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A John Cage Reader .

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oui1y 54

Spring 1982

Editor

Reginald Gibbons

Coeditors, Cage Reader

Jonathan Brent, Peter Gena

Associate Editor

Bob Perlongo

Managing Editor

Molly McQuade

Assistant Editors

Susan Hahn, Fred Shafer

Design Director

Gini Kondziolka

Editorial

Joe LaRusso, Denise Smith, Carol Summerfield, Lenore Zelony

Assistants

Advisory Editors

Contributing Editors

Elliott Anderson, Charles Newman Michael Anania, Gerald Graff, David Hayman, Bill Henderson

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART, WRITING, AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FAll, WINTER, AND SPRING AT NORlHWESTERN UNI· VERSITY, EVANSlON, IWNOIS 60201. ISSN:0041·3097.

Subscription rates: one year $14.00; two years $25.00; three years $35.00. Foreign subscripttons $1.00 per year additional. Life subscription $100.00. USA or foreign.

Single copies usually $5.95. Baclc: issue prices on request. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQparterly. 1735 Benson Avenue. North­ University. Evanston. Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions of fiction. poetry. and literary essays. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped. self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for western

publication become the properry of TriQparterly. unless otherwise indicated.

Copyright (;11982 by TriQparterly. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers. not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America.

This publication is made possible in part by grants from the lllinois Arts Council. a state agency, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. and the National

Endowment for the Arts. Publication of the John Cage Reader was made possible in large part by a generous grant from the Woods Charitable Fund.

National distributor to retail trade: B. Deboer, 113 E. Central Street-Rear. Nutley.

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Table of Contents Editorial

3

Seven questions about poetry for Eugenio Montale (1962) Translated by Jonathan Galassi

7

The far bank (story)

12

Ray Reno Sacrifice (story)

34

Grace Mary Garry

"The Murder of Laius" from Sophocles' Oedipus the King Translated by Robert Fagles Five poems Teresa Cader

52

60

A John Cage Reader in celebration of his 70th birthday pages 68-232

MacIntyre, the captain and the saints (poem, with preface and note) Jay Wright

233

Smart men (story)

250

Rush Rankin

Three poems Michael Collier

264

Angel (story)

269

Arturo Vivante

Cover Art

Reviews

280

Contributors

287

Seventeen Drawings by Thoreau, 1978, artist's proof #6

John Cage (Photograph by Colin C. McRae)

2

Editorial

We debate the future of fiction and poetry a great deal in literary magazines, in classrooms and bars, at meetings like the American Writers' Congress. If

what worries us is the continuation of imaginative writing, then it seems obvious that there will always be those who write, even if it is only for a few hours a week between household chores and child-raising responsibilities, or on scraps of cigarette paper in prison cells. But if we mean, as most of the debaters do, that it is not clear how this work will survive and who will read it, then there are two related questions.

Do we have doubts because much poetry and fiction seems undistin­ guished? Or is it because the reading audience also fails to distinguish itself and does not often honor the work that is most substantial, that speaks to us with the greatest emotional power, quickest sense of the complexity of life, and beauty?

We can reassure ourselves there will always be some readers who cherish imaginative accomplishment, even if they are to be found only among the ranks of fellow writers. But we must also see, each day, that writers need a larger audience, and that the larger audience needs imaginative accomplish­ ments to feed on. Why then is the imagination so often crowded out of our attention?

Loves and births; crimes and outrages; terrors and inhuman force wielded

against both innocent and guilty; the triumphs against such force; the pain of divided allegiances in families, courtrooms, nations; any profundity of under­ standing of our everyday actions: buying a toy, stealing a car, leaving home, loving or hating or hurting or hearing music or frying eggs-all of this should be the province of imaginative endeavor, which is simply a part of our way of understanding how we are formed as persons, and what sense our actions may have, what effect they produce on ourselves and on others. But all this is precisely what seems so complicated and almost removed from us at times by the drive in our culture to make all of us into creatures whose lives are defined by quantities and ruled by distant and incomprehensible sources of power. We are left little time by jobs and the media for reflection; and little energy to spare for thinking, even for feeling. As readers most of us are often tired and as undistinguished as the work we read, and this is so partly because of the demands clamoring around us.

3

I don't mean only the demands of family and work, that must be honored and if we are lucky can be lovingly answered. But so many impersonal, deceitful and alien voices cajole, browbeat, lie, tease, politick, lobby, coax, threaten and flirt around us, at us, with us, that we often find it difficult to give concentrated attention to a story, a drawing or a photograph, a poem, a piece of music. And the newer the imaginative work is, the more it has its own roots in these very same clamoring voices that we want to shut off, and many would rather read Hardy or Keats or listen to Mozart or Brahms (though in their own day they, too, had to fight for the attention of their contemporaries). And, after all, shouldn't we all be glad that anyone wants to read Hardy or listen to Mozart?

What do writers think of this state of affairs? Just "get it into print," a novelist friend told me, when I asked him what was most important to him.

"However you can," he said. "I've been lucky, my publishers have always published my work when it was ready, even if the editions were very small."

But is this enough, mere preservation for anonymous future readers?

In his Nobel lecture, Czeslaw Milosz spoke of a crisis of memory, a kind of cultural amnesia that cheapens our ability to act responsibly by keeping from us the knowledge of what has gone before; thus our responses as readers are cheapened as well. For without a sense of the history of men and their works, we are prey to both political and artistic manipulation. Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting presents us with a parable of the same crisis, in which an abolished party member, removed by political surgery from Czech history, can be inferred only from the presence of his hat on another man's head in an official photograph. If knowledge of the past is what feeds a writer's sense of his own work, helping him to see what must be done now, out of what has been done before (whether he is concerned with the rhythms in a single line of a poem or the canvas against which he wants to place figures in a war), then a knowledge of the history of imaginative accomplishment gives a reader a place to stand in drawing sustenance from imaginative works, in judging them. We become laughable when our daily lives declare that we don't think there is much at all in the accumulated artistic accomplishment of man that could

please us or instruct us. Remembering is a task, a responsibil­ ity, as much as it is a pleasure; for many it just takes too much time and trouble.

Our responsibility as readers is clear: diligent attention to new writing, as much of it as we can get hold of, and generous help, when we can give it, and however, to the best work we can find. And there is enormous pleasure in reading good new work, and that is what sustains good readers through the lifelong and wearisome task of keeping up, a task that is the literary editor's

consuming responsibility.

"Perhaps the greatest misfortune for a man of letters is not in being the object of his brethren's jealousy, or the victim of conspiracies, or held in contempt by the mighty of this 'world; but in being judged by idiots." That caution is not recent, but came from Voltaire, and the warning is as clear now

then, to an editor, to dispose of biases and peeves as much as possible, to read with eyes and ears open, with expectations that are high but not as

4

categorical. After only a few months as editor of TriQuarterly, I have been chastened already by the way practical realities, too-schedules and money and correspondence with writers, some of them still my friends-erode principles and plans. I have asked myself not only what 1 hope to publish in TriQuarterly, but also what responsibility it is that TriQuarterly or any small literary magazine should bear, in this welter of voices, vices, arguments and despairing cries in which the good works provide a miraculous exhilaration.

If TriQuarterly has a recognizable identity, it arises out of its energy and its seems to me. Its readers respect its devotion to short fiction (a devotion that will remain unchanged), its seriousness (and sometimes its frivolousness), its heft, its handsomeness, and what one would have to call its tone of voice-by turns straightforward, edgy, flashy, testing, theoretical, encyclopedic, heavy, campy, once in a while avant-gardish, scholarly, eso­ teric. The magazine has been lucky to have the support of Northwestern University, without which it might not have survived (the twentieth anni­ versary is coming soon). It has won prizes for what it has published and for the way it has presented itself. Its special issues have often been reprinted as hardback books by other publishers. This special and recognizable identity will continue to draw readers, I hope, and more and more writers will send to TriQuarterly the best work they have to offer, as many have done in the past.

The most important work, the best, cannot be categorized or described in advance by anyone. But 1 think it will often look to the world outside the writer, to the culture swirling around his or her solitary labor. Narrow, self, regarding, clever work always has some appeal to the small reader in us, that imp of a reader who doesn't wish to be led out of himself toward others, toward the world, or even toward deeper pleasure or understanding. But there is a larger reader in us, too, who responds to work that is free of self, indulgence; that goes beyond a trivial occasion; that will break, when it needs to, all formal expectations; that has emotional and even philosophical weight; that binds us to others rather than asserting that our solitariness is an interesting state of mind. Or, when we must face our essential solitariness, as the writer does when he or she is writing, then such work explores that state with passion as well as anger, with vision as well as accomplishment and cleverness. The material of such work is anywhere and everywhere, in bed, rooms and newscasts and at racetracks and wakes, and in imaginative flights beyond what is familiar. A fundamental attitude of wonder and delight in seeing what is there-that's the mark that Conrad and Welty and Milosz and many others have found in good writing. It is wonder I find put down this way in a story of William Goyen, "Old Wildwood": "There was so much more to it all, to the life of men and women, than he had known before he came to Galveston just to fish with his grandfather, so much in just a man barefooted on a rock and drinking whiskey in the sun, silent and dangerous and kin to him." And in this sentence, from Goyen's "The White Rooster": "He had a face which, although mischievous lines were scratched upon it and gave it a kind of devilish look, showed that somewhere there was abundant untouched kindness in him, a life which his life had never been able to use."

It is much easier to illustrate such vague and eclectic likes and dislikes than

range, it

5

to describe them. In this issue, apart from the celebration of

John Cage, which fitting continuation of TriQuarterl,'s devotion both to other artistic disciplines and to innovative artistic endeavors, there is Ray Reno's epistolary story, which sets a dramatist's troubles, personal and artistic, against the fall of 1939; Grace Mary Garry's portrayal of adolescent sexual wonder and is

a

alarm in the midst of Baptist and Catholic contradictions; Teresa Cadet's personal elegies for public tragedies in the death camps and present-day Poland; and Rush Rankin's tale of romance in our casual land of fecklessness and idiosyncrasy. I think Michael Collier's intimate poems, the 1962 inter­ view with Eugenio Montale, and Robert Fagles' translation of a passage from Sophocles offer counterweights of personal loss, the poetic vocation, and the mythic revelations of tragedy, to Jay Wright's remarkable dramatic poem in several voices, a poem that raises issues of race, history, and religious vision.

I hope to find more work that explores the depth of feeling linking domestic horrors with social ones, as Pamela Hadas does in a long poem that will appear in the fall 1982 issue; more work that explicitly addresses the last American war; more work from abroad; more work that considers the shaping of the American artist, like a brief memoir by Michael Harper that will also appear in the fall 1982 issue; more work that can give a shape to the delight in our lives, as well. A good story well-told will always have a place in TriQuarterl,; so will the sort of story that represents a formal conquest, innovative or traditional, of seemingly intractable materials and feelings. The range of poems will also, I hope, be wide.

TriQuarterl,'s reviews will mostly be brief, and will mostly commend to our readers important fiction and poetry that in the din of the crowd is in danger of remaining unheard. There will be more graphic work, more special issues, and more works of unusual nature that have fewer places to roost than the short poem and the short story-novellas, long poems, dramatic forms, whatever.

In short, TriQuarterl, will look for a special sort of engagement arising out of the largest view of the individual life (which is the irreducible material of fiction and poetry) and out of that craftsmanlike and loving awareness of predecessors that both instructs and challenges good writers. Out of that engagement, that intimacy, that remembering, comes the work that is most innovative, that binds us fiercely to others, that lays down a path for future rememberers to trace. These are my preoccupations and hopes as editor. My greatest hope is that TriQuarterl,'s readers will return to the magazine again and again, to see what new voice has for a moment entered the forum, asking to be heard.-Reginald Gibbons

6

Seven questions about poetry

for Eugenio Montale (1962) Translated by Jonathan Galassi

1. There has been talk, even recently, of a "crisis in the novel." Can one speak of an analogous "crisis in poetry"? And if so, in what sense?

Since poetry-like the novel, though on a reduced scale-is becorn­ ing an industrial product, it is clear that it too is subject to the oscilla­ tions caused by supply and demand, i.e., by the marketplace. Poetry is therefore in crisis no more or less than anything else: a product, if it is

kept current, even by becoming worse, loses its patronage.

But if we wish to consider poetry as a spiritual activity, then it is evident that all great poetry arises from a personal crisis of which the

not

poet may not even be aware. But more than a crisis (the term is suspect nowadays) I would speak of a discontent, of an inner emptiness which

the achieved expression temporarily fills. This, however, is the terri, tory out of which every great work of art is born. Your question is marred by the hypothesis that the term poetry must refer to a par, ticular literary genre, which is also true, but not absolutely so. One can imagine a great poetic period that produced nothing of what we ordinarily understand as poetry.

2. The poetry of the postwar period has been characterized by an ideo log, ical "reaction" to henneticism, among other things; what is the status today of this "reaction to henneticism"? And what about henneticism?

I know very little about hermeticism. The term arose in Italy, but did not catch on elsewhere. In Italy it was used in a sense that was not always negative: there was talk of a decadent experimentalism that also included so-called hermeticism, and which was supposed to have "deprovincialized" our literature. At present, if I am not mistaken, the negative use of the term is prevalent; although today the more serious critics are prone to exclude from the field the very poets who are supposed to have given rise to hermeticism. The "herrnetics" are supposedly only their imitators and followers. But this is so with any

7

school in Italy. Those who come first have certain advantages over those who follow. The opposite can also occur, though rarely: he who follows can gather the fruits of others' experiments that have been left hanging in mid-air. For the moment, this cannot be said of the so­ called neo-hermetics, And yet it should be noted how many of the young poets, who according to you are supposed to represent "an ideological reaction to hermeticism," are more obscure than their predecessors and are consequently deprived of a true means of com­ munication. Today there are no poets who communicate in the sense that they are accessible to that abstraction known as "the people"; not even the dialect poets do so. In fact, the return to dialect is one of the surest signs of the "decadent" spirit (still assuming that decadence and hermeticism are labels to be taken seriously).

But then we are not speaking of the call "to an active intellectual awareness of the directions, etc., etc." Who is issuing the invitation?

And to whom? Try to name some names and you'll see that it will be hard to keep from laughing. There has never been a period (in the production of so-called poetry) richer in active awareness in every

direction, especially in Italy.

Ideological engagement is not a necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of a poetically vital work; nor is it, in itself, a negative condition. Every true poet has been engage in his own way and has not waited for it to be pointed out to him by barely identifiable regulators and guides of production. Naturally, professional poets have often paid tribute to their protectors, princes, and patrons; it is probable that those who are salaried as "poets" in Russia today must run on a prescribed track. These are extreme cases; but the history of poetry is also the history of great, unfettered works. Poetry, whether or not it is engage in the sense demanded by the moment, always finds its re­ sponse. The error lies in believing that the response must be lightning­ quick, immediate. There is a place in the world for Holderlin and a place for Brecht. Another error is to believe that the response is measured statistically. Those with the most readers are the most valuable, respond best to the demand of the marketplace. Thus we come back to poetry understood as a commodity to be sold.

3. Many claim that the task of contemporary poetry is to develop the new "content" and themes that our time suggests, which also inroZve new

problems of communication. Poetry is being called to an active intellectual awareness of the directions in which history moves and is even being assigned a practical purpose of classification and animation, as has occurred in other eras, even long ago. What do :YOU think of this?

(See answer to question 2).

8

4. Any poetry, or rather any concrete poetry, postulates, explicitly and implicitly, a problem of language, which inoolves a need for innovations and at the same time for a particular relationship with tradition, which is the point from which every poet "innovates." What do you think of the linguistic or stylistic experiments of recent poetry? What do you think of neo-expeti­ mentalism? Of the tendency of some currents to reabsorb attitudes and forms of the so-called European or American "aoara-gasde"] What do you think of dialect in recent poetry?

There are no problems of language, experiments, transplants, or derivations from other literatures that have a normative value. Every poet creates the instrument he feels is necessary for himself. What we can see, in any case, is that today in all the arts, technique seems to be understood in the materialistic sense: the collage, the paint in a tube, the noise of the lowered shop shutter, the multilinguistic "cocktail" of words mixed in a shaker "before serving" substitute for the "medi­ ated" expression proper to art. Let's be honest: at this point art is no longer interesting, nor is it in demand anymore. Its failing is that it cannot be produced serially and planned. This does not mean there is no one who practices the profession of artist. The number of artists increases, in fact, in inverse proportion to the decrease in real and true artistic feeling. These supernumerary artists learn and apply the for' mulae: they can be guided, directed, and divided into "currents." If they did not exist, intellectual unemployment would create very seri­ ous problems. In fact, with their associates, patrons, and relatives, they make up a totality of economic interests of great significance.

5. Can the irrational moment in poetry, any poetry, be defined? And if so, how can one differentiate the "irrational" in an "engage" poet from the irrational in a "pure" poet? Does the notion of irrationality coincide with the notion of decadence to the point of a total identification, or is there an irrationality that is necessary, not decadent, i.e., not mythicized as the one possible mode of consciousness?

Does something similar happen in poetry, too? Certainly, though to a much lesser extent, for poetry by its very nature circulates much more slowly. Yet there are beginning to be a considerable number of young poets who have read poets of all times and all kinds and believe they can avail themselves of a very extensive keyboard and try to play it in all directions. Here too they fall into the error of believing that the instrument (the means) is the poetry. I pass over other errors inherent in the fast pace of our time. He who believes he is endowed in terms of poetic technique looks for speedy confirmation, i.e., success, whether within the circle of a small group or in a small review. If the instant consensus of the judges (who write poems themselves) is not forth,

9

coming, the poet is prepared to change his manner and style; he believes in good faith that he is searching for himself, but in actuality he is only looking for the part that is most acceptable to others, the salable.

There is a kind of charlatanism, a way of leading people on, which up until a few years ago seemed to be limited to the visual arts and to music: today it has also entered the field of letters and even that very restricted area of literary production which you understand as poetry.

Poetry is becoming an art at the very time when art is being challenged and rejected in favor of other human products: the happening, the gesture, the figure, the easily-used cliche. There are no remedies: if the world changed, poetry would change, too; but poetry (or whatever is left of it) cannot change the world. Nor can men of action change it, today; any regime, any social organization whatsoever must come to terms with the absolutely new conditions under which human life is being lived: conditions that are hardly favorable to artistic creation, but endlessly open to every sort of substitute. In this sense a great transformation is under way; and the intellectuals (many of whom are engages) are ready to accept it with enthusiasm. And I don't deny that they must accept it: I only deny that they should claim to be free men. most

6. Poetry always seems to be determined by its special contact with prose.

What do you think of the relationship between contemporary poetry and contemporary prose, both fiction and nonfiction?

Someone once defined poetry as a dream dreamt in the presence of reason.

It was true then, and it is still true today, after Blake, Mallarme, and the Rilke of The Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies. There will be a difference between the poet who eliminates some links in a chain of metaphors and the poet who wants to say but there will everything, explain everything; always be the need for reason in these various activities. The use and abuse of reason is present even in those surrealists who claim to immerse themselves in the "gulf stream" of the subconscious.

But here, too, I am not in favor of restricting poetry to a certain type of writing in verse or pseudo-verse. I don't think Cervantes or Gogol were more rational than Baudelaire; nor do I think that one can distinguish between decadent rationalism and rationalism of another sort in the realm of poetry. One can, however, distinguish between the reason of science and the reason of art: the mechanism may be the same but the intention is different.

The boundaries between prose and verse have been brought much closer: today verse is often an optical illusion. To a certain degree it has always been so; an error in typesetting can ruin a poem; 10

Ungaretti's Fiumi [Rivers] are incomprehensible without the vertical dripping of their syllables. A large part of modern poetry can only be listened to by those who have seen it.

Verse is always born out of prose and tends to return to it (cf. the frequent "drops in tone" of poets). It is a question of tone and of expressive concentration. The art of the word has many gradations of nuance, many musical

possibilities, and does not exhaust them all in

period of history. Certain ages have shown themselves to be more favorable to verse, others to prose. When the necessity for spoken discourse (which can be true poetry) is prevalent, we have a period of

one

prose; when writers appear who are lifted to an intense musical concentration, poetry carries the day. I speak of periods that can be

brief; and of recent periods. In other eras even a long rational discourse in strictly observed metrical verse was possible (e.g., The Divine Comedy); but prose hardly existed then. Today the poem-as­ summa, the poem-as-machine, is no longer possible in verse-and perhaps no more so in prose. Neither the Cantos nor Ulysses can repeat the miracle of Dante.

very

7. Poetry, too, constitutes a social "value," whatever place one wishes to assign it in the hierarchy of values of our time. How does poetry in particular fit in with the other forms of expression in art today? What do you think of the place of poetry in our society?

Whatever I have said demonstrates that poetry (in the sense you indicate) already "fits in" very well, too well in fact, with the arts of today. And what about the situation of the poet in contemporary society? In general it is not a happy situation: some are dying of hunger, some live less badly by doing other work, some go into exile, and some disappear without leaving a trace. Where did Babel and Mandelstam go? Or Blok and Mayakovsky, if not to kill themselves?

And where did Dino Campana go but to the insane asylum? (I limit myself to the moderns: the list could be much longer.)

But these are illustrious examples in any event: they are the glory of modern poetry. Many others make understandable the discredit into which the modern poetic animal has fallen. And it is not only society's fault: to a large extent it is the fault of the poets.

(This interview was originally published in Nuavi Argomenti.)

11

The far bank Ray Reno

Rodney, Indiana April 11, 1939 Dear Tony, You're right about the second act. It should pick up the note struck

by Mrs. Danlever at the end of act one. I've redone the opening and

you'll get new dialogue as soon as it comes back from the typist.

The snows are gone, and there's a green haze on the yard. Now that spring's here I'm sure I'll start feeling better. Which will be a relief to my long-suffering mother. Poor woman-she couldn't have supposed that a week's visit in January would stretch out to the edge of doom.

Assuming that all goes well, I'll be in New York no later than mid, May. Give my best to Marcia.

Phil

Rodney, Indiana April 18, 1939 Dear Jack,

Thanks for your kind inquiry about my health. With the balmy weather we're having, I'm improving rapidly. Plagued with a slight cough and an odd little hearing problem, but otherwise returning to fettle. I had energy enough to completely redo the opening of act two.

Sent Tony the material a day or so ago.

Of course I think you'd be a fine Russell. But Tony's the director and I leave the casting to him. I'm only a scribbler and know nothing about the theater.

Still, you have my best wishes.

Warm regards,

Phil 12

Rodney, Indiana April 23, 1939 Dear Claire,

What a fine poem "Two Doors" is! I thought so when you wrote it and am even more impressed seeing it in print. We don't get literary journals in Rodney-The Police Gazette, yes, G,8 and His Battle Aces, yes-but The Niagara Review, no. However, Tony was kind enough to send me a copy a few days back.

I must confess, though, that it cost me a pang to read it again. I thought of the night you woke me up and read it to me.

Anyway, congratulations. If it doesn't cop some sort of prize, there's no taste left in America.

Love, Phil

Rodney, Indiana April 26, 1939 Dear Tony,

Glad you like the new dialogue. So far as I'm concerned, the play's done. It's in your hands now.

Yet one thing gives me pause. I know I wrote Jack that I thought he could handle Russell, but are you sure you want him in the role? To my mind he relies rather too much on talent and too little on percep­ tion. The decision, of course, is yours. Only, if you will, brood on it a bit.

Rain, rain, rain the last three or four days, and, naturally, my cough kicks up, like myoid Plymouth backfiring.

Thanks for sending me Claire's poem-how does she manage so much grace with so much strength? Such a gifted girl I married! And how I miss her.

Yours, Phil

Rodney, Indiana April 29, 1939 Dear Bill,

Your letter disturbed me. Tony's not said a word about the ending.

Are you sure his feelings are as strong as your letter suggested?

Damn this cough and this intermittent fever-like a bad conscience

visiting me at its convenience, not mine. Otherwise I'd be in New York

right now.

Do me a favor and sound Tony out. I don't mean that you should throw your weight around-my agent or no. By indirections find 13

directions out. Assays of bias. You know what I mean. The ending's crucial. I did it in one sitting. Twelve hours at the typewriter and never did anything feel more right.

My best, Phil

Rodney, Indiana May 6, 1939 Dear Claire, I'm glad you're glad I like the poem even more in print than in typescript. It's a fine piece of work. Was I hitting below the belt to recall your awakening me and reading it to me?

I think you're right to try the book with Leland Press. Gil Roberts has at least an ear, which is more than most editors have. You're including, I hope, "Love Philtres." Not that I wouldn't forgive you for omitting it, but its absence from your first book would give me, I'm afraid, a hollow feeling in the vicinity of my breastbone.

Tony seems pleased with the script. He thought the opening of act two stalled the action, but I revised and he's apparently now satisfied.

As you know, action is everything in a play. No matter how striking your characters are-listing port or starboard, idiosyncratic, obses­ sive, "theatrical" as mountebanks or medieval devils with squibs firing from every orifice-unless the damn thing moves, you've a gallery of waxworks but no play. I think mine moves now, with act two con' tinuing the momentum of act one-which, if I dare say it (or whisper it only to you) is the second best thing I've ever done. The first best is the ending. It's like nothing I've written before, and yet it's what I've always been trying to do. You'll understand, though probably no one else ever will.

Which brings up a problem. Bill Clemons wrote to say that Tony's been talking about wanting the ending changed. I don't know how, but if he does, Donnerwetter, even Stunn und Drang. I knuckled under once, to my regret. So his change brought me some 200 performances! And a maculated play. I don't know. Maybe it's my illness or my age (defunct in my 4Os?), but frankly I don't give a damn about success.

What I want is something authentic-a Ming vase or the iron chord that opens the Iliad. So I'd like the play to get at least one clean

performance.

I'm morbid, I know, but what else have I to leave behind me? Five

plays that brought a now and then flurry of attention and once a shower of shekels, but not a one that will outlive this decade. If I'm going to survive at all, it will be in this play. Otherwise only in a line or two of your poetry, a skewed turn of phrase (I think of your Galatea

14

poems), will I ever be found, like some dim rubbing from an old coin or tomb-remember Sir John Peyton with his clerk's face and scrub, woman's hips?

Besides, I fear what's happening in Europe. In truth it weighs heavily on me. We're in for a wrackful siege of battering days, and damn little will hold out against them. Certainly not my play. Let it have its then. Bad cess on those who would plunder it for petty loot-a notice in the Times, the eye of some Hollywood agent.

But I've run on too long. Forgive me. All good fortune with the moment

book.

Love, Phil

Rodney, Indiana May 17, 1939 Dear Tony, The leads seem to be in good hands-Jack as Russell, Delores Sutton as Mrs. Danlever, Bob Thomas as Ted, Joyce Downes as Anne.

The others look good too. Only do me a favor, Tony. Don't give Jack and Delores their heads, those vacancies.

The weather's settled down to sultry, but I think the damp and chill of the last weeks have worked into my bones. Despite the stupid fever I'm half the time shivering. If my health were better I'd go somewhere else to get cured-the Mayo Clinic maybe.

You've taken good care of my play.

Thanks, Phil

Rodney, Indiana June 12, 1939 Dear Tony, Sorry to hear about the ruckus Delores is kicking up. But she knew that Mrs. Danlever's in her eighties. What does she want me to do­ transmogrify her to a 35,year,0Id belle? And what then will I do with Russell and Ted? Put them in knee pants?

Give her a silver-headed cane and some lace at her throat.

My mood is foul. I have to sit with my ear pressed to the radio to hear Gabriel Heatter. And if ever a man had an apt name, he's it. The trump of doom is all he can blow. He sours even the sunshine.

Yours morosely,

Phil 15

Rodney, Indiana June 17, 1939 Dear Bill, Still nothing from Tony about the ending. When will he drop the damn shoe? I chafe and look around me. Imagine, if you can, a town of twenty-thousand souls under barrage without knowing it. At one end a steel mill, at the other an automobile plant. The mill rolls out great hawsers of black smoke; the plant shivers the streetlights.

But the folk scurry heedless-in pickups, lunchpail sedans, hotrods.

Of a Saturday night, with both plants blazing, the downtown streets are choked as if panic had suddenly struck. But no such thing. Merely the jaunting time. Young blades in front of Walgreen's and the Rebob Bar. Waddles of bobbv-soxers. Farmers and their broods gawking into store windows. On the benches along the courthouse walks sit the old men-relics of the Great War, San Juan Hill, and, a few, even Shiloh and Chancellorsville. They smoke pipes and chew Mail Pouch and spatter the pavement with tobacco juice. Fat blood blisters. Don't they know what's brewing? Sometimes I feel like a visitor approaching Pompeii just in time to catch the first belch and grumble from Vesuv­ ius. And I wonder: What wilderness voice?

All right, all right, I'm glum. But I want out of here. I want to be back in New York.

Phil

Rodney, Indiana June 26, 1939 Dear Tony, First Delores, now Jack. Tony, my patience is milk thin. Tell the

clod that Russell's not the play's hero. He's Augustus Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, keeping his sword like a dancer at Philippi. His very smallness is his greatness. With an accountant's heart and brain, he totes up chances, finds the main one, and strikes. He will die in his bed, his bladder giving way, a stunned look on his face.

Yet it's a great part. To playa character so shrewd and still so obtuse takes some art. To cast one's glance only a certain distance, as if it ran into a barrier translucent but not transparent-that's a trick for the ages.

But if he doesn't recognize it, dump him. The sonofabitch is not to wreck my play. Tony, I wrote the damn thing with scalpel and cleaver, and I want it done right, at least once.

Phil 16

Rodney, Indiana June 28, 1939 Dear Tony, Please forgive my last letter. I'm like a man with the shingles-the smallest things irritate me. And this business in Europe.

By all means keep Jack. I'm sure that if you work with him, he'll see what the part involves. And the bastard does have talent.

All apologies, Phil

Rodney, Indiana July 8, 1939 Dear Bill, Got a letter from Tony ten days or so ago, but only about some troubles Jack Whelan was causing. I'm afraid I replied waspishly, but

dogged my letter with an apology. Still no word about the ending.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am it must remain as it is, as Mrs. Danlever and Ted lived it. How could it be otherwise?

She's never believed what stares her in the face. Dead and rotten these fifteen years, her husband still lives; the phone's yet listed in his name.

What is unacceptable simply cannot exist. Nor is this just a matter of fantasies; rather she generates hallucinations with the totality of her being-not only desire but will. With that she would reshape the So Ted world, undo history. Caesar would not cross the Rubicon will go in to dinner with her and the others. He will not leave the house, cross to his cottage, pass through the hedge with its strings of rusted trumpet-creepers, follow the slate walk to the door, and then, once inside, go to his bedroom and get from the dresser his Browning target pistol, the one with the custom grips, and blowout his brains.

No, this will not happen. Only-Caesar did cross the Rubicon.

Bill, I started this letter three days ago and write now from the County Hospital. I'm not sure what happened. I was writing to you; then it was like looking through a window running with rain. Things wavered. My mother tells me I blundered into a wall. She heard the thud. I don't remember that-only the strange plasticity of things.

And awakening here in the hospital. My doctor looks sage, strokes his cheek, but is obviously baffled. Yet, oddly, I feel all right; my fever's subsided and my cough is infrequent. Still, there's this sense of discon­ nection, of translocation.

A moment ago I looked over this letter's opening, and it frightened me. If you glance at my play you'll know what I mean.

Let me tell you something. On the fourth my mother drove me to the park for the festivities. The fireworks were fine, all those carna...

17

tions blooming and fading in the night sky, and the band struck up a

Sousa march. But I merely remembered it. I couldn't actually hear the was sitting at a whitewashed table with ribbed planks, but when I laid my hand on it I couldn't feel the ribbing. I had to dig my nails into a corrugation to register it. Strange.

I go home this evening. My doctor, at a loss, strews consoling con, jectures-a momentary attack of vertigo, strain, worry about the play, a sudden gust of this mysterious fever. We'll see. No cause, I suppose, for alarm. music. I

Regards, Phil

Rodney, Indiana July 14, 1939 Dear Claire, I'm writing this with no intention of mailing it. Perhaps when I've assembled a packet, I will. Perhaps not. I came home from the hospital

days ago, after an unsettling experience-not altogether a black, disorientation, displacement, a marine sort of sub, mersion in which things took on a fearful fluidity. My doctor couldn't explain it. Tests revealed nothing. So he sent me home.

On the first night while I never really slept, there was a film of what might have been unconsciousness. The posts at the end of the bed were distinct, the windowsill glittered with moonlight, and, outside, the bole of the apple tree was a solid black shaft. All this was immediately present and yet giving way, or rather admitting something else-another scene, vague shapes of furniture, and three figures dis, solving and reforming, shadows that thinned and thickened but always remained shadows. Yet I thought I recognized Ted's hopeless forlorn mustache, Russell's coinpurse mouth, the sockets of Mrs. Danlever's two

out but a kind of

eyes.

The three figures scrapped over money (early on in act three), Russell arguing that a wooden coffin would be perfectly suitable. Even tasteful. I won't hear of it. Cary's your sister. Ted, reason with her.

What do you want me to say-that Dad's bronze coffin and water, proof vault have not preserved him, that only bones and dental work are left? You make me sick. I'm not talking about that sort of thing. I tell you I won't listen to any more of this. I don't blame you. I'm going back to my cottage. The port's made me sleepy. That's always your way-go around in a stupor. Yes, it's my way.

I heard none of this and heard it all. Have I told you that I seem to be growing deaf? There were, I knew, cicadas outside, fast little clicks, 18

like those we made with the tin beetles popular when I was a boy. But I couldn't hear them.

At some point I got out of bed and scraped up a shaving of moon­

light. A flavorless ice.

I've tolled the times you clutched me in sleep and said Oh Phil I love you so much. My abacus (no warranty attached) reckons the count at

thousand two hundred twenty. The mind reels.

Even in the moonlight, the grass, so green in the sun, is black. With

one

bad smell.

If Tony thinks I'll change a line, a phrase, a word I've had three bourbons and can't keep my scrawl under control.

So for now, Phil P.S. I have a strand of Christmas ribbon-but there'll not be another Christmas. It won't snow again. And what happened to the topaz I got you that one Christmas? The size of a man's pocket watch, I recall.

Lodged, is it, like a sachet in some drawer? Oh, the ribbon. What I thought was that when I've a number of these letters I'll tie them together with the ribbon, put them in a safety deposit box, and leave them to you in my will. If you want, you can untie and read them, though if I were you, I wouldn't.

I have trouble signing off. Some commentator does it with "thirty."

But what does that mean? Everything's so goddamn cryptic. All sorts of codes baffle me, including the protocol of ending a letter that contains a P.S. Does one again subscribe? Well, I will even if I'm damned for it.

Phil

a

...

Rodney, Indiana July 28, 1939 Dear Tony, I'm sorry, but no. The ending must remain as it is. Trust me. I knew what I was doing when I wrote it.

Yours, Phil

Rodney, Indiana July 29, 1939 Dear Bill,

The fox has finally left his den. You were right. Tony does want the ending changed. Mrs. Danlever's to be more "sympathetic"; Ted's to be more "sympathetic"; Russell's to be more "sympathetic." And no suicide.

19

I responded curtly. No changes-not a jot, not a tittle. If that makes the script seem incised on stone I can't help it. I'll endorse no altera­ tions. If he makes them himself, I'll come back and haunt him.

Sympathetic! The word sickens me. What does he think the play's about? A family gathered to bury an only daughter and squabbling over the funeral costs-and Tony wants, like Chamberlain, to dodge and palter in the shifts of lowness.

Damn to be in New York! My cough worsens, my fever mounts, my hearing deteriorates. Padded hammers on a cotton drum. I spend twenty minutes composing a simple declarative sentence. Stead for me, Bill. I need you.

In wormwood,

Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 1, 1939 Dear Claire, Another letter for the safety-deposit box.

Hitler has renounced his peace treaty with Poland, but Mrs. Dan­ lever says there'll be no war. Won't hear of it. "We'll talk no more," she says at the end of my play. "Now we'll go in to dinner." And that settles that. Except that Ted doesn't go in to dinner.

As I won't change my play to suit Tony'S pandering taste. Once was enough. And what a botch it made, reconciling Warren and Letta when she had soiled things in the first place, confined as she was to her

blinkered experience and unable and unwilling to grant a value to something so fine, though bizarre, as the relationship between Warren and Grant. So I wrote nihil obstat to her judgment and gave it my own

imprimatur.

Why? For pelf? Would, oh would the motive had been that noble!

But in truth I wanted what Tony had promised-the smash hit, the arrival, the triumph. Which I got. PM: "The most powerful, wrench­ ing play of the decade." The Times: "Brilliant, original, stunning." Can you

wonder that even now the words scorch and smoke?

Yet deeper and more vile, the desire to be understood. They won't understand it, Tony had said, neither the audience nor the critics.

They'll be puzzled, then annoyed, then angered. He was right; the event bore him out. Nor could it have been otherwise. Did they not sit there for two hours looking not only through but with Letta's eyes and

could they then tolerate having their judgment mocked? And why should I have supposed better of the critics? They too were only play­ goers.

20

Well, they all understood what finally took the boards. No wonder.

There was nothing to understand.

But I had my hit, I had my audience, I had my critics. Alum and ashes. And now a green taste to go with the green smell constantly in but of the film that covers my nostrils, not the smell of grass or leaves a stagnant pool such as the one behind the greenhouse on 12th Street.

A green membrane, quivering and sightless. A green mist over it like mustard gas on a windless day. Algae grow there and something with a fat pale stalk. The ground stinks. Excrement of flowers.

But you wouldn't remember. Of course you wouldn't. You've never been there. Odd that I should forget that when I recall so much else, the shape of your earlobes, the angularity of your mouth at certain moments in the night, the pulse in your throat.

Outside my window the moon pulses too. Tattered apple tree. I can see the flare from the automobile plant's furnaces but I can't hear the fall of the great hammers. Only voices: She was your sister. You have to come home. Of course. What made you think I wouldn't? But I'll have no bad blood in my house. Mother, I bring no bad blood. I won't have it, you hear?

Now they'll inter Cary a second time. And what will it cost? Ten thousand dollars? Less, of course, much less. But that was what they laid their hands on when they had her committed and got power of attorney over her affairs. Ten thousand dollars! Which, facing lifelong maidenhood, she'd wanted to hang onto. Yet Russell's manipulations paid off, for her as well as for him. Interstate trucking. With the war coming on he'll be a millionaire. Let him. He deserves money.

The issue now is flame-grained oak versus brushed bronze. But it's enough. Murder has been committed for less, even wars fought for less. I think of the tennis balls the Dauphin of France sent to Henry V. And last week at a bar on Broad-Vance's, I think it was-a man knifed another to death over the price of four beers. No bad blood, she had said. But it's all bad, that black surge. With my hatred I've shrivelled enemies like spiders in a flame. And would again when I think of what Tony wants to do to my play. Or when I think of whoever sits across from you in a restaurant and leans forward to light your cigarette, with your fingertips cupping and guiding his hand.

If you ask why I torment myself with such images, I can only answer that there are moments when they alone convict me of living. I can fool my doctor, my mother, even myself. But I can't deny the testi­ mony of my fingernails. They grow at an enormous rate and, brittle, break before I can trim them. I'm surprised to look in the mirror and not find it vacant.

It's a posthumous existence. In front of the house children roller, 21

skate along the walk. At one place the concrete humps and the children take it with great daring. Not a one of them ever falls. On the porch I sit with the evening paper. Revels in Spiceland, ads for Purina chows and John Deere tractors, columns of homely wisdom from "Soapy" Pearl-e-l'In Rodney, Soapy Sells the Clothes"-tidbits on the local arts, pronouncements from Mayor Herschel "Sammy" Tenbar (ex-used-car salesman, ex-realtor, ex, insurance agent, ex-this-that-and­ the-other, but by endowment, inclination, and assiduous practice rhen-now-and-the-dav-after knave, blackguard, and charlatan) on Rodney's glorious future and encomia on Rodney's zealous, forward, Eventually the children go home, I check for my looking citizens and take the obituary, newspaper to the trash can in the back yard.

There's a woman named Gail. I knew her years ago, went with her briefly. She's never married and still has her figure. Under her eyes are little puffy lozenges, some sort of hormonal aberration, I suspect. She comes by every couple of weeks. Once we went to the Anchor Room.

All very nautical: life-buovs on the walls, great falls of netting studded with cork; other such gear along with mounted sailfish and tarpon.

We drank, of all things, cuba libres, and she, after several, spoke slurringly of lost chances that might yet be redeemed. I listened, missing much but catching her drift. Yet, after you, what could I do?

Adam wandered for two or three hundred years in arid discontent.

She's not interested in my play, although she pretends she is and lets me talk about it. Not that I do at any length. A gnomic utterance, an allusion, a near rhyme. All of which you would catch. Do you remern­ ber the language we spoke? Gabotz, notary sojac, nov schmoz kapop.

At parties no one could follow our dialogue. And sometimes we didn't need language at all-only a lifted eyebrow or an emanation from the skin. But we would mumble apologies, get our coats, and leave-to have pancakes or waffles at some all-night diner and go home to make love in the morning grayness to the sound of milk trucks in the street below. I look for a word to describe that time and can't find it.

Perhaps no word would do, only a collision of words, their chance ...

tumbling into place.

At three in the a.m. and with a fair load of bourbon aboard, my mind goes back to the time we went to Washington for Jack Calla­ ghan's party-wild Jack and his fourth-floor spread at the Willard­ the party we'd so looked forward to, such a gang of old friends. But we took a double room at some motorcourt somewhere and made love first in one room and then in the other and afterwards went out and ate and came back and made love again. (Do you remember the three days at Laura's in Boston? What lions we were! You draped over that low bed with your head on the floor. And how jealous I was of the 22

faggot you danced with that one night. Maladroit of both feet I sat at the table and slugged myself sodden with gin. But how sweetly you

soothed me when later you slid into bed beside me.) In the motor' court, sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, you began to sing in that small sweet voice of yours. The party whirled on without us, memor­ able we were told, although Jack could not actually recall the details.

Something about a girl hanging out a window, all deshabille, and three men pulling her in and then something about a scene in the Emerald Room. And you sang "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and, deaf as I've grown, I still hear the longing in your throat. Once you bent at the waist and kissed me. I've been a husk ever since, a bankrupt, but rich as Pompey home from the East with loot enough to field a modern army. In the morning I shelled out the contents of my wallet, a trivial sum, twenty-five dollars or so, and we drove back to New York with you snoozing in the front seat and I loved you. What now can I settle for?

Again I've gone on too long. Nor do I know how to close this letter. "

...

But I must, so I will.

With all my love, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 5, 1939 Dear Bill, Et tu, Brute!

Why does a man commit suicide? If I take pains in answering the question, please don't suppose I think you an idiot. My hope is that I'll help you make things clear to Tony.

To the question then. One destroys the self because he has come to see it as both corrupt and hollow. First, Ted's complicity. He stood idly by while Mrs. Danlever and Russell committed Cary to the asylum where she did indeed lose her sanity. That episode in the Palmer House in Chicago: her dogs urinating on her luggage in the lobby and her imperious demands-swathed as she was in a leopard coat-that the bell captain walk them along Randolph. And the in, credible man she picked up in the bar, all Valentino brilliantined hair above that fungus of a face, and three rings on his right hand. Never would she have behaved so before the sanitarium. And what a name for the place! Draining sanity from her as physicians once drained blood from patients anemic to start with. Pathetic when she entered, blighted and mad when she emerged. And he stood by.

The funeral made him take stock. At 47 what did he have? Two failed marriages and a job in a private school in the Bronx teaching the 23

frippery offspring of theatrical and literary luminaries. And as for his work. Well, you know that before he returned he read through it all, the labor of so many dank nights, and found it-as he had always known-worthless. Verses that scanned and prose that wreathed a

python syntax. Nothing else. So he lit a fire (this was in July) and burned it all, published and unpublished.

Then he went home to the old quarrels, the whole flawed and sleety history of greed, cunning, cruelty and coldness. If any hope existed, it lay in Anne. Surely after so many years of marriage to Russell she had to see him as he was.

And there was hope. All those calls to New York: collect, so Russell wouldn't know of them. Brief admissions that she missed him, wanted him to know she was thinking of him. On the train he remembered the last call, hushed and hurried, Russell due home at any moment: Anne, are you happy? I must be, I guess; I don't think about it Happy and not think about it? That defied belief. He thought of his own life with Becky, and especially of that one afternoon in November when he had opened the apartment door to find her, against the late slant of light, floating, buoyant in a flowered gown, across the room to him. They had made love. And afterwards, as if from the shell of her ear, the salt unestranging sound of the sea Happy and not think about it?

From her answer he should have known how withdrawn he would find her. Never would she confess-the terror was too great-that in choosing Russell she had invested unwisely. In the hallway she turned a dry, taut cheek to his kiss. The bowstring snapped.

How, then, can you side with Tony and tell me that Ted must follow his mother into the dining room? No, Bill, that outside door must close with a last audible gasp: not a crash, only a closing.

I wish I could shake the exhaustion I feel over this business in Europe. And to think that Shakespeare gave Bohemia a seacoast and not a tremor was felt anywhere. come

...

.

.

.

Bill, I'm counting on you.

Yours, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 13, 1939 Dear Claire,

Jackals from all sides-Tony and now Bill. Snap and another piece of the play gets bolted.

Don't worry. I'll not mail this letter either.

I had a salad today with a large green segmented worm in it. Hal24

lucination? I'm not sure. My mother swore she couldn't see any worm but tossed (ha, ha) the salad out anyway and fixed me another. I couldn't even look at it.

I know I have them-hallucinations, I mean. And sometimes that I'm having them. Combination maybe of medicine and booze. I can't decide whether it's better to go around hallucinating because I'm drunk and coked or because I'm stupefied from insomnia. Or whether it makes a difference. Right now I'm having my fifth bourbon. Natur­ ally, the moon throbs, on a faltering current, and takes the shapes of various faces- Ted's, Russell's, Anne's, Mrs. Danlever's-but always, finally, yours. Did I ever tell you that at certain angles (you below, me above), it was a Medusa face stoning my eyes? No, I never told you.

Such words did not come easily. But I remember thinking that no matter who might make love to you he would never see the beauty that I then saw. I ramble, I know, but since you won't read these words (I wouldn't if I were you) they may be easier to forgive. I can manage: ego me absoloo.

Not, however Tony. I do not absolve him. Or Bill. There is such a culpable ignorance, and of that they are guilty. They will not under, stand: it has already happened. Ted has already blown his brains out.

There is nothing they can do about it. They might as well try to send the bullet back down the gun barrel. There are ineluctable laws: Caesar has crossed the Rubicon.

All of which strangely cheers me. Let them do what they will, but Ted will still not go in to dinner with his mother. And even if he does, the audience will know it's experiencing an illusion and hear, nonethe­ less, the closing of that outside door. ,

Now I will switch subjects. On my street lives a postal employee, a former scoutmaster. He has a carved face and a blocky granite body.

His hands are stubby, rough as sandpaper. I see him readying for death. Oh, there are no obvious signs. His walk is vigorous, his color burnished. But there is no question that he is tilting towards death. His wife somehow knows. I watch her watching him as he trims his hedge or plants a flower. On her face is a sad awareness, as if she were snapping photographs against the time he will not be there. They've been married for more than thirty years. Like us, they have no children. When she dies, the house will go to strangers; the hedge and the precise tended flowerbeds will become as anonymous as moss. She has a soft, almost bovine face of great compassion and gentleness.

Seeing her, I think of the cows we would visit on our late afternoon walks that summer in Pennsylvania, the time we stayed at Roland Childer's farm. Remember what genial girls they were, congregating to greet us but taking care to shoulder away any who wandered too near

25

the electrified fence? Their protectiveness always touched us, and we would continue our walk hand-in-hand. It was a golden time. I would sit at my Underwood and bang away at my play (my first, and a disaster), and you would sit in the kitchen and write wonderful poems on yellow legal-sized pads-"In Slumber," "The Child Upstairs," "Silences." There was something in that house. We didn't talk when we were working, but we were there and we were together. And our lovemaking was different. So gentle, stroking each other's faces after­ ward and finally falling asleep crooked into each other, my arms around your waist, your hands gripping my wrists. I don't understand what happened. The globe careened into something.

Perhaps it's my fever or this cough or this frustrating deafness (from the radio nothing but a crackle), but my mood darkens by the day.

Even if we survive the coming war, innocence won't. Once, I think we supposed, there was somewhere a jewel of integrity. It's been filched, or it never existed.

I will tell you something. In late spring, to my shame and out of my loneliness, I drove to a brothel in Muncie. The girl wore green silk underthings, had rouged her nipples and painted her face a lead white.

Incapacitated, I tipped her outrageously, drove home, and dreamt that night of making love to Yorick's sister.

Do you know that I've lost weight? You'd hardly recognize me.

Love, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 17, 1939 Dear Tony, Bear with me. I find it all too easy to snarl these days. The sun melting the asphalt in the streets and no relief at night-just a humid

darkness and insects clogging the screens.

Still I will try to answer your last letter dispassionately. The point is this: A play should be concluded in the theater. I don't mean that it's wrong to leave an audience wondering, asking, for instance, what the future of these people will be and so forth. But the central action must conclude by the time the curtain falls. Otherwise the play lacks form.

That's why Ted must not go in to dinner with the others. If he does, the central action remains incomplete. And that, more than anything else, leaves lasting dissatisfaction. When a batter steps up to the plate, he must get a hit or a home run or a walk, strike out, get thrown out at base or put out on a caught fly. Any of these events will complete the action-and, whether you root for or against him, you will not feel cheated. So must a play function. In the final analysis it doesn't matter 26

whether you want the protagonist to fail or succeed. Who wants Othello to murder Desdemona? But tamper with that ending and we will feel defrauded-regardless of how, sitting there, we might cheer some last-minute revelation that would save Desdemona's life.

So think about it, Tony. If the ending is changed, your opening may get rave reviews, but sooner or later the play will spoil and audiences will leave the theater with queasy stomachs. So think about it.

Best, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 19, 1939 Dear Bill, I wrote Tony a day or two ago giving him my reasons for keeping the ending as it is. Since you seem in constant touch with him I assume

that he's shown you my letter and that I need not repeat my arguments here. So far as I can see, they answer your objections as well as his.

My cough worsens, and my energy flags. Right now it suffices only to express my disappointment that you side with Tony. But I do have one question for you as my agent: Have I the right to withdraw my play, to remove it from Tony's hands? I'd appreciate a prompt reply.

Sincerely, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 20, 1939 Dear Claire,

The news from Leland Press strikes me as encouraging. I don't think Gil would ask to see additional poems if he were not genuinely interested in your work. Perhaps he's right. Fashionable as slender volumes are, yours may be a little emaciated even for verse. Since you've not told me what pieces he has, I can't suggest which ones to add. If you didn't include the Phaedra poem, I think you should send it on. A longish narrative work might be just the thing to fatten the volume. It would also give the book some distinctiveness. No one much writes narrative verse these days.

I'm thinking of trying to get my play back. Tony seems determined to alter (i.e., neuter) the ending, but I want the thing performed at least once as I wrote it-if only in some community playhouse in

Duluth, or even Warsaw, Montana.

Let me know how things go at Leland. They'll go well, I'm sure.

Love, Phil

27

Rodney, Indiana August 23, 1939 Dear Tony,

Since your letter didn't mention the ending, am I to suppose that

you've accepted my argument?

About the dialogue between Ted and Anne at the end of act two, I don't understand what you mean by saying it doesn't work. Of course they don't say what they're thinking. What have you got actors for?

I smell a conspiracy. Your letter had an accomplice, a letter from Bob Thomas in the same mail. He too complained about the dialogue.

Can't you tell him that an actor sometimes has to play cross-grain to the words? And how can he say he can't perform the ending? It's simply a question of exiting stage right or stage left. What he feels doesn't matter. It's what the audience feels. And if he exits stage right, they'll feel what they're supposed to feel. And you can get him to make that exit, can't you?

Bill's letter, I imagine, will arrive special delivery tonight.

Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 23, 1939 Dear Claire, I know I wrote you only a couple of days ago, but I need someone to talk to.

I'm baffled. None of the people producing my play seems to under­

stand it. Today came letters from Tony and Bob Thomas (he's playing Ted) carping about some dialogue in act two, and Bob insisting that he can't perform the ending. All he has to do is exit stage right. What's there to perform? Beckoned with a banana a chimpanzee could do it.

His obtuseness infuriates me. And what is all this rubbish about actors having to feel? Is it beyond them that the writer has felt, the characters feel, the audience feels? The man who throws the switch at the power plant-who cares how he feels so long as he throws the switch?

I wish I could do fiction. I'd be freed of directors and actors, their temperaments, their niggling density.

Do you want to know how I feel? Overwhelmed. Sometimes by the sheer physicality of things. Dog days, acetylene sun, flies so bloated they won't even stir at your approach. There's no energy anywhere.

The mailman droops along the walk with the century's woes slung from his shoulder.

Yesterday Chamberlain solemnly averred that England would honor its commitment to Poland. "Honor" must have stuck in his throat. No 28

The question is whether Hitler believes him and, if he does, whether he'll change his policy. I think not, on both counts.

My mind is parceled out. I think about my play, then about you and our past, then about Europe, then about my illness and doldrums and sargasso seas. There is a crazing, the kind that porcelain sometimes suffers. And there are moments when I don't care. Let things come apart. This lingering has become intolerable.

Do you believe in the coincidence of stars? You left me a week after I finished my play. Three days later the four powers signed the Munich pact. In the late winter I came home for a short visit, fell ill, and have been confined here ever since. It's as if at the axletree of the universe a linchpin had worked loose. Of course I don't believe all this, and yet I do. I want some field theory, like original sin. Things might then make sense. They might be as simple as my play. I know what drives Russell and what keeps Ann mortised into her life, but I don't know what tumbles this world along or any life in it, including mine. I don't know why you left me, and I don't know what I'm going to do with the love I still have for you. It's corrosive, eating away at me, like acid, or like a stomach consuming its own lining.

I'm sorry. I know my illness has been talking. When it goes and my hearing returns, my mood will change. I'll bound like the hart. After all, I've much to rejoice in. I've written a good play, and another is already in the vat stage, simmering. In a few months-all this fuss and feathers with Tony and the rest behind me-I'll sit down to start matter.

writing it.

There, I feel better already. Mind over matter. Maybe Mrs. Dan' lever has something.

Love, Phil

Rodney, Indiana August 27, 1939 Dear Bill, It's taken me three days to recover from your letter. Even now my hand trembles. But I'm able, I think, to respond. The sun is setting, and there's a breeze-the first in a week or more. A break at least in the weather.

Ironies spring like tigers. In what I supposed was a bitter joke I

speculated in a letter to Tony that, after his and Bob's, your letter was arriving special delivery. So it did, although not that evening. It got here on the 24th.

A memorable and infamous day. Even the Rodney Courier Times bannered the news: "Germany and Russia Sign Non-Aggression Pact!"

29

Poor Poland. Its only comfort Chamberlain's speech to Parliament that Germany should not nourish the "dangerous delusion" that England and France would not fight. But who else planted the delu­ sion, watered it, and saw that it had the sunlight it needed?

Delusion upon delusion, maggots breeding in a jellied mound. Your sun, once ran the belief, generated your crocodile from the slime of the Nile. That was true, for it warmed the mud where the eggs nested.

I'm rambling, you suppose, but images of pathogenesis swarm in my mind. Not long ago you thought my play the best thing I've done­ "flawless" you called it. What has hatched all these objections?

Four pages of your crabbed coiled handwriting, like trichinosis in a muscle. There's too much exposition in the opening; Russell at times borders on caricature; Anne's motives remain murky; the dialogue between Ted and Anne at the end of act two communicates nothing; Mrs. Danlever's final words sound unnatural; and the ending is all wrong, dead wrong. There's no real reason for Ted to commit suicide, and even if there were, the audience would never know that when he leaves the house he will kill himself. For all they'll be able to tell, he might be leaving to get drunk. In a pique and a sulk. Have I omitted

anything?

Reading your letter, I grew more feverish by the moment. The tone was

more

than critical; it was treasonous.

I never supposed the work "flawless" (your word, not mine). I was

insistent-all right, unyielding-on one thing only: Ted must not go in to dinner with his mother and the rest. He must leave, and he must cross to his cottage and commit suicide.

You say the audience won't know he's going to do that. But what else could they possibly suppose? Do you think they actually need to hear the gunshot?

No, on that point you're as wrong as Tony. They'll know, and it's the only ending that can possibly close the play.

But I'll not make a Verdun of everything. If dialogue needs revision here and there, I'll revise it. I'll redo the exchange between Ted and Anne at the end of act two. I'll sharpen Russell's characterization. I'll make Anne's motives more apparent. I'll redistribute the exposition.

But Mrs. Danlever's words must remain as I wrote them. They're precisely what she would say. I know. I know her better than she knows herself. They trigger Ted's leaving and cannot be changed.

Still, all things considered, am I not an accommodating fellow?

But I'm hurt. I can't help thinking that you've colluded with Tony to make my play palatable to an audience craving all things sweet and frothy. Cotton candy may look like a bomb burst but melts to a sugary residue. And sells. Is that what you're after-your ten percent? To 30

the cost of bronze would you bury your sister in a wooden coffin?

A cruel question, I know. But for some reason-no doubt mad-I don't feel especially benign on this 27th day of August in the Year of

save

Our Lord Nineteen Hundred Thirty-Nine.

In my last letter I asked whether even at this late point I could withdraw my play. Since you gave me no answer I intend to consult an attorney here.

Sincerely, Phil P.S. Narrative, narrative? What the hell do you mean? The goddamn

thing's a play.

