Born again Lene: again and again.
Born again Lene: again and again.
The reincarnation of Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich learned very early that it wasn't a good idea to let on that you thought you were from another planet. No martyr she, to suffer at the hands of the ignorant. Instead she chose to suppress such thoughts, however spontaneously they entered her mind, and to rationalise the visions that she could more or less turn on and off at random, as the product of a fertile imagination.
Not bad thinking for an eight-year-old. Survival is the key and Lene knew instinctively that people would not take kindly to a child who dreamt the future in panoramic full-colour. Even as an adult she's aware that reincarnation and allied topics have their pitfalls if, in conversation, you're prepared to be specific about your own experiences rather than just theorise, wide-eyed, about the possibilities.
Still, it's an important part of her life and she has managed to find her way into a world where her extra-sensory experiences need no longer be denied. She inhabits the pop world with flair and dignity and if a touch of madness has helped her to be the true original that she is - well, so far, no one is complaining.
Mind you, if Lene Lovich is mad then insanity should be handed out by the welfare state along with the child allowance and social security. Pleasant, articulate and possessed of a truly winning smile she recounts what must have been devastating experiences with no sense of wonder so that the true effect of what she is saying can really only be gained with hindsight.
The fact of her powers, some of which are at her beck and call while others can be frighteningly spontaneous, she accepts wholeheartedly. It is the questions that they raise and the theories that they produce which are not so readily welcomed.
"I change my theories about every six months," she says, smiling. She's aware that it's an area with no black and white, mostly because orthodox science has yet to give the subject its stamp of respectability, even as a topic for serious discussion.
"It's really only in the past 10 years that people have tried in any serious way to document experiences. Mostly when you talk about mysterious experiences you are regarded as fantasising, exaggerating.
"There are behavioural restrictions which society imposes and even if you step slightly outside of them - saying hello to a stranger or singing in the street, for instance - people think you are silly. I went to see a doctor once, after a particularly disturbing experience, and his sympathy gave me confidence enough to tell him about other things which had happened to me. He wrote everything down in the form of a letter, sealed it in an envelope and suggested I take the letter along to a psychiatrist that he recommended.
"When I got home my curiosity got the better of me so I steamed the envelope open and read the letter. I thought: 'If they read this they're going to put me away'. I decided not to go, my freedom's worth more to me than anything and in any case I don't have much confidence in the way that they would handle a situation like that."
The experience that precipitated the visit to her doctor was one which shook her badly. "One day I just found myself sitting on a window ledge, like a cat. I wasn't going to jump or anything but it was frightening because I don't know how I got there or what I was there for. I thought 'This is getting out of hand'."
It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened completely outside her control. During her days at Art College, towards the end of her stay, she spent more and more time outside the college. One day she visited the British Museum to make drawings, ideas for her sculpting. "I was leaving, walking down the stairs. I had a whole load of junk with me which I needed to rearrange because it was falling all over the place.
"I put my bags down on the stairs for a few seconds and when I looked down I noticed something odd, like something materialising. It was very hazy at first, and then I saw I was wearing sandals - which I hadn't been seconds before.
"But what really freaked me was that I became aware of something yellow flapping around my ankles, which disturbed me immensely because I had developed an almost passionate hatred of the colour and wouldn't have been seen dead in it. And yet there I was wearing this yellow dress, a flowing garment, like a robe.
"Then a really, really loud noise came thundering in and I looked over the staircase and there was a marketplace - people were shouting and screaming, there were animals: total confusion. I remember seeing huge sacks of grain, as big as table tops, and people carrying baskets.
"But the thing that really affected me was the feeling that I had gone to that place to meet somebody, it could have been a boyfriend or a lover. I knew that it was a secret meeting and that we had chosen this crowded place so as not to be noticed.
"And then I realised that this other person was not going to turn up. I was totally shattered. As soon as I realised it I felt this stab of dreadful disappointment and everything just started to fade away. I don't think all this can have taken very long because in a place like the British Museum I would have drawn attention to myself. I don't even know what I was doing while it went on, it was like time had stood still for a few seconds.
