going through hell, keeping going

on art, grief, and the emotional heroism of just bloody keeping on making your work

I went to a Paul McCartney concert in Hamilton, Ontario on Friday night. He played for THREE STRAIGHT HOURS without a break, at the age of 83. Though at times his voice cracked a bit that really just made it all more emotional. He’s extremely 83-years-old-hashtag-goals: full of energy, clearly enjoying himself, charming and properly funny.

I’ve had the tickets booked for months, I went with someone very dear to me, and I flew in specially for it because… well, Paul McCartney is 83 and it’s wise not to delay seeing someone in their 80s if you want to. And because during the lockdowns in the pandemic I went through quite an intense Beatles period, read a load of books about them (can I please urge you to read Rob Sheffield’s Dreaming the Beatles which is the very best book of the lot, I think). I followed through by listening to a lot of John and Paul’s post-Beatles work.

Side note: honestly, you can make yourself at least one more decent side of the White Album just by engaging with the music John and Paul each made next. Of course they did their best work together, sparring off each other, challenging each other, understanding and being annoyed by each other. But they’re still there after they split up and the songs they wrote were sometimes still bloody good even if John tended to give up music to write art-psychology to scream to, and Paul always had a tendency towards what John called ‘Paul’s granny shit’, cheery well-crafted songs with sometimes slightly cringey lyrics, and sometimes outright bizarre¹. But that’s them. In some ways what worked - especially by the White Album - wasn’t songwriting together but the juxtaposition. One band holding both of those views of what life, and music is together. I’m going to put some great Paul McCartney songs into this post, and you tell me if you think they couldn’t have gone with pride onto a later ‘if we’d stayed together’ Beatles album.

But, I shouldn’t be coy and ironically distanced about this. I flew across the Atlantic to see Paul McCartney because I really like Paul McCartney. I think he’s one of those musical talents that comes along every once in a while, where someone can write songs that feel like they’ve always existed. His music makes you understand how ‘traditional’ and ‘folk’ tunes were created: someone with that gift, for making a tune that you’re instantly drawn to and gets into your bones, which you’d be happy to have as the soundtrack for the events of your life.

And in addition to really liking the music, I really like who he’s been as a person these past 83 years. He wore his politics on his sleeve in the concert: a Ukranian flag flying in the film at the start, a big picture of Greta Thunberg among many other admirable women in Lady Madonna, coming on at the end with a huge LBGTQ+ pride flag.

He talked about how in 1964 the Beatles were booked to play a venue in the Deep South which they only realised when they arrived was segregated - Black people on one side, white on the other. “That’s just stupid,” they said, and wouldn’t play until the concert was desegregated, which did happen because the Beatles were big business. And from then on they insisted in their contracts that all their concerts had to be desegregated. A young Black girl who was at that first concert wrote to him many years later to say that was the first event she’d been at where she could sit next to white people.

Then he played Blackbird and everyone in the - very mixed, in age and ethnicity - audience had a good cry. About the things that are so hard in the world and about how sometimes something can be made better. A bit better. (It’s getting better all the time, sings Paul. Can’t get no worse, butts in John.)

Here is a song that Paul introduced in the concert by saying that he expected no one would have heard it. Which is a shame because it is a banger and I was jumping up and down when the first notes played. And it’s had two million views on YouTube which for many people would be LOADS. But obviously not if you’ve been a Beatle:

---

Paul McCartney it was clear really knows why people come to his concerts, what we’re there for. It was a really generous show, framed as a way to retell his life story, with anecdotes about Liverpool and London in the sixties, and the first time he heard Jimi Hendrix play. McCartney understands the place that he occupies in people’s lives, that everyone there will be remembering good and tough times that have been soundtracked by the Beatles music and about people who they’ve lost who were fans of his and of the Beatles. My late mum was a massive McCartney fan and I felt her very present with me during the concert. Paul is I think also well aware that watching an 83-year-old man play is an experience of thinking about the arc of our own lives, and how human lives go with all of the joys and the sorrows.

There was a point in the concert when he played Here Today the song he wrote about John. My friend and I were trying to whoop but we literally could not whoop because we were too choked up.

