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MacDonald:
The last reel has the John Lennon/Yoko Ono passage. Did you know them?
Mekas:
Yes, I knew Lennon. I'd known Yoko since 1959 or 1960 perhaps. Around 1962 she left for Japan, then decided to come back to New York. But she needed a job, for immigration, so
Film Culture
gave her her first official job in this country. We have been friends ever since. I met John after he married Yoko. When they came back from London to settle in New York, they were quite lonely. On their first night I took them for coffee, very late. We could find nothing that was open until eventually we came to Emilio's on Sixth Avenue. We sat and drank Irish coffee. John was very happy that nobody knew him there, nobody bothered him. But just as we were about to leave, a shy, young waitress gave John a scrap of paper and asked for his autograph. She had known all along who he was.
MacDonald:
Am I correct in saying that at the time of
Walden
you had a sense of the increasing fragility of the things that mattered most to you?
Mekas:
There is a very pessimistic passage of "narration" or "talking" in the Central Park sequence where I say that perhaps before too long there won't be any trees or flowers. But I don't mean for that attitude to dominate the entire film. In general I would say that I feel there will always be Walden for those who really want it. Each of us lives on a small island, in a very small circle of reality, which is our own reality. I made up a joke about a Zen monk standing in Times Square with people asking, "So what do you think about New Yorkthe noise, the traffic?" The monk says, "What noise? What traffic?" You
can
cut it all out. No, it's not that we can have all this today, but tomorrow it will be gone. It
is
threatened, but in the end it's up to us to keep those little bits of paradise alive and defend them and see that they survive and grow.
Of course, there is another side to this, another danger. Even in concentration camps, in forced labor camps, people could still find enjoyment in certain things. Not everybody in the forced labor camps sat with his or her nose to the floor, saying, "How dreadful! How dreadful!" There are moments of feeling, happiness, friendships, and even beauty, no matter where you are. So what I said before could be seen as a justification and acceptance of any status quo. I wouldn't want what I say interpreted that way. Somewhere I would put a limit to what I, or a human being in general, would or should accept. As Gandhi did.
The question is how one is to counteract the destruction. Should one walk around with posters and placards or should one retreat and grow natural food in Vermont and hope that by producing something good, and sharing it with others, one can persuade those others to see the value of what you're doing and to move in a similar direction?
Change can't come from the top. The top, which is occupied by