"Even now, when I think about it, that dreadful feeling of having been let down comes over me."
As she sits, hands on lap, recounting this extraordinary experience, there is not the remotest temptation to think of Lene Lovich as even mildly dotty. She is a calm, very pretty girl, softly Germanic to look at. Her appearance is, of course, eccentric and only an inveterate betting man would put money on whether she was fat, thin or voluptuous under the bulky clothing she tends to wear.
She speaks very precisely, often with the intonation of a little girl, her thoughts organised, her sentences cohesive. In an age where sex appeal seems to depend on saying as little as possible and wearing a similar amount of clothes, Lene Lovich doesn't just ignore the rules - she doesn't even seem aware that the game is in progress. The upshot is that she is very, very attractive.
Part of her appeal, of course, is the mystery which surrounds her. Unlike others, hers will not go away in the fullness of time because it is not the result of some PR man's imagination. It has been with her since she can remember and is even now helping to feed her creativity. Sometimes the childhood dreams and the adult reality link.
"I remember when I was eight having a really vivid dream, you know the kind when you really believe it is happening and it still seems real when you wake up. I was very excited at that age about the prospect of space and space travel and in my dream I was on a space ship and there was a party going on - balloons, crackers, streamers, all the usual party stuff.
"When I thought about it later I was really disgusted with myself. I told myself: 'Don't be an idiot, you wouldn't really have balloons and crackers in space. It's a serious business handling a space ship.'
"Then about three or four years ago we were in a studio over Christmas time and we decided to hold a surprise party for the engineer. While he was out to dinner we completely decorated the control room and then turned out all the lights and hid behind the desk so we would surprsise him with 'Happy Christmas' when he walked back.
"While we were waiting I looked at the control desk with all its lights and buttons, looked around the room at all the balloons and streamers and realised that that had been my dream. I saw how the technology of a modern recording studio would seem to an eight-year-old child all those years ago just like the inside of a space ship."
It was about the age of eight that she began to articulate, to herself at least, certain strange things which were going on in her mind. "I had a few premonitions, often very tiny things, nothing significant. What you might call extraordinary mental activity."
Other things were not so easily explained. "We lived in Detroit, a very run-down area. There weren't many places to play - the river was quite a walk away and as a child you didn't want to venture too far because it wasn't very safe.
"The place to play was this field nearby where there had been some houses knocked down and it had just grown wild, a flat place to play jungle and those sort of games.
"We weren't long into one of our summer holidays when I had a dream about the field being levelled and dug up. I was crying about it when I woke up and I thought: 'This is stupid, what does it matter if they cut it down?' When I went outside all my friends were sitting on our porch looking very sad. 'They cut the field down', they told me. The lawnmowers and tractors had come in that very morning."
"Sleep dreams were one thing, but there were also the waking ones, images which could sometimes get quite frightening. "It's all right when they were nice pictures but one thing which used to happen regularly was that whenever I would put my hand on a door handle a scene would flash through my mind. It didn't matter where the door was, even to my own room. I would see the most horrible, gruesome things behind the door, almost like tuning in to a movie on the television, and the images were specifically of scenes in the room I was about to enter.
"Eventually, through practice, I learned to suppress that, although of course it could be quite entertaining. After regular school (she came to Britain at the age of thirteen) I went to art school and began to release the stops on my imagination.
"But while I was at school I knew that there were things I should not talk about." Now she is looking for words, not sure that her next admission won't get her certified. "I had the idea, I don't know, er, but I thought that, maybe, I was from another planet." A nervous laugh punctuates this confession. She knows it was an irrational concept. All it proves, though, is that children are just as capable of clutching at straws as adults in a tight situation. Grown-ups don't have an exclusive hold on foolishness.
"It didn't last terribly long, a couple of years on and off. I used to look around, because I felt sure I couldn't be the only one. I even used to look at trees or other inaminate objects for signs that I wasn't on my own."
