonas Mekas) 

"The reason I was doing the howling was that friends of mine were all doing electronic music and that. It was to bring back the human thing." 

– Yoko to David Skan, Record Mirror, October 1969 

The raw, intense vocalizations in Yoko’s wordless pieces are the aural equivalent of Abstract Expressionist art. They are derivative of hetai, a highly expressive Kabuki theater vocal technique which requires straining of the voice to convey emotions. She is articulating years of repressed emotional responses from traumatic experiences throughout her life. We can hear Yoko crying inside. We also hear her rage, courage and absolute sincerity – a release from years of suffocation. In the 1960s, She was conflicted with the avant-garde movement’s pretentious attitude toward art, feeling alienated because they considered her work too emotional and animalistic. 

In Blood Piece written in 1960 (included in her 1964 book Grapefruit) Yoko’s words express the giving of her entire being in her work, with the instruction to “Use your blood to paint... until you faint, or until you die.”  Yoko told Option Magazine in 1992…

“The avant-garde guys didn’t use the voice. They were all just so cool, right?

And there was also this very asexual kind of atmosphere in the music. and I wanted to throw blood.”

Yoko’s mother played several musical instruments. Her father had been a pianist. As a young child in Japan, she received classical vocal and musical training at the prestigious Jiyu Gakuen (Learning Garden of Freedom) school for children of wealth and nobility. The school building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Yoko learned about how the breath works inside of the body to make different sounds; the French way, the German way, the Italian way, Chinese way and the Japanese way. She found that they are all very interesting in their differences. 

“One day, I was going through some bad stuff in my private life. I started to sing... and when I played it back on a tape recorder, I realized it was out of tune. The sound was distorted. It sounded like a song sung by someone who was mentally deranged, or at the limit of their emotion. And I realized I hadn’t liked those clear voices that (sang) the way you’re supposed to.” 

– To Lillian Roxon, Bank Street, January 8, 1973 

The Sound of Women 

The power of a woman’s voice and the influence of women in general was highly inspirational in this childhood memory, and her mother’s warning not to ever go near the servants’ rooms.. Yoko told The Guardian in 2016,

“...it’s very bad, because they’re talking about things you don’t want to know.’ And sure enough, I just sneaked up and listened to it. And these two teenage girls, they were combing their hair and talking. ‘My aunt had a baby yesterday.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yes, and she was making noises. And I just thought: ‘Oh my god, a woman does that when she has a baby?’ There was a totally sanitised image about a woman, you know, they were supposed to be just pretty and make pretty noises... So I was scared, and I sneaked back to my room, but that really stayed with me. And years later, I started to create all sorts of sounds.” 

The memory permeated her mind as Yoko grew older. She decided to emulate the sounds of childbirth. When she accidentally played the tape backwards, she replicated and rehearsed those haunting sounds. They perfectly illustrated her feelings as a disrespected woman. She began to carry the torch for the plight of all women. 

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night Hearing thousands of women screaming.

Other times just one woman tries to talk through me.”

– Blueprint for a Sunrise 2001 album liner notes

 

“My sound is the sound of women.

The ones who bore babies, and thus created the future race. Just like the Earth,

I am trying to communicate to you

with the sounds that are within us. Woman Power.”

Twitter – November 11, 2019

In the early 1960s, there was no such thing as avant-garde in Japan. Teachers were judging Yoko’s work based upon existing standards and did not consider it well. Most people like to hear sounds they are familiar with. She began to search for like-minded artists and composers in America. 

“I was interested not in the noise you make but the noise that happens when you try not to make it, just that tension going back and forth."

– Rolling Stone, March 18, 1971

Yoko’s musical colleagues in the 1950s and 60s were jazz great Ornette Coleman and cutting-edge composers; Toshiro Mayuzumi (the first Japanese composer of electronic music), John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi (her first husband) and American avant-garde minimalist La Monte Young. These modernists, along with 12-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, birdsong, drones, Buddhist chants, and even silence were the soundtracks that would resonate throughout her work. 

“You see, I was doing music of the mind – no sound at all, and everybody sitting around just imagining sounds... But I felt stifled even with that, I was dying to scream, to go back to my voice. And I came to a point where I believed that the idea of avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.” 

–Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice Rolling Stone March 18, 1971 

Limitations of notation 

As a child, one of Yoko’s school assignments was to translate the sounds of twittering birds into musical notation. This impossibility made her realize that there was a limitation in the way that we scored music. She realized that we cannot translate magnificence of natural sounds. They become a mere simplification, without capturing the original intricate beauty. She resolved this by combining musical notation with written words in her musical scores. 