Rodney, Indiana August 28, 1939 Dear Claire, Three letters in roughly a week. You must wonder at the state of my mind. Not good.

Four days ago I received a brutal letter from Bill. He again harped on the old note-the play's ending-but also went through the script with a magnifying glass and a malevolent eye, finding everywhere blots that were only reflections of his own bleared and-dare I say it?-venal vision. Thinking of his ten percent, he wants a hit. Does he sniff my death and suppose that he must now vulture what he can?

Otherwise I can't account for his criticisms. Some I couldn't even understand. One passage jabbered incoherently about "narrative." I puzzled over it and finally threw up my hands in despair. But even supposing his objections valid, there was no reason to pen them so

viciously. I went, I think, into shock.

The letter came on the 24th. There was no sleep that night, and precious little since. The days have passed in a miasma, with things again taking on the undersea shapes they assumed during the curious attack I described earlier this summer. It's as if I had drowned and were visiting the bottom of the monstrous world. Yet it's not un­ pleasant. Quiet, one drifts at ease on soft currents.

Nor does my fever much bother me. It stays locked at 100-101 degrees and alarms my mother. Today she brought the doctor here. He wanted to hospitalize me. I refused. He argued, but since I could not, for the most part, hear him, he was only making mouths at the event. I

nearly laughed.

This morning I got up, dressed, and took a walk before dawn. It was cool, the silence soothing. I wandered aimlessly down one empty street after

another. Then I came back and sat on the front stoop and looked at the sleeping houses and the dark watery lawns. Quite at 31

peace, I thought of the mornings we would leave a late party-the one

Ned Parlin threw at the Madison-to find the city filling up with How it would take us by surprise, the hush, the fall of silence.

And we would go up to the apartment and have a final drink and a cigarette and watch the flakes rock down past the window. Strangely, even as I was re-experiencing it this morning, I began to think that the serenity we then felt was only a dream. Or perhaps at this stage dreams turn into memories. I remember the corner streetlamp glowing gold through the snow. But did it?

My play too now seems a dream. I've thought of it as history­ Caesar crossing the Rubicon-and in part it is: Ted did leave the house and go to his cottage and put the pistol to his temple. And, like the one in my dresser, it was a Browning with custom grips. And he did spray bone and tissue across his bedroom floor. But none of this is actually in the play. It's engraved on history. And the rest? Maybe it is malleable. Maybe Bill is right. I dreamed one thing and wrote another.

There is suddenly a great blankness.

If, like Mrs. Danlever, I thought I could create by an act of the will, did I do the same with our life together, endow it with a perfection it never had? I fear I must have. Now I dare not look at my script.

And, good play or bad, what difference does it make? A day or two ago England and Poland signed a mutual assistance pact, and yesterday the German newspapers carried stories of Polish troops massing along the German border and of Poles burning German farmhouses in the corridor. It takes no haruspicy to interpret signs like those.

Still, isn't this precisely when I should hold out? Fix my small imprint on things? I made a drink and, summoning up somehow a spasm of nerve, went through the script. Crystal it may not be, but the flaws Bill discovers are simply not there. What is there is what I willed to be there. Why, at this late date, should I suppose that will is not creative? Merely because we cannot, by willing it, stop Caesar on the far bank? But will can accomplish other things. No one is born a writer; you become one by willing it-by determining that those inchoate shapes struggling inside you will receive form. And by will­ ing, in both exultation and exhaustion, the labor it takes. Can I turn my back on that now? No. I would be like the servant of Caius Gracchus who, learning that the Senate would pay for Gracchus's head with its weight in gold, severed the head from his slain master's body, scooped out the brains, filled the cavity with lead and, taking the thing to the Senate, received his promised reward to the troy ounce. They'll do my playas I wrote it or not at all.

It's taken me all night to come to this point and I'm tired. A moment ago I went out and stood on the lawn. A faint gauze of light snow.

32

lay along the horizon, but I came in before the sun could ignite it. Now I've lowered the blinds and drawn down the sheet on my bed. I'll have one

last bourbon and turn in. My mind is at ease: in a day or two I'll attorney about getting my play back. Good night. I love you.

Phil

see an

Rodney, Indiana September 1, 1939 Dear Tony,

This morning Germany invaded Poland. Do what you want with my play. Unheard melodies are sweeter.

Phil

33

Sacrifice Grace Mary Garry

Mary Margaret had never been inside a Baptist church before, and she hadn't meant to be here now. She had said only at the last minute she would come because Mrs. Ross, who had been so nice to her all weekend, had insisted. And Sandra had promised they would see Isaac. The front of the church was crowded, and Mary Margaret sat in the third row, wedged between Sandra and a fat lady she'd never seen before. Mrs. Ross had leaned across Sandra and introduced her to this lady, whose name was Miss Purvey. Miss Purvey had squeezed Mary Margaret's hand and said how nice it was to have her with them on this beautiful morning, but Mary Margaret thought Miss Purvey did not look pleased in spite of what she said. Then Mrs. Ross leaned forward and spoke to a woman in pink, who turned and smiled at Mary Margaret and said how glad she was.

Sandra fidgeted beside her and craned her neck to look around.

Sandra was little and cute, with a face not pretty but lively, and she always knew what to say, even to boys. Mary Margaret wished she were little too and thought if she were she would certainly be still so people wouldn't look at her. Mary Margaret was so tall she attracted attention just by being there. She was five feet seven and still growing, the tallest one in the eighth grade except the boys who had failed so many times that they were just waiting to be sixteen so they could quit school for good. The trouble was, Mary Margaret couldn't seem to grow any way but up. At night she would stand sideways before her dresser and look at her outgrown little girl's shape in the mirror. Not like Sandra, who was already nicely rounded.

Mary Margaret balanced her straw purse on her lap and squeezed her bare sunburned arms, hugging herself into a smaller space. Miss Purvey shifted, spreading thick legs under a speckled voile skirt, and Sandra's shoulder nudged her. "I just can't imagine where he is," she said.

Mary Margaret looked at the empty pew two rows in front of her, 34

the front pew reserved for Isaac as a place of honor because he was the minister's son. Once, Mary Margaret knew, Isaac's mother would have

Saturday last April she went out to buy groceries and never came home. They didn't find her for three days and when they did, she was lying on the front seat of the car with all the windows rolled up, at the end of an overgrown path out by the river. The path was so thick with vines and underbrush nobody could understand how she'd managed to drive through it. By the end of the week it was like a highway, they said, such a crowd had been out there to look. Mary Margaret had not gone, though, because her mother wouldn't let her. "Let the poor soul rest in peace," she said. But people hadn't let her rest. They said terrible things about her. Some people even said she'd been having an affair with Mr. Soames, the assistant undertaker, but Mary Margaret didn't believe that because he was an amen Baptist and a good friend of the preacher himself.

Mary Margaret couldn't let her rest either. For days afterward it was sat

there

too.

But

one

all she could think of. Because Isaac's mother was young; she looked almost like a girl, like his sister perhaps. And beautiful, with fine gold hair spun out like a halo and long, dreamy eyes. The horror and strangeness of it sent shivers up Mary Margaret's back. How terrible to die like that, and worse still to die in the spring, when everything else was coming back to life. The Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, she thought. She supposed it must be comforting to Isaac, being brought up so devout, to think of his mother's soul and not her body, yet she did not know what happened to Baptists who committed suicide.

Mary Margaret closed her eyes and tried to wish herself in the middle of the lake. She could almost feel the water's coolness, could sense the odd buoyancy of her own body, bobbing like a cork. If she shut her eyes tightly, she could see the dance of sun on the water, like a handful of jewels, or stars thrown down around her. When she opened her eyes, she saw white walls. Stark and endless, almost brighter than the lake. She thought of Isaac's face as it had looked last spring, after they found his mother. The vacant pew in front seemed a reproach, like hunger in the midst of plenty. A wound. Mary Margaret had tried to imagine what he must feel, but she could not. It seemed to her more than anyone could be asked to bear. She pressed her fingers into the rough straw of the purse on her lap and closed her eyes again.

Dear God, she tried to pray, but she found no words for her prayer, could neither grasp Isaac's helplessness nor name the thing she knew she needed strength for. She could hear Sister Evangeline's voice reach out to her from the darkness. "God gives us the strength to bear what we must," it said.

35

She had dreamed last night of Sister Evangeline, walking across the school yard with the other children, her white robes blowing out behind her. Mary Margaret could hear the music of her voice and the laughter of the children but she could not catch up with them. She called out but they would not hear. She toiled after them in the slow, motion way of dreams and then, from the little copse of trees that bordered the playground, something stepped out and blocked her way. Nun-like too, it was wrapped from head to toe, but in filthy, rotting rags. A hand reached out from the rags and grabbed at Mary Margaret. It was dark and hard and twisted, like the gnarled limb of an old tree; a green vine curled around the wrist like a snake. But she looked up from the hand into the face of Isaac's mother, translucent and shining under the soft gold nimbus of her hair.

Mary Margaret awoke sitting straight up in bed; in the dim half-ltght of gathering dawn she could just make out Sandra's head on the pillow beside her. It was strange not being in her own bed. Strange too, she thought, how everything was changing. This time last year she didn't even know Sandra, probably wouldn't know her now if the Sisters hadn't at the last minute closed the junior high at St. Bridget's because of "staffing difficulties," the Church bulletin said. If that hadn't happened, she wouldn't know Isaac either. Once everything had seemed so clear to her, a bright path stretched out in the sunshine, but now, sometimes, she felt as though a river of darkness had sprung from inside her and engulfed her, swirling her around and around until she was so dizzy she couldn't tell which way she was going.

There were, quite suddenly, too many things she could not under, stand. Why must this happen to Sister Evangeline? First to be crippled with arthritis, now eaten up with cancer that was so far along when they found it there was nothing to do but wait to die. The saints had suffered, she knew, but that was long ago. Until now Mary Margaret had never known anyone who was dying. Even her grandparents, who were old, hadn't gotten ready to die yet. Three days ago they put Sister Evangeline in an ambulance and took her to Houston to the Mother House. This meant that now she was really dying, that the long, dragging months of waiting and suffering were nearly over. "It will be a blessing, Mary Margaret," her mother had said. And then she said, "Would you like to go to the lake with Sandra on Saturday?"

So while Sister Evangeline lay miles away in Houston, Mary Margaret was rising up tentatively from the murky water behind Sandra's father's boat, frightened at first, falling back almost immedi­ ately, then, with Sandra and Mrs. Ross in the water beside her, learn' ing to balance, to pull back on the rope, and finally to skim the surface in a flying rush of wind and spray and sunshine. By the end of the day 36

she could water-ski. At night she had fallen into Sandra's bed, sun, burned and exhausted. She had hardly thought of Sister Evangeline.

But after the dream she could not sleep and she lay there by Sandra, trying to think, until it was light. Then she got up and dressed and walked to seven o'clock Mass at St. Bridget's. She didn't know whether Sister Evangeline was alive or dead. When she got back, Sandra wasn't even

up yet.

The woman beside her shifted again and Mary Margaret opened her eyes. The woman took a large red fan from her purse, flicked it open, and began fanning her face with a short, jerky motion. The little wind she made smelled of talcum powder on damp skin. A man in a maroon jacket was pushing open some windows with a long stick. The win, dows were opaque, frosted glass, oddly like the ones in filling station rest rooms. When the man passed, Mary Margaret could see the bright blue of the sky. But the day was still and the open windows high above their heads; except for the quick little swirls of air the red fan was making, not a breath stirred. Mary Margaret's hair felt damp and hot on the back of her neck, but she did not try to swing it free or even touch it with her finger tips, which still gripped the purse on her lap as if it were Pandora's box and she alone responsible for holding the lid on.

A woman with a wine-colored robe and bluish hair sat down at the

and began turning the pages of the hymnal. Mary Margaret looked at the empty pew, but it was Sister Evangeline's face she saw before her. Each time she had gone to the hospital, the face on the pillow had seemed thinner, paler, at last almost unearthly in its frail transparency. In the spring she had watched the change in Isaac's face too, watched him as she had been watching him all year, ever since she saw him in that first game, running like something set free, like pure joy escaped and gone wild. After they found his mother, he went pale too and his eyes glazed over and wandered, as if he were looking for organ

something.

Last year Mary Margaret had walked across the street to the high school two days a week for general science lab. The lab was just around the comer from Isaac's locker. In the fall the place had been crowded with boys in their green and white football jackets, laughing and pushing in the gently rough way boys have with one another. Isaac would stand tall and radiant in their midst, holding his head in a special, heroic way, a bright beacon that drew everything to him.

There were girls too, laughing and swaying and looking up into the boys' faces. There was one girl in particular, a cheerleader; Mary Margaret had seen her run out and grab Isaac around the neck at the end of a game. She was small and she had a high little laugh and very

37

long blond hair that she was always swinging back from her face.

Sometimes Isaac would put his arm around her. Mary Margaret might walk past his locker two or three times, back and forth, but Isaac never even saw her. That was in the fall. In the spring, after they found his mother, the blond girl disappeared and so did the laughing, pushing athletes. Isaac seemed to stare through walls, but he must have seen Mary Margaret because he started to speak to her and she spoke back.

It was May and school was nearly out when she finally talked to him. A sunny, warm Saturday morning, already beginning to feel like summer. She ran into him downtown, or rather he ran into her, rounding a corner, and almost knocked her down. It was Mary Margaret's fault. She was corning from the hospital, not thinking about where she was going at all. They had gotten the tests bade on Sister Evangeline and found out there was nothing they could do. Just wait, Sister Evangeline said to her, and she looked quite cheerful, sitting up in bed, like herself but thinner, more fragile. She said she'd been trying to get ready all her life. Sister Mary Peter sat in the corner under her black veil like a mourner in advance and glared at Mary Margaret. "Don't strain yourself, Sister," she would say from time to time. Sister Evangeline wore her wimple without a veil. It made her head round and egg-like, bald. Above the white hospital gown and the taut expanse of white sheet, she could have been wrapped in a ban­ dage, or a shroud.

Walking horne, Mary Margaret hardly noticed the street in front of her. Sometimes it didn't seem fair that God gave some people so many crosses to bear and others none at all. Mary Margaret's own life had been completely uneventful: she had never been asked to bear anv­ thing. When she turned the corner onto Main Street, Isaac almost knocked her down.

He didn't say a word at first, just backed off, looking at her with long, soft eyes like his mother's. "You okay?" he said finally.

They had hit with a great crash and she thought something ought to be hurt, but all she felt was a sudden burning in her cheeks. She nodded and flapped her mouth open stupidly. Not a sound carne out.

"Sure?" he said, bending closer to examine her face. Something inside her opened like a floodgate, and she closed her eyes to trap it, or to keep it from showing in her face. But she had to open them again very quickly and say yes, she was fine. So he backed off again and dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans. She just stood there, looking at him, waiting, not able to believe that he was standing there looking at her, that he actually recognized her.

"Where were you going in such a hurry anyway?" he said.

"Horne. Just horne. And I wasn't really in a hurry, only thinking."

38

He looked at her, still in that examining way, and then he laughed. was so

loud that a woman walking

It

down the street stopped to look at

them. But it was a friendly laugh, not at all at Mary Margaret's expense, so she laughed back.

"What's your name anyway?" he said.

"Mary Margaret McGuire," she answered. think­ "Well, Mary Margaret McGuire," he said, still smiling, "stop some­ hurt to ing and watch where you're walking or you're going And he walked off down the street, leaving her to look at her

body."

startled image in the plate glass window.

After that, when she saw him at school, he would say, "Have you

own

tackled any football players lately, Mary Margaret McGuire?" or "Are same time, Mary Margaret you still trying to think and walk at the McGuire?" But in two weeks school let out for the summer and she hadn't seen him since.

Now it was the end of July, the days so hot and long that each one seemed an eternity. Over a month before school would start, like waiting a lifetime. When it did start, though, she would be in high school, there all the time and not just twice a week like last year. She could walk by Isaac's locker fifty times a day if she chose. But she wondered, after all this time, if he would even remember her.

The lady with bluish hair had begun to play the organ and Mary Margaret tried to concentrate on that, to let herself be swept away by its great swells and falls like a little boat carried helplessly out to sea.

She closed her eyes as she liked to do at Benediction, to let the sick­ sweet breath of the incense float over her and the sing-song regularity of the hymn pull her gently into a silent place, opaque, glowing, almost sublime. But this music was different, and she couldn't seem to concentrate anyway. She opened her eyes and looked again at the empty pew. Now she almost hoped that he wouldn't

come.

There was a great stir behind the velvet curtain that filled the front

of the church. Men and women in maroon robes emerged and filed into a bank of seats behind the pulpit, just where the altar should have been. Mary Margaret knew she would feel a fool if Isaac saw her here, like telling him outright what she had tried to keep out of her face that day on the street. Telling him, like a fool, what she herself could not understand and didn't even like to think about.

Suddenly the organ boomed out louder than ever, as though the organist had thrown herself on the keys, and the choir in their maroon robes stood up. The choir director raised his arms, and with one great shuffle the congregation stood too. The director flapped his wide sleeves at them like a large red bird about to take flight. "He's the Lily of the Valley," they sang, "the

Brightest Morning Star." Mary 39

Margaret, who did not know the words, concentrated on balancing the pew in front of her. Sandra sang loudly and not very well, still craning her neck to look around. But Miss Purvey's voice was high and fine and clear, like a crystal bell; it seemed to come from some hidden inside her, some delicate, mysterious corner of her place being Mary Margaret could not even guess at.

Mary Margaret looked at her but the broad, slightly bloated pink face had not changed to match the voice. Miss Purvey stared intently toward the front of the church, and Mary Margaret, recollecting herself, looked there too. In the front pew stood Isaac. The large globe of light shone down on him now and made a little halo around his fair head. She didn't know when he'd come in or how long he'd been there straw box on the

how he got there, but there at last he was, head and voice lifted into the light. He wore a pale coat, the color of cream, and he seemed

or even

gather all the brightness in the room to him. Mary Margaret's heart pounded in her ears, louder than the voices around her; but the glow that spread over her cheek was caressing and full of promise. She could stand here and look at him now and not think of anything else at to

all.

The hymn ended but the organ started on another tune, softer now, and everyone sat down. Mary Margaret kept her eyes on Isaac; she could see his tan neck above the white collar, his bright hair, and a thin slice of his fine, smooth cheek. The organist retreated from the keys again and the tune faded slowly, floated out of the church and across the blinding blue day. The minister stood with his back to the choir, looking out at his congregation. He was dressed in a dark blue suit and plain blue tie and white shirt. He stood directly in front of Mary

Margaret.

"Good morning, brothers and sisters," he said, smiling out at them.

"Good morning, Brother Horton," they chorused back; they sounded happy.

"We are gathered here this morning," said the minister, "to praise the Lord and to give Him thanks for joining us today in this blessed spirit of Christian fellowship." He paused and smiled again. "Let us pray to the Lord," he said and extended his hands toward them. The heads in front of her bowed, and Mary Margaret lowered her head too.

"Lord, keep us mindful, teach each and everyone of us the cause that You have created this beautiful day for Your faithful ones. The voice was deep and full. It ran like a grand river over the bowed heads and carried them along on its strong tide. It pulled Mary Margaret's eyes upward to its source. The minister's arms were stretched wide, palms heavenward; he looked first at the light fixture, then at the bowed congregation, then at the light fixture again. "

40

Mary Margaret had seen Reverend Horton before, on the street and

at football games, but she'd never seen him so close or had the chance

consider him. He was tall, like Isaac, and broad-shouldered; he looked as though he might have played football once too. But other, wise he wasn't like Isaac at all. His hair was dark and cut close on the sides, sideburns shaved off to the top of his ears so that his cheeks were as stark and white as the walls of his church. But the hair on top was full, almost wild, and looked as though a barber had never touched it-as though, like Samson, his strength and power resided there. It gave his head an odd, uplifted appearance, as if some great force were rushing up through his being and trying to escape out the top, like a geyser or a volcano just ready to erupt. But it was his eyes that held Mary Margaret, almost against her will; they were blue and astonishingly bright, frightening eyes that came out and struck at you and looked as if they could pierce your very soul. They struck at Mary Margaret and she looked down again. Isaac's eyes were different: slow and dreamy and not at all ironical like the eyes of other boys, the boys who looked as if you reminded them of some terrible joke and who made Mary Margaret draw in her lips and straighten her back and to

appear even taller than she already was.

The great river of the preacher's voice rose to the flood swell and

then subsided. "Amen," it said. Everyone looked up. The preacher was

smiling again.

"It's so nice to have you with us this fine morning," he said, and he cocked his head as if he were talking right to Mary Margaret. "So many of you have been on vacation lately that I've felt a little down,

looking out there and seeing those empty places." The voice droned on, friendly now, forgettable. Mary Margaret looked at Isaac, who sat alone, not watching his father, but with bowed head, as if he were praying. Mary Margaret bowed her head too. She looked at the hands folded across the straw purse and turned one over to examine it.

There were blisters on the palm, from holding so tight to the short wooden bar that pulled her up out of the water, a sign of the fear that each time had been prologue to the wild exhilaration. The back of her hand was smooth and brown. She thought of Sister Evangeline's gnarled hand fingering the beads of her rosary.

Mary Margaret looked up to find that now every other head was bowed. Reverend Horton had stepped forward, away from the pulpit, and his arms were stretched out straight ahead of him, like a sleep, walker's arms in a movie. He might have been a sleepwalker, for he did not look at his congregation now but stared glassv-eved, like one in a trance, toward the back of the church. He was saying something about the Ark of the Covenant, about being a humble vessel for carrying the

cast,

41

Word of the Lord. He said it like that: Word, with a capital. "And we pray, Lord," he said, "that we may humble ourselves in Thy sight and submit ourselves as instruments to Thy Great Purpose." His hands reached out in blessing or supplication and seemed to rest over Isaac's bowed head. Mary Margaret could see the fingers trembling.

Once Sister Evangeline had told them about going to a fortune, teller. It was in Ireland, long ago, and it happened quite by accident. It was a caravan of Tinkers, who Mary Margaret understood to be some, thing like Gypsies, dirty, swarthy people who went about in wagons and spoke a strange, guttural language almost impossible to under, stand. Sister Evangeline was just a girl and she was walking along the road with three of her friends. They could see the dust the caravan made long before they saw the wagons themselves, and when they saw it was Tinkers the other girls were frightened and wanted to turn around. But Sister Evangeline, who was always very bold, shamed them into going on. When they met the first wagon, the other girls were looking down at the road or out across the field, but Sister Evangeline looked right at the wagon, which pulled to a stop by them.

A man was driving, and the woman sitting next to him stuck out a dark bony hand and motioned Sister Evangeline to her. She said some' thing which Sister Evangeline finally understood to be an offer to tell her fortune for money. She held up her empty hand to show she had no money, and the woman grabbed it and held it tight. It was as cold as death, Sister Evangeline said; it felt like the Devil had hold of her hand. She looked into the woman's eyes and she could see the Devil there too. "Mother of God, protect me," she shouted at the woman's face and jerked her hand away and ran after her friends, who had already struck out across the open field.

Miss Purvey pushed a book in front of Mary Margaret and indicated a spot with her finger. "These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb," the minister read.

"And in their mouth was found no guile," the people responded, "for they are without fault before the throne of God." Mary Margaret looked up at Isaac's father. He held the book in his right hand and pointed skyward with his left. "And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven," he read. On the outstretched hand a

gold ring gleamed in the light.

Eventually Sister Evangeline's hands had grown so twisted and swollen and painful from arthritis that they had had to cut the gold band off her finger, the band that showed she had given herself to Christ, a happy, dour bride folded in cumbersome layers of white. The Bride of Christ, she had told them, twisting the ring on her knobby finger, the Bride of the Lamb.

42

The collection plate was in front of her before Mary Margaret could find the quarter in her purse, and she had to pass it on to Miss Purvey.

The organ started another tune, slow and soft and sad, and several members of the choir got up and changed places. It was so hot Mary Margaret didn't know how they could stand it in those robes. She felt boiling even in this dress, which was the coolest Sunday dress she owned. Her arms were still hot to the touch, feverish from her day in the sun. She wished she were back there now, floating in the lake, buoyed up by the life belt Sandra's mother had fastened on with her sure, capable-looking hands, watching the two little points of the skis sticking up out of the water in front of her.

The voice of the organ rose, the choir sang, a woman with black hair and a rapt look stepped forward for a solo. Reverend Horton sat in a chair against the dark curtain and looked straight ahead. Isaac was looking down again. Mary Margaret closed her eyes and floated, the sun throwing down its wet jewels around her.

The woman of the rapt look raised her voice in one final peal of praise, the organist lifted her weight and retreated softly. Miss Purvey sighed. Reverend Horton stood behind the pulpit. For a moment there was an immense silence. Mary Margaret stared over the pink shoulder of the woman in front of her to a place just under Isaac's left ear; her hands still gripped the purse on her lap as if she expected it to jump up and flyaway. Out of the depths of the silence, the preacher's voice rose like an explosion, thunderous and commanding. It grabbed Mary Margaret's eyes and pulled them away from the spot on Isaac's neck.

The preacher's eyes were as bright as two little fires in the white plain of his face. He spread his arms again and reached slightly forward.

"If any man worship the Beast and his image, and receive the mark of the Beast, that man, or woman, shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God. He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone before the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb." The voice exploded over them and the words settled on them like hot ash. Again, for a moment, there was silence. "There is nothing you can do, brothers and sisters," the voice said, swelling again, making a great wave to wash over them, "nothing in the world you can do to save yourselves from the mark of the Beast." His arms dropped, helplessly. "Paul warned the Hebrews that their offerings under the Old Law were vain and empty, that they could do nothing to save themselves." He shook his head at them, sadly. "Nothing," he said. "But do you know what?" he said, and a curious smile began to play around his mouth as if he'd just remem­ bered something important. "You don't have to save yourself." Then louder: "You don't have to save yourself. Did you know that?" His voice had grown high and shrill and it ended on an odd lilt. "No," he

43

breathed. "For though you are surrounded by the wicked, by liars and fornicators and idolators and drunkards-for as Paul tells the Ephes­ ians, the days are evil, 'For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord'-though you are surrounded by wickedness, the

Lord casts out the wicked from your midst and makes them drink of the wine of the wrath of God. He casts them out into exterior dark, ness, and He does this to save you, for you are those who have come out of great tribulation and have washed your robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." He paused and looked around him.

"The blood of the Lamb has sanctified you," he said.

Mary Margaret turned her eyes back to Isaac, who looked all white and gold and sanctified as his father said. She thought of Isaac's mother and wondered if what Reverend Horton said meant that he and Isaac had come through their tribulation. God gives us the strength to bear what we must, Sister Evangeline had said.

Sister Evangeline loved to talk better than anything, and when Mary Margaret had first known her, back in the third grade, she walked all the time too. Every day she led a great parade of children around the school yard, circling the playground again and again, adding children to her train as she went. As she talked, her twisted fingers would slip over the beads of the rosary that from her waist.

She would tell hung them of the most wonderful things, of the wild moors of Connemara; of her village in County Mayo where the people lived in cottages with dirt floors and where everyone was a Catholic and devout and crossed themselves when they passed the church; of a Holy Week procession through the ruined shell of an old monastery where wild flowers grew from the stones and the ghosts of old holy men could be seen at twilight, where she, a red-haired girl in a white dress, had thrown petals on the ground where the priest would walk, bearing the Blessed Sacrament.

Mary Margaret could hear Reverend Horton's voice but she had lost track of what he was saying. She had a bad habit of not listen, ing to sermons because she preferred being quiet and thinking. At St. Bridget's she liked to watch the sun make beautiful patterns on her hands through the stained glass; it was like praying inside a jewel.

She could kneel for hours with her face in her hands listening to the vague hum of the Latin, the regular, expected exchanges between priest and altar boy; or she could go into the church in the afternoon and kneel in the empty darkness, losing herself in the warm red glow of the sanctuary lamp. Yet she could never force herself to follow a sermon through, even a short one; and Reverend Horton's showed no indication of being one of those. She tried to concentrate on his bright eyes the way she concentrated on the altar candles at Mass, 44

looking until her whole being was focused in those two pinpoints of light.

The two flames danced in front of her, tiny beacons on a dim sea of waves, like the heat waves that stretched across the broad horizon and made a shimmering lake at the edges of the world. The voice rose and

fell, as distant as the points of light, murmurous, monotonous, yet compelling, pulling her forward, out across the waves to some distant, unimagined place. Mary Margaret closed her eyes and gave herself up to the power of the voice, rising, falling, now thunderous, now barely rippling the sea it had made. The waves spread to the pit of her stomach and rose through her chest, then broke in little patches of dampness all over her body. It was so hot and still that she could hardly breathe. She opened her eyes. Isaac's father stood there, his right hand in the air, his voice rising. She blinked and looked hard.

"The way to truth lies in submission and humility," Reverend Horton was saying, now stretching both arms toward them. "We must open ourselves to the Lord and let Him work His great Plan through us. And if temptation come to you, know it is part of His Plan and

submit yourself to the Lord's rule here too, as Job did. And keep your eye on the Plan and the Goal, for you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light. And know it is God's Plan that you cast out the unclean from your midst, though it destroy your own flesh. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Cast it from you though it be your own flesh, and know it is the will of the Lord."

Reverend Horton stopped and sighed deeply and drew his hands across his breast like the pictures of the girl martyrs. Miss Purvey echoed his sigh; Mary Margaret could see a tear gleaming on her pale lash, poised to roll helplessly down her cheek. The red fan lay closed on her lap. Then the preacher reached his arms out again and looked up at the ceiling. "Lord," he said, "I cast myself down before Thee and submit myself to Thy will that I may pluck out the offending eye and walk in the ways of the righteous." But he did not cast himself down; he just stood there with his eyes on the ceiling, looking transfixed, as though any minute God might pull him up into heaven as proof of his righteousness. Miss Purvey sighed again and even Sandra sat very still, watching. Mary Margaret's cheeks burned from the stifling air, the press of bodies, and some secret shame she could not even identify.

God gives us the strength to bear what we must. But Mary Margaret did not know what she was called upon to bear; she could not even guess at it. It would be far easier to bear anything, she thought, than this empty mystery, this useless waiting for she did not know what.

Once, long ago, Sister Evangeline had told Mary Margaret and her friends how her hair had been bright and fiery red and had hung to her 45

waist when she was a girl. And how when she took the veil she had cut it off short, as short as a boy's, and

wept. Mary Margaret almost wept she listened. She thought what a fine sacrifice to Our Lord it would be, cutting off all your hair like that. A splendid sacrifice. She decided then and there she would take the veil too and cut off her hair, though it was brown and wispy and barely reached her shoulders.

The preacher suddenly dropped his hands and looked down from the ceiling, back at his congregation. His voice was gentle and slow, as though he were thinking out what he had to say. "You know," he said, "I have a story to tell you and I think it will warm your heart as it warmed mine. It's a true story about a man, a fine Christian that I met on my travels last month, and about how he submitted himself to the Lord's Plan. I had the privilege, as you know, of preaching in one of the fine churches in Houston. After the service that morning a great many people crowded around and told me what the sermon had meant to them and I felt overwhelming gratitude that the Lord had chosen to use me to instill the Word in those Christian hearts. Out of all those people one man in particular came up and wrung my hand and said, 'Brother Horton, your sermon has struck me to the soul for it is my own story.' I had preached that morning as I preached to you today about submission to the Lord's will. 'Brother Horton,' that man said to me, 'the Lord has cast out the old man and the new man has been born in me and my heart is filled with the glory of God.' And my friends, I could see the glory of God shine forth in his eyes. It was wonderful. This man invited me to take breakfast at his home the next morning. He said he would pick me up. Well, you can imagine my surprise [here Reverend Horton smiled broadly] when he did not pick me up himself but sent his chauffeur instead. The chauffeur was a white man, all dressed in a uniform with gold braid, and he put me in the back of a long black Cadillac limousine and drove me to the home of the man who had spoken to me after church. That home was like an estate, my friends, surrounded by great walls and a big iron gate that a uniformed guard opened so we could pass through. We drove up a long, winding driveway lined with tall trees and finally reached me house itself. Friends, I have never seen a house like that. It was a mansion: marble halls, paintings on the wall, fine draperies, servants. I had breakfast alone with my friend. We prayed together."

Reverend Horton stopped and bowed his head. Perhaps he was recalling their prayer. Isaac had bowed his head too. Miss Purvey took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her face. Now she looked happy. "Brothers and sisters, I tell you I have not met a more godly man," Reverend Horton said, looking up again. "I wish you all could know him. His humility was overwhelming. It would be hard for you

too as

46

believe it, seeing him today, but he told me how he had been marked by the Beast-those were his very words-and how a miracle of God had saved him. Once he was given over to Mammon and his iniquities, his whole life taken up with the making of money and caring nothing for the works of the Lord and Christian fellowship. He was often drunk with wine, and he was stained with the filth of fornication. For though he had a wife, he kept another woman for his illicit pleasure. 'I lived the filth and the abomination,' he said to me, and with such humility that it made me want to shed tears."

Miss Purvey gave her face another wipe; Sandra stretched forward,

to

waiting.

"Then

one

day God visited a judgment upon him," Reverend

Horton said. "His wife was driving the car and she too was drunk with wine. Ah, the wine of the Lord's indignation, the wine of the wrath of

God. She lost control of the car and it turned over. She was killed instantly, but he woke up in the hospital three days later. When he opened his eyes, there was a nurse standing beside his bed, and in her white she looked like an angel of mercy. He took it as a sign and knew God had spared him for some purpose. He took the nurse's hand and they prayed together. When he left the hospital, he married the nurse, for she was young and innocent and untouched by the filth of the world. He calls her Angel, his Angel. Together they devote themselves to doing good with his money. The sweetness between them is a glorious thing to behold. That morning, before we left, I sat on the terrace of that grand mansion and watched him and his Angel do what they do every morning. They walked through the garden and with their own hands cut bouquets of the most beautiful flowers, and he took those bouquets into the limousine with us when we went to the city, and the chauffeur stopped at a hospital and, while my friend and I waited, took the flowers in to be given to the sick people there. He stops at a different hospital or nursing home every day, on the way to his office." Again Reverend Horton paused, and everyone around Mary Margaret sighed. Even Sandra sighed.

Mary Margaret thought of the big dark limousine, laden with flowers like a hearse, and wished she had paid closer attention to the beginning of the sermon. The brightness of the long white room seemed sud­ denly blinding; she SQuinted up at the preacher. The fire in his eyes had died and he smiled a small, bland, vaguely satisfied smile. Mary Margaret formed in her mind the picture of an angel, white-robed and smiling wanly, diaphanous, carrying a huge bouquet-of what, white roses or red?-in its translucent angel hands. She looked down at her own hands, still grasping the straw purse in her lap. The air was close and heavy and still.

47

Again the preacher's voice broke the hot air. "I have a son," he said, and Mary Margaret's head flew up to look. "Corne here, boy," said Reverend Horton, but Isaac sat motionless. "Corne here," the preach, repeated and reached out his hand. Isaac stood up and walked to his father. Reverend Horton touched him on the shoulder and turned him to face the congregation. Mary Margaret swallowed hard, trying to force down the pounding of her heart. She wondered if Isaac could see her. But Isaac was looking over the heads of the congregation; he seemed to see nothing at all.

"The Lord gave me a son," Reverend Horton said, and he put his arm around Isaac's shoulder. Isaac stood rigid as a statue, his eyes ahead.

"What a fine' looking boy," Reverend Horton said, his straight voice soft now, confidential. "Don't you think I am tempted to look at this boy and be proud? I go to those football games and hear the people cheering and I know it's because of this boy. Don't you think I am tempted to rejoice? I look around me and I stop and think, that is son down there.

The Lord has this great talent: he son my given my can run with a football." He turned and looked at Isaac. "This boy is dedicated to football," he said. "I have seen him so sore that he could hardly crawl into bed at night. I have seen him hit so hard that they had to carry him off the field. I have watched him take off his shirt and show a side that looked like raw meat. And I have prayed when I saw it that in like manner he would submit himself to the Lord. For even the Lord's mercy is a scourge of the flesh." Reverend Horton released Isaac and drew his hands together as if he were invoking God's scourge out of the heavy air.

"Don't you think I am tempted to look at this boy and be proud?"

Reverend Horton asked again. "Yes," he said, "to forget like a father.

To fall into the sin of pride over outward things and forget what I know in my heart-that corruption and rottenness run in the boy's blood like a disease that must be scourged out of him." He put a hand on Isaac's shoulder and stood for a moment, looking at him. "When the Lord gave me this boy, He sent me a sign, a warning. The boy was born with a mark, just on the inside of his forearm. It was big on his little arm." The preacher measured the size with his free hand, thumb and index finger extended in the air, three inches apart. "It was brown and ragged. It looked like a withered leaf or a flame that had burned itself to ashes. It looked dead. I stood there looking at it and I knew that even in that white, soft, innocent-looking baby's flesh there was corruption. Corruption and death. And I began to pray to the Lord to give me strength, for I knew that one day He would test me as He had tested others before me. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. That is the Lord's command. So I named the boy Isaac in token of my

er

48

willingness to submit myself to the will of the Lord. To pluck out the corruption even if it be my own flesh."

His hand seemed to grip Isaac's shoulder harder and Mary Margaret

felt her own hand tightening on the purse. "I prayed to the Lord to free me from the corrupt flesh, to cast it from me, and to clothe me in those pure and downy robes that have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. And the Lord in His Providence, out of the depths of His infinite Mystery, pardy answered my prayer. But not in a way I expected, for the Lord's answers are a scourge and a test and forever mysterious to men." The flicker of a grim smile passed over his face and was gone. "And the Lord seemed to say He was not finished with me yet. That the day of darkness is long but I must walk as a child of the light."

Reverend Horton took his hand from Isaac's shoulder, stopped, and looked at him hard. "Show them your arm, boy," he said. But Isaac just stood there; he did not seem to hear. The color had faded from his face; he looked as cold and bloodless as the marble angel on the altar at St. Bridget's. Then Reverend Horton took Isaac's hand, which hung down like a dead thing, and in one quick motion pushed up the sleeve and held high the arm. "Look," he said. There was a faint brown splotch on Isaac's arm, hardly noticeable against the summer tan.

Mary Margaret could feel her heart beat wildly again, from anger now, and all the blood that had fled Isaac's cheeks rushed into hers, hot and tingling. He hadn't the right, she thought, even if he was Isaac's father.

"You think this boy is innocent?" the preacher said, still holding Isaac's arm high. "You think he is clean because you can accuse him of no foul act? Well, I accuse him. I am his father, and I say to you that he is as the whited sepulchre: within this pure-seeming outside is the filthy stench of corruption. Pollution runs in his blood like a disease.

It is in his blood, I tell you; he sucked corruption in the womb. The Mark of the Beast is upon him." He shook the offending arm. "And the Lord in His infinite mercy will either save him or, in His justice, cast him out into exterior darkness, as He has cast others before him."

He let go of the arm, and it dropped like a weight.

Isaac stood straight beside his father and stared over Mary Mar­ garet's head. His eyes had the lost, glassy look she had seen after they found his mother, but then they had seemed to be searching for something and now they were blank, looking straight ahead at noth­ ingness. Isaac looked shrunken, as though his father's words had drained him of life and strength and youth and left him a pale specter.

A figure she had met in a dream, the face shining but unearthly. Like the glow of death she had seen at last on the face of Sister Evangeline.

"I can't scourge the corruption out of him," the preacher said.

49

"That is the Lord's job. All I can do is pray. And ask you to pray for this boy that he be not lost to the Lord."

Mary Margaret's cheeks burned in anger and humiliation. She wanted to stand up and shout at Reverend Horton that he knew nothing at all about God and the Devil and saving your immortal soul.

That he wasn't making any sense at all. She closed her eyes and saw herself standing up and denouncing Reverend Horton, then walking calmly to the front and taking Isaac by the hand, leading him away from his father, out of this ugly, hot, oppressive place. Running, she with her white dress streaming behind her, her hair long and loose and blown back like a banner, Isaac golden and swift and free, released like joy. They would run down the aisle and out the door and keep running, through fields and green pastures and over hills alive with flowers until they reached somewhere. But where? She searched in her mind for the place but she could not put them where she wanted to, in the old ruined monastery where the ghosts of holy men walk at twilight. She could not see how they would go or where they would end up.

The insistent tug of the preacher's voice pulled her back to the hot glare of the church, to the figure of Isaac as cold as alabaster under the harsh light. The preacher was looking at Isaac. "The man who will gain glory must first submit his flesh to chastisement," he said, almost shouted now. "He must beg the Lord to whip the carnal weakness out of him."

Isaac seemed to sway from him, and Mary Margaret's own head felt loose and detached. She could hear the preacher's voice rising, pulling her: "Lord, whip the offending flesh out of him that he be not cast into everlasting darkness." But her head swam out and away and the voice became a murmur, dim and distant. Something clattered to the floor; she felt the cold wetness of her own palms upon her cheeks.

Then a great weight pressed on the back of her neck, pushing her down. "Between your knees, get your head between your knees," the voice hissed. "You're as white as a ghost." The weight held her down, near the floor, and something swept the hair from the back of her neck. A rush of wind reached her back, her neck, and her head swam back, faltering, to its place on her shoulders. She opened her eyes.

Miss Purvey's knees looked as if they'd melted in the heat and run down into her ankles. The toe of one white pump pointed to the straw purse, which lay on its side, its contents strewn on the floor-a comb, two quarters, some bobby pins, a cracked mirror. Mary Margaret sighed and sank into the softness beside her. The preacher's voice had stopped and the organ had begun. With an extended shuffle the congregation rose to sing and the weight lifted itself from her neck.

50

She sat up. Miss Purvey was leaning over her, fanning hard. Her forehead was wrinkled and she pursed her lips in a determined way.

Sandra patted her on the arm and Sandra's mother reached across to say, "It's almost over. Are you going to be all right?" Mary Margaret nodded. "She'll be all right, she just got too hot," Miss Purvey said, and handed Mary Margaret the fan. Then she stood up and began to sing in the voice that lay hidden deep within her.

Mary Margaret looked up but she could not see Isaac for the people standing in front of her. The music swept over her, but she did not try to listen to the words. She had not been sick in church since the summer she made her First Communion. Then she was sick every Sunday, from the heat and the fasting. It was so regular that Mama had taken to carrying a damp washcloth in her purse. But this was dif­ ferent, Mary Margaret knew, and it bore no hope of comfort. She looked down at the fan in her lap. It was bright red and covered with an Oriental scene, a man, a woman, a little boat on one side and three large blossoms-lotus blossoms perhaps-on the other. The man and the woman seemed distant and remote, obscured by the exotic, fleshy flowers. They seemed to be set adrift in a sea the sun had turned to blood, journeying to a distant place Mary Margaret could not even imagine. She closed her eyes but still she could see the bright red of the fan, like the waves of red that rose threateningly inside her. With her eyes closed she looked hard, trying to reach that place of cool, oblique whiteness where prayer dwelt, but her vision was stained by the sea of blood and the fine red fall of cruelly severed hair.

51

ttThe Murder of Laius" from Sophocles' Oedipus the King Translated by Robert Fagles

At this point in the play Oedipus begins to fear that the man he murdered years ago was Laius, the former king of Thebes, but he still has no idea that his victim was his father.

Jocasta For the love of god,

Oedipus, tell me too, what is it?

Why this rage? You're so unbending.

Oedipus I will tell you. I respect you, jocasta,

much more than these

...

(Glancing at the Chorus.)

Creon's to blame, Creon schemes against me.

Jocasta Tell me clearly, how did the quarrel start?

Oedipus He says I murdered Laius-I am guilty.

jocasta How does he know? Some secret knowledge or

52

simple hearsay?

Oedipus Oh, he sent his prophet in do his dirty work. You know Creon, Creon keeps his own lips clean.

to

Jocasta A prophet?

Well then, free yourself of every charge!

Listen to me and learn some peace of mind: no skill in the world, nothing human can penetrate the future.

Here is proof, quick and to the point.

An oracle came to Laius one fine day

(I won't say from Apollo himself but his underlings, his priests) and it said that doom would strike him down at the hands of a son, our son, to be born of our own flesh and blood. But Laius, so the report goes at least, was killed by strangers, thieves, at a place where three roads meet my sonhe wasn't three days old and the boy's father fastened his ankles, had a henchman fling him away on a barren, trackless mountain. ..

.

There, you see?

Apollo brought neither thing to pass. My baby no more murdered his father than Laius suffered­ his wildest fear-death at his son's hands.

That's how the seers and their revelations mapped out the future. Brush them from your mind.

Whatever the god needs and seeks he'll bring to light himself, with ease.

Oedipus Strange,

hearing you just now my mind wandered, back and forth. my thoughts racing .

.

.

Jocasta What do you mean? Why so anxious, startled?

Oedipus I thought 1 heard you say that Laius was cut

down at a place where three roads meet.

53

Jocasta

That was the story. It hasn't died out yet.

Oedipus Where did this thing happen? Be precise.

Jocasta A place called Phocis, where two branching roads, one

from Daulia, one from Delphi, together-a crossroads.

come

Oedipus When? How long ago?

Jocasta The heralds no sooner reported Laius dead than you appeared and they hailed you king of Thebes.

Oedipus My god, my god-what have you planned to do to me?

Jocasta What, Oedipus? What haunts you so?

Oedipus Not yet.

Laius-how did he look? Describe him.

Had he reached his prime?

Jocasta He was swarthy,

and the gray had just begun to streak his temples, wasn't far from yours. and his build ...

Oedipus Oh no no, I think I've just called down a dreadful curse upon

myself-I simply didn't know!

Jocasta

What are you saying? I shudder to look at you.

54

Oedipus I have a terrible fear the blind seer can see.

I'll know in a moment. One thing more-

Joca&ta

Anything, afraid as I am-ask, I'll answer, all I can.

Oedipus Did he go with a light or heavy escort, several men-at-arms, like a lord, a king?

Jocasta There were five in the party, a herald among them, and a single wagon carrying Laius.

Oedipus Ainow

I can see it all, clear

as

day.

Who told you all this at the time, Jocasta?

Jocasta A servant who reached home, the lone survivor.

Oedipus So, could he still be in the palace-even now?

Jocasta No indeed. Soon as he returned from the scene and saw you on the throne with Laius dead and gone, he knelt and clutched my hand, pleading with me to send him into the hinterlands, to pasture, far as possible, out of sight of Thebes.

I sent him away. Slave though he was,

he'd earned that favor-and much more.

Can we bring him back,

Oedipus quickly?

Joca&ta Easily. Why do you want him so?

55

Oedipus I'm afraid,

jocasra, I have said too much already.

That man-I've got to see him.

Jocasta Then he'll come.

But even I have a right, I'd like to think, to

know what's torturing you, my lord.

Oedipus And so you shall-I can hold nothing back from you, now I've reached this pitch of dark foreboding.

Who means more to me than you? Tell me, whom would I turn toward but you as I go through all this?

My father was Polvbus, king of Corinth.

My mother, a Dorian, Merope. And I was held the prince of the realm among the people there, till something struck me out of nowhere, worth remarking perhaps, something strange hardly worth the anxiety I gave it.

Some man at a banquet who had drunk too much ...

shouted out-he was far gone, mind youthat I am not my father's son. Fighting words!

I barely restrained myself that day but early the next I went to mother and father, questioned them closely, and they were enraged at the accusation and the fool who let it fly.

So as for my parents I was satisfied, but still this thing kept gnawing at me, the slander spread-I had to make my move.

And so, unknown to mother and father I set out for Delphi, and the god Apollo spurned me, sent me away denied the facts I came for, but first he flashed before my eyes a future great with pain, terror, disaster-I can hear him cry, "Y ou are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see­ you will kill your father, the one who gave you life!"

I heard all that and ran. I abandoned Corinth, 56

from that day on I gauged its landfall only by the stars, running, always running toward some place where I would never see the shame of all those oracles come true.

And as I fled I reached that very spot where the great king, you say, met his death.

Now, Jocasta, I will tell you all.

Making my way toward this triple crossroad I began to see a herald, then a brace of colts drawing a wagon, and mounted on the bench

...

a

man,

just as you've described him, coming face to face, and the one in the lead and the old man himself were about to thrust me off the road-brute forceand the one shouldering me aside, the driver, I strike him in anger! And the old man, watching me coming up along his wheels-he brings down his prod, two prongs straight at my head!

I paid him back with interest!

Short work, by god-with one blow of the staff in this right hand I knock him out of his high seat, roll him out of the wagon, sprawling headlong.

I killed them all=-everv mother's son!

Oh, but if there is any blood-tie between Laius and this stranger what man alive more miserable than I? More hated by the gods? I am the man no alien, no citizen welcomes to his house, law forbids it-not a word to me in public, driven out of every hearth and home.

And all these curses I-no one but I­ brought down these piling curses on myself!

And you, his wife, I've touched your body with these, the hands that killed your husband cover you with blood. ...

Wasn't I born for torment? Look me in the eyes!

I am abomination-heart and soul!

I must be exiled, and even in exile my parents, never set foot native earth again. Else I'm doomed

never see on

couple with my mother and cut my father down Polvbus who reared me, gave me life. to

...

57

But why, why?

Wouldn't a man of judgment say-and wouldn't he be right­ some savage power has brought this down upon my head?

Oh no, not that, you pure and awesome gods, never let me see that day! Let me slip from the world of men, vanish without a trace before I see myself stained with such corruption, stained to the heart.

Leader fill our hearts with fear.

My lord, you But at least until you question the witness, do take hope.

Oedipus Exactly. He is my last hope­ I'm waiting for the shepherd. He is crucial.

Jocasta And once he appears, what then? Why so urgent?

Oedipus I'll tell you. If it turns out that his story matches yours, I've escaped the worst.

Jocasta What did I say? What struck you so?

Oedipus You said rhieves­ he told you a whole band of them murdered Laius.

So, if he still holds to the same number, I cannot be the killer. One can't equal many.

But if he refers to one man, one alone, clearly the scales come down on me: I am guilty.

Jocasta

Impossible. Trust me, I told you precisely what he said,

and he can't retract it now; the whole city heard it, not just I. 58

And even if he should vary his first report

by one man more or less, still, my lord, he could never make the murder of Laius truly fit the prophecy. Apollo was explicit: my son, my son was doomed to kill my husband a chance had defenseless he never thing, poor to kill his father. They destroyed him first. ...

So much for prophecy. It's neither here nor there.

From this day on, I wouldn't look right or left.

Oedipus True, true. Still, that shepherd, someone

fetch him-now!

Jocasta I'll send at once. But do let's go inside.

I'd never displease you, least of all in this.

(Oedipus and Jocasta enter the palace.)

My thanks to Bernard Knox for his helpful criticism of the translation.-R.F.

59

Five poem.s Teresa Cader

I am not afraid to tell you I am sixteen

take my ten minute break without coffee, my lunch on a thin bench in a room with no windows, while summer lifts a wan head, nods from the trees' shadows.

Beneath a steel fan whose blades like sickles chop the burning air, I listen to blue-haired women cursing their children who loiter on street corners

play pinball in alleys.

In my mind I am stranded train track in Warsaw, and when my aunt fetches me with her eau de cologne, black-seamed stockings, fur hat, she tells me I must live in her silk parlor, eat raspberries, play the violin at dusk.

I dream this dream the way I live my life: eyes open, on a

looking into my own eyes.

60

I try not to see in this factory

symbol of anything else, how light comes to us from behind, for instance, and we catch each other's faces in it, then look away, trolley tracks cut in the wood floors, at the end of the day a siren, and so the girdles I hang on hangers this summer are only girdles, my body on the rack, only my body, and I am not afraid to tell you I wake at night cupping my life in my hands. a

61

"Shame, shame

...

and girls, too"

-Principal, Parkway School for Peggy Brink Warner

I remember bananas-everywhere,

oozing from my hair, eyelids, thick smears on

my

high socks, a clump in my left nostril,

the slime of banana in my earI remember swimming in gold, your face covered with banana, the windows of our yellow school bus, vinyl seats, and the ridged floor Harry Rickenbauer later slipped on to break his coccyx, how good it felt when the whole bus cheered as I stuffed a handful down your jacket.

What I don't remember is how it started, what energy in October air made us want to turn the color of sunburned leaves, who broke the first peel, lobbed the first splattering pellet.

I was playing as if my life depended upon it.

And maybe it did. After twenty years I saw you yesterday, and it was like home, all it was, and wasn't.

62

Let the dead bury their dead

Auschwitz, 1977

I am riding to Oswiecim

through pastures where horses munch grass.

I see thatched roofs, houses that resemble my

father's,

purple foothills of the Carpathian mountains.

I am riding in the limousine of an American senator.

See, he says, this country is so beautiful, I love the people and look at these villages.

At the gate

with a number his forearm takes our money.

We find sour coffee in the cafeteria, a man on

purchase our movie tickets.

What are we here to see, I think, and walk into the auditorium.

People speak in Polish, Russian, English, Italian, and French.

I hear little, as if all

language were incomprehensible.

Next to me sits an American friend, the senator, and a German.

We do not speak to him, he speaks to no one.

63

He holds one red rose.

At the children's memorial he lays his rose on a pile of roses.

I see a glass case of baby clothes, metal cups, small gold bracelets.

The senator is talking to the Italians.

I hate this German and want to know who he is.

In a corridor lined with inmates' photographs, I see the familiar red of my friend's jacket.

She is staring at one

picture.

It's my family name,

she says, and Eva Dombrowska stares back at us.

She was crying.

Her eyes still frighten.

We pass wooden doors in a hallway of cells, the gouges that fingernails ripped from layers of oak.

This is the cell of a Catholic priest, the guide tells us, who saved the life

of a father of five by volunteering be executed.

Roses line the floor.

to

I cannot stand the sight of roses.

64

In a house in New Jersey

father rocks in his cloth chair, listens to Mozart and looks at me from a blackness he has no name for. my

I have no

name

for it either.

A young woman

named Mala Zimetbaum escaped with her lover, hid in the cafes of Oswiecim for weeks, took a room, and there with the dogs at her door, the 55 in the streets, a cloud of burning bodies, made love for days if every thrust, her own wet flesh could save her. as

They were found in a cafe and executed separately.

I am Mala Zimetbaum,

Eva Dombrowska, my father with his

unutterable knowledge, the American senator, that German and I think I understand

only simple things­ grief in New Jersey,

how it feels when I am so tight in my

groin,

I sink into my own screaming,

everything disappears.

65

In a house of strangers Slivovitz, he says, embarrassed by his English,

though I am grateful anyone speaks to me.

I hold the thick glass to my lips, nod.

Across the room Stella Gardulski the welder's wife cuts

bread, sausage, ham,

coffee in frail cups.

Do you hatJe a job? a man asks me in Polish, and Stella Gardulski confused tells them I am a trapeze artist.

They tell me how thin I am, how strong my arms must be.

Alone this time I think, yes, I could be your trapeze artist, look up at the top of the tent, that is my body, flat on the curve, serves

I am falling now,

catch me.

66

Night watch for Marieve Rugo

In this darkening city, lights

close around you, an arc of voices, the pale fumes of anaesthesia. Already they gather in the green corridors, whispers, a forbidden language in an occupied country. Beyond the doors, in the silent wells of bone and tissue, you hover in the night air, a delicate breath connecting you to the stream of voices, to your husband and parents, to your children sleeping cautiously in their beds. Oh, my friend, if I could carry you back from that still world, I would have nothing to offer for your years of pain, except my fear, the cry in my throat, the whisper of your name long after all of this is gone.

67

A John Cage Reader in celebration of his 70th birthday 70

Preface

Jonathan Brent 73

John Cage the composer Peter Gena

"Uuimpededness and Interpenetration": the poetic of John Cage Marjorie Perloff

76

John Cage, nature, and theater

89

Natalie Crohn Schmitt

John Cage and the way of the ear

110

M. C. Richards 122

H. C. E. (Here Comes Everybody) Morton Feldman in conversation with Peter Gena

Under the influence Christian Wolff

145

Choice and change in Cage's recent music William Brooks

148

John Cage's recent violin music Paul Zuko{sky

167

A collaborative process between music and dance

173

Merce Cunningham

Etchings John Cage

At 186

"Changes and Disappearances" Lilah Toland Changing art: a chronicle centered on John Cage Kathan Brown

189

A kaleidoscope on the art of John Cage

200

Stephen Addiss 68

187

Talking about Writings through Finnegans Wake John Cage and Richard Kostelanetz

208

John Cage: a view of my own

217

Minna Lederman

John Cage the mycologist

231

Alexander H. Smith

Publication of A John Cage Reader has been made

possible by a generous grant from the Woods Charitable Fund, lnc., of Chicago.

69

Preface to A John Cage Reader

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.-George Eliot One philosopher has recently speculated that today we face a collec­ tive choice between

freely recognizing the nihilistic truth .of the modern world, on the one hand, or shrinking back from this truth into a mentality dominated by kitsch, on the other To choose recogni­ tion is to realize the paradoxical nature of our freedom; to shrink from recognition is to reimmerse ourselves in the familiarities of self­ .

*

deception.

Perhaps this choice is not always visible or even always present in the exigent forms of daily life; and yet something like this choice has inform the situation of contemporary literary culture and literary publishing as well. Gerald Graff and other critics have written about the increasing "ghettoization" of literature and the arts which has greatly weakened the discourse of general cultural inquiry at the same time that it has led to a deepening sense that the various individ­ ual arts have less and less to tell us about the world we live in and have therefore become more and more superfluous. One effect of this ghettoization has been to render both society at large and artists and intellectuals in particular more ignorant of the world than they need be.

