“Yes, I’m a Witch”: Lessons on Writing (and Living) from Yoko Ono
A talk given on July 8, 2022 to UBC Creative Writing's MFA Summer Residency students
The following is a 40 minute talk I gave on July 8, 2022 to UBC Creative Writing’s MFA Summer Residency students.
Thanks for being here with me. I’m assuming the focus of my talk may seem strange. When I was invited to give a talk, I had a few different ideas for what I might do. But my gut kept telling me it might be time to revisit Yoko Ono.
I’ve decided to not use slides and to resist playing any audio or video today. I’m just going to talk, mostly about Yoko Ono. I’ll read some of my work and some of her work.
At the same time I was thinking about Yoko Ono, I was thinking about the writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs. (Here, I’m going to quote the first two sentences of her bio from the ‘about’ page of her website: “Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice.” I love a good bio, which to my mind is, ideally, more than a list of places where you’ve published your work.)
So, okay, back to Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She recently published a triptych of poetic books inspired by Black feminist theorist ancestors:
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (inspired by Hortense Spillers)
M Archive: After the End of the World (inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander)
Dub: Finding Ceremony (inspired by Sylvia Wynter)
In each of these works, she pays deep (read: book-length) attention to a specific writer as her own writing unfolds “infinite, unstoppable ancestral love.”
Her latest book (which I recommend very highly) is Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
I was moved and inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ approach.
My work is deeply indebted to dozens of artists, and I wondered what would happen if I tugged on one of the threads of influence that runs through my work. So, for this talk, I’m going to focus on Yoko Ono. (I now realize this could be a two hour talk. I’ve cut so much material to stay within the time frame.)
~
I googled terms like “fearless artist” and “fearless musician” and saw the names of people nowhere near as fearless and ferocious as Yoko Ono.
If you went to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s show on her work, you probably saw the Maysles brothers’ short film of her performing “Cut Piece,” a work she first performed in 1964.
Here is how Yoko Ono described “Cut Piece” in 1966 in a series of instruction for John Cage:
“Cut Piece.
“Cut.
by Yoko Ono
“This piece was performed in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York and London. It is usually performed by Yoko Ono coming on the stage, and in a sitting form, placing a pair of scissors in front of her and asking the audience to come up on the stage, one by one, and cut a portion of her clothing (anywhere they like) and take it. The performer, however, does not have to be a woman.”
A recent New Yorker piece included the following description of the work: “In ‘Cut Piece,’ the performers are unknown to the artist. They can interpret the instructions in unpredictable ways. It’s like handing out loaded guns to a roomful of strangers. Ono is small (five-two); the shears are large and sharp. When audience members start slicing away the fabric around her breasts or near her crotch, there is a real sense of danger and violation. In Japan, one of the cutters stood behind her and held the shears above her head, as though he were going to impale her.”
I can’t imagine performing “Cut Piece.” No offense, but I don’t think I trust people enough.
Once she became involved with John Lennon, Yoko Ono attracted more hatred than I can imagine. She was Japanese and she was a woman. People thought she broke up the Beatles. But she kept making art, and she started singing. I recently watched videos on YouTube of her performing with Frank Zappa and John Lennon, as well as Chuck Berry and John Lennon. Based on the most popular comments, people still hate her guts. Fifty years have passed and people are still pissed. (The funny thing is she studied composition and could read and write music, unlike any member of the Beatles.)
In Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono, Lisa Carver quotes a few descriptions of Yoko Ono’s voice, including “pig squeals,” “tortured cat noises,” and “fuck donkey” (99). Then, Carver writes about the jam session between Zappa, Lennon, and Ono in 1971 as follows: “I think you have to be musically illiterate to believe that she got in the way of these two rock geniuses with her animal sounds. I thought the whole purpose of rock was to wake the animal within? Her animal was wide awake. Anyway, her contributions certainly shook up an otherwise rather pat and solid jam, this animal spirit crashing the masters’ meeting” (99), adding that finding “herself onstage with two giants, icons, rock gods, she was not intimidated by their body of work, their history, their belovedness. This was just another moment, another chance to capture something new before letting it go” (100).
Sometimes when I’m writing a work of fiction or a song, I’ll find myself wondering if it’s too much. And then I’ll think about Yoko Ono performing “Cut Piece” for the first time in 1964 or I’ll picture her standing in front of tens of thousands of people, making something happen with her voice; she knows millions of people on this planet seem to hate her, but she’s still somehow present, singing into the moving moment. So, writing a sex scene that lasts a dozen pages doesn’t feel daunting; it feels fine, maybe even freeing. I can cut it later if I need to. Yoko Ono doesn’t worry if a sound she’s making is too weird or if a piece isn’t immediately understandable.
