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Introduction: Conversations in Retrospect

Joan Retallack

The role of the composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place…. We talk, moving from one idea to another as though we were hunters…. (By music we mean sound; but what’s time? Certainly not that something begins and ends.) … (Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby. Got lost.) … A teacher should do something other than filling in the gaps…. What we learn isn’t what we’re taught nor what we study. We don’t know what we’re learning. Something about society? That if what happens here (Emma Lake) happened there (New York City), such things as rights and riots, unexplained oriental wars wouldn’t arise. Something about art? That it’s experience shared?—JOHN CAGE, Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965¹

Not long after John Cage died, I received a phone call from a scholar who was writing an essay on Cage’s Europeras. He told me it had just taken him two days to put everything in the past tense. Through no fault at all of that very nice man, I found this chilling. I vowed I would never put anything having to do with Cage in the past tense. A vow I of course had almost immediately to break.

I had found myself shaken by the past tense before. There came a time in my life as a reader—partly due to Cage—when I no longer wanted fictive time-machines to whisk me away from that resonant, chaotic here-and-now that is, with all its entanglements, our only source of history. The chosen afterimages of a narrative past are as removed from the complex real as a sci-fi future. They are an exercise in past perfected, scything through the thicket of intersections that constitute real life, clearing out complexity and possibility. How to present the phenomenon of Cage now, without stopping time, stopping breath; without falling into the narrative fallacy that the micrologic in a string of sentences is the way things were? In philosophy this is known as the problem of reference. For me, a poet, it is a crisis of linguistic life against death. I bring it up partly to confess from the outset that I’ve found no solution in this awkward prologue to the real event, the transcripts of the conversations themselves. Despite my short-comings as Cage’s interlocutor, the conversations in their expansiveness impart a sense of Cage’s everyday life. They do not fall into that category of “forms that erase all trace of arbitrariness”—Adorno’s phrase for the kind of literature that makes us impatient with signs of life.² Many twentieth-century writers have felt, like Adorno, that complex, fragmented, performative forms were the only hope for retaining vital principles, thinking new thoughts, changing minds. Cage in his own writing produced a catalogue of such possibilities and, finally, counted conversation among them.

John Cage often acknowledged that his sense of poetry and prose style began with the example of Gertrude Stein. The writing collected in his early books (Silence, A Year from Monday, M …) enacts the very process of forming a revolutionary aesthetic with language that is both crystal clear and enormously complex in its implications. It is language whose radically reorienting energies register graphically and syntactically on the page. In mentioning the debt to Gertrude Stein I’m not referring to that misleading tag “continuous present.” What one might call cheap imitations of Stein (and early Hemingway) demonstrate the limits of a pure and simple use of this device. It produces literary artifacts in which a terrifying purification has taken place—history obliterated in a grammatical disaster whose aftermath is a single glistening strand of narrative events. Cage appreciated the odd and wonderful fact that we don’t live our lives in orderly tenses or mono tonic modes.³ We live in messy conversation located at lively intersections of present, past, future—where future is not just a hypothetical, but is always actively emerging out of our exchange with the world. One learns this from Cage’s work. He saw the past as exigent and instructive resource, the future as his now.

Conversation necessitates what it etymologically denotes—living with (con), turning (verse) toward—turning, that is, away from self alone. The verse of poetry and the verse in conversation are related in just that way, as a literal turning—at best, unexpectedly, toward our many pasts, presents, futures—that is, toward possibilities, contingencies, recognitions, unintelligibilities. There is as much unspoken in conversation as enters the realm of what can be said. Both parties must be comfortable with silence. Silence is the one thing that can be counted on. Silence is the authoritative presence.

During the taping of our conversations there were numerous silences, pauses, and interruptions. Most are noted in parentheses, though it would have tried readers’ patience beyond all reasonable bounds to have noted every one. I did feel, however, that it would be of interest to those wanting to better understand Cage’s thought processes to preserve the distinctive rhythms of the interchanges that occur in the course of thinking things through aloud. The pleasure of conversation is as strange and humorous as any form of life by virtue of its empty words as well as full, its digressions and improbabilities as well as strenuous efforts to make sense. It is not most honestly and productively about filling in all gaps, pinning things down so terminally they will never wiggle out of discursive traps.

Cage and I had wanted, insofar as we could, to tape “real conversations” rather than formulaic interviews. Though the shadow format of the interview always remains, the conversations did begin to overflow our taping sessions, continue over lunch, in taxi cabs, on the phone, and during non-taping encounters and visits. My major editorial intervention has been in several instances to make a continuous sequence of a line of discussion that left off and then came up again in entirely unrelated contexts as further or afterthoughts and addenda. I have also omitted certain personal exchanges never intended to be “on the record.” On the other hand, during one of the conversations printed in this book, the one that included the cellist Michael Bach, I left the tape recorder on during lunch and transcribed everything that transpired.⁴ This particular interview captures a hefty slice of the life of John Cage, cook, solicitous host, and composer. He begins a new composition as we talk.

My friendship with John Cage was for me so large and diverse in its implications that it’s been difficult to know how to begin and middle through an introduction. Ultimately, I have taken to heart (once again) something Cage said in response to my mentioning the same problem years ago, during one of our first conversations in the sixties. He said simply, “You know, you can always begin anywhere.” So too a narrative, in the midst of time, which neither begins nor ends, can in principle begin anywhere. But perhaps what we most urgently learn from Cage is that the narratives we use as our “history” begin in some potent and generative sense in the future. Whether we call it teleology, utopianism, vision, hope, curiosity, or the simple force of “There must be more to life than this!?” future promise is what draws human events on. Later, in beginning an attempt on what led to what, we participate in that metamorphic retrospect where everything suddenly seems prescient. Particularly things having to do with those who were to such an unusual degree “on time” they seemed to be way ahead of the rest of us.

The name “John Cage” denotes such a figure, and much of this is no doubt an illusion. But if it is possible to distinguish between worse and better illusions, those that are forms of nostalgia versus those that function as a kind of oracle, the rapidly forming Cage mythos is surely the latter. I use “oracle” here, as I think Cage did when he referred to his use of chance operations as an oracle, to mean an active principle that allows us to be guided by questions rather than answers, by an opening-out of inquiry into a suggestive dialogue with life principles not unlike the selective intersections with chance that are the morphology of culture as well as biology. The classic oracles—East and West—present their “wisdom” in the form of unfinished puzzles, polyguous figures that instruct via the stimulus to figure things out for ourselves. They energize and clarify our vision by giving us work—invention—to do. They also serve as the kind of impetus we might associate with the Epicurean clinamen or swerve—the collision with contingency that dislodges us from enervated patterns into a charged apprehension of something new. I have a feeling it’s this kind of thing that is meant when people say, “Meeting John Cage changed my life.” Of course everything changes one’s life to some degree or other, no matter how minuscule. But Cage’s life/work, itself functioning as oracle and clinamen for others, seemed to enlarge the range and scale of the possible.

I first met John Cage in the fall of 1965 when the Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to perform in a dance festival being held at the Harper Theater in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. It was Merce Cunningham I was eager to see for the first time out of a general curiosity about “modern dance,” but also because I had heard from friends that Cunningham was “really something completely different.” At the time, though I had a taste for adventure, my interests in dance and music were relatively conservative. George Balanchine was my favorite choreographer, and my very intense preferences in music were largely Baroque and pre-Baroque. I was in fact hardly aware of John Cage. And, looking now at the program for what was billed “DANCE FESTIVAL: The most important dancers performing in America—ballet, modern and ethnic,”⁵ I notice to my surprise that Cage, though listed as Musical Director of the Cunningham company and performing (as did David Tudor) in every event, was really not featured in the program. Neither he nor Tudor was given a bio.

The series of five performances was for me a sudden education in what I had never dreamed dance could be, as well as in new music—mostly by John Cage, but also by La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Bo Nilsson. (There was one piece by Erik Satie.) I saw Cage preparing a piano, heard both Cage and Tudor play. Many of the events involved complex multimedia components with theater-wide sound sources emitting constant surprises—words and noises. Program notes included “Let me tell you that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. Ivan Karamazov”—something familiar to me from my own reading of Dostoevsky. But then there was the more enigmatic and, as I subsequently learned, quintessentially Cagean “The events and sounds of this dance revolve around a quiet center which, though silent and unmoving, is the source from which they happen.” This, along with the sensibility structuring the conjunctions and disjunctions of sound, silence, film, and movement, completely astonished me. What occurred had not turned out to be dance accompanied by music in any way I had experienced before, but a strange intermingling of the visual and auditory glancing off one another’s energies, never cohering or congealing within a familiar logic of relations. Over half of the audience left early, a considerable number exiting during the last piece, Variations V, a simultaneity of dance, electronic sounds, VanDerBeek film, and “remarks” read by Cage.

The next night the audience became even more restless, with the premiere of How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Many stomped out angrily, shouting their disgust over their shoulders. This was the piece in which Cage, seated at a small table to one side of the stage, equipped with microphone and sound-sensitive collar, performed a repertoire of noisy activities—smoking, drinking a bottle of wine with gulps and swallows broadcast over loudspeakers, and reading a series of short humorous texts which he later published in A Year from Monday, calling them “the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance.” He goes on, “I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive.”⁶ Few if any of us in the audience had had the opportunity to think about all this. We were experiencing it “cold,” as some might have put it. I prefer “out of the blue.” It came with the pristine sensuality of “out of the blue.”