In recent years, this ignorance (for it can be given no other name) has manifested itself in a general refusal by established cultural institu­ tions to venture far beyond rather specific and prescribed boundaries of interest. Little magazine publishing in particular (there are excep­ tions, such as Salmagundi and Performing Arts Journal) seems to have come

*

to

Karsten Harries, The

1965).

70

Meaning of Modem Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

lost that capacity for multidimensional thinking, as Paul Klee termed it, which in the great days of The Partisan Re�iew or The Kenyon �ew, for instance, was one of its peculiar strengths; that is, little literary magazines could and did act as points of nexus among the arts and general cultural affairs. As such, they helped stimulate the impulse toward the kind of criticism which is synthetic rather than textual and which, as practiced by writers such as Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, was capable of adjusting a vision of our culture to the evidence presented by our arts. If this criticism could not provide analytic certainty about texts, it could provide a necessary impetus for self-awareness about our beliefs, actions and desires without which a culture stagnates and becomes rigid.

It is hoped that many readers of TriQuarterly will find it self-evident that the ideas and works of John Cage are significantly related to their more general literary and cultural interests. But others, perhaps most, will not feel this relevance so strongly; and some will not feel it at all.

Nevertheless, in view of the situation which I have sketched out above, it seemed to us at TnQuarterly that there was good cause for acknowledging the accomplishments of Cage in a magazine that in the course of the past eighteen years has devoted itself principally to the publication of fiction, poetry and literary criticism.

At a time when the very possibility of cultural and artistic centrality has been questioned, Cage has continued to occupy a central position in modern artistic self-awareness. He has done so, not by insisting upon dogmatic adherence to certain ideas, but rather by clearing new spaces for the imagination and winning new freedoms for the activity of art. In particular, Cage has consistently attempted to awaken art, and the consciousness which accompanies it, to the realities of the contemporary world. He has attempted to incorporate an awareness of modern technology, social dynamics and the artifacts of daily life into his music, poetry and art. He has listened to the roar which, as George Eliot told us, lies on the other side of silence. And by so doing, he has brought into the spectrum of artistic forms new possibilities of self,

recognition.

This is an accomplishment which cuts across the divisions ordinar­ ily thought to separate the arts from one another. Nevertheless, this accomplishment has gone to a great extent unappreciated, particularly in this country, by all but a rather specialized group of aficionados and disciples. Despite the fact that Cage has written numerous books of poetry and essays, and despite the obvious impression of his ideas upon a multiplicity of different media, it is safe to say that he goes almost entirely unacknowledged in current discussions of literary work. It is commonly known that he is regarded more highly in 71

Europe than in America. In Europe he is seen as characteristically American; in America he is seen as an anomaly.

It was, then, as much with a desire to celebrate

Cage's seventieth

birthday as to break through the provincial attitudes dominating so much current literary discussion that we decided to assemble the collection of essays which follows. Cage is indisputably a figure who has sought at all times to usurp the settled boundaries of our ignorance and to absorb a distinct, wholly contemporary awareness of life into his art. We need not like or assent to what his work tells us about the world or ourselves, but we must listen to it and respond and see ourselves in its light. And once one engages in this process, the question of Cage's relevance to a literary journal answers itself.

The essays that follow were solicited with an eye toward examining the almost alarming breadth of Cage's interests and

accomplishments mycology and even mac­ robiotic cookery. This collection contains, we hope, reflections both on the man and his work which help to set him in a proper relation­ ship both to the arts and to his age.-Jonathan Brent in music, theater, literature, the visual arts,

72

John Cage the composer Peter Gena

About ten years ago, during a composition lesson in Morton Feld­ man's apartment, I remember lifting from his piano a score of an early piece by Erik Satie. The unmetered music had no written tempo indications whatsoever, yet the last chord was clearly meant to be held for seven counts. Morty sat down and played that final sonority.

"There it is," he said. I understood immediately. A pulse emerged as a result of interference patterns among the pitches which made up the chord. This also signified that different pianos would produce slightly varying tempi. Satie left himself, the performer, and the lis, tener open to discovery, a characteristic increasingly evident in his later music.

This is what is always being uncovered in John Cage's work, dis, covery and invention. At a time when American composers were in

the throes of an academic "complexity complex"-a fastidious de' mand for order, a passion for controls, an allegiance to the traditions of Europe-Cage saw the virtues of simplicity, disorder, chance, and Eastern philosophy. He exhibited originality, while accepting the premise that nothing is ever new. He pursued freedom, but only through rigorous discipline, and he created an environment for gifted performers to explore .heir own creativity, rather than expose their egos. Sounds now could appear naturally without positions of super' ioritv or subordination. Western music practitioners had come to assume that musical sophistication was possible only with the con' struction of complex schemes, hierarchical progressions, etc. Absence of such "sophistication" has often been attributed to a lack of ex, perience or knowledge of tradition, rather than a valid departure \from it. Perhaps to do what he did, Cage, like Satie, had to know

nothing-or everything. He advocates anti-composition, though never anti-art.

There were also the misunderstandings. Many composers made fools of themselves by confusing freedom with the unleashing of ego.

73

Certainly we all sat through a vast number of "free" pieces and Happenings in the sixties and seventies when composer and performers

alike imposed their actions on the musical environment. Similarly, I pianist who, while conversing in the lobby during the intermission of his recital, announced that he was in the process of performing "John Cage's silent piece" (4' 33"). What about those who would suggest that this commemorative issue should have consisted of nothing but blank pages? And to this day there are composer/ performers who justify the results of a sloppy technique or poor execution by saying, "It's all part of the music." Indeed it was quite common, even fashionable, to credit such license to John Cage.

The contributors to this volume provide the necessary contempo­ rary perspective on the philosophy, ideas, and attitudes of Cage. In addition, however, there are aspects of Cage the composer that can be easily categorized and documented. A look at his very prolific musical output (this year also marks his fiftieth as a composer) induces a once heard about a

musicological urge to segment his complete oeuvres into periods somewhat similar (and here I beg his forgiveness) to Beethoven's. In the early period (up to 1951) masterpieces in the tradition of the "classical" American experimentalists were produced. The Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48) for prepared piano have become a fixture of the repertoire. The String Quartet in Four Parts ( 1950) is a unique piece of Americana which, in my opinion, eclipses even the most nation, alistic of Aaron Copland's music. The "second period," which could encompass the Music of Changes (1951) through HPSCHD (jointly composed with Lejaren Hiller, 1969) is perhaps again analogous to Beethoven's in that it has provided more profound inspiration to the younger composers than the early or recent music. 4' 33'" (1952), in fact, may be the third milestone in the history of Western music (the first being the development of musical notation, before 1000 A.D.; the second being the invention of sound recordings).

Much of the recent music has a retrospective quality about it (e.g.

Etudes Australes, 1974-1975; or even Roaratorio, 1979). Here, any similarity with Beethoven ends. In his late music, Beethoven was preoccupied with what Adorno described as the struggle between self, determination and classical formal structure. He idealistically pre' ferred an "enlightened" monarchy for Austria. Cage, on the other hand, consolidates self-discipline and disorder; he optimistically em' braces anarchy.

Today, we must also appreciate Cage's optimism toward life and art.

He freed the elements of art through much hard work, and his all, inclusive outlook is a positive force in general artistic development.

We can now enjoy the presence of minimalism, conceptualism, new

74

tonality, realism, indeterminacy, and so on, all at once. His openness assures us that this pluralism need not be construed as a dilution of a radical force in art, or as a new conservatism. Cage not only ex­ panded the boundaries of music, but he christened a common ground for all of the arts and in doing so he has had an enlivening impact on culture. His impact, however, comes not from culture, but from life itself.

75

"Uriimpededness and Interpenetration": the poetic of John Cage Marjorie Perloff

-One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be

done. I

John Hollander, reviewing Silence for Perspectives 0/ New Music in 1963, complained that, however amusing and inventive Cage's verbal and musical compositions may be, "something seems to be missing": Perhaps what Mr. Cage's career as a composer lacks is a certain kind of hard work. Not the unbelievably elaborate effort merely, of planning, arranging, constructing, rationalizing (however playfully or dubiously); not the great pains of carrying off a production, but something else. The difference between the most inspired amateur theatricals and the opera, between the conversation that one would like to record and the poem, between the practical joke and the great film, is not one of degree of effort or of conviction. It is that peculiar labor of art itself, the incredible agony of the real artist in his struggles with lethargy and with misplaced zeal, with despair and with the temptations of his recent successes, to get better. The dying writer in Henry James' "The Death of the Lion" puts it almost perfectly: "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." The rest, to be sure; but Mr. Cage's sense of indeterminacy is not this profound doubt, and his metier is not task.?

The Romantic myth of the artist as suffering hero, as dying Lion undergoing the Agony (Hollander's own word) and the Ecstasy-it is ironic that the Cagean enterprise should be judged to be deficient by the very standard it has consistently and resolutely called into ques­ tion. "The difference between the most inspired amateur theatricals and the opera"-a difference Hollander accepts as a given-is one that Cage has never recognized, committed as he is to the erasure of boundaries between genres, modes, and media-indeed, between what we call "art" and "life." Again, what Hollander calls the artist's "struggle with lethargy and misplaced zeal" seems curiously beside the point in the case of an artist like Cage, who, by his own account, refused to be psychoanalyzed when, at a preliminary meeting, the

76

analyst told him: "I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now." "I said, 'Good heavens!'" Cage recalls," 'I already write too much it seems to me" (5, 127). As for the ternpta­ tions of recent successes," Cage has always gone by the precept that if something works once, you must not repeat it, that "Whenever I've found what I'm doing has become pleasing, even to one person, I have redoubled my efforts to find the next step."" "Doubt as our passion," "passion as our task," "the madness of art"-these are phrases not only alien to Cage's aesthetic; they represent, in terms of that aesthetic, a nco-Romantic self-centeredness to be resisted by all the discipline at one's command.

I mention discipline because readers of Silence, A Year from Monday, and the later writings are often misled by Cage's repeated insistence that "art is not an attempt to bring order out of chaos but simply a of to the life we're which is so excellent way waking up very living, .

.

.

...

once one gets one's mind and one's desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord" (5, 12). Isn't this to imply that anyone can be an artist, that all we have to do is to be open to the world around us and the rest will take care of itself?

In order to answer such questions, we must distinguish between what Hollander calls "the peculiar labor of art itself" and what Cage means by "true discipline" (RK, 13). A good place to begin is with a Cage interview of 1965, conducted by Richard Schechner and Michael Kirby and published in the Tulane Drama Review. The subject of discussion is the nature of theater and the theatrical. At one point,

Cage becomes quite angry, recalling a symposium on the performing arts held at Wesleyan University,led by George Grizzard, then playing Hamlet at the Tyrone Guthrie, and the director Alan Schneider: I certainly wouldn't have gone had I known what was going to take place. It was a warm evening and they began by taking their coats off, and trying to give the feeling of informality, and they went so far as not to use the chairs but to sit on the table which had been placed in front of them. They proceeded to say that they had nothing to tell the audience, in other words they wanted to have a discussion.

Of course there were no questions. So they had to chat and supplement one another's loss of knowledge of what to do next. The whole thing was absolutely disgusting: the kind of ideas and the kinds of objectives. the vulgarity of it, was almost incomprehensible .•

The irritation expressed here is at first quite puzzling to anyone familiar with Cage's usual equanimity, his belief that "rather than using your time to denounce what someone else has done, you should if your feelings are critical, reply with a work of your own" (RK, is Cage so annoyed by the behavior of Grizzard and Schneider? Hasn't he said, earlier in the same interview, that art is ...

30). Why

77

"setting a process going which has no necessary beginning, no middle, end, and no sections"? Why then can't the director and actor sit silently on the platform, waiting to see what process will unfold? After all, if, as Cage says in Silence, "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time" (S, 8), isn't something interesting likely to

no

happen?

The problem has to do with the authenticity-or lack thereof-of the situation. As Cage explains: I was quite heated. I normally don't like to talk against things, but I had been asked to [by the chairman of the meeting]. When we couldn't discuss Hap-­ penings because they had no knowledge nor interest and didn't think it was as serious as Hamlet and thought they were being virtuous, then I said, "Well, what do you think about TV?" They weren't interested in TV. And yet they're living in an electronic world where TV is of far more relevance than the legitimate theatre.

(TDR, 71)

What Cage finds so irritating about this "performance" is that the speakers claim to have no ideas about theater, when the fact is that they conceive theater quite narrowly as what Cage calls "the Hamlet situation," with its accompanying rejection of "low" art forms like Happenings and "low" media like television. The audience, under, standing that its response is not really being solicited, predictably says nothing; the two speakers just as predictably move to break the silence, a silence that has nothing to do with the natural "silence"­ really full of sound-events-e-that is central to Cage's aesthetic, by engaging in chitchat. By this time, the symposium has become pure power play, defying Cage's aphorism, "We are involved not in owner' ship but in use" (RK, 10). Here the discussion leaders are involved in "ownership" and so nothing of artistic interest can possibly happen.

"True discipline," Cage tells Richard Kostelanetz in an interview of 1966, "is not learned in order to give it [self-expression] up, but It is precisely what the Lord rather in order to give oneself up and mother and follow me" father meant when he said, give up your (RK, 13). Such self-surrender has nothing in common with what John Hollander calls "the incredible agony of the real artist," an agony that Cage would surely associate with excessive ego. "When I say that anything can happen I don't mean anything that I want to have ....

happen" (TDR, 70). Rather, as Cage puts it in "Happy New Ears!"

(1965), "I have for many years accepted, and I still do, the doctrine about Art, occidental and oriental, set forth by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his book The Transformation of Nature in Art, that the function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation" (YM, 31). Here the phrase "manner of operation" is tricky. Cage writes:

78

Our understanding of "her manner of operation" changes according to advances in the sciences. These advances in this century have brought the term "space­ between the space and time" into our vocabulary. Thus, the distinctions made ...

the time arts are at present an oversimplification. (YM, 31)

To put it another way, the scientific and technological advances of our own

time inevitably demand a reinterpretation of the very nature and

role of art; the "Death of the Lion" is, so to speak, no longer our "death." In this context, an art that is to be genuinely avant-garde 5 must, first of all, acknowledge the present.

This has been, from the start, one of Cage's central themes. Con, sider the following exchange between Cage and Richard Kostelanetz, prompted by Cage's complaint that his work is too frequently inter, rupted by phone calls, often from total strangers: Kostelanetz: Why do you keep your name in the phone book?

Cage: I consider it a part of rwenneth-centurv ethics, you might say. I think that this thing I speak of about fluency is implied by the telephone, and that is partly why I have these ideas I have. If I were to have a totally determined situation in my

own

conception, then of course I would be unlisted.

Kostelanetz:

Well, if you want to close yourself off, it is the easiest way.

Cage: Yes but it would fail. Morris Graves, an old friend of mine, is searching for a place to live that is removed from the twentieth century; but he can't find it, even in Ireland. The airplane flies overhead. If he finds a beautiful property, he has to bring a bulldozer in.

Kostelanetz: You want very much yourself to live in the twentieth century?

Cage: I don't see that it would be reasonable in the twentieth century not to.

(RK, 6) We are now in a better position to understand the famous Cage aphorism, "PERMISSION GRANTED, BUT NOT TO DO

WHATEVER YOU WANT" (YM, 28). To be false to one's art is to impose inappropriate restraints that impede the process of creation­ nostalgia for the past, for example, or needless repetition of oneself or of others, or the refusal to recognize what is actually going on around us, as in the case of George Grizzard's ignorance of television. But this is not to say that

one

can

make any experiment one pleases:

Paraphrasing the question put to Sri Ramakrishna and the answer he gave, I would ask this: "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." (S, 68)

79

What does this mean in practice? In the Foreword to Silence, Cage writes: teAs I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time,

sound) to be introduced into the world of words" (5, x). This distinc­ tion may strike us at first as decidedly unCagean, for doesn't the composer-poet always argue that "structure" must give way to "pro­ cess," and that, as he declares in the prefaces to such sound poems as Mureau and Writings through Finnegans Wake, it is essential to "demili­ tarize the language" by getting rid of conventional syntax? Why, then, the concern for formalizing the language by means of sound repetition or, in other cases, by means of visual patterning?

Here a Zen proverb is applicable: "To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon. To write "

of mesostics or a sound text like Empty Words or a prose meditation on Jasper Johns-one submits oneself to a partic­ ular rule, generated, in Cage's case, by an I Ching "change" or chance operation, so as to free oneself from one's habitual way of doing things, one's stock responses to word and sentence formation. Once the rule (for example, telling one story per minute as in "Indeter­ minacy" [S, 260]) or using twelve typefaces and forty-three characters per line without ever hyphenating a word as in "Diary: How to Improve the World" (YM, 3) has been established, it generates the process of composition. What the rule is, in other words, matters much less than the fact that one uses it.

Consider how this works in Cage's "36 Mesostics Re and not Re Duchamp" (M, 26-34). The words "Marcel" or "Duchamp" form a vertical column of capital letters down the middle of each stanza, which has, accordingly, either six or seven lines. The stated rule is that "a given letter capitalized does not occur between it and the preceding capitalized letter" (M, 1). Here is the first stanza:

a poem-say, a series

a

utility aMong swAllows is theiR

musiC

thEy produce it mid-air to

avoid colliding.

this little mesostic is likely to be one of merely game-playing? And if Cage wants to skepticism: restrict his movements by imposing rule, why not use such traditional Our first reaction

isn't this

80

to

prosodic devices as a fixed stress or syllable count, the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds, rhyme?

The fact is that these devices are used. "Their" rhymes with "#air," and the first and last lines chime with the near-rhyme "Among"/ "colliding." The fifth ·line has another such near rhyme internally­ "avoid" / "col.lid-," and there is marked assonance throughout of short, lightly stressed a's ("a," "avoid," "aMong," "air") and i's ("utility," "is," "musiC," "it," "mid-air," "coLliding"), as well as

"aMong," "musiC,"

"

"swAllows," "coLliding," the syllable count is Further, "mid-air").

alliteration of laterals and nasals ("utility,

7-2-2-2-6-6-hardly an arbitrary pattern, the number of stresses remaining within the limit of one ("musiC") and three (thEy produce it mid-air"). But because our usual way of processing poems today is to read them silently, Cage provides us with the column "MARCEL," a column designed for the eye only since it is obviously impossible to hear the embedded letters as forming the word "Marcel." One might thus say that Cage's lyric pays tribute to what he calls "twentieth, century ethics," to the world of typographic layout and print format in which we all live, at the same time as it slyly sneaks poetic conven­ tions in by the back door. In this sense, the mesostics for Marcel with history in order Duchamp nicely exemplify Cage's "concern to thicken the plot."

Cagean plot is generally characterized by what Jung, in his Foreword to the Bollingen edition of the I Ching, designates as "sychronicity": ...

the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation. and all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence.

While the Western mind carefully sifts. weighs. selects. classifies. isolates. the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail. because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment," ...

not at

How such a "configuration" is created out of what seems to be "the minutest nonsensical detail" may be observed in Cage's longer lecture, poems or collage-essays, for example, the recent Where Are We Eating? and What Are We Eating? (38 Variations on a Theme by Alison Knowles), originally written for a collection of essays and photographs on Merce Cunningham (1975) and reprinted in Empty Words (1979).

The preface to the "38 Variations" begins with a neat distinction: No one need be alarmed by the exercises dancers give their stomachs. Dancers furnaces. They burn up everything they eat. Musicians as furnaces are not efficient; they sit still too much. (EW. 79) are

As such, Cage himself began in his late forties to suffer various aches and pains, for example, arthritis, for which the doctors prescribed 81

huge doses of aspirin-a remedy that, so Cage tells us matter-of­ factly, did no good at all. Finally, in 1977, on the advice of Shizuko Yamamoto, he adopted a macrobiotic diet and "For two days I lived in shock. I ate almost nothing. I couldn't imagine a kitchen without butter and cream, nor a dinner without wine." But as soon as the diet has gotten underway, "The pain behind the left eye went away. After a month the toes began to move. Now my wrists, though somewhat misshapen, are no longer swollen and inflamed. I've lost more than

twenty-five pounds."

It all sounds very virtuous, rather like one of those ads for Granola or Raisin Bran. But Cage's account of his new cooking habits-his use

of sesame oil and tamari to flavor mushrooms, of dill and parsley to flavor brown rice-is only the framework for his text, a framework that is wholly exploded by the outrageously funny food catalog con' tained in the "Variations" themselves. Eating miso soup and nuka pickles, the piece implies, is all very well-indeed essential if you are a musician rather than a dancer-but don't think it will make you forget the joys of real food. Or, in Cage's own words, "One does not seek by his actions to arrive at the establishment of a school (truth) but does what must be done. One does something else. What else?" (S, 68).

Where Are We Eating? and What Are We Eating? is thus the elab­ orate food fantasy (paradoxically straight fact) of the artist as macro' biotic dieter. The "38 Variations" range from 15 to 24 lines with irregular left and right margins, the lines themselves averaging around 10 syllables. This stanzaic structure is visual only, for the discourse is that of a diary, written in short sentences and sentence fragments that regularly override line endings. But not quite a diary either, for Cage's prose has no continuity: each variation catalogs items and incidents unconnected in time and space, the only point of reference being that everything mentioned refers to where and to what members of the Merce Cunningham troupe ("America's Best Fed Dance Company," as Cage calls it in "Variation 31"),7 eat as they travel around the world. For example: We were invited to the Riboud's in

Paris. They had just received a large box full of fresh mangoes from India. We kept on eating until they were finished.

In a Buffalo hotel Sandra and Jim stayed on the eighth floor. They had a large can of sardines for breakfast. Five they didn't eat they flushed down the toilet.

After paying the bill at the desk, Sandra went to the ladies' room. There in the

82

bowl of the toilet were two of her five sardines. We stopped at a small crowded restaurant on the road between Delaware and Baltimore. After our orders were taken, we waited a long time.

The waitress finally came with some of our food. Hastily, she said to Carolyn, "You're the fried chicken," and to Viola, "And you're the stuffed shrimp."

(EW,87)

The fresh mangoes from India eaten at the Riboud's in Paris have no connection to the sardines eaten for breakfast in a Buffalo hotel room (two of which turn up in the toilet downstairs) or with the crowded restaurant, somewhere between Delaware and Baltimore, where the waitress pronounces Carolyn a fried chicken and Viola a stuffed shrimp. But Cage's curious lamination has the effect of making the world quite literally the poet's oyster, for it is a world defined by only two or three things: the quality of the performance space ("Zellerbach, in Berkeley, I is one of the most comfortable theaters I we've ever performed in. Stage is I wide and deep, has big wings" [EW, 81]), the setting for food intake, and, most important, the 1001 attributes and species of the food itself.

Cage's settings are carefully chosen so as to take us around the world in 38 Variations, but we come back, again and again, to joe's in Albany ("Variations" 1, 9, 21, 30), where one eats a "number 20 (Old English): Beef, I ham, tongue, lettuce, tomato, with I Russian dressing"; to the Moosewood Inn in Ithaca, New York (15,21,25,26, 36), whose luncheon menu features "Spinach and mushroom soup," "asparagus souffle," and "yoghurt cream cheese pie (nuts in the crust)" (EW, 91); and to the Sri Lanka in London (6,32,34), where dinners generally begin with egg hoppers: "An egg hopper is an I iddiapam made with rice flour and coconut I milk in the bottom of which fried egg I sunny-side up is placed. On top of I the egg your choice of condiments from a I tray of many" (EW, 95).

In between these points, the journey takes the Cunningham troupe to every conceivable variety of eating place: the Cafe de Tacuba in Mexico City (4), the Big Tree Inn in Geneseo, New York (7), a motel in Malibu, whose "miserable" Chinese restaurant is perceived as serv­ ing "delicious" food once the company is sufficiently "plastered" (7), a truck stop outside Chicago (12), a restaurant inside a gas station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (16), a California bungalow Japanese restau­ rant on the Sunset Strip (19), the lawn in front of Howard Johnson's (19), an Amish farm (22), a Durango whorehouse (26), a super83

market in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (29), a Ceylonese restaurant in Boulder, Colorado (32), and the Whole Earth in Santa Cruz (36)­ not to mention private homes, hotels, open-air restaurants, and clubs in Paris, Warsaw, Grenoble, Amsterdam, St. Paul de Vence, Tennes­ see, Bremen, the Hague, Oklahoma City, and Delhi. There is even one dinner in "a lodge in a meadow surrounded by / a forest near the north rim of the Grand Canyon" (EW, BO).

The descriptions of food become more and more elaborate in the course of the "Variations." The poem begins on a low key: dancers need, Cage explains, a good steak restaurant with a liquor license so they can have some beer. But by the end of the first variation, we are already taken to Sofu Teshigahara's house: "room where we ate had two parts: one / Japanese; the other Western. Also, two / different dinners; we ate them both" (EW, 80). From here on out, we move into a world of "tequila sangrita" (4, 5) and Pernod (10), of "risotto with truffles (6) and "mousse au cMcolat" served with "a large pot of creme fraiche" (6), and then on to moments when food seems to come alive and take over the human scene: II

Picnic preparation in hotel room.

Chicken, marinated in lemon and sake, wrapped'n foil, left overnight, next day

dipped in sesame oil and charcoal-broiled.

Broccoli, sliced, was put in ginger in twenty-five packages; corn, still in husks, silk removed, butter 'n' wrapped. Noticing bathtub was full of salad, David said, "I don't want any hairs in my food." In addition to the roast beef and cheese on rye, Robert had triscuits, a sour orange from Jaffa, a banana, and some apple pie. David's sticky

fermented Passion-fruit juice geysered on the way to Grenoble. Bus floor and handbags were cleaned and the windows were

opened. Then it geysered again.

(EW, 87-88)

Here David (Tudor's) "Passion-fruit juice geyser[ing]" in the bus becomes a kind of fountain of love, the jet stream that keeps this wild group of people going.

But don't dancers do anything but eat? Cage's narrative playfully takes the great art of Merce Cunningham (to whom he has paid frequent trtbute]" as a given, as if to say, "Well, of course the dancing is marvelous, so why say anything more about it?" Deflecting our expectations, his text presents, under the guise of simple record-a

84

logbook in fact-a Gargantuan eating dream that outdoes Leopold Bloom's Lestrygonian fantasies. Cage's technique is to collage indi­ vidual-and often quite unrelated-events (conscientiously providing every

name

and date-what Jung calls "the minutest nonsensical

detail"), in keeping with the Zen belief that it is only the coincidence of events in space and time that reveals to us the "UNIMPEDED NESS AND INTERPENETRATION" (S, 46) at the heart of the universe.

The narrative is, moreover, entirely autobiographical ("this happened to me and then this and then that") without being in the least "confes­ sional": we learn nothing whatever about Cage's personal life. The Zen precept followed is "Never explain, indicate," for there is no such thing as final understanding. Accordingly, everyone is called by name-Carolyn, Rick and Remy, Carroll Russell, Meg Harper, Kama, lini-but the names are entirely opaque; they point to no hidden truth, no conceptual reality. Again, Cage's Orient is not the Exotic East, any more than his Paris is the City of Light; indeed, the Japanese restaurant on the Sunset Strip (where the waitress who brings Cage a pineapple ice, tells him, "Oh yes, that'll cut the grease in your stom­ ach" (EW, 88]) might serve one's purpose just as well as the real thing, depending upon one's mood and what happens to be on the menu that night.

The Global Village presented in Cage's narrative has no center: the Ceylonese restaurant in Boulder is no more peripheral than the Swiss chalet in Ceylon; Jerusalem Artichoke may be ordered at the Moose' wood Inn in Ithaca, and fresh mangoes from India are served in Paris.

Indeed, one's dream recipe may turn up anywhere: in Cage's case, it makes its appearance in Room 135 of the Holiday Inn (city undesig­

nated): Four of 4 cups of walnuts; ground cups flour; 12 tablespoons of sugar; 2 2/3 cups of butter; 4 teaspoons of vanilla. Form into circa 125 small balls. Bake at 350" in motel oven. Now bade to Room 135.

Roll in 1 pound of powdered sugar.

Nut balls.

(EW, 91)

These nut balls keep reappearing ("Variation 36" begins, "After Jean 'n' I'd rolled one hundred / balls, I remembered I'd forgotten the vanilla"), but fond as Cage is of this particular recipe, he is just as pleased to come across "Excellent tempura (not greasy; flaky, delicate batter)" or to take note of Cunningham's high-protein breakfast drink: 85

two

parts yeast, one part liver, one part wheat germ, one part sunflower­ kernel meal, one part powdered milk (cold

pressed), pinch of kelp, one part lecithin, one-half teaspoon powdered bone meal.

At home, mixed with milk and banana in a blender. On tour USA, mixed with milk in portable blender. On tour elsewhere, mixed with yoghurt or

what-have-you.

(EW,95)

Rules, that is to say, are always useful but one must retain one's flexibility in applying them: "one does not seek by his actions to arrive at the establishing of a school (truth) but does what must be done.

One does something else. What else?" (S, 68) The final, or thirty-eighth, variation thickens the plot by a remark­ able twist: "You go home now?" No; this ends the first of five weeks. Toward the end, Black Mountain didn't have a cent. The cattle were killed and the faculty were paid with beefsteaks. Chef in Kansas motel-restaurant cooked the mushrooms I'd collected. Enough for an army. They came to the table swimming in butter. Carolyn, who isn't wild about wild mushrooms, had seconds. I complimented the cook. How'd you know how to cook 'em? "We get them all the time: I'm from Oklahoma." There's a rumor Merce'll stop. Ten years ago, London critic said he was too old. He himself says he's just getting a running start.

Annalie Newman says he's like wine: he improves with age.

(EW, 97)

The faculty at Black Mountain College are paid in beefsteaks because there is no money; the mushrooms Cage collects swim in butter; Cunningham is like wine: "he improves with age." How are we to interpret these overwhelming "what one eats is what one is" met­ aphors, when we remember that the man who is telling us this whole story is eating nothing but barley bread and brown rice?

A helpful perspective on this question is provided by the following exchange between Richard Kostelanetz and Cage: Kostelanetz: But why don't you go yourself to every happening?

86

Cage: I've been telling you how busy I am. I barely have time to do my own

work.

Kostelanetz: What I meant is, why do you go to one and not another? Because you happen to be in New York at that time?

Cage: Purely.

Kostelanetz: Do you walk out of one feeling happier that you went to that one rather than another?

Cage: The big thing to do actually is to get yourself into a situation in which you

experience no matter where you are, even if you are at a performance of work of art which, if you were asked to criticize it, you would criticize out of existence. Nevertheless, you should get yourself into such a position that, were you present at it, you would somehow be able to use it. use your a

Kostelanetz: But does that alter the fact that you might have preferred going to a

different happening?

Cage: That's not an interesting question; for you are actually at this one where you are. How are you going to use this situation if you are there? This is the big question. (RK, 28)

Which is to say, with reference to our text, that when one is engaged in eating, one enjoys what one eats, and when one is dieting, one finds way to use that particular experience so that it will yield positive results. Now that Cage is on his macrobiotic diet, does he hold forth on the horrors of slaughtering cattle? No more than he objected to a vegetarian dance or to Merce's veast-and-liver drink during his feasting days with the Cunningham troupe.

Where Are We Eating? and What Are We Eating? is thus, in a curious sense, an exemplary tale. The narrative reveals no psychological com' plexities, whether Cage's or anyone else's; it has neither a climax nor a turning point; it does not, for that matter, move toward an epiphany because our attention has been carried, so to speak, "not to a center of interest but all over the canvas and not following a particular path" (YM, 31). Yet what seems to be a set of variations made up of "sheer multiplicity, unfocused attention, decentralization" (RK, 8) thickens the plot by layering its seemingly trivial data so as to arrest the attention, thus forcing us to rethink the meaning of its title. "EAT," we learn in "Variation 34," is the acronym of an organization called "Experiments in Art and Technology." "Merce," Cage remarks, "never got involved in it. David Tudor and I did" (EW, 95). Was it then a good thing to be, so to speak, part of EAT? Or is Cage to be defined by his new role as consumer of brown rice and seaweed? "The situation," as Cage says in his collage-essay on Jasper Johns, "must be Yes-and-No not either-or. AtlOid a polar situation" (YM, 79).

a

87

1. "History of Experimental Music in the United States" (1958), reprinted in Silence, p. 68. The following abbreviations are used for Cage's works throughout this essay:

S

Silence, Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

YM

A Year from Monday, New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.:

M

EW RK

Wesleyan University Press, 1967).

M, Writings '67-'72 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).

Empty Words, Writings '73-'78 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979).

John Cage, ed. Richard Kosrelanets ( 1970; New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974).

2. Perspectives of New Music, I (Spring 1963), p, 141.

3. Cited by Calvin Tomkins, "John Cage," in The Bride and the Bachelors, Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 107.

4. Tulane Drama Review, X:2 (Winter 1965), p. 71. Subsequently cited as TDR

5. For a good discussion of the analogies between contemporary art and science, Michael Kirby, "The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde" (1969), in Esthetics Contem­ porary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1978), pp. 36-70.

6. The I Ching or Book of Changes, the Richard Wilhelm translation from Chinese into German, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series III (1950; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. xxiii. I discuss the nonsensicality of Cage's Zen stories in the larger context of his performance aesthetic in my The Poetics see

of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp.

288-339.

7. For the sake of convenience, I have numbered the variations; similarly, in" reproducing portions of the Kostelanen interview, I normalize the format; Kostelanetz does not use names but italicizes his own questions, a device useful in a long interview but confusing in the case of brief quotations.

8. See, for example, "Four Statements on the Dance," in Silence, pp. 87-97.

88

John Cage, nature, and theater Natalie Crohn Schmitt

This is a segment of a book on post-modern drama on which I am currently at work.-N.C.S.

I here elaborate a contemporary theater aesthetic-that propounded

by John Cage in his writings through 1974-and argue that, as he claims, this aesthetic is based on a contemporary scientific view of nature in its manner of

1 operation. I present this aesthetic in argument

against the widely accepted view that the theater it represents can be understood as anti-theater, a theater in critic Ronald Hayman's words "hostile to reality though the anti-world it creates can never provide a viable alternative to reality."!

John Cage is a musician and his writing on aesthetics relies largely on a vocabulary and analysis more obviously applicable to music. But his theorizing is meant to be more inclusive. Cage says that since 1952 all his work has been in the theater and that for him theater is the "obligatory" art form "because it resembles life more closely than the other arts, requiring for its appreciation the use of both eyes and ears, and space and time. "3 He thinks of his musical performances as theater. And his analysis is so applicable to the other arts that Time magazine writer Robert Hughes claims that "if it can be said that advanced art through the fifties and early sixties had one single native guru, that man was Cage." Similarly Richard Kostelanetz believes that "no American has done more to form an aesthetics for post- World War II advanced art than John Cage." Michael Kirby, The Drama Review editor, declares that Cage's work "forms the backbone of the new theater" and both James Roose-Evans and Richard Schechner state that Cage is one of the two most important influences on con­ temporary theater-though they do not agree on the other most important influence."

Cage's influence on theater is by and large limited to the United 89

States. But his writing serves to explain a great deal of the work of, say, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter-whose work he has not influ­ enced-because it expresses many of the important theatrical percep­ tions of our age.

Despite Cage's statement that his interest lies in theater, and despite the recognition of his influence on theater, there is only one analysis of Cage's views with respect to theater and that, provided by Michael Kirby, is limited to an account of the relationship between Cage's views and "Happenings. "5 The resistances to serious analysis of Cage's views with respect to theater have been many. The first is the belief that we can simply understand what Cage propounds as anti-art. We

The New York Review of Books, for instance, that Cage's aim has long been clearly destructive, and in The New York Times that appreciation of Cage is "a worshipping of wildness, a romanticizing of the savage.t" This view, that Cage is merely anti-art, seems to be borne out by Cage's demeanor, which is unserious; he seems, because of it, but to be mocking traditional aesthetics. His statements to the effect that he has never been interested in anything simply for its shock value and that he is a naturalist following the findings of science are ignored or denounced." One can read in criticism of Cage that "nature as "8 anything but the bringing of order out of chaos is inconceivable. So much for Cage-and for the second law of thermodynamics as well.

A more considerable objection has been put forth: that while Aris­ totle's Poetics may be understood as of a piece with the view of reality expressed in his scientific writings, John Cage's aesthetics cannot in the same sense correspond to the view of reality expressed in the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg because in all likelihood Cage cannot understand the mathematics in which these discoveries are expressed and, if he can, he cannot literally translate them into theat­ can read in

rical terms; they are inherently mathematical concepts." One must accede to this objection. At the same time, though, it is the case that any number of distinguished scientists, including Einstein and Heisen­ berg themselves, have attempted to explain their discoveries and the import of them in ordinary English. In part, this effort has been made

by the Nobel prizewinning physicist Percy Bridgman: "The conceptual revolution forced by recent physical dis­ coveries in the realm of relativity and quantum effects is not really a revolution in the new realms of high velocities or the very small, but is properly a conceptual revolution on the macroscopic level of everyday in the belief expressed

life." 10 There can be no question but that the vocabulary, at least, of modem physics has affected contemporary theater. Richard Schech­ ner begins his 1973 book on theater with a chapter on "Space," in 90

which the term "space-time field" is frequently employed, and he follows that chapter with one on "Participation." Richard Foreman employs the words "field" and "quanta" and tells us that he wishes us to see small because to see small means to enter the realm where contradictions are seen to be at the root of reality. And he wishes his audiences to become aware, not of objects, but of perceptual acts.!' I do not know that Schechner and Foreman have been reading up on the theories of complementarity and relativity. I do know that the ideas they express are manifest more generally in the theater. Perhaps the vocabulary of science can have only metaphorical employment in the arts. I think, though, that in correspondence with Bridgman's sugges­ tion, Cage has tried to see what the implications of scientific discov­ eries are for everyday life and of all the aestheticians has most boldly and fully envisioned an art which manifests this life.

The view of theater to which Cage's view is antithetical is, in essence, Aristotelian. Cage follows Aristotle in believing that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation-and yet the aes­ thetics of Cage and Aristotle are in opposition virtually point for point. The reason for this, Cage would argue, is that our under, standing of nature's "manner of operation changes according to ad, 12 vances in the sciences."

Cage would argue that the guidelines of the Poetics are not so much violated by contemporary theater practice as they are simply superseded because they have ceased to show us the world and to help us to live in it. To facilitate understanding of Cage's views I have made a schema which contrasts them to Aristotle's. Cage believes that all things flow and interpenetrate and cannot finally be set into categories. Certainly his own writing is not schematic and my arrangement of his ideas has been extremely difficult to make. Yet, Cage's writing is in many ways a deliberate response to traditional Aristotelian ideas and my organization aims to make this clear. The arrows in the chart below indicate the comparison with and trans' formation of Aristotelian categories.P

ARISTOTLE 1.

CAGE

The observation Language and technology Phenomena Process Field

2.

Chance, indeterminacy,

3.

purposelessness Unimpededness and interpenetration

91

Implicit in the schema is the fact that Cage and the theater he represents take as their scientific model, not biology, as Aristotle did, but physics, the science of most import thus far in this centurv.' .. The shift in scientific basis has, in itself, significance for theater. Physics turns the emphasis away from living things to the larger universe. The world of Greece, the focus of Aristotle's interest, seems a small part of a universe which is conceived of as infinite and therefore without a center. Man, the highest living form in Aristotle's biology, in the perspective of the whole universe, diminishes in significance. And, as physics studies events which are nonprogressive, the idea of devel­ opmental change becomes less important.

I. THE OBSERVATION

Jacob Bronowski makes clear the justification for making observa­ tion the first category: "All the currents of science flow together in

this: that the analytical and impersonal view of the world is failing The basis of the world is the observation." 15 Relativity derives es­ sentially from the philosophic analysis which insists that there is not a fact and an observer, but a joining of the two in an observation. And just this is what the principle of uncertainty showed in atomic physics: that event and observer are not separable. Or, as Cage puts it apho­ ristically, "People and sounds interpenetrate. "16 The study of science is no longer nature itself but the interplay between nature and our, selves. The concept of object in itself becomes meaningless; nor can one speak of an observer in the absence of objects of observation.

Aristotle's category "Knowing" implies a comprehension of nature apart from the questions we put to nature; it implies absolute descrip­ tion of that which is out there, an exact correlation between our understanding and the world. But physicists have come to regard theories about natural phenomena, including the so-called "laws," as creations of the human mind; properties of our conceptual map of reality rather than of reality itself. It is not denied that there may exist a world of things in themselves; but this world defies description. The physicist Gustav Hertz tells us that "physical determinations are only pictures, on whose correspondence with natural objects we can make but a single assertion, viz., whether or not the logically derivable consequences of our pictures correspond with the empirically ob­ served consequences of the phenomena for which we have designed "17 our picture.

Reality itself is unknowable; there is no exact cor' respondence between the world outside and that in our minds. We turn, then, from conception (knowing) to perception (the observa­ ....

tion).

92

If the basis of the world is the observation, the imitation of nature include that observation. So, for Cage, art is not an object distinct from ourselves, but an experience, an event, including the observer. Percy Bridgman explains his intention to include himself as observer thus: "It was my original intention to present my analysis of doings or happenings exclusively in the first person singular, the must

doings or happenings being doings by me or happenings to me. My reason

for this was, among others, my desire to secure the greatest

possible immediacy in description. "18 What this interaction means for Cage and for contemporary theater in general is that the performers are explicitly there in what they are performing and that live per­ formance, entailing both performers and observer, becomes far more important than script or score (or film or phonograph record). Actors do not perform roles separate from themselves; they interact with the roles and are present along with them. The script is but a report on a performance, not itself the art object to be presented. To make it clear that the audience is, like the performers, interacting with what it observes, it is not set apart from the performance. Arrange it, says Cage, "so that the physical circumstances of a concert do not oppose audience to performers but dispose the latter around-among the former.t"?

If the idea of reality is dependent upon the observer, the best we can do is report as fully as possible upon our sensations of it. "Our description," says Bridgman, "is not complete unless we can specify what we see or feel or hear or smell or taste."ZO We have to take account of all of our actual experience. This means, with respect to theater, that we should not pretend that we are elsewhere than in a theater watching a play. All that is actually occurring and present is to be acknowledged. To make this idea emphatic, lighting, backstage, actors not performing, other audience members, and "the house" are all made manifest. We shall see repeatedly in the course of this analysis that Cage is most interested in revealing those parts of reality which have heretofore been hidden, ignored, or degraded. His ex­ tremism in this regard may be understood as a corrective to previous views.

If there is no object to be defined apart from an observer, the concept of the uniqueness of reality is challenged. Bridgman explains: The meaning to be attached to reality is to a large extent a personal matter and changes with time, but I believe it fair to say that the sense in which everyone used reality a few years ago and the sense in which the majority use it today has

"uniqueness" as a minimum connotation. It would not have been admitted that two

entirely different explanations of the universe could each be equally real."

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We have first of all the idea of complementarity, for instance of wave and quantum theory: two contrary concepts, both of which seem necessary to account for the data. Neither is complete; one is as good as the other. There is also the difficulty, particularly acute in the realm of small-scale phenomena, that verification by repetition or by having another see what one does becomes impossible. In the microscopic world an elementary event may be observed by only one observer.

Confirmation by public report thus becomes impossible. This sugges­ tion that the world is at its foundation pluralistic is also made in the realm of the very large by Einstein, who showed that there is no universal "now" but only "here and now" for each observer.22 Conventional theater, with its frontality and single focus, is based on the assumption that what is to be understood about reality is its uniqueness-one thing at a time to which everyone is to attend from the same right perspective, albeit some seats are better than others.

"The assumption," says Cage, "is that people will see it if they all look in one direction." But, in fact, he goes on to say, each "consciousness is structuring the experience differently from anybody else's in the audience. "23 If reality is perspectival, the value of art cannot reside in its universality. The very "possibility of conversation," observes Cage, "resides in the impossibility of two people having the same experience whether or not their attention is directed one-pointedlv.t'P The composer does not have the same experience of the music as any audience member "for the composer was not in the same position as he was, in respect to it-on the most mundane level, not in the same part of the room."25 Composing, performing, and hearing are separate experiences. And accordingly, Cage believes, attempts in theater to present reality as unique ought to be given up and the attempt made, rather, to provide experiences which reveal reality as we actually know it, as pluralistic. One ought not to try to arrange the seats, sights, and sounds in such a way as to attempt to provide everyone with the same experience. There ought to be no right or best seats at a performance; there are none for experiencing reality. The performance ought to make clear to the listener that "the hearing of the piece is his own action-that the music, so to speak, is his, rather than the composer's.t'-" One of the purposes of non-intentionality in Cage's music is to make clear that the experience is what we make of it. To make clear that reality is perspectival, there had best be, as in life, more than one thing happening at a time, so that, as in life, our respective attentions are divided. The effort in conventional theater to keep the performance consistent throughout the run is the effort to provide the audience members at successive performances with ideal and identical experiences, but, as at one performance audience

94

members do not all have the same experience, so at different perform' ances they do not have the same experience, nor does a returning audience member have the same experience a second time. The effort to present the ideal unique view is, Cage believes, falsification of reality. The audience should be made specifically aware of the fact that the performance they see is unlike the performance another sees. The variation inherent in performance makes it a particularly suitable means for representing reality. And when the three-dimensionality of theater is acknowledged in performance, there is no right perspective from which to view it. It is, in this respect, better than a painting which can only be viewed from the front.

If there is no observer apart from an observation, not only is the idea of the uniqueness of reality challenged, but also that of the constant and distinct identity of the observer. Observation is an interaction. It changes the observer; the observer is not a recording consciousness, a fixed entity. "If you do not change your mind about something when you confront a picture you have not seen before," says Cage, "you are either a stubborn fool or the painting is not very good." Self-preservation is "only a preservation from life. An indi­ vidual, having no separate soul, is a time-span, a collection of changes." "Our nature," he says, "is that of Nature. Nothing's fixed."27 Art ought to heighten our awareness that our identity is not separate from that of nature and not fixed. We are as we experience.

Art should be an experience which changes us, extending our percep­ tions of reality. Just as observers are not distinct from that which they observe and are changed by it, so the actor cannot regard the character played as "other"; the character is, rather, a manifestation of the actor in relation to the role. The actor grows and changes in a role as he shows himself and takes on the other; the two are not distinct. This is, in part, the idea behind Cage's statement that distinctions between self and other are being forgotten.P The corollary of the observer's effort to report fully on all that is actually experienced is the effort to restrict the report to only that which is actually experienced. Bronowski tells us that scientists fol­ lowing Einstein have seriously made the effort to make their systems only out of what is in fact observed." Cage is of the same persuasion: he wants to free himself from abstract ideas about sounds and to listen, rather, to sounds themselves in all their acoustical details.P He finds art which is "anthropocentric (involved in self-expression)" trivial and lacking in urgency." The most that can be accomplished by a musical idea, he tells us, is to show us how intelligent the composer was who had it. To appreciate the composer's expressiveness one "has to confuse himself to the same final extent that the composer did and 95

imagine that sounds are not sounds at all but are Beethoven and that but are sounds."32 He wishes to move away from subjective concerns toward the world of nature and society of which all of us are a part. We live, he says, in a world in which there are things as well as people, and he has come to be interested in anything but himself.33 The world does not express meaning and it has no essence. Art which imitates nature cannot reveal essence or express meaning. Concepts of meaning and essence are inseparable from, and rely upon, a subjective selection and ordering of the possible material.

In the words of painter Frank Stella, "What you see is what you see.")4 To be sure, says Cage, movements, sounds and lights are expressive but what they express "is determined by each one of you­ who is right, as Pirandello's title has it, if he thinks he is." "The meaning of something," Cage says, echoing Wittgenstein, "is in its use, not in itself."35 Cage understands far more than meaning and essence to be ex, pressions of anthropocentrism. Those mainstays of art, and of an "objective" view of reality-the idea of order, of causality, of force, of the possibility of isolating objects, of continuity, of purpose, and of absolute space and time-have to be given up now and understood as intrusions of the self, rather than as manifestations of the external world. One must give up on the "desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.Y-" Accordingly, Cage tries to compose music which does not express himself, music which originates in no psychology, motive, dramatic intention, or literary or pictorial purpose. "I had," he says, "taken steps to make a music that was just sounds, sounds free of judgments about whether they were 'musical' or not, sounds free of memory or taste (likes and dislikes), sounds free of fixed relations between two or more of them (musical syntax or glue, as Henry Cowell called it)."37 To compose such music, Cage has had to find ways to remove himself from the sounds. He uses noise, those sounds which are not officially designated as musical, feeling that because they have not been intellectualized as music, one can hear them directly without automatically going through abstrac­ tions about them. One reason, in general, he thinks, to use non-art materials is that one is able to view them with a certain freshness. Cage uses silence, by which he means any sounds not intended, there being no such thing as actual silence. He employs means to make composi­ tion chancy and indeterminate and, thus, free of his control. He explains the distinction between chance and indeterminacy thus: "In the case of chance operations, one knows more or less the elements of the universe with which one is dealing, whereas in indeterminacy, I that I'm outside the circle of a known universe and like to think men are not men

...

96

dealing with things I literally don't know anything about."38 Naturally, Cage is more interested in methods of indeterminacy than in those of chance. Cage provides various sounds at one time, and places the sound sources in various parts of the room so that what each audience member hears is a function of his location and attention and is, in these respects, beyond Cage's control.

Like the composer, the performer must work to relinquish control of the material. Discipline for the performer, then, comes to mean not incorporation of technique, but self-renunciation, the ability to give oneself up to the material. Cage elaborates, "It is precisely what the Lord meant when he said, give up your father and mother and follow me. It means give up the things closest to you. It means give yourself up, everything, and do what it is that you are going to do."39 The performer is likened to a religious figure. The widely used physical exercises of Jerzy Grotowski and the vocal exercises of Kristen Link, later are designed to bring actors to precisely this self-renunciarion.t?

They are designed to free the self from physical and psycho-social barriers, to develop a far wider range of movement and sound than used to be thought humanly fitting or possible, in hopes that the actor could respond more directly, without restraint, to the material at hand. That relinquishing of control is what is meant when acting is talked about as risk-takmg. If self-renunciation provides a more direct, "honest," response, it is likely to provide one which is not "believ­ able" -thus flouting the sine qua non of Stanislavskian Method-for believability is a function of our expectations and a direct and full response to the material may well produce something neither partici­ pant nor audience expects.

The audience too must learn to experience disinterestedly. To be, come fluent, confluent, with nature, one must give up one's desires, expectations, and valuations with respect to it, give up the presupposi­ tions that it is orderly, continuous, purposeful, etc.-presuppositions which Cage calls "clap-trap" -and assume what, borrowing from Zen, he calls the condition of "no-mindedness. "41 "A sober and quiet mind is one in which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams." "With a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception."42 It is no easier for an audi­ ence member to achieve the condition of no-mindedness than it is for composer or performer. As Cage observes, "Not all of our past, but the parts of it we are taught, lead us to believe that we are in the driver's seat. With respect to nature. And that if we are not, life is meaningless."43 The cessation of the application of mind seems at first 97

to be a giving

up of everything that belongs to humanity, but, believes

Cage, it leads to the world of nature where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that nothing is lost when everything is given away. In fact, every­ thing is gained because life is more interesting than man-made struc­ tures.f It is Cage's hope that art can teach us to check our habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness, to be un­ familiar with what we see. Gradually, we are learning not to ask what a Pinter or a Foreman play means and we are learning not to analyze all plays as if they could be understood as logical sequences, specifically located in time and place. Eventually, Cage believes, by ceasing to ask that art be meaningful, logical, etc., we will cease to ask that of nature.

The grand thing about the human mind, Cage says, "is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning. "-45 While no-mindedness or poverty of spirit, or silence of the ego, the condi­ tion necessary for the art experience, may be understood as a kind of passivity, it is also a condition of extreme alertness and activity. When the material is not controlled by the composer, when observers are not provided with that which is given as meaningful or logical, they must be far more active in their observation of it.

As no-minded observer, a human has a lesser role in the universe than Aristotle's Knower. In an infinite, centerless universe, humans lose their centrality; they have no privileged point of view; humans and nature are not separate. And if the universe is both infinite and infinitely small, a human being cannot be the measure. If reality is perspectival and continually changing, a human cannot know it once and for all. There is no correspondence between a human's mind and nature. Humans cannot, then, find their unique, essential purpose and pleasure in knowing; like the rest of nature, they have no purpose.

"Life goes on very well without me," observes Cage.-46 To see, people have to "keep humble. "-47 They cannot comprehend or grasp nature; to see it, they have to give up such desires and "get with it," "go with the flow" (the idea of no-minded participation has become part of the vernacular). Cage believes it essential to keep a proper perspective on people's place within nature without desire to elevate them above it. It is this sense of necessary humility which keeps Cage's writing un­

pretentious, even seemingly lacking in seriousness, revealing a comic sense of life. It is essential to keep a proper perspective on the place of human beings in the world, without desire to elevate it.

Critic Jill Johnston claims that the most advanced thought and art of our

time serves to bring people back to their proper situation within

nature.f" If art by example is to serve this function, then artists must be de-deified. Artists cannot be those who show us what life means or how it is ordered. The role of artists deified suggests that the artists are

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distinct from the rest of nature and that their views are superior to our own. "Someone," observes Cage, "said 'Art should come from with­ in; then it is profound.' But it seems to me Art goes within, and I don't see the need for 'should,' or 'then' or 'it' or 'profound.' When Art comes from within, which it was for so long doing, it became a thing which seemed to elevate the man who made it above those who observed it or heard it. "49 If art, like nature, is a process and the artist a participant in nature, the artist is not one who makes special prod­ ucts but one who participates in the process; there is no distinction between living and making; art is a way of life and can be anyone's.

"But seriously," remarked one reviewer, understanding that Cage meant for music to be just sounds, "if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you." And Cage agrees.P The act of creation is not special; we are to think of others as artists. The division between composer, performer, and audience in that sense no longer exists. 51 Viola Spolin, the Judson Dancers, Anna Halprin, and others have devised means for amateurs to create and to perform theater and dance events. And others, technically trained, have given up their dance movements and stage voices so that they appear to be amateurs.

More recently Robert Wilson has relied on a brain-damaged child for his texts. The Wooster Group has sought inspiration from children.

Cage would approve: "We begin," he says, "to be keenly aware of the richness and uniqueness of each individual and the natural capacity in each person to open up new possibilities for another."s2 Art as participation that requires no special people, can be communal. And art, as a way of perceiving, a framing, need not be restricted to objects made by humans, and can be found anywhere. The role of humans, if they can be said to have one, is simply to become more aware and more curious. And the artists' role, if they can be said to have one, is to help us to be so.

As Cage wants us to model our art on nature, including the fact of our participation in it, so he wants us to model our society on art.

Aristotle thought of Greek society as of a piece with nature.

Cage believes that while some art is now in accord with nature, our society is not in accord with that art. "Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing"; "the very practice of music is a celebration that we possess nothing."53 The world must be seen as a process in which we participate and we must give up our possessive, grasping, self-important habits of mind with respect to it. "To imagine that you own any piece of music is to miss the whole point."s4 We must give up the idea of ownership with respect to nature. "If one maintains secure there is no limit to what one may freely possession of nothing enjoy" is a dictum Cage intends not only with respect to art but also ...

.

..

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with respect to nature.t! Without ownership there is greater abun­ dance. One must give up the idea of ownership and substitute the idea of use. 56 If there is abundance, and we understand that life is purpose­ less, then art, like all of living, is just something to do. The artist is de­ deified indeed.

While Cage does not assume the correlation between man's mind and the world which Aristotle thought enabled us to know the world as it really is, Cage does believe that there is one convenient cor­ respondence between world and mind which Aristotle did not ac­ knowledge. The world, Cage believes, is a complex interrelationship of discontinuous events in time and space, especially now when "every­ thing happens at once." Analyses in terms of single linear actions are, he thinks, particularly unsuited to the modern world. As luck would have it, we are omni-attentive; we do not perceive only one thing at a time but many things at once and discontinuously. Perception is not sequential like language (or like an Aristotelian action); rather, the electronic analogy-that everything happens at once-is more apt.

And unlike print, the electronic media condition us to the multiplicity of simultaneous perceptions of which we are capable. On that ac­ count, Cage believes that for a theatrical activity the minimum number of necessary actions going on at once is five. "Bright people can clear "57 up rather quickly perplexity arising from lower numbers.

2. LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY

Aristotle assumed that language, like mind, corresponded to and reflected the world exactly. We are now aware of many ways in which language has misled us about the nature of reality. Language has meaning and intention; reality does not. Insofar as language is ob­ jective ("There is a horse," rather than "I see a horse"), it is mis­ leading. As physicist Henry Stapp puts it, "The observed system is required to be isolated in order to be defined, yet interacting in order to be observed."5B Syntax is a system of subordination, which because we describe things in sentences, suggests an equivalent system of sub­ ordination in nature. Language presents things one at a time and sequentially; experience does not. Language analyzes events into static, clear, and discrete elements, whereas experience is continually flow­ ing, dissolving, and reforming them: the word "horse" is misleading in its creation of a category. Our language is committed to rhree-dimen­ sional space and the forward flow of time, whereas as we penetrate deeper into nature we find that the images and concepts of ordinary language have to be abandoned in order to understand it.

