Читать книгу MUSICAGE - John Cage - Страница 13

Cage’s Loft, New York City September 6–7, 1990

John Cage and Joan Retallack

I arranged to tape this conversation with John Cage for publication in the Washington D.C. literary journal Aerial. The editor, Rod Smith, was planning a special issue featuring Cage’s work with language and demonstrating, via juxtaposition, its connection with contemporary experimental poetry in America. What follows appeared in Aerial 6/7 along with “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” and a selection of Cage’s macrobiotic recipes. Our conversation focused in some detail on poetic practice but, like all encounters with Cage, moved in many other directions as well. Cage’s worklife and life-work were pragmatically and spiritually intertwined and interdisciplinary. At the time of this taping, we were in the midst of the “Gulf crisis,” which had not yet degenerated into “Desert Storm.” President Bush was still ostensibly in pursuit of a peaceful solution to the confrontation with Saddam Hussein of Iraq.—JR

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

JR: (Setting up tape recorder on dining room table.) This is an odd way to have a conversation, (pause) I’ve thought a lot about your statement “All answers are answers to all questions” and how that relates to the process of the interview. Have you thought about that?

JC: I haven’t thought about it, but we can talk about it. (laughter)

JR: It seems that logic should dictate something other than the usual kind of interview. I thought of coming with a card game of questions and answers—where we simply shuffled and played. I’m curious; what would your reaction have been to that?

JC: Well it’s hard to know, but I would have followed what was happening. I mean I would have done what I was expected to do. (laughter)

JR: What I decided was that it would have been my game and therefore inappropriate.

JC: Yes. No, no, I think you’re right.

JR: Another thought I had was that we could telescope out or in—in perspective. I tend to start out wide-angled in my thinking. The order of these questions reflects that. But we could reverse or change the order at any time.

JC: No, I’m perfectly willing to go with you.

JR: Recently I met M. C. Richards at the Quashas’.¹

JC: She called yesterday, yes.

JR: She’s, as you know, involved with the notion of “Mother Earth”—doing things to heal the earth. Thinking about that metaphor—Mother Earth—in relation to Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor, Spaceship Earth, in the context of the Persian Gulf crisis—how fragile things seem at the moment—I have some questions about the relationship between art and that fragility. Does, for instance, the gulf between mass culture and so-called high culture mean that no matter how smart or wise we become in our art, the life that is closer to mass culture, mass media, will always be in some sort of “gulf” crisis?

JC: I think the nature of what you’re calling a “gulf” crisis will change. I mean the specificities. I actually think—I’m saying “think” rather than “hope”—it seems to be in the air that the present Gulf crisis is already outdated. It doesn’t belong to our time.

JR: What do you mean?

JC: We’re moving toward a global situation. And this Gulf crisis has very specifically to do with nations. And Fuller already told us years ago—I forget the number, but it’s something like 153 or 159 sovereignties—that our first business is to get rid of those sovereignties, those differences. And to begin to recognize the truth, which is that we’re all in the same place and that the problems that are for one of us are for all of us. There’s no place to hide anymore. And there’s no way to separate one people from another.

JR: That’s so “reasonable.”

JC: But I think the crisis will be the kind of crisis that will work globally, and then we will put our minds, like you were speaking about … we will put our minds to how to correct those things we really recognize without the clouding over of politics and economics.

JR: So you think, though this is an old-style crisis, it may have a new-style resolution?

JC: I don’t know what the resolution will be in this case, but I think the new problems will be different—say, in a hundred years. And they’ll be recognized by everyone and people will put their minds to solving them and we’ll do it! (laughter)

JR: I love hearing that, and I think it’s interesting that you say it’s a thought and not a hope.

JC: Well I’ll tell you why. The political situation has greatly changed in this last year, as I think all of us agree, between Russia and the United States—the question of two superpowers being—

JR: —Antagonistic—

JC:—Is not true any longer. We feel that the more militarism we give up, the better in the case of Russia and the United States. And there’s an enormous feeling—I think a genuine feeling—of friendship back and forth. This Gulf crisis erupts in a fairly global optimism and one of the amazing things about it is, it split the Arab world, and that the Arab world didn’t stay together in a plain national situation. There’s an indication of a kind of international, or global or united nations—whatever you want to call it—at the present point, a kind of global intelligence at work against, not in agreement with, Iraq, hmm?

JR: When you said “a kind of global intelligence” what came to mind was our relatively thin layer of neocortex that overlays all of that other brain that isn’t rational, and I wonder if the optimism of which you speak is not the optimism of, again, a high culture—occupying a small part of the brain and a small part of the general population on the globe. I ask this because, in trying to understand the Middle East situation myself—before the Gulf crisis—as well as other so-called “third world” areas, most of the reading I’ve done has stressed the tribal nature of cultures in the Middle East and, say, in Africa—the idea that the conflict is between tribalism and nationalism, which “we” look at as an advance. Tribalism being oriented toward issues of blood and—

JC: Blood and earth and such things.

JR: Yes, and “kin,” so that it’s very hard to recognize and respect the “other.”

JC: The artificial one, the seemingly artificial.

JR: Yes. In the New York Times a few Sundays ago there was an article that talked about the “new cultural tribalism” in this country—that at this point we feel our audiences are so split, there has to be a women’s art, a black art, an Arab art, a Latino art…

JC: Very, very pluralistic. I think that’s the nature of everything though. That’s much better than having everybody a bunch of sheep.

JR: The point the writer in the Times was making was that this does not necessarily further understanding. If the only audience is the one reflected in the piece it becomes a kind of cultural solipsism.

JC: I don’t think that’s true.

JR: So you think the availability of multiple perspectives will be—

JC: Yes. There’s always someone coming in from the street, into a situation where they don’t belong, (laughter) I mean, it’s not pure. What we’re basically in, it seems to me, is a greater population than the earth has ever experienced before, and we just don’t know what’s happening or how to deal with it yet.² We’re inexperienced, we’re uneducated, and so forth, about the reality of the present circumstance. This article sounds as though they know something. Whereas I think we don’t know much about what we’re doing. But I do believe that we’re on one earth and I think more and more people realize this. And if we could give up this silliness of the difference of nations and concern ourselves with problems that affect all of us, we would make a great step forward…. And, on a less Utopian level now, if President Bush’s tactic of making an economic war before making a militaristic one … if it works, it will be really a boost for optimism—following the Russian, what you could call, erasure of politics, hmm? If we could now have an erasure of militarism through economics. The Japanese, for instance … they actually think they need the oil. Actually, we don’t need the oil. Fuller has told us long ago we should quickly not use it anymore.

JR: Solar energy and—

JC: All those things. We need the oil in order to do the things that really must be done, rather than the things that needn’t be done, like driving for no reason at all from one place to another in all the cities of the earth. If you just imagine from the sky any metropolis, you see all this vast waste of oil.

JR: That’s true, and so I wonder about the basis for optimism.

JC: Fuller said we would need that oil in order to start the necessary pumps of the future to solve the giving of food and utilities and whatnot to everyone on earth rather than just the few.

JR: What do you think of the role of the artist who is developing ideas similar to Fuller’s, and other ideas that might be called pragmatically optimistic, in relation to the fare on television that is retreading old-style ways of thinking about ourselves as fragmented—that presents the earth only as the scene of continual conflicts? Adorno, for instance, was very pessimistic about the effects of mass culture—he felt its power to shape the consciousness of people in ways that would be socially destructive.

JC: I do think that if we walk along Sixth Avenue now and look at the people we see on the street … you don’t have a feeling of culture. You really don’t, as you see the people in the street. And now, I think one of the striking things about our awareness of, say, the United States—and that probably extends to other countries—is that we have certainly not a sense of mass culture, but of individuals who have culture. We have the feeling that many people pay no attention to culture. And that they also don’t pay any attention to anything else that is connected with spirituality or with things other than physical necessity. And that they, furthermore, now … that so many people escape from all of that through drugs. I have no objection to their using the drugs, but I do miss what one might lump together under the word “spirituality.”

JR: Spirituality seems to exist—at least partly—in the realm of desire … something you don’t get to if you’re totally preoccupied with need.

JC: Right.

JR: And I wonder if, to the extent that we have a culture, we’ve left ourselves too needy. Too needy to shift attention away from terrible anxieties about survival, and things that close people in on their fears.