This isn’t the best song he’s ever written² - you feel the lack of John’s intellect, wit and bite in it. But then you feel the lack of John in it. Feeling the lack of John is the whole point. Paul McCartney is someone whose best friend, closest-ever collaborator, the person without whom he could never make work as good again, was shot and killed by a maniac at the age of 40. And here he is, having lived half a lifetime more than John got³, still singing about how much he misses him. I find it unbearably moving.

All the more moving because, for me, the most important fact about John Lennon and Paul McCartney in terms of understanding what drew them together was that both of them lost their mothers when they were teenagers. Mary McCartney died of complications around her breast cancer when Paul was 14. Julia Lennon was hit by a car and killed when John was 17. It was different for them - Mary had been a loving and present mother, Julia was more complicated and John hadn’t been living with her⁴. It seems to me that you can see how these questions can form the outlines of a personality: Paul more self-certain, John with his cynicism and wit disguising his pain.

They were both young lads who wanted to be loved, who had lost a huge and important source of love, whose every sung word yearned for the return of the love that was gone. Combine that with their talent and you blow the roof off the world.

Wherever creativity comes from, it’s rarely “everything in my life was totally fine, yeah”.

The concert on Friday night, framed around Paul’s life, had a lot in it to think about in terms of the terrible things that can happen in one person’s life and yet they remain working, moving, enjoying life, having fun, being themselves unapologetically, standing up for what they believe in. I really think that’s what a lot of McCartney’s work has been about. And I find all of that just massively heroic.

I mean look at this. He specifically frames his ‘brave face’ as the thing that is the pride of a collector’s McCartney memorabilia. They’re breaking into his archive to find his brave face. A brave face is what you need to deal with the life he’s had. But then it’s what we all need.

---

Which brings me to Yoko Ono.

I want to tell you something about Yoko Ono that you probably don’t know because she doesn’t talk about it much and no one else seems to either. Yoko Ono had a daughter Kyoko with her previous husband before she and John had Sean. Yoko Ono’s ex-husband first refused to let her see her daughter even though she had visitation rights. He then kidnapped Kyoko, went on the run and joined a cult. Even with John Lennon’s fame and money scouring the earth for her, they couldn’t find Kyoko. Yoko Ono didn’t see her daughter from when Kyoko was eight years old until she was into her 30s.

They seem to have a good relationship now and I can well understand why neither of them wants this to be a big public story. It is intensely private and intensely painful and Kyoko clearly wants to be a private person which she has every right to be.

But just imagine it for a moment, for Yoko. She doesn’t know where her eight-year-old daughter is, or whether she’s living or dead. Then her nine-year-old daughter. Her ten-year-old. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. I imagine her constantly thinking of her. How tall is she now? How has her face changed? Is she being educated? Is she being loved? Any time the phone rings, any time a letter drops onto the mat, there must be a little part of her that thinks “this could be it, I could hear from her now, it could be her”. It must get difficult to leave the house, just thinking about whether her daughter is trying to contact her. Every day that goes past, her daughter recedes a little from her. Every day, this sadness is there.

Here’s a song John wrote. Yoko did not in fact win the fight. Hold on Yoko, just hold on.

And Yoko Ono does just hold on. For years and years, decades. She holds on through seeing her husband being assassinated in front of her and cradling him as he died. Look at this incredible letter she wrote to his fans after he was killed. She keeps making her art. She’s 92 now and she just had a major retrospective at the Tate.

What we are talking about here is heroism. Emotional heroism. Just bloody keeping on, step after painful step, even when it feels impossible, just Keeping. Bloody. Going.

Who does this remind me of? Oh yes, Paul McCartney⁵.

Let’s have another stone cold McCartney banger. I’m telling you, if this had been released by Ultravox we’d remember it as a timeless classic. It’s just the problem of ‘everything that Paul McCartney does has to stand in the shadow of everything else Paul McCartney has done’.

---

What Ono and McCartney have in common is a kind of doggedness, which may not be an attractive quality or one we tend to associate with making art. Portrayals of art-making tend to suggest that all artists are histrionic or that making the work itself is the great struggle of existence. Rather than this: dogged, reliable persistence. Life is the struggle. Creative work is where you can take those struggles to make sense of them and to get some respite perhaps, even while you remain in motion.

Paul McCartney’s mum died of cancer when he was 14. His extraordinary collaborator and dear friend was assassinated at 40. His beloved wife Linda died of cancer when she was 56. Breast cancer, just like his mum. He’s lived his life for the past 55-odd years knowing that his most successful work was almost certainly behind him; imagine being 27 and knowing that you were a Beatle and whatever happens you’re just… never going to be making work that successful again. You only get one go at making work that shapes the modern world.