The logic was simple. "Certain things were happening in my mind which I had tried to talk about to my friends, but all I got was strange looks. They didn't understand, so I felt I was different."
It was at art school that she began to see the potential for using these previously unwelcome mind-pictures. Fully aware that she didn't know anything about Art - as contained in galleries - she had really only entered the school to get away from home. "I was really very keen, though, to understand what this Art was." Very quickly she realised that, whatever it was, it wasn't for her.
"I didn't have problems in the beginning because I was keen to learn and was doing more or less what the teachers wanted. I had it down to a pretty neat formula, what was good and acceptable to make for happy days.
"Then I began to think: 'This is really silly. Art is a form of self-expression and the ideas should be your own.' That's when the trouble really started because I realised that the only thing I could be really honest about was my own imagination. We'd had a few lectures about William Blake and he had seemed to listen to his imagination. He may have suffered in his lifetime but at least his Art was true."
She was mostly sculpting by now and took to entering the classroom devoid of concrete ideas and with the intention of allowing her mind to take over. "I wouldn't know what I was going to make, just let my mind be completely open, almost trance-like. It was very exciting and I would work very fast."
Around this time Lene began to think about what these mental interventions represented. Fellow-students would come to look at her work and point out aspects of it which were familiar to them. She realised that she was incorporating into her sculpture images of people or places which actually existed but which were outside her own physical experience.
Hard on the heels of this revelation came the British Museum incident. "The idea of seeing something centuries old and being a part of it didn't really affect me very much. I wasn't terribly surprised although I knew that it wasn't one of my usual imagination things and it wasn't for my entertainment.
"What concerned me was that it was something totally out of my control. My imagination I could switch on and off practically at will. You know, if I'm on a tube train and I'm bored I can entertain myself by seeing monkeys swinging on the hand grips. But this thing in the British Museum had happened completely spontaneously."
Although, as she has said, she entertains different theories in a faddish way, the underlying theme of her belief in reincarnation is her reluctance to accept the finality of death. It's a powerful argument which has been used by some influential people. Benjamin Franklin firmly believed that he had lived before: "When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot expect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist and put Himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in this world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."
Of course it's easy to read ego in that statement, a desire on Franklin's part to believe that the world couldn't go on without his illuminating presence. But, as Lene Lovich says: "It's difficult to rationalise that someone can be walking along the street, thinking, controlling a large part of their environment, then walk off the curb, get hit by a car, and that's the end of that.
"We can't be something one minute and nothing the next."
In support of such doubts Heber Curtis, an American astro-physicist, said: "With energy, matter, space and time continuous, with nothing lost or wasted, are we ourselves the only manifestation that comes to an end, ceases, is annihilated at three score years and ten?"
If it is true that we live before and will live again, why is it that we don't remember past lives. Lene Lovich believes, although it could be one of her passing theories, that between lives we may go through some form of deprogramming and that the memory is then stored in some far corner of our minds.
Scientists have already declared that we only use about 10 per cent of our brains [Note: wrong] and that even a genius is only using about another three or four per cent, so the deprogramming idea is not so far-fetched. It also provides an easy answer to the problem of child prodigies such as Mozart: how else to explain a four-year-old writing complex symphonies except that he carried the knowledge with him from a former life?
"Some people you meet," says Lene, "even quite young children, have much deeper understanding of things than they could possibly have learned in their young lives, or even just one previous life."
There is no room in her life for organised religion; too many rules, too much restriction. But there is comfort to be had from her own beliefs, and she does accept the existence of a Deity, although she can't or won't put a name to it. "I don't fear death itself, only the possibility that it might be painful. There is a worry, of course, about the future because I don't always see it in a beautiful way.
"But I am disturbed by these people who insist on freezing themselves," she says, laughing. "I wouldn't want to come back as myself, I can't think of anything more dull.
"Whatever the world will be like in the future, I think that you need to be introduced to a society gradually, to be born into it and grow up in it so you can accept its hardships.
"Nor would I want to live forever. Much as I am enjoying this life my belief and curiosity about future lives is, I guess, greater than my interest in continuing this one indefinitely."
