Jarvis Coffin: Off the Highway – Visualizing world peace

This year’s winner of the MacDowell Medal was Yoko Ono. Yoko, age 91, could not be there, but she was on the other end of a video stream watching the proceedings.

We were prompted to wave a couple of times, and while not quite like having her seated on the dais, the roughly 1,100 in attendance can add Yoko to the list of people they have streamed with over the last couple of years, certainly since the pandemic.

One of the world’s most-recognizable and respected interdisciplinary artists, Yoko will think that’s cool, that we were all connected that way. I am going to say the same. It was cool to share her orbit for an hour, even via bits and bytes.

For the rest of the year, a lot of the art happening at MacDowell goes on unobserved, quietly and intently, as it has since 1908, when the first two resident fellows arrived.

We are offered glimpses of it at MacDowell Downtown, part of Peterborough’s First Friday events from March through November – usually at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture – when volunteers among MacDowell Fellows make themselves available to share their work and answer questions.

They are a reminder that observed or not, MacDowell artists – 300 of them per year – are always in our orbit, which should force us to think about the total creative industry that has had its start (or finish) here over the last century. How much would it be? Would it paper the world? Fill every concert hall at once? As sculpture, reach the moon?

Yoko Ono has one project, the Imagine Peace Tower, that is 12,000 feet tall. Therefore, my answer to the above is,yes, and it does not begin to include the works of countless other artists and performers here and throughout the world, producing the music, painting, writing, sculpture – everything that keeps us from going over the edge.

Apart from what faith we have in our creator to make us behave well toward each other, it is the artists that save us from the infernal regions by shoring up our humanity.

Yoko’s Imagine Peace Tower, for instance. Created in memory of her late husband John Lennon, citizens of the world are invited to send their wishes by postcard, email or X to Imagine Peace headquarters in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Attendees at this year’s Medal Day were given white luggage tags and a pen, and urged to write our wishes and hang them on fruit trees in the MacDowell gardens. The tags would be collected and sent to Yoko, with assurances she would read them and send along to Reykjavík.

Any wish. Any wish at all. Thoughts of the presidential race popped up, but that felt too much like arguing. Poor choice for a peace tower. I thought of health for the family. But it felt wrong not to include the health of everyone’s family, around the world. And is hard to defy the aging process.

If it is before you to write a wish for submission to Yoko Ono for inclusion as part of the Imagine Peace Tower project, why punt with an answer that lands short of the goal line? I went for universal world peace.

Growing up, Yoko was always a mystery to me as that dark, speechless character sitting next to John Lennon. A Beatles intruder. But there I was, writing “PEACE” on a small tag, tying it to a tree with approximately 600 other wishes waving in the breezes, all of them destined for a care package going back to somewhere near the North Pole, where Santa Claus lives – as may cross your mind, awkwardly picking your branch on the tree – and reindeer fly.

You smile gently at the person beside you, careful not to spy on their own wishes, and it has you feeling slightly squeamish about lending yourself to fanciful possibilities such as universal world peace.

Except, yes, there is a Santa Claus, Virginia, as the great Francis Pharcellus Church wrote in the New York Sun. “You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which . . . Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside.” Call it the stuff of art.

Thank you MacDowell. And, congratulations Yoko. Hope you can read my handwriting.

Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive, and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.