Theater has generally reflected the belief that language can accu100

rarely capture reality. The principal medium of drama has been lan­ and to guage. We have been able to regard the text as the play itself, characters and And in terms of their speeches meaning. analyze plays have been suitably analyzed in terms of their single unified action or intention. Finding that language does not serve to represent experi­ ence-that, as Cage puts it, "if before you live you go through a word then there is an indirection"S9-the arts in general have moved away from language and have tended toward the condition of music: they have become more self-referential and untranslatable. This tendency for all the arts to approach the condition of music explains, in part, why Cage can have such wide influence. It is also the case that theater has been influenced by the visual arts and has accordingly become more spatial, and by dance, and has accordingly come to rely more on kinesthetic expression. Because Cage has emphasized music as a per­ formance art and has conceived of it in visual and spatial terms, he, of all musicians, has most directly influenced contemporary develop­ ments in theater.60 At the same time that theater performance has come to rely more on nonverbal means of expression, there have also been, in the theater, increased efforts to use language in ways which are not descriptive or analytic. And Cage has been influential in and representative of these efforts also. Aristotle was particularly attracted to poetic language because it was refined; Cage, on the other hand, by example of his own writing argues for a language which is closer to experience. He objects

language organized rhythmically because it suggests that the reality represented thereby has great regularitv.s' He has made experiments in language which, like nature, reveal simultaneity, odd juxtapositions, to

repetitions, lack of progression, and lack of subordination of parts.

On the whole, his experiments with language have lagged behind his musical experiments. The writing has generally been meaningful and organized syntactically, but more recently, in M, Cage has made experiments with language which rely almost solely on the musical or visual effects of language: experiments with graphics which leave sentences unreadable, experiments with nonsense words and sentences. The latest book, Empty Words (1979), is in large part an effort to make language "saying nothing at all" a language "without sentences and not confined to any subject." It is a transition from language to music. Much of the writing is intended for performance.

Spoken language is closer to experience than written language. Voice and gesture provide a more personal and a fuller response to ex­ perience than words alone. And spoken language is continually flow­ ing, dissolving, and re-forming, whereas "good" writing eliminates these aspects of language.

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Between the observer and the world observed, Cage introduces a new consideration: technology. Like language, technology is a means for perception and has the same disadvantages: "measurements mea­ sure measuring means. "62 Aristotle believed that nature is as we can know it experientially. Cage believes that all we can know of nature is as we experience it. Aristotle believed man to be so suited as a knower that his naked eye and ear would suffice. Cage sees technology as the possibility of extending our nervous system into the environment.

Many of the discoveries we have made have been dependent upon technological advances. Technology provides the possibility of experi­ encing events more directly. Electronic music, for instance, is sound without middlemen-without interpreters, people subservient to the sounds they produce.

But the real significance of technology is in its power not only to change our perception of nature but to change nature itself. The "only chance to make the world a success for humanity," says Cage, "lies in technology, in the grand possibility technology provides to do more with less and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of US."63 Much of the technological development has been very recent, yet some of the errors made with it have already been very serious. "We are in our technological infancy," says Cage, "Tesla, who discovered alternating current, did so in this century. Technological errors made by government, industry (DDT, ABM, SST, CIA, etc.) are those of children, who, even though they don't know what the score is, go on playing pre-technological games of power and profit."64 But technology affords us the opportunity to change the economy from one of scarcity to one of abundance. "The question really now-the most urgent thing-is getting us to shift from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance; and this is going to mean an utter change of our mind with regard to morals and

everything. "65 For art, the significance of the abundance technology can provide is

Technology can provide abundance in the midst of which the masses can cease to strive. (Richard Foreman suggests that the drama of conflict is interesting only insofar as people have to compete for limited goods, only insofar as people must fight the environment and one another to survive.)66 Abundance provides the possibility of leisure, time in which people can experience the world, rather than perceive it in terms of its usefulness for their livelihood. Cage, like Aristotle, believes that the highest experience for people lies not in changing the world but in knowing or experiencing it as it is. Cage's music proposes that we do nothing, that we cease to strive. The enormous.

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argument that through technology we must change the world in order to appreciate it as it is, is, to be sure, paradoxical. So, for that matter, is the idea that the highest experience for man-in a valueless world­ is to appreciate the world as it is. Cage is aware of such contradic­ tions in his writing and makes no claim to logical consistency-nature

logically consistent-although Cage is for the most part ex­ tremely logical. He thinks of these paradoxes as correlatives or com­ plements and has in mind the complementaries of contemporary physics.67

is not

3. PHENOMENA

When physics is taken as the model science, life loses its central

importance. This is less the case with theater, it would seem, than with the other arts because theater relies primarily on the human as its medium and this medium tends to suggest that human life also be the primary subject matter. Nonetheless, the dispassionate and distant view of humanity in much contemporary drama, the performances in which human and nonhuman are viewed equally as objects and those in which humans serve to represent the nonhuman, become more comprehensible when we take phenomena rather than life to be the central reality. The term "phenomena" also makes clear the essential role of our participation in that which we perceive and emphasizes the fact that reality is now analyzed in terms of process.

While Aristotle's analysis of nature is in terms of action, that action is understood to be an action of matter; the world is in essence substantial. Contemporary science tells us that the event is the unit of things real-that energy, not matter, is the basic datum of science.

Particles are seen not as material stuff, but as dynamic patterns or processes.s" In Aristotle's analysis, actions are taken to be discrete and finite. But according to contemporary physics all particles can be transmuted into other particles; they can be created from energy and can vanish into energy. Classical concepts like "elementary particle," "material substance," or "isolated object," have lost their meaning; the whole universe appears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns. Actions, in Aristotle's view, are understood to take place in an essentially unchanging universe. But in the view of contemporary scientists, the world is endlessly changing; events do not repeat. Ernst Mayr, an eminent biologist, has observed that "no greater revolution has occurred in the history of human thought than the radical shift from a fixed, stable cosmology to a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing "69 Likewise, Bridgman tells us that the new feature in cosmogenesis. the present situation is an intensified conviction that in reality new 103

orders of experience do exist and that we may expect to meet them

continuallv.P The perception of reality as endless process of which the observer is part has deeply affected Cage's view of art. Performance, not the art object, becomes primary. There is, he says, an unfortunate "tendency

a

in painting (permanent pigments) as in poetry (printing, binding), to

be

thingness of a work. "71 Permanent art materials mislead us about the nature of reality. The value of art cannot be its timelessness, for that which is fixed misrepresents reality. For this reason, Cage thinks of past literature as material rather than as art, and tells us that the phonograph record is not the music. "A finished work," he says, "is exactly that, requires resurrection." "We are having art in order to use it." "Art for the now-moment rather than secure

in the

for posterity's museum civilization." This, he says, is the very nature of the dance, of the performance of music, or any other art requiring performance.F The idea of art as process is the idea behind Hap­ penings and also partly explains the current prevalence of director's theater over playwright's theater. It is the idea behind the desire to make a work specific to a particular place and to particular per' formers, thus making specific its particular and temporary nature. It is behind the desire to call everything a work in progress. Theoretically, no effort is made to stabilize performances of a work in progress; rather, means are devised to allow the production to change in time as does everything else in nature. Cage's views change in time and, while consistent enough to be considered as of a piece, they may-indeed, did-become very different in later years. Art in process, because it is like nature, can, Cage hopes, help us to adapt to a continually changing nature. With respect to change, Cage, as usual, has no regrets that nature is as it is. "What permits us to love one another and the earth we inhabit is that we and it are impermanent"; "Life without death is no longer life but only self-preservation": "The acceptance of death is the source of all life. "73 Language works on the principle of repetition and thus misleads us about the nature of reality. In reality there is no repetition; everything, including ourselves, is in the process of continual change; reality is dynamic, not static. The tree makes no two leaves exactly alike. As usual, Cage is especially interested in art which points out those aspects of reality which we have overlooked, in this case the particu­ larity of things. Generalizing about all the leaves on a tree, we distance ourselves from each leaf; the particularity of one leaf is immediate.

Cage is fond of the use of apparent repetition because it makes clear that there is no actual repetition; everything changes in time and in relation to other things and we perceive different aspects of things and 104

also change in time. Thus, Cage, borrowing the idea from Zen, re� quests, "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirrv-rwo, and so on. Eventually one "74 discovers that it is not boring at all but very interesting.

Bridgman observes that what our senses give us changes with time, not only if we stay still but more especially if we ourselves move about or manipu­ late." As if to heighten our realization of this aspect of the particu­ larity of events, Richard Schechner has contrived environments that encourage the audience to move about to see the performance from various perspectives.

If the world is in essence endless dynamic process, all particles transmutable into other particles, we are going to have to speak of transformations or creation by transformation instead of creations or annihilations." Applied to performance this means that a work can have no clear beginning or ending. Cage's early works had beginnings, middles, and endings. The later ones do not. They begin anywhere and last any length of time. An analyst of Cage's work explains, "The whole performance is an excerpt; indeed the piece is an excerpt from everything. It begins nowhere and ends nowhere. It has always been in progress; it is only that it became audible just recently. It is, in fact, still in progress."77 Cage describes a 1965 performance of his, which was to begin without the audience knowing it had begun and which was to conclude when the last audience member had left. ...

"When only twelve people were left, we arranged to serve refresh­ all those people had a party."78 Such manifestation of trans­ formation became de rigueur in American theater of the late sixties and early seventies: as the audience arrived, the actors were to be seen warming up; gradually, in plain view, they each assumed a character; at the end, the character was transformed into the actor; the audience members were invited on stage to dance or to have a party with the actors, presumably until everyone got tired and went home. With no ments:

curtain

opening or closing, sometimes no houselights dimming or

stage lights perceptibly brightening, it became difficult to establish a definite beginning or ending for the theater event. Robert Wilson tells

that all his theater pieces are one piece,"? And commonly, now, the actor does not describe himself as creating a role which he then drops out of at the end of the evening and the end of the run; he describes himself as being transformed by the role by virtue of his transactions with it.so The Living Theatre's Mysteries and Smaller Pieces contained a section variously entitled "Lee's Piece," or "Sound and Movement," in which one actor improvised a gesture and/or sound and "gave" it to the performer in front of him. That one picked it up, transformed it into a new expression and passed it on to another actor, and so on. Or, 105

in the course of a single performance a player may undergo a number of transformations, changing roles as he changes costume pieces-as the particles of an atom might change. He doesn't need an hour before to "create" his role. Such transformations prevent us from seeing the playas an object and urge us to see it as unbounded process in which actor, character, and audience all playa part.

curtain time

1. In John Cage's most recent book, Empty Words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), the last essay, "The Future of Music," bears the same title as his first essay in his first book, Silence. However, Cage's new essay reveals a marked change which puts the book beyond the bounds of this essay. The function of art in it is not to reveal nature in its essence but to change society. The shift in function is obscured by the fact that Cage's writings have gradually become more political and by

the fact that heretofore nature, through art, has indirectly been the model for society.

But in Empty Words, nature is not the basis of Cage's aesthetic, the ideal society is. This shift entails others. Cage does not discuss the role of technology in Empty Words, but

clearly it has become problematic for him. Its immediate potential is for providing not unlimited abundance but unlimited destruction. I discuss Cage's recent writing in a separate essay.

2. Ronald Hayman, Theatre and Anti-Theatre

(New York: Oxford University

Press, 1979), p. 241.

3.

John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University

Press, 1969), p. 32.

4. Robert Hughes, "The Most Living Artist" [Robert Rauschenberg], Time (November 29, 1976), p. 59. Richard Kostelanetz, "Contemporary American

Esthetics," in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1978), p. 26. Michael Kirby, The Art of Time (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1969), p. 77. James Roose-Evans, Experimental Theatre (New York: Universe Books, 1971), p. 132; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), p. 60.

5. Michael Kirby, The Art of Time, pp. 77-98.

6. Virgil Thomson, "Cage and the Collage of Noises," The New York Review of Books (April 23, 1970), p. 14; Donal Henahan, The New York Times (October 22, 1976), C7.

7. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger, 1970; first edition, 1968), p. 117.

8. Richard Keel, "The Great Repression," British Journal of Aesthetics, 13 (Winter 1973), p. 44.

9. George Steiner, "Retreat from the Word," The Kenyon Review, 23 (Spring 1961), p. 191. Steiner does not specifically refer to Cage but to the general effort to contemporary science expressed in art.

10. Percy Bridgman, The Way Things Are (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 8; see also p. 168.

11. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater; Richard Foreman, "How to Write a Play," Performing Arts Journal, 2 (Fall 1976), p. 86; Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, ed. Kate Davy (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 138; p.

135.

12. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 31. see

106

13. The basic Aristotelian categories are taken from John Herman Randall, Jr.,

Aristotle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), chap. l.

14. At present the greatest advances in science seem to be in biology.

15. J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 79.

16. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 9l.

17. Gustav Hertz, quoted by Werner Heisenberg, The Physicist's Conception of Nature (London:

Hutchinson, 1958), pp. 152-53.

18. Percy Bridgman, The Way Things Are, pp. 3-4.

19. John Cage, Silence (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.l.T. Press, 1967; first edition, 1961), p. 53.

20. Percy Bridgman, The Way Things Are, p. 45.

21. Percy Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist (New York: Philosophical Library,

1950), p. 108.

22. Percy Bridgman, Great Essays by Nobel Prize Winners, ed. Leo Hamalian and Edmond L. Volpe (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), pp. 312-13; J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, p. 68.

23. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview with John Cage," TDR, X:2 (Winter, 1965), p. 51; p. 55.

24. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 159.

25. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 11.

26. Ibid.

27. John Cage, Silence, p. 106; p. 134; John Cage, M (Middletown, Conn.; Wesleyan University Press, 1974), p. 3.

28. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 32.

29. J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, p. 103. Percy Bridgman observes that "if the insight that one can never get away from oneself has really 'got under one's skin' two diametrically opposite reactions are conceivable. Realizing the hopelessness of trying to get away from one's self, one may abandon one's self to an orgy of invention and construction of metaphysical principles and absolutes, on the principle that one might as well die for a sheep as a lamb. Or one may react by trying to get away from one's self as much as possible and to intrude one's self into any situation as little as possible. (An unsympathetic reader will have no difficulty in pointing out that there is very little meaning in the last sentence.) It was the latter ideal that inspired William of Occam long ago in his celebrated slogan that entities are not to be created beyond necessity.

Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for adopting it is that thereby one has given as few hostages to the future as possible and retained the maximum flexibility for dealing with unanticipated facts or ideas" (The Way Things ...

Are, p. 10).

30. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 100.

31. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 117.

32. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 97.

33. John Cage, Silence, p. 95; Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview with John Cage," p. 70.

34. Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Art News (September

1966), quoted by John Lahr, Up Against thc Fourth Wall (New York: Grove, 1968), p. 191.

35. John Cage, Silence, p. 95; John Cage, John Cagc, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p.

191.

36. John Cage, Silence, p. 32.

37. John Cage, M, Foreword, p. xiii.

38. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 141 (ellipsis in original).

107

39. Ibid., p. 13.

40. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968). Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice (New York: Drama Book Special­ ists, 1975).

41. Cage is much influenced by his study of Zen. Physicist Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1975), explores the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Cage has long been aware of these parallels.

42. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 77; John Cage, Silence, p. 23.

43. John Cage, Silence, p. 195.

44. Ibid., p. B. 45. Ibid., p. 195.

46. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. lIB. 47. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. B. Likewise, Pascual Jordan tells us that the change in attitude of the scientist "may be characterized in a simple phrase that also suggests its human content; it is a turn from arrogance to humility." Science and the Course of History, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p,

x.

48. Jill Johnston, "There is No Silence Now," in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz,

p.147.

49. John Cage, Silence, p. 129.

50. Ibid., p. 46.

51. John Cage, Empty Words, p. 1Bl. 52. Ibid., p. 1BO. 53. John Cage, Silence, p. 110; p. 12B. 54. Ibid., p. 125.

55. Ibid., p. 132.

56. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. ix.

57. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 167.

5B. Henry Stapp, quoted by Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p. 136.

59. John Cage, Silence, p. 135.

60. "The adoption of principles of musical composition by the other arts is probably the single most dominant characteristic of all modernism." Walter Sokel, quoted by Nahma Sandrow, Surrealism: Theater, Arts, Ideas (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 52. "So, I say, looking back over this record, that John Cage would ...

appear to be the most influential living composer today-whatever opinion you or I may hold about his music. Instead of fighting Cage and laughing loudly at every fresh

newspaper's description of his latest escapade, wouldn't it be more sensible to treat him as an aesthetic philosopher-at least, one of the most decisive intelligences of our creative century, a mind so unconventional that before long its very unconvention may be convention?" Peter Yates, "After Modern Music," in John Cage, ed. Richard

Kostelanetz, p. B7.

61. John Cage, Silence, p. 40.

62. John Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 7.

63. John Cage, M, p. 102.

64. Ibid., p. 114.

65. John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 11.

66. Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, p. 70.

67. John Cage, M, p. 3.

68. Percy Bridgman tells us that his "resolution to use the first person was one of the outcomes of the attempt to see things in terms of activities. A spoken or a written word was spoken or written by someone, and part of the recognition of the word as

108

it" (The Way Things Are, p. activity is a recognition of who it was that said it or wrote the performer must a and for a specification complete 4). "Doings require performer, be specified" (The Way Things Are, p. 37).

69. Ernst Mayr, quoted by Robert Francoeur, Ewlving World, Converging Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. x.

70. Percy Bridgman, The Logic of Modem Physics (New York: Macmillan Co.,

1932), p. 3.

71. John Cage, Silence, p. 68.

72. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview with John Cage," p. 53; John Cage, Silence, p. 128; p. 64; John Cage, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 24; John Cage, Silence, p. 65.

73. John Cage, M, p. 69; John Cage, Silence, p. 134; p. 135.

74. John Cage, Silence, p. 93.

75. Bridgman, The Way Things Are, p. 45.

76. lbid., p. 198.

77. Eric Salzman, John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 151, ellipsis in original.

78. John Cage, John Cage, Richard Kostelanetz, p. 18.

79. "Robert Wilson and 'Einstein on the Beach," Interview/Report by Jeff Gold­ berg, New York Arts Journal, 1:1 (1977), p. 21.

SO. While psychiatrists traditionally viewed the patient as a self-contained case and focused their attention upon the history of this patient, psychiatrists have come to regard personality as a process and to focus their attention on family interactions and

behavior as an interaction with the therapist who is no longer thought of as invisible and irrelevant in his person. That is to say, the account of behavior has become more spatial and is expressed in terms of interactions. Such changes, con­ sistent with changes in our general perceptions of reality, of course, affect the examination and understanding of character in drama.

on

Copyright � 1982 by Natalie Crohn Schmitt

109

John Cage and the way of the ear M.e. Richards

The union of mystery and sensory exactitude makes music a possible metaphor of reality. John Cage is drawn thoroughly by the experience of sound, which is the matrix as well for his connectedness to graphics, dance, architecture, and love of nature. He hears through the sounds and silences a counterpart to human development: both esoteric and social. His work is toward musical presence as a vehicle of more-than­ musical values. This is at the heart of reconnecting human attitudes with artistic practice-to reexperience music as a path of knowledge, as in the way of ancient wisdoms. Social, political, economic, religious concerns may be reintegrated through a philosophy and practice of music. This is Cage's intuition and commitment.

Today the experience of music as witness to reality has been re­ newed through research in theoretical physics, notably by David Bohm, at the University of London. He proposes an understanding of the universe and consciousness which can best be experienced, he says, as music is experienced. Music "continually flows into emo­ tional, physical, and other responses, that are inseparable from the transformations out of which it is essentially constituted." 1 In the order in which we live, music and morality are enfolded and unfolding. One finds one's way musically to human wholeness. Taste may be regarded, not as aesthetic judgment, culturally biased, but as a capacity closer to that of listening, of savoring, of being one with, of

"knowing.

"

What is Cage's devotion, musical and ethical? Where has his lis,

tening led him?

To experience the sounds of the world musically. All the sounds.

Giving preference, perhaps, to sounds which have not tended to be regarded as musical.

Years ago, for instance, after I decided to devote my life to music, I noticed that

people distinguished between noises and sounds. I decided to follow Varese and fight for noises, to be on the side of the underdog.!

110

A musical apprehension of the world. Not necessarily to provide familiar pleasures. But to broaden the base. To let in all the waifs and can be regarded as a leveling strays, as well as all inventiveness. This it can be seen as a process Or culture. process, reducing high musical be to of allowing sound to be acknowledged, given musical credence, of music. A no matter what its source or nature. A kind of theology kind of musical mysticism. A Meister Eckhardt of music: "Split the and find the music therein!" A Zen master of music: "There!

stick,

Listen to that!"

Affirming the primal intuition that Sound is Formative, and that we had, therefore, better harken to it. In the beginning, some say, was the Sponda-the original sound. Others have it that the Ear is our mother, out of the Ear we come. Hans Jenny in Kymatics shows how forms come into being when matter is vibrated on a metal disk. We can imagine the body of God as, among other things, a listening chamber.

We can imagine it as a transparency of inner hearing. Does it separate the sheep from the goats? The music of the spheres, the heavenly harmony: is it Grecian modes, and European music from the tenth century through Wagner and Bruckner? Is it possible to imagine a WorldSongBody and to keep the ears open and to teach them to receive experience beyond their own likes and dislikes, their own habits? These are not only musical questions, John Cage knows. They are social questions, moral questions-questions of a way of being.

1974. As I think about the future of music, I notice that music-as an activity

separated from other activities-doesn't enter my mind. Strictly musical ques­ tions are no longer serious questions."

A war against elitism, against music theory, music culture which has deafened our ears, and replaced them with attitudes and tastes, rather than the capacity to receive, to listen and to hear, "to taste what is present." The mystery of the ear. The mystery of the receptive. We are moving, Cage suggests by his philosophy and practice, toward a new marriage, of those originating hexagrams in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, of Oracles, which is so much a part of his love and his work. THE CREATIVE and THE RECEPTIVE. The gestures of the OFFERING and the VESSEL. The ACTION and the CONTEXT. Who knows what new children may be engendered if we move in our music and our lives toward an integration of the op­ posites rather than toward ignorance and warfare?

MORE

THAN

ANYTHING ELSE WE

NEED COMMUNION

WITH

EVERYONE, STRUGGLES FOR POWER HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH COMMUNION. COMMUNION EXTENDS BEYOND BORDERS: IT IS

111

WITH ONE'S ENEMIES ALSO. THOREAU SAID: "THE BEST COM­ MUNION MEN HAVE IS IN SILENCE."4

Dangers lurk in this kind of musical sainthood. Always the shadow where the light is bright. Cage risks being identified with defending a position. Positions tend to lose mobility. Without mobility, without paradox, truth is even more fugitive. It takes fast footwork to keep the lines open and not begin to create another musical entrenchment, another antagonism: to institutionalize chance and indeterminacy.

Cage wouldn't do this, but his students and his admirers (as disciples and followers mostly do) may tend to pare down the teacher and the teaching to their own size, their own inexperience.

Cage has come to his way through an inventive and moral disposi­ tion-an impulse to challenge, to broaden, to deliver from bondage.

He is by nature, he used to tell me, "a Methodist minister." I noticed in him a fastidiousness for the True, the Beautiful, the Good. To make these into Dancers and Singers in a World Theater rather than pillars in a provincial pogrom-ah, that has been the suffering and the journey and the joy. And to perceive that this threefold devotion is not to one's personal preferences, but to an autonomy that sounds from within life itself. It may indeed sound from deep within oneself.

What makes the difference between the false sound and the true, the ugly and the beautiful, the evil and the good? John Cage indicates over and over again that this is the mystery of the human ego and of inner development. At what level do we live? For the experiences we have are not forced upon us from outside, but come from within our own nature.

I think the work was a success, I think you really got your point across.

No, I didn't get my point across to you, you got your point across to you. I don't know why you still think people are pushing ideas from one head into another.

Haven't :you said that you want to incorporate outside noises into your work?

I haven't said that, I've said that contemporary music should be open to the sounds outside it. I just said that the sounds of the traffic entered very beauti­ fully, but the self-expressive sounds of people making foolishness and stupidity and catcalls were not beautiful, and they aren't beautiful in other circumstances either.

But are they a part of the work?

No. They're a part of the experience we have. They are a part of our lives, but are they a part of what we want society to be?

It's what we are.

No-I think society can be different ....

Aren't you glad you got an honest response?

If we are talking about the interruptions, that's not to be classified under honest, that's to be classified under the complete absence of self-control and openness to boredom-and boredom comes not from without but from within."

112

He knows he is out on a limb, opening things up and then drawing a line. But that's it, that's the two-way street, the paradox, the move, ment.

It's the line that I've drawn, and to which my life is devoted. I had the good fortune in the late forties to go for two years to lectures by Daisetz Suzuki on Zen Buddhism. One of the lectures he gave was on the structure of mind. He drew an oval on the board, and halfway up the left-hand side he put two parallel lines which he said was the ego. "The ego has the capability to close itself in by means of its likes and dislikes. It stays there by day through its sense perceptions and by night through its dreams. What Zen would like, instead of its acting as a barrier, is that the ego would open its doors, and not be controlled by its likes and

dislikes. "6

What may make sounds ugly or behavior ugly is what Cage calls self, expression: namely, being controlled by the addictions of our egotism.

Why is it that when I go to hear someone and I don't like what is going on, instead of interrupting it, I say to myself, why don't you like it? Can't you find something about it that you enjoy? People insist upon self-expression. I really am opposed to it. I don't think people should express themselves in that kind of a way,1

This view can be misunderstood as being against individual expres­ sion if it is not heard as containing its opposite as well: namely, that

the uniqueness of each person's creativity is life's prime value. "If one of us doesn't have an idea that will open the minds of the rest of us, another will. We begin to be keenly aware of the richness and unique' ness of each individual and the natural capacity each person has to open up new possibilities for another.!"

John Cage has done so much to free the single sound, to free silence into imaginative hearing. To free our listening from structuring itself in terms of harmony, melody, and rhythm. To give us free sounds, without dependencies.

Sounds should not get stuck in the service of our emotions, he implies. We should learn to hear them as they freely are, unenslaved

by personal history, nor by mentation nor music theory. Open our ears to pure sound, or to sound purely. Musically to listen to the world.

It is for many of these reasons that he uses chance operations in his

composing activity: CHANCE OPERATIONS ARE NOT MYSTERIOUS SOURCES OF "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

113

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 WHETHER THAT BE OUTSIDE OR INSIDE.9

What does Cage want? What are the serious questions? Music, he says, has not been idle in preparing the way in a new direction. What he wants is that we should open our ears and change our minds. "In changing our minds, therefore, we look for that attitude of mind which is non-exclusive, which can include all possibilities-those we know and those we do not yet imagine." 10 More and more, he says, the concern with personal feelings of individuals, even the enlightenment of individuals, will be seen in the larger context of society.

What we are learning is how to be convivial. "Here comes Everybody." Though the doors will always remain open for the musical expression of personal feelings, what will more and more come through is the expression of the pleasures of conviviality (as in the music of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass). And beyond that a non-intentional expressivity: a being together of sounds and people (where sounds are sounds, and. people are people) ....

The fences have come down and the labels are being removed. An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming together in one huge tank.'!

Musical open-mindedness.

Through the activities of many com'

posers, through changes in technology associated with music, through

the interpenetration of cultures formerly separated (why not a duet between tuba and sitar, he asks, on the ground common to both?) and through the reason that "there are more of us and we have many ways of getting together."

Open-mindedness about time: brief events, extended durations.

About loud and soft. About what sound follows another and when.

An open-mindedness about melody: Klangfarbenmelodie has not taken the place of bel canto. It has extended our realization of what can happen. The same is true of aperiodic rhythm: it includes the possibility of periodic rhythm. In terms of counterpoint, we can recognize the presence of different known kinds (we can imagine inventing kinds of counter­ point as yet unknown); we can also recognize and enjoy the absence of counter­ point (that is to say, we cannot imagine two or more lines composed of sounds that couldn't or shouldn't be heard at the same time).'!

We can be extremely careful about harmony, or extremely careless (as Cage says he is), or in some gray compromises. Not only musical structures are to be considered, but processes. It is the difference, he

114

says, between an object that can be divided into parts, and the weath­ er.

Open-mindedness among composers, which has affected composers and listeners too, is comparable and kin, he says, to the religious spirit: namely, feeling ourselves all to belong to one limitless whole. But open-minded as the religious spirit is, it is not enough. "Needed (and urgently) is a social sense of all Mankind as Family, of Earth as Home. I would be willing to say a 'political' sense, if politics were understood 13 as all of the actions of all of the people."

One important step in this direction taken by the new music is the blurring of distinctions between composers, performers and listeners.

Performers, rather than merely doing what they have been told to do, have the opportunity to use their own faculties, to make decisions in a field of possibilities, to cooperate, that is, in a particular musical undertaking. It is a revelation to observe how unnerving it can be to a group of professional instrumentalists to be invited to take part in the making of choices. Having been given little opportunity to mature in their relationship to their own creativity, their reaction to freedom tends to express anxiety, distress, anger, hysteria-at finding them, selves without a leader, finding themselves to be responsible co' creators. It is a barometer of the unconscious authoritarianism under which many people live. The unconscious fear and self-belittling. It does no good to reproach ourselves for what we have not yet out, grown. We need places to practice.

When our relationship to art can move from product to behavior, much will have been transformed. "Behaving artistically" is the ap­ proach made in the new handwork of Paulus Berensohn, where art is experienced as life-process, rejoining the individual soul with sensory experience-and enlivening the artistic archetype in human behavior, namely the tendency toward fusing the opposites (Coleridge says this is the heart of poetry) and experiencing the whole in every part. This is the non-exclusiveness toward which Cage urges us to turn our minds and spirits, and in the spirit of which we may in the future invent our practices. It is also a step in the direction of perceiving how interiority is an aspect of the sense world as it is of the soul world. "Non' intentional expressiveness" as Cage calls it. let us beware of being distracted {rom life by art

14 ....

It is the social nature of music, the practice in it of using a number of

people

doing different things to make it, that distinguishes it from the visual arts, draws it toward theatre and makes it relevant to society, even society outside musical

society

...

.15

115

We can say that this blurring of the distinctions between composer, per­ formers and listeners is evidence of an ongoing change in society, not only in the structure of sociery, but in the feelings that people have for one another. Fear, guilt, and greed associated with hierarchical societies are giving way to mutual confidence, a sense of common well-being, and a desire to share with another whatever one person happens to have or to do. However, these changed social feelings which characterize many evenings of new music do not characterize the As long as we tolerate the division of Mankind into power society as a whole and profit organizations and nations all continuously at one another's throats, we must each day remind ourselves that though it is beautiful, each day is miserable.

And act accordingly. 16 ....

That government is best that governs not at all, writes Thoreau.

Many musicians, Cage says, are ready. "We now have many musical examples of the practicality of anarchy. Music with indeterminate parts, no fixed relation of them (no score). Music without notation.

Our rehearsals are not conducted.... Musicians can do without

government." 17 By making analogies between musical siruations we do have and desirable social circumstances which we do not yet have, we make music suggestive and relevant to the serious questions which face Mankind.!"

Cage's approach to language likewise shows a deep musical concern.

He warns against the militarization of language-the march of syntax,

the analytic rhetoric which, even so, is not listened to. He pleads and acts on

behalf of the right brain, which is the current symbol for

"behaving artistically," which may appear to be "uselessly."

Since words, when they communicate, have no effect, it dawns on us that we need

sociery in which communication is not practiced, in which words become they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of primeval environment. The demilitarization a

nonsense as

of language: a serious musical concern.'?

Empty Words, Cage's monumental project following the nonsvntac­ tical poetry of Jackson Mac Low, and based, as has been most of his work the past dozen years, on Thoreau's Journals, is meant to make a gradual transition from language to music, renouncing first of all sentences, then phrases, then words, then syllables, then letters. Part of the impulse is, surely, to turn our attention to living source, to become unabstract. To have a sensation, which may well be incom­ prehensible. No matter. Not to understand something is the least of our troubles, Cage implies, so long as we have an experience. In 1980, he wrote a kind of theatrical fantasy, a tribute to his beloveds: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Sane: An Alphabet. He speaks of how the 116

works of these men have "resisted the march of understanding and so are as fresh now as when they first were made."

He did not understand Duchamp's work, and was more changed by it than by any artist of this century. He does not understand Joyce's work: Nor do I understand the night sky with stars and moon in it. The fact we travel to the moon has given me no explanation of it. I would be delighted to retrace Basho's steps in japan where as an old man he made a special tour on foot to enjoy particular views of the moon. When I was in Ireland for a month last summer (,79) with John and Monika Fulleman collecting sounds for Roararorio, many Irishmen told me they couldn't understand Finnegans Wake and so didn't read it. I asked them if they understood their own dreams. They confessed they didn't. I have a feeling some of them may now be reading Joyce or dreaming at least that they're reading joyce. Adaline Glasheen says "joyce himself told Arthur Power, 'What is clear and concise can't deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery!' Human kind, it is clear, can't stand much reality.

We so fiercely hate and fear our cloud of unknowing that we can't believe sincere and unaffected, Joyce's love of the clear dark_H20 ...

Cage is invigorated by what is enigmatic, untranslatable, vitally itself. He is also masterful at elucidation. The dialogue in his being, between the one who understands and he who experiences, is striking.

They seem to be unantagonistic to one another, uncompetitive. Cage's joy in the doing of whatever it is, is infectious. His laughter affec­ tionately explodes. For well he knows how for all his scope, he draws the line. And how for all our tracking, the moon stays unpredictable.

The suggestiveness of [Thoreau's] drawings is increased when they are taken At that point we don't know what they're about.

They are like modern art, and also like the ideograms of ancient Chinese language: they float in mind-space, They illustrate an early remark by Thoreau: Yes and No are lies: the only true answer will serve to set all well afloat." out of context.

In the end, what is music? Cage says music is work. That is his conclusion. More, it is teamwork. It is work to build a new civiliza­ don. Art serves no useful material purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits. The minds and spirits of people are changing, everywhere, he says. Friendship is in the air.

How many people can work together happily, not just efficiently-happily and unselfishly? A serious question which the future of music will help to answer.F

How to bring about the revolution, not by

enforcing it, but just by

suggesting it-this is his serious musical concern.

Each day is a beautiful day. Each day is a miserable day.

117

duchaMp telephones from kAnsas it's like nothing on eaRth i feel as i did before beComing a ghost i havE no regrets i weLcome whatever

happens next23

In this final stanza and mesostic (UMARCEL") of the theatrical fan, tasy, Cage's voice seems intimately present-his wonderful humor, his love, and his intuitive perceptions of the truths of human life and death. I hear him speaking for himself, UI have no regrets/I welcome

whatever happens next."

I met John Cage in 1948, when he and Merce Cunningham came to

perform at Black Mountain College, where I was teaching Reading and Writing. I was printing a small book of my poems on the handpress we had there. John asked to read them. He told me about the nine emotions of eastern philosophy, and said that my poems were espe­ cially strong in two: Wonder and Mirth. I think he also is very strong in these. Plus anger and devotion and optimism. We have been friends ever

in

since our first meeting. And we were neighbors for several years

country co-op near Haverstraw, New York.

I think of his approach to music as "a way"-not exclusive of other a

but added to them-historically crucial, making way for the by demythologizing the old and venerated. Like a wash of color over a painting, which is made of other color washes as well, so that larger perspectives appear through the overlays.

"Beethoven is a roll of toilet paper," he said, and the gasps are still resonating. He did not mean that Beethoven is a roll of toilet paper. He meant it is possible to free ourselves from assumptions about Beethoven's absolute value, and get on with our own work. UNo more masterpieces!" as Antonin Artaud cried, and I was translating Artaud's The Theater and Its Double just at that time. It is a kind of shock treatment for addicts. It does no harm to Beethoven. And it may allow his music to be more freely related to and chosen. We don't need to feel culturally locked in.

Nor do we need to feel locked in by Cage's performances. The beauty of his philosophy is that it makes us free to appreciate a world larger than ourselves and our past experience. Free of expectation.

Free to stay or to go. Though I myself am not sure that music is the same as sounds or noise, I have always been enriched by his creativity.

With the ego pressure off, any issue seems unstressful, whether the audio is turned up louder than some can bear, or whether the sounds seem less interesting than the ideas, or the limits of attention are ignored as if they don't matter (and maybe indeed they don't, maybe ways,

new, sometimes

118

he is right, maybe they too are cultural assumptions). I am reminded of one of my favorite stories told by Cage: about the Zen monk who went up the mountain each day to take a bath. Others noticed it and wondered what spiritual significance the monk's action had. Someone asked, "Why do you go everyday up the mountain to wash yourselfl" "No why, just a dip!"

Cage means his music to be an activity, an action. Not forced on anyone. And there is always wit and warmth and surprising enlarge, ment of consciousness that comes of it. And his own presence gives off such waves of commitment and unending originality-such an

unique "EAR"-such determination and concentration and willing' ness for joy in the next task. Such a sense of personal validity, of self, respect, of serving life. He teaches us all to go toward that.

Cage's "silent piece," 4'33", is an integral resource in my life since I heard it premiered by David Tudor at Carl Fischer Hall in New York City. It contains no notes, only "listening"-in three movements. It can be played by anyone anywhere anytime. It is inexhaustible in its freshness, its healing-the unappeasable hunger it appeases. I love the deep listening-the richness-the mystery of the inaudible. There is a way of approaching music by way of the inaudible as well as by the way of sounds. There is a way of experiencing tone as an inner sensation of our being, not as carried on the air, but as freed from the air when it crosses the threshold of the ear and enters the supersensi­ ble self. Beethoven, deaf, heard the fathomless songs.

I myself tend to be more interested in the inner experiences of tones than in the external sounds, more moved by an inner hearing than by the blast or whisper Tone does not lea ve us free of feeling. The feeling it arouses is a rapture different perhaps from the emotional associa­ dons Cage too wishes to go beyond. But our feeling life tends to be so arid. Thank God for the abuses of music. And Thank God for the release from abuse into another quality of feeling. Perhaps the way we experience music does have something to do with ego and personal development, as Cage claims, for we can tend to use anything that comes into our senses either as an ego charge and discharge, or as a threshold for transformation. Perhaps a general cultural unconscious, ness is part of what Cage is trying to wake us from when he demands that music be freed from a psychological or emotional enslavement.

And perhaps what I move toward is the possibility of a sense-free music, heard by soul and spirit. But it has, usually, to get there through the ears!

The instrumental and vocal music which we may hear has the possibility of transforming into tone, of joining the "tonestream" which flows like a musical tao in the subtler substances of our being. .

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Or it has the possibility of ignoring this aspect of musical experience

and continuing to deliver punch after punch of musical bravura which accumulates as musical culture. Musical materialism. Aesthetic greed.

Mirrored, as Cage protests, in social greed.

It is possible to think about it differently, to experience it dif­ ferently. Another wash of color across the cosmic canvas. Another step, as Cage imagines it, toward communion.

His inspired and constructive insight is that musical behavior is human behavior. In a recent work, Cage says he wants to give an opportunity for us to examine 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 (as our nations apparently for their continuance, as though they were children playing games, prefer to have it)."24 In the evolution of consciousness in our day, these are signs of movement toward the next revelation of artistic spirit: namely, an art of human behavior toward the good of the whole planet. Not by direct action, but by the development of new ways of working together musically. This Way of the Ear is a path toward communion, as Cage says. And the communion is not only among human beings. It re· connects human intuitions with earth and sky; fire, water and air; dawn and dusk; the seasons. One of the most remarkable aspects of Cage's contribution is his use of these testimonies as sources of musical notation. His ear opens and opens to the wholenesss he discerns.

Thoreau's Journals engendered a musical language for Cage, grounded in woodlands and weather and garden plot. For an even longer period, he has found music in star maps, in the great volumes of Atlas Ec1ipticalis, Atlas Australis, Atlas Borealis, Atlas Coelis. Specks of light transform to sound as his scores materialize. Even the expe­ rience of stellar space Cage tries to bring into the music through the slowing of tempo and the discipline of silence.

For Cage, the dimensions of life are the dimensions of music. The sound of a growing plant, fire burning through pine cones, water lapping inside a conch shell as he tilts it back and forth-when entered into, heard, these can be meditations, portals of perception, quick­ ening into delight and awe. Or New York's Sixth Avenue. Or the softest possible sound of a plucked string. Or all the keys a pianist's hands can cover in a sweep. Or. Through the sounds, we hear more than meets the ear. We hear reality, little by little. We are told, by the few surviving traditions of ancient mystery schools, that true knowl­ edge of the world was once known as musical knowledge.P Cage's fidelity to The Way of the Ear recreates this union.

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True knowledge is musical knowledge because they are paths of inner

development, schooling us toward unobstructed "hearing."

Their evolution is reciprocal. They resonate in the soul like lotus tympani, opening our hearts beyond ourselves. They leap, like Cage, into "the work," an alchemical opus. For new music can transform us even as, Cage says, his devotion to it has transformed him. Innovator and philosopher, his ear is to the ground of human becoming, intuited through the divine mystery of music.

1. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p, 200.

2. John Cage, "The Future of Music," Numus West (1974), p. 6.

3. Ibid, p. 6.

4. John Cage, Preface for Lecture on the Weather (New York: Henmar Press, 1975), for United States Bicentennial, commissioned by Canadian Broadcasting Corpora­ tion.

5. "Empty Words: John Cage Talks Back," Loka, A Journal from Naropa Institute, ed. by Rick Fields (New York: Anchor, 1975), p. 97.

6. Ibid., p. 96.

7. Ibid., p. 97.

B. "The Future of Music," p. B. 9. Preface for l..ecture on the Weather, op.cit, 10. "The Future of Music," p. 7.

11.

12.

13.

Ibid., p. B. Ibid., pp. 6-7.

Ibid., p. 9.

14. Ibid., p. 12.

15. Ibid., p. 9.

16. Ibid., p. 10.

17. Ibid. lB. Ibid., p. 11.

19. Ibid., p. 12.

20. John Cage, james jCYyCe, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Sane: An Alphabet, unpublished,

(19BO), p. 11.

21. "The Future of Music," p. 12.

22. Ibid., p. 14.

23. james jCYyCe, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Sane: An Alphabet, p. 33.

24. Preface for Lecture on the Weather.

25. Rudolf Steiner, Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, new translation (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970), p. 146.

121

H. C. E.

(Here Comes Everybody) Morton Feldman in conversation

with Peter Gena

GENA: I think you'd agree, Morty, that the New York music and art scene

from the earliest fifties, in which Cage, you and many others

were

involved, was unique. Certainly unique for America because

New York was now the focal point of new art and music and there was

tremendous influx of European talent during and after the war.

FELDMAN: When I first met John in the late 1950s most of the people that I became friendly with in his circle were painters. He did have a musical world that he saw constantly-Lou Harrison was living in New York, as was Virgil Thomson-but both Lou and Virgil had other concerns. Then, of course, there was Henry Cowell. And Henry Cowell was the first older composer who actually wrote one of the initial articles on the new music. And he was very interested in it.

Actually everybody was really interested, but to some degree divorced from it. What struck me, coming from just being a student-I was twenty-four or twenty-five when I met John-was the fact that the painters were interested in completely different concerns than I was used to. In music there were Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And people were still talking about Schoenberg and Stravinsky as if all the con­ cerns of composition were bouncing off one or the other.

GENA: Yes, as Schoenberg said, "Either we're right or the French are right. We both can't be."

FELDMAN: But among the painters, cubism was already an old story. You didn't hear anything about it the way you would hear constantly about how one orders the twelve-tones, or whether com­ posers have to write serial music, and things like that. Naturally, among the painters certain artists would be discussed. Matisse, of course, would come up in conversation. Mondrian would come up in conversation; Giacometti-it was the beginning of his big reputation a

Note: Thanks go to Kathleen Beckerman for transcribing this taped conversation into type­

script.

122

in America. But there wasn't reall-y that much talk about European art in the way composers talked about Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In the

world there wasn't this kind of either/or situation. Just an un­ believable amount of energy, an unbelievable amount of talent and, of course, there were people that, for whatever reason, might have re, ceived more public attention than others. De Kooning had a big following around him; Clyfford Still, though living in California, was a personage that loomed over that particular time, especially because of his relationship with Clement Greenberg, the critic; and Barney New, man, Rothko, Jackson Pollock and so forth. So there were luminaries, but the feeling that I had was that there really weren't issues. It's as if you had fifteen Stravinskys. And that was absolutely extraordinary to

art

me.

GENA: The artists weren't forced to polarize like the musicians. It serialism or not for the musicians.

FELDMAN: Yes, it wasn't even a crisis of whether or not one

was

should do figure painting or abstract, because everybody was painting so

differently.

GENA: So what was it like in terms of sharing ideas? I'm thinking of Larry Rivers depicting Jackson Pollock's style as directed accident.

And then Cage talking about purposeful purposelessness and coming up with the silent pieces; or Rauschenberg doing white canvasses.

What was the feeling like? Were these ideas just in the air, or was there a direct link? In all periods of music the ideas were in the air. Certainly serialism was in the air and Schoenberg wasn't the only one to do it.

FELDMAN: You have to be a kind of cultural anthropologist to survive today. Kandinskv was doing serial painting fifteen years before Schoenberg. Now here is what I feel the connection was. You have to remember that except for myself, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, it was not a youth movement. It's very important to remember when I met John he was in his late thirties. De Kooning didn't have a show until after he was forty. They all left periods behind them. John left, what I feel is, a magnificent period behind before he became tl.c:: John Cage that most people know. Beautiful pieces, a whole cycle of pieces.

I will actually name them because I feel they belong together: Six Melodies for Violin and Piano. Sensationally gorgeous pieces. String Quartet, which is now a modern classic. The Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra and Sixteen Dances. And it was after Sixteen Dances, which might have been the last piece before the Music of Changes, which now brings us Cage as we know him. So John already had the prepared piano, the Sonatas and Interludes, and the book of music for two pianos, played by Gold and Fizdale many years ago. So he had that world behind him. And he had the whole series of

123

percussion constructions and miscellaneous things behind him. The most striking thing about that time is that there seemed to be little concern with influence. Of course there were always followers. But the whole continuity of influence and how we thought about it in terms of picking up some kind of thread was not there. If there was a thread I certainly wasn't tuned into it. But I did catch this attitude and the attitude was absolutely Well, let me tell you an anecdote that will maybe better explain what I'm talking about. It was in 1951. Jackson Pollock had a stunning show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. A large group of people were sitting around a table. And I remember one man in particular, an artist perhaps in his very early forties who said, "What a terrific show. Am I glad he did it. Now I don't have to." I think that describes the attitude.

GENA: There was no necessity to jump on any bandwagon because there was so much talent around.

FELDMAN: That was not an extraordinary thing to say at the time.

I would say that it's the key attitude that got me into another kind of energy of where my thoughts should be and what kind of questions I should ask. I don't feel that it was by accident that in one of Cage's early lectures he continually talks about H.C.E. from Finnegans Wake-"Here Comes Everybody." He works on that idea over and over in this particular lecture. "Here Comes Everybody, H.C.E." If was to write a book on I would anybody John Cage, suggest that he use this as a title. H.C.E. Because that's exactly what was going on.

Everybody. And it was very, very exciting, of course.

GENA: There's the title for this interview But let's get to the ...

...

European "everybody."

FELDMAN: Yes, Europe was in America. A lot of Europeans were living in America during the war. Mondrian was brought here. Leger here. A lot of surrealists were here. And now we get into the surrealists. I feel that's the Cage connection. I think that the surrealists influenced art in America more than they influenced art in Europe. I don't like to time surrealism because there's a really vast spread. For example, Max Ernst once said to Mondrian when he was looking at some work in Mondrian's studio, "You know, Piet, you're the real surrealist." So you've got the range between a Max Ernst (who was a good friend of Cage's) and a Mondrian. Who knows, Jasper Johns might be America's greatest surrealist. So we have a very, very big spread here. You've got from Magritte to Mondrian. In the Schoenberg world what have you got? You've got Krenek to Schoenberg. Surrealism gave vent to the imagination; and I feel tern' peramentally, if not spiritually, something in that particular era by way of surrealism made it possible for someone like a John Cage to move. was

124

GENA: Perhaps that was the dichotomy in art, though, at least early on. One headed either in the direction of abstraction, or the direction of surrealism, using realist images in a kind of noncontextual fashion.

Just as in music, Satie and even later Debussy, would represent realis­ tic images as tonal structures in a noncontextual fashion, as opposed to the abstraction of Schoenberg.

FELDMAN: John was very friendly with Marianne Moore. He once took me to a poetry reading she gave. He always liked that line of hers, "Real frogs in an imaginary pond." There is a kind of surrealist connection.

GENA: Allowing unrelated juxtapositions, I guess, which is some­

thing in John'S philosophy that obviously has to come from there and not

from the absttactionists.

FELDMAN: But at the same time I still feel that his processes were very much involved with his old teacher. To this day. In other words I feel that Cage's processes are continual variation. I think this came about because of Schoenberg's comment to John, "You have no

feeling for harmony. It would be like knocking your head against the wall." And John said, "Well, I'll knock my head against the wall." But like anybody else who had no interest in harmony, he found that which freed music from harmony. He found his Zen for polyphony.

GENA: The rhythmic structure aspect which allows sounds and silences.

FELDMAN: I wrote an article where I actually said, "John, don't be mad if I compare your rhythmic structure, how you use it, to perhaps the way Beethoven used harmony." This is not taking anything away from Cage in his use of continual variation, because he does not use it didactically. Again we must quote him. He uses it in order to imitate nature in its manner of operation. Which brings up another American connection. Because evidently there has to be something here that could produce a John Cage. Recently a friend of mine, a brilliant art historian, Barbara Novak, wrote a book called Nature and Culture. It's about nineteenth-century American painting, which is not too well known. And her contention is that what we had over here was some­ thing Europe didn't have-the wilderness. The luminaries went out and they painted it as they saw it. And I feel that Cage, too, in a sense explored an aspect of the wilderness in his pursuit of sound, and I feel that also it is not a replica of nature but, as he would put it, an imitation of its mode of operation, so that Cage's music lost the idealized, what appeared to be more focused, artistry of his teacher.

GENA: Wasn't John tremendously influenced, at least we see it later, by Satie and Duchamp? This certainly was not the American wilderness.

125

FELDMAN: As far as Duchamp goes, I seriously regret the fact that John is continuously being coupled with Duchamp. The crucial dif­ ference between them is that Duchamp freed the mind from the eye, while Cage freed one's ears from the mind. Also, all that Duchamp has really left us is the green box. True, it was an unprecedented fusion of linguistic and visual possibilities, and in this regard there is no denying his historical importance-while with Cage there is a long, long, long, long, long, list of very important musical compositions.

GENA: Yes, but also with Cage there is a very long, long, long list of ideas and perhaps with Duchamp there is a long, long, longer list of ideas I know when I first started studying Duchamp I was amazed at the similarities in terms of ideas; true, comparing eyes and ears be like and might comparing apples oranges or something. So if Duchamp really did free the mind from the eye, to that extent he moved away from craft and picked on ready-mades, FELDMAN: Especially if you had two left hands, like Duchamp. I mean he was better with a ruler. Once he took up a ruler, he was .

.

.

fine.

GENA: Yes, he was interested in mechanical drawing. Accordingly,

Cage talked about his terrible ear for harmony, and once he took up the ruler, as it were, which was time grids and rhythmic structures, it was wonderful. So Cage freed the sounds because he wanted to put them outside of the harmonic context.

FELDMAN: I didn't bring up Schoenberg's remark about John's lack of interest in harmony to imply what you're trying to say. I said that Duchamp picked up the ruler, not Cage.

GENA: What did Cage pick up?

FELDMAN: He picked up the eraser! He's bluffing. He's a Du­ champ in Cagean ears. He's bluffing. He has impeccable ears.

GENA: I didn't mean that. But he himself has said he never had an ear for traditional harmony. Undoubtedly he has impeccable ears for sound, but we were talking initially about conventional harmony.

FELDMAN: Listen, I just reread the harmony book of Schoenberg.

And he's a great, great teacher and he's one of the greatest composers of all time. I don't think that he had a feeling for harmony. If Schoenberg was studying with me, I'd say, "Arnold, you are going to be hitting your head against the wall. I don't like your feeling for harmony. Now if you really want to get that interested in Schenker, go ahead, but I don't know, Arnold, you've got problems." So, in a sense you could say that about anybody. Cage opened up the door to a vast world, willv-nillv. He opened Pandora's Music Box. He opened a door for me where I saw a direction which had nothing to do with any model in his world. He articulated for me what I was doing, but I 126

figured it out for myself. It took some time. I went another route. For example, the whole secret to my music, if I could just talk about myself for a minute. Knowing me all these years, you can imagine the great deprivation I feel in not being able to talk about myself com­ pletely, but if I could only talk about myself for a moment ...

GENA: This is going to be some moment.

FELDMAN: It's that essentially I am the master of nonfunctional harmony. And only a school kid is involved with functional harmony.

But what composer heard in terms of functional harmony? Harmony died in the early part of the nineteenth century. Harmony is like serialism. Kids talk about serialism. Serialism lasted six months. It lasted six months. One piece, or so. It was a six-month period. Really, that's all it was.

GENA: Even shorter than fauvism.

FELDMAN: So harmony had six years! It's a fantasy. Is Chopin involved with functional harmony?

GENA: He's involved with functional harmony in the sense of what he could do to muck it up.

FELDMAN: You mean he also was a master of nonfunctional

harmony.

GENA: A master at manipulating your perception of functional harmony. I guess that it became a conceptual thing. You felt safe because you knew harmony was under there somewhere.

FELDMAN: Schoenberg's remark, I think, was a little premature and a little too facile. I could say the same thing right now. If Verdi came to work with me and I see these long violin throbs going, very little harmony. I'd say, "What's the matter. You afraid of harmony?

Look at the bass line. It's not very strong there. What's the matter, Giuseppe? Unless you get a feeling for harmony, you're going to be knocking your head against La Scala for as long as you live." I mean it's a facile remark.

GENA: Well, let's say that it's not even such a matter of functional harmony, but rather the idea of teleological sound structure where the sound had to go somewhere. So not only would Schoenberg criticize Cage's chorale assignments, but he obviously didn't feel that John's music went somewhere. Of course, this is the big break, where finally there were people like yourself and John saying music doesn't have to go anywhere. A sound is not part of a hierarchy.

FELDMAN: But music does go somewhere.

GENA: Where, other than time? It moves in time, but you can't tell me after all these years that when there are two successive sounds in the your music, choice of the second sound was dependent on what the first was. Or that you were drawn from the first sound into the

127

second one. Cage certainly allows for that not to happen. You both deal with nonreferential time.

FELDMAN: It's not so easy. It's not easy. If you were going to analyze, for example, Tolstoy's War and Peace, you can say the man is rambling on and on. A big Balzac novel-is he rambling? Where's the cause and effect? Is he telling the story? Proust is a perfect example.

Where's the form? What ties things up? Is it rambling?

GENA: In a novel initially this rambling was often to provide perspective, so to speak, to the characters. But you're writing music without perspective. You're not providing "perspective" to the sounds, so that when I listen I hear some kind of a logical unfolding from sound "a" one by one up to sound "z."

FELDMAN: Being that my music has a bigger point of view, a less censored one. I don't think those are the issues because I think what Cage makes us face is that we then have to define for ourselves how censored we are in terms of our own vested interest. Either our patience, or our professionalism, or whatever.

GENA: But the point is that there was a period in the fifties which you said was so delightful because you each discovered how un­ censored you were.

FELDMAN: It depends on a lot of things. For example, people used to leave the house without locking the door. Now I tum a burglar alarm on. You know, it all depends on how one wants to enjoy an uncensored point of view. I once described a difference between John and me: John opened up the door and I just opened the window a crack. The only thing is that Cage created a problem by showing that there was something other than either serialism or Stravinsky or the few jokers in the deck-you know, like Bartok and Hindemith. There are only a few jokers. That's all. You know how dismal the whole state of music is? It's absolutely pretty dismal. I always wondered why John has been more or less consistent. At least in procedures all these years.

Especially when one of his favorite remarks, when I met him, was Sane's: "Show me something new and I'll start all over again." There is no need for Cage to start over again. The musical situation, you know, is still the same. It's 1982 and if I were going into the musical world it would be like 1946 in New York. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Schoenberg might change. The Schoenberg might be Boulez, and the Stravinsky might be Phil Glass.

There is still this kind of polarity, and things are going around these two particular points without too much diversion. And anything that well, it's like when really is a question of diversion is a kind of Xenakis was with me during the performance of a piece of mine and afterwards he said, "Well, we're perhaps the only two significant non' ...

128

mainstream people around." So he meant it jokingly but it's inter­ esting. But you know that if it weren't for Cage we wouldn't even have

important nonmainstream people around.

GENA: You hit on it there. It's a funny thing. No matter what's going on today, it can only be seen in the light of a sense of history. I

know when students ask me this question, "Is it necessary to study the masters to compose today ?" "Yes, you should," I answer. You should study Feldman, Cage, Wolff and Brown. Because there's an area that we can look back on and see that it did the necessary dirty work to free us to have this new pluralism. Even when we hear the new tonality now, it's not a return to traditional tonality; it's a reevaluation of tonality that could only have happened after the experience of the fifties. It's like looking at someone with short hair. We could tell if that person had long hair in the sixties and now has short hair, as opposed to the guy who's always had short hair since the fifties.

FELDMAN: But what are we supposed to learn? I never said this in the classroom, but I said it to a student of mine who studied here and became very upset with the way his work was going. I said, "You know, there's not one thing that I ever learned in the past that I could actually apply to my music. Nobody ever helped me. Any insight I had in the past does not reflect on anything I'm trying to do. I have no models to use. What I have to use is another tradition: how to notate."

GENA: It's not a musical model. I think it's an esthetic or philo,

sophical one.