In the mode of Diaghilev’s “Astonish me!” (to Cocteau), I too relished surprise, and wanted more. The experience from the very first moment had been riveting—fascinating, humorous, mysterious. During that opening performance, I had seen and heard more acutely and complexly than ever before during a programmed aesthetic event. Very little of what had taken place was in a descriptive or referential relation to the natural world, but when I thought of how it had engaged my attention I could only liken it to watching ocean waves in infinite variety spuming against rock on the coast of Maine, or sky and water becoming one in the heat and stillness of a South Carolina low-country afternoon, or even moving through the endlessly interesting medias race of humanity in downtown Manhattan. These associations were familiar from my past. What was completely new, what I could not connect with anything I had ever been consciously aware of before, was what seemed to be a radical alteration in my experience of the relation between visual events and sound—space and time. (As a philosophy student I knew that this was truly profound, since according to Kant space and time were the fundamental aesthetic categories.)

When the performance was over, literally shaking with excitement and fright, I went backstage, where I came upon Merce Cunningham. I told him that this had been the most stunning, puzzling experience of dance and music I had ever had, that I didn’t understand what had happened, that I was intensely curious to find out. Were rehearsals by any chance open to the public? Cunningham was friendly and welcoming. He said, “Oh yes, of course,” and told me what their rehearsal schedule would be.

The next afternoon when I arrived at the theater, the dancers—Carolyn Brown, Gus Solomons, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Barbara Lloyd, Peter Saul, and Albert Reid—were beginning to arrive for warm-up exercises. I was struck again, as I had been the night before, by the exquisite discipline and precision of their movement—a rigor I had in my ignorance not expected outside the ethos of ballet. Sitting alone in the dimly lighted auditorium was the man in the black suit, white shirt, and tie I recognized as the composer-performer from the night before, John Cage.

When he saw me come in, he nodded and smiled, walked over, introduced himself, and sat down. He asked me about my interest in dance and music, wanted to know what I did. Was I involved with either? I told him that I was painting, writing poetry, and studying music (cello), all more or less “on the side.” I was a graduate student studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Oh,” he said with a smile, “I’m involved in the study of philosophy too. What kind of philosophy do you study?” I told him I had been studying ethics and philosophy of science, and was primarily interested in the methods of philosophy of language, particularly the work of Wittgenstein. Cage said he was interested in Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism, and that he didn’t much care for Wittgenstein—“too many rules.” But he was curious what I found of value in Wittgenstein, and I was curious about Buddhist philosophy, so we talked about those things and about my sense of something unfamiliar having happened the night before to my perception of space-time.

Cage was buoyant, charming, expansive. He explained the way in which he and Merce Cunningham worked together—each composing and choreographing independently, having agreed beforehand only on the length of time of a given piece. This meant that the relation between the dance and the music was not causality, but only that they happened to occur in the same space over the same period of time—“synchronicity.” Cage said neither he nor Merce Cunningham could bear to see dancers “Mickey Mousing” to the rhythm of the music. He then told me, rather shyly, that he had recently published a book of writings on some of these matters. It was called Silence. When I told him I would look for it, he said that he hoped I would find it interesting, but he was sure I would be interested in the I Ching, the “Chinese Book of Changes.” He said to get the Bollingen, Wilhelm/Baynes edition with the essay on synchronicity by Jung: “That may help.”

I ordered Silence the next morning and bought a copy of the I Ching. Jung’s foreword was both helpful and puzzling⁷:

We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception. —(C. G. Jung, p. xxii)

This confirmed the importance of chance; and/but then there was this:

Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with [that moment] in quality no less than in time. To him [sic] the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast—even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be—inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin. This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity[,] a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. —(Jung, p. xxiv)

So, chance, though “mere,” is all pervasive, and coincidence turns out to have as much relational glue as causality, if not more. Attention to synchronicity allows one to notice relationships between disparate elements minus the compulsion to absorb them into a progressively homogenizing system. I read the following passage from Jung’s foreword—knowing nothing about Cage’s use of the I Ching in his music—as having somehow to do with Cage’s account of Cunningham’s movement away from story ballets to the coincidences of sound and movement that structured the performances I had seen:

The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that A′, B′, C′, D′, etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A′ and B′ are of the same quality as the psychic events C′ and D′, and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture. —(Jung, pp. xxiv-xxv)

Of course what is “understood” will not meet criteria of traditional Western logics of discovery and understanding unless the conceptual framework within which those logics operate expands to include psychic phenomena, or forms of spirituality, or ecological or environmental views, or the kind of modeling of complex systems (like turbulent fluids and gases and the weather) that goes under the rubric of “deterministic chaos.” Going back to the Jung foreword now, I am, despite its dated assumption of absolutes and essences, startled that he wrote it in 1949. Another mind that had managed in certain very interesting respects the difficult trait of being “on time.” In the twentieth century, bogged down by enduring nineteenth-century forms, the present has always looked downright futuristic.

Cage and I continued to talk the next day, about “ordinary language philosophy,” art, and “ordinary life.” I told Cage I thought he should give Wittgenstein another chance, particularly after reading the Jung. And I don’t clearly remember the relevance I thought I saw then, but it had something to do with Wittgenstein’s connecting meaning and use within active forms of life, which I probably visualized as a series of contexts radiating out from the linguistic event like a series of synchronic concentric circles. Focus on any moment and you would have synchronic, concentric contextuality…. Whatever it was that I said, Cage looked doubtful, smiled, and probably changed the subject. He told me the art that he valued was not separated from the rest of life. (I think he may have mentioned Duchamp’s readymades.) The so-called gap between art and life didn’t have to exist. And (here he began to laugh heartily) an artist friend (Robert Rauschenberg?) had written a play for three characters—called Art, Life, and Gap.

This conversation was for me like a spring of fresh water opening up in the midst of centuries of conceptual rubble. Similar to my encounter with Wittgenstein’s work on the heels of Hegel and Heidegger, a few years before. Though I had been reading Gertrude Stein and Pound, and had loved as a teenager “living in” the porous and mysterious, nonlinear structure of The Waste Land, I still revered crystalline logic and the transcendence theories of art that pervaded the academy in the guise of “the sublime.” Even Wittgenstein, I later realized, had retained this etherealized view of art despite his rejection of metaphysics. It wasn’t until I read John Dewey’s Art as Experience that I discovered a spiritually rich, aesthetic pragmatics of everyday life that corresponded to Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning—meaning as “form of life”—and Cage’s imitation of nature’s processes.⁸

So, this is how I met the Master of Nonintention at a time when I happened to be in a seminar conducted by the British analytic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, who might well have been called the Mater of Intention. Elizabeth Anscombe was the author of what was at the time a quite influential book called just that—Intention—though she was then, as now, best known as Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague and the translator of the Philosophical Investigations. The title of her seminar that fall was Wanting. Cage of course had been engaged for years, as he would continue to be, in a spiritual and aesthetic practice of not-wanting. The collision of these two figures, entering my life at the same time, produced a crisis with a long series of aftershocks. As the only female professor I ever had, and easily the most brilliant, male or female, Anscombe was a powerful model for me. I greatly admired the quirkily inventive, entirely lucid character of Anscombe’s reason. And I envied what seemed to be her intellectual immunity to messiness, to the morass of the emotions. But, to my dismay, she seemed to think, along with her “ordinary language” colleague, the philosopher J. L. Austin, that if you were going to do sensible things with words you simply couldn’t be engaging in humor or writing poetry.

In fact, Wittgenstein—whose writing has always seemed to me to be a form of poetry, and later came to strike Cage similarly, but who was taken at the time to be entirely, prosaically, rationalist in his enterprise—had also relegated poetry to a zone outside philosophy, somewhere near the place where Kant had stashed religion. There was so much that could not be talked (reasoned) about by philosophers. Now, here was Cage, who had certainly managed to escape sentimentality, but who was warm and friendly and did what he did out of a need for poetry!⁹ Silence turned out to be a startling intermixture of the conceptual and commonplace, experimental forms and straightforward anecdotes, passionate seriousness and humor, philosophy and poetry—with much breathing space in the interstices, as in conversation. At that point, Cage was the only person I had ever met who did not experience intellectual (or artistic) transgression in entertaining all these things at once.

My next meeting with Cage came about after I had left both Chicago and the pursuit of a Ph.D. It was a result of the sort of coincidental chain of events that is nonetheless surprising for making up the everyday fabric of everyone’s life. I had become active in the civil rights and anti-war movements in Washington, D.C., working with a theater and film group sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies. There I met a cultural anthropologist named Robert Emrich. He was acting deputy director of a newly formed interdisciplinary institute at the Department of Justice with the mission of developing a social value framework for policies that were to be instrumental in bringing about “The Great Society.” This institute had been started under the guidance of a Lyndon Johnson appointee named R. G. H. Siu, who was, surprisingly enough, the author of a book called The Tao of Science.¹⁰

In 1968 Emrich proposed that Siu meet with me as a potential consultant in social philosophy. To my surprise (and alarm) I was hired, as Siu said, because of my “alternative” experience, which he thought might bring a fresh perspective. Siu assured me carte blanche in deciding what I would do, saying only that he hoped I would bring ideas to the institute that it would not have been exposed to otherwise. I took this quite seriously and immediately made arrangements to interview a variety of people involved with issues of social justice, including John Cage and one of his mentors, Buckminster Fuller, as the basis for seminars I would conduct for the institute staff.

