The Imaginal World

‘Girl with bicycle, Dublin’ by Evelyn Hofer

I arrived in Ireland just before Christmas, 1967. A severe attack of cattle foot-and-mouth disease had developed in England, the Taoiseach urged Irish people not to return home from the UK for the festive season, and travel arrangements were disrupted. My father picked me up in Belfast when I arrived there on a ferry from Scotland, and my first experience of the island was framed by protective tents, their floors covered with sponge saturated with the disinfectant that was also used to spray wheels at entrances to the port. The skies were grey, and the countryside, seen through the car windows on the way back to Dublin, looked dismal. Bus and train rides into the often windswept and rain-soaked capital during the following winter days did little to alleviate the gloom. Fortunately, the mood was soon to pass.

Dublin, A Portrait, had been published earlier that year; it included an essay by V.S.Pritchett and images by a German photographer, Evelyn Hofer, with whom he had previously collaborated. Pritchett’s sympathetic and astute text, later printed independently by the Hogarth Press, reflected broadly on the city’s history; his dominant theme was the relationship between Ireland and Britain, and especially England. As a young journalist, Pritchett had been to Ireland to write about the Civil War, and although raids and rifle shots in Dublin were still commonplace, he liked the place, enjoyed himself and returned to the country on many occasions. Some of his experiences are recalled in the essay, occasionally with humour, and often he plays on differences and contrasts: ‘My first Irish friends were boundlessly hospitable, of course, but they pointed out to me that I belonged to a fleshly, materialist, sensual nation given to sex, the love of money and over-eating’. Pritchett’s views were warm and plain-spoken.

Evelyn Hofer’s photographs, recently re-published on their own, are quite different in tone. While they don’t share Pritchett’s emotionally direct approach to Dublin, her images are reticent, inquisitive, and open; she worked slowly with a hefty 4”×5” camera on a tripod, which allowed her to absorb more deeply the nature and spirit of the city. Hofer photographed people considerately, in a way that didn’t reduce her subjects to their social function or position in society, and there is often a subtle complicity between them, as in the colour portrait of four footballers, standing in a row in Phoenix Park, who have a touch of detached amusement in their eyes, as if they knew they were performing for the camera. Her celebrated and beautiful image of a young Dublin girl standing astride an adult’s bicycle is a study in attentiveness that is almost uncanny: dressed in what are probably her Sunday clothes, she gazes at the photographer with unaffected awareness, alone, save a dog, on an empty street.

At first, Hofer’s Dublin work can seem austere; she liked frontal compositions and structured framing of people and places, but she also infused her images with a subtle feeling of melancholy, which she described as ‘clouds and sadness’. She was in search for ‘inside value, some interior respect’. Her pictures of Dublin don’t look or feel like the place I first encountered not long after she photographed the city, or even how it looked when I came to know it better, but they are rooted in deep and gentle truth. Neither conventionally realistic nor idealised, her images, most of them of unremarkable subjects, are curiously quintessential.

As I left Britain for our new home in Dublin, I was looking forward to watching The Beatles’ film, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, which was due to be screened by the BBC over Christmas, but I soon discovered that there was no television in the house. The songs, however, had already been released on an EP, and because I knew them well and had read much about the film in advance, when the hour came for its first showing on December 26th, I tried to access it internally, as if it were to be found in what the Sufi Ibn al’Arabi called ‘the imaginal world’, a realm where all ideas, actions, and thoughts, including supernatural experiences, are manifested, and where invisible realities become visible. It is a real, not an imaginary, place, but I knew nothing about it at the time.

Something of the ‘imaginal world’ can also be encountered in the masterly video by Peter Jackson that accompanies The Beatles’ recent release, ‘Now and Then’, which encapsulates, in little over four minutes, the history of the group from end to beginning and back again, with an astonishing visual fusion of the past and present. The song, written by John Lennon in the late 1970s and recorded on a domestic cassette deck, was worked on after his death by the remaining Beatles and considered for inclusion in the 1995 Anthology, but after some experimentation they rejected it, largely at the behest of George Harrison, who strongly disliked either the song itself or the poor quality reproduction of Lennon’s voice. Shelved until recently, it appears that McCartney never abandoned his wish to return to it, perhaps because it holds some special significance for him. It is said that John’s last words to Paul were ‘Think about me every now and then, old friend’, and that he may consider the song to be a personal message. Giles Martin, son of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin and a key contributor to the new record, concurs. ‘I do feel as though ‘Now and Then’ is a love letter to Paul written by John’, he has said, and ‘that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it’.

Lennon’s original home recording, with only piano accompaniment, is wistful and now seems ghostly; the new version, on which his voice has been isolated and clarified by ‘MAL’, Peter Jackson’s fiendishly clever AI technology, is densely produced. The haunting demo, which until recently was widely accessible on the internet, may in some respects be a more appropriate manifestation of a love song that has much in common with the ballads on Lennon’s album ‘Double Fantasy’, but the later interpretation is fuller and more immediately compelling, closer to what might be expected from a Beatles composition. Considering that it is a blend of music that was made over the course of four decades, restricted by the absence of John and George and respect for their past contributions, it is remarkably coherent and convincing.

The song’s greatest strength, nevertheless, lies not in its tune, sound or lyrics, and there are few who would argue that it matches the best Beatles music. In a way, the form of ‘Now and Then’ is secondary to its essential themes, which are the merging of the band’s past and present and the harmonious resolution of the differences and difficulties that its members experienced as their unity came to an end over half a century ago. About sixty years after their first single, ‘Love Me Do’, they have released their last; ‘Now and Then’ echoes, in the three words of the title, its antecedent, which is on the ‘other side’ of the new record. The project might be said to be about completion and the full turn of a circle; it is a kind of reverie, a ‘what if’, a few moments of wish fulfilment. Watching the video, it is hard to be sure what is real and what isn’t, but that is part of its charm. The mood is benign, funny, silly, affectionate, and sad; it is also surprisingly emotional, in part because it reminds us of a time when it was often possible to see the world as a good and happy place, but also because it tells us that everything comes to an end and how, as a consequence, we feel compelled to try to preserve whom and what we love, to stop the present fading into the past. It is moving, especially for those who grew up with Beatles music, to see Paul and Ringo trying to reconnect, in the imaginal world, with their long-lost companions.

Many Beatles songs still speak to us vividly, the best of them expressing feelings that are perhaps too strong or intense to be communicated in ordinary words; Lennon and McCartney used them to tell each other and us about experiences that they may not have been able to describe or articulate directly. Meeting first as teenagers, much of their closeness lay in unacknowledged grief for the loss of their mothers, as well as in mutual enjoyment of fun and laughter, but music was at the heart of their friendship; they wrote wonderful songs, together and apart, dreaming a world into being, a radiant place that we can still visit and share.

For further exploration:

‘Dublin - A Portrait’ on ‘internet Archive’: https://archive.org/details/dublinportrait0000unse

Evelyn Hofer’s new book, ‘Dublin’: https://steidl.de/Books/Dublin-0717284955.html

The first Irish exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s photographs of Dublin: https://photomuseumireland.ie/evelyn-hofer

A good article on Evelyn Hofer: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/11/evelyn-hofer-photographers-gallery-london-a-total-perfectionist

The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opxhh9Oh3rg

An interesting opinion piece on ‘Now and Then’: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/opinion/beatles-lennon-mccartney-last-song.html

The Imaginal World: https://medium.com/@donnix/the-imaginal-realm-37b25f767516

Image on index page: ‘Dublin Sky’ by Evelyn Hofer

Still from the end of the video for The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’