“Imagine the clouds dripping.
― Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in”.
An artist looked out of his window one evening in Turin. Behind him, a scratchy record of Lennon’s was playing.
Empty streets, empty skies. Lockdown. Expanses of planet. Countries, continents, seas, and oceans, he imagined, empty of people. “Imagine all the people” in the world… and the artist did. He began painting the world he saw. It looked like this:
Colorful cities lit through windows, skylights, balconies. Filled with people, everywhere but on the empty streets. In Athens, playing sports on rooftops. In Madrid’s beds, making love. Tea on the stovetops of London, coffee on those of Sanaa. Music in Paris, breakfast in Brussels, art in Amsterdam, and pasta – every possible kind – in Florence. Imagine that.
Now, far away from any city and land itself, in a bay in Southeast Alaska, imagine icebergs on empty waters. Humpback whales, sea otters. Not a single cruise or trigger-happy tourists. It made a scientist wonder: What would one hear if one were to listen in empty waters?
A submerged hydrophone or two, and, for the first time in history, acoustic ecologists heard … whales having conversations! Undisturbed, uninterrupted by human noise, humpback whales, most of them for the first time in their lives, were speaking, debating, singing! Imagine that.
Imagine a generation of whales not knowing the sound of silence. Now imagine another, human, never having seen a mountain.
Imagine 1,053,670 Indians in the city of Jalandhar, Punjab. Imagine smog cloaking the sky opaque for over thirty years. Then imagine a pandemic, quarantine. Empty roads, shops, factories…
One morning, just out their windows, people saw, snowcapped … the Himalayas! Glistening peaks bathed in blood orange, plum, strawberry hues of dawn light. Imagine a million people on rooftops, breathing transparent air, looking up, seeing what for decades was impossible…. Nothing. Emptiness. The tallest mountain range in the world. Imagine that.
Imagine Shakespeare writing King Lear, Hugo Les Misérables. Thoreau, Shelley. Newton’s theories on gravity and optics. Imagine fashion designers turning evening gowns into face masks. 3-D printers churning ventilators. Virtual yoga classes. Cooking, philosophy, knitting classes. Online concerts and cocktail hours. Virtual, curated tours of museums. A three-time-zone game of trivia.
Or even just a pot of basil, one of mint on the kitchen sill. A few leaves to garnish the tomatoes. White hydrangeas on the table. Imagine sitting down, together, to eat. Lingering wine and conversation. Just being still a moment. The streets will not always be empty.