FELDMAN: What young composer could use Cage? What could they learn from his music? Look at the long list of Cage's work and you know how prolific he is. Do you notice that some years he didn't do very much? And did you ever look at the pieces where he didn't do very much? They are so vast, so extensive that it's amazing that he could even have done them in a year. Do they know the work that it took? How many people in our time in the past fifty years know the level of work that Cage has done? Do you realize that there are only a few people in our time, Freud perhaps, who knew what it took? Is that any kind of moral for a student?

GENA: I think that's something that is coming out, because part of the problem that critics have had with Cage is that they dismiss his so' called frivolity; when in fact those of us who look deeply into what he says and what he did in his music know that there was a lot of discipline and hard work. And, of course, he's the first one to be saying that now, when he is accused of fluffing things off.

FELDMAN: Are you too young to remember when Khrushchev did the famous UN thing? You know the shoe he took off had a hole. So in 129

order to make a parallel with Cage, the hole will be his lack of concern for harmony. Khrushchev said, I'll bury you, remember?, with or without the hole. Well, Cage is going to bury most of the twentieth century just on the level of the work. Forget about any kind of qualitative remark. The level of the psychic force for energy that went to write that body of work is in itself monumental.

GENA: It's something that the young people didn't appreciate right away. I mean in the sixties. Many young composers picked up the banner of Cage and acted like fools, doing absolutely anything and justifying it all by saying that's what Cage is about.

FELDMAN: Why did that come about?

GENA: There was a total misunderstanding of the difference be­ tween the kinds of discipline and inner thought that Cage was involved in, as opposed to what on the surface appeared to many as an anything-goes attitude.

FELDMAN: They don't know anything that he's done in the past forty years, thirty years, twenty years; they don't know his recent work?

GENA: I think that is the problem. Many people are just now understanding what the essence of Cage's work, music and ideas is. I think the initial infatuation with Cage's ideas remains very much on the surface, so we had a situation where Cage himself was very unhappy with what his followers were doing under the aegis of his ideas, of chance, so to speak. That's a good point to bring up with you-this whole aspect of indeterminacy. John credits you with being the first one, for instance, to write music which was indeterminant in respect to performance. What misunderstandings and problems did this bring about?

FELDMAN: Well, in the past twelve or thirteen years, I started moving out of that area. Do you know what Picasso said when asked why he left cubism? "Because," he answered, "I wanted to be a painter. I didn't want to be a cubist." I don't want to imply that I wasn't a composer when I was writing the kind of music I was writing.

But as far as I was concerned, I always felt that the minute you set up a grid, or the minute you are notating certain types of acoustical events, whether the time world is in varying degrees of tight or loose, to some degree you know what you are doing; you have a sense of the pro­ priety of it, like the way Jackson Pollock would have a sense of his eye and his scale of things. I can't say that I wasn't writing a kind of deterministic art, but I felt that I was always in some kind of realistic space. And it's realistic to know if the space is going to be long or short, and it determined the many kinds of choices I made. But my argument is not with the concepts. My argument is, though this 130

sounds absolutely ungenerous and I don't really mean it to be, that I was interested in freeing the sound and not the performer.

GENA: John has said many times that, "Morty's notated music is

Morty playing his graph music."

FELDMAN: And that was the big problem I had. Did you ever hear of Nick the Greek?

GENA: Jimmy the Greek? The bookie who gives the odds on the sports games?

FELDMAN: Then maybe it's Jimmy the Greek. Good old Jimmy said, "Never bet on anything that breathes." I forgot there was some­ body breathing for these notes. It became a realistic social phenom­ enon, in a way. I have to really hand it to John for never getting discouraged in any way, because I agree with him almost as if a child of mine came to me and said, "Dad, I believe in free love. And I'm going to go and move in with Matilda." And I would say, "Well, it's all right, but for the kind of life that you want to live with Matilda maybe you're better off getting married."

GENA: But John's music at this early time, his chance processes as in the Music of Changes, were before the fact of the realization. They were fixed so his removal from the process was done way before the

performance.

FELDMAN: But if what he produced was so irksome to the New York Philharmonic players, the fact that it was now fixed on a page didn't make any difference. I'm not going to live to see the ramifica­ tions of the fact that a human being can't present someone's art with the dignity it deserves. I just read an interview John gave. Towards the end he talks about the fact that he doesn't have much experience in being a pessimist. He also talks about the didactic nature of his work.

That he thought it would change people.

GENA: Was he often accused of being utopian?

FELDMAN: I don't think he was utopian. Look, if a Jew in Nazi Germany was told by someone, "What are you complaining about?

You're acting like an utopian," are you going to say, "All right, I can understand anti-Semitism, I can understand even getting hit on the head on occasion because I'm Jewish, but to put seven million of me in a gas chamber, that I don't understand"? So in that sense, Cage is utopian. The only thing is that as an artist, to a great degree, he is living culturally in Nazi Germany. That's what it amounts to. I just left Nazi Germany and I went to London. That's all.

GENA: Well, I was going to follow up with John's interest in Thoreau, and his mention of anarchy. His hope for an anarchistic society where more people would be laid off to do useful work.

FELDMAN: But don't you know that story he tells about some131

body he met who's an anarchist? This guy was very upset because as the kids started to grow up they started to jump on the bed, among other things, and he didn't know what to do with the kids because he was an anarchist.

Cage himself tells this story; the dilemma of watch, ing people jumping on his music and doing this and that and yet being an

anarchist.

GENA: In recent years, John has been known to get upset when the audience reacts in a hostile way, rather than to delight in the contro­ versy. There were an awful lot of misconceptions about what John was doing, what he was about, in the sixties.

FELDMAN: John opted to go into the world. A very close friend of mine who is now dead, a great painter, was standing on Eighth Street.

It was freezing winter, and he was complaining about some reviews, complaining about the reception of his last show, which was a magni­ ficent show. He got hysterical and he's screaming on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. I said, "Look, if you wanted to take your clothes off now in this freezing winter and then complain that it's cold, what do you want? You can't have it both ways." And in a sense I feel that with John. He's less in the world than, for example, Thomas Hardy, who wrote a great novel, got lousy reviews and then decided to keep writing. But the world in Cage's temperament, to some degree, is some kind of measurement, some kind of protagonist in an artistic and ethical way. So he's forced to be a philosopher.

GENA: But there were, are, all these fantasies about what John represents. This is a big problem. Whatever discrepancies there are in your performances are nothing as compared to the crazy kind of fantasy world that people are living in when they think of Cage.

FELDMAN: Listen, being a former entrepeneur of so many con' certs here, I found superb performers not even reading directions. You know, on a more vulgar level, it's no different than what happens in Hollywood. There are cycles where the composer is the boss, the bankers are the boss, the producers are the boss, then the writers become the boss, then the directors. Understand? In the fifties, the

director was the one who got the money. Then came the writer. I think it's very true in music when the entrepeneurs take over, and the performers take over, and so forth. But it's an important fact. And I think what's happened now is that the performers took over. If they start a modern music group today, it's because they want to shine, where they would play something that would make them shine and have a repertoire where they could get good reviews. So anybody who picks up the Sunday Times and sees all that crap they're playing in New York should know that essentially it's for the performers, and it has nothing to do with playing a new piece by Christian Wolff. Christian 132

is not going to get them a good review. Everybody kisses me and pats me on the back when I walk into a room in New York, but nobody

plays me. They are not going to get a good review. So in a sense the whole thing is pretty messy. This relationship between performance and composition is something that is not really discussed in terms of just what it's all about. It's avery, very serious problem.

GENA: Well, how serious is John when he says composing is one thing, performing is another and listening's a third-thus breaking down that relationship, that stream of direction that music has always had. How serious a statement is that in terms of, perhaps, listening to a performance of Etudes Australes or the Freeman Etudes?

FELDMAN: John asks the most crucial questions only because of the John Cage phenomenon. It's a Cagean phenomenon. That leads us to ask only one question. The question is not whether or not what Cage is doing is art. I'm convinced that it will be art without even hearing the piece, only because he does it. The question is, and it is because of John we must ask this question: Is music an art form to begin with? Was it always show biz? And by show biz I mean Monte­ verdi. And by show biz I mean [osquin's music, which in a sense is a high-class "Song of Bernadette." I mean it is a serious question. The question is, again, and say it to yourself when you wake up in the morning, say it to yourself when you go to bed, and say it five more times in this interview: Is music an art form? Because that's what Cage is really forcing us to decide. It's no question of art for art's sake. But is it an art form? Or has it always been show biz based on a kind of

small attention span? Did you ever hear those Chopin preludes? The thing is going on and it can go on forever and it's got this fake cadence at the end. Every piece has a fake cadence, one after the other. The piece could go on for hours. What I mean by show biz is fantastic show biz. That a new piece of Boulez, perhaps, presented in a classy hall in Paris is like Sarah Bernhardt doing a monolog. Without the hisrri­ onics, of course. That's what I mean. By holding the moment. By capturing the moment in every sense of the word. Where people then go to the party and have a conversation about it.

GENA: Is this something that Cage himself sees or, in his optimism, refuses to see?

FELDMAN: I think in a sense he's not idealistic about performers; he was not idealistic about society. The man, evidently for some particular reason, thought that he was involved with an art form. Just like Jews are not allowed to win a war. Israel is not allowed to win a war. A writer could make art. A painter could make art. Maybe a composer is not allowed to make art, and maybe a composer never made art.

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GENA: So, maybe, Cage is the first composer who freed music to become pure art, with the same kind of intention Pound had for poetry or Kandinsky for painting. But why do you suppose the issue of Cage's music as art is so often skirted? I mean let's talk about education.

FELDMAN: Everybody thought they're listening to anti-art when they're listening to Cage. They don't know that the reason they're annoyed is that it's art. I'm serious now. I'm not trying to be clever.

GENA: So music is an art form when John does it.

FELDMAN: If you give vent to the imagination and travel the path that he has taken, it becomes an art form. It's not anti-art. Yes, the problem with Cage is that it's too much art for music. But I think about this. I see John very infrequently these days. He's always on my mind.

And he's on a lot of people's minds, who are close to him and don't see him, only because he does raise very, very interesting problems.

Not because people don't want to change, or performers to a great degree get annoyed, but because he presents a lot of problems.

GENA: This brings up the question of accessibility. Certainly when one reads John'S writings or listens to him, one often gets the impres­ sion that there's a huge effort to reach out to the public, finally, after all these years of being tainted by allusions to what music was in

Beethoven, Schoenberg, etc. Cage particularly hated Beethoven. One might even say that Cage also opened doors for a new accessibility, and if he has, it's an accessibility that appears only recently in other composers.

FELDMAN: Everybody's talking about accessibility, yet if you look

the repertoire, they play the same old things; or they don't play the music that was accessible in the forties. I gave a seminar on acces­ sible music. I won't mention names, but I played hit pieces from the forties that are no longer played. Critic awards, Pulitzer Prizes, they are forgotten. We all felt that they were so poorly put together. They were so inept in every sense of the word. Now this whole business of accessibility is a lot of baloney, because what's going to happen with John is going to happen with every other great composer. I mean what do they play of Stravinsky's repertoire? What do they even play of Schoenberg's? Five pieces for orchestra. I mean, they're short enough, they're attractive enough, like five little photographs of par, ticular scenes. One would be the Black Forest, another the Alps, etc.

But no music has gotten into the repertoire. Beethoven is not even in the repertoire. For example, how many symphonies do they play?

The third, the fifth, and for the pension fund they play the ninth.

I heard Beethoven's Fourth Symphony the other night. That piece should be played at least once every three years or so. What I'm at

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really trying to say is that nobody is in the repertoire. Nobody has made it.

GENA: Nobody is accessible?

FELDMAN: Nobody is accessible. Unless you go to church, where will you hear Renaissance music? If I want to hear Renaissance music, I have to convert! Where are you going to hear it? How much Bach do they do? Again, I have to convert. I have to go Easter week. Nobody is in the repertoire. Mozart is not in the repertoire. If you get some clarinetists, then they play the Clarinet Quintet. You have new genera'

playing these pieces-new fiddle players wanting to compete with Mendelssohn. If there wasn't that competition for the violinist, you wouldn't even hear Mendelssohn. So nobody made the reper­ toire. A few selective pieces. It's all hokum, you know. There's no repertoire. They're going to do Pelleas and Melisande at the Met. They'll fall asleep, for crying out loud. Monteverdi's Orfeo-They'll doze off. When's the last time you heard Machaut in Chicago? Did you ever sit through a Machaut mass? You could commit suicide. The repertoire is in books and, I imagine, in records.

GENA: But they will fall asleep during Pelleas, but come running next week for La Boheme.

FELDMAN: You go back to Chicago and put on a Machaut mass, but instead of Machaut put John Cage's name on the mass and they will be throwing bottles at the chorus.

GENA: What you said about attractive pieces, that's interesting. If I asked you to put together a retrospective concert of John'S music, how would you start?

FELDMAN: If anything, Cage belongs in the repertoire more than Beethoven because I can't make that much distinction between one piece and another as having more importance than another. He's just like any other composer. He's no different. As far as I'm concerned, one of Boulez's most important pieces was one of his first. His flute Sonatina is still a terrific piece. In other words, if you get into a hot idea, you take it in places that have a kind of fresh insight, adven­ turous feeling. I'll do it. I'll put on a Cage concert just like I would put on a Beethoven concert.

GENA: I want to continue on the point of accessibility, but in the sense of judgment. One thing that John has always discouraged is value judgment. There's no point in expressing likes or dislikes. These tell you nothing about anything except yourself. Again, this is an idealistic approach. But obviously, even John must have his likes and dislikes in

tions

pieces.

FELDMAN: Yes, doesn't he dislike the vibraphone and the dom­ inant seventh chord?

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GENA: Well, yes, those are elements, but in terms of a performance of a piece, probably the most difficult thing in John's music, especially the music after Music of Changes or since Variations IV, or Cartridge Music, is the concept of a value judgment. And of course, John says that a value judgment is neither necessary nor useful. Whether or not he applies that to everything he hears, I'm dubious. I question this.

How do you deal with the question of evaluation?

FELDMAN: There is a value judgment, but it gets tied up with performance. In other words, if he goes someplace with Paul Zukofsky, evidently, he's just not picking any violinist off the street.

GENA: So value judgments are made in terms of performance.

FELDMAN: Well, it has to do with a person's character, profi­ ciency; and if they have a fantastic character, John will lessen his standards in terms of proficiency. I think he's no different than anybody else. You want to work with good people, that's all. And he's always, as far as I'm concerned, with the people that were personally close to him, and they were people who were nice people, just nice people to work with.

GENA: Okay, let's get back to the beginning. So he had David Tudor. Surely, it was a luxury to have a person like that. Correct me if I'm wrong. There was a small circle of composers in the fifties that had certain luxuries. You knew if you wrote a piano piece you'd get a top­ notch realization, a serious performance.

FELDMAN: But it's no different even from the past. Brahms had his Joachim. Beethoven had Czerny. Everybody wrote for very key people. Berlioz had Paganini, but Paganini didn't want Berlioz. That's a perfect example: Paganini pays for Harold in Italy, but he wouldn't play it because it didn't have the pizazz. He probably liked it too. I have this experience all the time. It's show biz. I'll never forget when my nephew, now an adult, was about six or seven years old and his folks took him to Tanglewood. They went backstage after a Leinsdorf concert. Jay is standing back there with his program and he wants Leinsdorf to autograph it. So Leinsdorf asked him, "What's your name?" And he said, "Jay Feldman," and Leinsdorf, whom I never met, said, "There's a composer by the name of Morton Feldman, any relation?" "Yes, he's my uncle." And Leinsdorf patted him on the back and said, "Congratulations." I never heard from Leinsdorf. Did I ever tell you the story about Munch and Tanglewood? Lukas Foss conducted a piece of mine in Tanglewood. The piece was received badly by the other performers and the composers. I remember one famous composer hid as I walked up the gangplank in the chamber shed. I recognized Munch in a white suit with two elegant Boston dowagers on each arm, and he started to walk towards me. When he 136

got to me, he grabbed me by the shoulder, hugged me and said, "Ooh­ lala. Fantastic poet." Did I ever hear from Munch? Did Munch ever play me? I have this all the time. "Congratulations": Leinsdorf; "You're a poet": Munch. I never heard from them. So I think with

Cage, too, there are a lot of people who have a sense of Cage's importance. As FDR said, "The American people talk one way and vote another." Unfortunately, performers talk one way, but when they perform, they vote another. I don't think there is lack of ap­ preciation for John Cage among serious colleagues. I think he's felt to be a very important composer. And that's because he raises the question that maybe music could be an art form. Cage needs no defense, no apologist or explanation. With young composers, though, I don't think it's too late for Cage. I think it's too late for the young composers. I don't think the young composer can get anything out of

anything for the simple reason that Cage took away their security blanket before they were really ready for it.

GENA: By doing what? Doing it all?

FELDMAN: What he did was constantly to bring up the possibility of music being an art form. To me the whole moral of the fifties with John's work, with my work, is that it's like what our friend said at the bar after Pollock's show: "I'm glad he did it. Now I can go on and do something else." While in painting there seem to be many places where you can go to do something else, this really isn't the case in music. There's something impregnable about music that opposes this diversity. You know, it's marvelous that John recently said that he felt that if he did anything, he made it possible for other streams to exist, other than the mainstream. And I don't think there would have been other streams without him. I think he dramatized in big capital letters THE MAINSTREAM STOPPED HERE. But there is something in the nature of music that resists this. After working all my life in music, I can't put my finger on it. I don't know what the hell it is.

GENA: Could it be because the western musical tradition is so

strong?

FELDMAN: No, the western tradition was strong only because its pushing around those twelve tones and you know what I mean. Now, no matter how ingenious we are, we really don't have any resources, and the only kind of resources we want to use are very obvious.

GENA: If John's the one that says perhaps music is an art form, there's a huge amount of responsibility on his shoulders. But did he ever feel it? I was recently reminded of a funny story about Schoenberg when he was in the army. Someone came up to him and asked, "Are you Schoenberg?" He said, "Yes I am. Somebody has to be." He felt resources were so weak. You start

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this incredible sense of responsibility. Certainly on a personal level, from speaking to John, I don't think that he ever felt a terrible weight on his shoulders to bring everybody out-to lead. That's why I couldn't imagine John accepting a John Cage School idea or john-as­ influence. In the fifties, John was more of a catalyst.

FELDMAN: It was only because it was an American style. But it was

different than Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, for example. John much of a teacher. You know, Christian Wolff had one lesson with him. It was just a question of how to line up a neat page.

And I never went to John as a student, but he gave me advice which made it possible for me to have the career that I've had. He gave me one piece of advice, and I followed it just this morning. On the second day I knew him, he suggested that I copy out my score nicely, and as I'm doing it I'll get ideas for what's going to happen. It saved my life. I remember a humorous situation. Some years ago, when I joined with Universal Editions, I was staying with my publisher (I stay with him when I'm in London), and he came home and saw me working, copying or something. My eyes are bad, as you know. He said, "Don't waste your eyes like that. Just give us a copy that we can read and we'll do it here." So I started to do that. And my music deteriorated because I wasn't given the opportunity for extra thought while copying. I was working too quickly. So that was the advice John gave to me. I once showed a five-year-old kid how to use a catsup bottle. I told him how to twist the cap so that the catsup goes back in the bottle. About twenty years later, this nice looking man stopped me on Madison Avenue. "I know you, but you don't know me," he said.

"No," I said, "I don't know you." He said, "Catsup, the bottle of catsup, remember?" And I remembered him. He told me that every time he picks up a bottle of catsup for a hamburger, he thinks about me. That's the way I think about John Cage, though I think it's a little not

was not so

more

important.

GENA: It's interesting that you point out his need for thinking while copying, because in your music I see a tremendous value in that,

but I would never have realized that in John'S. FELDMAN: When John was staying with me a few years ago, and he does a million things at one time, he was doing some proofreading of an article. And there were mistakes that weren't very serious. The imperfections were miniscule, but he spent hours fixing them. I myself wouldn't have fixed it.

GENA: I see a comparison here. John has talked about the dif­ ference between Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He said if a work is damaged in transit, it would be fine with Rauschenberg, but with

Johns it would open up a whole new aesthetic realm.

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FELDMAN: People are very, very peculiar. He might have a terrific largess, but as soon as John has made a choice, he could be as stubborn as anybody else.

GENA: That is exactly what one would understand. That once he removes himself from the decision-making process, and once the decision is made from outside of his control, it's a means for dis, covering new things and it's to be left as it stands, which is similar to

Rauschenberg's attitude.

FELDMAN: It all depends. If he decides on something that just didn't work out or appears to be irrational, he'll still put it in. For example, one of the most wonderful things, to me, that demonstrates this is in the Music of Changes. I don't think anybody ever noticed it unless you played it, that there's a kind of pedaling gambit on another chart that he generated by throwing coins, and the pedals went in certain sections. There was a part that was completely silent in which the pedal has different moves. In other words, the pedals do not accompany sound. The pedals are used during silence. Yet he kept them in.

GENA: Was that the beginning of conceptual music?

FELDMAN: No, I love the idea because I just think it's the in, nocence of the part. Remember, he's one of the group of cultured people that didn't sound like graduate students. He's such an artist and yet he's so stubborn that he left it in. I think that's part of the didactic element that he talks about.

GENA: Whereas you're more liberal with the eraser, perhaps.

FELDMAN: You know, there hasn't been anybody of his stature that developed such close friendships with so many wonderful and different kinds of artists. If you read about people like Schoenberg, Gertrude Stein, even Freud or Joyce, especially-they're constantly dickering over the supremacy of ideas, father figures, authoritari­ anism. I once spent an afternoon with Beckett. Beckett would not talk about Joyce at all, or his relationship with Joyce as a younger man. The fact that Cage could proliferate among so many generations, and so many magnificent artists, is absolutely extraordinary.

GENA: I guess the whole package works. You can't think of him in any other way. You can't think of his music or ideas as anything other

than what they are.

FELDMAN: I think he is idealistic. I think, in a way, he is part of the American ideal of what D.H. Lawrence called the Rejuvenation, the whole idea of what we share about the frontier. European railroads might have gotten us out to the Rockies, but from there on in, we took a canoe. And I think Cage had this idea about America, the

wilderness.

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GENA: So John got in a canoe, whereas others stopped at the Rockies.

FELDMAN: You know, maybe he's in the wrong field. I remember when his father was still alive and we were writing. John was winning all kinds of awards before he became John Cage. He was very famous, but his father kept talking about him going into another field. So, when I said that, I really wasn't serious. I was kind of drifting off. But you know he wanted to be a painter, and when he went to Europe he painted-in fact, I saw an early painting of his that was somewhat like Georgia O'Keeffe. He was very gifted as a painter. He was always close to painters. He grew up with painters, wonderful painters. He might have been happy because then it would have been an art form, and everybody would have been happy with his work.

GENA: It's interesting because now he is doing etchings. But we haven't talked about eastern philosophy and Zen. This is something that's synonymous with John and yet on the other hand, I can't think of anyone's music that's not more Zen-like than yours.

FELDMAN: But I think John's Zenness is not so intense. I think, again, just like the way surrealism in a sense opened up the mind, John said one should keep one's mind open for divine influences. I think John's Zen really comes from the fact that he grew up on the West Coast, which faces the Orient. New York faces Germany; that's why the tradition in New York was essentially Germanic.

GENA: But you have no profound interest in Zen. I know your famous statement about the only thing you owe to the Orientals is gratitude for Chinese food. Your music, though, seems to be able to set the mood for what at least most people think of as Zen. Certainly, more than John's does. And John'S initial affiliation with surrealism and closeness to painters shows up perhaps less in his music, although we do see similar ideas, whereas I could show my class a Rothko and play your Chorus and Instruments and everything is understood. No

explanation is necessary.

FELDMAN: Well, maybe I was Zen insofar as I never had a philos­ ophy. I really don't have a philosophy.

GENA: It might be as Daniel Charles points out in For the Birds, that this idea of no philosophy is still a philosophy.

FELDMAN: Yes, but no philosophy in conversation sounds very Zen-like. But I really don't have one, nor do I have one about John.

John'S interest in Zen is no different than that of a close friend in London whom I stayed with at one time when she said, "I'll be right back. I have to go to Mass."

GENA: Did she come back?

FELDMAN: Yes, she was a Catholic and she went to Mass. Once I

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asked her about rosary beads; I wanted to know about beads and everything. I asked her about the iconology of a lot of things, just as I would ask John about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was interested in information, but I would never ask him if he really believed in Zen. There are a lot of people who are very religious but who don't believe in God. Can you imagine after all these years if you asked John Cage, "Do you really believe in Zen?" and you get the "No." GENA: He's also the first to admit that perhaps he doesn't know a great deal about Zen. There's that discourse with Alan Watts where John capitulated and said that he didn't pretend to be an expert.

Whatever relationship his musical ideas have to Zen is usually some' thing applied by someone else other than him.

FELDMAN: Yes, it's not that I never took whatever interest he had in Zen seriously, but it's like a belief in anything. I would fear that I would be prying to ask about it. My reassurance came essentially from his vast musical gifts and inventiveness.

GENA: Right in the beginning of the Daniel Charles book, Charles quotes Schoenberg, who said that Cage is an inventor of genius.

Charles then asked Cage, "What do you invent?" He said, "I invent music, not composition." From what I can see, that's probably the most important element that the rest of you were able to grasp. There was an effect that his presence had that wasn't necessarily influential­ it just caused you to feel secure about what you were doing. Like you said so many times, John's presence in what he was doing gave you permission to go ahead and do what you wanted.

FELDMAN: I think his presence depended upon many aspects of how one needs somebody like John. He could be somebody's cream on the table and he could be somebody's meat on the potatoes.

Sometimes he could be GENA: Somebody's vinegar?

FELDMAN: Yes, I was thinking about an incident, and I don't think that Richard Lippold will be annoyed if I mention it because, actually, it was quite funny at the time. When I first met John, I moved into Bozza's mansion. It was a house down on the East River. The joke was that it was called Bozza's mansion after the landlord who treated it as if it was a mansion. All he had to do was look at his tenement house, keep it clean, and see that nice people moved into it. Anyway, during one of the first weeks that I was there, I was walking up to see if John was home. I was on the second floor and he was on the top floor and I met Richard Lippold, the sculptor, who was living next door to John.

He just looked at me and said, "I'm moving. I have to get out of here. answer,

...

John is just too persuasive." So there's a perfect example. I'm going 141

upstairs to hear what he had to say, not thinking of it as persuasion.

Richard Lippold is running down the stairs, too persuaded. And I think that's exactly what John's relationship is-not only with society, but with his personal friends as well. I once watched Jasper Johns during a conversation at dinner with John. John had too much wine, and was saying one off-the-wall thing after another, and people didn't know how to take it. They were listening and they were confronted with some very provocative, interesting remarks. Jasper was just sit­ ting there with that little Cheshire-cat grin on his face, enjoying this trip. He didn't feel intimidated. So it's just a question of who's

walking up and who's walking down the stairs.

GENA: One took what one needed from John and there was a lot there.

FELDMAN: Maybe John Cage has to be looked at in the way T.S. Eliot said, "One takes from history what one needs." Maybe one has to learn to take from John Cage what one needs, because I think it would have been a devastating century without him. Absolutely devas­

tating. It's shoddy enough.

GENA: One could easily understand if there was no Beethoven, there would have been someone else to take music where it had to go.

It seems that you don't believe that if there wasn't a Cage that there would have been someone else to do what he did.

FELDMAN: It all depends. I think that in order to discuss Cage, every minute issue has to be brought up and we must toss our own three coins into our mind and come up with whatever oracle appears appropriate. Because it's a question of care. If one would say that John doesn't give enough care to notes, I would reply: just look at all the care he gives in creating a situation that needs the notes that he doesn't seem to care for. I mean, there is a great degree of caring. He gives more care to that particular detail than most people who feel that they care about things, but who don't really care enough. So it's a question of what you mean by what one should be concerned about. Does a lack of interest in one area show a lack of concern in another? It becomes a very complicated situation. And that's only because we're using a completely different yard stick in trying to relate his actions to actions that we are already familiar with, or that we think are a normal response to a certain type of situation. The century would have been dismal without him and I think that future music would absolutely be dismal without him.

GENA: And the future of music is still going to benefit from him.

FELDMAN: I think that it's beginning to. I think that historians will view music before John similarly to the way we look at Pythagoras.

What was it like?

142

GENA: Right. Five hundred years from now it will be the Greeks up to

Cage and then Cage and beyond.

FELDMAN: It was a kind of Grecian heritage of idealization before Cage. There's no question about it.

GENA: It's starting to happen. I think that academia is embracing a lot of what happened in yours and Cage's early careers, and maybe, in essence, it's a Renaissance of those ideas. Perhaps history is starting there and maybe I am correct in what I tell composition students that they must study the great masters-Cage, Feldman, Wolff and Brown.

FELDMAN: To bring it into context, I think my most important point is that he asked that dangerous question, "Is music an art form?"

If he asked that question, then I feel he's really at the beginning of something. Now this beginning might have to sacrifice certain things.

And what it really might have to sacrifice is what we would feel. The same kind of status quo between audience and performer, between musician and composer. In other words, does he keep the status quo going? Maybe he doesn't. I feel that in my life I'm trying out another option. It's not philosophy. It's the option of writing very long pieces that are very difficult to play, very difficult to hear, and have to do with the life of the piece, whatever that means and not the life of the performer, or what happens to an audience when they go hear it. I'm trying to see what happens when the work does not depend on those other very important, very rigid factors. Recently I received a call from Paul Zukofsky about writing a piece for a concert in New York

dedicated to John. Shortly afterwards, a young man from New York called to announce the marathon concert in honor of john's birthday.

And he asked me to participate by having a piece done. And I think I mentioned to him that I was writing a piece for Paul and Aki Takahashi as a tribute to John-a piano and violin piece. The first thing the young man asked me was how long the piece was. Now you would think that in a tribute to John Cage one wouldn't ask how long the pieces are. Right away we have the impresario. So right away I was bullied. I called up Paul and I said, "I didn't even think about it. I don't know the appropriate length. If I write a twenty-minute piece for John it will be an insult." So I decided that I couldn't really participate in this thing. I decided that I would just write the piece and see what's going to happen. I'm into about fifty minutes already and it's just getting going. Now it seems to me that an hour and a half in the whole of someone's lifetime, on such a momentous occasion as a tribute to John Cage, is not too much. But there's a very interesting problem.

Am I out of bounds? It has nothing to do with me. This is a tribute to Cage. I can't help it if the piece might be an hour and twenty-five minutes. I don't mean anything egotistical about it. It's a little piece for 143

piano and violin, but it doesn't quit. So it's very interesting, this question: "What would I write given the opportunity?" What would my music be if I didn't have to think about the performer? There are

good performers-friends of mine. I don't have to think about an audience, and yet there are good audiences. In California recently I got practically a standing ovation for a very grueling hour-and-a-half string quartet. So the

world is full of surprises. There are two ways of the world. A Greek philosopher said that you develop a understanding perspective either by getting closer to a thing or moving further away. I would say that in John's life he got closer to the sun and he's getting a little sunburned. And in my life, little by little with every decade, I'm leaving it, leaving it.

GENA: And it's getting colder.

FELDMAN: It's pretty chilly.

144

Under the influence Christian Wolff

Discussion of John Cage's work I have always found useful. Discus, sion of his influence, though, seems unappealing. When I mentioned to him that I had been asked to write about it, he grimaced. Influence suggests, willv-nillv, the exercise of power and control, which as means of politics or self-aggrandizing he rejects in no uncertain terms.

Those designated as the influenced may seem somehow demeaned.

Talk of influence suggests a simple-minded, undialectic view of his, tory.

But there are instances of influence for good. And for the influenced to declare themselves as such can be an occasion for noticing

congenial relationships. As for history, because we must inevitably have one, we can at least consider trying to get it straight.

His own view of writing music is that one should not repeat existing work, not duplicate effort. He also holds, citing Rene Char, that there really is no repetition. He has himself been always generous and explicit in naming those who he thinks of as having affected his work

and thought. Consideration of what music has affected his would be quite interesting: take, for instance, the company of Grieg, Scarlatti, Satie and Boulez (David Tudor, whose influence, differently, has been great, noticed the effect of the latter's second piano sonata-its com, plexity and violence).

One could certainly make a long list of composers and artists whose work would not have been what it is without him. Whole movements in music, visual and performing art have been affected. Particulars can

be found, for example, in Richard Kostelanetz's writing and compila­

tion, John Cage (1970) on pages 15, 184-187 and 201-204; in the Dictionary of Contemporary Music edited by John Vinton (1973), under "John Cage"; and in Charles Hamm's article on Cage in the new Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1981).

He has told the story about Willem de Kooning who, when asked what painters of the past had influenced him, answered that it was not 145

the past which influenced him but he who influenced the past. There is no doubt that Cage's attention and devotion to Satie and Thoreau have influenced them. They have been changed for us.

What have generally been most influential in his music, I think, are the explorations, and inducements to exploration, in sound produc­ tion, to include in a variety of aspects the presence of noise or complexly pitched and irregularly, aperiodically and fluidly rhvthmed sound; the element of theater; and the reestablishment of the sense of an American identity in the experimental music tradition.

He has spoken of wanting in a prospective work to make a response to work by someone else which struck him as new. Similarly his own work is such that if you are seriously engaged with it, it irresistibly requires a response, constitutes a kind of testing. The result tends not so much to exert influence as bring about release, to be an encourage, ment to allow change, to realize a climate of experiment, because of his eagerness for what is new and because of his concern that whatever you did it should be simply what it is (free of influence!). Morton Feldman first pointed this out, speaking of "permission."

I'm sometimes mentioned as especially influenced by John Cage.

Well of course I was. I was sixteen and impressionable when we met.

Nothing interested me so much as what was new in music, and there,

through him, it was: information, ideas, activity, people, including at first, in 1950-1951, also Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Earle Brown, Pierre Boulez, Robert Rauschenberg and M.C. Richards. What are some of the things I learned? That musical structures are most usefully and clearly made in terms of time (rhythmic structures). That musical continuity need not follow along single, homogeneous categories, say, from pitch to pitch, but can be shifted among as many categories as you want to identify, say, from duration to noise to color to something not usually regarded as musical (a scraping foot, a radio transmission) to a specified high C to an indeterminate sound ("auxiliary") outside the collection in a given piece to the absence of anything specified ("silence"). That you needn't worry about too much silence or space. That ideas are en' livening, including those about what you were doing as a musician, what relation music has to the rest of your life and social condition.

That music could dehierarchize, insofar as nothing, any aspect of sound, silence, sound-source, performer, audience, composer, is sub,

sidiary, and everything makes a difference, has its own particular existence, is equally respected: democracy. That by making indeter­ minacy integral to the process of composing and (or) performing there can be brought about unpredictable successions, combinations, super' positions and overlaps which may surprise you, innocently and imper146

sonally. That your work is not finished until performed, thatit cannot but exist socially. (I should say that since the seventies a point of difference has emerged between us about the distinction of what is social and what is political. He insists, excluding the latter, on an ideal of anarchic society supported by a service network; I insist on dem­ ocratic socialism. His view is more all-inclusive: politics, the exercises of power, may sometime wither away, but we will always be, and must always improve our capacities for being, social beings. I worry in the meantime about the palpable enemies who will never give up their politics nor let us realize properly our social being without a fight.)

One should also mention, in the hope of their best effect on us: His capacity for work, exercised unobtrusively. His discipline, uncom­ promisingness, asceticism, at the same time as his untiring declarations of support, cheerfulness, discovery and communication of pleasure.

His call for the use of intelligence and conscience.

It is probably his writing and speaking which have affected the greater number of people. His ideas, though characteristically

expressed and applied, are often, and explicitly, drawn from others.

His music, however, is like no other. I know of hardly anything that sounds anything like it. You cannot hear its processes in anyone else's work (as you can, say, in the case of Stravinsky or Bartok or Berio or Terry Riley). As such, you could say it has had no influence, though many composers are devoted to it and a few may have tried to imitate it. It is such that you would no more try to imitate it, if you had any sense, than you would try to duplicate a thunderstorm

*

or the growing of grass. What a relief. What an incitement to do one's work. To do new work.

*It occurs to me that Marianne Amacher has done just that, but to be part of Cage's l...ecture on the Weather (1975), where, exceptionally, the storm is not itself but a representation intended to evoke the force of revolution.

147

•

Choice and change In

Cage's recent m.usic William Brooks

It's been twenty years now, and the sixties have been swallowed by

history, as clouds swallow a mountain. But many of us still carry a fragment of the constructive anarchy of those years, like a length of wood brought down from the peak. First used as a cudgel and then as a support, it is now a yardstick. We gauge the present by souvenirs of the past.

It's no surprise that by this measure, the sixties and early seventies seem

to have been a twist on the curve of

depending

on one's

history-a peak or a trough,

orientation. Certainly recent years have witnessed

the rebirth of a powerful and pervasive conservatism, manifested not only politically but also socially and aesthetically. People look dif­ ferent now; a curious sort of time-lapse links present style to the 1950s, skipping the intervening years. At the cinema, space westerns have supplanted satire and experiment, with illusion rather than com­ ment the objective. Abbie Hoffman has turned himself in; Jerry Rubin's getting rich. John Lennon is dead.

New music, too, reflects this shift. Whereas the controversies then centered on the place of anarchy in the arts, those today concern the place of order. The transcendent lunacy of an evening with Nam June Paik has been supplanted by the transcendent consistency of one with Steve Reich. Virtuosos who once sought to adapt instantly to unpre­ dictably changing contexts are now devoted to precise replication.

Twenty years ago we thought there was more than enough for every­ one, and our music manifested this plenitude; now, in an age con­ vinced of scarcity, music makes the most of very scant material.

For many people, John Cage is forever linked with the 1960s.It was certainly then that his influence was most pervasive; he held a variety of prestigious university appointments, published his first two anthol­ ogies of lectures and writings, speculated freely on how to improve the world (he only made matters worse), and was interviewed regularly on subjects ranging from cooking to revolution. He toured extensively,

148

with the Cunningham company and without it; and perhaps more closely than at any other time in his career, he approached that wonderland in which his music and his life would be truly coextensive.

In the years since, unlike other figures from that time (McLuhan, Brown, Fuller), Cage has continued to produce new work at an almost alarming rate. But a change has occurred: in a kind of socio-corporate shuffle, he's been promoted out of his position as guru and into one as elder statesman. The change is not just a function of age; society clearly has decided to use Cage differently. By skewing its questions toward the past, Cage has been induced to look backward, to become an apologist for an era that has ended. In just this way new genera­ tions, unable to silence their loquacious elders, deflect their comments from present conditions by asking what it was really like "back then."

But the change embraces more than the public persona. Cage's beard is gone and his hair is short; and though he still wears denims, they seem more a habit than a statement. More significantly, the music is different; in many, many ways it can be argued that Cage's recent compositions manifest the same neo-conservatism that has come to characterize America's political life. Staff-lines have reappeared, some­ times even with meter signatures and notes of fixed durations. Instru­ mentation is often conventional, unaffected by electronics. Unpre­ dictability has been reduced; in contrast, say, to the scores for the Variations (from the mid-sixties), that for Apartment House 1776 (1976) gives a fairly clear picture of the sounds that will be heard.

Critics who once complained about the noisy confusion now grouse about the tedium of so much C major. Something, clearly, has changed; but what, and how much, and how is it to be interpreted? *

*

*

It is conventional to partition a composer's life according to musical style, and this can be managed for even so unconventional a figure as Cage. His music falls rather neatly into four periods, with divisions roughly at 1938, 1951, and 1969. The early pieces-equivalent to the "student works" in other composers' careers-are characterized by a systematic chromaticism akin to, but not identical with, twelve-tone technique. Cage wrote only a few pieces in this style, and through most of this period he was also experimenting with music for per­ cussion. The last of the chromatic works, Metamorphosis, was com­ pleted in 1938, and the following year Cage wrote his first extended piece using durational structures, the First Construction in Metal.

For the next twelve years Cage's music was regulated by a precise and categorical aesthetic. Composition was divided into four com-

149

ponents-structure,

method, materials, and form-which Cage later

described thus: By "structure" was meant the division of a whole into parts; by "method," the note-to-note procedure. Both structure and method (and also "material"-the sounds and silences of a composition) were, it seemed to me then, the proper concern of the mind (as opposed to the heart) (one's ideas of order as opposed to one's spontaneous actions); whereas the two last of these, namely method and material, together with "form" (the morphology of a continuity) were equally the as an activity proper concern of the heart. Composition, then, I viewed integrating the opposites, the rational and the irrational, bringing about, ideally, a freely moving continuity within a strict division of parts, the sounds, their combination and succession being either logically related or arbitrarily chosen} ...

The elaboration of this system rested on a single crucial observation: that the materials of music consist of sounds and silence, and that the only parameter of sound that is shared by silence is duration. There­ fore, Cage reasoned, structure must be based on duration; and if this is the case, the sound-materials need not be restricted to pitches, but can include noise. Indeed, noise is to be preferred, to some extent, because the ear will not be confused by old habits; the music's logic will not be distorted by pitch-derived patterns imposed by the lisrener J The compositions that resulted were primarily for percussion or prepared piano, although there were a few remarkable works (notably the String Quartet) for conventional instruments. Form, being "of the heart," remained essentially intuitive, but the other three components in Cage's system were explored quite systematically throughout the

1940s.

Structure most often conformed to what Cage called the "square­ was divided into equal units and these into unequal sections; then each unit was divided into sub­ grouped units grouped in the same way. Thus, for example, the Imaginary Landscape No. 3 contains twelve units of twelve measures each, grouped into sections of three, two, four and three units; in tum, the twelve measures in each unit are grouped into sub-units of three, two, root" formula: the whole

four and three measures.!

Cage usually chose by taste, though they were often related to the structures or the methods used: the sixteen numerically in used the First Construction in Metal reflect the sixteen­ instruments unit structure, while the eight-by-eight charts of materials for the Music of Changes correspond to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. In general, as the decade passed Cage chose his materials more and more precisely and systematically; rather than simply selecting instruments (as in the First Construction, 1939), he eventually used Materials

150

and the

gamuts of specific sounds (as in the String Quartet, 1950, Sixteen Dances, 1951).

Method, too, became increasingly systematic. Originally the note, to-note procedure was determined solely by Cage's own taste, but by

the early 1940s Cage had begun regulating it by means of numerical schemes: a number series, for instance, controlled the density of events, measure by measure, in some of the early percussion pieces."

But such systems still left considerable liberty; by the end of the decade Cage had restricted himself far more severely, determining the succession of events by making moves on large charts according to a system of rules.

By 1951 Cage had disciplined his compositional technique to such an extent that he had little control over the outcome once the initial choices were made and the system set in motion. The Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, finished that year, was a kind of allegor­ ical summary of the preceding decade: the orchestra, strictly regulated throughout, manifests an ideal discipline while the piano improvises freely in the first movement, is instructed by the orchestra in the second, and joins in the discipline in the third." It was a small step in practice, though a large one philosophically, to substitute for the discipline of systematic moves on charts the discipline of chance

operations.

But Cage actually entered this next and most controversial period rather cautiously. In the Music of Changes, composed shortly after the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, the actual sounds (the "materials") were chosen by a combination of system and taste; the proportions (the "structure") followed the square-root formula. Only the tempo (affecting the "form") and the note-by-note choices (the "method") were determined by chance. The Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for twelve radios, was in a sense the complement of the Music of Changes; in it the materials (radio broadcasts) were indeter­ minate, while certain other compositional decisions were made more

conventionally.

These early hybrids were followed by works in which chance opera, tions played a more pervasive role. A variety of techniques were used to produce noteheads-templates (in the Musics for Carillon), imper­ fections in the music paper (in the Musics for Piano), and star charts (in Atlas Eclipticalis )-but they produced similar scores. In these, conven­ tional staff notation was used to write precise pitches in a specific order, but the pitches were arrived at by chance; moreover, since rhythm was given only proportionally and since in most cases Cage allowed the lines and pages of music to be excerpted and overlapped freely, the sequence and duration of pitches varied from performance 151

performance. Cage was, in effect, providing "materials" (and "method," to some extent), but leaving "form" and "structure" to be determined by the performer. But such works were only partially unpredictable; although Cage could not anticipate the content of a score before making it, once it was composed he could anticipate (to some extent) the performance that would follow. Music for Piano 18, for example, would necessarily entail playing on the piano, in order, some number of the flftv-three pitches the score contains.

It was not until 1957 that Cage began devising pieces in which all aspects of the performance would be left undetermined. In the piano part for the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, an extraordinary compen­ dium of compositional and notational devices, several pages contain only lines and points with sets of instructions. These no longer specify sound-material for the performer; they only indicate a procedure by to

which the material can be found. All decisions about sounds and their succession are delegated by the composer to the performer; the score serves only to ensure that these decisions will be made in a disciplined way which will yield unpredictable results. From 1958 to 1968 a large group of scores-including Fontana Mix, Cartridge Music, and the extraordinary series of Variations-consisted only of opaque and transparent sheets of lines, points, and curves, from which perform­ able scores could be constructed to suit any occasion.

The extreme aesthetic continuity defined by these works was inter, rupted dramatically in 1969 by HPSCHD and the first Cheap Imitation, and Cage's music entered its fourth phase. The new pieces shared two

important characteristics: they required a return to conventional nota' tion (at least in part), and they entailed the use of earlier pieces by other composers. Though Cage had often assembled diverse materials in realizing other indeterminate scores, HPSCHD was his first fully,

composed collage: it presented the performer with an enormous col, lection of materials, some quoted and some newly-composed, to be assembled in virtually any way imaginable. Nearly all of these were very precisely specified; thus, although HPSCHD offered much free' dom to the performers, it retained, from performance to performance, consistent and distinctive character-a festive air of exhilaration attributable in part to the timbral brilliance, rhythmic energy, and cheery C major of the source material (the Mozart Dice Game Minuet).

Cheap Imitation, though less spectacular, was in a wayan even more radical departure from Cage's earlier works; fully composed, it left no room at all for interpretation, and was close enough to its model (Satie's Socrate) to manifest an oddly conventional and evocative

a

melodic and rhythmic logic.

The use of pre-existing material, collage, and traditional notation 152

has continued to characterize much of Cage's work since 1969. Even the large, fully-original pieces, like the Etudes Australes and the Free­ man Etudes, have entailed fairly conventional and restrictive notation.

But at the same time, certain earlier compositional techniques have been continued; thus the score for Renga is graphic, offering extreme liberties in interpretation, while that for Child of Tree essentially contains instructions for preparing a performance score. In many

fact, Cage's most recent "period" is not so much a new departure as it is a summary. Probably the most clearly recapitulative work is the Song Books, and a close scrutiny of these helps to clarify the relationship of the recent pieces to those that came before.

ways, in

*

*

*

The Song Books were written in considerable haste between August and October 1970. Having decided to continue the series implied by the Solos for Voice I and 2, Cage's first question of the I Ching was how many additional solos to write. It assigned him "this astonishing number" [ninety}," and it was immediately clear that the crucial problem was to discover a way to maximize diversity without having to devise an entirely new scheme for each song.

Cage's solution was to set up a simple three-step procedure by which he could outline the entire work. For each solo he used the I Ching to decide genre (song, theater, song using electronics, or theater using electronics), content (the piece was either relevant or irrelevant to the sentence "we connect Satie with Thoreau"), and compositional

technique (either introducing a technique, repeating one already used, or varying one already used),? (Cage had used part of this procedure years earlier; in writing the piano part of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, he had also chosen whether each page would be new, a repeat, or a variation.) The outcomes of the three decisions made for the Song Books can be combined in a total of twenty-four ways

(4x2x3); thus substantial diversity would be built into the whole piece from the outset. But, at the same time, Cage's plan to use some pieces as the basis for others (varying or repeating the compositional tech­ would the work consistency, as well as helping him to nique) give write quickly and efficiently.

Cage further decided to compose at least some of the new solos by using procedures he had already devised. He made a list of the ways of writing songs that he knew: composition by taste (as in The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs), by means of transparencies (as in Aria, made by using the score for Fontana Mix), by the use of star charts and the I Ching (as in Solo for Voice I), and by other means. He probably 153

reviewed earlier uses of theater and electronics as well. Theater (the composition of actions, as opposed to sounds) had not only been central to such mixed-media works as Water Music and Speech, but also had been strongly implied by many of the fully-indeterminate scores from the 1960s, such as 0'00". Electronics had encompassed tape recordings (in the Williams and Fontana Mixes), processing or diseortion of voices or instruments (in Atlas Eclipticalis), and sound synthesis (in HPSCHD); another technique often used in the past had been to make a score which described changes in equipment but left the equipment itself unspecified. With these lists of known proce­ dures at hand, Cage would be able to respond, when required to introduce a compositional technique into the Song Books, either by using one of these familiar procedures or by inventing something new.

The three initial decisions made for each solo in the Song Books were recorded on an ordinary stenographic pad,8 with a new leaf assigned to each piece (when Cage ran out of paper, he turned the book over and began using the versos ). Table I summarizes these decisions for the first twenty pieces (numbered 3-22, since they continue from Solos for Voice I and 2); the parenthesized symbols are the labels Cage himself assigned to the compositional procedures used. With the preliminary organization complete, Cage simply sketched each piece in tum. The thumbnail descriptions of the first twenty pieces following Table I will give some idea of how each piece was actually made.

Solo for Voice 3: The

performer obtains a curvy line by tracing

between two points on a map of Concord; complicated this is inscribed as a "melody" above a text from Thoreau's Journal printed using various typefaces, and the text and melody are sung. This compositional idea is new for Cage. The points on the map to be joined were determined by I Ching operations on the Journal; so was the text, which was also edited and typeset using the I Ching. route

a

Solo

for Voice 4: The same procedure was used, with different yielding different points, texts, and typefaces.

outcomes

Solo for Voice 5: A variation on the above; a portrait of Thoreau (over which the performer may "wander freely") is used rather than a map, the text is fragmented, and time constraints are added. Cage used the I Ching to decide whether to continue with Thoreau materials or switch to Satie; when it selected Thoreau, he sketched the variation, then determined text, timing, and typeface using the I Ching.

154

TABLE I Solo

Genre

Content

Compositional Procedure

3

Song, electronics

Relevant

Introduce (A)

4 5

S,E S,E

R

Irrelevant

Theater

6

R

Repeat Vary Introduce

R

Vary

Theater, electronics

I

Introduce

T

R

10

T

I

Repeat Repeat

11

S,E

7

T

8

9

12

I

I

Song

Introduce Introduce

13

S

I

14

S

I

Repeat Vary

15

R

Introduce

I

R

Repeat Vary

18

T,E S,E S,E S,E

R

Introduce

19

T

I

20

S,E S,E T,E

R

Repeat Repeat

R

Introduce

R

Introduce

16

17

21

22

(A) (A var B) (1 ) (Ivar=2) (a) (2) (1) (C) (I) (I) (I var II) (b) (C) (C var D) (E) (1) (A) (F) (c) =

=

=

Solo for Voice 6: A series of numbers is given, in various typefaces,

superpositioned, and each with a plus or minus sign; the performer makes (by any means desired) a numbered list of theatrical activities or objects, decides how to interpret the signs and typefaces, and performs the series accordingly. The composi­ tional idea is new for Cage; in realizing it, he used the I Ching to decide how many numbers there would be, what they were, what the sign was for each, which would be superpositioned, how many numbers would be inscribed before a change of typeface, and what the typeface would be. some

Solo for Voice 7: A variation on solo 6; a time-limit is imposed, and

Cage himself has interpreted the numbers, so that the score contains a series of performable words and phrases relevant to

Satie and Thoreau, with signs, typefaces, and superpositioning as before. In the realization Cage first made separate lists of phrases for Satie and Thoreau (using the I Ching to decide how many

155

items there would be in each list and selecting the Satie materials

by taste, the Thoreau by I Ching operations on the ]oumal), and then composed a score using the procedure for solo 6, substitut­ ing the appropriate bit of prose for each number as he went

along.

Solo for Voice 8: Cage introduced an exact copy of an earlier work, 0'00" (UIn a situation provided with maximum amplification, ...

perform a disciplined action

...

").

Solo for Voice 9: The procedure used to make solo 7 was repeated, but with different outcomes resulting in a different series.

Solo for Voice

10:

The procedure for solo 6 was repeated.

Solo for Voice

1 I: Dots, to be interpreted as noteheads for a vo­ calise, are scattered freely through the upper half of a space indicating range (thus requiring that only the high part of the voice be used), and pairs of numbers describe changes in the electronics (by specifying which dial on the available equipment is to be changed and to what position). The composing pro­ cedure is newly introduced to the Song Books but closely related to that used for several other works, such as Atlas Eclipticalis: the

I Ching is used to choose a page or pages from a book of star charts and to select a star color; then the corresponding dots (of different sizes, indicating magnitude) are traced onto some sort of staff-system, the number of pages or systems having been decided by the I Ching. (The technique was so familiar to Cage that the original sketch could be extremely brief: "star map. free vocalise. high, i.e. coloratura.") The I Ching was used again later to determine the numbers affecting electronics (this procedure had also been used in Atlas Eclipticalis).

Solo for Voice 12: As in solo 8, Cage introduced a copy of an earlier work, in this case Solo for Voice I. written originally in 1958 for Arlene Carmen.

Solo for Voice 13: The procedure used to make solo 1 (copied as solo 12) is reused to make a new piece, this one suited to Cathy Berberian's vocal range. The I Ching determined the number of pages and number of events on each page; then the appropriate number of dots of various sizes were transcribed from star charts onto

156

ordinary music staves. Additional notation (phrasing and

dynamics) and texts (in this case, from books on mushrooms) were associated with each dot, using the I Ching.

Solo for Voice 14: The procedure for the preceding solo was var­ ied by using the staff Cage designed for Atlas Eclipticalis, in which the lines are not equidistant but reflect the unequal distri­ bution of chromatic notes. Solo 14 was written for Simone Risr's vocal range, and the texts were selected (using the I Ching as

before) from newspapers.

Solo for Voice 15: A typewriter amplified by means of contact microphones is to be used to type a statement by Satie thirty' eight times. The idea is a new one; the I Ching was used to decide whether the sentence would be drawn from Satie or Thoreau and how many times it would be typed. The sentence ("L'artiste n'a pas le droit de disposer inutilement du temps de son auditeur") appears to have been chosen by taste.

Solo for Voice 16: The procedure used to make solo 11 is repeated.

for Voice 17: Cage was required to vary a procedure used "song using electronics." By this time three procedures were available ("A," from solos 3 and 4; "B," from solo 5; and "C," from solos 11 and 16), so the first decision to be made was which of these would be varied in solo 1 7. "C" was selected, and the I Ching was used to decide whether the variation would be

Solo

to make a

pertinent to Satie or Thoreau. Thoreau was chosen; the variation consisted of reducing the space representing vocal range to a

single line (above, on, or below the line, thus indicating simply high, middle, or low voice), adding a text (composed by the I Ching from Thoreau's remarks on the "telegraph harp"), and eliminating the numbers for the electronics, choosing instead to require that they transform the voice "so that it resembles singing wires."

Solo for Voice IB: A copy of the third movement of the first Cheap Imitation (of Satie's Socrate), with the text to the original under, laid after scrambling the syllables within each phrase, and with symbols added irregularly to indicate some unspecified change in the electronics. The procedure (using the I Ching to transform the pitches of an existing work) is new to the Song Books but a familiar one to Cage. Having decided to introduce it, Cage then apparently used the I Ching to decide whether to write a new

157

imitation, repeat the existing one, or vary the existing one, and then (required to vary it) to decide which movement was to be used. The text was rearranged using the I Ching, and a symbol requiring a change in the electronics was added wherever the transformed pitch content coincidentally matched the original.

Solo for Voice 19: The procedure used to make solos 6 and 10 was

repeated.

Solo for Voice 20: Cage was required to repeat a procedure used to make a "relevant song using electronics"; as in solo 17, there were by now three available ("A," "B," and "D"). "A" was selected and the procedure repeated.

Solo for Voice 21: A line and its mirror image are given, one above the other, to be interpreted as a forty-second melody, with the singer allowed to change from one line to the other at "structural points" indicated by vertical lines; one electronic change is to be made smoothly throughout, and a sentence by Satie is to be used freely as a text. The compositional procedure is new and was designed so that it could be relevant to either Thoreau or Satie (in the sketchbook Cage jotted "reflections in water T, rhythmic structures SIt). Satie was chosen, using the I Ching; five sentences by him were selected by taste and the I Ching used to choose one and to determine the structural points and the total duration.

The melodic line was drawn freehand, spontaneously.

Solo for Voice 22: The performer breathes regularly or irregularly through nose or mouth according to a series of points distributed among four lines ("nose reg/irreg/mouth reg/irreg"); some points are connected, and pairs of numbers describe electronic adjustments as in solo 11. The compositional procedure is new; Cage used the I Ching to determine the number of points, their placement, the connections, and the numbers for the electronics.

And so the Song Books continue, the compositional procedures continually building upon those already used. Even from the sketchy analysis just given, it is clear how intricate and rich Cage's technique is; the solos in the Song Books, while extraordinarily diverse, are intimately interlinked both to each other and to earlier pieces.

It is also clear that, despite the sophisticated use of chance tech, niques, Cage's own taste played a significant part in shaping the Song Books. Even the smallest of his decisions concerning procedure often 158

shaped the result distinctively. For example, in making the list of words and phrases relevant to Sa tie and Thoreau for use in Solo for Voice 7, Cage chose not to assume equality between the two persons.