Both Fuller and Cage were surprised and pleased by this opportunity to think aloud about issues of social justice in a context that might conceivably have some effect on government policy. Fuller was interested in both the conceptual and physical framework of “correctional institutions.” (He had, in fact, been corresponding with an inmate.) Cage had recently published the first three installments of his “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” 1965, 1966, and 1967. In 1967 Cage was at the height of his optimism. There was the triumph of Fuller’s immense geodesic dome housing the U. S. exhibition at Expo ’67 in Montreal, in which the art of Cage’s close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as that of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine was on display. It seemed as though the socioaesthetic project that Cage saw himself collaborating in was finally being valued by the society at large, and was thus coming into a position to have transformative consequences.

“Diary … Continued, 1967” is full of an awareness of the high incidence of pain in the world (the war in Indochina, world-wide hunger, lack of adequate shelter, etc.). Cage thought at that time that art was in pretty good shape; what was in urgent distress was not art but society. And what needed to be done was “Not fixing it but changing it so it works.” The Diary ends with “We cry because anyone’s / head was struck.) Tears: a global / enterprise.” But the Diaries contain a programmatic optimism in the form of catalogs of spiritual and techno-utopian remedies for the world’s problems from the work of, most notably, Buckminster Fuller, but also Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Huang Po, and other Western socio-philosophical and Eastern spiritual thinkers. Both Fuller and Cage, like most of the reformers and revolutionaries of the sixties, believed at that time that if the means to dramatically improve human life on the planet were made clear and available, people would have the good sense to use them—to do what needed to be done. Cage’s lifelong project could in fact be summed up as trying to figure out what needed to be done and doing it. In 1958, in his “History of Experimental Music in the U.S.,” he had written,

Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)? And I would answer, “In order to thicken the plot.” In this view, then, all those interpenetrations which seem at first glance to be hellish—history, for instance, if we are speaking of experimental music—are to be espoused. One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be done.¹¹

Cage’s 1967 “Diary” entry ends on this hopeful note, conceived as both utopian and pragmatic:

If

we get through 1972, Fuller says, we’ve

got it made. 1972 ends the present

critical period. Following present

trends, fifty per cent of the world’s

population will then have what they need.

The other fifty per cent will rapidly

join their ranks. Say by the year 2000.¹²

I, for one, certainly wanted to contribute to the coming of this kind of world, which at that point, 1968—with student uprisings in the name of “the revolution” going on around the world—seemed already visible on the horizon. I felt the Justice Department could benefit from the sources of that vision. Some of my long-range ideas, in what actually turned out to be a very short-run situation, had to do with rethinking the language of government in the U. S. (specifically at “Justice”), and community arts projects along the lines of things going on at the Institute for Policy Studies, both as substitutes for incarceration and to begin conversations between the Justice Department and citizens from disparate economic classes and communities. Cage found this of interest and suggested that we meet at what was then his favorite Greek restaurant in New York, the Parthenon on West 42nd Street. When he arrived he was in a particularly ebullient mood, saying that it really was heartening that the Justice Department had hired R. G. H. (Ralph) Siu, whom I think he knew through Siu’s essay “Zen and Science—‘No-knowledge’ ” in Nancy Wilson Ross’s book, The World of Zen.¹³ He found it equally heartening that Siu had hired me to do what I was doing, and absolutely marvelous that others in the Justice Department (Robert Emrich had come with me to tape the interview) might be interested in the opinions of Buckminster Fuller and himself! Cage always felt that he and Fuller were working on the same social project in different ways.

Unfortunately, this is about all I remember of our conversation. Cage had ordered a bottle of Retsina for the table. He thought it was wonderful and generously refilled our glasses. When the first bottle was empty, Cage ordered a second. I got through the lunch conversation with some superficial level of coherence but by the time it was over I was completely drunk. I had a blinding headache throughout the next day, which rendered the whole experience a blurred and fragmented memory. I do recall that Cage himself was tipsy by the end of our long, two-bottle lunch. When we left the restaurant he stepped off the curb to cross the street, smiling and waving goodbye, and came very close to being struck by a speeding cab.

Buckminster Fuller arrived in Washington wearing three wrist-watches and sprinted about like a 73-year-old, turbocharged elf.¹⁴ He was also delighted, even excited, by the “Justice Department’s” interest in his and Cage’s opinions. He seemed to think (as I think many of us did at the time) that the new era was beginning. The Fuller interview took place over an entire day, beginning in the morning at National Airport, moving on to my apartment, then to a downtown restaurant, and finally to his room at the Mayflower Hotel. Fuller had room service deliver a large urn of hot tea, an extra pot of hot water, and a dozen tea bags. He explained that his dietary convictions included eating a single meal a day and, as much as possible, flooding the system with a constant stream of hot liquid. This meant that the interview—which at the Mayflower became a dazzling monologue—was taped in 10- to 15-minute segments between Fuller’s trips to the bathroom. His talk throughout the day had ranged from the way in which social values are reflected in public structures to prison reform to structural integrities, which, at around 8 P.M.—close to his bedtime—turned into a theory of eternal life. Fuller, who had turned off his hearing aid while maintaining almost unblinking eye contact (never closing his eyes as I saw him do on other occasions), said this was the best explanation he had ever given of these matters and asked that a transcript of the tapes be sent to him as soon as possible.

I gave the Cage and Fuller interview tapes to a secretary at the Justice Department for transcription. Not long afterwards, with Johnson having relinquished his bid for a second term, Humphrey lost the election to Nixon, and the secretary, probably daunted by the unfamiliar content of the tapes, was taking such a long time on them that, before I could get them back, the Nixon team took over. Ralph Siu was immediately replaced, and a Nixon appointee, Charles Rogovin, lost no time in requesting that I write a memo and then meet with him in order to explain just what it was I had been doing. He declined to renew my contract. Everything I had done—notes, memos, seminar papers, tapes, and any transcripts that may have existed—was confiscated and “classified.” My request for the return of my materials, particularly the tapes, of which we had not made copies, was refused.

Of course I was mortified—about, among other things, having wasted Fuller’s and Cage’s time—as well as depressed at the enormity of what Nixon’s election meant for the country. I saw Cage now and then at concerts after that but didn’t approach him. I had retreated into a period of my life that’s hard to characterize; I was trying to come up with a way of continuing to work—in visual art, and as a poet and essayist. The next time I spoke to John Cage was when he came to D.C. for events in celebration of his seventieth birthday. After his reading performance at the Washington Project for the Arts, I said hello without really reintroducing myself. He seemed very remote and I had the feeling he didn’t remember me.

Around that time, the early 1980s, I was writing multidirectional essays that often began or ended with Wittgenstein or Cage. I was invited to participate in a symposium at the Strathmore Hall Arts Center Cage-Fest in May 1989 in Rockville, Maryland, where I read an essay entitled “Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2: John Cage—May 18, 2005.”¹⁵ Among other things, it placed Cage’s work within the American pragmatist aesthetic articulated by John Dewey in Art as Experience. Cage thanked me for the essay, saying with great emotion, “With what you say about Dewey it all makes sense. For years I have lived under the shadow of Susanne K. Langer.”¹⁶ After that, as we came to work together on the conversations project, and as we came to be friends, he would say periodically, more or less out of the blue, “You know, Joan, that essay says it all.” This was, of course, gratifying to me. But it also made me feel, periodically, not so much that I had said it all, but perhaps that I had said enough. That saying more would be too much. That may indeed be the case. But the work on and with Cage has continued, up to this book.

In the summer of 1990, Rod Smith, the publisher-editor of Aerial magazine, who had attended the Cage-Fest in Rockville and become a great admirer of Cage’s work, decided to dedicate a large portion of his next issue to John Cage through the publication of the long lecture-poem Cage had read in Rockville, “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else,” along with a selection of his macrobiotic recipes. (Cage was no longer drinking Retsina, nor for that matter eating most of what his favorite Greek restaurant had served. He had also, by this time, come to love Wittgenstein.) Rod Smith asked me if I would consider interviewing Cage for the issue. I had some trepidation about this, given what had happened the first time around, but my delight at having a second chance won out. I called Cage to ask him whether he would be willing to do this and he said yes.

So, what turned out to be the first conversation in MUSICAGE took place during two days in September 1990 and was published in Aerial 6/7 in 1991. Because of the pleasure we found in doing it, Cage and I talked at the time about the possibility of taping more conversations, but it didn’t really seem practical in the absence of a specific occasion. When we had both heard from a number of readers of the Aerial issue that the format—combining an example of Cage’s work with a detailed exploration of it—had been helpful in understanding his motives and methods (some said they felt they had really understood his use of chance operations for the first time), we thought that doing a conversation book in this way might be warranted after all. We decided to structure it with sections devoted to recent work in each of the three major areas of Cage’s interest—language, visual arts, and music. My sense of a need for this was strong. Over the years it had become apparent to me that, except among the circle of Cage devotees and scholars, there was an almost inverse relation between Cage’s increasing fame and the degree of understanding of his work. Fame, which is of course based largely on the abbreviated codes of media images, had led in many cases to misleading caricatures.