In fact, my understanding of my own art and my own life keeps shifting. We can’t really see it from our own (always limited, always limiting) point of view. Our view is always static and fixed; the moment is always fluid and unfixed.
In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard jotted the following in his journal: “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause — that it must be lived forwards" (Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 1:A–E IV A 164, p. 451; entry 1030).
So, we live our lives forwards, and we understand our lives backwards. It’s only in the past few months – I’m in my late 40s! – that I’ve started to get a sense of how deeply Yoko Ono has influenced me.
I didn’t take her work seriously until 1992, when I bought a compilation album called Walking On Thin Ice. I think I bought that album because there was so much attention being paid to her work because of a 6-disc retrospective box set called Onobox. The internet didn’t exist yet. Cell phones didn’t exist yet. I lived on the outskirts of Colwood, which was over 90 minutes away from downtown Victoria, a 30 minute walk to the nearest bus stop. During my long commute home after buying the CD downtown, I read an essay included in the Walking On Thin Ice booklet, which Yoko Ono had originally published in the New York Times in 1973. Her essay knocked me out. It was so incredibly smart and good. In retrospect, that essay changed my life, and I can now see at least a few things in it that morphed years later into bits in my first novel.
In fall 2019, I published my first novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) with Metonymy Press. It’s an unrequited love story between the queer trans femme narrator and her recently deceased straight trans femme friend Vivian. The narrator works through her grief by revisiting Vivian’s favourite TV series, Little Blue, which leads to her writing about their relationship through the lens of encyclopedia entries about the TV show.
When I’ve done readings from Little Blue Encyclopedia, I’ve often started with the following extract:
After a few months of emptiness and anger, I felt the urge to sift through the boxes in my closet that held remnants of Vivian. The first box I opened contained a tailored houndstooth trench coat that she adored. I tried it on. It was a little snug, but I felt good in it. Standing in the coat, I felt so intensely that Vivian was still alive, somehow. I imagined a hummingbird trapped inside my heart, its tiny wings vibrating against my rib cage. I imagined it quivering and expanding and, finally, folding in on itself. I put my hands in the coat pockets, where I found an old tube of lip gloss. Viv was a fiend for lip gloss.
While preparing for this talk, I realized that somehow the kernel of this scene came from three sentences in Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay: “Don’t leave me words, they haunt me. Leave me your coat to keep me warm. I like secondhand clothes because they are like wearing a person.”
Here’s another extract from her 1973 essay: “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.”
I remember that idea being so potent and so freeing when I read it in 1992. “In a hundred years, they would all be dead.” Reading that, I felt calm. I felt less pressure. A few years later, I’d read the Tao Te Ching and be beautifully unmoored by the sentence “Accept being unimportant,” which turned an existential microscope into a telescope.
I found it really hard to be alive until I was in my late 20s. I felt like I’d somehow been born without skin because being in the world just felt unbearably difficult. After reading Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay, I frequently calmed myself down when fear, anxiety or panic hit me by reminding myself that in a hundred years everyone around me would be dead - and I’d be dead. I don’t know if this is morbid. It probably is. But it was also incredibly helpful to weather the wear and tear and weight of daily life.
Here’s an extract from Little Blue Encyclopedia where the narrator uses that same ‘one hundred years from now’ technique that I derived from Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay.
Viv expanded my orbit. She didn’t school me on any reductive rules of femininity. She just let me see how she was able to be strong and femme and trans.
She also said early on that I could ask her anything . I’ve always been shy and never want to cross any lines. I’m the sort of person who will get cozy in the bathtub and never want to get out. Even making friends has always seemed like magic when I’ve seen it happen or it’s happened to me. But it’s never felt like a magic that I have any control over. When I try to make it happen, I always do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing. So, I didn’t want to ask Viv the wrong question, even though she’d said all questions were acceptable.
After a few too many drinks one night, I finally asked her via text message how she remained so confident and unflappable. I sent the text and immediately regretted it, but I couldn’t take it back, so I just had another glass or two of Malbec, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.
The next morning, I saw she’d replied with a cascade of texts:
oh that
it’s gold dust + glitter
it’s a perfume i call Defiant Beauty
it smells like FUCK YOU, I AM PRETTY
i dab it on before i go out
it’s yours if you want it
let’s pancake for breakfast, ok?