Instead, he used the I Ching first to decide how many items in the list would be pertinent to Satie, and how many to Thoreau; as it turned out, Satie was assigned only one item, while Thoreau was assigned forty. As a result, solo 7 has a distinctively Thoreauvian flavor, sprinkled with phrases like "sound of the wind," "obvious inactivity," and "walking." But when the procedure was repeated to make solo 9, the proportions turned out differently; thus the character of this solo is quite different, with a good mix of items like "flyswatter," "terrible anger," and "Take your temperature. Give yourself another (each

hour)."

The point is not, of course, that Cage wanted these two solos to have the character they do (he didn't), but rather that he took care to devise a procedure that would allow character to emerge. A curious thing has happened: a chain of choices has been made randomly but in such a way that the result is very likely to appear biased. Such techniques are quite typical of Cage's recent work, and they explain in part why the pieces composed since 1969, although built by using chance operations, have such distinctive profiles.

Cage's taste also affected the Song Books more directly. Many adjust, ments and additions made after the solos were first sketched have the effect of elaborating the web of connections that binds the solos together. To solos 3 and 4, for instance, Cage appended the suggestion that tape recordings (of hawks and of bird sounds, respectively) be used as accompaniment; the content proposed for the tapes was suggested by the content of the Thoreau texts chosen by chance for these solos. No tape is proposed for solo 20, composed using the same procedure; but for solo 17, based on a wholly different technique, Cage suggested a tape recording of telegraph-wire sounds. Thus a new link is established which connects the "map" pieces (solos 3, 4, etc.) to the "star chart" pieces (solos 17, 11, etc.). Similarly, the method used to notate the electronics in solo 22 (a theater piece, relevant) is exactly the same as that used in solos 11 and 16 (songs, irrelevant). In this case the new connection links different genres as well as different compositional procedures; later on in the Song Books, in solos 40 and 50, the same notation is extended to still more varieties of solos.

More directly yet, Cage's taste shaped most of the most obvious characteristics of the Song Books: the use of procedures already familiar from previous pieces, and the selection of these; the type of new procedures devised, and the type of variations applied to older ones; and the overall plan tying all the solos together. In many ways, Cage's 159

of taste in matters of detail was a necessary consequence of these decisions, since they led to ways of writing typical of earlier But periods.

Cage not only accepted the return of such methods; he appears actually to have sought them out. There are two solos in particular (35 and 49) in which fully-notated melodies were corn­ posed almost entirely by taste; the procedures for both were quite deliberately introduced into the Song Books by Cage himself. If such composition represents a regression, it appears to have been a wel­ use

more basic

come one.

In any case, such composition is fairly typical of the recent works.

The Cheap Imitations, for example, are all fully composed and notated melodies; and although chance operations determined the pitches, other aspects of the score were often decided by taste. Because of this, for example, Cage was able to shape movement 2 of the first Cheap Imitation (in which taste determined register) to produce an elegant and gentle climax about seven-eighths of the way through: the size and frequency of large melodic leaps increase and the melody moves gradually upward to its highest point, two octaves above the begin­ ning. A similar tasteful control of pedaling in the first movement and of conjunctions in the last allowed analogous subtleties to emerge. The whole work, in fact, is artfully as well as arbitrarily composed.

In other recent pieces, Cage has applied chance techniques more rigorously but devised them to suit particularly well the source mater­ ials used. The Hymns and Variations are built by a process of "sub­ traction" (in effect, a partial erasure) of two hymns by William Billings. The harmonic purity of the originals is enriched by the subtleties of the compositional procedure: certain notes are selected to be extended as well as deleted, so that new and arbitrary harmonies are created, often unexpected but generally rich and consonant. The same extensions affect the phrase structure of the hymns, so that no two variations have quite the same balance; and the use of only soft singing by solo voices, non vibrato, further enhances the sense of serene

activity.

The resulting music is extraordinarily coherent and comfortable for the ears, and the relationship between it and the more anarchic pieces from earlier periods can easily be interpreted as akin to the relation­ ship between, say, Stravinsky's neo-classic Pulcinella and his earlier Petrouchka. It is this sort of analogy that supports the interpretation of

Cage's recent work as regressive or neo-conservative. But to impose such a judgment, the character of other recent pieces must be ignored: the extreme imprecision of Renga, the militance of the Lecture on the Weather, or the tumultuous anarchy of Roaratorio. Moreover, a post1970 regression is obviously inconsistent with the line traced by 160

Cage's previous music, which has grown ever more radical; nor is it consistent with Cage's personal and political views, which (except perhaps on diet) appear little changed. Clearly an alternative explana­ tion must be found. *

*

*

When Cage embraced chance operations in the early 1950s, the shock was so profound and the implications so far-reaching that chance soon came to be regarded as the cornerstone of his aesthetic.

But this had clearly not been the case previously; and, in fact, it never became the case. Chance procedures are only one tool among many that Cage has used to pursue quite consistently a single goal through­ out his career: the disciplined acceptance, in musical contexts, of that which had been previously rejected out-of-hand. "I've always been on the side of the things one shouldn't do," he once remarked, "searching for ways of bringing the refused elements back into play."?

But the "refused elements" have changed, of course; once some­ thing had been accepted, it was accepted for good (though it may have been forgotten from time to time), and Cage's efforts turned toward accepting something else. Once the sequence of changes is traced, the evolution of Cage's music becomes extraordinarily clear and consis­ tent.

At the very outset, Cage chose not to use tonality, which by definition excludes certain pitches while establishing others as central. :age proposed instead to accept all twelve chromatic tones and to treat them equally; in this sense he allied himself with Schoenberg. But he quickly realized that Schoenberg'S method also discriminated: it lumped all F#'s, for example, into a single abstraction, despite the fact that an F# near the top of the piano sounds radically different from an F# near the bottom. So Cage evolved a more elaborate system of chromatic composition treating every pitch independently; "I thought there were eighty-eight tones," he recalled later (and added, "if it were feet, would it be a two-tone row?").10 But problems remained. Cage's fully chromatic system, like the twelve-tone one, required that certain combinations of notes be avoided because they would too strongly suggest tonality. Worse yet, a system based on pitch had no place for noises, or for silence.

"Noises," Cage found, "had been discriminated against; and being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises. I liked being on the side of the underdog." 11 So Cage began writing for percussion, inventing the prepared piano to serve as a substitute when

percussion instruments proved impractical.

161

In both the chromatic pieces and the percussion works, the problem

merely to introduce the "refused elements" into an existing compositional framework but to devise an altogether new one. Noises, in the context of a work built on the organization of pitch, would be novelties, in no sense equal participants. It was necessary to invent a compositional logic which would apply equally well to sounds of all was not

types, and to silence as well. Moreover, this system would have to be

sufficiently abstract to admit even sounds its inventor (the composer) had not yet imagined. The acceptance of new materials had to be disciplined; otherwise it was likely that certain types of sound would be discriminated against inadvertently, by neglect or omission.

Cage therefore conceived the elaborate aesthetic that governed the music of the 1940s. The "structure" of that music was designed, above all, to be open to any kind of material-tones, noises, words, silences: "Structure is a discipline which, accepted, in return 12 whatever The "method" and the "materials," newly, accepts devised for each piece, simply provided a means for filling a particular ...

"

...

structure.

But by the late 1940s it had become clear that there were still elements being refused. Though Cage's music was open to all types of sound, it was not open to all continuities; the ordering of sounds remained a matter of taste, and Cage's preferences would automat­ ically tend to exclude certain "melodies." Then, too, imagination is limited, so there no doubt would be a vast collection of sound, sequences that would never be heard because they would never be conceived. A further discipline was required, one which would be as open to all continuities as structure was to all materials.

The variety of "methods" devised through the 1940s was largely a response to this need. Each placed more severe constraints on Cage's taste than the last, so that little by little his music began to accept sequences of sounds that Cage might previously have rejected. By the early 1950s Cage was operating according to rules so complex that it was no longer clear what, if anything, they excluded. It was only practical to tum to chance operations.

The use of chance, then, was not a revolution in Cage's music, but simply one more way of extending his determination to accept refused elements. It enabled him to open his music not merely to all sounds, but to all continuities. As his familiarity with chance operations increased, Cage little by little discovered procedures which widened the universe of possibilities still further: the content of the score could remain partly unspecified, so that each performance would be dif­ ferent; parts could be overlapped arbitrarily, so that new continuities would always be created; the performing forces could be unspecified,

162

that the materials could be freshly conceived for each situation.

Eventually, by the mid- 1960s, Cage had extended such techniques to their limit; he was producing works which were not scores, but directions for making scores. These pieces left all aspects of per­ formance undetermined; literally anything that coincidence might ere­ ate could happen.

In this musical universe only one concept was refused: intention.

The remarkable achievement of the late works, from HPSCHD for­ ward, is that they continue still further Cage's disciplined acceptance of "refused elements" by opening themselves to the very sort of so

intention that it had earlier been necessary to reject. Cage had pre­

dieted something of the sort years previously, in discussing Morton Feldman's music: There is no end to the number of somethings and all of them (without exception) are acceptable That is to say there is not one of the sornethings that is not acceptable. When this is meant, one is in accord with life, and paradoxically free to pick and choose again as at any moment Feldman does, will, or may. New picking and choosing is just like the old picking and choosing except that one takes as just another one of the somethings any consequence of having picked and chosen. 13 ....

That is, choice as well as chance is free to enter into the act of composing, but that which is arrived at by choice is in no sense preferable to that arrived at by chance. Taste and judgment are applied within a discipline in which they are simply one way among many of making decisions; the discipline is violated only when they are irn­

posed without being required.

The procedures entailed by such a discipline must be sophisticated and carefully balanced. They must call for the use of taste in an unpredictable way, and they must specify quite precisely taste's do­ main when it is used. Although intention is acceptable, it must never be preferred, and the procedures used must generate a variety and quantity of events sufficient to make intentional decisions simply some among many. It is precisely this that the Song Books accomplish: a mix of known through techniques (many involving taste) with new ones and with variations, the whole interlinked by a naturally web of allow taste enter in as just to emerging relationships, they another device, nothing more. The lyric modality of solo 49 (a fullv­ intentional re-cornposition of The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs) in no way is preferable to the arbitrary abstraction of solo 11; these solos are simply two among the ninety which comprise the extraordinarily diverse, yet altogether coherent, universe of the Song Books.

163

Yet there is a sense in which intention must be extended still further. By a kind of self-referential logic, procedures designed to accept changing procedures must themselves be subject to change; and by the same logic, if that which is accepted includes intention, it must be possible for these changes to be intentional. If taste is admissible, it must be admissible at all levels; yet, paradoxically, procedures which strictly exclude taste must also be admissible. In effect, the cornposi­ tional universe must be open to all compositional techniques, from the most arbitrary to the most artful, with no particular technique preferred. And indeed, Cage's most recent period manifests exactly this openness, with works ranging from the abstraction of Renga to the precision of the Cheap Imitations. The world of music, with all its conventions, is returned to itself, together with all that was gathered on the way; only the values formerly attached to that world have been removed.

It is with oo.lues that the line can be drawn. Values need not be reaccepted into Cage's discipline because they are not part of music; values contain neither sound nor silence. Values concern inter, actions-in this case, between people and sounds-and such inter' actions are essentially social in character. As always, Cage's music eventually leads out of the domain of art and into that of society.

But the new works are not models, as in earlier years. The effect of the recent pieces is instead to clarify music's limitations: though it can, as Cage has always insisted, change people's minds, the discipline of acceptance available in composition cannot at present be extended to daily life. Judgments are acceptable in the recent music because they have been previously rejected, and thereby disassociated from value; but it remains for society even to take the first step. Social [udg­ ments will not be acceptable until they too have been rejected; then, valueless and anarchically changeable, they can be reintroduced without danger.

If there is a conservatism in Cage's recent work, it lies in this: that music can now accept as part of itself that which it not long ago expunged. But the new music, though it resembles the old, has left the

burden of value behind; in the end, it is not so much conservative as transcendental. And its conservatism, if it be that, is no model for society. The world has yet to accept a discipline of anarchy, let alone one which would readmit order; for the present, the social objective remains revolutionary. We may indeed have reached the point at which the intentions of those who would compose our music need not concern us; but the intentions of those who would compose our lives must still be opposed.

164

1. John Cage, "Composition as Progress," Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan

University Press, 1961), p. 18.

2. John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," Silence, p. 116.

3. Probably the clearest explanation of such structures appears in Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," where the lecture itself serves as an illustration of the pattern it is

describing.

4. See Stuart Smith, "The Early Percussion Music of John Cage," in Percussionist XVI:l (Fall, 1978), pp. 16-27, for an excellent analysis of one such work.

5. Information from an interview with John Cage, February 22, 1979.

6. From the interview, February 22, 1979. Most of the following discussion is based on this interview, and on a detailed examination of the sketch books, drafts, and of the Song Books.

7. A brief explanation of just how the I Ching is used may help somewhat to demystify Cage's music. The I Ching is essentially a collection of commentaries indexed by sixtv-four hexagrams, each made up of six lines of two sorts-broken and unbroken. In consulting the I Ching, the questioner first builds up one of these hexagrams, line by line, traditionally by throwing yarrow stalks or coins, and the procedure is such that each line (broken or unbroken) can also be characterized as either changing or at rest. Changing lines, transformed into their opposites, produce a second hexagram, and both the original and the transformed hexagrams are used to obtain commentary from the collection.

In practice, Cage is usually unconcerned with the commentary itself, and considers the changing lines only occasionally (usually when making major decisions). The I Ching is, for him, essentially a device which produces random numbers from 1 to 64.

In his earlier work Cage actually used coins to generate the hexagrams (and hence the numbers); but when making HPSCHD he was able to program a computer to construct them instead, and his hexagrams are now, so to speak, prefabricated in large stacks of computer printout.

To make a decision it is first necessary to determine the number of options. The numbers from 1 to 64 are then partitioned accordingly, into equal segments, and a hexagram obtained; the number of the hexagram determines the outcome. For exam­ pie, there are four genres in the Song Books, so the partitioning could be 1-16 (song), 17-32 (theater), 33-48 (song using electronics), and 49-64 (theater using electronics). Thus if the next hexagram on the printout were number 41, the next piece would be a song using electronics. When 64 cannot be divided equally, the closest approximation is used; to decide compositional procedure in the Song Books (three options), the partitioning was 1-21 (repeat), 22-43 (vary), 44-64 (introduce).

If the number of options is greater than 64, then they must be subdivided into 64 equal groups; one of these is chosen first and then a second choice is made to select a single option from it.

Until very recently, Cage has nearly always partitioned groups equally (the Freeman Etudes are the first pieces to be based deliberately on asymmetric divisions). But asymmetry has often resulted indirectly from chains of decisions (for an example, see the discussion of solo 7 above, p. 159). In fact, complex procedures involving many contingent choices almost always skew the results in some unforeseen way; in ana­ lyzing Cage's music, then, it is vitally important to begin by analyzing the composi­ tional procedures and their consequences.

8. Cage has often used stenographic pads to sketch compositions and writings; see, for example, A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), pp. 36-40. scores

165

9. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview with John Cage," Tulane Drama RelJiew X:2 (Winter 1965), pp. 60-61.

10. John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," Silence, p. 124.

11. Ibid., p. 117.

12.

Ibid., p. 111.

13. John Cage, "Lecture on Something," Silence, pp. 132-33.

166

John Cage's recent violin music Paul Zukofsky

In summer 1975 I became aware of John Cage's having returned to a

traditional notation in the Etudes Australes (which he was just finishing). The implications of this return were of general importance, but my interest was more personal. I had by then recorded the Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard, as well as the Nocturne. I knew both 59J.1" and 26' 1.1499" for a String Player, but did not feel much affinity for those pieces because of the totally graphic notation which, in my experience, does not work perceptually and therefore fails to provide the sufficient specification which allows a performer maximum inter' pretive possibilities. While I had always hoped that Cage would return to a more traditional notation and write more violin music (I have always felt that both the Melodies and the Nocturne are extremely beautiful and very violinistic), I was very reluctant to bother him.

After all, if he wanted to write violin music, he would do so. In discussing this with both Earle Brown and Pia Gilbert, Earle remarked that John had no more reason to assume interest on my part than I assumed on his and, if I was serious about it, I really ought to get in touch with him. Following this statement, I wrote John, and a few weeks thereafter he called me, and explained that he was already committed to writing an orchestral piece for the Bicentennial (Renga with Apartment House) and could not start anything until that was completed. Once done with Renga, however, he would be happy to write something for me.

Sometime early in 1976 we met and discussed the possibility of his doing a series of etudes for the violin. I also mentioned how much I loved Cheap Imitation, * and thought that an unaccompanied violin more

·Cheap Imitation (1969) for solo piano was written to replace Socrate by Erik Sa tie after the French copyright holder had refused permission to allow the work to be arranged for two pianos for use as an accompaniment to Merce Cunningham's Second Hand. It was later (1972) orches­ trated for 24-95 parts, with or without a conductor.

167

version of it would be a great addition to the repertoire. John was

concerned by what he felt was a lack of knowledge about the violin (something which in my opinion he had no need to worry about).

Since Cheap Imitation was already in existence, we decided to use it as a preliminary to a larger and more complicated project, thereby giving

experience working together.

John first considered a violin and piano duo version of Cheap, but it became evident that solo violin would be sufficient, and that a version for the two instruments might be unnecessarily fussy. The work was transcribed up a major third, primarily because of various E�s (E flats) in the original which were below the violin's G string. In addition, minor changes were made in some of the sustained passages, and in one instance (because of range) a descending line became ascending After we searched for a method for solving bowings (I: 140-44). this, and stringing. (Note that we did not decide fingering, but let that be us

the consequence of the stringing decisions.)

In both the Melodies and the Nocturne, John had decided, as part of the composition, which strings were to be used for which pitches. In a work with a restricted gamut such as the Melodies, where each note occurs on only one string, this is a fairly simple process. Cheap Imitation not having such a restricted gamut, we decided to determine the stringing by chance. After maximum (overlapping) ranges had been specified for each string, John determined for each note its string.

Once this was done, I did some minimal editing in John's presence, making suggestions regarding ease and fluidity. What was remarkable about this chance stringing procedure was how useful almost all of it was, how refreshing some of the ideas revealed by the chance opera­ tions were, and how things which on paper looked quite absurd in reality produced some very wonderful effects.

Following the stringing, we spent a good deal of time on bowings.

We restricted ourselves to three types: detache (separate bows), lega­ to, or portato-Le., a series of semi-detached strokes played within one bow. John, in his Preface to the violin version of Cheap Imitation, describes it as "a close togetherness of clearly articulated tones, what might be termed a paradoxical legato or a 'philosophical' detachi."

We painstakingly worked phrase by phrase on the bowings for the first two movements, with my trying various combinations of de­ tache, legato, and portato for John to hear. This decision process took a great deal of time, so when we arrived at the third movement, which is longer than the first two put together, I suggested that we decide the bowings entirely by chance-that is, for each phrase, not only determine the type of bowing (totally detache, totally legato, totally portato, or a mixture of any two or all three), but also determine for 168

how long within that phrase that particular type of bowing should continue.

John was reluctant to do this. He felt that the chance-derived bowings would not be compatible with those of the first two move­ ments since the method of determining them would be so different.

We found ourselves in the following curious position-a conservative violinist normally opposed to chance operations was supporting their use to determine a most important aspect of violin playing, and a composer with years of devotion to those operations was opposing

traditional violinistic grounds. We compromised by try chance operations and, if they did not work, to then agreeing return to our painstaking methods of the first two movements.

The chance operations worked like a charm. The unexpected corn­ binations and juxtapositions of different lengths and styles ofbowings gave results of a freshness and vitality that the tradition-steeped mind often did not even conceive of. In only two instances, to the best of my recollection, did the bowing seem unnecessarily cramped and, as later work showed, this was only a first impression.

In first creating Cheap Imitation, John had preserved the double­ sharps and double-flats of Socrate. In practice, if not in principle, this was rather meaningless for a piano work, but given the intonational flexibility of the violin, we could now seriously reconsider the highly enharmonic pitch notation. We decided to use Pythagorean intona­ tion (i.e., D# is sharper than E� by 24 cents or 24/100 of a tempered semitone), and suggested increasing the difference, so that the Pythagorean commas would be more evident. To me, the piquancy of this intonation adds immeasurably to the beauty of the work.

Having completed Cheap Imitation successfully and worked out useful strategies regarding stringing and bowing, we decided to pro­ ceed with the Etudes, which were named the Freeman Etudes in honor of the lovely and generous woman who commissioned them.

Using star maps (as in the Etudes Australes) and superimposed trans­ parent paper, John placed each event in a continuum of time after determining the respective density of each etude. I had agreed that a time notation would be acceptable although it presented space perceptual problems. We solved these by running two time lines under each staff. The lower of these lines supported a series of tactae which divided each line into seven equal segments. Each segment was eventually assigned a nominal value of three seconds-therefore, each line equaled twenty-one seconds. Above this set of "bar-line" tactae was a second line with tactae indicating the exact position of each event. Since the events were placed proportionately on the staff, this may seem redundant; nevertheless, it was quite useful since the

their

use

on

to

=

169

perceived spacing between events (as opposed to tactae) is highly dependent upon their nature and procession.

Having decided the temporal occurrences, general classifications of detache vs legato were specified for each event; single "pitch-classes" were assigned each event, and octave placements were determined.

"Stringing" was then decided, and the question of whether these events were to be

single notes or the basis of aggregates (intervals or chords of two to four notes each) was answered.

The pitches of all aggregates were determined by successive pitch­ range restrictions which depended to a large degree on the order of string-choice. Aggregates were constructed over a series of phone calls in which John might begin by saying: "This is going to be a four-note aggregate. The first note occurs on the third string and it's an Aa just above four ledger lines above the staff. What can you play on the first string (at the same time )?"

Since any of four fingers could stop the Aa on the third string, the

possibilities on another string (in this case the first) usually were large and I would give John an available range. There would be as many questions as there were aggregates to solve. Aggregates of more than two notes would require follow-up calls-Le., John might say, "The four-note aggregate which started with 'A' on the third string, now has (on the first string) a 'Da' one note above the highest note of the piano (a note chosen from within the range I had given previously). The next note (to be decided) occurs on the fourth string. What can you play?"

Since the hand was now anchored with two pitches, the possibilities on the fourth string were more limited. Once again I would give John a

range-sometimes large, sometimes very small-and finally (in the of four-note aggregates only) John would call back again saying

case

that the four-note aggregate now consisted of the following pitches on the third, first, and fourth strings, and asking what I could still play on the second. As the work progressed, a catalog of these aggregates and aggregate-ranges began to exist. We hope to eventually publish the catalog, as it provides a fairly comprehensive guide to chordal possi­ bilities on the violin.

Following aggregates, timbres, note repetitions, and microtones were chance-determined for all events. The timbres category consisted of normal, sul tasto, sul ponticello, harmonics and pizzicato. The note repetitions category consisted of successive marteles, ricochet, spic­ cato, tremolo, vibrato, and beating. Microtones ,utilized the standard American notation for quarter tones (�, �, �, " .), but were not to be thought of as quarter tones (although in actuality some of them may be quarter tones). As John says, "When the apple is rotten, cutting it in half does not help." Rather, these microtones are pitches

�,

170

belonging to that large perceptual space where a pitch still maintains its name (i.e. a C� is a lowered C, which is not so low that it will be heard as a sharp B�).

Once having set this golem in motion we discovered that while every event was in and of itself completely playable, a quick succession of events was something else again, and in many instances was quite unplayable due to the constraints of time. Obviously something had to give, but what? Should time be expanded, and if so, expanded con' sistently throughout the whole piece, or just for the difficult section?

Should stringing be changed, or timbre substitutions be made using harmonics, or should one consider deleting certain pitches? This was quite problematic because in essence we were stating a hierarchy of importance among time, stringing, timbre, and pitch.

John was extremely reluctant to change anything, and I kept in, sisting that certain things were impossible as they stood. The example of Merce Cunningham finally brought the two of us back together. In his use of chance to create dance, Merce had in many instances derived results that were physically impossible, and, as such, demanded com' promise. We had essentially choreographed a ballet of the arms, and chance had given us some results that were physically impossible­ therefore, we too had to compromise. The question then became: should the compromises be rigid and final, or constrained but allow, ing of evolution? I was most reluctant to create an absolutely final version since, as every violinist is aware, the fingerings and bowings that one uses throughout one's life evolve constantly as the mind and body change.

We finally agreed that the golem would operate, would produce results (some of which, because of the constraints of time, would be manifestly impossible) and that the individual violinist, when it be, came absolutely necessary, would make such changes as he or she saw fit, preserving the original and its intent to the greatest possible extent.

Since I have only learnt the first eight Etudes, I cannot say what the ultimate tempo of all the Etudes will be. It would be good to keep the same tempo for all thirty-two, but that may prove impossible. Small deviations or rubati are of course acceptable, but a constant tempo change of the basic tempo to accommodate difficult passages must be avoided at all costs; otherwise, one has the impression of every,

thing happening at the same rate-all very easygoing and without contrast.

The Etudes are both fascinating and frustrating for many reasons.

They are the most difficult music I have ever played, yet they are also extremely violinistic. They have endless phrasal possibilities, none of

which were intentional in the creation. Some of the Etudes are so 171

complex that we may have to synthesize them, but the challenge of playing them live may be too great.

Working with John has been of the greatest importance to me. With Cheap Imitation, the Etudes, and the Chorals (taken from the Song Books )-in which we explored the world of unisons and beatings-we have added immeasurably to the twentieth-century unaccompanied violin literature. Violinists mayor may not enjoy these works-that is of no importance-but no violinist can consider himself of today without coming to terms with their methodology of creation, their problems, and their solutions.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN!

172

A collaborative process between music and dance Merce Cunningham

What follows concerns a selection of the works that John Cage and I have collaborated on over the past four decades. It is in no sense a complete survey; there are numerous others not included. But these are some of that history that reflect to me a change or enlargement of the underlying principle (with the sole exception of Second Hand), that music and dance could be separate entities independent and interdependent, sharing a common time. There is a continuing flexibility in the relation of the ruo arts. We are involved in a process of work and activity, not in a series of finished objects.

Whatever tremors it may have provided for the various dancers who have shared these experiences with me, I think they would agree that it is also exhilarating and adventurous. It keeps one on one's toes, and jumps the mind as well as the body.

The first program that Cage and I shared was presented in New York City in 1944. The evening consisted of six solos by myself and three pieces of music by Cage who had also composed the music for the dances.

At the time, he was working in a way he called rhythmic structure, and all of the dances with the exception of Totem Ancestor were choreographed involving this use of time. What was involved was a "macro-rnicrocosmic rhythmic structure" in which the large parts were related to the small parts in divisions of time. This was a way of working between the music and the dance that allowed them to be separate, coming together only at the structural points. For example, in Root of an Unfocus, the original phrase was structured 8-10-6 beats.

The dance was in three parts, the first section being 8 x 8, the second 10 x 10, the third 6 x 6. The tempo for each section varied as did the time lengths (one and one-half minutes; two and one-half minutes; one

173

minute). This use of a time structure allowed us to work separately, Cage not having to be with the dance except at structural points, and I was free to make the phrases and movements within the phrases vary their speeds and accents without reference to a musical beat, again only using the structural points as identification between us. Each of the five dances made this way had a different time structure and length which came out of my initial working with the movement for the particular dance.

TRIPLE-PACED

DANCE

ROOT OF AN UNFOCUS

TOSSED AS IT IS UNTROUBLED

THE PERILOUS NIGHT: SIX SOLOS

MUSIC SONGS: SHE IS ASLEEP THE WONDERFUL WIDOW OF 18 SPRINGS AMORES:

PRELUDE; TRIO; WALTZ; SOLO

THE UNAVAILABLE MEMORY OF

DANCE

TOTEM ANCESTOR

SPONTANEOUS EARTH

Studio Theatre, lOB W. 16th Street, April 5th, 1944

I had written a dance-play lasting an hour that was to be presented in the Perry, Mansfield Summer Theatre. Cage wrote a piano score for it. I had asked if he could make the score fairly simple, not being certain of the pianist's capabilities in such a situation. We devised a

rhythmic structure that included time-lengths for the script and the dancing, and then he composed the work for the white keys only. The rhythmic structure left me free to work with the dancers and actors in such a way as not to pin the words or all the movements to specific notes, although the structural connections were observed. Cage was school, and at one point in the rehearsals, Arch Lauterer, who was co-directing and had designed the set and lighting, pointed out one part he thought too long. "You must cut the music there." I agreed that the section dragged, but did not feel that to cut the music was a solution, and would not have chosen to do so anyway. Searching about for another answer, I changed the dance not present at the summer

174

and rephrased the timing of the scene; in other words, used the allotted structural time differently. The next rehearsal Lauterer said, uy ou see, it is much better with the music shortened."

movements

FOUR WALLS a

dance play

under the joint directorship of Merce Cunningham and Arch Lauterer

Choreography: Merce Cunningham Design: Arch Lauterer

Perry-Mansfield Theatre, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, August 22nd, 1944

In the spring of 1948 Cage and I were touring, giving joint programs of music and dance. One of these was presented on a small stage in the Richmond Women's Club, the "oldest in the country," we were told.

The oldest member had been informed ahead of the program about the prepared piano, so that when the sounds were heard she would not be too disturbed. At one point in the program there was a piece that Cage had arranged for piano and flute. She confided loudly to her companion, "Well, I understand how that other music came out of the piano, but if this one did, then our piano's broken."

Later on that same tour, at a college in Virginia, we were asked to give a lecture-demonstration. We chose not to do the conventional talking and demonstrating, but rather to make a short dance and piece of music in front of the largely student public. Explaining first about the rhythmic structure and what this particular one would be, we proceeded to work separately, he at the side of the stage with a piano, and I in the stage space itself.

As I remember, the structure was 8 x 8, divided 2-2-1-3. At the completion of any section, any 8, we would try it together, the dance and the music, the public applauding as each point was made. I had explained we did not expect to finish the work, that it was more of an act of process. But we did, to my amazement.

The 16 DANCES FOR SOLOIST AND COMPANY OF THREE special for me in my work. It was a long piece intended to fill an

was

175

evening. It was also the first time the use of chance operations entered into the compositional technique.

The choreography was concerned with expressive behavior, in this case the nine permanent emotions of Indian classical aesthetics, four

light and four dark with tranquillity the ninth and pervading one. The structure for the piece was to have each of the dances involved with a

specific emotion followed by an interlude. Although the order was to alternate light and dark, it didn't seem to matter whether Sorrow or Fear came first, so I tossed a coin. And also in the interlude after Fear, number 14, I used charts of separate movements for material for each of the four dancers, and let chance operations decide the continuity.

The work had an overall rhythmic structure to which Cage wrote the score, generally after the dances were finished. He composed it for both piano and small orchestra, distinguished by a number of unusual percussion sounds. Although each dance was a separate entity, we were

beginning to use "poetic license" in disregarding connecting

points within the dances.

16 DANCES FOR SOLOIST AND COMPANY OF THREE

Solo: Trio: Solo: Duet:

Anger Interlude Humor

Interlude

Solo:

Sorrow

Quartet:

Interlude

Solo:

Heroic

Quartet:

Interlude

Solo:

Trio:

Odious Interlude Wondrous Interlude

Solo:

Fear

Duet:

Solo:

Quartet:

Interlude

Duet:

Erotic

Quartet:

Tranquillity

Hunter College

Playhouse, January 21, 1951

At the Black Mountain Summer School in 1952 Cage organized a theater event, the first of its kind. David Tudor played the piano, M.e.

Richards and Charles Olson read poetry, Robert Rauschenberg's

176

white paintings were on the ceiling, Rauschenberg himself played records, and Cage talked. I danced. The piece was forty-five minutes long and, as I remember, each of us had two segments of time within the forty-five to perform our activity. The audience was seated in the middle of the playing area, facing each other, the chairs arranged on diagonals, and the spectators unable to see directly everything that was happening. There was a dog which chased me around the space as I danced. Nothing was intended to be other than it was, a complexity of events that the spectators could deal with as each chose.

THEATER PIECE

Speaker:

John Cage

Music: Dance:

David Tudor

Poetry:

Charles Olson M.C. Richards Robert Rauschenberg

Paintings:

Merce Cunningham

Black Mountain College, North Carolina, Summer, 1952

Cage had written the pieces Music for Piano, the sequence of sounds for which had been found by noting the imperfections in pieces of paper, and applying chance operations to this. I decided to do the same thing to ascertain the space points for a dance called Suite for Five in Time and Space. The Suite eventually came to comprise seven dances. The spacial plan for each dance was the starting point. Using transparent paper as a grid, a bird's-eve view of the playing space, I marked and numbered the imperfections, a page for each dancer in each of the dances. In the Duet, the Trio and the Quintet I super­ imposed the pages for each dancer to find if there were points where they came together and would allow for partnering or held poses, some form of liaison between them. The time was found by taking lined paper, each line representing five-second intervals. Imperfections were again noted on the paper and the time lengths of phrases obtained from chance numbering of the imperfections in relation to the number of seconds.

This was one of the first dances where meter was completely aban­ doned, and we, the dancers, had to rely on our own dance timing to guard the length of any phrase, and the timing of a complete dance.

Cage's Music for Piano, which was played with the dance, is variable 177

in time. Although the dancers came to know the sequences of sounds,

the sounds do not necessarily happen at the same points from per­

formance to performance. And, as sometimes occurred, with the addition of pianists and pianos, the sound was augmented and the original piece had other layers with it.

The total length of a given dance, however, remained identical each time. Through many performances, the duration of the pieces varied little. After a period of, say, three months of not rehearsing, the dancers (assuming they were the same ones, of course) would come within five to ten seconds of a two-minute and forty-five-second dance.

SUITE FOR FIVE IN TIME AND SPACE

the music is from Music [or Piano Solo:

At Random

Trio:

Transition

Solo: Duet: Solo: Solo:

Stillness Extended Moment

Q.tintet:

Meetings

Solo:

For the Air

Repetition Excursion

The events and sounds of this ballet revolve around a quiet center, which, though silent and unmoving, is the source from which

they happen.

Piano:

David Tudor

(First Performance) The University of Notre Dame Concert and Lecture Series, May 18, 1956

My company and I were in residence at Connecticut College, and there was to be a festival of programs the last week. We would appear on two of them. So I made two dances, Summerspace with a commis­ sioned score from Morton Feldman, and the second, Antic Meet, using Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. This was one of the first times I gave him only the length of the total dance (twenty-six minutes), but no time points in between. His score is indeterminate in length, and also in the proportions within the piece, so even though the dance was set, we could not count on the sounds as cues, as they never fell in the same place twice. The dancers' unsupported time-span was expanding.

178

ANTIC MEET

Merce Cunningham, Choreography David Tudor, Pianist

John Cage, Conductor (First Performance) Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, August 14, 1958

The Events were originally intended as a means of giving perfor­ in unorthodox surroundings. Since then they have sometimes been given in conventional theaters. The first Event was presented in the Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts in Vienna during a world tour. The music was Cage's Atlas Edipticalis and was played by six musicians who were seated apart from one another in the corners of the large hall in whichthe Event took place. Since the performing area was uncon­ ventional, just an open space in the Museum, it did not seem to us that a conventional presentation of three or four dances was appropriate, and so we chose to present a single length of time, an hour and a half, in which the music and the dance could be heard and seen. I put together a series of sections out of the repertory. At times during the program there were several dances going on at once. There was no separation between the dances; we went directly from one to another.

The audience was seated mainly in front of us, but also extended onto the two sides. The musicians played continuously for an hour and a half. Since we, the dancers, had no awareness of what the continuity of sound would be, we were free to involve ourselves in what we were mances

doing.

We continue to present Events in orthodox and unorthodox situa­ tions, usually with four musicians. In recent years they have been Takehisa Kosugi and Martin Kalve as well as Cage and David Tudor.

Each is a composer, and each makes a sound ambiance separate from the others, using the Event time as he chooses. The dance material now consists not only of pieces from the repertory, done in whole or part,

but also dances and actions made specifically for the Events.

MUSEUM EVENT

Mittwoch 24,

VIENNA 1964

Juni 1964

19:30 Uhr

Gastpiel Merce Cunningham & Dance Company, New York Museum Event Ny. 1

(Erstauffuhrung) Tanzer

179

Merce Cunningham

Viola Farber Shareen Blair Barbara Lloyd Sandra Neels Deborah Hay William Davis Steve Paxton Albert Reid

Carolyn Brown

Schlagzeug: John Cage Friedrich Cerha Peter Greenham

Judith Justice Petr Kotik David Tudor Musik: John Cage (Atlas &lipticalis,

1961162)

Dekor, Kostume, Beleuchtung: Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay

The French-American Festival had commissioned Cage to prepare a and me to make choreography for it. For this work, Variations V, Cage decided to find out if there might not be ways that the sound could be affected by movement, and he and David Tudor proceeded to discover that there were. Several, in fact, only two of which finally worked out for use in the piece, the rest being impractical due to cost, or requiring machines not usable in the theater, or simply too clumsy.

The two ways that were used were not differentiated with respect to the dance, but were different for the musicians, the technicians and the stage set-up. The first was a series of poles, twelve in all, like antennae, placed all over the stage-each to have a sound radius, sphere-shaped, of four feet. When a dancer came into this radius, sound could be triggered. Each of the twelve antennae had different sound possibili­ ties. The metal rods were five feet high and roughly one inch in diameter. I had not known the exact dimensions of the poles nor their placement previous to the stage rehearsal the day before the per­ formance, as the technique necessary to ready them had been in a constant state of experimentation, but I did know they would be upright and the number would be twelve. So I had prepared the choreography and the dancers-there were seven of us-for the pos­ sibility of instant changes of mind. But I did wonder about our feet stepping on the wires which would be running from the base of the poles across the floor and up to the electronic systems which con­ trolled all this. Fortunately, it was a surmountable impediment.

The second sound source was a series of photoelectric cells which were to be positioned on the floor along the sides of the stage. The a stage lights would be focused in such a way as to hit them, and when score

dancer passed between the cell and the light, more sound possibilities were triggered. This did not work out precisely, as the stage lights were too distant to strike the sides of the stage strongly enough. After all, 180

they were focused on us and we were prone to be in the middle of the area.

So at the last minute the cells were put at the base of the twelve

poles throughout the area and this was a viable solution. The general principle as far as I was concerned was like the doors automatically opening when you enter a supermarket. The dancers triggered some of the sound possibilities, but the kind of sound, how long it might last, the possible repetition or delaying of it, was controlled by the musi­ dans and technicians who

were at the numerous machines on a behind and above the dance space. They utilized tape platform and shortwave radios. machines, oscillators, Film and television images were also used in this work. Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik both showed visual elements on screens behind and to the side of the performing area. There were also various props: a plant, a pillow, a pad, a table and two chairs, to which contact microphones were attached and which, when moved or touched by the dancers, added to the sound possibilities. At the end of the piece I rode a bicycle, the wheels wired for sound, through the space, around the poles and the photoelectric cells, and then exited.

New York Philharmonic

French-American Festival. July 23. 1965 at 8:30

John Cage: Variations V (World Premiere) Merce Cunningham. Carolyn Brown. Barbara Lloyd. Sandra Neels.

Albert Reid. Peter Saul. Gus Solomons. Jr. Electronic Devices: Robert A. Moog Film: Stan VanDerBeek Distortion of Television Images: Nam June Paik Technical Consultant: Billy Kluver Musicians: John Cage. Malcolm Goldstein.

Frederick Lieberman. James Tenney.

David Tudor Lighting: Beverly Emmons

One of the earliest of my solos, called Idyllic Song (1945) was made

to the first movement of the Socrate of Erik Satie.

Cage had arranged

the music for two pianos. Over the years he had suggested I choreo­

graph the other two movements, as he had planned to arrange them for piano also.

On one of our tours in the late sixties in the Middle West, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, the musicians with us, explained to me 181

that it was difficult for them to make different electronic set-ups for each of three separate dances for the performances and what could be done about it? Cage suggested I choreograph the Socrate. He had completed the two-piano arrangement. I worked on the dance, re­ membering the early solo to the first part, making a duet for Carolyn Brown and myself for the second, and a full company dance for the final movement. A month before the scheduled first performance, Cage telephoned from Davis, California (where he was in residence at the University of California) to say that the Satie publisher had refused permission for his two-piano arrangement, but not to worry as he was writing a new piece for one piano, keeping the structure and phraseology of Satie's music but otherwise using chance operations to change the continuity so there would be no copyright problem. When he told me this, I replied, "But you will have to rehearse with us and play the music so we can learn the new continuity." "Don't worry, I will," he answered. "I'm calling my version 'Cheap Imitation.'"

"Well, if you're doing that, I'll call mine 'Second Hand.'" It was the last time I made a work following the phraseology of a musical score.

Second Hand

John Cage (Cheap Imitation) (First Performance)

Part 1 Meree Cunningham Part 11 Meree Cunningham

Carolyn Brown

Part III Merce Cunningham

Carolyn Brown

Sandra Neels

Valda Setterfield Susana Hayman-Chaffey Chase Robinson

Meg Harper Jeff Slayton Mel Wong

Douglas Dunn Decor: Piano:

Jasper Johns John Cage

Brooklyn Academy of Music, January 8, 1970, 8:30 P.M.

In the fall of 1973 I spent nine weeks in Paris working with dancers from the Opera Ballet. The Festival d'Automne and the Paris Interna­ tional Dance Festival had jointly commissioned this work to be

182

choreographed utilizing dancers from the Opera on the Opera stage. I asked Cage if he would compose the music, and Jasper Johns if he would design the decor. They agreed. It was to be an evening' length work without intermission and would involve the full Opera facilities.

Cage had originally wanted to use the works of Satie in various juxtapositions, to make a circus of Satie's music, but Salabert, the publisher, refused permission. So he composed the work Etcetera, for orchestra, which involved twenty musicians and three conductors.

Cage arrived in Paris a month before the first performance, and proceeded to have consultations with Marius Constant, the principal conductor, and the other two, Catherine Comet and Boris de Vinogradow. When the first musical rehearsal came, there was a problem. From what I understood, the musicians, upon learning that they were to make choices about which sounds they played, as in' dicated in Cage's score, asked for more money, pointing out also that it was chamber music. Rolf Liebermann, the then Director of the Opera, spent a good part of the day with them, eventually solving the difficulty by giving them two marks (double pay) for each re­ hearsal and performance. Cage was worried about setting a precedent.

Constant said, "Don't. It's the Opera. It would have happened

anyway."

Each day I was in the top of the building working in the ballet studio with the dancers, many of whom were worried about dancing without musical support, and what would happen when the two came together?

This fear increased as the piece grew longer, one or two of the soloists becoming quite upset at times. I thought it had to do mainly with an idea about their image, and assured them they were strong enough as dancers not to be thrown off by it.

At the first rehearsal of the music in the theater without the dancers, a sound like rain on a number of roofs came out of the pit. The large handful of spectators rushed forward to see what was producing it.

Each musician had, as a supplement to his instrument, a French cardboard carton which he used as a drum at various moments during the piece.

Several days later, at the first full rehearsal of the work with the dancers on the stage and the musicians in the pit, I had to repeatedly calm several dancers as to their dancing with the music. Finally the rehearsal began. I was nervous enough trying to keep track of the dance and the timings within it and what was working and what wasn't, so any difficulties they might be having with the music were

immediately apparent to me. Afterward, upon my questioning, they said, "The music? No, we didn't have any trouble."

not

183

UN JOUR OU DEUX

Choreography by Merce Cunningham Music by John Cage: Etcetera Decor and Costumes by Jasper Johns Assistant: Mark Lancaster

Conductors: Catherine Comet.

Marius Constant. Boris de Vinogradow Theatre National de l'Opera, Mardi 6 Novembre 1973 a 20H30

Our Event for Television, presented on the National Educational Television's "Dance in America" series, was a collaboration among the dance company, John Cage and David Tudor. This was an hour program which in this instance became flfty-eigbr minutes and forty­ five seconds. Charles Atlas, with whom my video and film work has been done, and I spent four weeks working out the dances and excerpts of dances we planned to present. The excerpts that were from

the repertory were remade and angled for the camera; in some cases they were shortened, as I feel one receives information quicker and more directly on television than on the stage.

Cage and Tudor decided to share the hour, Cage having the first section for which he played Branches, music for plant materials. He was interested in sounds from nature and had found that the spines of cacti, when touched and amplified, produced resonant sounds. At the point in the program, when the dance RainForest appeared, Tudor's music for it began, and this continued through the balance of the hour.

Both musics were introduced into the program after the taping and editing had been completed-that is, several weeks after the actual shooting of the dances.

Working with dance in video requires a constant adjustment in terms of space, often on a small scale. A six-inch shift can seem large on the camera. This also can cause a displacement in the timing, requiring a change in rhythm, or the amplifying of a dance phrase, sometimes necessitating a cut or speed-up of the movement. In the conventional music-dance relationship, this could require a constant recomposing or rearranging of the sound. But since I work separately from the music and not on a note-by-note relationship, I was free to

adjust the dance phrases and movements through the camera in a visual sense.

184

EVENT FOR TELEVISION

Minutiae

Solo Westbeth

Septet Antic Meet

Scramble RainForest

Sounddance Video Triangle Music: John Cage (Branches)

David Tudor (RainForest)

Taped at Nashville, Tennessee, 8-11 November 1976 First public showing, WNET I"Dance in America," 5 January 1977

The most recent collaboration that Cage and I have been involved with was the International Dance Course for Professional Choreo­ graphers and Composers held in August 1981 at the University of

Surrey in Guildford, England.

The workshop was a two-week period that involved eight choreo­ graphers selected by audition from professional companies (ballet and modern) on the Continent and in the United Kingdom, and eight practicing composers, with a nucleus of twenty-seven dancers and five musicians for the various choreographers and composers to use as

working personnel in the projects.

With one exception, Cage and I decided to conduct the Workshop by means of chance operations. The exception was the time length of each project. The decision here was to make the original project four minutes in length and to increase the daily project by a minute; thus, the final project would be fifteen minutes long.

Other than this, the rest of the decisions concerning the daily work were decided by chance operations: the number of dancers or musi­ dans any choreographer or composer would work with each day, the actual dancers and musicians involved in a given piece, and the com,

poser-choreographer relationship.

Each day after the morning class and lunch, I would suggest a project to the choreographers and dancers from ideas I had employed in dances in the past. These ranged from simple time and space problems to complexities involving multiple spaces and superimposi­ tion of movements and phrases. Then each choreographer would be informed as to the number and names of the dancers he or she would be working with that day. The dances ranged from solos to octets.

Following this, the choreographers had the balance of the afternoon, 185

roughly three to four hours, to work with their dancers in the separate studios the university provided.

With the composers and musicians, Cage talked each morning about the ideas in his music. He gave a survey of it from the earliest pieces to the latest work, pointing out the musical ideas he had been working with in each instance and the philosophical concerns with which he had been involved. He did not present a particular project to the composers, preferring to leave them free to make their own choices.

Neither the choreographers nor the composers knew during the after­ noon working period which music would be played with which dance.

Each evening for the twelve days of the workshop there was a program of the dances and the music that had been made during the day. And it was then, again using chance operations, that the decisions were made as to the choice of music to be played with any given dance.

At times there would be two choreographers' works being presented to a single composer's music. At other times two separate pieces would be played along with one of the dances.

One came to the evening's program with a certain amount of anticipation and, although not all fare was gourmet, there were an astonishing number of times when the music and the dance seemed to have been made for each other.

The original plan of having a minute added to the length of the works each day was relinquished after the first week. A number of the choreographers felt it was difficult to deal with the increased length each day due to the short working period and their unfamiliarity with the dancers. They made their own decisions about the length, although several of them elected to continue the one-minute addition. And choreographers who, during the first week, had worried about doing a longer work each day, found a ten- or twelve- or fifteen-minute length not intolerable, but provocative and feasible.

The sharing of dancers, musicians and ideas; the non-impinging atmosphere that resulted (as well as the extraordinary amount of music and dance that was made, rehearsed and presented each day) was exhilarating, giving a feeling not of things finished, indexed and catalogued, but of work that was being done, and could continue to be done and shared.

INTERNATIONAL DANCE COURSE FOR PROFESSIONAL CHOREOGRAPHERS AND COMPOSERS

University of Surrey, Guildford, England

Sunday 16th August-Saturday 29th August 1981 Copyright (!;) 1982 by Meree Cunningham

186

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"Changes and Disappearances" Lilah Toland

"Changes and Disappearances" is the result of John Cage's fourth visit Crown Point Press. The project began January 1, 1979, and ex, tended through January 1982, due to the complexity of the work.

to

This work is a progression from Cage's previous work at Crown Point ("Score Without Parts," "Seven Day Diary," "Seventeen Draw,

ings by Thoreau," and "Signals," all done in 1978). The artist has subjected to chance determination, through consultation of the I Ching, an ever-increasing number of variables which are inherent in the etching process.

Cage's point of departure for the project was the selection of an unusually shaped and colored handmade printing paper. Eight copper plates, each the exact size of the paper, were cut out into sixty-six smaller plates of varying size and shape. To determine the curved edges of these smaller plates, Cage made use of a greased string which he dropped from various heights onto the original eight plates (he cited hommage to Marcel Duchamp's use of the same method). The straight edges of the plates were lines cut between chance-determined quad, rants.

Each

plate was assigned an identifying number. As the project progressed and plates were selected for appearance in an etching, they accumulated lines and images of three types: curved lines, engraved by the artist; straight drypoint lines drawn by the artist; and photographic images of drawings from the journals of Henry David Thoreau. At the project's conclusion, only one plate had never been used.

The number of plates used in anyone etching is chance-determined.

Theoretically, a print could contain from one to sixty-six plates. In composing each print, Cage allowed the selected plates to rotate 3600 around the point of intersection of two quadrants of the printing paper. While some portion of every selected plate would appear in the etching, often a large section of the plate could be rotated off the 187

Cage has described this process as "fishing," using the catch different parts of different plates.

Cage uses the same analogy to explain his method for "catching" the photographic images of Thoreau drawings. (It happens that most of these drawings "get away.") In the darkroom, Cage subjected to chance all photographic variables: lens, F,stop, exposure time, enlarg­ er position and etching time. At times "nothing" resulted from a particular combination of photographic variables. This inspired Cage to add the word "disappearances" to the tide of the work, which was originally simply "Changes."

Cage consulted the I Ching (sometimes called the Book of Changes) as to whether any given plate would change during the printing of an When he was added an indicated, etching. mobility engraving or a A times in successive runs of a drypoint. plate could appear several single etching, changed each time by the addition of another line. Thus the plates were altered irrevocably, not only from one print to the next, but, within the print, from one pass through the press to the next. Each time two plates are overlapped in an etching, a separate run or pass through the press is required. It is possible to print more than one identical impression of these prints only by pulling the first run on all the sheets, then adding the second run, and so on. Because this was so time consuming, only two or three impressions were made of each

paper. John paper

as a

net to

print.

Although the same plates may be used in several consecutive etch, ings, their positions and colors are newly composed each time. The increasing number of images has meant an increasing number of colors in most of the etchings. In addition to the images, Cage inked selected

plated edges with color. One etching required 178 colors. As the work progresses to the projected thirty-five prints in the series, it will probably (but not necessarily) become even more complex.

188

Changing art: a chronicle centered on John Cage Kathan Brown

The etching studio is a large upstairs loft in a sixtv-year-old indus, trial building; its windows face north, looking out over downtown Oakland toward the Berkeley hills. At one of the worktables sat John Cage. He was sixty-eight at the time; he was following a series of computer printout sheets, transferring information from them onto charts in front of him. On another worktable was a row of file folders; sticking out of them were drawings and instructions and copper plates cut into eccentric shapes. About twenty of these plates-some no bigger than a matchbox, others a foot or more in length-were spread out on the bed of a large old-fashioned metal etching press. A printer was arranging them, carefully following a diagram; another printer was pressing ink into fine lines on one of the plates, while a third mixed colors from powdered pigments; the latter had an array of colors before him, arranged in numbered rows on a large glass pallette.

The visitor to Crown Point Press that day in January 1980 had nothing in his background to prepare him for either John Cage or the archaic nature of etching. I began as I usually do by explaining that the process is really very simple: an artist draws on a copper plate, either by scratching it directly or by submerging it in a tray of acid where the drawing will be bitten away; then the marks in the metal are filled with ink, the excess wiped off, and through the action of the press a sheet of damp paper receives the image.

"But what is he doing?" the visitor asked, indicating Cage. I ex, plained that before Cage could make the marks on a plate he had to discover where he was going to put them, so he was consulting computer printouts of I Ching hexagrams in order to form a plan for arranging marks according to chance. The plan was being drawn up on the charts he was working on. The format of the charts had taken some time to develop, as each format depends on a thorough know, ledge of the etching process.

189

"And what about him, what's he doing?" He pointed to the printer with the glass pallette in front of him. We examined the chart he was following and I explained that each mark on each plate had its own color mixture: thirty percent cadmium red and seventy percent ultra­ marine blue, for example. And since each print had dozens of plates, each with several marks on it (and the potential for more to be added all the time), a great many mixtures had to be made before anything was run through the press.

The other two printers were nearing the end of the hours-long inking that preceded each printing. Cage left his worktable and came over to check the arrangement of plates on the bed. A sheet of paper was positioned and the press was "run through" one time. The sheet was left in the press, the plates removed and more arranged in their place; the press was then run through again to print images on top of the previous ones. This was repeated several times; finally the etching was completed. Cage admired it ecstatically, ttl had no idea it would be this way-look at that little line, isn't that marvelous! Oh, it's just beautiful-don't you think it's beautiful?" The visitor, quite genuinely I'm sure, agreed. He was caught up in the excitement and was begin­ ning to forget his bewilderment. We went into a neighboring room together, and he-looking at the acid baths and other workshop tools-recapitulated what he had learned about etching. He was begin­ ning to understand and starting to feel confident. But as I was saying goodbye and we passed through the studio again, he suddenly became wide-eyed. "What's he doing now?" he gasped. I turned to look and discovered Cage with his hands in a big bowl of flour-he was making bread.

2

At Crown Point Press we place no constraints on what an artist can do. Cage, with his computer printouts of I Ching hexagrams, his fragmented plates and multiplicity of colors, even with his baking bread, was fascinating, but not, for us, terribly eccentric. We are used to the nontraditional; most of the artists we work with are artists of

the seventies.

For one project we found a hypnotist to regress the artist to three

old so he could discover something about the moment when activity becomes art. For another our printers went to the Anchor Steam Beer Company to bottle a limited edition of beer; they also printed the label that the artist (Tom Marioni) had hand-engraved.

We counterfeited an Italian 10,OOO-lire banknote for Chris Burden (it sells for 100 times the face value of the money). Hamish Fulton came here from England and went to nearby Mount Lassen for a week-long walk in the snow before making an etching that grew out of that years

190

experience. These are a few examples of seventies art as we have seen it in our etching studio; there are many others.

I was thinking about this essay when Hamish Fulton was working with us, and I asked him if John Cage had had an influence on him.

"Not directly, not in the normal way," he said. "But if John Cage

hadn't existed and done the work he has done, it would never have been possible for me to be doing the work I am doing today."

This kind of influence has its roots in Cage's adaptation of Zen Buddhist philosophy to the concerns of modern Western art. John Cage began to study Zen philosophy with D.T. Suzuki, its greatest modern spokesman, in 1945. According to Peter Yates, who knew Cage over a long period, he changed personally as a result of those studies; he had been "stubborn, gifted, argumentative" and became to argue, tolerant of misconception, "willing to explain but not self-forgetful and considerate. "I He has been able to merge life and art; he does not want to waste time on criticism, and he does not want to manipulate others.

"Why do you speak of holding an audience?" he asked an inter­ viewer. "[My] notions imply dropping the idea of controlling the audience So, in the case of a performance, we would think of it, wouldn't we, as a celebration of some kind; and we would certainly not think of holding those people to us. "2 Cage believes that art is useful to the individual if he realizes he must take responsibility for creating it for himself-the artist merely opens a door that the viewer (or listener) could go through if he wished, and then, "at least, see through [the art] to something that wasn't it."!

To Cage, art is a discipline that he practices, like yoga or zazen. The purpose of art for the artist is discovery, enlightenment, to change the mind. It must be approached like a meditation, without passion or intention. "True discipline is not learned in order to give it up, but rather in order to give oneself up.

It means give yourself up, everything, and do what it is you are going to do. At that point, what have you given up? Your likes, your dislikes, etc The notion of an art which would be an escape from life would seem pointless to me.

This I learned from the I Ching, where art is viewed, in the hexagram on Grace, as a light shining on top of a mountain penetrating to a certain extent the surrounding darkness. Therefore, art can't answer the important questions, for those important questions will be asked in the darkness where art does not penetrate This means we are trying to identify life with art, and we begin in the darkness. "4 .

.

.

....

.

..

....

....

3

By 1950 John Cage was a prominent member of the avant-garde in New York. With Robert Motherwell, the most articulate of the 191

Action painters, he edited a one-issue journal called Possibilities, and he attended meetings of the Artist's Club, started by Motherwell and now considered to have been a breeding ground for Action

Painting-or Abstract Expressionist-ideas. The key to the new painting was the artist's use of the act of painting for attempting to understand himself. It was influenced by Surrealism, and by Freudian analysis, and most of the painters personally were hard-drinking, quick-tempered and inarticulate. The aim of the art, however, was not much

self-expression as it was self-revelation. The focus of the was the act of art rather than the object that his activity finally produced.

This had something to do with Cage's idea of art as discipline, as work that needs simply to be gotten on with. But temperamentally Cage was drawn to another group of artists, just as temperamentally he so

artist's attention

more drawn to Zen than to Existentialism.