Thus, the conversations in this book, starting with the one published in Aerial 6/7, came to be taped over a period of three years in John Cage’s art- and plant-filled loft in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. We worked at the round wooden table where he composed, just a few feet away from a bank of large windows overlooking (and overhearing) 18th Street and 6th Avenue. This was the same table at which Cage and Merce Cunningham and their frequent guests ate, steps away from the open kitchen where something delicious was often cooking, not far from the phone that rang unmediated by an answering machine with calls from all over the world.¹⁷ Given this setting, a busy intersection of the domestic and global, the everyday pragmatic and sensual, the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the spiritual—all in the complex and humorous intermingling that was Cage’s preferred form of life—it’s probably not surprising that our conversations ranged widely: from the portentous question of whether the beans were burning—while checking, we decided that cooks smell time—to detailed discussions of philosophy, poetics, visual aesthetics, and of course music practice and theory. Cage’s musical principle of “anarchic harmony,” the result of a particular discipline of attention to time expanded by chance and design to accommodate dense and surprising interrelationships, was entirely manifest in Cage’s living-working arrangements both at home in New York City and in his working travels around the world—in Europe, Japan, and Latin America. This was the remarkable integrity of a poethics of everyday life and work where forms of art and the art of life interpenetrate within a coherent framework of values.

For Cage the role of the composer was always multiple and paradoxical: to compose music, of course; but also to compose language, visual materials, a space in which to live and work that was both socially responsive and set apart—a kind of oasis in the midst of our consumer- and mass-media-dominated culture—almost as though “the revolution” had occurred. He was delighted to learn and to share alternatives to what he saw as destructive cultural habits. But, though Cage in many ways enjoyed being a public figure, his extraordinary accessibility was the other side of a very private person who longed for invisibility, for a mode of being in the world where ego disappears, leaving no trace. In the middle of enormous responsibilities and a fame about which he certainly felt ambivalence, within quite consciously constructed brackets and parentheses of time and space, Cage made getting lost a way of life. He often said, “When I’m not working I sometimes think I know something. When I’m working I discover that I don’t know anything at all.” This discovery always pleased him. It came from the fact that each project was in some way a radical quest to make it new, for himself as well as for anyone else who would be involved with his work, to genuinely not know where the processes he had set in motion would lead. This was not in order to produce the market value of an “original” commodity, but to move into a zone of unintelligibility, the only place where the possibility of discovery lies, where the future is not at the outset already a thing of the past.

Because the charged field of the paradoxical was Cage’s preferred territory, I think it’s important to try to distinguish paradox from contradiction. Paradox operates outside the internal consistency of any given set of rules. It is evidence of complexity. Evidence that the conditions of life will always exceed the capacity of a unitary systematic effort to contain or entirely explain them. A state of affairs described in the mathematical world by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Contradiction takes place within closed systems, unified and coherent sets of interlocking definitions and laws. While contradiction leads to logical gridlock, shutting the system down and sending us back to ferret out our mistake, paradox reveals insufficiencies of limiting systems in a complex world, catapulting us out of system into a new realm of possibilities. A paradox, such as Cage’s “silence is ambient sound,” opens up new frontiers on the edge of unintelligibility (silence), full of crosscurrents of fresh air—multidirectional and from many (sound) sources. It breaches and enriches definitions of music. So also, when Cage used the word “beautiful” as highest honorific and dismissive pejorative, was he contradicting himself? Or was this an indicator of a more complex situation? The cult of beauty has degraded art with its preestablished criteria, encouraging nostalgia and imitation. An encounter with beauty can be a process that awakens one’s whole being. Both of these statements appear to be true. That such divergent experiences of “the beautiful” involve use of the same term signals not contradiction but complication, perhaps even paradox—a situation which demands something more than either/or ways of thinking: The degree to which our desire to possess beauty leads us to imitate its image rather than its processes may (paradoxically?) make experiences of beauty harder to come by within the fluid circumstances of everyday life.

To compose is simply “to put together.” Cage is often thought to have most notably pulled coherent traditions apart in order to create room for chance, apertures for silence. His notoriety, as with all avant-garde artists, has been one of dismantling. This view comes from perspectives which lie outside the locus of his constructive activities. The substance of avant-garde work is often hard to perceive because, at least initially, the absence of the familiar is more palpable than the strange presence of what is actually there. New forms in fact not only seem disturbingly wrenched out of contexts that have given old forms their meaning, but can appear to be violently abstracted from “content” itself—empty. It is not until they begin to attain familiarity, to acquire context, that they seem miraculously to fill up with their own substance. Certainly this experience of alarming absence is most likely to occur when one is unfamiliar with the “other” traditions—East and West—that form the contexts and moving principles of Cage’s compositions.

This work brings material and experience together in a mode of enactment rather than “aboutness.” Patterns of sound and silence, chance and design startlingly reveal their utterly intermingled contingency, not as idea, but as initiating experience to be undergone by composer and audience equally involved in the making of meaning. Cage’s lifelong project was one of dislodging cultural authoritarianism (and gridlock), inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes. (I think it’s not really a paradox, though it’s something we tend to forget, that we experience freedom only within structuring contexts.) He hoped the sense of possibility this engendered would be helpful, specifically within the tradition of the art form, but also more generally within the society. He once said with great passion—responding to a goading inquiry about skeptical and hostile reactions to his work (as though Cage himself wanted his music to be inaccessible) — “Everything I do is available for use in the society.” For Cage, like Wittgenstein, meaning was determined by use, not by intention—at least not by intention seen as a picture in the artist’s mind to be faithfully replicated in the object or event. Cage wanted his art to introduce us to the pleasures of nature and everyday life undistorted by domineering ego. His motive, like John Dewey’s, was fundamentally environmental: if creature and environment become separated, both die. Almost all of Cage’s work, if actively engaged within the terms its structures suggest, directs audience attention to the ambient context in which it takes its time and place. Engaging with it is enacting a very particular form of life, one of attentive conversation—turning toward, turning with. Cage took his work—an invitation to the aesthetic pleasures of everyday life—to be no more, no less than a contribution to the global conversation among those who care about the future of the planet. But, just as importantly, a conversation with the processes of nature itself.

The use of what Cage called “chance operations” was a way of escaping the trap of ego, emotions, habit—inviting nature to have its “other” say in art. He explained this in a preface to be read at the start of each performance of one of his most overtly political pieces, Lecture on the Weather, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the American bicentennial year of 1976. Cage used the opportunity of this commission to honor the revolutionary spirit still very much alive in the nineteenth-century work of Henry David Thoreau, as well as in the position of the American draft resisters who had fled to Canada during the U.S. war in Vietnam. But most of all he wished to honor by these means the possibility of a world in which we finally realize the meaning of “world us”—the extent to which we are all in this wonderful/awful mess together. Cage wrote:

I have wanted in this work to give another opportunity for us, whether of one nation or another, to examine again, as Thoreau continually did, ourselves, both as individuals and as members of society, and the world in which we live: whether it be Concord in Massachusetts or Discord in the world…. It may seem to some that through the use of chance operations I run counter to the spirit of Thoreau (and ’76, and revolution for that matter). The fifth paragraph of Walden speaks against blind obedience to a blundering oracle. However, chance operations are not mysterious sources of “the right answers.” They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience…. Rome, Britain, Hitler’s Germany. Those were not chance operations. We would do well to give up the notion that we alone can keep the world in line, that only we can solve its problems. More than anything else we need communion with everyone. Struggles for power have nothing to do with communion. Communion extends beyond borders: it is with one’s enemies also. Thoreau said: “The best communion men [sic] have is in silence.”¹⁸

Silence for Cage was the point of entry of “the rest of the world” into audibility. And it was by means of his “chance operations” that silence was invited into the conversation. (There are detailed explanations of how he used chance operations in all three sections of this book.) With this means he was able to probe the undiscovered field that lies outside the direction of our attention, a direction always very precisely charted in his work so that chance occurrences can be construed as meaningful events (alternative “voices”) within a designated range of sources, materials, and instrumental processes. Cage truly loved alterity, the existence of what Charles Sanders Peirce called “real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them.”¹⁹ This sums up a usefully chastened view of nature, one in constructive contrast to both nostalgic and techno-scientific views. We may be coming to realize that Baconian sci-tech prediction and control (nature as extension of our will) is in its clumsiest forms as pathetically fallacious as romantic nature nostalgia (nature as extension of our emotions). The “weather” in Lecture on the Weather is an atmospheric political climate composed of many interpenetrating voices, not the sympathetic resonance of a few leading characters.

During a performance of Lecture on the Weather, political climate and (simulated) meteorological climate collide in such a way that the political climate is experienced as meteorological—as the complex chaotic condition of interpenetration and obstruction in which we live, a fragile balance of order and disorder, clarity and cacophony. How we orient our attention in this situation, how we identify significant patterns, construe meaning, how we act in relation to our values, is an index to the difference between forms of political order—between, for example, consumerism and environmentalism, authoritarianism and anarchic harmony. Either side of both of these sets of choices (and there are certainly many more alternatives) can characterize the relationship between audience and performance. But finally, Cage’s work promotes an environmental dispersal and refraction of what there is to see and hear to such an extent that the participatory engagement of performers and audience can only be anarchic.

For that part of mass culture and philosophy (both Disney and Baudrillard come to mind) which operates as if we have the god-like capacity to entirely construct the universe in our own image, nature that is not “imagineered” (a la Disney World) into entertainment commodity or into the conceptual construct that is its parallel in academia, nature as truly other than our intentions has become almost unimaginable except as source of skepticism, deconstruction (locate a contradiction in the construct), economic irritation, or terror. A “terrortory” to be tamed into landscape reflecting only the desiring eye of the beholder—consuming all that falls prey to its gaze. This is, in perhaps a more positive construction, the civilizing impulse. But don’t we ignore what lies outside the fragile currency of our images and constructs, our tightly constructed and self-repeating rhythms, our descriptive colonizing, at our (and the world’s) peril? It may be that Lacan was right (about at least one thing)—that always lurking in the margins is “the revenge of the real.”