JC: I think that the hope, any hope, any future in fact, has to be viewed from the viewpoint, not of the masses, but from the viewpoint of the individuals. And I don’t mean to separate the masses from the individuals. We need to approach the mass as though it were as many individuals as there are in the mass, hmm? If the masses are going to get any culture that is really useful to them, they will get it individually rather than as a group.

JR: How? They get it “individually” sitting in front of a video box in their house.

JC: We don’t know how. Because no individual knows how his life is going to change, hmm? Even the cultured ones (laughter), let alone the uncultivated ones. But even the uncultivated ones, the hopeless ones, the homeless ones—all of those—can in the next ten minutes change their lives. And we don’t know why, or what will have stimulated them to do that. But they do do it. And that is how life is … don’t you think?

JR: I’m not sure, actually, I—

JC: But you certainly don’t think that five people, because they’re in a group, are all going to agree upon some change in culture and take it—

JR: I think groups can be much less than the sum of their parts, rather than more … I suppose my state of mind at the moment is that both my optimism and my pessimism are on hold and I’m not sure what that leaves me with. (laughter) I do worry when critics and people who think about a postmodern era as a possibility—and I think thinking of it as an empty category which has yet to be filled, where we have the opportunity to look back and say to ourselves, we don’t want to do this anymore, let’s try that—makes the idea of a postmodern era rather exciting, thinking of it as a threshold (that’s how those labels are useful, as thresholds)—then I worry about the critics who say one of the problems with modernism was that it ignored mass culture; it ignored whatever it was that all those people out on Sixth Avenue, with the exception of perhaps one or two, were responding to and having their consciousnesses shaped by. At the moment that seems to be television, certain radio stations … mass media. There is the tension between the fact that these are of course individuals, and yet the input is very homogenized, is very uniform if you believe things like Nielsen ratings.

JC: You mean many people respond the same way?

JR: Not necessarily. I hope not. But many people are responding positively or negatively to the same things.

JC: They’re being stimulated by the same things, going in slightly different directions probably.

JR: Yes, perhaps so.

JC: I think that the media—they will get more and more boring.

JR: Could that possibly happen? Even more boring? (laughter)

JC: I think so. I don’t use it anymore and I know many people who don’t. One of the arguments in optimistic support of radio goes to the effect that television is so boring that people are going back to radio, hmm? Isn’t that true?

JR: Well I think people I know and you know may be …

JC: But I don’t even do that. I don’t really listen to the radio either. Neither did Marcel [Duchamp]. He listened to WINS and he called it LULLABY. And the reason he called it LULLABY was that it repeated itself, over and over; and he used to use it, perhaps, to go to sleep … I don’t know.

JR: Well some sort of anesthesia is probably a good deal of what people are after. I suppose the scary part is that it isn’t anesthesia with amnesia afterwards—that it does shape the way people think.

JC: I can’t listen anymore with any spirit to much more than the weather report on the radio, because the news on WINS, this lullaby, the lullaby is intolerable because of the children who are murdered one way or another, or who themselves murder their parents, and that kind of news is what we get every day. I find it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help—I’ll avoid the word “culture” now (laughs)—it doesn’t help my work. Or it doesn’t help in the use of the hours of the day.

JR: Actually, I’m curious about whether your anarchism—which is basically what—

JC: Spirits me.

JR: —You’re articulating: whether it’s some sort of optimistic fatalism with a long view.

JC: (laughs) Some Pollyannaish …

JR: No, “p-o-l-y” perhaps; not “Anna.” But it seems to me that it possibly does entail a long view. As you say, any time you turn on the radio or look at the papers, a good deal of the information is horrifying.

JC: Yes. All those details are intolerable. You can’t live with it. If your attention were constantly on immediate problems—like the Gulf crisis, for instance—I think you’d have to give up. I mean, what could you possibly do? Nothing that you or I can do now will change any of that. Much less effective are we than say that butterfly in China³ who will determine it, probably. (laughter)

JR: But of course that could be an argument in defense of political activism. You could say, well, if even a Chinese butterfly can affect the weather in New York, then—

JC: Then how much better if we would do something activist? Oh, I see. Well, I think that my strongest action, in terms of either immediate time or long-term time, hmm? is what I’m doing. Hmm? I can’t do any better than I’m doing. And I think that’s true of each person who is concentrated on his or her work. Just the example of one’s work, and one’s dedication to it, is … is … I don’t know what to say about it, but that’s what we’re doing. And we’re doing our utmost. I don’t think if we made it directed more to the person in the street, hmm? that it would be our work. What’s involved is the people in the street changing their focus of attention, and we can’t force them to change it, something else has to do that. Circumstances have to do that. And they will! Hmm?

JR: Where does that last come from—“and they will”?

JC: You see, we may always get an impression that the masses are inert, or uninspired and so forth. But every now and then some of them will become inspired. And others who are not inspired will take their place. (pause) So … there might be a continuing stupidity just as there’s a continuing enlightenment! (laughs)

JR: It seems one view that could come of that is who are we to—

JC: To distinguish?

JR: Or to feel that our species is capable of doing any better than it does.

JC: Oh, I think we know that. I know that we know that we can do better. Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] knew that. He kept talking about success in contrast to failure, which he considered was what we were doing. He made the distinction between “killingry” and “livingry,” and we’re now at a possible point of shifting the Gulf crisis from killingry to livingry. From the concern with killing people as a solution to letting people live as a solution. That’s where the hope lies in the present Gulf crisis.

JR: If you think of that as a ratio—“killingry” to “livingry”—do you think that ratio has changed?

JC: Yes, I think it’s in the process of changing. I see the change in the Russian-USA relationship as a move in that direction. And I see the possible outcome of this Gulf crisis as being non-militaristic. And that would be a step in the same direction. It would be toward the use of words rather than guns. And it would give an incredible boost to optimism, and it would spark minds. But I would like to equate the possibility of military violence with the possibility of drug addiction … that they’re both the same thing, they’re extremes of moving away from intelligence. It’s not that the drugs are bad, it’s that the addiction, or placing the attention in such a way that you have no freedom, is bad. Don’t you think? If there could be a taking of drugs mixed, as it has been in the past, with spirituality—that would be a step in the right direction.

JR: We are, I think, a bunch who do need to be—

JC: Changed.

JR: Jolted out of habitual perspectives.

JC: And drugs can be effective in that way. I think that’s true, so I didn’t want to speak against it. Do you know his books, Andrew Weil, who hopes for legalization of drugs?⁴ But he speaks also of Buddhism—which has long involved me on an amateur level—as one way of altering the spirit without recourse to drugs.

JR: My feeling is that various disciplines of attention can do that.

JC: So that enlightenment can come either chemically or not. (laughter)

JR: I have a question about I-VI, from the transcript of the seminars you gave at Harvard, pages 177–78, where you talk about the performance of a piece of music as a kind of metaphor for the way society works.⁵ You’re answering a question at the time that has to do with the political dimensions of music, the social implications of music. You say, “Performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society, of how we want society to be. We could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live, a piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live.” I thought about your interest in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein talks about language as a form of life, but I haven’t found any place where he talks explicitly about art as a form of life, even in this book [Culture and Value] which collects his writings on art, though it seems to me to be directly implied.⁶ I’m curious about how far you might take the notion of the performance of the piece being—

JC: A metaphor of society?

JR: Yes, but also wondering whether it is really a metaphor or representation and not actually a “form of life” itself, in some important sense. Somehow calling it a metaphor seems to remove it.

JC: Oh, I see. No, you’re right. It doesn’t have to be called that. But, in other words, you would go to a concert and you would hear these people playing without a conductor, hmm? And you would see this group of individuals and you would wonder how in hell are they able to stay together? And then you would gradually realize that they were really together, rather than because of music made to be together. In other words, they were not going one two three four, one two three four, hmm? But that all the things that they were sounding were together, and that each one was coming from each one separately, and they were all together. The togetherness was from within rather than imposed, hmm? They were not following a conductor, nor were they following an agreed-upon metrics. Nor were they following an agreed-upon … may I say poetry?—meaning feeling or expression, hmm? They were not doing that either. Each one could be feeling in quite a different way at the same time that they were being together, hmm?

JR: So that really is a kind of microcosm of an—

JC: Of an anarchist society, yes. That they would have no common idea, they would be following no common law. The one thing that they would be in agreement about would be something that everyone is in agreement about, even the masses.