Born again Lene: again and again.
The reincarnation of Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich learned very early that it wasn't a good idea to let on that you thought you were from another planet. No martyr she, to suffer at the hands of the ignorant. Instead she chose to suppress such thoughts, however spontaneously they entered her mind, and to rationalise the visions that she could more or less turn on and off at random, as the product of a fertile imagination.
Not bad thinking for an eight-year-old. Survival is the key and Lene knew instinctively that people would not take kindly to a child who dreamt the future in panoramic full-colour. Even as an adult she's aware that reincarnation and allied topics have their pitfalls if, in conversation, you're prepared to be specific about your own experiences rather than just theorise, wide-eyed, about the possibilities.
Still, it's an important part of her life and she has managed to find her way into a world where her extra-sensory experiences need no longer be denied. She inhabits the pop world with flair and dignity and if a touch of madness has helped her to be the true original that she is - well, so far, no one is complaining.
Mind you, if Lene Lovich is mad then insanity should be handed out by the welfare state along with the child allowance and social security. Pleasant, articulate and possessed of a truly winning smile she recounts what must have been devastating experiences with no sense of wonder so that the true effect of what she is saying can really only be gained with hindsight.
The fact of her powers, some of which are at her beck and call while others can be frighteningly spontaneous, she accepts wholeheartedly. It is the questions that they raise and the theories that they produce which are not so readily welcomed.
"I change my theories about every six months," she says, smiling. She's aware that it's an area with no black and white, mostly because orthodox science has yet to give the subject its stamp of respectability, even as a topic for serious discussion.
"It's really only in the past 10 years that people have tried in any serious way to document experiences. Mostly when you talk about mysterious experiences you are regarded as fantasising, exaggerating.
"There are behavioural restrictions which society imposes and even if you step slightly outside of them - saying hello to a stranger or singing in the street, for instance - people think you are silly. I went to see a doctor once, after a particularly disturbing experience, and his sympathy gave me confidence enough to tell him about other things which had happened to me. He wrote everything down in the form of a letter, sealed it in an envelope and suggested I take the letter along to a psychiatrist that he recommended.
"When I got home my curiosity got the better of me so I steamed the envelope open and read the letter. I thought: 'If they read this they're going to put me away'. I decided not to go, my freedom's worth more to me than anything and in any case I don't have much confidence in the way that they would handle a situation like that."
The experience that precipitated the visit to her doctor was one which shook her badly. "One day I just found myself sitting on a window ledge, like a cat. I wasn't going to jump or anything but it was frightening because I don't know how I got there or what I was there for. I thought 'This is getting out of hand'."
It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened completely outside her control. During her days at Art College, towards the end of her stay, she spent more and more time outside the college. One day she visited the British Museum to make drawings, ideas for her sculpting. "I was leaving, walking down the stairs. I had a whole load of junk with me which I needed to rearrange because it was falling all over the place.
"I put my bags down on the stairs for a few seconds and when I looked down I noticed something odd, like something materialising. It was very hazy at first, and then I saw I was wearing sandals - which I hadn't been seconds before.
"But what really freaked me was that I became aware of something yellow flapping around my ankles, which disturbed me immensely because I had developed an almost passionate hatred of the colour and wouldn't have been seen dead in it. And yet there I was wearing this yellow dress, a flowing garment, like a robe.
"Then a really, really loud noise came thundering in and I looked over the staircase and there was a marketplace - people were shouting and screaming, there were animals: total confusion. I remember seeing huge sacks of grain, as big as table tops, and people carrying baskets.
"But the thing that really affected me was the feeling that I had gone to that place to meet somebody, it could have been a boyfriend or a lover. I knew that it was a secret meeting and that we had chosen this crowded place so as not to be noticed.
"And then I realised that this other person was not going to turn up. I was totally shattered. As soon as I realised it I felt this stab of dreadful disappointment and everything just started to fade away. I don't think all this can have taken very long because in a place like the British Museum I would have drawn attention to myself. I don't even know what I was doing while it went on, it was like time had stood still for a few seconds.