JOHN CAGE: COMPLEX REALIST, I.E., UTOPIAN AVANT-PRAGMATIST

Cage’s work attempts to move us beyond skepticism, beyond irony, beyond commodification, beyond idealization to a realm of complex realism that shifts the scene of the aesthetic outside the swath of the culture’s self-reflecting gaze. It brings together natural, aesthetic, and social processes in an exploration (a conversation composed largely of questions) of possibilities we, in our infatuation with image-making, might otherwise overlook. Cage worked in service of principles and values derived from what in lifelong study he took to be the best, the most practically and spiritually relevant, of Eastern and Western thought, hoping that someday global humanity might live with pleasure in anarchic harmony—in mutually consensual, non-hierarchical enterprise. This vision was utopian in the best sense of the word—that is, within the pragmatics of real-world modeling that distinguishes utopian constructs from dreams, fantasy, and wishful thinking.²⁰ Utopianism for Cage was a carefully designed function built into his working aesthetic, and into the realization of his scores. From the late ’50s on, his musical compositions modeled forms of anarchic harmony in the relations between musician and composer, musician and music, musician and other performers, as well as among composer, performers and audience. It was in this quite concrete way that everything Cage did was poethical—making or implying connections between aesthetic structures and habits of mind and living—and, in the way it combined the spiritual and the political, steadfastly utopian.

Cage’s idea of a utopia characterized by anarchic harmony directly informed his composing (with parallels in his language texts and visual art). He envisioned, and wrote music for, an ensemble or orchestra without a conductor, without a soloist, without a hierarchy of musicians: an orchestra in which each musician is, in the Buddhist manner, a unique center in interpenetrating and nonobstructive harmony with every other musician. When asked at one of the seminars he gave at Harvard (1988-89) in conjunction with his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures whether he thought his music had political content, Cage replied:

I think one of the things that distinguishes music from the other arts is that music often requires other people. The performance of music is a public occasion or a social occasion. This brings it about that the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society, of how we want society to be. Though we are not now living in a society which we consider good, we could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live. I don’t mean that literally, I mean it metaphorically. You can think of the piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live.²¹

There was a time during the sixties when John Cage liked to remark that he was gifted with a sunny disposition, a tendency toward optimism and humor.²² Humor, which can accommodate the good … bad, beautiful … ugly, sacred … profane, continued to come easily. Spontaneous optimism was, not surprisingly, an effort to maintain.

Personal, professional and political crises in the 1940s precipitated in Cage a major spiritual and intellectual reorientation.²³ In its wake he came to mistrust all emotional content in the arts, believing that it was properly the business of members of the audience to supply—in relation to their own experience—the emotional dimension. Both spiritually and aesthetically, Cage longed for the serenity of Buddhist detachment. But as he and the twentieth century aged together, he could not ignore the terrible degradation of its early utopian dreams. That is, he could not ignore all the work that still needed to be done. Visionary turn-of-the-century movements—communist, supremacist, constructivist, and futurist—had pinned their hopes on scientific and technological advance to move us beyond historical injustice and despair, but despite an enduring sense of being on the threshold of unprecedented social possibility, this century has been depressingly persistent in its production of horror—wars, poverty, institutionalized cruelty, ruinous greed. Cage found that in order to be a contributing world citizen, he had, with artifice and discipline, to continually reinvent the “gift” that life’s brutality always threatens to eradicate, the gift of good-humored openness to constructive possibility. Cage’s optimism had to be transformed from a feeling of confidence in the inevitability of progress to a complex modus operandi posited on the belief that we are responsible for the construction of our social world as well as on respect for the natural world. (This is a position in which it is not useful to view nature as a social construct.) The chief goal of his aesthetic became a pragmatic, though still visionary, utopianism: temperamental optimism transformed into utopian method. In the late 1940s Cage quoted Meister Eckhart, “But one must achieve this unselfconsciousness by means of transformed knowledge,” followed by a self-described (by Cage) “random thought”: “If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear towards love.”²⁴ For Cage this meant a quest to quiet the mind and the emotions while contributing something of use to the society. Cage’s utopianism became the working solution to the tension between hope and despair.²⁵

Utopianism has historically differed from wishful thinking, science fiction, and fantasy to the extent that it has been rooted in the hope and possibility of enactment—it is a material rather than transcendental idealism. From thought experiments like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and More’s Utopia²⁶ to the Epicurean community known as “The Garden”; from the Enlightenment philosophies that were the source of the French and American revolutions to experiments like Oneida and other intentional communities in America; from Marxism/Communism in Europe, Asia, Cuba and Nicaragua to Socialist Democracy in Scandinavia, Kibbutzim in Israel, Martin Luther King’s civil rights “Dream,” and the Poor People’s Campaign—there have for millennia been forms of utopianism connected to real social experiment and real historical consequences. In this way utopian visionaries have been an ongoing source of both disappointment and inspiration. All of this belies the vaguely pejorative, casual usage of the adjective “utopian” connoting impractical or impracticable—not having to do with practice. In so far as utopian thinking engages the imagination, it is entirely about the interaction, in praxis, between creative vision and real-world contingencies—an active engagement with potentially useful implications.²⁷ The pragmatic value of the visionary imagination is startlingly revealed when we think of the alternative—a human future in its absence.

Utopianism, along with a belief in large-scale human progress, is currently on the postmodern list of banned (Enlightenment and Modernist) ideas. Cage’s work and thought help us ask whether we might need to restore and renovate rather than abandon them. Certainly the mono-rational Enlightenment vision deserves to be in serious trouble. The purist clarity of its one-way directional beacon leads to suffocating visions (see, e.g., Foucault’s “Panopticism”) of Reason’s centralized control. Might there be more complexly realistic ways to think about a global hopefulness? Whatever one may think of Cage’s decentralized vision of anarchic harmony,²⁸ it certainly suggests that there can be other models. That there may be a way into a post-skeptical poetics of public language, a post-ironic socioaesthetic modeling without denial or naiveté—a complex, not naive, realism.

If, that is, to imagine democracy in monarchist France or in colonial America was utopian, to imagine socialism in Czarist Russia was utopian, to imagine children’s rights in early industrial Europe and America was utopian, to imagine Feminism in the nineteenth century was utopian (some say it still is), to imagine integration in the pre-civil rights South was utopian, to imagine a world without consumer aggression, nationalism, and war is utopian, to imagine a world without racial and ethnic conflict is utopian—then, Viva Utopia! In these globally desperate times, it may be utopian in the best sense to invent ways of constructively working on (“solutions” can be hoped for but are as much a matter of chance as intention) the most grotesque, self-inflicted problems of our species.

JOHN CAGE : BEYOND IRONY : RE:SOURCERER

I-VI continues an ongoing series, of which Themes and Variations was the first, and Anarchy is the most recent, to explore a way of writing which though coming from ideas is not about them, or is not about ideas but produces them. For Anarchy the source material was thirty quotations, all of them related to anarchy. For these lectures four hundred and eighty-seven disparate quotations have been put into fifteen files corresponding to the fifteen parts of Composition in Retrospect…. —JOHN CAGE²⁹

In his transfiguration of sources at hand, Cage was, like his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, a sourcerer. But Cage’s complex realist model of resourcefulness goes beyond the irony of a Duchamp toward a model of a constructively usable past. History, in the form of ideas, texts, cultural artifacts—history as ambient cultural silence—is an object of neither irony (distancing fascination) nor reverence (distancing respect) but is a visionary pragmatics undertaking a constructive recycling and reorienting—a benign and (paradoxically) conservative radical practice which invites us to enjoy new forms of attention.

Søren Kierkegaard, an avowedly addicted ironist, thought that, though irony was essential in starting the motion away from a deeply entrenched undesirable state of affairs, one had really not gotten very far until one had gotten beyond irony as well. The ironic mode is so heavily parasitic on the object of its critique that it is, if anything, a sign of the robust life of its host. So, for Kierkegaard, who saw life as a progress through stages of spiritual development, the road from the aesthetic to the ethical to the religious is one where irony first creates distance but must then be abandoned in order to traverse that distance to the next stage. (I think Cage, with help from the East, moves outside Kierkegaard’s model by accommodating all three “stages” simultaneously.³⁰) Irony places us crucially on the threshold of movement beyond the position it critiques but is not itself an alternative. Its energy, ironically, derives from reference to a state of affairs it simultaneously honors and disavows.

The musical composition that always remained Cage’s favorite (despite the fact that he was against having favorites) was 4′33″. It can be seen (but not heard) as ironic comment on the empty gesture of composing a traditional three-movement piano sonata mid twentieth century, but it is most concretely and interestingly an entirely new form: ambient noise in three movements.³¹ Both 4′33″ and Cage’s poem on silence, “(untitled)” in X,³² were composed after Cage had visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard expecting to experience absolute silence, the complete absence of sound. What happened, to his surprise and subsequently to ours, was that instead of hearing nothing, he heard sounds that the noise of everyday life normally makes inaudible—the whoosh and whine, respectively, of the circulatory and nervous systems. In “(untitled)” Cage wrote along the mesostic string, S-I-L-E-N-C-E, “if you exiSted / we might go on as before / but since you don’t we’Ll / makE / our miNds / anarChic / convertEd to the chaos / that you are /.”³³

This conversion is a figure/ground swerve that opens up an entirely new perceptual and conceptual field: where what was previously ground (ambient noise) becomes figure (music reconfigured); where what previously lay dormant outside the scope of our attention becomes possibility. In this sense silence is always awaiting a crisis of attention—a formal turning away from the present state of our preoccupations toward possibilities in perceptual/conceptual wilderness, toward territory not yet recognized, utilized, tamed, exploited, explored. This turning toward silence, effected by means of chance operations within frameworks that heighten unfamiliar focal vectors, became Cage’s working principle thereafter. It suggests that we can explore radically new approaches to aesthetic and social processes as we enter the silence of our future in a new millennium. Perhaps some of the music of the twenty-first century can already be heard in the noise of our times.