A cathartic musical score, Voice Piece for Soprano published in her book Grapefruit is Yoko’s manifesto and her mantra. 

VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO 

Scream.

1. against the wind 

2. against the wall 

3. against the sky 

1961 autumn 

Voice Piece for Soprano was later performed live by Yoko at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in summer 2010 (as part of the Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition. A microphone connected to high-volume speakers was left in the atrium for participants to recreate the piece intermittently, including Yoko herself. The volume was eventually turned down, as the “performances” startled museum visitors. This resulted in a headline in The Observer: MoMA Turns Down the Volume on Yoko. 

Plastic Ono Band bass player Klaus Voormann described Yoko’s performance of ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow)’ at the Live Peace in Toronto festival in September 1969 in Uncut Magazine, 2019.

“She was doing everything she could possibly do to let the people know that war was terrible. By the end she was croaking like a dying bird. It was heartbreaking. I really heard tanks and soldiers and people dying. At the end, John came and embraced her. You could see exactly what he saw in her. He was proud of her and loved her, and in a way, he couldn’t care less about the public, but in another way, they were trying to spread this message.” 

When Yoko was a child, she read many Chinese stories about the battle between good and evil. She told Arthur Magazine in 2007…

“ ...I thought I was a warrior. A warrior with one sword, which was just my voice. I could go anywhere. I felt if you wanted me to do something with you, then let’s do it. And I’ll do it with my voice. That’s how I was when I arrived places. And when I met John... I was trying to create a new sound. The reason you create a new sound is because you’re not that interested in the sounds that are around you.” 

Yoko told Mojo in June 1997 that she was trained in Italian opera and German lieder, Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg and Lulu by Alban Berg. She was fascinated by Menotti’s way of using English. Despite the extreme backlash, she followed her instincts. “I was really into bringing out the sound that comes out of the inner soul.” 

“ ... I know that my voice became a joke in this society, so people are going to say-oh, no! But I had an incredibly good voice then, which was when I was around 17 or 18 and I had instructors who would say that I could probably make it as an alto, or mezzo- soprano. I started to dislike it so intensely. I was supposed to go to music school to study voice, and then eventually go to Italy. I thought, there’s something wrong with it. I didn’t enjoy singing other people songs. You know, I like good German lieder and all that, but I had an urge to compose...” 

– The Guests Go in to Supper, 1984 

The chances of random synthesis being so perfect during improvised pieces are slim, but Yoko often manages it – especially on the track ‘Why’ from her first solo album Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band. ‘Why’ was John’s favorite piece of Yoko’s music. You cannot distinguish his guitar sound from her anguished vocal at the start. She always knew that screaming was a healthy thing to do. In 1970, John became mentally liberated by Arthur Janov’s Primal (scream) therapy. John’s guitar playing became inspired by Yoko’s vocalizing. 

“What she’d done for my guitar playing was to free it the way she’d freed her voice from all the restrictions. I just played whatever I could to match it to her voice.” 

– John Lennon, One Day at a Time, Anthony Fawcett

Alex Bennet, on WMCA Radio: “Here’s a track called ‘Why’ – phone in and tell us what you think of it.” 

“’It’s Today’s Tutti Frutti,’ John writes on a note pad.” 

• Rolling Stone March 18, 1971 

Sean Ono Lennon spoke about his parents in Nero magazine in 2016.

“I think that my mom brought my father to that place of pure, visceral expression. My mom was avant-garde and he was pop. She also gave that connection to a pure expression. Some of the ways my mom sings is almost like a baby crying. My father was very influenced by that and you can hear it in songs like ‘Mother’ on John Lennon Plastic Ono Band. He screams at the end. That was my mother’s influence. That was their new chapter, the new chapter of John and Yoko.” 

“It’s my arrogance, but

I thought my music was beautiful all along. When I say beautiful ...

well, the maximum beauty can be ugly to some people.”

– Yoko, The Guardian February 22, 2016

Just as Yoko inspired John Lennon to experiment, he instilled something in her that would drastically transform her amorphous music – a beat. Beginning with the seventeen-minute long ‘Mind Train’ and with ‘Midsummer New York’ on her album Fly, Yoko began writing structured songs with evocative lyrics in a more conventional framework. 

"I was doing very musically intricate things, in terms of rhythm and notation and how it moves. I thought it was comparable to someone like Schoenberg in terms of the structure of the music, and they didn't hear that at all. They just said, 'Yoko's screaming!' Is that terrible? Is it terrible? For some people it is. I don't think that I am screaming ENOUGH. I mean, look at what's happening in the world. But then the thing is, if I had screamed as much as is happening in the world, well, nobody's going to listen to that.” 