But the thing is, like Yoko Ono, he keeps on making his work and putting it into the world. He makes songs about everything.

I love that he literally just turned his daily to-do list into a song and why the hell not? Please, if you are a creative person, allow yourself to be inspired by this. You can make work about anything.

I flipping love this, a sort of riposte to Noel Coward’s I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party, from someone who actually had been to Frank Sinatra’s party:

And all the different Pauls in here! Absolutely the same playful lightness of Sergeant Pepper!

The ur example of what John called “Paul’s granny shit” is the song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. You know that song, everyone knows that song. Plinky-plonky sound and they should have given the Nigerian musician Jimmy Scott a writing credit on it.

But still, in the middle of the pandemic, having spent weeks and weeks reading about the Beatles, that song managed to move me to tears. Because of the absolute audacity of two men who’d lost their mothers so young, whose own family homes were ruptured, making music about: life goes on.

That’s what Yoko Ono’s work is about and Paul McCartney’s work is about. Life going on. A couple meet and fall in love. They have some kids. They never hit the bigtime, or maybe they do. Life goes on. What happens next is outside the frame of the song. If it’s in the normal pattern of life, the pattern of Ono and McCartney’s lives, there will be illness and too-early death, there will be sorrow over children and marriage won’t be easy. And life goes on. We go bloody on.

Life will go on until it doesn’t, filled with unexpected shocks and alarums. What can we do about it?

Keep on making your work.

If you’ve liked this essay, please do give it a like below, it helps other people find it.

---

And now: some more things I’ve enjoyed and thought about this week, including the perfect cosy Christmas read, a good high-concept science fiction TV show and what Wittgenstein can tell us about internet pile-ons.

Plus! A way to get yourself to go to sleep that has actually worked for me (I found it in a French podcast, like an absolute pseud).

Technology

• Gmail is now training its AI on your emails, here’s how to turn it off. I did this, and that meant it stopped dividing my inbox into ‘important/not important’ and... it turns out that that little bit of so-called ‘smart help’ was making my inbox much harder to manage? I am finding it much easier to find the emails I need to answer without it!

• I had this piece in the Guardian. Some advice that I didn’t put in but would really like to offer: if you see a friend ‘posting through’ some kind of horrible online pile-on event, reach out privately and say the words ‘I love you and please stop posting. Let’s have a phonecall & see each other in person, shall I pop over?’ I don’t think that making a public statement does anything much, just puts fuel on the fire. What people need in the midst of a pile-on is real love from real friends. People need to be reminded that those they really care about also care about them, irrespective of their opinions.

• And I’ve had a book-promoting week! I was on Start The Week with Cory Doctorow and Oliver Moody talking about the internet, trying not to be horrible to each other, and why we can’t trust tech companies to sort things out for us and we need to enforce the competition laws we have.

• This is a very good article about game design by the master of game design.

Some Wittgenstein and how it applies to the modern internet

A thought I had about internet communication and why it goes wrong. Something that happens very often is when someone has heard a view online that they hate, and you happen to use a few words that remind them of that view (even though you’re saying something different) and then they descend like a ton of bricks telling you why your view is BAD. And you’re left going “that’s not what I said or what I meant?” and often hurriedly googling to try to find out what it was that your words reminded them of, so you can figure out why the reaction has been so intense. It sounds like you’re quibbling over word choice but actually it’s entirely the opposite, you just literally had no idea until that moment that some news story (even in a different country) had used two key words that you used, so that you seemed to them to be referencing it.

The reason this problem happens so much and is increasing is that we’re all seeing a different internet. Everyone is responding to the version of the world they see. Now we all see the world in large part via our chosen portion of the functionally-infinite online sources, we are increasingly each seeing a different world. Wittgenstein says language only has meaning in a context. The words “you’re a terrible asshole” can be an expression of loving affection or of bitterest hatred, depending entirely on the context of the relationship. This is the problem. Our words can literally mean different things depending on what people have been looking at through their version of the internet an therefore the world.

This is why (see above) the solution to distress online is not more online, it is reaching out in reality.