In the late 1940s he had begun teaching in the summer at Black Mountain College. Robert Rauschenberg was a student at Black Moun, tain in the early fifties, and later in New York he introduced Cage to was

his friend, Jasper Johns. Cage had by this time been working for several years with Merce Cunningham, who had founded his own dance company and had asked Cage to be musical director of it.

Rauschenberg became artistic director of the company in 1954, a post he held until he turned it over to Johns in 1967 (johns held it until 1979 then passed it on to Mark Lancaster). Cunningham had the idea that it was not necessary for the dance and the music to have any other relationship than to occur in the same place at the same time. He also worked very concretely, using simple, everyday movements in his choreography, treating people and props with a similar cool detach, ment. The Zen concepts of oneness dividing and changing, of con' creteness of mind that flows nonverbally from a cryptic question, are at the base of a philosophy that Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns shared, and each developed this philosophy in his own indepen­ dent, original and influential way.

Rauschenberg's work is tremendously inventive, much of it made by combining and collaging, letting his mind wander. At Black Moun, tain in 1953 he painted all-white paintings that were described by Cage in a Zen-like poem:

"(To whom)lNo subject!No image! No taste I

No object! No beauty! No message! No talent! No technique (no why)! No idea! No intention! No art! No black! No white (no

and);'?

Jasper Johns, perhaps the most influential painter alive today, des, cribes his attitude toward his work in this way: "I tend to focus upon a relationship between oneself and a thing that is flexible, that can be 192

thing at one time and something else at another time. I find it "6 interesting, although it may not be reassuring.

Johns also has pointed out the tendency of his work to deal with "relationships of parts and wholes";' Cage's work (and perhaps all art), I think; deals with relationships of parts to the whole-the universe, life itself, nature. In Cage's case, however, the rigor of his ap­

one

proach-that is, the use of chance operations derived from the I Ching-totally prevents composition, prevents his own taste and judg­ ment from acting except initially, when the premises for the particular work are established. These premises come mainly out of the process or medium being employed, but the intelligence and intuition of the artist are at work-otherwise, it would not be so easy to identify Cage's work as belonging to him. Johns, whose intelligence and intui­ tion are employed continually (not only at the initiation of a project), finds that the amount of chaos he can encompass is limited. In an interview, Johns spoke about this briefly: "At one time I hoped that the three panels in Voice 2 might be able to accommodate any order or disorder; might be upside down, sideways, backwards. While working in this way, trying to make the painting have no 'should be,' trying to make it be any way it wanted to be, the 'should be' seemed amusing; but working with that idea became too difficult for me, too compli­ cated. I couldn't deal with it and I settled for the more simple order. "8 It would be impossible to imagine anyone but Johns working on Johns' paintings. But Cage, in his music, often allows others to con­ tribute to his work-and this is effective so long as the contributor enters into the spirit of the work and makes no attempt either to subvert it or to insert himself. The basic attitude of the artist as working in order to discover something rather than to assert ideas he already has (the artist in the process losing his ego rather than enlarg­ ing it) has fostered in contemporary visual art a return to the work­ shop system of production: most artists nowadays who can afford it have assistants, and often the assistants not only stretch the canvas but also do some of the routine work on the actual painting. Rauschenberg has always had assistants of this type, and two of his assistants, Dorothea Rockbourne and Brice Marden, became important artists of the Minimal school (or perhaps Post-Minimal-e-thev are not the earliest Minimal artists).

If Minimal Art was influenced by Cage, Cunningham, Johns and Rauschenberg, it was because it carried the ideas of detachment and concreteness as far as they could go. One of the many paradoxes of Zen thinking is that the most abstract ideas are expressed by the most concrete means, so a black square, a circle on a grid, a rectangle divided into three panels alternately painted black, white and gray, 193

each takes on a kind of "thingness" and can express the universe, wholeness, oneness; ancient Buddhist texts are full of such illustra­ tions. Johns pointed out that dealing with change is not reassuring; Minimal Art is reassuring, and in the sixties, when this art was being developed, reassurance was especially desired. Minimal Art, as it was practiced in the 1960s by Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt and others, is about anchoring ourselves, realizing that there is still one

universe, one world, the "unchanging oneness" that encompasses (and

tames) change and instability.

Out of Minimal Art carne at least one aspect of Conceptual Art, Systems Art. In music this is typified by Steve Reich, who is influ­ enced by Asian religious music. Curiously, Cage dislikes music and art that involve repetition-he finds them too coercive, "like the army"­ even though rhythmic chanting and drumming are a part of traditional Zen Buddhist ceremony; this detail shows that his influence from the

Orient is in its ideas, not in its practice. Systems Art is not immune to

the influences of its time; the point of using a system is to break out of the artist's personality and taste, to see where completion of the system might lead. Sol Le Witt moved from being a major figure in Minimal Art to being a major Conceptual artist working with systems.

LeWitt will fill a whole wall, for example, with a drawing that de, scribes in different sections all possible combinations of straight, not­ straight and broken lines. Systems, like Cage's chance operations, prevent composition. I could not say, however, that Le Witt is influenced by Cage-Le Witt is not irrational; he does not even feel connected to Duchamp, though he acknowledges his importance.

But we must backtrack, because we have not talked about Duchamp. His importance is always acknowledged, seldom defined. A key member of the Dada group, his art is elusive because it is involved with instability, change, rule-breaking and real life. It has symbolic overtones; it contains personal references, but it is not important that the viewer understand these. The viewer looks through the art, as John Cage said, to something else. Jasper Johns, writing about Duchamp's Large Glass, wrote that it allows "the changing focus of the eye, of the mind, to place the viewer where he is, not elsewhere."? Duchamp used many materials to make art, including his own body. In the last years of his life he spent most of his time playing chess. He used chance in his work (dropping a string, for example, to determine a contour) in order to involve it with life; Cage's use of chance, because of its Oriental influence, is more structured and far-reaching. Duchamp's manner of being detached yet involved-irony is a word often asso­ ciated with him-was fascinating to many younger artists. He was past sixty years old in 1950, but he deeply influenced the thinking of the 194

artists of the 1950s and the 1960s to whom he was personally avail­

able. The most influential of these was John Cage who, as Cage said, "studied chess" with Duchamp during this period.

4

At the same time that Cage was "studying" with Duchamp, a number

of younger artists were "studying" with Cage. Cage was teaching a formal class at The New School; I used quotation marks around the word "studying" because the class was in experimental music and most of the artists who became a part of it were not enrolled. Al Hansen has written a book about this class and the "Happenings" that were its aftermath; some of the artists involved were Allan Kaprow,

George Brecht, and-sporadically-George Segal, Jim Dine, and Larry Poons. Writers (Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow) and musicians also attended.

The first Happening took place in 1952 at Black Mountain College.

It was conceived by Cage, and consisted of a number of simultaneous but unrelated and independent events: Cage on a ladder read a lecture.

M.C. Richards and Charles Olson, at different times on another ladder, recited poetry. Merce Cunningham danced. David Tudor played the piano. Robert Rauschenberg played a Victrola; his white paintings were suspended from the ceiling. The principle of simul­ taneity was being explored. Cage told me that he had read Antonin Artaud's Le Teatre et son Double, and wanted to tryout Artaud's idea of the "centricity of each event and the fact that things could be independent of a text." Al Hansen, in his book, offers a simple definition: "The Happening is a collage of situations and events occurring over a period of time in space." But the art form took root and grew of its own accord.

In his book, Happenings, 10 Michael Kirby credits Cage with an important role in initiating the form of Happenings, but he traces the ideas behind it back to the theater of the Bauhaus and Merz Theater as imagined and written about by Schwitters. Happenings, according to Kirby, are always compartmented, and he draws a distinction between Happenings and Events, as typified by George Brecht's Three Aqueous EtJents, in which Brecht simply filled three glasses with water from a pitcher. Happenings, which in their developed form were scripted and theatrical, were concerned with effect, while Events were not. Cage and the artists influenced by him are uninterested in effect. The Happening as an art form was largely developed by painters, and was quite short-lived. The Event, on the other hand, has had lasting influence as an early form of Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art was the dominant art movement of the seventies.

Although idea-oriented, it is not intellectual. The intellect is short195

circuited so that it functions in an unexpected way. The artist's idea is something to explore rather than something to communicate, and the artist explores it quite concretely by manipulating materials or situa­ tions. Since Conceptual artists believe that art and life are closely interrelated, any material or situation may be used to make art if the context is such that at least some people perceive the work as art-the lack of interest by Conceptual artists in traditional composition and traditional materials often makes their art invisible to people who have rigid expectations and definitions of "art." Formal properties are not ignored, however, simply because they are not approached tradi­ tionally; when the viewer wishes to take responsibility for seeing, hearing and thinking for himself, the art becomes visible and an idea (not necessarily the artist's idea) becomes clear.

5

Cage belongs to the branch of Conceptual Art known as Action Art­ or Performance Art as it is called in the U.S. This was genuinely worldwide, perhaps the first art movement since the Renaissance that produced key, early figures in several countries. All of them, however, were influenced by the American action painter, Jackson Pollock.

A forerunner to Action Art was Yves Klein, working in Paris from the late forties to the early sixties (he died in 1962 at the age of 34). He called his art "New Realism" because it was real things, not pictures of real things. He made paintings of monochromatic blue, often over a gold-leaf ground; he also let raindrops fall on powdered pigment on canvas to make paintings, and covered nude models with paint, then had them press themselves against the canvas. He exhibited a photo­ graph of himself diving from a second-story window "in order to experience the void." Klein lived in Japan in 1952 and '53 and achieved the black belt in Judo. He wrote that "Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is in fact the discovery by the human body of a

spiritual space."

II

A group of artists in Japan called the Gutai, led by jiro Yoshihara, in 1954 began making paintings by direct means: balls of paper dipped in paint were thrown at the canvas, a toy tank made paintings with a paintbrush tied to it, and, in theater-type productions before an audience, colored water and colored smoke were employed. (Michael Kirby points out that the Gutai were written up in The New York Times in 1957 and thus may have influenced Happenings).

In Europe, the new empha sis on concreteness and direct use of materials was defined in a book by Italian art critic Germano Celant as Arte Povera. The book discussed artists from Germany, England, Holland, and the United States, as well as from Italy. In Italy, Jannis

196

Kounellis was the major figure. He would install piles of coal, wood, other "poor" or earthly materials in the gallery. Later Kounellis exhibited live animals-his most famous installation (1969) turned the gallery literally into a stable for a group of horses-and sometimes he would place himself or another person in a kind of tableau. "Arte Povera" is a general term used to describe impulses which led outside the gallery system and became two major art movements that were early stages of Conceptual Art. These movements were Earth Art (Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter deMaria, Richard Long, Jan Dibbets) and Anti-Form (Robert Morris, Barry Le Va, Eva Hesse,

or

Jannis Kounellis, Joseph Beuys).

Anti-Form was very much influenced by Fluxus, a movement which

predominantly European rather than American-John Cage and some of his friends (George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow) crossed over. Fluxus Events were more simple and direct than Hap­ was

penings, less theatrical, and there were more poets and new musicians involved than visual artists-Fluxus festivals were usually called "con­ certs." Cage might drink a glass of water with a microphone attached to his throat, George Maciunas might nail down each octave of a piano, Yoko Ono might invite people to cut off pieces of her clothing with scissors. Some of the other members of Fluxus were Naim June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Joseph Beuys, important in both the Anti­ Form and Action Art movements, was the most influential visual artist to emerge from this group.

Beuys is German and his work has a strong German character; it is visually engulfing: a grand piano formfitted with felt so it looks like an ungainly animal (1966); a wedge of fat melting in the corner of a room (1960); a man (Beuys), his head covered with a mixture of gold leaf and honey, holding a large dead hare like a baby in his arms (1965).

Beuys works with installations and with sculpture-actions. Some of his actions involve giving lectures, writing on a blackboard, holding audi­ ences transfixed-his personality is quite compelling. In the introduc­ tion Beuys wrote for the catalog of his retrospective at the Guggen­ heim Museum in 1979, he said: "My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone. "12 In 1968 Tom Marioni, at that time a young artist, was looking for a job. He found one as a curator of a small art center in Richmond, California, near San Francisco. Marioni was interested in the work of Joseph Beuys and had read Cage's books. He decided to approach his curating job as an art work. "When I went to work as a curator I

197

thought of sculpture in terms of, at most, an environment, a single room; but after working as a curator, I thought on a much larger scale.

I

was

concerned with all the elements of an exhibition, with the

publicity, with the arrangements, with the catalog-even with aspects that reached outside the space itself. "13 For a couple of years the Richmond Art Center was, as Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word, "one of the great outposts of invisible Conceptual Art."14 Then Marioni got fired, and he formed his own museum, the Museum of

Conceptual Art, MOCA, in 1970, as "a large-scale social and public art-work." Marioni runs MOCA in addition to pursuing personal art works-actions and situation, installations. But the point I wish to make here is that because he took seriously Cage's idea of extending art into life, Marioni has "arranged" an art scene in San Francisco over the past ten years that would not have otherwise existed. 15 "Arranging is manipulating materials, which is what art is-not promoting or sponsoring. When I organize shows of artists I don't think of it as my art. But MOCA's social activities and the idea of this museum are my art."!"

"Left to itself," John Cage has said, "Art would have to be some­

thing very simple-it would be sufficient for it to be beautiful. But when it's useful it should spill out of just being beautiful and move over to other

aspects of life so that when we're not with the art it has nevertheless influenced our actions and our responses.i"?

I have brought this chronicle only just over the edge of the seven, ties. In the past decade many artists have worked seriously and di­ versely with these ideas, and their work has had a strong impact­ certainly in the field of art and perhaps in the culture as well. In a way, John Cage is responsible for this and in a way he is not at all respon­ sible. His influence is of an unusual kind-through ideas much more than through form; he is most of all an eloquent spokesman and example. He speaks of his desire, as he works, that "the mind be changed," and certainly he changed my mind; it seems that he changes the minds of many people who come into contact with him, his work or his books. "He made it easier for us to use a greater gamut of possibilities than our previous experience would have led us to expect," wrote Dick Higgins, one of his students.P "Artists are sup' posed to do everything, or anything," Tom Marioni said. "An artist, a real artist, is somebody who wants to realize his idea, and he realizes it in the best way he can. And if it means doing something outside of painting or sculpture then, if he's a good artist, he finds out how to do it and he does it."19 But what about the eighties? A reaction against Conceptual Art is setting in. Artists, seeing nowhere further to go with the freedom of

198

the seventies, are moving "back" to traditional painting. Will we lose everything, all these insights that we have gained? Asked by an inter­ viewer if he thinks his work will "last," Cage replied, "It could go into a decline as a person does who gets ill, but then it might recover Generally, if something does go into a decline a kind of sympathetic action takes place in some part of the population, and they take care of »zo it and bring it back so that everything is bound to go on.

I see this happening now-both the decline and the sympathetic reaction. However, the ideas I have been describing are powerful; now that they have been assimilated-even as delicately as they have ....

..

.

been-they will, one way or another, go on.

I. Peter Yates, Twentieth Century Music (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1967), quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage, Documentary Monographs in Modern Art (New York: Penguin Press, 1968), p. 59.

2. "Conversation with John Cage," Kosrelanetz, p. 29.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 13, 14.

5. John Cage, quoted in Kosrelanetz, p. 111.

6. Jasper Johns, in an interview with Christian Geelhaar, Jasper Johns

Proofs (London: Petersburg Press, 1979), p. 48.

Working

7. Ibid., p. 55.

Ibid., p. 50.

9. Jasper Johns, review of a typographic version of Duchamp's "Green Box," in 8.

Scrap (December 23, 1960). Quoted in Geelhaar, p. 33.

10. Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), p. 19.

11. Yves Klein, Selected Writings (London: The Tate Gallery, 1974), p. 25.

12. Joseph Beuys, introduction to Joseph Beuys, Caroline Tisdall (New York: Thames and Hudson/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1976), p. 6.

13. Tom Marioni, interview by Robin White, View (October 1978), p. 8.

14. Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), p. 107.

15. See Suzanne Foley, Space Time Sound (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981).

16. Tom Marioni, p. 10.

17. John Cage, View, p. 12.

18. Dick Higgins, in Kostelanetz, p. 124.

19. Tom Marioni, p. 2.

20. John Cage, View, p. 13.

(Note: This essay is abridged. The complete text can be found in John Cage, Etchings 1978-1982, an exhibition catalog published by Crown Point Press, Oakland, California, in April 1982.)

199

A kaleidoscope on the art of

John Cage Stephen Addiss

Nore: When I was asked to wrire an article on the art ofJohn Cage, I began collecting marerials. First, I wrore out some thoughts of my own, as well as word-plays. Next, I inrerviewed Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, who had invited Cage to make etchings at her studio, and Lilah Toland, who had worked with Cage there. Finally, I collected quotes from the writings of John Cage, and inrerviewed him during his recent journey to Japan. In the following, Cage's words are given in capital letters, Kathan's in capital italics, Lilah's in small italics, and my own in small regular type. Once I came up with a number of small sections, I used chance methods (with the help of the Kyoto relephone directory) to put them in order.

Thus, associations could become free rather than at the mercy of my linear sense of organi�ation. The result, resembling the action of a kaleidoscope, is this article.

-S.A., Kyoto Japan *

I'm always happy when he's here because the way he liCJeS is the way he

makes his art. *

He did all his own engraving. TO BE ABLE TO ENGRA VE RE.­ QUIRED A CERTAIN CALMNESS, AND IT'S THAT CALMNESS THAT I'VE BEEN IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER APPROACHING IN MY MUSIC AND MY WRITING. IT BECAME PHYSICAL WITH THE ENGRAVING TOOL, FOR IF YOU WERE AT ALL

NERVOUS IT SHOWED UP VERY QUICKLY. *

200

Chinese experts have distinguished between painters who copy the forms of earlier masters ("capturing the flesh") and those who follow the spirit of the ancients lin new ways ("capturing the bones"). *

Why has the art world accepted ideas that the music world still mostly rejects? BECAUSE OF THE ESOTERIC NATURE OF MUSICAL NOTATION. IT'S LIKE LATIN-THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE LEARNED LATIN TRY TO PROTECT LATIN FROM ANY CHANGES. THE MUSIC WORLD IS MORE OPEN THAN IT W AS FIFTY YEARS AGO, BUT MUSIC IS DEPENDENT IN MANY CASES ON INSTITUTIONS, WHILE VISUAL ART IS INDIVIDUAL AND PERSONAL; ONLY LATER DOES IT BE, COME INSTITUTIONALIZED IN MUSEUMS. THE LOVE OF ONE COLLECTOR OF AN ARTIST'S WORK CAN CHANGE PEOPLE'S WAY OF THINKING CHANGES HAPPEN FIRST ....

IN THE ARTS WHICH, LIKE PLANTS, ARE FIXED TO PARTIC, ULAR POINTS IN SPACE: ARCHITECTURE, PAINTING AND

SCULPTURE. THEY HAPPEN AFTERWARD IN THE PERFOR, MANCE ARTS, MUSIC AND THEATER, WHICH REQUIRE, AS ANIMALS DO, THE PASSING OF TIME FOR THEIR REALIZA, TION NOWADAYS MUSICIANS, TO EXPLAIN WHAT THEY ARE DOING, SAY "SEE, THE PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR QUITE SOME TIME." ....

*

1 et t ers

of

past

t h h i

e

h

toe

s

ten s

g

e

f

g

0

c

J

n

e

0

a m

uoy

n a

e

eht

t ser

h c

11 eps

nac

*

201

Tao

Yuan-ming, a Chinese poet of the fourth century, loved the music of the ch'in, a seven-string zither played by scholars and literati in order to harmonize their minds. After a time, Tao took the

strings

off the instrument as he no longer needed them for his music. *

The most complicated and complex project I've ever W01'ked on. *

NOTHING IS EVER THE SAME. *

WHEN DAISETZ TElTARO SUZUKI GAVE LECTURES ON ZEN THERE WERE THREE LECTURES I REMEMBER IN PARTICU� LAR. WHILE HE WAS GIVING THEM I COULDN'T FOR THE LIFE OF ME FIGURE OUT WHAT HE WAS SAYING. IT WAS A WEEK OR SO LATER, WHILE I WAS WALKING IN THE WOODS LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, THAT IT ALL DAWN� ED ON ME. *

Direct transmission from teacher to follower is a characteristic of Zen, yet all a teacher can do is to help the pupil discover in himself the enlightenment that was there all along. *

Zen Buddhism resembles the earliest Buddhism in that each of us is

responsible for reaching his own enlightenment without the help of exterior gods. All that is needed is to find the Buddha within. *

He added more layers of complexity f01' his own amusement, but his complex have no extra WOTds 01' directions; there is a clarity about the way he

SC01'es

thinks that is brilliant; his prints become infinite in their implications. *

202

N

N o

o I

I T

T A

C R

A E

T

L L

A A

N

IDEAS F L

I

OUT M THROWING I E FOR R S HAVE C WE SWAY S I

A

I

IS

EMIT OT EMIT MORF GNIRRITS NI STSISNOC ART LIBERATES US FROM DEFINITIONS IS I

A

S

SORT

I S

OF o C I

S EXPERIMENTAL STATION E IN V WHICH E

A

ONE TRIES

L

R

Y

lOUT Z

W

LIVING

H

E

E

D

R E

*

Of course, Cage's writing about his work is itself also his work. *

s n t

pel 0

f

the c h

a s

pastla

ce r

e

toe

n

e

nttg

meg

chte

ahuoyeees n t

0

sih

J

r

fos *

203

We learned early on how important it is to be disciplined

...

.1 fight against

doing it, I don't want to surrender to him, then I surrender, and focus on the meticulousness of it and get pleasure from it. *

Why did you invite Cage to do etchings?

I KNEW THAT HE WAS A GREAT PERSON AND HIS WORK

WAS VERY VISUAL. *

He opened more and more of the elements of etching to chance. *

Early Buddhists did not worship Sakyamuni as a god, but followed him as a teacher who had achieved enlightenment and could serve as a model for others. *

John Cage has written so well about his work that there is no need for more

words. *

In working with the Japanese Diamond Mandala, one begins at the center,

moves

downwards, and circles in a clockwise direction. *

Arnold Schoenberg called his pupil John Cage "an inventor of ge, nius." One definition of genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.

Is nothing more required than devotion to one's path? Blake wrote

that the fool who persists in his folly will become wise. Shakespeare suggested that the fool is already wise. *

WHAT I DO, I DO NOT WISH BLAMED ON ZEN. *

204

It is perfectly wonderful to work with him, he is the most charming man

he is a devil

.

.

.

an

imp

.

.

.

a

leprechaun

.

.

.

a

great

.

.

.

man.

*

Zen masters have used many methods to help others find their own

awakening, including impossible riddles, shouts, unrelated answers to reasonable questions, and beatings with a stick. One famous monk was enlightened when told that the master who had hit him was treating him with the kindness a mother shows her child. *

Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha, first lived a life of pleasure as an Indian Prince, but when he discovered poverty, sickness and death, he determined to renounce the world and seek enlightenment. Turning to the life of an ascetic, he lived as a hermit, eating only enough to keep himself alive. He did not reach enlightenment. After many years, he found a middle path, neither denying the world nor clinging to any part of it, and gained satori. He taught his followers to live as part of nature by letting go of their personal desires. *

THE QUESTION IS NOT: HOW MUCH ARE YOU GOING TO GET OUT OF IT? NOR IS IT: HOW MUCH ARE YOU GOING TO PUT INTO IT? BUT RATHER: HOW IMMEDIATELY ARE YOU GOING TO SAY YES TO NO MA TTER WHAT UNPRE, DICTABILITY, EVEN WHEN WHAT HAPPENS SEEMS TO HAVE NO RELATION TO WHAT ONE THOUGHT WAS ONE'S

COMMITMENT? *

Since early in your life you considered whether to be a painter or a composer, does the making of etchings seem to make a circle and connect with your early ideas? WHAT HAPPENED IS THAT I HAD THE FEELING I SHOULD DEVOTE MYSELF TO MUSIC, BE, CAUSE OF MY PROMISE TO SCHOENBERG THEN MAG, NETIC TAPE MADE IT CLEAR THAT THERE WAS AN EQUIV, ALENCE BETWEEN TIME AND SPACE, SO MUCH OF MY I WAS ASKED AT VARI, NOTATION BECAME GRAPHIC OUS TIMES TO MAKE PLEXIGRAMS, LITHOGRAPHS, A SILK, SCREEN, AND THEN I RECEIVED A LETTER FROM KATHAN ....

....

205

BROWN INVITING ME TO MAKE ETCHINGS BECAUSE OF GRAPHIC NOTATION, MUSIC BECAME GENEROUS. I'M US, ING THE SAME METHOD I USED IN THE ETCHINGS "ON THE SURFACE" IN MY MUSIC "THIRTY PIECES FOR ORCHES, TRA" OR "ETCHINGS FOR ORCHESTRA." AS WELL AS THE FEELING OF RETURNING TO THE BEGINNING, AS ONE IS CLOSER TO DEATH THERE IS ALSO THE FEELING OF BEING SPED UP TO COMPLETE ONE'S WORK. ....

*

HE SAID HE WANTED HIS COLORS TO LOOK LIKE THEY HAD GONE TO GRADUATE SCHOOL. *

Having once studied with Cage at The New School in New York City, I still see him primarily as a teacher. His music has offered us new conceptions, new structures, and new sounds (sometimes these are familiar sounds we have never before heard as music). His graphic art has opened new visual possibilities to the eyes of a public already surfeited with novelty. His books even more directly teach in surprise and delight. Cage's influence in contemporary art and music is widely acknowledged, yet we have been spared a legion of imitators. This is partly because Cage himself has never stopped changing, and even more because what he has fundamentally taught us is not art or music, but what lies behind them and beyond them. He has helped us become ourselves by going beyond the self, to accept more of life without needing to control it, and to appreciate each breath, each sound, and each vision. *

I'M PLEASED BY THE WORK BUT I'M MORE PLEASED TO BE ABLE TO GO ON LIVING. *

By using chance, by rotating the plates before printing, and by inking the edges of the plates, Cage made etching history. Unlike other artists (most people make a "picture"), he worked terribly hard in order to surprise himself. He is really delighted in the results that chance brings. *

206

In the "Signals" series, Cage used drawings by Thoreau, and also circles and straight lines. FOR ME, IT WAS TO NOT GET IN, VOLVED IN MY OWN GESTURE. WHEN I DID USE GESTURE, AS IN "7 DAY DIARY," I DID NOT LOOK At WHAT I WAS IN "ON THE SURFACE" I USE SCRAPPED COPPER DOING ....

WHICH HAS NO ONE'S GESTURE. *

YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO WORK IN SUCH A WAY THAT SOMETHING HAPPENS FREE OF THE MIND'S OPERATION. ANYTHING THAT APPEARS, APPEARS BY VIRTUE OF THE EMPTINESS OF THE SPACE. I'M IN AN ACCEPTING FRAME OF MIND RATHER THAN A CONTROLLING FRAME OF MIND.

207

Talking about Writings through Finnegans Wake John Cage and Richard Kostelanetz

In the 1960s, John Cage wrote poetry, initially in a series of notational

"Diary" pieces that I regard as a rich extension of Black Mountain poetics. More recently, he has been rewriting poetry-to be precise, rewriting someone else's poetry. His principal literary project of the early 1970s was based upon the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

Our conversation about it appeared first in the New York Arts Journal, 19 (November 1980) and then in the recent collection of my essays on poetry, The Old Poemes and the New (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). More recently, Cage has been working with James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. When we met for the following con, versation, for SoHo Television in the spring of 1978, he had already finished two of his Writings through Finnegans Wake; he was now beginning a third that, in fact, he subsequently put aside, so that the title Writing for the Third Time through Finnegans Wake went instead to a piece composed in a different way. At last report, the piece begun for the Fifth Time. At during the following conversation is tided review Wake of 1979 rate, any my Cage's project appeared first in The New York Times Book Review (December 2, 1979) and then in The Old ...

PoetTies and the New. As poetry radically unlike any written before, that is composed in ways original with Cage, it is, in the truest sense, avant-garde work that is important not only in itself but also for its status in Cage's contin­ uing artistic adventure. It is not difficult poetry in the sense of some' thing no one else can do. Rather, it is inventive poetry-better yet, audaciously inventive poetry. It was often said of Cage's music that no one else composes like this, because no one else would dare; the same

might be said of his poetry. His Writings through Finnegans Wake exist outside not only the mainstream of contemporary American poetry but its tributaries as well. It is not reviewed in poetry magazines; it is not anthologized or mentioned in the literary histories of native work.

Nonetheless, on several grounds, it connects to advanced tendencies 208

both in the other arts and in literature around the world-to tenden­ des that to various degrees and in various ways reflect Cage's influ­ ence.-R.K. KOSTELANETZ: I'm with John Cage. He is just beginning a new

piece. What is it called, John?

CAGE: Just a second. 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56. I was counting the letters in this line of Finnegans Wake. The text will be called Writing for the Third Time through Finne­ gans Wake.

KOSTELANETZ: It follows, therefore, the pieces called Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake and for the First Time.

CAGE: Right. But the first time didn't have that in the title. It just said Writing through Finnegans Wake. Actually, the title of this third one may change because I'm not going through it. What I'm doing is, through chance operations, landing here and there in it: coming down on phrases, words, syllables and letters but not writing or riding or walking through it, but flying over it and landing here and there on it.

KOSTELANETZ: How did you do the first one?

CAGE: For the first one I made mesostics. You know what an acrostic is, with the name down the edge. A mesostic is the name down the middle.

KOSTELANETZ: It's a form you have used before.

CAGE: Right. I have made them for the names of Marcel Duchamp and Merce Cunningham and Mark Tobey and so on, but these are on the name James Joyce and this is the first page of them. The number 3 on the right refers to the opening page of Finnegans Wake which is page 3. It opens: "wroth with twone nathandjoe" which includes the words "wroth" and "joe." "Joe" has a "J" in it and that "J" doesn't have an "A" after it, because the "A" belongs to the second line.

KOSTELANETZ: Because the mesostic spine here is J�A�M�E�S. CAGE: This is the first "J" that doesn't have an "A" after it. I think it's actually the first ")" in the book.

KOSTELANETZ: It seems to be, yes.

CAGE: You know how you can tell-you can turn the page upside down and then if you look for the dots you can catch the "P's and the "1"s that way very easily because the "J"s dip below the line whereas the "P's don't. I had a friend named Hazel Dreis who was a fantastic proofreader, and she proofread the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman which she had bound for the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. She proofread it upside down and backwards. That means-and this is something I think of as very close to my work-that means that we do very good work when we don't know what we're doing.

209

KOSTELANETZ: That comes into a lot of your work, except that you're a very good proofreader too. I know because you proofread my own book about you, and you found mistakes that I missed.

CAGE: No, we're all rather poor at proofreading. Anyway, here's "wroth with twone nathandjoe," and then my second line is "A" and I skip the word "rot" that lies between them. "A"-this is the first word that has an "A" that doesn't have an "M" after it. Then I leave out "peck of pa's" and here's the letter "M" in "malt." M-A-L-T doesn't have an "E" in it.

KOSTELANETZ: The "E" being the next letter in "James." The "E" in the text appears in "[hern."

CAGE: And then "S" is in "Sheri." Then we have the brothers Jhem and Shen.

KOSTELANETZ: Since brothers in various form are a continuing motif in Finnegans Wake, you were lucky to get them into the opening mesostic of your own redoing of Finnegans Wake.

CAGE: Now we look for the next "J," and here's the first thunder, clap, by the way-the hundred-letter word.

KOSTELANETZ: Right, but there's no "J" there.

CAGE: No, we don't get a "J" until we come to this marvelous word right here: "pfrischute."

KOSTELANETZ: Which sounds like air going down a chute.

CAGE: Right, the falling of Humpty Dumpty- "the pftjschute of Finnegan." He fell off a ladder, you remember.

KOSTELANETZ: So it's a neologism for falling. But here you broke the phrase into two lines, putting "pftjschute" and only it with the "J" and then "Of Finnegans" for the "0." Why did you use "of Finnegan," rather than just "of" alone?

CAGE: Because I was so delighted to get "Finnegan."

KOSTELANETZ: Ah, you made a decision of taste.

CAGE: Well, you see, I'm not dealing with chance here, and I have the choice, I gave myself the liberty, of going up to forty-four char, acters to the left and forty-four to the right, so that the name would come down the middle.

KOSTELANETZ: Forty-four characters in measuring away from next

the letter on the mesostic axis.

CAGE: Right, and sometimes I made a long line and kept quite a lot-except there was a tendency to omit and, in that way, to arrive at a different rhythm than was in the original, though all my words are words from the Wake itself. Anyway, for the next line I need a "Y": "that the humptYhillhead of humself." You see, we don't have any "C" there. Here we'll have it: "is at the knoCk out." You see I had to skip practically a whole line ...

210

KOSTELANETZ: to get the next "c."

CAGE: Because the original reads this way: "rhar the humptyhill­ head of humself prumpdy sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park KOSTELANETZ: So you take the "c" from "knock."

CAGE: Right, and the "e" is in "in the park."

KOSTELANETZ: So, in effect, you've completed one mesostic there-one vertical "James Joyce."

CAGE: And we leave out the rest of the sentence, which is: "where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved ...

"

....

livvy."

KOSTELANETZ: So what you did, in Writing through Finnegans Wake, is go through the entire Wake, writing up mesostics on the name

"James Joyce."

CAGE: Then what I'm going

to do, Richard, is distribute the punctuation by chance operations on the page like an explosion. Read just the text and you'll see the punctuation omitted. You can imagine

it where you like. You can replace it where you wish. And I also have it

oriented according to the twelve parts of the clock.

KOSTELANETZ: Which is to say that it isn't all horizontal-that the exclamation point on the first page, for instance, is tilted slightly like the tower of Pisa.

CAGE: Right, and you know that the night hours are important in Finnegans Wake. So that's the first one. Anyway, my editor at the Wesleyan University Press found the text, which is about 125 pages, to be too long and boring, and he said I should make a shorter text and I didn't want to shorten that because that one is complete. It's like Schoenberg said: A long work can't be cut because if it is cut it would be a long work which was cut. So I wanted to make a new work which wasn't cut but which was shorter. And what I did was to make a further discipline, keeping the ones I had of J,A,M,E,S J'O, Y,C,E but keeping an index-l actually kept a card index. And once I used a syllable, I put it in the card index.

KOSTELANETZ: How did you measure a syllable?

CAGE: Well, like in the word "nathandjoe," I assume that it's the syllable "joe" that has the "J" in it.

KOSTELANETZ: Why isn't "nath" the syllable?

CAGE: Because it doesn't have the "J." KOSTELANETZ: Oh, the only syllable you're counting is the syllable on the mesostic axis.

CAGE: Right. So "joe," j-o-e, represents the "J" of James which I don't identify as the "J" of Joyce. I keep it as the "J" of James. "A" 211

represents the "A" of James and "malt" represents the "M" and they never do it again in the entire work. So the result was, following that

discipline, that something like 125 pages here became something like 39 pages there. You can see that the word "just," for instance, which

recurs and recurs in the

Wake, only gets used twice here, once for the of and once for the "}" of Joyce, because tT' James "just" has neither "A" nor "0" after it. I did one thing that was, again, a question of taste. I knew, from having written that, that the final mesostic could be this one:

Just a whisk Of

pitY a

in

Cloud

pEace and silence

And I admit to being very fond of that. Somehow, it's very evocative.

And so I saved the word "just," representing Joyce, for the end. And even though it could have come up earlier, I didn't let it.

KOSTELANETZ: It seems to me that, here and elsewhere, one characteristic of your work is always this: Yes, chance is a basic principle for doing things, but certain decisions of taste appear throughout. They govern quite a bit.

CAGE: Well, they govern, for instance at the beginning, the deci­ sion to work with Finnegans Wake.

KOSTELANETZ: Which is a very key decision.

CAGE: I'm actually glad that I made that decision, because I think that, living in this century, we live, in a very deep sense, in the time of Finnegans Wake. Don't you think so? And there I was, here I am rather, sixty-six years old almost, and I have never read Finnegans Wake through. I had read parts of it but this process of working with it and writing with it has gotten me deeply engaged in it and I've not only read it once, I've read it many times. And, as I pointed out to you, sometimes upside down.

KOSTELANETZ: And you're always discovering new things in Finnegans Wake, as you're always going to discover new things in your own redoings of Finnegans Wake, because you've respected the basic richness and multiplicity of the text. Is your reworking of the Wake a work of literature or a work of music?

212

CAGE: Well, this is whether we pay attention to it as literature or whether we pay attention to it as music, and we're capable-that's one of the lovely things about being a human being-we're capable of turning one way or another. We can turn ourselves toward literature or we could turn toward music. One could take, for instance, the text, and say I sang it to you. Then would you say, "Is that literature?" You

would rather think that it was music, if I sang it. Actually, reading is the process that takes place in time so that literature has an affinity for music, because they both take place in time. If the literature sits, so to speak, on the page and waits for you to come to it and doesn't itself

might say it is not having an affinity for music; it's having affinity for painting.

KOSTELANETZ: Are you going to publish this?

CAGE: Certainly. This little one is actually going to be in my next book from Wesleyan [Empty Words, 1979]. And the big one is going to be published by the James Joyce Quarterly [and the University of Tulsa Press]. The two of them, together, are being published in a limited edition printed by the Steinhour Press. move, as some concrete poetry does, then we an

KOSTELANETZ: What will that edition look like? Will it be multi, colored like those special editions of your Diaries?

CAGE: No, it's going to be black and white, but the punctuation, as I told you, is going to illustrate each page. It will be on fine paper. The Wesleyan edition and the James Joyce Quarterly edition will be reduced in size and not on fine paper.

KOSTELANETZ: Are you going to make a record of it as well?

CAGE: I think that this is naturally something that one wants to do now, and Joyce himself wanted to do that and did-to make records of parts of Finnegans Wake, but we more and more like to hear some, thing rather than just read it. On the other hand, the expenses of all our technologies, even though we have all their benefits, the expenses are still very great. And now that everything is so expensive, it's quite possible that we'll all eat dinner, rather than listen to records of my

readings.

KOSTELANETZ: One question that constantly comes up with reference to your activity is whether you're now a composer who writes or, since you've done so much writing recently, a poet who also composes.

CAGE: Well, this morning I was writing music and this afternoon I'm showing you how I'm starting "a Third Time."

KOSTELANETZ: So you've set up an existence in which you can do one thing at one time and another thing at another time, for they are simply options in your own life.

CAGE: Which seems reasonable. One can also go to sleep.

213

KOSTELANETZ: Sure enough. Now that we know how the Second Time was done, let me ask about the new piece.

CAGE: The new one is not going through the book but, as I told you, landing on it, so it's a mix of phrases, words, syllables and letters, and I omit sentences. That's perhaps again a question of taste. And if! kept sentences I might come out with something like Mureau, which is music/Thoreau; and this, instead of coming from Finnegans Wake, comes from the Journal of Thoreau, and this includes sentences. So it has sentences, phrases, words, syllables and letters, and it produces a sound like this: "sparrowsita grosbeak betrays itself by that peculiar squeakarieffect of slightest tinkling measures soundness ingpleasa we hear!"

KOSTELANETZ: This is, in effect, a prose, as Finnegans Wake is prose.

CAGE: A kind of prose, yes. Now Empty Words begins this way and it doesn't have any sentences and yet it comes from the same material

that Mureau came from and it goes this way: notAt evening

right can see suited to the morning hour

trucksrsq Measured tSee t A w dee e str oais sfOi ys KOSTELANETZ: So by avoiding sentences you approach poetry.

CAGE: That first section that I just read to you has phrases, words and letters. Now if you have just those things, one, two, three and four-phrases, words, syllables and letters-you can use them singly, one two three four, or in combinations of two, phrases and words ...

KOSTELANETZ: Which is to say singly-only phrases, only words?

CAGE: Right, or you can use phrases and words, or phrases and syllables, or phrases and letters, or you can use words and syllables or words and letters-this is the principle of permutation-or syllables and letters; or phrases, words and syllables; or phrases, words and letters; or words, syllables and letters, or all four, phrases, words, syllables and letters. That means you have fourteen possibilities. A little bit before we began talking, I began this. I found out what I was the chance operation-and this beside me is the to write

through

printout of the I Ching. I no longer toss the coins. A young man named Ed Kobrin at the University of Illinois programmed for HPSCHD 214

(1967�69) a simulation of tossing three coins six times, and I use the printout now instead of the coins.

KOSTELANETZ: So that the I Ching process is now all coded.

CAGE: Right. And then I form the questions. Now I have a question dealing with the number 14. Which of these permutations am I going to involve myself in? And then we got, as you recall, the answer that led to words and letters. And then our next question was how many words and letters are we looking for? And the answer was 28.

KOSTELANETZ: You made twenty-eight lines there, to be filled.

CAGE: Twenrv-eight places, yes. Then I had to find out which were words and which were letters and that's a question having to do with the number 2, so that the table of 2 in relation to 64 is one to 32 is one and 33 to 64 is two.

KOSTELANETZ: That means, in this either-or question, if you get any number between one and 32, it is one choice; if you get between 33 and 64, you have the other choice.

CAGE: I pick a word and the other way get a letter, and so I've gone through here and I get W, W, W, W, W, letter, letter, word, word, letter, etc., and now I know what I'm doing. Then the next question is what part of Finnegans Wake am I looking in? And here are the parts of Finnegans. The first part about the father and mother has eight chap­ ters and these are the page numbers and these are the numbers of pages. This is the second part about the children: 41, 49, 74, 17. This is the third part: 26,45,81,36; and this is the last part which returns to the first: 36 So there are 17 parts. And I ask that question, of course, in this case now for this first part of words and letters I asked it 28 times: which part are we in? And then which page of that part are we on? And then which line am I going to? And it turns out that the full pages have 36 lines.

KOSTELANETZ: And all these decisions are made by consulting the I Ching? ...

CAGE: Right. And then I count the words or letters as the case may

be, and I finally pinpoint a word.

KOSTELANETZ: Which you pull out or extract from the Wake?

CAGE: Or I pinpoint a letter. And in this case I'm keeping a table of what pages and lines it comes from because the words in Finnegans Wake are so invented that there might come up later on some question as to their spelling. And I can refer back.

KOSTELANETZ: That is a very shrewd way of keeping track of Joyce's neologisms that are not only easy to misspell but easy to mis­ copy.

CAGE: Right. Now when the program or when our conversation 215

just now began-that's a question: is this a conversation or is it a pro­ gram?-what do you think? It's according, as I said, don't you think,

according to how we pay attention.

KOSTELANETZ: Or what you want it to be in your life?

CAGE: Right. Anyway, I was looking for a letter which is on page 203; and when you asked me the first question, I was counting the letters and there are 56 letters in this line, and now I want to know which letter I've put in the text. So my next number here is the number 17. And I turn to the table for 56, because there are 56 letters, and 1 to 24 equals 1 to 24, so it will be the 17th letter: 1,2,3,4,5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, which is an "I." And since it's surrounded by consonants, there's no question about it. I just plain take the "I." KOSTELANETZ: If there were another vowel, you might take the other vowel?

CAGE: If there were another vowel, I would then ask, shall I have them both or shall I have just one of them?

KOSTELANETZ: And what would govern your choice?

CAGE: The I Ching again. The reason I did that was because of the vowels really more than the consonants, because of the diphthongs, which you know are important among vowels.

KOSTELANETZ: So what you've done here is develop a compo­ sitional method by which lots of choices are made by you by consul­ ting the I Ching, your chart there that you made before, the chart here, from which you thereby extract words from Finnegans Wake, a text by Joyce that you chose, just as you chose the I Ching. Now what is it going to look like in the end?

CAGE: Well, I don't know exactly.

KOSTELANETZ: How long will it take you to finish?

CAGE: I have the habit, which I see no reason for breaking, of making a text of this kind until I have completed 4,000 events. And this first business of mine has 28 events; and I've now in an hour done eight of them. So you could divide eight into four thousand and could

give me an estimate.

KOSTELANETZ: Five hundred hours.

CAGE: But you see, I'm doing other things. Like this morning, I was writing music. So I don't know exactly when it would be through.

But it's the sort of work that I can take with me; and when I'm waiting in line

or

riding in the bus or subway or plane or whatnot, I can

continue this work.

KOSTELANETZ: If you can carry not only the Wake but all your

codebooks with you.

CAGE:

216

Right.

John Cage: a view of m.y own Minna Lederman

Had Marcel Duchamp not lived, says Cage, someone exactly like him would of necessity come into being. But for Cage himself no replica can be imagined: he is so uniquely his own creation. The Cagean essence evades analysis. For such a subject, with no' accepted rationale, the only rewarding approach, I find, is to adapt in some measure his own method of collage. I will not therefore attempt to impose order­ in Cage's universe a plus b does not always lead to c. Instead, taking my lead from him, I will try to call a few relevant matters to attention and offer personal observations in place of Olympian judgments.

Cage came to live in New York forty years ago and I have known him ever since. He has been for me a slowly maturing experience.

Though not perhaps a True Believer, I find myself today profoundly in his debt. For he has greatly expanded my world and opened my mind, as he puts it "to the enjoyment of life itself," which he defines as the of art. enduring purpose But I also believe that his impact on our time, perhaps not yet fully recognized, has been wide and deep-even on those who once ac­ cepted but now reject him; who out of fear of the unknown may never have faced up to him; who, furiously irritated- "he always steals the show"-wish he would fade away, never to return. Vain hope, vain dream! He's the immortal gravity doll. Long after we are gone the Cagean overtones of Chance, Indeterminacy, Events, Happenings, Process, Ephemera and, most sonorously, the fullness of his Silence will rever, berate in the global air.

THE POOR MAN'S BALI!

This was the applauding cry of a young woman at Cage's New York debut February 7,1943, in the Museum of Modern Art. Neither she nor the rest of us, except Colin McPhee of Balinese fame, had as yet listened to an Indonesian gamelan, but tales of its rich and complex music and a few records had been circulating. Cage's program of all,

217

percussion works included three by himself-A mores for his soon-to­ be-celebrated prepared piano, an early Construction in Metal and the Imaginary Landscape No. 3 for audio frequency oscillator, recorded sounds, tin cans, buzzer, gongs, marimbula and thunder sheet.

To the musical segment of the very mixed audience, prepared for sensational revelations, the overall sound seemed rather damped down, muted. Still ringing in the ears of the more jaded were echoes of Henry Cowell's fist and elbow thumpings on the piano, and of fire sirens screaming through the turmoil of Edgard Varese's early works.

However, the group of twelve formally dressed young people (Cage in white tie and tails, Merce Cunningham in a tuxedo) earnestly manipu­ lating a combine of exotic instruments and homely objects of everyday use impressed the fashion magazines, and so it has come down in

legend as a "spectacular."

Cage's impact on musical America did not, however, remain muted for long. During his first weeks in New York he had acquired in Virgil Thomson a patron of the widest influence. Thomson, then in his third year as critic on The New York Herald-Tribune, had discovered Cage in the salons of the art world. He at once recognized a very special voice, an

innovator with the unmistakable aura of a pioneer. Thomson took

Cage immediately under his wing and introduced him and his wife, Zenia, to friends and professional associates. In his widely-read col, umn Cage's first performance and others that soon followed received the most generous attention. He promoted the concert at which Gold and Fizdale, already known as a chic young duo, presented the Book of Music for prepared piano, a work Cage wrote especially for them.

Privileges and grants that rapidly advanced Cage's career were ob­ tained through Thomson, and it was certainly he who suggested that a few articles be written for Modern Music, of which I was the editor.

This proposal required no great persuading, for Cage had an over, abundance of bright new ideas. Virgil often brought him to dinner at our house, and when we came to his place Cage was always there.

In the early forties I remember Cage as a tall, lean young man with black hair en brosse and a manner sometimes importunate, sometimes even abrasive. It took time for us to become friends, and more time for me to develop a sustained interest in his work.

134 MONROE STREET

This new address made a difference-a very big difference. In 1945, after divorcing Zenia, John moved way downtown to the top floor of a tenement house where he hacked out of two apartments a large white loft that soon became famous as the most beautiful in the city of New 218

York. Masses of people-painters, writers, young musicians-would drop in to visit, the ostensible lure after 1949 being a documentary film about Alexander Calder with music by Cage. But my husband and I came again and again just to be in that lovely open enclosure. This great rectangle had seven high windows, three facing the Queens' borough Bridge and the East River, and four looking south to Battery Park, the Bay and the Statue of Liberty beyond. One entered through a small hall with a tiny kitchen and bath on one side, paintings by the West Coast artists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves on the other. In the room itself three plants stood very tall against the south windows­ an avocado, a lemon and a grapefruit. There were two couches, a long low marble table, a desk in one corner, cushions everywhere for people to sit on, and in a commanding central position Cage's grand piano which seemed low and unsupported. In fact the whole space appeared to be floating in the shimmering twilight of late afternoon. In this extraordinary area, above a mob of guests, loomed Cage's non' erasable Cheshire-cat grin.

A GLOBALIER, OR HOW TO INFLUENCE PEOPLE

Composers, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, wrestle everywhere. If they also perform they may travel the seven seas. For decades Cage has been among the most itinerant of this breed, trekking from east to west, from north to south on the American continent. He has been lost and found in the Alaskan tundra. At seventeen, callow and

unknown but venturesome, he made his first trip abroad. Returning to Paris twenty years later, he was already influential enough to obtain a publisher in France for Pierre Boulez, that country's still unrecognized enfant terrible. With choreographer Merce Cunningham, he coura­ geously presented modern dance recitals that utilized the music of the new American avant-garde. Since the mid-fifties he has flown to Europe several times each year, circled the globe, visited most of the Iron Curtain countries (not yet Russia), and appeared often in India and the Middle East and on the North African coast. The summer of 1981 found him for the fifth time in Japan and, immediately after that, in Guildford, England, where, once again joining Cunningham, he gave lectures on music and the dance.

Cage is no feckless minstrel. As he wanders, he teaches. Driven by Messianic zeal, he is a true American evangelist, indeed an old-timey gospel preacher. His early mission appeared to be simply to loosen the shackles he felt were binding Western music. As his view of life expanded so did his message. Now it has become "How to Improve the World," the title he gives a series of lectures which is always 219

followed by the cautionary quirk, "You Can only Make Matters Worse." Aware that his mission has not yet been an overwhelming success, he still pursues his goal with remorseless fervor.

IN THE BOTANICAL GARDENS On a hot July day in 1948 John invited me to visit the Gardens in the Bronx. Both of us had plant troubles-he with his avocado, I with my

ivy and geraniums-so we took a subway express and in no time at all

knocking at the door of the Director's office. To my astonish, instantly admitted. "We have horticultural problems," said John, introducing himself and me. The official heard us out and then addressed John succinctly: "Give that avocado a good tepid bath." "Heavens," said John, standing up tall and erect, "it's bigger than I am and, you see, I myself can hardly get into my tub," at which point the Director showed us summarily to the door.

After a quick visit to the tropical plant house, John found a broad flat rock comfortably shaded, placed me on it and dashed out of the Gardens to buy fruit and large deli sandwiches. While we were having this pleasant, lingering meal, he began, in a desultory way, to tell me the story of his California youth. Like many others I knew a good deal about him already-his dropping out of Pomona College to spend a year and a half abroad; his discovery there of modern painting and modern music; his lectures (at $2.00 an hour) on these subjects later to Los Angeles housewives; his work with dancers; his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell. What captivated me, however, was the family history of people moving from the Mid to the Far West, among them ministers [Methodist-Episcopal), two aunts who taught piano, and, most particularly, his parents-the inventor-father with a streak of fantasy (clearly inherited by John), whose submarine, while making a world underwater record, revealed its presence with bubbles on the surface; the mother (what one used to call a spunky little woman), a self-educated court reporter on the Los Angeles Times, who founded a Western Woman's Club for Self Improvement that, said John exultantly, "still exists to this day!" This personal biography with its rare (for Cage) note of nostalgia I found I very revealing. After I came home, reflecting on John and his work, attention. a both more discriminating prepared to give them were

ment we were

THE ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF TIME

When he was twenty-one Cage came thirty minutes late to a meeting with Buhlig, who thereupon gave him a two-hour reprimand for 220

tardiness. Ever since in his music-and also in his life-time has been of the essence. Duration was his inevitable choice to supersede all other dimensions of sound. Besides, as he points out, it would be as hospitable to noise as to what had been accepted as music.

But all-enveloping time lends itself to multiple definitions. In the twentieth century its very concept has undergone profound changes.

Cage, more immediately receptive than most of us, has responded, after his own fashion, step by step to its expanded meanings.

His scores, until the mid-fifties moving steadily away from the West in their use of instruments and in their abandonment of struc­ tural development, still maintain definite time indications. The Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48) for prepared piano last seventy minutes; the Suite for Toy Piano (1948) takes eight minutes; Water Music (1952) for piano, radio, whistles, water containers and a deck of cards is six minutes long. The Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for twelve radios, a conductor and twenty-four manipulators took only four minutes (but at its post-midnight premiere with its ex­ tended no-sounds it seemed much longer). And of course the famous 4'33" (1954), the sounds-with in-silence piece, is temporally self­

defining.

Soon, under the influence of INDETERMINACY -which is known principle-adherence to precise duration

in physics as the uncertainty

is relaxed and then disappears. Music for Piano (begun in 1953) and

Winter Music (1957) may be played "in whole or in part" by one or more performers. All the Variations from I (1958) to VIII (1978) are indeterminate as to time. Of the early "free" works, the important Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), commissioned by Elaine de Kooning, is perhaps the most prophetic; it may be performed in whole or in part, any duration, by any number of specified performers-as a

solo, by chamber ensembles or as symphony concert. For maximum freedom there is, of course, HPSCHD (1969), composed with computer expert Lejaren Hiller, for one to seven solo harpsichords and one to fifty-one tapes for amplified monaural machines, to be used in any combination to make an indeterminate concert of any

agreed-upon length.

And finally we come to the time-space continuum. Time is to be liberated by what Cage calls the invasion of space. A new dimension will be added by superimposing one work upon another, preferably with distances observed between performers or performing groups.

Cage's Aria with Fontana Mix and the Concert (all of 1958) is a favorite combine. He recalls Charles Ives' famous childhood memory of hear­

ing different orchestras at a country crossroad-the effect of which Ives later translated into his own music. "The superimposed works," 221

says

John, "accumulate their own spaces-which tend to multiply

among themselves."

So at last, with this accumulation and expansion, we arrive at the compression of time. It's not too surprising to find that his "deepest desire regarding contemporary music is to hear it all. Not consecu­ tively, but all at once, at the same time. Everything together!"

John is now a man in a hurry. Although he has gone back recently to the conventional piano, the violin, the orchestra, with works that have defined time-indications, there is no assurance that these will not eventually be liberated also, as earlier pieces have been. "Everything I write is usable," he has said and he means to assure their practicality.

The inter-media Musicircus-a combination of Rozart Mix (1955), the Concert (1958) and the Song Books (of 1970), introduced to Paris in 1970 and later presented in Minneapolis (where it also included works by other composers as well as speakers, films, slides, elec­ tronics), is not, as it has sometimes been called, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk but a kind of exalted Gebrauchsmusik, a truly Cagean,

all-purpose event.

With time thus compressed, a certain acceleration in his daily life has also taken place. A definite note of anxious haste has become evident-a nervous impatience for getting on with matters not only of routine living but also the work of the world. Appointments by the month, the day, even the exact hour, are made years ahead. Meticu­ lous always, since I have known him, about keeping dates strictly to the minute, there now seems no time at all for relaxation. He has learned to write music or books even while traveling. One hears many more public and private admonitions about "Work to be Done" and the world to be reformed, with an insistent air that it's Now or Never.

Rumination, in life or art, has really never been to his taste-he is in the marrow of his bones an activist-and I doubt whether now, under any circumstances, he could find time to duplicate with anyone that

long meandering talk we had years ago in the Botanical Gardens.

For today IMMEDIACY has become the message. All the past,

which for him involves the excision of the nineteenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, plus the future, which Cage foresees as a union of the most advanced technology with the eternal verities of Eastern philosophy, are integrated in his vivid experience of the present.

CHANCE and INDETERMINACY, the concepts for which he has become world famous, seen in this perspective, become only working procedures, the instruments for a breakaway from the outworn and the useless, beacons toward the light and the music which he pro­ claims are all about us-if only we have eyes to see, ears to hear.

Emphasis on the Here and the Now, as not only he but others point 222

out, has a long history in the great American dream. "Whenever I take "I find that someone else has thought of it a forward," says

step Cage, before," and he can't understand why his discoveries are so shocking.

But with Cage every such discovery is followed through at once to its

ultimate resolution. This is what sets him apart from other more slow­ moving explorers-the severity of his unmodulated logic. The "pur­ suit of the truth inside the meaning," to quote John Ashbery, becomes

for Cage not only the search for the real, but for its complete exposure and immediate application.

OUR GRAND ECCENTRIC

The British know how to adjust to their Originals, in arts and letters, even in politics. But America, which produces as many (if not more) of this fructifying species, is, while fascinated, persistently uncom­ fortable with them. Cage is perhaps our best present example. From early on he seems to have inspired both unbelieving approval and frightened withdrawal. Immune to the hazards of variable public favor, he goes steadily his off-center way, an unyielding revolutionary.

His brilliant mind is a grab-bag of paradoxes. He is indeed a living oxymoron. The useless, he says, is always useful. Learning that some universities classify the ephemera of distinguished men as treasures, he once cleared his working space of all its accumulation, and shipped the cargo (it was massive) to the Northwestern University Music Library.

