WALKING ON ICY AIR

 

I’ve been thinking about Yoko, who turned 90 on February 18th. Towards the end of January, when she was just 89, she Tweeted 

I learned about this from the New York Post which isn’t the most universally reliable news source, but in this case the information seems accurate enough – the Tweet is right there on Yoko’s feed.

 

And I do happen to think Yoko’s walking cure for depression is a very good one, though by no means every walk in New York gives you a high.  And how far was she claiming to walk?  Well that’s tricky.  There are about 20 blocks to a mile running north-south, but east-west there are about 7 to a mile. You do the math; but Yoko couldn’t be doing less than 4 miles, which would be good for any 89 year old.  Here she was walking in New York in 2015.

The Post then pointed out, and again this seems accurate, that Yoko’s in poor health, and has mobility issues.  In 2017, her son Sean Lennon pushed her in a wheelchair to receive the National Music Publishers’ Association’s Centennial Song Award (whatever that is).  

In her acceptance speech she said, “I’ve learned so much from having this illness,” though she didn’t say what the illness was, and personally I’m rather opposed to the notion of illness as a ‘learning experience,’ but that’s just me.

Other sources say she has round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her apartment in the Dakota. So maybe she goes walking in her mind.

I was especially thinking about the song ‘Walking On Thin Ice,’ which  apparently she and Lennon were working on at the time of his murder.

The song contains the lyrics

I knew a girl
That tried to walk across the lake
'Course it was winter when all this was ice
That's a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say this lake is as big as the ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?

That’s is indeed a hell of a thing, a hell of lake, one helluva walk.

PLODDING WITH PASCAL (AND YOKO)

Not so long ago I had an idea for a kind of “travel book” to be called something like “The Road Never, Ever Travelled.”  I was partly inspired by Pascal’s familiar old line “All of humanity's woes stem from one thing; the inability to sit quietly in a room.” (“Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne pas savoir demeurer en repos dans une chambre.”) And further inspired by Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (Voyage autour de ma chamber)  a parody of travel literature,  in which the author explores his own room as though it were some exotic foreign land.

The idea was that my book would try to deter people from going anywhere, tell that travel wasn’t good for the soul, didn’t broaden the mind, and that they should simply stay home and live quietly.

My agent thought this wasn’t a good idea.  She thought a book that spent all its time telling people not to do things was a non-starter.  People she said, like books that tell them to DO things.  I’m sure she had a point.

My book The Lost Art of Walking has supposedly been published in Korea – by “supposedly” I mean that I signed a contract, got a small advance and have heard absolutely nothing since.  The book by no means tells you “how to walk” but I was talking to a Korean expert (Colin Marshall, op cit) and he said the Koreans love books that tell them what to do.  I only have his word for this, and it surely isn’t only Korean walkers who need instructions.

I remember when the Arthur Frommer travel guides were at their peak of popularity – how to see Europe on $5 a day, kind of thing.  They gave ruthlessly precise instructions on where people should walk, and even the very spot where they should stand, if they wanted the best view of, say, the Acropolis, and if you went there you’d actually see people standing on that exact spot, with the book in hand.

All this seems some way from the freewheeling exploits of our own dear Yoko Ono --- and yet, and yet.

I was browsing (re-browsing?) her book Grapefruit, which I first read decades ago, and I’d pretty much forgotten that part of its subtitle is “a book of instruction.”  And, I’d completely forgotten that it contains some instructions for walking.  Both of these pieces are actually doable, which is not the case with many of her instructions.  Only the second one “City Piece” will make people think you’re a bit nuts, depending (of course) on which city you choose to do it in.