I wish I could say that I’ve gotten to a place where I can dab a little Defiant Beauty on me before I go out, but the truth is that I’m still far too self-conscious. Around Viv I felt more calm and confident than I’ve ever felt on my own. Small talk stresses me out terribly. I wish I could calm my mind, but no matter how much I meditate it doesn’t seem to translate into making it easier to navigate the real world. One technique I sometimes use to calm myself down is to remember that everyone around me will be dead in a hundred years. So, eventually, no one will remember the time I accidentally bumped into that older woman behind me in the supermarket and apologized and she looked at me with complete contempt and I suddenly felt so uncomfortable and crummy that I had to put down my shopping basket and rush home to curl up in bed with my cat Whisk. Sure, it’s morbid to remind yourself that everyone around you will die, but at times that reminder feels comforting and necessary. The stakes are suddenly lower. Sometimes just walking into a restaurant by myself and sitting down can feel terrifying.
I think of Vivian’s phrase “defiant beauty.” When people ask me what kind of music my band plays, I sometimes say our genre is Defiant Beauty.
One of the things I love about Yoko Ono is her defiance. After I sent in the title and abstract for this talk, my best friend texted me a snap of an article that had just been published in the New Yorker called “Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance.” I wasn’t surprised by the coincidence; it just felt synchronous, like a breadcrumb confirming that I needed to pay attention to Yoko Ono.
The title of this talk is “‘Yes, I’m a Witch’: Lessons on Writing (and Living) from Yoko Ono.” In 1974, Yoko Ono recorded a batch of songs that weren’t released until 1992. Her song “Yes, I’m a Witch” was recorded during the year when she sent John Lennon to Los Angeles because she needed space. (When I told queer friends about this talk, I told them I was going to try to resist talking about Yoko and John’s D/s vibe. D = dom / s = sub. I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about power. Yoko was pretty clearly in charge. In that 1973 essay, Yoko wrote, “Actually, I’m a Lenny Bruce married to Greta Garbo, if you must know.” And I think that checks out.)
Okay, back to the song “Yes, I’m a Witch,” which is such a defiant song from a woman who was not beloved, especially a few years after the Beatles broke up. Even the title feels like a performance piece.
WITCH PIECE.
Yes, I’m a witch.
I mentioned the song “Yes, I’m a Witch” in Little Blue Encyclopedia as a possible trans femme anthem and I stand behind that reading. And now I’m going to read you the lyrics of “Yes, I’m a Witch” from 1974:
Yes, I'm a witch,
I'm a bitch
I don't care what you say,
My voice is real.
My voice speaks truth,
I don't fit in your ways.
I'm not gonna die for you,
You might as well face the truth,
I'm gonna stick around for quite awhile.
We're gonna say,
We're gonna try,
We're gonna try it our way.
We've been repressed,
We've been depressed,
Suppression all the way.
We're not gonna die for you,
We're not seeking vengeance,
But we're not gonna kill ourselves for your convenience.
Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.
Each time we close our minds to how we feel, we're dying.
Each time we get to do what we wanna do, we're living.
Each time we're open to what we see and hear, we're living.
We'll free you from the ghettos of your minds,
We'll free you from your fears and binds,
We know you want things to stay as it is,
It's gonna change, baby.
It's gonna change, baby doll,
It's gonna change, honey ball,
It's gonna change, sugar cane,
It's gonna change, sweetie legs.
So don't try to make cock-pecked people out of us.
Now here’s the scene from Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) that mentions “Yes, I’m a Witch.”
Vivian’s sister Dot invited me to karaoke at her favourite place. She got a babysitter for Teddy. When I arrived, she was waiting for me with two shots of Chartreuse. We hugged and clinked glasses and downed the shots. I’d forgotten how herbal and potent it was. She led me to our own little karaoke room. Dot handed me the song list and I quickly discovered why she liked this spot. It specialized in punk and new wave songs.
“Pick a song,” she said. “C’mon. Pick. A. Song.”
I flipped through the pages. It had been a while since I’d been to karaoke and I was overwhelmed and suddenly nervous to sing in front of her. We’d never been to karaoke together. I asked her to go first, pleaded with her to go first.
She selected a song, took the mic, and launched into “Identity” by X-Ray Spex. She went from standing in place to bouncing around in just a few seconds. It was impossible to take your eyes off her while she sang. She was a whirligig. She was free and having fun. As the song ended, she collapsed into her chair.