JR: Even the mythological masses.

JC: And that is, what time it is. They would agree that the clock is correct.

JR: Somehow, in this context, even that sounds major. (laughter) Not in the least bit trivial.

JC: They would agree that it was ten o’clock rather than eleven o’clock. Although that’s a kind of artifice. I’m thinking of the people who live, say, on a time line and of narrative agreement or disagreement about what time it is. They could speak together and reply one hour later in the next second. (laughter) (Tape recorder turned off for lunch.)

JR: Taking the idea of art as a metaphor of society or as a form of life further, I wonder how you would respond to the current kinds of arguments that are being made for art that represents all of the social groups needing representation in the society. Could you imagine, for instance, writing into a score that five different minority groups would have to be represented by performers, or that minority points of view would have to be represented in the material the performers choose to use?

JC: I don’t think I would do that because I don’t want to live that way. I mean to say, I don’t think of individuals as being massed together in a group. I really think of individuals as having their own uniqueness. So that I’m not sympathetic to people who consider themselves members of a minority group. And I don’t really support minority groups. I don’t like the notion of the power or the weakness of a group. Hmm? I consider that a form of politics, and I think we’ve passed that.

JR: What would you substitute for the notion of politics?

JC: The uniqueness of the individual.

JR: In—

JC: In every case.

JR: In a free, anarchic society.

JC: Anarchic society.

JR: Wittgenstein, in this book [Culture and Value] which I know you’ve read, since you quote it in your sources [in I-VI]—

JC: Well I haven’t read them all, Joan. I’ve dipped—guided by chance operations.

JR: You don’t have to have read it all for me to ask you this. And, actually, a question I’ll ask later on is about your dipping. You talk very beautifully about “brushing” the source text.

JC: Yes. That term comes from Marshall McLuhan, you know, “brushing information against information.” And that this is our only work now. Do you know that? Yes, work is obsolete. All we do is brush information against information. (laughter)

JR: You may or may not have read this: Wittgenstein writes, “People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. As long as there continues to be a verb ‘to be’ that looks as if it functions in the same way as to eat’ and ‘to drink,’ as long as we still have the adjectives ‘identical,’ ‘true,’ ‘false,’ ‘possible,’ as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc. etc. people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up.”⁷

JC: Suzuki said something similar.⁸ He said, after an evening when we were all asking him questions—we were walking on Fifth Avenue—a lady turned to him and said, Dr. Suzuki, we talk to you all evening and we ask you questions and nothing is solved. And he said, that’s why I love philosophy; no one wins, (laughs)

JR: And now this cat [Cage’s cat, Losa] is lying on my next question, (laughter)

JC: He’s very dog-like. He likes to be right in the center. (Losa is resettled to other side of table.)

JR: You talk of artists setting examples. Do artists—in, say, using language in new ways—change the grammar of the way we are together?

JC: Are you asking this in relation to what you just read from Wittgenstein?

JR: Yes.

JC: Yes, isn’t that beautiful, (pause) We don’t know. But we can try.

JR: And the same for developing new intuitions?

JC: You know I have a slight chip on my shoulder about the word “intuition.” I did speak about the uniqueness of each individual and I believe that. And I suppose the intuition of one individual would be quite different from the intuition of another, but it sounds like something very special—intuition, hmm? And I’ve always suspected the word “inspiration” in the same way. If we have to have intuition, or if we have to have inspiration in order to carry on the day, then where are we? Will we have to wait for a long time after getting up? Before we can do anything? What!? (laughter) That’s why I feel a little bit off of those things—because they sound like special circumstances. I would rather be—even if I were at a lower altitude—I would rather be able to work at any moment, even when I was uninspired. That’s one of the things that chance operations makes possible. Or brushing information against information. You can do that without being inspired. In fact, doing it will inspire you, don’t you think?

JR: Yes. I feel the same way about inspiration, and I can see that “intuition” has kept company with that whole cluster of things that has to do with genius and being special.

JC: Yes, yes. That, yes.

JR: The reason why I use it—and maybe there’s a better word—is because I think not enough of us trust the awareness and the quality of attention that can brush information and select things that strike us in strange and interesting and unexpected ways … and give them value.

JC: Right. I don’t object to the mysterious aspect of intuition. Or even inspiration. I mean to say the “Where does it come from?” I like that. But I don’t like the part that would make one person inspired and the next uninspired. I don’t like the political nature of intuition or inspiration.

JR: What I realize is I don’t associate it with those things anymore. I think of intuition as something you can consciously develop, through a kind of discipline of attention; and its being valuable as a resource for your work.

JC: What would you do, for instance?

JR: Well, with my students I do various kinds of language exercises—some of which come out of a Zen sort of spirit. One is in fact related to your “All answers are answers to all questions.” I have them write on a piece of paper a statement that they believe to be the case—trivial or sublime, it doesn’t matter. No rules except that they believe this to be the case. Then I ask them to write a question on another piece of paper—something they genuinely wish to know. We collect these statements and questions in separate piles and shuffle them up. Two students now read from these randomly ordered piles responsively. The first reads the question at the top of her pile, the second reads the first statement as if it were the answer; and of course it is the answer. (laughter) My students are always amazed. They say, how did you get this to work?

JC: Isn’t that marvelous.

JR: What I think it does is help them develop a sense of trust in their ability to make—

JC: To make those connections.

JR: Yes. That’s right. To make meaning.

JC: Make meaning, yes.

JR: And I do a number of things like that—developing intuitions about language by using language in disarming ways, coming to meaning from odd angles. And I started doing this partly in reaction to the idea that some people had intuitions and others didn’t. What I find is all my students can do wonderful things when—

JC: When they realize they can do it without being put down or without needing to be embarrassed. No, I agree.

JR: Yes. And the “intuition” has to do with the fact that our brain takes in so much more than we process at the cognitive level. I think so much of what makes language lush and sensual has to do with experiences and associations we have that are sub-neocortical, that aren’t being processed in logical terms. I don’t know what else to call that, in order to pay attention to that part of language, as well as to its logical levels. We’re noticing on an intuitive level. But there may be a better word, because I agree, it carries that unfortunate baggage. Having said all that, we could talk about how, when we experience art, we are educated or initiated in some way by the experience so that even if we don’t logically assimilate or repeat the experience, it affects the next experience we have.

JC: Yes, well, that’s characteristic of art, I think. That it goes into the life, and transforms it. You really see the world differently because of your experiences with art, one art or another that shows you connections other than you knew before it.

JR: And in a piece like Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else,” which you have said works with ideas, from ideas, but is not about ideas—

JC: Yes, it [“Art Is Either …”] is all from words of Jasper Johns, but they’re used with chance operations in such a way that they make different connections than they did when he said them. On the other hand, they seem to reinforce what he was saying … almost in his way. And why that should surprise me I don’t know because all of the words are his. (laughs) But they make different connections. And I mistrusted it at first, or rather I didn’t want him to be unhappy about it, because it was all his words. So I didn’t want to put, so to speak, false words in his mouth, false connections. Before publishing it or delivering it, I read it to him and he was delighted with it—so there was no problem.

JR: Did he hear anything new in it?

JC: I didn’t ask him. But whether he did or not, he hasn’t objected to my reading it. You know, he doesn’t himself give lectures about his work, so it serves … it could, from his point of view, serve a purpose.

JR: Better than sending out a surrogate lecturer, (laughter) Would you give some examples of specific pieces of art or performances that changed the way you saw things, that were models for you in some sense.

JC: Yes. The first one that I remember is very striking. I was in a gallery looking at the early ’40s white paintings of Mark Tobey, and in particular one which had no representational elements at all, which was just white writing. And I left the gallery, which was then on 57th Street, and I went down to Madison Avenue—I think the bus then went in both directions—I was waiting for the bus and I happened to look at the pavement I was standing on and I couldn’t tell the difference between that and the Tobey. Or I had the same pleasure looking at the pavement. And yet I was, I was determined—I was very poor at the time—and I was determined to buy the Tobey, on the installment plan, which I did. I paid five dollars a week for about two years. And yet I had learned from Tobey himself, and then from his painting, that every place that you look is the same thing. You don’t really need the Tobey. (laughs) But you need it to tell you that, I guess.

JR: To remind you.