JOHN CAGE: CLINAMEN

In his multiplicity of sources re: and resources, in his working engagements with silence and chance, John Cage has been for twentieth-century Western art a kind of personification of Epicurus’s clinamen—the improbable swerve that opens up new prospects, saving some portion of the world from the inexorable logic of its own precedents.

In Nanjing dialect, the sounds “i luv yoo” mean would you care for some spiced oil? What the West does, encountering our art, the artist Ni Haifend said, is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.

—Andrew Solomon³⁴

Eastern thought served as a clinamen or swerve for Cage, just as his work has served as a clinamen for Western art. He was not an orientalist, but one who welcomed reorienting, defamiliarizing experiences. Knowing that he would never fully enter it, or leave Western culture behind, Cage used Eastern philosophy to transfigure his mind, emotions, spirit, practice … in conversation with ideas and principles he valued in his Western sources. Cage was an American who felt very close to the European and Russian avant-gardes but was most of all an aspiring Global Villager, the compleat outsider in a historical moment (or two) when our best hope may come from dedicating our efforts to a world where obstructive borders and egos disappear to such an extent that national, ethnic, racial “us-them” insides and outsides become functionally indistinguishable. Cage neither appropriated nor imitated Eastern thought; it radically changed his manner of operation. It functioned for him as clinamen, a refreshingly alien element that skews business as usual, specifically, the business of mainstream culture—a stream heavily polluted with authoritarianism, consumerism, xenophobia, meanness, and fatalistic conventionality—the one stream you can step in twice.

Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity.

—Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)

It strikes me that Cage’s resemblance to Epicurus is no accident; that is, Cage’s resemblance to Epicurus is a most telling accident. These two men can be seen as bracketing the history of the Western humanist investigation of chance. Each happened to develop a therapeutic philosophical (ontologically based ethical and aesthetic) practice based on our material being in the random circumstances of everyday life, rather than on a transcendent rationalism that invites one to ignore, even deny, such messy details. Their checkered reputations, like the reputation of chance itself (not to say “serious pleasure” and the quotidian) over the last two (Western) millennia, seem to me to have to do with our chronic aversion to both paradox and complexity.

Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who mistrusted traditional religion and was dismissed by some as a profligate, revered by others as a religious figure, was perhaps the first Western thinker to make chance responsible for every change, every new development, every new possibility in the universe.³⁵ It was chance that drove the clinamen, or “swerve,” causing collisions and novel forms within otherwise unvarying patterns of atoms. And it was the presence of chance as a fundamental metaphysical principle, replacing the power of destiny, fate, and the motley assembly of puppeteer gods, that put humanity in a position of radical freedom. The invention of a life in accordance with nature, but departing from conventional habits, became not only possible but ethically and emotionally desirable, since the cultural values of the time had led to moral disaster and widespread misery. Epicurus was, like John Cage, a utopian ethicist, ascetic, and sensualist who strenuously rejected the deterministic fatalism of his era. Cage, who was introduced to Indian philosophy by the Indian singer and tabla player Gita Sarabhai, credits her with teaching him that “The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”³⁶ Epicurus, too, held that quieting the mind was the chief good in life, and, like Cage felt this goal should be pursued with an acutely calibrated social conscience. Epicurus wrote:

Vain is the word of a philosopher by which no human suffering is healed,

and

It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honourably and justly, nor again to live a life of prudence, honour, and justice without living pleasantly.

It is almost uncanny how the Epicurean statement “Time is not recognizable by a concept, as are concrete things and qualities, but is a special kind of accident” could serve as a description of Cage’s sense of the temporal in music.³⁷ And there is a kind of structural parallel in Cage’s introduction of chance into the regularity of the “music of the spheres” and Epicurus’s introduction of chance into a determinist metaphysics. Both men valued the ascetic life of pleasure (what is in our culture seen as a contradiction)—a good life based not on greed and gross consumption but on attentive calm.

Cage, in medias mess of the twentieth century, could draw sustenance and swerves from Chinese Taoist and Confucian, Indian, Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, which more than Dada were responsible for his selecting chance as a serious instrument of discovery.³⁸ Epicurus, in his own desperate times, despite the fact that his aphoristic “Doctrines” often read more like the sutras of Eastern spiritual traditions than Western philosophical texts, found himself in polemical either/or positions vis-à-vis Platonic and Aristotelian rationalisms. What comes of these divergences is instructive. Epicurus and Cage are in a sense different sides of a cultural/conceptual/temperamental coin. What makes Cage the expansive yin who can enjoy life in the midst of an imperfect world to Epicurus’s anxious yang retreating into a hermetic enclave, what gets Cage out of the trap of Western dichotomies of good/evil, sensuality/reason, sense/nonsense, is his humorous acceptance (in the Eastern mode) of the generative grace of accident. Epicurus feared the very chance forces he had the moral and intellectual courage to introduce into his metaphysics.

There is much that separates the Cagean from the Epicurean project, but if it is a common (culturally constructed) fate (even trial) of all who could from some perspective be called spiritual or religious or revolutionary figures to be both controversial and radically misunderstood, the misconceptions adhering to “Cagean” and “Epicurean” are eerily similar indicators. Both men were thinkers whose ideas, enacted as disciplines in their own lives, functioned as a clinamen in the more prevalent views of the times. As Epicurus pointed out, the clinamen causes a collision. In the aftermath of their respective cultural collisions, both Epicurus and Cage were widely thought to have been promoters of frivolous excess of one sort or another. Epicureanism came to mean pretentious and immoderate occupation with one’s appetites—distinctly counter to its originator’s ascetic and disciplined model; Cagean has come in many circles to mean an anything-goes assault on all structure—distinctly counter to Cage’s clarity of aesthetic discipline. It is a curious, and I think significant, puzzle—a sort of Western cultural Koan—that two thinkers devoted to a discipline of ethical integrity in contrast to the hypocrisy of their times were culturally misconstrued in virtually the same way.

JOHN CAGE: HUMORIST

Q: How could so much humor be so serious?

A: How could so much seriousness be so humorous?

Living with close-to-inexhaustible conviviality and productivity in the midst of the circus of urban culture, relishing its improbable juxtapositions, its microcosmic relation to the chaos of the world at large, required a generosity of temperament that could only survive as the manifestation of a deeply embedded, one might almost say eminently serious, sense of humor. It will be immediately apparent from the transcripts of our conversations that throughout the variety of concerns, as well as the ups and downs of circumstance—whether aesthetic, sociopolitical, or spiritual—humor is the pervasive element. One editor, early on, found this a bit alarming. He wondered whether I should take some of the “(laughter)” out of the transcripts so that Cage’s image as a serious figure in the arts could be bolstered. I have chosen to keep the laughter, along with a good deal of what may seem to digress from serious aesthetic issues, because this fluidity and generosity of attention, alongside absolute professionalism and attention to detail, was the heart of Cage’s way of being and making things in the world. Divisions between work and pleasure, seriousness and fun, were unthinkable. He delighted in the intermingling of what tend to be viewed as mutually exclusive in a logically timid culture.

The (laughter) in what follows has very little, if anything, to do with clowning or joking—self-contained routines removed from the flow of life’s discourse. People who, knowing of his legendary sense of humor, told jokes to John Cage were baffled and even embarrassed when he responded with a long soulful look rather than laughter. My understanding of Cage’s humor—his laughter, his mirthfulness—as I experienced it and as I think it was central to his work, is clearly related to the surprising conceptual/perceptual shifts and accidental swerves of the Zen Buddhist “sudden” school of thought.³⁹ But it is also very close to the etymology of the word “humor” in English⁴⁰—a history which connects it (via Latin and Old Norse) with moisture (humidity), fluids, fluidity. In medieval and Renaissance usage this became a model of a kind of temperamental fluid dynamics. I’m referring, of course, to the idea, current in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that shifting “humors” were responsible for both characterological and perceptual shifts. Once fluidity has entered into the picture we are not far from figure/ground shifts of the sort we experience with ambiguous figures, or paradoxical swerves like hearing silence as sound. Nor are we far from the conceptual fluidity of Dada (which reappeared in the minimalism of the seventies under the rubric Conceptual Art) or the humor characteristic of Zen Buddhism—the sudden conceptual shift that collapses divisive categories and reveals the strange and delightful interconnectedness of things. A constant, generous awareness of this is what might be called mirth—a light frame of mind that refuses containment by categorical divisions such as the joke as set piece on the one hand, and the logically encased argument on the other. (We all know by now that in Zen there is only one hand.) Or the comic and the tragic. It is a lightness of spiritual and conceptual valence.

Cage called me on the phone one day, after we had been talking about the role of humor in his work, to say he had remembered a book he thought might bear on my questions. I had remarked, during one of our conversations, that I thought all his work, including his music, was humorous; did he? He had reservations about this, particularly because of his sensitivity to what was at one time a prevalent misunderstanding of his music as being a joke. Cage hadn’t at all liked being thought of as some sort of Dadaist clown. The book, he said, was a collection of Japanese poems in a humorous form of haiku called senryu, but “You may not like it.” He wanted to warn me before sending it that it had some offensive views of women: “But there is much that’s marvelous in it…. Maybe you can just skip around.” A few days later Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, edited by R. H. Blyth, arrived in the mail. I opened it and found:

I would have them laugh

At the strangeness

Of being alive.

