Yoko Ono’s Grief

John Lennon loved Yoko Ono for saying yes. Ono’s art — gallery shows, performances, music — has always been about embracing vision, no matter how ugly that vision might ultimately be. She goes for clarity, not for any specific ism or viewpoint, and this has gotten her into trouble, especially with Lennon-worshippers infuriated by her transmutation of their hero. But Lennon always insisted that Ono’s effect on his work was positive, and his writing after their relationship clearly cut closer to the bone. Ono the artist, who was coming into her own after years of cult status, is the one who suffered from their association, because proximity to Lennon’s myth diluted her burgeoning credibility. Barely tolerated by Lennon’s audience, she at the same time lost her art-world base. In the ‘70s, the punk vocalist copped her yawn-to-screech technique with less effect, but to greater reward, and Adam and the Ants stole the tom-tom track from Plastic One Band's “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City” for their own “’Ant Music.’” That a later wave should cash in on Ono’s inventions is the price she has had to pay for consistently outdistancing fashion. But if what Ono wants is for us to see deeper into the world, then she succeeds, despite her work’s surface inaccessibility, by remaining true to her principles, examining the depths no matter how painful the descent.

Season of Glass, Ono’s album of grief, release, and soldiering on, is one step closer to the heart. As usual, she’ll be called manipulative for continuing to use Lennon’s celebrity in and exhibitionistic way. But if Ono is to face continued rejection from the Lennonists, she might as well continue to use his myth as a tool — they would feel vindicated if she stopped, and she would be dismissed as an opportunist who has no use for him now that he’s dead. So don’t believe those who assure you she’s exploited an unwilling Lennon in the service of the voyeurism and self-examination that are the tools of her therapy-as-art style. Ono’s emotional display is very, very brave. By stripping away all defenses, and baring not only such acceptable responses to grief as sorrow, but also unspeakable loneliness, anger, resentment, and the many shades of misery that the death of a lover raises, she has created a daring album — an album that convinces me, and I’ve been there. On Season of Glass Ono explores the range of her emotions as she slowly recovers her life, in an unprecedented attempt to deal openly with death and loss, long a subject exempt from all but the most cursory scrutiny.

In many of these songs of loneliness, there is more than a hint of Lennon’s 18-month lost weekend in the mid-‘70s and Ono’s unhappiness and fury at the separation. This is an eye-opening parallel: the heart makes no distinctions between voluntary and involuntary abandonment. “No, No, No,” which swings back and forth between admonitions and taunts or complaints to John — “You promised me/You promised me/I don’t remember what we promised/But I know we didn’t keep it” — and hissing/thrumming yes/no to her lover — “Let me take my ring off/no, no, no/Don’t do it, I can’t do it” — is one response to being left alone; she flaunts someone else at him, immersing herself in the pain of reawakened sensations that symbolize Lennon for Ono. “Toyboat” flips the coin with its wistful, plaintive “You who are/Help me out, help me out, help me out of here.” Escape from sorrow into dreams (“Toyboat”) or daily routine (the intro to “Mindweaver”) are conventional responses to loss — bereaved celebrities participate in the ordinary like everybody else. But Season of Glass also attempts to exorcise grief. “Silver Horse,” a song about retreating from the questions before you can be frightened by the answers, called up memories of a nameless fear — looking into a mirror and seeing the face of my dead lover in place of my own. But it ends on a note of recognition and return that I was unable to hear for years. “Goodbye Sadness,” the album’s anthem, is a gentle release, while the crudity of the gunshots that open “No, No, No,” and Sean Lennon’s “A Little Story,” in which he says “I learned this from my daddy you know,” is intended to shock us all into facing the real death, and facing down the hate and revulsion that acts as a narcotic, a distraction.

From the vaudeville evocations of “Will You Touch Me” and “Turn of the Wheel” to the feminization of “The Lord’s Prayer” as “Mother of the Universe,” Season of Glass is musically comfortable and recognizable. The predictable instrumental backdrop assures her a point from which to let fly indelicacies. One gathers confidence as she passes signposts of her ambivalence, one foot almost out of the old world, the other surely in the new — employing familiar musicians and producers, stepping into her arrangements that ought to give her FM airplay. Once she recorded “Touch Me,” a push/pull of wordless screeches, swoons, and experiments; now she’s recorded “Will You Touch Me,” a lyrical reprise full of the same yes/no, but a dozen years later an articulate, even seductive request.

Although Season of Glass is Ono’s first album-length attempt to deal with loss, “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” from 1971’s Fly, exposed Ono’s belief that connections aren’t broken by distance. In “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do,” Ono repeats this assurance by Lennon, whose presence she feels nearby, even in death. Ono makes numerous references to Lennon’s spirit communing with her throughout the ordeal of recording Season of Glass, including a passage in the liner notes that explains her failure to dedicate the album to Lennon, who Ono says “was right there with me, busy trying to arrange things for me.” If Ono’s real belief that Lennon’s spirit is guiding her makes her transition any less difficult, I hope she can hold on to him a little while longer — recovery from grief involves a skin-shedding acceptance that is often more painful than remaining aggrieved. But the public admission that life goes on implies an end to grief.

Grief is like a game or test. If all the rituals are accomplished properly, and the requisite period of proprieties has passed, the object of grief should come back and tell us the game is over. Truly laying the ghost to rest is the last step, and Season of Glass tells us that Ono hasn’t gotten there yet. She may be able to form art from her therapy; she can skin herself wide open, exposed to the criticism that she has kept Lennon for herself even in death. But in this she’s like his fans — eventually she’ll have to let go. And not only will she have to let go of Lennon, she’ll have to let go of the parts of herself so private that only he could break through to them. Then at last we’ll be able to hear Ono on her own.

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