JC: To transform you. That happens of course with sound. It happens in all the various ways, it happens in different ways so that you, you notice different things than you had noticed before. See, this was just sort of noticing the pavement itself, but sometimes art seems to transform, seems to become something other than itself—the pavement doesn’t remain the pavement, but gets to be more like the art, hmm? I think then you need more of an environment than just the pavement.

JR: You need more for what?

JC: More relationship. Different things. Because so much art has the characteristic of connections between things. So that connections are different from the simple thing of Tobey’s white writing which is like one thing. It introduces you to the one thing—like the pavement. But the relationship arts can introduce you to other kinds of relationships.

JR: By “relationship arts” what do you mean?

JC: Well, when art seems to be dealing not with one thing like white, as in Tobey or Robert Ryman, but is dealing with many shapes and colors. You see? Then you begin to notice different kinds of relationships between all those things as they are mirrored in your daily experience. You notice them again. You recognize them, (pause) I wonder if I can give an example of that. I’m not sure. I mean to say, one from my experience. I don’t remember one right now.

JR: That certainly happened to me after my first time at a Cunningham-Cage performance. I walked out into the street and—

JC: And you could see movement—

JR: Movement, and hear the sound in a new way. And connect the movement and the sound, though that connection was nonintentional. It was a complete transformation. And I think of first seeing Helen Frankenthaler’s large canvases—the edges of her shapes and the spaces in between. After seeing her canvases I started noticing relationships between edges. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

JC: Yes, that’s what I mean. This leads to the relation of art to the enjoyment of life. Which is what must be its purpose!

JR: If not, then why?

JC: Then we’re in the wrong place. (laughter)

JR: That’s what I love about [John] Dewey’s Art as Experience. That’s really what it’s all about for him.

JC: Yes.

JR: Dewey’s notion in Art as Experience is that art, in reconnecting us with our sensory nature, revitalizes us in our connection with the world. And this is the purpose of art. He interestingly comes to this from a negative point of view—his feeling that we are dangerously susceptible to emotional fragmentation, that we tend to become alienated from our sensory selves and from the forms of the physical world around us—our natural environment. His positive assertion is that art can awaken and focus our attention, and it does this by drawing us to attend to a particular kind of order.

JC: Does he specify that in any way? What does he mean by order?

JR: Well, he means … “meaning” … he—

JC: What does that mean? (laughs)

JR: It has to do with the fact that he sees us as experiencing the world on several levels, one of which is intellectual, and that we naturally want to understand what it is we’re experiencing. The enjoyment of art for Dewey requires some form of understanding, some sort of intellectual as well as sensual content—and that has to do with pattern. He talks about how terrifying complete chaos is. I guess he believed that was actually possible as raw experience—pure randomness, total lack of order.

JC: Yes, I think he would be less frightened of it now. I think things change, don’t you? I mean even things of this order.

JR: The new thinking in the complex sciences changes the way we view these things.

JC: Yes, and I think our daily experience now. As the world becomes, as Marshall McLuhan said, smaller—it’s not much larger than the room we’re in, as he points out—then the kinds of things that go on close to you, I mean the kind of chaos that we understand (laughter) introduces us to the one we don’t understand, simply because we’re in this corner of the room … (We decide to end for the day. Tape recorder turned off.)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7

JR: I want to start today by asking you about “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” since it will appear in the issue [of Aerial magazine] with this interview. Would you explain the process of composition of the piece?

JC: Yes. The piece is made with computer facility. Both in terms of chance operations and the special computer facility of being able to establish a source of material from which the chance operations can then select material and specify where the material comes from by line and character. So that it becomes easy to work in a state of multiplicity with precision, hmm? And without having to bother choosing. So that in a vast array of material, you can pinpoint something, and you can know where you are, and then work accordingly. I can imagine programs in which you would specifically not want to work with the thing that you had pinpointed, but to work with something at a distance. I’ve never done that. I’ve tended to pinpoint and then work close by the pinpoint. In the case of the Jasper Johns text, I’ve taken quotations from him which appear in a catalog that was published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In it, there was one mistake—in grammar—which Jasper Johns immediately recognized. He was misquoted in the catalog, but fortunately I had not misquoted him. I quoted the catalog correctly, but the catalog misquoted him in … what was it?—“Art is either a complaint or appeasement,” something like that. And he said it should have been “Art is either a complaint or an appeasement.” He noticed that, he noticed that difference. It couldn’t be “a complaint or a appeasement,” you see.

JR: Are the first two pages of your piece—

JC: Those are all quotations from this catalog.

JR: And did you pick those by “brushing the text” or—

JC: No, no, I simply took all the quotations from him that there were.

JR: Oh, so this is exactly the way they were?

JC: No, they were scattered through the catalog. I put a space between each one of his remarks. I didn’t really do any eliminating or changing. And when he noticed that mistake, I was worried, and when I went back to the book I saw that I hadn’t made a mistake. Seems silly, but that kind of thing is very descriptive of him, you see.

JR: Well it’s also descriptive of poetry. If poetry isn’t about precision of language, then what is it about?

JC: Yes, yes, exactly.

JR: Then, when you moved from—

JC: Then I had all those [quotations] in the computer. And I was able to distinguish them from one another and I was also able, through chance operations, to brush them together.

JR: And what role did the mesostic strings play?

JC: The remarks themselves become … the string down the middle: A DEAD MAN TAKE A SKULL, do you see? COVER IT WITH [Section 1]—sometimes there will be letters missing.

JR: Ah, yes, in trying to read the strings I had trouble at times because of that.

JC: Sometimes there will be letters missing. And there’s nothing to be done about that. I mean, I haven’t thought of anything to do.

JR: I’ve never noticed letters missing when you use names as the strings. Have there ever been letters missing in those?

JC: Generally there haven’t, but in this case when the letters are missing it’s because there are no possibilities that follow the rules, that permit the presence of that letter. The rules are that words before a second letter in the mesostic shall not have the letter that’s coming in the middle. So between the E and the A there is no A, between the A and the D there is no D, etc. When there were no alternatives to what was stated, then it simply couldn’t exist in the mesostic.⁹

JR: And what determined the order of the strings?

JC: Chance operations, (pointing to text) So, what came up there was A DEAD MAN TAKE A SKULL COVER IT WITH PAINT RUB IT AGAINST CANVAS SKULL AGAINST CANVAS.¹⁰ That makes the first one. CANVAS is the end, what’s the next one?

JR: The next one [Section 2] starts, I DON’T—

JC: I DON’T WANT MY WORK TO BE AN EXPOSURE OF MY FEELINGS. That’s right, “I don’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.” So you see that is here.¹¹

JR: Uh huh. And the next one [Section 3] is …

JC: Oh yes, here it is, “I think it is a form of play or a form of exercise and it’s in part mental and in part visual but that’s one of the things we like about the visual arts the terms in which we’re accustomed to thinking are adulterated or abused.”¹² I could have gotten this (points to a longer section of the Johns quotations), which would have made the third one much longer than this makes it. So not knowing ahead of time, or until the chance operations were used, how many of these I should find, I worked one by one until I got to what seemed to me to be a reasonable length. Now a reasonable length is, in this case, a lecture length, because I was asked to give a lecture at the Philadelphia Museum and so I asked them what they thought was a reasonable length, and when it came to that length I stopped.

JR: Ah, so that answers the question, why thirteen sections?

JC: No reason except that. Practicality, you might say. (pointing to another part of the text) This is very beautiful. You know that he loves Wittgenstein. Or did you know that?

JR: No. I didn’t know that.

JC: That’s very much like Wittgenstein (pointing to first page of Johns’ statements) “We say one thing is not another thing. / Or sometimes we say it is. / Or we say ‘they are the same.’ ” Or maybe, as you said yesterday, instead of being stated this way, it might have been stated as a question.¹³ Then it would be a little bit different. But this is the way Jap said it. Or this is like him [Wittgenstein] too, “The condition of a presence. / The condition of being there …” In fact, I think his thinking comes out of Wittgenstein. I don’t mean to say with any precision, but that he’s been strongly … don’t you think?

JR: The moment you say that—

JC: Then you can recognize it.

JR: Yes. And I suppose that’s partly why I felt this was coming from you. Because—

JC:—Of Wittgenstein, yes. But it isn’t. It’s Jap.

JR: How long has he been reading Wittgenstein?