(Jiichirô, p. 513)⁴¹

and then

Quite recovered,

But his nose

Has fallen off.

(Unattributed, p. 311)

Blyth’s introduction was full of descriptive commentary very close to Cage’s spirit. For instance, this seems to relate quite directly to Cage’s often stated “need for poetry”:

The fundamental thing in the Japanese character is a peculiar combination of poetry and humour, using both words in a wide and profound yet specific sense. “Poetry” means the ability to see, to know by intuition what is interesting, what is really valuable in things and persons. More exactly it is the creating of interest, of value. “Humour” means joyful, unsentimental pathos that arises from the paradox inherent in the nature of things. Poetry and humour are thus very close; we may say that they are two different aspects of the same thing. Poetry is satori; it is seeing all things as good. Humour is laughing at all things; in Buddhist parlance, seeing that “all things are empty in their self-nature” … and rejoicing in this truth. (P. 4)

Blyth goes on to describe the role of humor in complicating the idea of beauty in Buddhist-influenced Japanese thinking:

The love of beauty we see everywhere in Japanese life and art, and yet strictly speaking it is a subordinate thing. Beauty is a part of something much larger that we may call significance. Significance includes ugliness, or transcends both beauty and ugliness…. There is no true or false, no good or bad, no ugliness or beauty, no pleasure or pain…. (Pp. 5-6)

and then Blyth quotes the seventeenth-century poet Bashô:

The old pond;

A frog jumps in,

The sound of the water.

There is just poetry, or rather, there is just the sound of water…. We see how essential it is that humour should perform its double task, first destructive, of getting rid of all traces of sentimentality, hypocrisy, and self-deception; and second, of making us rejoice at things. (P. 6)

The same spirit that produced senryu modified the Indian-Chinese Buddhism that came to Japan, and made it witty without cynicism, humorous without blasphemy or impiety…. The humour that is inseparably associated with satori (enlightenment), and with Zen writings and pictures, was … the faculty to see the vast, the cosmic implications of a slip of the tongue, a suppressed fart, a false smile, a balding head, and yet never to leave these concrete particular things, —in other words the power to be both wise and poetical, practical and transcendental. The philosophy of Zen is one of contradiction and paradox, and this suits well with the comic spirit, but there is also in senryu a certain mellowness, an all-inclusiveness, an unwillingness to reject, a non-choosing, a balance of strength and delicacy of feeling, a going to extremes but preserving moderation and suavity…. (Pp. 8-9)

Cage’s response to the chaos of our world was, significantly, to welcome both its order and its disorder to the greatest extent possible in the life of his art, the art of his life. (“Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”⁴²) This project required an enormously accommodating humor, a humor that converged in him from multiple sources—from his early, Californian “sunny disposition” to Dada and Zen. It was Cage’s humor that made his extraordinarily generous invitation to possibility via chance operations possible in the first place. And it is in turn the idea of the possible which links the exigent, pragmatic-realist circumstances of his art to the utopian imagination. The central driving question for Cage was, in infinitely simple complexity, What is possible? What is possible given the complexity of the circumstances in which we live, given the material character of the medium in which we happen to be working, given the hellish interpenetrations of history, given the hope that material process and experience will come together in a manner useful to society?

In advance of a broken spirit is the sense that there can be no new thing or act or thought under the sun. The humors of possibility shift when we, with Cage, attend to, enter into, silence (all that our present disciplines of attention do not admit). Inviting silence, by chance, to have its say in his work just as it always has in the rest of the world, Cage threw open the doors of the concert hall, the museum, the library to previously estranged processes of the continually surprising, complex real. In this he curiously and delightfully conflated certain old-line Western dichotomies. He was apollonian and dionysian, purposeful and purposeless, serious and playful, calculatedly spontaneous. Cage was apollonian in needing to have a reasoned structure for every new composition, liking to work from starting points with grids and symmetry in order to give chance a level ground on which to play with the elements of the art. He was dionysian not only in the hearty sensual delight he took in material presence (sounds, words, paper, color … people, food, conversation, nature…) but in his enduring enthusiasm for the degree to which chance took things out of his control. What this really means is that his aesthetic framework was both intricate and commodious enough to allow an exploration of the range between/around/above/below/before/after the polarities that have defined the dialectical agon of both romanticism and modernism in Western art. In this sense Cage’s conversations with history, silence, chance, and us were grand postromodern polylogues.

The contrast between the Western tragic sense of life and the Eastern comic sense interested Cage. He thought that when you believe the gods are separate from everyday life, you see separation everywhere and experience it as loss. But if you think of the sacred and the profane as right next to one another, you can’t help but delight in the fullness of things. The immense, commodious humor in John Cage’s laughter was, along with the prodigious accomplishment of his work, the most astonishing thing about his mode of being in the world. It caught him, and those with him, like a fresh wind, a sudden aperture opening up in the matrix of the moment. His laughter, his humor, became more and more spiritual in its sources over the years, but with no decrease in gusto. Cage’s spirituality was not at all “transcendent” in the sense of removal from daily life but in fact a constant return to pragmatic concerns with a resonant sense of the interconnectedness of things—that we are all, persons and environment, “in it” together. The “it” that we are in is the chaos of this teeming, cacophonic, carnivalesque globe. And though we must all be respected as individual agents, our interconnectedness makes each of us responsible to the overall social and environmental framework we share. The positive (fresh) vision of beauty—the source of humor and pleasure—is anarchic harmony, a multiplicity of voices along the multidirectional staves of paradox. Not Paradise Lost (we never had it) but Paradox Lost (or do I mean found?)—the real tragedy of Western Civ is the separation from complexity.

JOHN CAGE: PARADOX REGAINED?

It is perfectly accurate and even interesting to characterize John Cage as an American Zen master (and all his work as a complex Koan) as long as it is entirely clear that he was not a formally trained Zen Buddhist, that he was as global in spirit as he was American, and that he thought of himself as master of nothing.

Cage tried to operate outside the kinds of polarities the West has produced in self-conscious ricochets between ideals of critique and transcendence. He wanted to avoid, in fact, all polarities, dichotomies, dualities, either/ors—all choices of two or less. His range was instead structured much more like the one we are accustomed to in everyday life, where countless, untold, untenable intersections and juxtapositions of events—some by design, most by chance—leave us stunned, amazed, dazed, astonished, curious, desperate, exhilarated, bewildered … crying and laughing, determined and helpless … amused/frightened/enraged/inspired … and, not in addition but in multiplication, any combination of the above. All this creates anything but a linear progression. It is world as vast, interconnected, infinite visual and sonic topological network, where paradigms of intricate multidimensional, interdisciplinary and intercultural complexities replace the vertical soundings of shallowness and depth that have characterized our Eurocentric critiques of judgment—“depth” increasing proportionally to distance from dailiness. Cage’s aesthetic paradigm brings us to fractal models which can represent infinite surface in finite space, replacing clearly defined inside/outside, us/them idealizations of Euclidean geometries with the detailed interpermeable dynamics of coastlines and crystals and weather.⁴³ What I want to say is that new socioaesthetic paradigms must emerge if we are to live well in our increasingly complex intercultural world, and that Cage’s work enacts and suggests the invention of new models.⁴⁴

JOHN CAGE: EXSTATIC

All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns. —GREGORY BATESON⁴⁵

A sound accomplishes nothing; without it life would not last out the instant.

—JOHN CAGE⁴⁶

The dry winter wind

Brings along with it

The sound of somewhere.

(Shinsei, Blyth, p. 530)

At the Mayflower Hotel in 1968, in the course of the lost interview, Buckminster Fuller said, “The simplest definition of a structure is just this: it is an inside and an outside.”

It is only a radical and powerful art that can take us to the outside of our structures.

PARADOX NOW

Since I cant be just a listener to silence Tm a composer.

How can I write sound that is silent?

I’m in a position when I write music of not knowing what Tm doing. I know how to do that.

—JOHN CAGE, remarks at Stanford University, 1992⁴⁷

John Cage was one of the best (un)known artists of our time. The caricatures of fame function as a substitute for knowledge. Very little in twentieth-century Western culture prepares us for Cage’s work. This is perhaps not a question of receptivity or the lack thereof, but of readiness. Readiness as a threshold marker has a long history in disciplines of attention and spiritual training in the East. It has to do with the way in which the person approaching the spiritual or cultural challenge has been prepared accidentally and intentionally—through experience, study, and even training—to take not the next step, but the next leap.

I am interested in forms that we cant discuss, but only experience.

—JOHN CAGE, Stanford, 1992

JOHN CAGE: SILENCE

Flowers? Very good

Play? All right

I am ready, he will say.