– The Quietus, October 16, 2013 

Yoko wanted to make more music with John, but that was not to be... until much later when they recorded an alternating dialogue of songs on Double Fantasy in 1980. 

Yoko felt restricted by her peers in the avant-garde community who considered her vocalizing too emotional. Her voice experiments were not well-received by the avant-garde, who did not believe in using lyrics! 

“...the New York avant-garde was into cool art, not hot – and what I do was too emotional in a way they thought it was too animalistic. They were into controlling. They used to control the voice, rather than letting it out. And then I went to London, and I was making films and all that, and I met John... In one of the pieces I think I realized that I can sing three notes at the same time, which again I’m not doing by controlling it or anything. I just started doing it, and I said, ‘oh, this is great!’ And later, one of those doctors who checks your throat said there is a little sort of pea-sized something on my vocal cord, and maybe that’s the reason. I’m an early age I could sing a very wide range like alto, Mezzo-soprano, coloratura soprano – a big range, and I knew that. But then I didn’t know that I could do two notes or three notes at the same time. And when we found out about that we were very excited. So there’s some songs in the Plastic Ono Band album, if you listen to it you’ll hear the voice going like a harmonica, you know, three sounds.” 

– The Guests Go in to Supper, 1984

“She becomes her voice, and you get touched.”

– John Lennon, Rolling Stone, March 18, 1971

The intimacy, honesty and wisdom that Yoko openly shares in all of her work – especially in her music, is quite generous and always remarkable.  In 1999, she was asked by The Quietus,

How is it to try and push that voice out of the body?

“It's just something that's within me, WITHIN me. And within a body-in-mind that has accumulated in 80 years, and that's a lot, you know. I think it's a fortunate thing that it's been accumulated that long, it’s almost like discussing a good wine, you know. It took a long time to be what it is. I am very caring about it in the sense that I try to bring it out, as it is.” 

It seems like you are loved now. People really appreciate your work. Maybe in the past it was easy for people to criticize you because of what they thought you were. How has that shift been? 

“...Thank god they criticized me instead of ignoring me... Can you imagine if everyone was saying ‘she’s so good,’ I’d be dead by now!” 

– BBC Radio 6 Music First Time... with Yoko Ono July 2016

Sean Lennon told Nero magazine in 2016 that he views his mother as revolutionary. 

“ ...One of a kind... Her conservative Japanese family didn’t quite understand her art... She felt very hurt by that. She was channeling a sort of fundamental avant-garde that was connected to Japanese folk singing which wasn’t a Western style of singing. If you look at the notation, it’s actually sort of an abstract poem. There was no Western notation. It would just go up and down. I think she’s very influenced by enka also in terms of her minor chords. Even Okinawn folk music. There’s something in her heart that’s very Japanese that’s not bound by Western conformist musical technique and theory. I think she applied that to her avant-garde theory to break through all the barriers. Pure expression, not limited music.” 

Enka is a genre of traditional Japanese songs composed in the Pentatonic scale (five notes per octave), sounding similar to blues. Although Enka is rooted in traditional folk songs, it now defines syrupy, dramatic contemporary ballads. Another genre which has influenced Yoko’s vocal style is Dōyō – traditional songs for Japanese children. Enka and Dōyō songs conjure nostalgic memories. 

Whispers 

Ironically, much of Yoko’s work is done with a whisper. Many of her songs are sung delicately and softly in her sweet and youthful speaking voice. She told The Huffington Post in 2010,

“It’s very interesting because Whisper Piece might be a scream, and the scream piece might be a whisper. In the big picture, in the whole of the planet, a scream is definitely just a whisper. And the 16 written whispers in Whisper Piece could add up to a big scream, conceptually.” 

Yoko’s art sometimes relies upon silence, calling attention to negative space. She was given some unusual homework as a child in the 1930s – to transform natural sounds into musical notation. She became accustomed to doing this in her mind. When a clock rang (“ding, ding”) she repeated the sounds in her mind. She did not count when the clock chimed, but after the chime stopped. This is what came naturally to her. 

Yoko was invited to participate in the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in 1966. She chose to perform Whisper Piece, as she was interested in the delicate way that things change. She feels that this kind of destruction is in fact, more dangerous. The whispered word is destroyed as it travels from ear to ear. 

“Some artists ignore small messages as trivia and wait to hear a symphonic message hit them. I pick small messages as quiet as a whisper and make something out of it...

It works.” 

“Silence is the mother of all invention.” 