"Even now, when I think about it, that dreadful feeling of having been let down comes over me."
As she sits, hands on lap, recounting this extraordinary experience, there is not the remotest temptation to think of Lene Lovich as even mildly dotty. She is a calm, very pretty girl, softly Germanic to look at. Her appearance is, of course, eccentric and only an inveterate betting man would put money on whether she was fat, thin or voluptuous under the bulky clothing she tends to wear.
She speaks very precisely, often with the intonation of a little girl, her thoughts organised, her sentences cohesive. In an age where sex appeal seems to depend on saying as little as possible and wearing a similar amount of clothes, Lene Lovich doesn't just ignore the rules - she doesn't even seem aware that the game is in progress. The upshot is that she is very, very attractive.
Part of her appeal, of course, is the mystery which surrounds her. Unlike others, hers will not go away in the fullness of time because it is not the result of some PR man's imagination. It has been with her since she can remember and is even now helping to feed her creativity. Sometimes the childhood dreams and the adult reality link.
"I remember when I was eight having a really vivid dream, you know the kind when you really believe it is happening and it still seems real when you wake up. I was very excited at that age about the prospect of space and space travel and in my dream I was on a space ship and there was a party going on - balloons, crackers, streamers, all the usual party stuff.
"When I thought about it later I was really disgusted with myself. I told myself: 'Don't be an idiot, you wouldn't really have balloons and crackers in space. It's a serious business handling a space ship.'
"Then about three or four years ago we were in a studio over Christmas time and we decided to hold a surprise party for the engineer. While he was out to dinner we completely decorated the control room and then turned out all the lights and hid behind the desk so we would surprsise him with 'Happy Christmas' when he walked back.
"While we were waiting I looked at the control desk with all its lights and buttons, looked around the room at all the balloons and streamers and realised that that had been my dream. I saw how the technology of a modern recording studio would seem to an eight-year-old child all those years ago just like the inside of a space ship."
It was about the age of eight that she began to articulate, to herself at least, certain strange things which were going on in her mind. "I had a few premonitions, often very tiny things, nothing significant. What you might call extraordinary mental activity."
Other things were not so easily explained. "We lived in Detroit, a very run-down area. There weren't many places to play - the river was quite a walk away and as a child you didn't want to venture too far because it wasn't very safe.
"The place to play was this field nearby where there had been some houses knocked down and it had just grown wild, a flat place to play jungle and those sort of games.
"We weren't long into one of our summer holidays when I had a dream about the field being levelled and dug up. I was crying about it when I woke up and I thought: 'This is stupid, what does it matter if they cut it down?' When I went outside all my friends were sitting on our porch looking very sad. 'They cut the field down', they told me. The lawnmowers and tractors had come in that very morning."
"Sleep dreams were one thing, but there were also the waking ones, images which could sometimes get quite frightening. "It's all right when they were nice pictures but one thing which used to happen regularly was that whenever I would put my hand on a door handle a scene would flash through my mind. It didn't matter where the door was, even to my own room. I would see the most horrible, gruesome things behind the door, almost like tuning in to a movie on the television, and the images were specifically of scenes in the room I was about to enter.
"Eventually, through practice, I learned to suppress that, although of course it could be quite entertaining. After regular school (she came to Britain at the age of thirteen) I went to art school and began to release the stops on my imagination.
"But while I was at school I knew that there were things I should not talk about." Now she is looking for words, not sure that her next admission won't get her certified. "I had the idea, I don't know, er, but I thought that, maybe, I was from another planet." A nervous laugh punctuates this confession. She knows it was an irrational concept. All it proves, though, is that children are just as capable of clutching at straws as adults in a tight situation. Grown-ups don't have an exclusive hold on foolishness.
"It didn't last terribly long, a couple of years on and off. I used to look around, because I felt sure I couldn't be the only one. I even used to look at trees or other inaminate objects for signs that I wasn't on my own."
The logic was simple. "Certain things were happening in my mind which I had tried to talk about to my friends, but all I got was strange looks. They didn't understand, so I felt I was different."