“We need more Chartreuse,” she said, a little out of breath. “And you need to choose a song, princess.”
I chose a song and grabbed the mic. It was “Yes, I’m a Witch” by Yoko Ono. I wasn’t that familiar with Yoko until Ruby sat me down one night and introduced me to her music. Her band Vulva Death Grip covered “Yes, I’m a Witch,” which should be a contender if we ever have a trans femme international anthem. It’s so obscure that I didn’t expect to see it at a karaoke joint.
When I finished singing, Dot said, “Yoko Ono? That was SO good. You have to do that one again later, okay?!” I smiled, shrugged, and rolled my eyes. It’s the kind of gesture Shirley Temple might have done, but I’ve heard it’s kinda cute when I do it, so I probably do it more often than I should.
We went back and forth singing songs, drinking more Chartreuse. We even sang one duet. Dot said we had to sing the song “Stumblin’ In” by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman. I was confused. It was a cheesy classic rock boy-girl duet from the seventies. But she even got on her knees and said something like, “I beseech you, m’lady.” It was weird. I told her I’d do it, but only if I could do the Suzi Quatro part. I’d had a crush on Suzi Quatro from the time I was about ten. I mean, she was cute and wore a leather jacket and leather pants and played a character named Leather. Even when I was in elementary school, I was a little dyke tomboy. Dot agreed, saying she’d never ask me to sing the boy part. It felt surreal singing a corny love duet while locking eyes with my dead friend’s sister. I was sure Dot and Viv had probably sung this song into hairbrush microphones together a dozen times.
I remember listening to Miranda July on a KCRW show. She talked about a moment in her film The Future when the two main characters decide to have a song in case something happens to them - like amnesia or a car crash - this song will cut through all that and sort of bring them back to each other. In the end, she went with a Peggy Lee song, but she initially wanted to use the song “Stumblin’ In.”
Miranda July: “And because it was this special song between my parents it was very resonant to me, but I began to realize that for other people it was just…funny. And I was like, ‘oh no, this is one of those terrible things where like it's not going to work, it's only me’, and you're trying to be somewhat universal, especially with movies. So I had to find another song …”
But, no, Miranda July didn’t have to find another song. “Stumbin’ In” is pretty perfect, and it’s a super resonant song from my childhood, so I borrowed it for this scene in my novel. (I’ve never told anyone that before. Sometimes being a writer is also being a magpie and picking up stray bits of twine to weave into your own fictional webbing.)
After writing my book, I remember reading Tom Cho’s book Look Who’s Morphing and seeing his references to Suzi Quatro. I now realize there’s a pocket of queer folks and trans folks who really gravitated towards Suzi Quatro. I had no idea at the time.
And I think of Tom Cho’s blurb for Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), where he mentions that “a life recalled can be both encyclopedic and enigmatic.”
And this leads me back to Yoko Ono’s 1973 New York Times piece, where she wrote:
“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 encyclopedia and still you couldn't explain all that they took to survive.”
I literally wrote a novel in the format of an encyclopedia that focused on one person’s life. I’m struck by how Ono describes each person as “having a life show of their own,” largely because the encyclopedia woven in my novel is for a TV show that doesn’t exist called Little Blue.
~
Yoko Ono’s work is often rooted in possibilities. For example, her book Grapefruit (1964) includes a series of instructions for pieces you create in your mind. I’ve had so many people tell me they’re disappointed that the TV series Little Blue doesn’t exist. Typically, I tell them that it does exist; we made it exist together because I included enough detail for them to conjure the show. And I think Yoko’s work is the same. There’s space and generosity. There’s a conjuring that happens.
“Snow Piece” [1963 summer, from Grapefruit]
Think that snow is falling
Think that snow is falling everywhere
all the time.
When you talk with a person, think
that snow is falling between you and
on the person.
Stop conversing when you think the
person is covered by snow.
Yoko Ono often revisits ideas. So, “Snow Piece” several years later will become the song “Listen, the Snow is Falling,” which is one of my favourite songs of hers.
I mentioned her song “Listen, the Snow is Falling” in Miscellaneous Kisses, a project that I made during the pandemic. Last year, I published a tiny artist edition of around 50 copies with deluxe packaging for a Blu-ray. The packaging includes screenshots and a long essay I wrote about a non-existent film called Miscellaneous Kisses directed by an artist named Sadie Tang, who is a character in my next novel. I commissioned my brilliant writer/artist friend John Elizabeth Stintzi (JES) to do the design work. It turned out nicely.