(Unattributed, Blyth, p. vi)

R. H. Blyth gives this as an example of an “incomprehensible” translation in his book of senryu. For me, it echoes Cage’s reply to an impassioned challenge by Norman O. Brown during a panel at Stanford University in 1992. Brown had protested that with all the talk that was going on, the issue most present and least discussed was death: “I do not believe that the past and the present are all here; and that is related to my perception of death…. Death is everywhere present in this room,” he said, turning to look directly at Cage. Cage smiled sweetly, saying, “Nobby, I’m ready.”⁴⁸

The last conversation in this book took place on July 30, 1992, twelve days before the instantaneous and massive stroke from which Cage never awoke. He died the next day on August 12. In Western culture, 12 × 24 hours of the earth circling the sun equals time for a dozen classical tragedies to take place. Cage’s death did not require even one. It was certainly not tragic. It did not occur in classical time, or even contemporary American time as most of us experience it. It occurred in Cage’s time—along the horizon of his Amerizen consciousness. For Cage there was a very real sense in which the past and present and future are all here, now. For Cage, as Zen-minded composer of music, visual art, and words, imitating nature in her manner of operation, fascinated by the proliferation of detail as art moves into everyday life, the aesthetics of space-time could become an intricately expanding fractal coastline for ears, eyes, and humors to explore. What one discovers is infinite time-space in finite space-time (Or is it the other way around?), breathing room … free of the impacted terminal moment that characterizes possession and control, and that we fear death must be.

“What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?” Cage asked in 1961 in the foreword to Silence. For Cage this was a life and death question that remained for him a long-life-long question-as-practice with a continual updating of the time frame.

Each time I went over the transcriptions of our conversations, listening to everything all over again, I dreaded coming to the last of the tapes recorded on July 30. It takes up only 10 minutes of a 30-minute side. Cage is the last to speak. His words are followed by the sound of the recorder being switched off and then by a blankness that is a stark contrast to the noisy silence of pauses filled by the sounds of the loft. I found myself listening to the blank tape each time, not wanting to turn it off. Listening for more, thinking maybe this had really not been the end. Perhaps there was something more that I had forgotten. Fast forwarding. Wanting more. Finally finding it. At some point that blank silence too became fully audible as a delicate, microtonal whir. A whir of music both in and of silence: John Cage’s gift, again.

Everyone who knew John Cage well knew that he didn’t want to die but that he died just as he wanted to. He always said he never liked to know when a composition was going to end.

They die

As if they had won

A prize in a lottery.

(Kazuji, Blyth, p. 509)

There’s an American expression of this too. The summer of Cage’s death, Walt Whitman was being celebrated all around New York. It was the centenary of Whitman’s death in 1892 and Cage was delighted by the attention to his work, the way it was so much “in the air.” John Cage loved Walt Whitman, the Walt Whitman who wrote:

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.⁴⁹

NOTES

1. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 21ff.

2. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

3. In acknowledgment of the suspect status of “we”: my use is not meant to be universal, or even global. It refers to “some of us”—an “us” that changes from one context to another.

4. Excluding only a couple of side conversations between Bach and myself when Cage was preparing the food.

5. The series, running from October to December, included seven selections: Alba-Reyes Spanish Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Robert Joffrey Ballet Company, the New York City Ballet’s Edward Villella and Patricia McBride, Nala Najan, Classical Dances of India, Merce Cunninghan Dance Company with composers John Cage and David Tudor, and Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

6. A Year from Monday, p. 133.

7. All Jung quotes are from The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Foreword by C. G. Jung, Preface to Third Edition by Hellmut Wilhelm, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

8. I take Cage to be enacting the equivalent of Wittgenstein’s move from “picture” to “use” theories of meaning when he decided to “imitate Nature in her manner of operation.” See, for instance, A Year from Monday, p. 31.

9. “When M. C. Richards asked me why I didn’t one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, ‘I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry’ ” (Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961], p. x).

10. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, and New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957. Siu has since published many more volumes, including one on the I Ching, and has founded a new discipline which he calls “panetics”—the integrated study of the infliction and reduction of suffering.

11. Silence, p. 68.

12. A Year from Monday, p. 162.

13. This was actually a chapter from his book The Tao of Science, reprinted in The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, ed. Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage, 1960).

14. If I remember correctly, one watch was set to Tokyo time, one to London, and the third to Eastern Standard.

15. Published in Aerial 5 (1989).

16. Langer’s aesthetic theories, widely influential mid-century, hold that the force of all art, including music, comes from symbolism and the expression of emotion.

17. Actually, contrary to legend, Cage did occasionally turn the phone off in order not to be interrupted, but he preferred not to have to do this.

18. Empty Words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 5. Emphasis mine.

19. Cage took great pleasure in this quote from Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), p. 107.

20. There is a clear parallel to Wittgenstein’s interrogative modeling of “language games,” as well as to Fuller’s “World Game”—a computerized model he first called “Minni-Earth” to be used for regional planning—where the entire planet = the region. Interestingly, paradoxically, “utopia,” a word Thomas More invented circa 1516 to mean literally “no-place,” has become an adjectival category denoting very much “placed,” socially visionary, intentional communities that have been been a continuous part of history. Cage’s feeling about the necessity for utopian thinking is reflected in the title of one of Fuller’s books, Utopia or Oblivion.

21. I-VI (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 177-78. Punctuation has been added to what was continuous, unpunctuated text in the original.

22. For instance, in the foreword to A Year from Monday.

23. Cage’s marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ended in the mid-’40s as his relationship with Merce Cunningham was developing into what would turn out to be a fifty-year personal and professional union. Cage was deeply troubled about the dissolution of his commitment to Xenia and the highly charged implications of moving between “socially regulated” sexual categories. Ultimately, he told me, he felt that sexuality, like all of life, was manifestly more complicated than a handful of (invidiously competitive) categories suggests. He therefore refused to subscribe to any of them. He simply did not believe that there was truth in labeling. This, in my opinion, is the reason for his silence on these matters, as much as his firm belief that personal privacy should be respected. During this time Cage was also deeply affected by the horrors of World War II. His attempts to express his feelings about all these things in his music (e.g., In the Name of the Holocaust, 1942; The Perilous Night, 1945) were being met with misunderstanding and ridicule.

24. From “Forerunners of Modern Music,” Silence, p. 64.

25. This is my observation; I’m not at all sure Cage would have described it this way.

26. More also used the term “Eutopia” (good place) in a nominal dialectic with “no place.”

27. D. W. Winnicott is helpful here with his distinction between imagination—the source of play: a testing of ideas in material interactions—and fantasy, which is mind withdrawn from world, unsullied and unassisted by material contingencies. See, for example, Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (New York: Methuen, 1984). Utopianism which is entirely textual can be seen as public thought experiment—another form of “play” with real consequences.

28. In some ways reminiscent of anarcho-syndicalist ideas?

29. I-VI, p. 2.

30. Though I would substitute “spiritual” for “religious,” despite some vapid new-age connotations, because Cage preferred it. Religion for him meant institutions bound up with “the police” (see the last conversation in this book). Cage’s spirituality was as humorous and pragmatic as the Buddhist texts he studied for five decades. It was not an attempt to transcend everyday life, but to recognize the material and conceptual interconnectedness of all things, to act out of that recognition.

31. Similarly, Duchamp’s work seen as attention to “ambient everyday objects,” regardless of his intentions (no doubt more complex than irony alone), can move us beyond irony as well.

32. X (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 117.

33. See Figure 14, page 193 of this volume. This poem is written in a form that actually requires multiple readings, of which what follows is only one. See my essay, “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

34. From “The Chinese Avant-garde,” New York Times Magazine, 19 December 1993.

35. A status recently ascribed to Cage. George J. Leonard, in Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), argues that Cage can best be understood as a religious figure. There is a recent renewal of interest in Epicurus. Two new translations of Epicurean texts are available: Eugene O’Connor, ed. and trans., The Essential Epicurus (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), and Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, ed. and trans., with introduction by D.S. Hutchinson, The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994). There is also the old standard edition translated and edited by Cyril Bailey: Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). The stylistic variations among these translations are striking, and I have moved among them looking for the most pleasing translations for my purposes, but have used Bailey as my primary source. Epicurus has also reemerged as a figure of intense controversy in two books by broadly interdisciplinary classicists: Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

36. John Cage, “An Autobiographical Statement,” in the box catalog, Rolywholyover

A Circus (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), unpaginated. Gita Sarabhai brought Cage The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna during the time in the ’40s when he was so disturbed that he vowed if he could not find a reason for composing better than personal communication he would give it up. This led to the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (e.g., The Transformation of Nature in Art), where Cage found what would be his lifelong working principle: “the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” Ibid. James Pritchett has an interesting discussion of the effects of these Eastern principles on Cage’s music in his The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

37. Epicurus, like Plato, mistrusted music, but then so did Cage—the power assumed and asserted, by certain kinds of music, to mold the emotions and shape the soul.

38. In describing his new principles of composition in “The History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage says, “What makes this action unlike Dada is the space in it. For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary at this point in history.” Silence, p. 70.

39. There are two Zen traditions: Rinzai, which cultivates the capacity for sudden enlightenment; Soto, which subscribes to a practice of gradual awakening.

40. An etymology shared with French, Italian, Spanish, and German.

41. From Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, ed. R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1960), p. 513. Senryu is the humorous Japanese literary form that comes from perceiving what in the West is separated into the comic and the tragic as inextricably intertwined. Blyth calls this “Senryu no Michi, the Way of Senryu.”

42. Headnote to “Where are we going? And what are we doing?,” Silence, p. 195.

43. See Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983). Mandelbrot has developed the complex realist geometry of a broadly interdisciplinary thinker. He has taught in faculties of analytic and applied mathematics, economics, electrical engineering, and physiology at institutions such as University of Geneva, Ecole Polytechnique, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

44. For a more detailed discussion of this proposal, see my “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America.

45. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), p. 410.

46. “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” Silence, p. 14.

47. At a weeklong festival and symposium on Cage’s work called John Cage at Stanford: Here Comes Everybody, in January 1992, seven months before his death.

48. See Visual Art conversation, note 54.

49. “Song of Myself, 6,” Leaves of Grass (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press), p. 33.