It was at art school that she began to see the potential for using these previously unwelcome mind-pictures. Fully aware that she didn't know anything about Art - as contained in galleries - she had really only entered the school to get away from home. "I was really very keen, though, to understand what this Art was." Very quickly she realised that, whatever it was, it wasn't for her.
"I didn't have problems in the beginning because I was keen to learn and was doing more or less what the teachers wanted. I had it down to a pretty neat formula, what was good and acceptable to make for happy days.
"Then I began to think: 'This is really silly. Art is a form of self-expression and the ideas should be your own.' That's when the trouble really started because I realised that the only thing I could be really honest about was my own imagination. We'd had a few lectures about William Blake and he had seemed to listen to his imagination. He may have suffered in his lifetime but at least his Art was true."
She was mostly sculpting by now and took to entering the classroom devoid of concrete ideas and with the intention of allowing her mind to take over. "I wouldn't know what I was going to make, just let my mind be completely open, almost trance-like. It was very exciting and I would work very fast."
Around this time Lene began to think about what these mental interventions represented. Fellow-students would come to look at her work and point out aspects of it which were familiar to them. She realised that she was incorporating into her sculpture images of people or places which actually existed but which were outside her own physical experience.
Hard on the heels of this revelation came the British Museum incident. "The idea of seeing something centuries old and being a part of it didn't really affect me very much. I wasn't terribly surprised although I knew that it wasn't one of my usual imagination things and it wasn't for my entertainment.
"What concerned me was that it was something totally out of my control. My imagination I could switch on and off practically at will. You know, if I'm on a tube train and I'm bored I can entertain myself by seeing monkeys swinging on the hand grips. But this thing in the British Museum had happened completely spontaneously."
Although, as she has said, she entertains different theories in a faddish way, the underlying theme of her belief in reincarnation is her reluctance to accept the finality of death. It's a powerful argument which has been used by some influential people. Benjamin Franklin firmly believed that he had lived before: "When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot expect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist and put Himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in this world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."
Of course it's easy to read ego in that statement, a desire on Franklin's part to believe that the world couldn't go on without his illuminating presence. But, as Lene Lovich says: "It's difficult to rationalise that someone can be walking along the street, thinking, controlling a large part of their environment, then walk off the curb, get hit by a car, and that's the end of that.
"We can't be something one minute and nothing the next."
In support of such doubts Heber Curtis, an American astro-physicist, said: "With energy, matter, space and time continuous, with nothing lost or wasted, are we ourselves the only manifestation that comes to an end, ceases, is annihilated at three score years and ten?"
If it is true that we live before and will live again, why is it that we don't remember past lives. Lene Lovich believes, although it could be one of her passing theories, that between lives we may go through some form of deprogramming and that the memory is then stored in some far corner of our minds.
Scientists have already declared that we only use about 10 per cent of our brains [Note: wrong] and that even a genius is only using about another three or four per cent, so the deprogramming idea is not so far-fetched. It also provides an easy answer to the problem of child prodigies such as Mozart: how else to explain a four-year-old writing complex symphonies except that he carried the knowledge with him from a former life?
"Some people you meet," says Lene, "even quite young children, have much deeper understanding of things than they could possibly have learned in their young lives, or even just one previous life."
There is no room in her life for organised religion; too many rules, too much restriction. But there is comfort to be had from her own beliefs, and she does accept the existence of a Deity, although she can't or won't put a name to it. "I don't fear death itself, only the possibility that it might be painful. There is a worry, of course, about the future because I don't always see it in a beautiful way.
"But I am disturbed by these people who insist on freezing themselves," she says, laughing. "I wouldn't want to come back as myself, I can't think of anything more dull.
"Whatever the world will be like in the future, I think that you need to be introduced to a society gradually, to be born into it and grow up in it so you can accept its hardships.
"Nor would I want to live forever. Much as I am enjoying this life my belief and curiosity about future lives is, I guess, greater than my interest in continuing this one indefinitely."
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