JC: Quite a while. I don’t know exactly. In fact the way of thinking, the interest in variety, and sometimes introducing unexpected things to do or to think, hmm? unexpected …

JR: Yes, as in Wittgenstein. I was going to ask you about this, but now I know—where he says, “Also, a large part of my work has been involved with the painting as object, as real thing in itself. And in the face of that ‘tragedy’ …” This is so wonderful, such a beautiful, lightly disjunctive leap. I was going to ask if that had happened through your arrangement.

JC: I don’t know that this is the case in Wittgenstein, but in the case of Jap, the word “tragedy,” and the touching nature of that, seems very close to him. I don’t think of tragedy as being close to Wittgenstein, or, do you?

JR: I do. Very much so.

JC: You do. Oh, you do…. And you’ve probably read those biographies—or the one that’s very good. The one about the family.¹⁴ Jap loved that book. I think there is a closeness. And you think it includes the sense of tragedy?

JR: Absolutely. Wittgenstein went through periods of great torment. There was an unhappy family history. Three of his brothers committed suicide…. Wittgenstein himself was on the verge of suicide a number of times … often struggling with despair…. There’s a sense of an enormous amount of pain in Jasper Johns’ life too.

JC: Yes, apparently. To me, and to other people who know him—’cause I know him quite well … and yet he’s a complete stranger … you know … each time—and that’s why I love to see him, or be with him—is that each time I’m with him I have no idea who he is! You know? Just no idea at all. It’s a complete, marvelous mystery. When he uses a word like “tragedy” or something on the black, dark side, or like “Take a skull” and “A dead man” and all that, you think, oh yes, that’s his voice. So you know that much about him. But then you may see him and he’ll be all cheer and smiling and happy and—but it’s just as possible that you’ll see him and he’ll be grim and … difficult. You just can’t be … you can’t be sure until you actually have the experience of being with him. Each time is fresh. It’s quite amazing. And his work, of course. I don’t know if you know my mesostic about him. He was awarded the gold medal for print-making by the Academy of Arts and Letters and I was asked to give it to him, and so I wrote a mesostic on his name saying this is not really a gold medal, something like that, this medal is not pure gold. It was to the effect that he’s created the greatest difficulties for me. And the difficulties that I cherish the most. (laughter) That’s what he is—I think—as far as I can tell.

JR: “That,” meaning the difficulty?

JC: Yes, and the unpredictability. That’s why he’s so marvelous. I just had the experience after the meeting—I asked him to show me what he was working on now.¹⁵ He showed me a calendar that he’s made. He’s made twelve pictures to represent the different months for a gallery in London that has for the last five years published calendars by artists. His [pictures] are derived from a knowledge of the face. In other words, a knowledge that there are eyes, there is a nose, there’s a mouth—but they’re completely displaced in the twelve images. So that you know it’s a face, but it’s not a face, you know? It’s very beautiful. The eyes maybe over here and the ears …

JR: He says [in “Art Is Either…”] “My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented.”

JC: Yes, it’s that. The fragmented face, yes.

JR: This whole piece [“Art Is Either …”] is fragmented, or rather has a fractal quality—of the sort described in the chapter on Mandelbrot in Chaos.¹⁶

JC: Yes, I don’t know why I didn’t read it all the way through. (pause) Well the reason I didn’t was that I get involved in too many different things. There are things that take my time. (laughs)

JR: Time! What is your—

JC: Attitude toward time?

JR: What is your sense of time in this piece? When you’re working on a piece like this—

JC: When I do it?

JR: Well, both in the process of composing, and then your sense of what it does with the reader’s or auditor’s experience of time. Is it related to your sense of time in music?

JC: Well you see what I do, Joan, is … the computer gives me the center word for the string, but it doesn’t give me the wing words. To find the wing words—to right or left of the string—I go into the source material and I go in linearly with respect to the source material, so that if the word is “just,” down the middle, then I go back to the source material which the computer sends me to and I take the words from here up to “just” or here if they still follow the rule about the letters, and I make my choices, oh, for one reason or another, but not by chance.¹⁷ I make them according to my taste. With regard to sound, for one thing. Sound is very convincing, often. (laughter) Rhyming … or not rhyming. Opposition of sound, or similarity of sound. Or, then we could go off into what you were bringing from Dewey the other day, about ideas and intellectual [content]. In other words, there are all sorts of things that happen that make us … that let us make one choice rather than another, hmm? And I do that more or less the way Schoenberg used to do this with his composing. He said one of the ways to compose is to go over what you’re doing and see if it still works as you add something else to it. Just go over it again and see how it continues, how it flows … so as to make something that flows.

JR: “Flows.” So is that saying something about time?

JC: I think it is. Or … I would rather say it’s saying something about breathing … than about time. Because we have … we have all the time in the world.

JR: Until we don’t.

JC: I mean a line could be long, or it could be short, and sometimes a short line works, and sometimes a long line is necessary. I think they vary. When I was working on the Norton lectures, I was working quite constantly over a longish period of time and I used to think as I was struggling to get something done … in the spirit of working against a deadline … I used to think, well I’m beginning to know something, and I would no sooner have that feeling and I would discover I knew nothing. And I wouldn’t know whether a line should be short or long or what should be done or whether I should do this or that, but I knew that I would find some way to continue. And mostly it was through perseverance. Through a kind of … when the problem became, as it were, insoluble, then to just stick with it until the solution appeared.

JR: Breathing. You said the flow was more about breathing than time …

JC: That’s why I use these apostrophes.

JR: Which gives another overlay of form.

JC: Yes.

JR: There’s the vertical movement down the page, there’s the horizontal line length, and then there’s that undulating breath spiral charted by the apostrophes.

JC: Yes, and you see this, now, is quite nice.

reserve i Think

is perhaps dependent on real things i’M not willing to

arts thE terms’¹⁸

to turn that word “arts” into a verb. Isn’t it? It’s quite nice. Weren’t those called spondees, when everything is accented? That’s also like a complaint, isn’t it? (laughter; reads on, 15 lines down the page) … “In painting it would amount to/constant negation of/painting.’ ” That’s very exciting, isn’t it? And I think he [Johns] would say that’s exciting, hmm? In fact—and he didn’t say that, hmm?—but it’s in the spirit of what he might be thinking … I think.

JR: There’s so much of that in this.

JC: It happens.

JR: Did you find the pauses and the stresses by reading it aloud?

JC: By reading it, by improvising. But that was partly found by writing it that way. My practice to begin with was to write it without those pauses. But to write it because I was making the pauses as I was writing it. But then of course forgetting them, and then having—when I finally decided to put them in—to then read it [aloud] and put them in. And that happened while I was up at Harvard—that I recognized the need to put them in.

JR: One thing the presence of the apostrophes does is to stabilize the meaning of the text—

JC: There’s greater ambiguity without…

JR: Yes. And I’m wondering how you feel about that.

JC: I would rather—I … I feel … ambiguous … ambivalent! (laughter) I like ambiguity more in terms of a number of readers, because that would enable different readers to find their own breathing. But if I have to be the reader, then I like better to put the things in so that I know what I’m doing. So, actually those things are for me more than they are necessarily for someone else.

JR: I don’t feel they’re a dominating set of instructions.

JC: Sometimes I use them to take something too obvious out. Let’s see if I can find … for instance, “It/became’ a conStant negation of/myself …” That probably is some kind of refrain. And so I wanted to stop the refrain, “my work to haVe some than / It became’ / my work to haVe some than / It became’ …” What is fun is when—you see, in each one of these thirteen sections there’s the string, which is [picked out] by chance, and then the total amount of the source material changes, and the source material changes for that section. So, when the material is very slight … then you get this ceaseless repetition. There’s a very funny one, you know, where it’s just repeated over and over—“the psychological … infantile and psychological.” And that was the only source material there was.¹⁹ So that’s why all the repetition. [Section 11.]

JR: I know you’ve thought a lot about the structure of DNA, relating it to the sixty-four hexagrams in the I Ching. The visual outline of the mesostics on the page reminds me of the helical structure of DNA—wing words bonding in the spiraling—

JC: Yes, it looks that way, doesn’t it?

JR: —Around the generative letters of the mesostic strings. I wondered if that was part of your—

JC: It wasn’t in my awareness, no.

JR: —The pleasure you get from using—

JC: No, I admit to liking the shape. And the variety of shapes that develop.

JR: You have spoken of the lettristic principle in your practice with mesostics. The meso-letters are formally generative. But do you think as a lettristic principle they have any content? Is there any way in which lettrism is similar to a form of numerology for you?