Twitter – August 2013 / July 2019 

Yoko has written many more songs with lyrics than without. Her lyrical poetry is transcendent and imbued with wisdom and intuition. She poetically reveres the elements of nature. Lines from ‘Winter Song’ (1973) are prescient (The mountains lie in a distance like the future we’d never reach...) and also sacred, 

The lake is shining like a drop of Buddha’s tears... 

The bed is shining like an old scripture that's never been opened before... 

Yoko understood the frustrations of people who truly admired her music. When Onobox, a six-CD compilation was released in 1992 by Rykodisc, she was thinking of them. She spoke to American Songwriter in 1992…

“I think there’s a small group of hardcore fans who had to literally go through the same bashing that I went through just because they like my music. So I’m doing it for them, too, this box. I felt I really had to make sure that every note was right. For them.” 

In 1986 Yoko invited me to a party in New York City. The DJ played her song ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ and people were dancing! It was the first time ever that nobody ran out the door when her music came on! I said, “Yoko, look! Everyone is dancing!” She replied: “Oh, well maybe I’m becoming too commercial.” 

“I don’t accommodate the audience. I ask the audience to accommodate.” 

– The Guardian February 22, 2016 

“I was driven. I felt that I didn’t want to get into self-censorship, which is the most dangerous thing you can do. Going against the stream of things is one of the most organic things that an artist does. I was a rebel. It’s an innate part of me to be a rebel. I couldn’t help being that.” 

– Seconds magazine #36, 1995 

“I think she should have done more howling, because it was so new before, it was really like the first abstract picture you ever saw. When somebody just starts going ‘woooowggh’ ...I mean, we all accept Little Richard doing it in the 50s, but someone who eliminates all the words altogether, it’s quite a trip. To write, that’s easy. But to bloody howl, that’s hard.” 

– John Lennon to Lillian Roxon, January 1973 

“I came from a tradition of, ‘not concerned about the press,’ kind of ivory tower and a bit of snobbery and all that. On the stage, when the curtain’s up, you see me with my back against the audience. That was the attitude. And so everybody walked out of your concert – it’s a successful concert! A classic avant-garde idea.” 

– Yoko to Carol Clerk, Uncut September 2003

Yoko has always been reinventing the concept of how a song, or a vocal performance can be perceived. 

“I didn’t think I am I going to get to number one on the chart or something because I didn’t even know what a chart was.”

– The Guardian February 22, 2016

"I do the freaky songs so you know that I’m not lip-synching.”

– Onstage during Starpeace tour, May 22, 1985

Eventually, the world started to catch up with her. 

“Oh, now it’s very experimental, but we started a long time ago, it was a different attitude then.

Now I get letters saying, “your thing is too middle of the road, what are you doing, we want to hear you screaming.” 

– The Guests Go in to Supper, 1984 

Inspiring music 

Along with the 12-tone composers, Yoko also appreciates Japanese, Middle-Eastern and Indian music.” Yoko has mentioned that her favorite key is F#. The songs that she has written herself in that key are her favorites. The key of F# is primarily used in piano compositions and rarely in classical pieces. 

She also loves folk songs from different countries that she enjoyed listening to with John. When asked about her favorite music by Rolling Stone (March 30, 2012), she replied, “I can’t say, you know, ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula.’

Since childhood, she was familiar with written musical scores, the purpose of which was that the composer was not the only one who could interpret the work. This gave her the idea to create art scores, or instructions so that people may find their own meaning in her work. Yoko alwaysreturned to making music. Her art was all about us, making us think toward changing the world for a better future. Music is her favorite means of self-expression. She considers it her “security blanket,” as this was the first medium that she was taught at age four, when her mother enrolled her in musical education. 

“That’s where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes. My mind, my ears were trained to listen to sounds... The only instrument that I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano. I do play the piano when... it just sort of calms me down. 

– A.V. Club September 16, 2009 

“He woke me up from my mind game..." 

“Obviously, I learned all about rock and pop from John. He also had very astute observations about people – on a very realistic level – that I didn’t have... Surrealism is very natural for me. It’s easier for me to describe my emotions in a surrealistic way, a symbolic way. But here was this guy who was very straightforward. If I was beating ‘round the bush, trying to say things with symbolism he’d say, ‘What do you really mean?’... You know how you can sometimes read a surrealistic poem and not know what they’re talking about? It’s just word-weaving. Or mind-weaving. You think, ‘Oh well. It seems very beautiful, but what’s the point?’ I would have headed toward that, maybe... I might have been a nice old middle-class spinster. Instead, John gave me back the body. He woke me up from my mind game. That was very healthy for me.” 

• Yoko, Record magazine, December 1984