(If you’re interested, you can read my essay about the film Miscellaneous Kisses on a gorgeous page created by a beloved friend who helped bring this project into being.)
Yoko Ono invites you to imagine snow slowly covering the person talking to you. I invite you to imagine a film that doesn’t exist. In fact, there’s even an instructional piece in Miscellaneous Kisses that also appears in my next novel. In Miscellaneous Kisses, this piece (called “On Donuts”) appears as the voiceover for a short film. In my next novel, Any Other City, it appears as part of an art installation that includes actual donuts. In this piece, you need to conjure all the actions in your mind.
1. Put on a pair of latex gloves. Put gloves on both of your hands. Enjoy the snap of the gloves on your wrists.
2. Select a donut. Don’t think too much. Just find a donut. A donut is a donut.
3. Pick up the donut.
4. Look at the hole in the middle of your donut.
5. While staring at the hole, think about the last time you had an orgasm. Keep thinking about your orgasm. Don’t talk about it. Try not to be embarrassed.
6. Take a bite of the donut. Just one bite. Chew it slowly.
7. Close your eyes.
8. Think about the person you love most in the world. Picture their face.
9. Open your eyes.
10. Look at the donut in your hand. Imagine the donut is full of magic and pleasure.
11. Take another bite of the donut.
12. Look at the half-eaten donut you are holding. Imagine the remaining half of the donut is filled with love and kindness.
13. Eat the rest of the donut.
14. Imagine the donut inside your body is nourishing you with magic and pleasure, love and kindness.
15. Remove the gloves from your hands and put them in a trash bin.
16. Enjoy your life.
When the song “Listen, the Snow is Falling” was recorded, Yoko Ono didn’t like how some of the musicians were playing. She wanted it slower. And she was right. She told Nicky Hopkins, who may be one of the most accomplished studio pianists ever, to play as if "snow is melting from your fingertips, not that banging."
I don’t think she was saying that out of ego. I think she was trying to bring the song into being, to give it room to breathe. I find myself thinking all the time, “What does this thing want to be?” I ask myself that question often when I’m writing. How can I get the fuck out of the way and forget my puny ego? I think most of the best things I’ve created feel beyond me. Parts of my work are smarter and wiser than I am and that pleases me.
So much of what I love about Yoko Ono’s work is her willingness to be simple and to leave space.
Here’s a brief, telling exchange from the podcast Recording Artists on an episode about Yoko Ono:
Catherine Lord (an artist): She is very, very, very smart.
Helen Molesworth (podcast host): She is very, very, very smart. But her intelligence is really deceptive. ’Cause she won’t perform her intelligence as intelligence. I mean, she’s letting people cut her clothes off and she’s putting a great big bag over herself onstage, and she’s produced a book of instructions for things that can be misconstrued as humorous or impossible or a kind of foolishness.
Catherine Lord: She’s stripped away all the pretention, all the jargon. She never uses jargon. She writes in the simplest possible language.
Grapefruit was one of the first books I read that got me thinking about spaciousness and the page. My main metaphor for thinking about Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) during the several years of writing it was a rice krispie square. I knew my novel was dense with so much information about a non-existent television show, but I tried to leave space for the reader to spend time with it, to make it as airy as possible. So, there are illustrations for the 26 letters of the alphabet and each letter starts on a recto page to leave more room. I think Yoko is always thinking about space. The title of the New York Times article I’ve been quoting is the same name she gave to an album also released in 1973: Feeling the Space.
When I’m editing my writing, two words that always come to mind are emotional and expansive. Is it emotional? Is it expansive? If it doesn’t make me feel things in my body and it doesn’t feel roomy, I’ll often cut it. I’m tired of being clever or being funny. I want to leave space for readers to think and feel. I’m leaving gaps because I want to trust them.
I have so many more things to say about Yoko Ono, but I’m running out of time and I want to leave space. So, I’ll say in passing that her work is full of lessons about desire and sexuality and embodiment and repetition and beauty.
I interviewed the writer Ryka Aoki a couple days ago and at one point she said that all of her work is pretty much saying one thing: “I love you.” And I needed to hear that because things feel so heavy lately.
And in so many ways “I love you” is also the message of so much of Yoko Ono’s work. I’m going to end this talk by quoting from a passage from her 1973 essay that I found myself reading and rereading and trying to let myself feel into it. It feels like the sort of thing that will possibly percolate into work I’ll write in the future, as her work has been doing since 1992.
This is Yoko Ono from 1973: “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? [...] 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. [...] 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.”
Thanks.