JC: Not in the sense of having anything to do with the content. Numerology in the case of Schoenberg did have to do with the content.

JR: Yes.

JC: And with the expressivity even. But I don’t think of that as taking place. I don’t notice it. I don’t know … of course it must have something … certain letters will have, will of course draw up the same—not the same, but related—bits of the source. So they are really, actually doing something. But some of them are more active than others. And there are some letters that are very inactive as the word game Scrabble shows. Qs are impossible, for instance. Zs, and so on. But vowels are very active. And there’s a kind of, a kind of middle ground for some letters, like P and M and B—between very little action [and a lot]. There’s some sort of slight action, some with more action than others.

JR: You speak of the letters “drawing up” certain things, and that has to do with what I’m asking. If you think of the source text as a kind of oracle, as you have called it, is there a way in which the letters of the strings are the vehicle of that oracle? What does that mean—source as oracle?

JC: I don’t know … I try in general to use the chance operations—each number that I use, I try to have it do one thing rather than two things. And I don’t know if this has anything to do with your question, but I try to, try to get an event divided into all the different things that bring it into existence and then to ask as many questions as there are aspects of an event—to bring an event into being, hmm? So that one number won’t bring two parameters into being, but only one. That is toward a kind of confidence in the uniqueness of happenings, hmm? And then taking what happens. But slightly changing it through the breathing—placing of those apostrophes—and the accents. And of course the omission or inclusion of wing words. Very strong things happen when you minimize the wing words.

JR: What do you mean?

JC: What’s an example of that? (leafs through I-VI) I had the feeling, probably mistakenly, that I was learning how to do this, finally—you see—when it was almost done. (laughs) And you can see, through the shape, there are fewer words [toward the end of Lecture VI] and in some places it will be extremely that way. That was not taking any of the wing words, or very few of them. But again, not making a judgment about “we will have no wing words.” Here [earlier in VI] there are a lot of them.

JR: When you say “not making a judgment” about it, what do you mean?

JC: Well I could have elected—even through chance operations I could have elected—to minimize or maximize wing words. And I could have known when I was starting to write this that I had to have lots of wing words. But I wasn’t working that way. I was working by improvising and trying to find out what the words wanted, how they wanted to work. I was trying to do that.

JR: So at this point you “found yourself” choosing fewer wing words?

JC: See, this is quite beautiful.

It just works beautifully! (laughs) And that kind of thing didn’t work here. In fact, the opposite kind of thing worked here,

That works too. It’s a different kind of thing. And then there’s … I think at the beginning of this—the sixth lecture—I think toward the beginning I must have had that feeling that the mesostic didn’t need any wing words at all. I was moving here whenever I could toward [fewer]—and I couldn’t there on page 379, which has lots of wing words—but here’s one that has fewer.

JR: Could you say why you think that happened, with any one of the narrower columns? Specific to what the words were?

JC: I think the closest I can come is to say that when I read it, or when I voiced it, or breathed it, that the breath worked—without wing words some times, and with them other times.

JR: Does this have anything to do with the sort of thing [Charles] Olson was involved with?

JC: I’m unfortunately not sufficiently aware of his “projective verse.” For me it has to do with my notion of … of music, I guess. Where this becomes most musical is in these sections which get repeated, because it—and now I’m saying music in the most conventional sense, because Schoenberg said that music was repetition—repetition and variation. And he said variation is also repetition with some things changed and others not. And in IV, V, and VI—and we’re now in VI—there is, through chance operations, a section which gets repeated.

JR: While you’re looking I’ll turn the tape.

JC: … This one,

and then the whole thing gets repeated, “as an apple tree …,” and then you know you’re in the world of music. (laughs) I mean if you didn’t know it to begin with, (laughter)

JR: The theme-and-variations structure is so striking in this work. Have you done any non-linguistic, musical compositions that use a theme-and-variation structure since doing these? Is your purely musical composition influenced by your language compositions?

JC: What I’ve done that relates to these and goes off, say to music, is—perhaps the best example is—using a source material, a source that I don’t understand at all as language. And it was a poem of Hesse which happened to be a favorite poem of the book publisher Siegfried Unseld. Do you know his name? Ulla Berkewicz, who is now married to him, asked me, for one of his birthdays, like fifty or sixty or something, to write—and he had asked me earlier—to write some music on one of Hesse’s poems. But I didn’t like the poem that he likes. And it was all right in German because I didn’t really understand it. But he loved it. It was his really favorite poem. So I gave it to the computer and I did this kind of material with it. Except, I put the whole poem of Hesse as the string down the middle. And I gave the string only itself as source material.²⁰ So that all that gets said in the lines is the same thing over and over and over again, hmm? In German. Not the same words, but it’s from the same poem. So, the poem loses itself by using itself, hmm?

JR: It consumes itself in the form.

JC: It consumes itself. (laughter) So I then made an arrangement through chance in which different people read. Any number could read. I put it all in stanzas and the stanzas were never say more than three or four lines. So in a single minute each reader could find one stanza and read it any time during the minute, hmm? Then in the next minute any other stanza, or two, as the case may be. And that was read to celebrate his birthday and of course he was delighted because these little fragments of his favorite poem kept cropping up, out of context, out of rhythm, everything—but making some kind of music, you see?

JR: Was it beautiful in this new form?

JC: I wasn’t there, but I’m told that it brought tears to his eyes.

JR: I can imagine that for someone not familiar with the poem, so that it would invoke neither dismay nor nostalgia, it could be a beautiful piece.

JC: It could be interesting, yes…. I’ve done that with a number of languages—Spanish, and German … and I’ve even done it with Japanese. Toru Takemitsu in particular asks me, or [that is] other people ask me to write about him, for one birthday, or for one reason, or another. And that’s how I originally used mesostics—in order to answer commissions like this with respect to birthdays and celebrations—and it enabled me to do something relevant without knowing what I was going to say, you know? And not having to fall back on clichés of sentimentality. So I have written even in Japanese by searching for characters that belong to someone’s name, and then searching for them in a text of his.

JR: And you’ve done this search yourself, not using a computer?

JC: Myself. Of course, having a kind of guide or assistant in the language. I didn’t have an assistant in the German language, nor do I when I do that with Duchamp’s work in French. I know more French so I can tell where my mistakes are. The big problem in the European languages is the presence in French and German of the sexes, whereas we don’t have that problem in English. But apparently the French and Germans are willing to give that problem up. I mean they’re not offended apparently by misuse. It doesn’t seem to disturb them anymore.

JR: Huh! That’s—

JC: Unexpected, isn’t it?

JR: Unexpected, particularly for France.

JC: But I think they see that it’s rather silly. That if barbershops are willing to have only one sex—

JR: Then so can—

JE: So can language, (laughs)

JR: To return to the question of “oracle,” what does “oracle” mean in the sentence “The source text is used as an oracle”?

JC: What does oracle mean? Well, the source text is the one who’s going to speak, so, chance operations are used to find what it says. Say for instance it says “the” or “a” or “and” (laughs)—that seems very stupid. But it’s for that reason, and mostly for that reason, that I’ve put in the program that the source text must identify at what point it said that. So that we know which “and” among all the “and”s in the source, which “and” was speaking. And that makes a difference to the wing words that are available.

JR: So you’ve programed a smart and knowledgeable oracle.

JC: Well it at least can tell from which part of the source it’s speaking.

JR: What about the traditional association—

JC: With oracle?

JR: —With oracle, which is prophecy …

JC: Yes, I hesitate to say anything because there I would go along with Duchamp, that the final speaker is the listener. And how the listener is listening we don’t know, because he or she hasn’t done it yet. So we don’t really know what the significance of anything is until it is heard. Isn’t that true? That every person responds in their own way? It must be true.

JR: It certainly moves into Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as use—the listener then enacts the meaning through its use.

JC: Yes, the work of art, as Duchamp said, is finished by the observer. I think it’s true. I, at least, believe it … to be true. And it explains so many things that happen that otherwise would be intolerable—that is to say, many books on the same subject all in disagreement, (laughter)

JR: What about your conscious choices of words like “to make’ a poem,” or “to make’ a lecture,” rather than “to write”? I’ve noticed that you tend to say “to make.” Why?

JC: Here I think I need an instance.