Entertainments

Pluribus - a show from the man who wrote, you know, Breaking Bad… but who started off working on the X-Files. I am so happy that ‘high concept sci-fi’ is a thing again after the success of Severance. It is my favourite. This is about what happens when a weird alien virus melds together all the minds in the world except for… Carol’s. So she’s the only person who isn’t part of a giant hivemind, and they want to love her but she really doesn’t want to be loved by them. I could not see how this show was possibly going to work, because between a woman and a hivemind there are really just two characters. But there’s a lot of pleasure in just the weird mechanics of how the world works now, and in watching Carol trying to figure out what to do. And just like Severance is a show about what work demands from us, I think in many ways Pluribus is really a show about grief. It’s about how the world just seems like it’s full of NPCs when the person you love has died and no matter how nice they are, they’re all just interchangeable in place of her.

But: addendum! I wonder also whether it’s kind of a show about what it’s like to use AI. When we’re talking to AI we’re sort of talking to a smiling, helpful, supportive, uncanny melding of every human in the world. Maybe I’m reading that in. But Vince Gilligan is quite clever so possibly not.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson - this is extremely perfect, delightful and cosy for Christmas, a murder mystery where the creators of the game Cluedo are the detectives. And the cast of characters have names with colours in them, and it’s during the second world war and snow is falling. If you’re looking for a book gift for Christmas this is a *cosy-seeking missile* of a book.

Podcasts full of good ideas

Jasmine Sun’s podcast - I have been HOOVERING this up, really loving her bright thoughts on the world that’s coming, and her guests’ sense of how important it is not to fear the future. This episode on expanding the market for culture and this one on Notes are just superb.

Change ma vie: Outlils pour l’esprit - a great podcast to listen to if you have intermediate French and want to get better. And also full of great ideas! Below is her podcast about a technique for falling asleep that I think I’d vaguely heard about before but hadn’t ever tried out until she explained it: cognitive shuffling. This is the gist of what she says:

• first, think of a neutral word that represents something neutral or pleasant. She suggests the word ‘pillow’ as being quite pleasant and relaxing.

• then you’re going to think of a physical object that is neutral or pleasant that begins with every letter in the word you just thought of. Because ‘pillow’ is a different word in French, I can’t use her examples but let’s say…

• first for the letter P you think of a plum, what a lovely word plum is, and you imagine holding a plum, smelling it, tasting it, feeling its weight in your hand

• then move onto the next letter, I, we might think about a bottle of ink, and how it feels to fill up a fountain pen, imagining it all in tactile detail

• then L, maybe I would think of a lamp, warm and glowing, lighting up the room

• go from one word to the next, and each time, repeat the process, letter by letter, thinking of a neutral or pleasant word and visualizing it before moving on

• (if in doubt - my advice - name fruits and vegetables, flowers, other plants and animals. They are a very good source of neutral, pleasant words.)

• she says she’s never got through more than three (spelling-out) words before I fall asleep, and nor have I!

• so why does it work?

• it’s about attention focus, she says. Your attention is focused on the words and images that you conjure up, but because of the way you’re choosing them, they are words and images without a connecting thread. It’s almost like re-creating the ‘random images one after another’ of a dream while you’re awake

• so, the analytical part of your brain, which was on high alert, can no longer follow the thread, it gives it the impression that it is no longer ‘needed’ so there can’t be high danger. Little by little, your brain’s alert level decreases. And you fall asleep.

This has absolutely worked for me at times when nothing else did, like eg trying to get a nap in a hotel in Hamilton Ontario before a Paul McCartney concert, so I recommend it to you. It sounds trivial but if you actually do it with concentration, it has a good chance of working.

1. I can’t defend Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and I don’t think you can either

2. on the other hand he literally wrote Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby and Blackbird so, er, ‘the best song Paul McCartney ever wrote’ is not a bar any of us would like to be judged against in any creative work

3. not to mention 27 years more than his beloved wife Linda ever got

4. I also find it really moving that in Linda and Yoko, Paul and John both ended up marrying a woman who had a child already, someone who they could witness being a mother. And it is Rob Sheffield who points out in Dreaming the Beatles that they both also went off and made music with their wives, despite everyone telling them it was cringe to do that

5. it’s not really a massive surprise that someone’s wife and their best mate/best collaborator might have some character traits in common. I’ve had this conversation with my best friend too, about how much her husband and I have in common