JR: Well, in here [I-VI], when you speak of the process of putting the lectures together, you always say, “when I made this lecture” or “when I was making …” instead of “writing.” You’ve spoken of “writing through a text” elsewhere, but here, I don’t think you use the verb “to write.”

JC: “Making” is more inclusive, isn’t it? For instance, it would include breathing with writing, hmm? It could include other things than just writing. It could include breathing … it could even include listening, so one would “make” a text partly by writing, partly by breathing, and partly by listening, don’t you think? “Making” seems to include more variety of possibilities, of kinds of action. That could even include, for instance, assistance from the computer, hmm? or calling upon the computer, or chance operations. Whereas “writing,” if I said I was “writing” something, that would leave out the fact that I was using a computer, hmm? Or one would have to say, while I was writing this, of course, I used a computer.

JR: You speak somewhere of liking the fact that Wittgenstein spoke of “doing” philosophy.

JC: Yes, I like that very much, don’t you?

JR: Yes, and it seems to me—

JC:—To fit.

JR: —That “making” in the way you use it is a similar sort of thing. (pause) Back to the question of time—I know in your musical compositions you factor into the computer program silences, and that of course has a good deal to do with the way in which the listener experiences time. Is there any equivalent to silence here [in “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” or in I-VI] in your poetic composition?

JC: Not here, but there could be if there were a performance given of this, as was given of the German poem where [each reader] did so many things in a minute. Or if, say, during a question-and-answer period, after having given this, I then passed out this lecture to everyone in the audience and I said, now you can do it all together. And you just say one—it would be hard here—one thing between two of these apostrophes, any one thing between two apostrophes. One phrase, in other words. Then it would work. And you would get a spatial time event that would be fascinating to hear. And especially when the people had all heard, or had access to, the material. This would then become the material, or the source of something else that had more to do with time than this has, hmm? What I’m trying to say is, if I make time brackets, or have time limitations—which I didn’t have when I wrote this—then time would enter.

JR: I think time can become space on a page.

JC: Yes.

JR: That silence is the white space.

JC: Yes.

JR: The gaps, and unfilled line space on either side of the centered text. That is one way I experience silence in this text. I wondered if you—

JC: No, I didn’t do that. And, because of that, I put in these apostrophes.

JR: You often say that the principle you operate by in composing is to not make choices, but to ask questions. This work has involved both, more so perhaps than in your musical compositions? In your decisions about the wing words it has been—

JC: Both choice and asking questions. Yes, I think that’s probably true. As you may have noticed, the people at Harvard were very puzzled over my saying “And then I take out the words I don’t want.” They didn’t see how a person using chance operations could afford to do that. (laughter)

JR: And remain pure of heart? Does it have something to do with the fact that this is language and not sounds, not noise? Is there a kind of—

JC: Yes, you see, if it were sounds, I would have been working in a different way. I would have been paying much more attention to time, hmm? I mean when the sound was being heard, arranging for its freedom to be in what I call time brackets—spaces of time, hmm? Here, I was paying attention to what I thought was the nature of language.

JR: Which is?

JC: Well it’s full of all sorts of things, like we said—sounds and meanings. The sound sometimes becomes so powerful that one can put meaning aside. And vice versa.

JR: Can you imagine doing something now—with your mesostic poetry—like the work of Jackson Mac Low, in which the intentional semantic dimension gets entirely suppressed in the compositional methods? In some of his work—

JC: Yes, it’s quite amazing and marvelous what he does. And I think he’s able to go on a richer exploration than I.

JR: Why do you call it richer?

JC: More differences. More kinds of differences. And you can tell that very much from the difference between my writing through Ezra Pound’s Cantos [“Writing through the Cantos,” X] and his; his one about endings and so forth. [Words nd Ends from Ez] And I still don’t understand what he did, but I admire it deeply, what he did, and what happens as he does it. The thing that gives me courage to continue in spite of the fact that he’s working is that he tends to use a more restricted source, a more limited source, a more defined source. And I tend toward a multiplicity I think. And—well, I don’t really know that I have much to say about that difference. His work … but, I love his work, and somehow I think that I’m doing something sufficiently different so that I have a right to do it.

JR: Last night Jackson was showing me a procedure in which he uses language from some of his intuitively written poetry as source text for new poems subject to chance operations. He’s running the source poems through two consecutive computer programs—DIASTEXT and TRAVESTY.

JC: It’s the nature of the program …

JR: It’s the nature of the program to rearrange the language and make selections.

JC: And it’s with respect to something he’s already written, hmm?

JR: Yes. Once it goes into the programs, he gives up choice except to select out clumps of lines pretty much, if not entirely, intact. In other words he notices and separates out poems in the continuous readout that the second program gives him. Last night as I was looking over his shoulder he said, Ah, there’s a short one! He took out five successive lines and used the first two words of the first line as the title, so he had that poem. The kind and degree of choosing in this particular procedure²¹ seems very different from the kinds of choices you’re making now in your mesostics. This particular procedure, as I understand it, appears to have no semantic relation to the source text.

JC: “No semantic” means the connections of one are different from the connections of the other?

JR: Yes, there’s no attempt to “be true to” the spirit or the meaning of the source text in the way you are trying to be. It strikes me as very interesting that you are exploring similar territory and yet—

JC: Working differently. I think we’re very fortunate to be living in a period when poetry is more interesting, more useful than it has been. I’m astonished at the number of things I receive in the mail that are actually readable, (laughter) And enjoyable. There’s a little magazine—have you run into it?—called Lynx. It comes from the Northwest and it’s a journal of renga. And, there’s another field where the kind of poetry has been, I would say, inferior [as] practiced in the United States. That is, haiku and renga and things like that have been taken over by the sort of artsy and craftsy people, hmm? It’s a very difficult thing to do. I suspect that in the use of those [Japanese] characters there’s more ambiguity than there is in the use of English words. Apparently you can take a few characters of Japanese, or Chinese, and not know for sure what’s being said.

JR: I learned that from you in the introduction to Themes & Variations, where you say there isn’t the same mono-directional syntactic order in Japanese.

JC: Right. And we need to change our language if we’re going to have that experience.

JR: I agree that this is an exciting time for poetry, and particularly in this country.

JC: Yes, you can actually read what you find.

JR: And I think a lot of what is good and readable is related to your work.

JC: Don’t you think the idea of working with language in an exploratory way is in the air? And many, many people are doing it, and, as you said, in different ways. That’s what’s so refreshing about it. It’s not as though it were a tic on the part of one person.

JR: I see links with the turn-of-the-century Vienna that spawned Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s fascination with language, and Karl Kraus too, who was doing analyses of public uses of language. It was a time when public usage had become frighteningly detached from a sense of reality—was no longer helpful in trying to figure out what to think and how to live in the world situation that was developing—very much in the way our language appeared, from Vietnam on, to become increasingly detached and skewed in the public arena. There seems to be some sort of dialectic between public use of language and what poets begin to feel they need to do—those who feel the need to explore the medium of language itself…. Poets often feel that audiences are much more resistant to experimentation with language than they are to experimentation with any other medium. Part of that seems to have to do with an almost biological conservatism about language—because of the sense that you have to use it in practical ways, for survival.

JC: To make sense.

JR: To make sense. I wonder how you feel about that?

JC: I think this actually benefits poetry now, that conservatism. Because it enriches the field in which one can work. You don’t have to search for things to do. You can do so many different things … to bring about change. It’s because of the fixity of convention, that the unfixity of experimentation is increased, (laughs) It’s … it’s a rather silly idea to express, but it makes the field of possibility greater.

JR: Do you have a sense that the medium [language] itself is somehow resistant in any way? Does that ever feel like a limitation to you?

JC: Not now. It probably did to begin with. It’s actually through Jackson’s work that I was stimulated to do as I’m doing. And Clark Coolidge. Both of them.

JR: You were in touch with their work around the same time?

JC: Yes, I gave a class in experimental music composition at the New School for Social Research, and Jackson was in the class. The major activity of the class was the performance of the work of the students, and Jackson always had done something, so we heard a great deal of his work.

JR: And how did you come across Clark Coolidge?

JC: He made a magazine—I don’t now remember the name of it—I think when he was still at Brown University as a student, or maybe he was a teacher or a graduate student.²² But he began a magazine up there and that was how I began “Diary: How to Improve the World”—it was for him. And it tells that in A Year from Monday and says what the name of the magazine was [Joglars, Providence, R.I., V. 1, No. 3]. He wasn’t yet known as the poet he is now. And you see what I did for him was not in any sense what I’m doing now, but it did go into another field than I’d been in. So when he saw what I had done, he said it was a kind of a breakthrough. And all it was of course was that I was fragmenting the text and then writing it, not linearly, but according to how many numbers of words I needed to write. I would frequently write near the beginning, and then near the end, and then in the middle, and so on until I got the whole thing filled up. That was a different way of writing from this. This is back to a kind of—you could say it’s a chance-controlled linearity. But, coming from different parts of the source text, it has a curious kind of globality which is not linear. It’s like, you said this a moment ago too, it seems to be this and that—to combine different kinds of qualities.

JR: Well it seems to have multiple vectors.

JC: Uh huh. One thing I like too is that from poem to poem there will be, because of the difference and sameness of the source texts, there get to be resonances here and there of different things in different lights of different things. But that, Joan, is in terms of what we call content, or meaning, and where I would say that it’s different for every person reading it who recognizes how it hits them. And the same thing will hit two different people differently.

JR: Do you feel that absolutely? If someone attends closely to this text—

JC: That two people will feel differently?

JR: —And someone else doesn’t attend closely, could one “get it wrong”?

JC: No, because it isn’t right to begin with. (laughter)

JR: What do you mean by that?

JC: Well, I probably am not being honest. Because, relying on the breathing would make me want it to be one way rather than another. And there is something of that in it. But the fact that there’s no ordinary syntax in it makes it so that someone reading that breath could feel it differently. And then the question is, is the one breath—the one I had—right, and someone else’s breath wrong? I don’t think so. (pause) It’s hard to say. Or to say honestly.

JR: To say honestly …

JC: With certainty. With certainty.

JR: Critics and educators are concerned about this question: is there a totally open field of response to a text, or does the nature of the text delimit an “appropriate” range of response? Is it that whatever you feel at the moment, whatever comes to mind when you are experiencing a text is the meaning of that text? Or do the particularities of form and content have some kind of stabilizing effect on meaning? So that it is possible to get it wrong in a way that it might not be possible to get a piece of music wrong—just because a text has a cognitive component. You might misunderstand something.

JC: Because of the nature of language.

JR: Yes.

JC: (long pause) I, I’m inclined to think, oh, that each way of hearing it is right. I’m inclined that way. I can’t see anything wrong in each way’s being right. (laughter)

JR: Do you have a sense of being a realist as an artist? Actually, what I have written here [in preliminary notes] is, “Will you say something about your complex realism’?” Does that term sound right to you?

JC: Yes. Yes, I think so. One of the first persons to draw this kind of feeling to our attention, or my attention, was Mondrian. He spoke about reality. How did he say it, do you know? He wrote a number of very interesting texts about his work, I mean his late work. And he was objecting to representational art as being … realistic work as being … too abstract. He said that representational work was too abstract. That he required realistic painting like his own. (laughter) Yes, it goes that way. It’s very impressive. And when you agree with him it’s very mind-opening. Because you do see that representational painting, is, as Jasper says, a tragedy (laughter) and that he much prefers the real thing—the real fork. And what Mondrian wanted to paint was really what he was painting, hmm?—that couldn’t be mistaken for something else.

JR: You spoke in the seminars [accompanying the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and transcribed in I-VI] of science as a corroboration of your work.

JC: I was thinking of this book that I haven’t read (laughter)—the “chaos” book, you know. It’s in the air. We know enough that the book exists. And we think of that as being a kind of corroboration. It makes using chance operations seem not foolish, hmm?

JR: Yes. For me it was corroboration of an aesthetic of complex realism. Does the term “strange attractor” [from chaos theory] mean enough to you for you to have an opinion on whether the working, composing mind is in some sense a strange attractor?

JC: Oh tell me a little bit about that.

JR: Well, this is how I’m trying to understand it, one question with chaotic patterns is why or how they manage to have elements of both randomness and order. There’s pattern there but not predictability in the sort of system that is subject to the “butterfly effect.” So, generated by a set of nonlinear equations and a computer time-development, you might get a pattern that you can see is a bounded system, but the location of any given point within that system as it develops is unpredictable. The organizing principle in a nonlinear pattern like that has been called a strange attractor. Since the human mind is itself a complex system whose neural networks are characterized by open-ended unpredictability (the normal human brain produces irregular neural impulses, which some scientists feel is what accounts for our ability to work in an open-ended way on long-term, complex problems), I wonder whether in its organizing of experience within certain kinds of complex aesthetic procedures, the artist is allowing the mind to behave as a strange attractor.

JC: Well, that of course leads toward habit, doesn’t it?

JR: Well, it would lead away from habit if it were truly a strange attractor.

JC: So this would change distinctly from one thing to another?

JR: Yes, it would lead to constant change, though within a bounded system. Within an overall recognizable pattern there is constant change in all the details, which is why a complex system like weather, for instance, has large recurrent patterns but becomes less and less predictable as you try to pinpoint it locally.

JC: I’m led to think of a discussion I had with Pat Colville. She teaches painting at Cooper Union. And she was down in North Carolina when I was making edible paper.²³ We got to talking in one circumstance or another about the work of Mark Tobey, which is characterized by a great deal of variety from one painting to another. So much so that he used to refer to himself as America’s Picasso. He went in so many different directions, as Picasso did. As we got to talking, we went from the white writing of Tobey which is not always pure, is very rarely pure—I had one, I think I told you, which had no representation, or no abstract character, as Mondrian might say (laughter)—to the work of Robert Ryman. He’s devoted his life to white painting. It’s very beautiful. I was unfamiliar with his work until last year when I, late this spring—maybe April—I saw a factory in Schaffhausen near Zürich where the top floor was full of a retrospective show of Robert Ryman’s work. It’s all white. His exploration of white has continued over his entire life and of course is very extensive. He puts white on a variety of different materials. So he’s had an experimental relation to white in the world of painting that exceeds that of Tobey who earlier did it, you see, but didn’t do it, so to speak, faithfully. He didn’t do only that. He did more, different kinds of things. So we were wondering, had Tobey not been so Picassoid (laughter), would he have been a better artist? Sounds silly, a proposition like that. If he hadn’t been who he was, would it have been better for us in terms of white painting? A perfectly silly thing, but as we were thinking along those stupid lines we realized that the idea came to him, so to speak, in the same way that it came to Robert Ryman—out of the air, hmm? He did—because of the time, perhaps, that it came to him, in relation to all the other things that came to him—he did it as … he did what he did. And we’re grateful. It’s a question then of forgoing the thought that it would have been better for us had he done more than he did.

JR: So, interestingly, that came to your mind after my talking about the mind as a strange attractor … and weather systems …

JC: And I really couldn’t tell whether the strange attractor was subjective or was “in the air.” And I don’t know whether you mean it to be one place or the other.

JR: Well that’s an interesting question.

JC: Yes, we don’t really know where it is, do we? Because the mind in Buddhist terms is part of the air, so to speak. Which is Mind with a big M, hmm? So the little—this mind and that mind—are Mind, and there’s a communion, hmm? In other words, there can be a flow. In fact there must be one, otherwise we can’t explain the fact that several people invent the same thing at the same time independently—or that these two artists deal with white—satisfactorily—over a shorter or a longer period of time, earlier or later.

JR: So in a way that would be like those two minds having similar local weather within a larger pattern. That’s interesting, because I was—I think you picked up on it—I was thinking more in terms of the mind creating the weather patterns rather than being subject to them.

JC: It could go in one direction or the other.

JR: In this respect I’m thinking about Jackson Mac Low, and connections between your work, along with the earlier question of time. Jackson talks about five temporal arts—music, dance, poetry, film, and video.

JC: That’s very good.

JR: That interested me because, though I think of poetry as involving time more than any other form of writing, I have been approaching it lately graphically too—as a spatial art.

JC: With Apollinaire it could go in the other direction. It can be in both. But this is close to Indian thinking. I forget what they call it, but there’s a term for the temporal arts. Of course they weren’t thinking about video. But they certainly thought of music and dancing—those are the two that make it real, don’t you think? And poetry.

JR: Yes, and this complex realism seems so far from the contemporary fascination with various forms of irony. (pause) Has irony as a vehicle of change, in the Kierkegaardian sense—as a mode that can move us from aesthetic to ethical to religious perspectives—has that played any part in your thinking or your work? (Pause.)