Following the principles of Zen, he believes that the best art and the best life must eliminate all traces of the self. Yet there is no more self­ identifying work and life than John Cage's. He prizes irritation­ without which, he says, quoting Gertrude Stein, art ceases to function.

Yet he preaches the interrelation, the one-ness of all the phenomena of daily life, and of all audible sounds, including not only noise but "a little music." His recent scores, in general under the sign of Indeterrni­ nacy, are increasingly arranged for a minimum of control-but woe to any orchestra that misses out on one note or one pause of his tribute to Satie in Cheap Imitation (1969).

He is at once a barker at a country fair and a canonized saint. The uses of publicity are not abhorrent to him. In the early forties, as a performing composer, he gaily tied tin cans to his ankles. Last year in New York's small but stately Japan House, while chanting a new work, he covered his head alternately with two huge Northwest masks, one a doggie, the other a penguin. More discerning than our own critics, the British have penetrated his disguises-he is no buffoon, not even Shakespeare's court clown, but the Sacred Fool of Russian opera or the Holy Fool of Zen, whose voice often carries the burden of

prophesy.

223

He is a Visionary who has a dream filled with child-like wonder. Yet

he is as pragmatic as any Yankee tinkerer. When Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall are not available he goes down to SoHo and performs in The Kitchen. The concert halls of the world have known him, but so too have shopping-center malls, college gymnasiums, medieval abbies, and large, open theaters under the stars.

Bearded or not bearded (at present not, but with rather long hair, either way being a great departure from the close-crop of earlier days), his life style moves in wide swings. Formal dress of any kind has now for more than a decade been replaced by blue denims which, because of practicality, are probably here to stay. His food, only a decade ago extravagant and Lucullan, is now macrobiotic, and for this health, imposed restriction he has developed not only a miraculous method of preparation but also a genuine preference. When he lived in the country in damp, close quarters, no gift of garden flowers was accept, able, only the daisies, the thistles, the loosestrife growing along the roadside. He still loves them, as he does his mushrooms, but today, in the luxurious double loft that he and Cunningham are remodeling, he has an indoor garden of more than two hundred exotic plants-and rare orchid sprays are gladly welcomed.

No one has more hospitable friends the world over. He is at home in the mansions of the rich and powerful (where he sometimes gets kitchen privileges to prepare his own diet, while the chefs watch him spellbound as if in the presence of an alchemist) and he is also at home in the cottages of the poor and needy, of whom he knows too many, for he is open to every appeal for help. Laws, man-made, seem to him generally foolish and may be disregarded, with due respect for public safety-but honor is never breached and loyalties are eternally ob­ served.

THE COMPANY HE KEEPS

Cage leads a rich and rewarding life. His world travels, professional, and missionary, nevertheless take on the air of a merry cru­ sade. He is a very serious man with a light, frolicsome touch. New friends are drawn to him in fields within and outside the arts, and many, like his older associates, become counselors and some even collaborators. Merce Cunningham has been closest to him, in life and work, for over thirty-five years. Marcel Duchamp, one of his heroes, was his favorite chess companion and his host in Spain. Duchamp's widow, Teeny, opens her Fontainebleau house to him when he's in France. The late Marshall McLuhan wanted to write a book with him. earnest

224

Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, friends of long standing, have collaborated in his ballets for Cunningham. Octavio Paz, the diplomat-poet he met in India; Norman O. Brown, the philosopher-novelist: Buckminster Fuller; Louise Nevelson; Edwin Denby; and John Ashbery are visitors wherever he lives. He has an ever-changing musical following-David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, laMonte Young, Robert Ashley-but I must add that one also meets Morris Graves, Isamu

at

his place the young and the still-unknown=-artist.'. writers, and

composers whose work he admires and promotes. The composite is often startling in contrasts, but is certainly no juvenile hoi-polloi

trailing after a "pied piper leading to the gadget fair"-a charge made a dozen years ago that seems to me altogether misleading.

One memorable night in February 1971, I came to a party on Bank Street, where John and Merce had just refurbished a basement loft roofed over in glass. My husband, gravely ill, was recovering in a midtown hospital and John persuaded me to come down for a little distraction. I would, he assured me, find only himself and Merce and perhaps Jasper Johns. That certainly was his morning intention-but when I arrived Louise Nevelson and her spirited companion Diana MacKown were already there talking with Jasper, and almost immedi­ ately after me came Paz and his beautiful Corsican wife Maria, both of whom I had met in the country. They were followed by three young Latin American composers and writers. John's copyist, who had been working late, was also a guest. And finally there arrived from the next, door brownstone, each carrying a chair because John was chronically short of furniture, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who were then deep in the struggle to have Lennon's presence in the U.S. made legal and permanent. Yoko was an old friend of Cage's. He had taken me years

before to the Village Gate to hear her, then a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence, recite her own poetry. There were fourteen of us in all and the meal was both opulent and fastidious, John and Merce being then on unrestricted diets. Each one was served a beautifully roasted squab, wild mushrooms, brown rice highly seasoned, and artichokes oiled, wrapped in foil and baked according to a Milanese recipe, bread made

by John himself and lots of very good Bordeaux. I left at 10 P.M., before dessert. As I rose to go, Lennon, to my great surprise-we were not even placed at the same table-rose also to escort me to the door in a wonderfully gracious style, using all the appropriate words of hail and farewell. Afterwards I heard that, like myself, everyone in the room had wanted to sit near him-a rare chance indeed to talk with a Live Beatle-but no one had the courage to approach and so the Lennons were left entirely to John and Merce.

225

FUN "He wants to make it 'funny,' but I don't see it that way," Virgil Thomson was complaining to me angrily while Cage worked at the biography of him-a ten-year turbulent enterprise that led to the breakup of their friendship. No wonder! One man's fun can drive another to fury. John's is the sport of Unreason, of a world which must be shattered to make way for the new and unknown-a far cry from Virgil's ideal of preserving the handmade skills of times gone by.

Like Brecht, Shaw, Artaud and other didacts of the theater, Cage makes use of spoofs, of entertainment, to reduce the harshness of his message. His is the method of shock, the unexpected and, above all, the suspended resolution-the point being that, in McLuhan's words, there is no point-only a door to be opened. Those scintillating shaggy-dog stories scattered through his writings-some from Zen teaching, others from personal experience-were introduced in 1965 as accompaniments to Cunningham's ballet How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, when John read them, one to a minute, sitting on a far corner of the stage and sipping champagne. They are perfect illustrations of his style. Under their bland epigraphic succinctness, especially of the Zen, inspired tales, there is more than a slight thrust of gallows humor­ indeed the curious feeling that an unexpected vein of cruelty is about to be opened. But Cage's humanity pulls him back from this precipice of darkness. I do, however, have a reservation about his much ac­ claimed sunny temperament. He is by principle against what he calls "negative thoughts," and it is only by the power of his will that he overcomes melancholia. I am sure that in the wisdom of his nearly seventy years he knows the clouds above the silver lining.

Dislocation, dissociation, discontinuity, dismantling are his means to draw attention from the surface of what is happening to the reality beneath. His uncommon common sense is a divining rod that leads to a world on the other side of the Looking Glass. When Humpty, Dumpty falls in pieces, John is there to see that they are not put together again. For this leading-to-nowhere humor he has a visual precedent in Chaplin's early Pawnbroker, when the derelict brings his clock to the shop only to have Charlie perform a thousand surgical operations until it is completely fragmented.

John can be lighthearted; he is always fanciful; I laugh a great deal with him. But, as I reflect on it the morning after, John'S fun, dazzling and happy-making for the moment, is on second thought often deadly serious.

THE EAST IN THE WEST

This was Cage's title for his piece in the Spring 1946 issue of Modem 226

Music. In it he disapproves of all faithful transcriptions and Oriental­

sounding imitations (even the Turkish Rondo of his beloved Mozart).

What he's for is a kind of osmosis, an absorption of influences

whether intended or not. He draws up a list of composers that includes even Schoenberg-but only for his insistence on a non­ repeatable twelve-tone row for every work (a seeming parallel to the Hindu use of special ragas for each improvisation); Edgard Varese, of course, for his percussion; Alan Hovhaness for percussion and rhythm; Alois Haba for quarter and one-sixth tones; also Oliver Messiaen, Carl Ruggles, Lou Harrison for less specific reasons; Erik Satie for being static and not progressive; and finally Virgil Thomson for his non­ thematic procedures in Four Saints. They can, in however limited a sense, be related to the East, though their work neither sounds, nor is meant to sound, Oriental.

Here is the summary of his reflections on the subject: "Composers who wish to imbue their music with the ineffable go for inspira­ tion to those places [the East] and those times [the pre-Baroque West], where or when harmony is not of the essence."

The key word here is not "ineffable." It is "harmony" and he's against it. His almost instinctive distaste seems to have surfaced even before the much-publicized argument with Schoenberg, and it is per­ haps a question whether this aversion turned him to the music of the East or whether, in reverse, the influence of Eastern thought, so pervasive on the West Coast, effected this vital shift of balance.

Not till the early fifties when I abandoned all expectation of hearing a trace of Western structure, to which like everyone else I was of course conditioned, could I listen to Cage's music with sustained attention. Frustrated by the usual approach, since Cage was moving in another direction, I concentrated on what was new and strange-the sounds themselves, sound for sound's sake. These often seemed to be echoes of the environment-hootings of nocturnal creatures, insect raspings, dull thuddings of trees falling and slow aqueous movements.

(Cage has a vulnerability to the sound of water-from the kitchen sink, the hissing teakettle, the gurgling in conch shells, the rain drop­ ping on the roof.) And in his more tranquil and subdued works I could at times detect the suggestion of horizontal design, a flowing to ...

infinity, as in a Chinese landscape.

After his first experiment with tape (which was also an American first), electronics invaded and for a time seemed to take over con­ temporary music. One had to adjust to new and higher volumes. For Cage this seemed the beginning of "noisy" noise-as in the eight Variations, the several Mixes and, of course, the near ear-splitting HPSCHD. In recent years he has been threatening to really knock us

227

when he raises a storm with joyce's "Thunderclaps" from Finnegans Wake. An interesting parallel in his writings are frequent references to chaos-or, as he sometimes puts it, CHAOS, the great mythical presence to which Eastern seekers after truth once turned for guidance.

Cage has an impressive following in japan, whose theater has always been receptive to noise in music. More than does India, his first love, japan holds for him the greatest fascination. It is the land of Zen Buddhism, which at the same time welcomes the most advanced technology-a combination of powers he finds almost invincible. out

DAWN AT STONY POINT In 1974 a record with this title was made specifically to be the integral

second part of Cage's Score-40 Drawings by Thoreau and 23 Parts for Any Instruments and or Voices. It precisely illustrates how Cage means to open our ears to the environment. One hears the actual random sounds that envelop the summer cottage Cage had rented deep in the Stony Point woods-the cries of birds leaving their nests, the buzzing of insects, the zooming of hydroplanes approaching the nearby Hudson, the distant voices of people just beginning to move about, rock music on the radio blaring away to keep them awake-a great kaleidoscope of noise which, with almost precise accuracy, destroys any poetry that still lingers in the image of dawn.

Nature for Cage is the whole environment, the primeval mud which holds the past, the present and the future. It is the cities and the country, the buildings, trees, mushrooms and all the detritus around us. It is also the places where he and his hundreds of friends live, the sights and sounds, the flowers and the scents that please him-and the terrible contrasts he found on the streets of Calcutta; the people themselves, those he knows and those he only sees in passing. All this he tries to project in his music and in his books-a microcosm of the world viewed and heard at the moment, AS IS, with no screening, beautiful in its ugliness, in its casual totality. In years to corne, no radiocarbon dating will be needed to decipher the life and times of Cage-which are also part of our lives and our times. They have all been recorded-name, place and date in his own hand, in his own voice.

SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY One evening in the late fifties john carne to our house in Tomkins Cove happily carrying two big brown paper bags. His fortunes were then at a very low point and he lived in a tiny, semi-detached glass 228

cubicle on Paul Williams' Arts-and-Crafts Colony, three miles away.

"Look," he cried. "now I go to the grocery store only for eggs­ everything else I can find in the fields and in the woods." "Come in, Nebuchadnezzar," I said. "Join us for dinner." We had another guest whom he knew, and he accepted, but on condition that he also cook his day's treasures. The dinner then took quite a time to rearrange. We all came to the kitchen to watch while he prepared a witches' brew of poke and dock and day-lily buds and lamb's-quarters-r-to me then recognizable mostly as inedible-and of course his special mush­ rooms. It was, all in all, a wild. wild meal and our city guest found it the most joyful ever.

Years later. in the early seventies, when John and Merce were settled in their Bank Street loft, he began to break ties with the Williams Colony. Now earning a fair return on his world tours, he decided to rent a summer cabin by a stream in the Stony Point woods. His first accommodation to his simple, rustic quarters was to plan a vegetable garden. and he turned to us for help. So we asked Ted, our caretaker, who was also a farmer. to set John up.

Before the garden was dug, John and I had an interesting talk. "I've just read a book on agriculture that's fascinating," he said. "The author advises planting things not in rows, but in circles. And." he continued, a little appealingly, "he doesn't believe in weeding. Look, Minna, look at all those wild foods and flowers growing in the woods so abundantly with everything crowding around them." "Well," I replied, "that's very nice but, John, if Ted is going to dig and plant your garden, it will have to be in rows and not only watered, but weeded." Which is just how it worked out and John was very happy.

He had tomatoes, zucchini, beans, lettuce, herbs, and he could still go hunting for fiddlehead ferns and wild horseradish, and pick berries on the hillside before the birds got to them. Ted and his wife Margaret became John's great friends. He persuaded them to take the risk of eating his mushrooms, and they attended a local concert of his music, their first live one. Though they found it strange, they came home saying, "Isn't John just wonderful!"

The most moving expression of John's extraordinary feeling for people. his humaneness. was the Wake-no other word suits the occasion-that he arranged a few months after his mother's death. in 1969. When he had scattered her ashes on a beautiful hilltop in the Williams Colony, he decided to have a celebration she herself would have enjoyed in her most robust days. This took the form of a midsummer picnic on the rocks outside the little glass house where he still lived.

First he invited his closest friends. many of whom knew her .

229

through her regular attendance at his concerts. But soon the circle of guests began to expand because a few of them were also members of

the Colony-and then what would be the feeling of those other members, uninvited, yet aware of such a highly visible event? So of course John asked them all-the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, the poets, the potters. With their children, their cats and dogs, they seemed to flow down from the heights like lava to the rocks below where the great feast was spread out. More than a hundred strong they came to stand or sit and eat mushroom canapes, slices of beef, a magnificent salad that, naturally, included some wild greens, and a dessert of strawberries with a raspberry sauce (one black artist from New York wondered aloud whether at last he were about to have borscht!)-all of it prepared by Jo Hyde, the famous Rockland County chef, in the tiny kitchen of John's memorable semidetached glass house.

It was a peaceful, yet Brueghellian scene with everyone happy and at ease.

way

People talked, laughed, moved about, and when we picked our the rocks to leave, we saw John, absorbed, playing a

out over

quiet little game of chess with one of his guests. His mother would have loved the party and indeed we did too.

A BRIEF ADDENDUM

No one has yet called Cage an astronaut. Using a more modest, self, effacing term, let me instead describe him as a particle ceaselessly

afloat in planetary space, at times surrounded by a cluster in a mag' netic group, but more often solitary, emitting signals which in this technological age we sometimes hear clearly, and sometimes not. They add up to no common mathematical sense-one accepts them as messages from the unknown, or discounts them as unknowable.

Among the artists of our time, he is sui generis, our one-and-only. And, as I said in the beginning, I believe our dav-to-dav universe has been changed because he is in it. Of how many others may one even dare to advance such a claim?

230

John Cage the mycologist Alexander H. Smith

My acquaintance with John began back in the 1950-60 era when I was teaching an adult education course in mushroom identification. No, John did not take the course, though had he been able to (along with all his other commitments), he would have been most welcome. His interest in mushrooms has always been contagious. On this particular occasion-it was Sunday morning-my wife, Helen, answered the phone and a voice said it was John Cage speaking and was this the Alexander H. Smith residence (the "mushroom" Smith)? At that moment I was out with a class, but since the caller was interested in mushrooms, Helen continued with the conversation. She ended up by making arrangements for John and any others in his party to go on a morel hunt with me. My recollection is that the trip was very enjoy' able, but as a venture in mycology it was a disaster-as I recall it, the whole party did not find enough for a meal for one person. I was mortified beyond words, but John took the situation in stride­ apparently this sort of thing had happened to him before. We did enjoy John's performance that evening, however, which was his first of a

series of "Once" concerts in Ann Arbor.

The next year, again at morel time, John was giving another of his "Once" performances in Ann Arbor and we became better acquaint' ed. The following years were mycologically uneventful until I tried to get John to collect species of boletes for me in Canada, where he was teaching at the time. In his spare time he made a real effort to help me.

The climax came the day he walked out into the "bush" and found a number of specimens of the type I wanted. He collected vigorously (apparently); at last when ready to return home he found that he was lost. It was late in the day, so he started to look for a place to spend the night. The best available was a black spruce tree-which he climbed and in which somehow managed to survive the night: at least he kept his feet dry. The area was a boggy one-as indicated by the presence of black spruce. When morning came he heard an airplane approaching.

Seeing a small lake not too far from his "perch," he climbed 231

down and made his way to the shore of the lake. He waved to the passing plane, which then turned, landed on the lake, and picked him up: he had been the object of their search. However, John never lost his interest in mushrooms as a result of this episode, though somehow I got the impression he was not interested further in re, search on boletes-at least not in flat country.

On another occasion John visited me at my office and, as usual, the conversation drifted to mushrooms. I had two large specimens of the giant puffball on my desk, each over a foot in diameter and in the "eating" stage. While we visited, John kept looking at them, so when he was ready to depart I suggested he take both specimens along if he could use them. He tucked one under each arm and started across the campus, arousing much curiosity on the way. Later he told me that his group really enjoyed the feast; they devoured both in a single lunch

period.

On his

visit he

brought me specimens of what was then generally regarded as a rare Stropharia: S. rugosoannulata. This time it next

was my turn to jump up and down-I had never seen such beautiful specimens of this rare fungus. John assured me there were a lot more

like it where those came from, and how many would I like? I suggested a bushel of them as dried. Postage was cheap in those days.

Imagine my surprise, about a month later, to receive a large carton from New York which contained one bushel of dried Stropharia fruiting bodies. I now had enough specimens to exchange with most of the herbaria of the world. It is now known that the species is a good edible mushroom, and in fact has been grown in culture in some European laboratories. We have since found it on the University of Michigan campus, where bark mulch has been used around plantings of shrubs. To my knowledge the fruiting that John and Lois Long found of this species is the largest on record. Lois' painting in Mushroom Book, * as I understand the details, was made from this fruiting. It is excellent scientifically as well as artistically.

It is said that to be an expert on the mushrooms, one must be an opportunist. If you are not one at first, you soon become so. It is the irregularity of mushroom fruiting behavior that "gets" you. At least this seems to be the key to John'S adventures with the mushrooms.

John seldom misses a chance to further his interest in these unpredict­ able organisms, as witness the painstaking efforts he contributed in Mushroom Book. * Alexander H. Smith, John Cage, and Lois Long, 10 plates, limited edition (New York: Hollander's Workshop, 1972).

232

MacIntyre, the Captain and the Saints Jay Wright

Preface, from a letter I should say from the first that the poem is a philosophical one. It is a revisionary one. I constructed this poem, and I'm sure you know ...

that everything in it is calculated, to explore the reciprocal challenge of imaginative and historical making. A historian without imagination and no feel for symbol or metaphor can't write history. A poet without referential or documentary intelligence has a limited sphere for his or her imagination. My poem is designed to implicate the poet in referential and documentary experience and to implicate the his­ torian in the symbolic/imaginative, and it does so where these experi­ ences normally meet, in the dramatic experience. The boys in the "hill mists," "from the country," in my poem are professional or amateur historians and philosophers, and would-be shapers of culture. The poem wants to give as much attention to referential experience be­ cause this experience is contained within the poem's aesthetic exper­ ience. The ideograms refer to historical texts or events. The poem is about the shaping of those texts and events in the imaginations of the

poem's personae.

This last explains why there are various ideograms. They display historical texts or events directly, or once removed, or twice removed, even once three times removed. The ideograms frame the texts so that discrete, complex and seemingly incompatible temporal, ideological and spiritual levels can be presented as "present." They allow history to work within the poem's experience. It is not too much of a distortion to say that you can take internal ideograms as experience., external ideograms as experience-, experiencej, and mixed as exper­ ience�, if you understand experience to be progression, accumulation and differentiation. I got this method from Robert Wilson, who is a philosopher and mathematician. His method is like a calculus, with its class definition and operative and distributive elements. So you see 233

that we think mathematics, or as he would say, logic, can say some­ thing about historical experience. You must not forget that the poem is scored, is musical and that music is very mathematical. To write more of the poem like the opening would disrupt its balance. Poiesis and historia really must carryon this dialogue to keep the poem dramatic.

I can answer your specific questions by referring to the text. On page 236, John O'Groats, the Hill O'Many Stanes, etc. (all except the Wolf of Badenoch, who is Alexander Stewart, who tried to destroy

Elgin Cathedral because the church had been nasty to him) are place names, familiar to Scots and to tourists. They represent architectural and cultural achievement but "victim" is a key word. They all recall various forms of clan, ethnic and national conflict. Nothing in Scot' land is unencumbered by discord, not even its monuments.

On page 237, the first speaker, Maclntyre or Wright, identifies the second speaker by acknowledging him, Saint Christopher, Christo­ pher Grieve or Hugh MacDiarmid. The internal ideogram used for Christopher's speech imposes new metaphors on my text by quoting from his own text, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

The passage, "We drink away the sugar on our tongues," is a not very scientific, folksy explanation of the effects of alcohol upon blood sugar and taste. The Mound is now a middle-class area above the gardens in central Edinburgh, where Hume lived when he made money.

The area includes the university medical school. Hume's friends in­ cluded doctors, and all his friends, and Hume, thought they held the keys to culture. The medical school has gentlemen attendants who keep order, open doors, unlock boxes, address the students as doctor and guests like me as sir; they are very respectful of status and class.

The other Scotland, barely born, ironically comes into being by the activities of the Mound.

MacDiarmid's reference to the Equivalents, which came into being during the union of the English and Scottish parliaments in the early eighteenth century, recalls the manner of paying the English and Scottish debts. The National Gallery of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, the survivors of the Equivalents policy, sit at the end of

gardens. The historical text/event is given new meaning by Christopher's interpretation and is rendered by an external ideogram, roughly corresponding to experiencej The same is true of the fol­ lowing quotations which describe Columba, and James I's determina­ tion to restore government, respectively. These events take their deeper meaning in Saint Christopher and in the context of this dia­ logue which here tries to clarify where the two men literally stand.

On pages 239,40, I should explain that Danquah studied at Oxford the

234

and London, and under Hobhouse, and that Hobhouse, his sociology teacher, taught him how to observe his own Akan society.

On pages 240,41, sunsum, according to Danquah, is the outer form of consciousness, personality, ego, looks, individuality.

The list on page 242 is not mere invocation, though it does invoke.

The

men

are

Hume's associates.

They were historians, autobiog­

economists and medical doctors. Some you

raphers, philosophers, must recognize. They thought of themselves as intellectuals and keepers of culture.

The three-pronged ideogram represents a reference twice removed, a reference within a reference. I have to emphasize that the ideograms frame; they take in texts and redistribute them. The notations don't have to correspond to the indentations because all of the speakers use various forms of reference. The mixed ideogram, I I, represents ....

a

voice outside and within the other voices in the poem.

Robert Wilson wanted me to restrict the ideograms to a simple

basic one which could then be interpreted by simple markers, some, thing like saying A, A', A". I elaborated my own for plastic reasons (they look better and are much more easily distinguished) and to emphasize that each distribution is more than addition and is a com, plex and multi-leveled growth.

I know that everything I've said might seem to make my poem impossible and beyond any comprehension. But most of the "facts" can be looked up in any standard Scottish history, in Hume, in Danquah, in Rattray, in MacDiarmid. I think, in fact, that a good deal of these "facts" ought to be familiar to any literate audience. Perhaps part of our job out here is to force audiences to become literate in some of these matters. I could identify my texts, or at least the few central ones I've used. I think that a little thought will uncover the

ideogrammatic logic

...

MacIntyre, the Captain and the Saints A northern light at midnight wakes the bronze upon the hill.

The crowned clock sits on the tower in a gable's eye. And I, a serpent of the east, unwind at Lothian Road.

This has been my dungeon, through the day

235

and through the evening.

But, now, at night, my walls are

glass; they bubble, under the heathenish touch, till they are forest and sea, till they become one holy coracle, by which I am coiled to the house.

I live by the darkness of these other walls.

I turn on the cross of the house that lights them.

Again I wake in the royal burgh of Edinburgh.

I turn in the Castle's deep, and go where the city's life lies on the market.

A watch and an ivory cane handle lead me over His Majesty's bridge.

Saint Oiles, the Law, I salute High John.

High Street-­

I go into the close above Waverley, below the jolly Scotsman.

This is my castle of hotpies and rest, one-half an ale.

The keeper keeps a tap upon my nights;

I keep the

morning.

I call great John o 'Groats the Hill 0' Many Stanes, Ora y Cairns of Camster,

,

Craigievar, The Temple of Carinish,

Elgin Cathedral, Lantern of the North, victim of Wolf of Badenoch.

I call my David for the rights of trading; I posit my burghs--

236

Dunfermline, Perth, Stirling and Aberdeen.

What is my eye but the chief's eye?

What shield but his name?

Yet I am not Piet by Scot; great Kenneth is not my king.

I take my concepts and my kin

from desert waters.

I have belted my bones with ritual invocations.

Now, should I turn from this, and run from my rose garden and my kilt into another darkness? that I shall stand, I think No, called to see and stand who is the I of this constellation, what is the shape of this life. >And on a birlan edge I see Wee Scotland squattin like

a

flea

...

<

I see you now,

and I would dizen and divvy your birlan eyes to

protect me.

Saint Christopher, welcome to my castle keep, my

night of stars

and desert memories, your own planctus in the boat of history.

>Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air, < Come and hear the cryin 0 the Fair ...

Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air, < The wallopan thistle is ill to bear ...

I know ye dinna ken my sound, so

I'll speak to you

in the

sweetness

your tongue belies.

237

I'll accept your grace.

And I'll accept your cup.

Ale in the close.

Whiskey to wash away the stain of the rose.

We drink away the sugar on our tongues,

and take the Mound.

The school of doctors waits in darkness.

A morning coat with keys, a gentleman, with bones draped blue with mourning, waits in the thistle air.

His blue is cut by one small key.

I think of this, and wonder what a key may be.

I think of locks I cannot open,

locks I cannot lock.

Wee Scotland still is a howling babe in the breech this key will miss.

Are you happy on the Mound? *The Equivalents set that tail.6. on the gardens.

We are still, in this high air, mixed by money and God. I know that.

You cannot know it; you can only see.

This Mound is weary

with the thoughtan Irishman, a Pictish king

brought Jesus to us.

Yet even still, I think I hold him dear*a royal man, a scholar, abstemious and gifted with a second sight, and fine hand, 238

"none of your St. Maluag of Lismore, or your drybones of Pictland." � If we wait, we'll hear that first James promise God to see that *uthe key keep the castle and the bracken bush the kye." � It was St. Ninian who brought the key.

You do not even know.

But I do belong.

Look here, I have my on

tartan

the Princes street.

My name is Macintyre.

You show your purpose.

I'm searching for my purpose,

and it cannot be in blood in Highland drafts of praise.

or

The light is still, and time is a movement into light.

In the moonlight, here on Princes Street, I stare into the colors of my Celtic name.

If you plumed yourself in this, I'd break your hips, I'd sever your shoulders.

I taught you more than this.

Yes, Captain, I am sure I learned my lessons well from you.

Then?

Then, I leave you.

Oxford tames what London teaches.

My Danquah learns from Hobhouse what he could see at home.

239

Before he came, 1 said this.

You called the proverbs ethics of a savage people.

1 knew no other words.

1 learned.

To speak more carefully.

Yes. And more simply.

There follow:

Ashanti,

Religion and Art in Ashanti, Akan-Ashanri Folktales.

These things are true.

They were true then.

1 know that. 1 quote, >1 have taken every opportunity,

while gathering material from my Ashanti friends, to impress upon them strongly that our culture, our

ideas, arts, customs, dress,

should not be embraced by them to the entire exclusion and ex­ tinction of what is good, just and praiseworthy in their ancient national institutions.< The hope is in the sunsum.

1 suffered for this.

Half mad from teaching tongue to Great Stuart Street, 1 was on my island.

a

You condemn me, too.

You were the Scot who took the cause from New Town to Kumasi.

240

I took my life there.

I saw my kindred spirits there.

I returned, puff-hot in tweeds, a

fuller man.

I suppose I will return

myself, puff-hot in tartan, a

better man.

A fuller

man.

Haven't you learned anything?

The good is all of us.

It is never lost.

If you are better, it is not from the perfection of virtue, but the perception of virtue, the acceptance of the okara.

You, in this city of daggers and shields, instruct me?

The sunsum teaches. >Nae man can ken his hert until the tide 0 life uncovers it < ...

The sunsum teaches this.

I am the angel of sunsum,

the breath of rain that fights to fill the foam with mercy.

If the god does not appear, then we must imagine him in blue, or in the dun of earth, or in the red of bronze, imagine him wreathed with his own shrieking hands.

Now, I turn from my tartan, Captain, along St. David Street. **

As Mr. David Hume's circumstances improved he enlarged his mode of living, and instead of the roasted hen and minced collops, and a bottle of punch, he gave both elegant dinners

241

and suppers, and the best claret, and, which was best of all, he furnished the entertainment with the most instructive ** and pleasing conversation ...

*Lord Monboddo says the man died­ confessing not his sins but his Scotticisms .6. .

He still was a gentle man,

daemon of good sense, whose good sense disturbs.

If, in the light that carries us along this road, we could see him, startled by a piece of woolen cloth, lord of astronomy, savior of ethics, we could place herring and hides in the deep fissures of our souls. He is indeed dead, but much of him still lives among us.

I believe that there is cause to see him yet. a

So it is night in our royal burgh.

The father of Common Sense has been let out.

The boys from the country gather in the hill mists. I repeat:

Robertson, John Home, Bannatine, Alexander Carlyle and Adam Smith and Ferguson, Lord Elibank, Doctors Jardine and Blair.

Who is this who walks with a key in hand?

Oh, then, good St. David, by whose authority do you walk? >None can go beyond experience, or establish any principles which are not founded on that authority. < ...

Yau are here.

I do perceive myself.

242

Well, I pucker and refuse to enter

that clam of memory.

Enter, if you believe in the imagination.

Your memory and your belief lead me away from that.

I struggled with belief,

under your saints' bells, but here under the dissolving assurance of my skin. not

This is from Johnny Knox, Geneva bound. ***Those who are saved have certainty of it in their faith, that they are God's elect. *** I glorify

God,

but I will not toll man's corruption.

This is needless. *It is the visible body under the head of Christ .6. .

Do you deny it?

Do you deny a nation can

believe that God will provide?

>Let men be persuaded.

that there is nothing considered in object, itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion .

.

in any

beyond it

...

<

*The doctors at Aberdeen

refused to subscribe.

Lady Huntly lay in state at

the head of a brave funeral.

They had the town's haill 243

ordinance for ane good night, and the Marquis had taken his household and children back to the country in high melancholie. Wine and sweetmeats were offered to the Covenant embassy, and refused while the Covenant was unsigned.

The provost and the baillies gave the banquet to the poor.zx lIt is for God to judge whether the Least shadow or footsteps of freedom can be discovered in this

assembly.! >The only defect of our senses is, that they give us disproportionate images of things. <

*Spring corn and oats and barley were

all we had.

us Easter and other movable feasts, the shape of the tonsure. By Margaret's and Malcolm's time, we had lost Iona; our kings were buried in a Benedictine abbey in Dunfermline.zx

He gave

You hold me responsible for what was done?

I recorded this.

IGod hath a people here fearing his name, though deceived.!

And all my kin Barbadoed from the house.

I return, or do I return?

Do I hear the reason in St. David's voice?

Do I now enter myself most intimately,

and find myself able to entertain a diffidence and modesty in all my decisions?

Do I remember the special light St. David gave?

244

>If reason determined us, it would proceed upon that principle, that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.<

Oh, then, let our lives be bled upon the roses of our trimmed days.

This is no' comfort, but a spike in the tongue, a gate against true memory.

>And yet, I dinna haud the warld's end in my heid.<

Old Saint, I know you know the Gude and Godlie &llacls.

Just in faith, the head is redeemed by the head.

I twit you on the world's end.

The text excludes you as a saint.

You have no hiding place, no bawdy of perfection.

The body will not be quickened on your tongue. If there is a word to speak, and one author stands above it, how could your body be revealed upon these stones?

I read you as revealed in your own text, but read you in a feminine text now dead.

If the witches presume, Saint David puckers.

What can be known, appears; what appears, lies among us.

Then the offensive witches must go down in their own glory, and the king must search the basements.

I have heard it was said from the scaffold that **God hath laid engagements on Scotland: we

are

tyed by covenants to religion

and reformation; those who were then

245

unborn are engaged to it, in our baptism we are engag'd to it; and it passeth the power of all Magistrates under heaven ** to absolve a man from the oath of God. I know,

>The thocht 0 Christ and Calvary Aye liddenin in my heid; And aa the dour provincial thocht That merks the Scottish breed These are the thistle's characters. < --

No, not the thistle's alone.

I only understand

*quantity and number of fact and existence

matter

all else is

sophistry and illusion.zx

All else is the king's realm, and the king's realm is spirit and body, and dying being born, living on reason's unadorned shores.

Why do you quibble?

Why have you sent me with cap and compass to confirm these facts?

Can the facts grow from vision?

Can a new star arise to figure a new

constellation?

>1 find myself involv'd in such a labyrinth,

that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent. < Yes, it is sufficient reason for diffidence and modesty. >Darkness is wi us aa the time, and Licht But veesits pairt 0 us, the wee-est pairt Frae time to time on a short day atween twa nichts. <

246

**Deum de Deo, lumen de lurnine, Deum vero de vero Deo, genitum, non

factum

** ...

Wright, would you hurt me in this way?

Saint Christopher,

poet to poet and soul to soul, we

insist on our darkness;

yet we may be wrong.

There may be more light in David's perpetual twilight than in our hidden hope for light.

We live between the two nights.

We await the light.

A game of billiards may be all our affirmation of hope, crowned, in our anguish, belief.

Or do we find we have two bodies -a yellow seed split open by the sun, a blue stem caressed by moonlight­ and each embodied by a reason?

Though I have never been your king, you give me cain and conveth.

I would not burn your Cardinalle's town.

Saint David, believe I know the debility of my own assurance.

Captain, I have met you in the gulf.

Here, in my lean years, I have risen to say: God is not propter quid, but quia, a reasoning in an empty vessel.

We know, or think we feel, bodies calm upon the wave which has its own design.

Bird-boned, we contend with the fire within us.

What is our intention but the fire within us, or the description of a body clarified by a wind?

We may live through the bone blaze of our bodies and know only our

247

how to shiver each bone from its scaffold, each cell from its surface.

Surely, it is pain to reveal the indifference of God's substance, to acknowledge we are sufficient only in his grace. Singular, we prove and construct what we may only know.

The years rigor and steep these questions in your faces; I read the night's unhurried return there; you temper your return to

me.

Your air can promise me nothing but the thistle's sense of the spirit.

The cuckoo in the Hebrides would only bind my blue wings. I know the air as gold, the shell of an egg; I marry in the moon's seed.

I rehearse all reasons to be false to you.

Now the night covers my serpent skin.

I slip away.

Your night remains.

You ask for assurance; it comes,

as a

star

falls,

hart for the hind of our shadowed world.

I crown and sceptre you with your blood burden, and hear the echo of my own.

Note The ideograms in the poem, "Macintyre, the Captain and the Saints," were suggested by Mr. Robert L. Wilson's use of ideograms in a short series of his unpublished poems. Mr. Wilson uses the basic ideogram O-----� to indicate the opening and closing of the frame. For him, in ideogrammatic notation, there are three kinds of a basic identity:

1) external, in which the ideogram undergoes a shift in meaning effected by the context; 2) internal, in which the context undergoes a shift in meaning in relation to the ideogram; 3) mixed, a reciprocal shift in meaning. Internal ideograms are primary; external are second­ to mark ary. What has attracted me to the ideograms is their ability clearly the transformation of meaning in a dramatic poem such as mine. The ideograms need not be used in every poem, but it seems to me that they are particularly useful in this one. I have, therefore, 248

adapted Mr. Wilson's ideograms to my own peculiar ones in order to make even more radical distinctions among the temporal and spatial voices in the poem. I have used >--< for internal, *----6. and

for external and /--/ for mixed ideograms. Mr. Wilson has tried to save me from these errors by suggesting a basic ideogram which could be distinguished by simple secondary markers, but I have trudged ahead with my own ideogrammatic weight. It seems to me appropriate that, for the clarification of my personal Scottish intel­ lectual drama, I should have at hand an inventive technique elaborated by a citizen of brave Dundee and that he should have found his initiative in reading Ezra Pound, the universalist of ideograms. I am grateful to Mr. Wilson for his license to use his ideas, and for his understanding manner toward the license I have taken to use them.

The reader will recognize the poem's four actors as Wright; Capt.

R.S. Rattray, a British Colonial Administrator and Scot, who headed the first Anthropological Department established by that government in what he called Ashanti, West Africa; Hugh MacDiarmid, or Chris, topher Murray Grieve, a great Scottish poet, shaper of the Lallans Scots language and national sensibility; David Hume, British philos­ opher and historian.

Among the many texts which I have had in hand, some were essential and may be of interest and help to the reader. I give a short list, with the reminder that though these have helped to shape my **--**

poem,

they are not, individually or collectively, my poem.

R.S. Rattray, Ashanti R.S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti

Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book One, of the Understanding Rosalind Mitchison, A History of Scotland T.e. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 A final great presence stands behind my poem: J.B. Danquah, Ghanaian politician, philosopher/theologian, sociologist and histor­ ian. His Akan Doctrine of God, for all its faults, is a true book of wisdom, one of deeply human and transcendent aesthetic and spiritual knowledge. My poem is an attempt, among other things, to claim this -

knowledge as part of the continuing creative life of the Americas.

249

Sm.art m.en Rush Rankin

Obscene Admiration Marie idealized trees. Vines covered her small house, as though the

house had risen up gradually out of the ground. Most of the window­ screens were missing. She dreamed of understanding insects, hoped tree limbs might grow into the house. Our first evening together, gazing out the window at leaves, we watched an insect twitch. Since there were no chairs in the room, I sat on the bed, whose purple bedspread had been woven in India. Objects around the room lay where they had been dropped. Marie, I soon learned, identified the unexpected and unplanned with God. A sandal left on the toilet seat completed a mandala. "God does not proclaim himself, he is every­ body's secret," says the Hindu bible. On the bed now, feigning pas­ sivity, I leaned back on my elbow. Marie focused her bemused smile and floated down beside me. The world, caressed, settled around her like a parachute. In her plain face, her eyes, warm and bright, looked slightly dazed, like the angels in ancient paintings. She stretched out on the bed.

Earlier that Saturday afternoon we had met at an outdoor concert and, finding we had friends in common, began examining each other.

We were pleased. We enacted a kind of courtly dance: Marie, atten­ tive, stood still as I slowly circled her, nodding. Now, on her bed, chaste and adroit, we discussed old love affairs, the pathos of survival, and drifted asleep finally like animals in front of a fire. It was, however, actually summer. Moist air outlined our bodies. We had not

made love. The night passed. to find Marie, naked, standing on her head. window threw her shadow across the bed. She was from the Sunlight her body poised in the air, almost beautiful, beautiful, amazingly I where need Here's philosophy: in yoga the body discovers its trembling.

At dawn, I awoke

250

divinity, just as one sound, repeated endlessly, passes through God. A profound body stretches until it transcends life, dreams suspended inside itself. And now Marie's perfect ass floated gracefully over a polished floor. Her face pursed, secretly smiling, her thin muscles alert, it was as though a Victorian spinster, naked, danced in a garden. Of course, such a wonderful ass qualified her life. It was huge. It grew, swept, own

swelled out of her thinness like the subconscious itself.

Why, I wondered, had we, two decent people, not caressed each other? Apparently, Marie took her body for granted. I, on the other hand, took everything other than her body for granted. (That's almost true. The intense letters I write friends sound counterfeit. I'd plan suicide, if possible, without knowing u.) In any case, Marie seemed self-sufficient and untouchable, like an athlete or saint. I stared at her now, dazzled. Poised belly-down on the floor, she bent her legs back herself until one foot rested on each side of her face. She smiled as though peering out of her own vagina. I could tell she assumed I ignored nudity. As she unraveled herself and began dres­ sing, we chatted, and I suggested we get together Wednesday. She said she'd like to. Watching her slip into jeans twisting her hips, I gasped.

over

at

me

"Hey," she said, looking at me suddenly, "let's walk downtown for breakfast.

"

We headed toward the Carolina Coffee Shop, a locally famous dimly-lit cafe. For years it had featured wry waiters, great sweet rolls and classical music. A giant fern in the front window gave the place the security of a terrarium. On the way I noticed that when Marie walked, she loped, in the sixties style of the natural woman, barefoot. Let me rhapsodize: when Marie walked down the street, men fell off build, ings. They dreamed, gasping, of kneeling on the sidewalk between her

thighs. She dreamed, however, of birds flying unhindered through invisible buildings.

"What do

women

think,"

I

asked, "of men who drool?" She

laughed. We passed a longhaired person who grinned.

"Actually, I'm pleased," she said, "though never really convinced.

There's something unreal about it. I kind of laugh to myself."

Here's what I thought: most screams are swallowed, are absorbed by the body. Marie saw each man's awkward pain. She accepted as natural the obscene admiration through which she moved. Her gener-

251

osity, however, worried me, because it lacked focus and greed. Greed, I thought, keeps a person down

to

earth.

History

If ever you glimpse the passing truth, take a good look at her, so as to be quite sure you'll know her again; but don't expect her to make eyes at you.

-Georges Bernanos Marie went to college in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina where there were large trees and old buildings and traditions and dazzling possibilities and drugs. In a university town, exceptionally self-absorbed and brilliant people excite each other like angels on the head of a pin. Imagine a football picked out of the air at just the right moment.

After graduating as a sociology major in 1972, Marie chose to settle in Chapel Hill with a motorcycle gang. Most of the members of the

motorcycle gang were also former intellectuals. They played guitars, wore heavy boots, swaggered. In the basement, with moisture control and special lights, they farmed marijuana like scientists. Marie liked James because he made love to her in a basket hanging from the ceiling. But there were problems. Often James ran his huge motorcycle over dogs. When Marie said she needed a change, a new life, James said he'd kill her. Then he apologized and threatened suicide. Marie admired his passion, his abrupt erection, but left. In her compassion for James and other men she made her life first a private lament and then a celebration. She sought solitude, which she idealized. Often she smiled. Sexual passion had become an irrelevant memory the way stories in old newspapers do. But even as a spontaneous celibate, Marie advocated the uninhibited life. She belched openly without offering formal regrets. I had reservations. Apologies, I thought, help murderous people live together. If Marie praised India, its people amorphous, relaxed, I preferred the Japanese. Though violent, they build delicate houses, bowing constantly. Marie subscribed instead to a neutered God, phlegmatic and unbathed, his American Hindu guise, and thus renounced meat and cooked vegetables and lived almost entirely on juice. Her kitchen enshrined a blender and a refrigerator overflowing with vegetables and fruit. She had worked for the past year as a hospital orderly but planned to begin the next month 252

managing Chapel Hill's first juice bar. Until then, she'd steer damaged bodies around the hospital. I corrected proof at the university press one

block away.

Obviously the faith and melodrama of the 1960s endured into 1973 as a cartoon. Marie twisted her body around itself and meditated. I wiped ink off my hands. Hanging always just over my head a white cloud contained words. According to Freud, I trailed toilet paper behind me everywhere I went. I doubt that. I felt more like a spider helplessly secreting. With me, Marie became warm and vague. Our lives took place elsewhere (with friends, in our opaque pasts). Recent, ly divorced, I met Marie in Chapel Hill at the time in my life when I wore shirts unbuttoned, displaying a febrile chest. Basically formal, a gentleman, I felt naked in public, ridiculous. But I persisted. Though scared to death of women, of life, I knew secrets. The woman touching me, who spoke, heard herself for the first time. If her huge breasts embarrassed her, they floated in my admiration like buoys. So I exposed my chest, expecting hands, magical greetings. Unfortunately, most women, sensing neurosis, passed quickly by, like wind moving a weather vane. For three evenings, Marie paused, looked at me, and smiled. She saw, I think, what I saw in her: a fundamental, though unapproachable, innocence.

Of course, innocent people who are vain need theatrical settings. I loved Chapel Hill, in part because Chapel Hill made life real in a way that was more than real, like a photo-realist painting. The shops, for example, were so picturesque they resembled toys. On the university'S vast antebellum lawn that bordered the downtown, on green benches that rested under huge oaks, I lounged and read The New Yark Times with a feeling of accomplishment. Nearby, barefoot women gave away cats. Mumbling literary figures bought televisions down the street.

Derelict intellectuals and dope pushers whistled in Chapel Hill. They sensed that they'd wasted their lives in a significant way.

Poised in my generosity, I gladly accepted the town's self-congraru­ lation. Even the merchants grinned and glanced away when you sniffed a shirt, as though the act of buying should be an accident of discovery, an epiphany. People smiled in Chapel Hill without looking like sim­ pletons or Californians. And what about the children, you ask? In Chapel Hill the children carried frogs on tennis rackets to the library.

And old people leaned on original canes. And families existed off in the distance like echoes.

253

After work on Wednesday, before meeting Marie, I happened by a swimming pool out of which climbed beautiful women. I parked my car and approached. The water trickling off their bodies reflected, in each distinct drop, the image of my astonished face. I understood religious awe and narcissism. God, in contrast, sent a single effete man to earth. Those women, sighing in unison, a chorus, offered redernp­ tion. Into soothing towels, they pressed their faces. I left for Marie's.

Earlier Wednesday when I telephoned Henry, my best friend, to ask what he knew about Marie, he had laughed. Too damned pleased with herself, he said, too cheerful, like some kind of deposed monarch, he said, who has no regrets. Saw her this morning passing the flower lady's, he added. A tenant farmer's son and self-made intellectual, Henry had emigrated to Chapel Hill to escape vulgarity. Tormented yet gracious, he spoke beautiful words and grimaced. His wife Sandra made drawings at night of children swimming in hats. During the day she managed an art gallery. On her lunch hour one day she had met Henry, by then an austere poet, in the bookstore where he clerked.

She thought his bleak poems rested on the page like lace. Since her parents had died in a plane crash in Vermont, Sandra approached life carefully, as though every moment there were people falling out of the sky. Henry imagined her at the prow of a ship. They married, bought delicate Japanese prints, and settled into the exasperation of marriage.

To comprehend Chapel Hill, picture Henry'S gloom and elegance and Sandra's lovely dismay. See them Wednesday morning as they walked to work along tree-lined streets, passing Marie, who, at just that moment, was buying fresh flowers from a sidewalk vendor.

That evening at her house Marie passed on greetings from Henry and Sandra and placed the flowers, slightly wilted, in a vase on the television, which, Marie said, she seldom watched. I switched it on.

From the bedroom, I could glimpse Marie through the doorway while she moved about the kitchen and we talked. Our voices, raised over the sound of the television, sounded, I thought, strangely formal and deliberate.

"Did I tell you about the Vietnamese family up the street?" Marie asked, as though speaking through a megaphone. "The neighbors on suspect them of killing and eating local dogs." Two days before, her way to work in the early morning, Marie saw a decapitated dog's head gaping in the shrubbery.

"That's the war's resolution, its declension, in

254

Chapel Hill," I

replied, loudly. Marie yelled back that I needed at times to think beyond concepts. I said she didn't appear bothered seeing a murdered dog. The vagaries of history complicate despair, I shouted. I said it's like trying to make love while stars are falling. The accurate historian, I announced, speaking distinctly enough for an arena, the accurate historian describes his time from the point of view of those who died.

"That's beautiful nonsense," Marie said, more quietly. "I love to hear you talk, Sam." We looked at each other carefully, like refugees.

The luminous television flickered.

Seth

Seth, my brother, and Marie only met once, at a party before I knew Marie, fucked quickly in a closet and parted. That abrupt fucking both tantalizes and frightens me and explains why I must describe my brother in order to describe myself. Here honesty and narcissism are the mirror images of each other.

In the summer of 1973 my brother lived in Chapel Hill with a heroin addict named Debby who devoted her conscious life to the obsequious prophet, Meher Baba. Friends called my brother, Bender, as a kind of tribute, because he drank steadily, mostly cheap wine, without showing any signs of drinking. An imaginary bottle, sus­ pended always in his sight, purged his life of every distraction. His suffering persisted as a kind of sediment. Debby had stringy hair and a gaze that searched the horizon for a particular bird.

(l need to pause for a moment. I agree that compassion reveals its peculiar truth. Obsessed, however, with announcing myself, I hide, exposed by my own irony. Imagine a man sleeping in glistening pajamas. Laugh, please, but judge. Condemn and celebrate. I con­

tinue.)

The enthusiasm in Seth's face fascinated people. He was the only baby I've ever seen take self-conscious delight in being carried. On his mother's shoulder, he beamed. I think he has lived dismayed to find himself placed on the ground. When the scholastic life bored him, he quit school and settled in Chapel Hill to sell arcane drugs.

Thin but precise and strong, he limped, the result of a motorcycle accident, and yet moved gracefully, as though wearing a cape. Given to 255

melodrama, he rode a motorcycle, he said, because it seemed his body flew by itself over the ground.

As a mystic, Seth claimed the wind distinctly touched each strand of his hair. This intensity and his relaxed self-confidence, a kind of warmth and courage, both intimidated and attracted people. (Marie's insouciance and promiscuity also frightened me.) Even after coming, my brother kept his erection. Marie blithely told me that. Too cau­ tious, I envied him. I bailed him out of jail once, helped him escape to Canada once, groomed him to appear normal once to win release from an

asylum.

He became

a

pilgrim. Playing his harmonica, sauntering

into

Philadelphia, he introduced himself to a person wearing beads. That night, inside the generous stranger's room and woman, he mused. In his presence, the exhausted folks he visited felt redeemed. They could relax knowing a person that smart smiled in the other room. You must picture my brother's grace and charm, the quickness and hip coolness that entertained men, that soothed women. His blue eyes dreamed and calculated simultaneously. Growing up he never learned but simply became whatever he wished. Yet he excited people without exposing himself, getting close, remaining separate, like a priest.

Standing beside the road, hitchhiking back to Chapel Hill from Philadelphia, Seth encountered a group of testy Hell's Angels who buzzed their motorcycles around him, stopped, and handed him a loaded pistol. He pretended to shoot himself in the eye and then tossed the gun in the air as though freeing a bird. The Angels clapped.

That's my version of the stories Seth told me. He'd been back in Chapel Hill a month when I ran into him downtown on Thursday. He was sitting stiffly on a sidewalk bench in front of the drugstore.

Focusing his eyes carefully and looking through me toward the hori­ zon, he said, "Here's looking at you, Kid," and placed an invisible glass to his lips. I noticed that his shoes were untied. His wrinkled shirt was hanging open, his body tense, as though he were trying not to

breathe.

"Man, I've been juggling. Got everything in the air," Seth said.

"Like W. C. Fields. What a great juggler he was. A drunk, right?

Dainty almost. 'Ahhh, yes.' Joked about Philadelphia. Said he'd prefer death. Sam, you ought to visit Philadelphia."

256

Seth's eyes retracted slowly from the horizon as though tracing the history of his life. I wanted to ask why he had carved his initials on his chest. I was terrified. The previous week, in his front yard, he had dug a grave for our father. But Dad had died two years before, was found naked outside an adobe shack in the Arizona desert, had died of alcoholism in a perfectly white room. For me, his death, a relief, was also a scream the shape of the sky. I knew what my brother lamented.

In a convincing funeral, we would have buried an intangible life. Dad's brutality and precision tools, his whisky bottles and charm, his thick boots and despair should have been added to the coffin.

Now Seth's crystal eyes gleamed. A beautiful woman strolled by leading a Great Dane. My brother stared intently at me as though peering out of a forest. He saw my affection and intuited the greed I disguise with words like a politician. He sensed disdain, self-indul­ gence, the awkward life of a man who hates people. The people who passed us on the sidewalk were shining. Quaint shops glistened like dreams. I hoped Marie would happen by. Her smile might distract us. I felt helpless, as though, one by one, my fingernails were falling off. My brother opened his eyes wide and said, "Sam, have you ever really stretched out your arms, I mean, really stretched?"

Every Friday Night Even though they both worked at the same hospital, Marie didn't know Sarah, the intense woman I visited every Friday night. Every Friday night Sarah and I listened to the radio in a room lit by a single candle and made love poorly on a mattress on the floor. The slender flame flickered over her body like scars. We liked the incantations of the black radio station that encouraged all the brothers and sisters to get down to business.

Sarah was small and frantic yet walked slowly, languidly, like a large woman on high heel shoes. When she entered a room, she expected men to dream.

Cigarettes and despair had weathered her skin. I assumed that most men, even pleased, had felt helpless inside her.

Though feverish, she couldn't come. A past abortion haunted her the way fingers still move in a missing hand. Tense and sad, but exuberant, she kept herself ready, it seemed, to give birth at any moment.

While they were dating, Eric, her future husband, a soldier, had raped her, and now, divorced, they telephoned every week. Each,

257

lacking a real life, needed their mutual history as a kind of intimacy.

Eric lived in a trailer park at the beach where Sarah was visiting him the week I discovered Marie. (The fierce women he occasionally seduced would leave at dawn as though confronting the beginning of the world. Guessing, I offer this elegy, for his life.)

Uneducated, but quick-minded, Sarah craved smart men, the civil­ ized stranger, yet considered marrying Eric again to rescue her past, to hope. She predicted comfort, sunbathing, the last long drag on her cigarette in the evening.

She liked me because I was smart and because every Friday night I kissed her breasts like a mystic. She was the cave into which I crawled, pulling her in after me. We almost escaped life. Though aware I was a migrant intellectual, Sarah eventually resented our schedule. Now we meet every few years with the gratitude and ease of survivors attending a

reunion.

So. With Sarah, I found a brief hysteria, and with Marie, as you will see, a perverse calm.

Three Times

If anyone had brought me your book without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral, skeptical, indif, [erera, or heartbroken.

-George Sand

Friday. Marie's kitchen, cluttered with plants hanging from the ceiling in macrame halters, resembled a Rousseau painting. Not really, but I told her that, and she grinned. We sat at her round kitchen table, enjoying its intimacy, and she poured us cups of peppermint tea.

When I leaned forward, the table tilted slightly, so I positioned myself carefully, as though being photographed. Marie's new cat, Gladys, brushed against my leg and sauntered out of the room. like," I asked, "the way cats seem to walk without the touching ground?" Marie nodded and looked at me quickly, as I'd though just entered the room.

"Don't you

258

Then she purred. I laughed. Cats and women, I said, have no pressing need for men. Not true, she said. As recently as a month ago she went to bed with three men, one at a time, in one day. I pictured her taking off her clothes and putting them back on, three times. The more intense the pleasure, she said, the less real she felt and happier.

"Sam," Marie said, "I liked those guys. It was exciting, like riding a motorcycle through a field. But afterwards I felt like a silhouette of myself, like I was just a hand making shadow figures on the wall. And right now in my life I need to meditate. You saw the way Gladys walks."

Here's what I thought: I touch women gently, and, charmed, their

wings sprout; my awestruck longing incites fear or disgust or sublima­ tion. While Marie busied herself at the refrigerator, I watched her; I tried to see into her. In the oblivious spirit of the times, she wore clothes more exciting than naked people. A thin halter-top recorded each jiggle of her breasts. In molded jeans, her body pressed against the world.

"Big slice or small?" she asked, placing a banana cake on the table between us. My attention vibrated with a vague sexual hum. A woman's loveliness inspires a man to believe that his coming will feel precisely the way she looks. Looking at Marie now as she looked at me, the world poised for a moment in slow motion, I wondered what she saw. Her small, pursed face resembled a bird's, her delicate shoulders like wings. I said, "By the way, I can't tell if I like this tea," and swallowed, my eyes watching her over the cup like a monster at the edge of the world. Rising from the table to go to the bathroom, she leaned forward and playfully tapped my head three times.

What Marie needed to comprehend without flinching was my sexual anguish. Having become an astrologist, Roseanne, my former wife, left me for a man, whom she has since left, who drove his car with the headlights off when there was a full moon. Roseanne was gentle, shy and lovely, and wanted life to be exciting. She memorized Carl lung. When she came, she screamed, as though lifting, in her urgency, off the surface of the bed. When she came sometimes she helplessly pissed all over me. Sometimes when she came, she burst blood vessels in her eyes. I felt like an invited witness poised just

above an explosion.

Still, we wondered what was supposed to happen. After she came, I 259

weakly, as a kind of afterthought, as though off in the distance, abandoned. (When coming, we disappear, don't we? In seduction, we search for what vanishes, right? Breathing deeply, we dream of affec­ tion, its incarnation.) I hoped Roseanne would hold me at the edge of a perfect silence. For three years, I never really came; nor, I'm sure, did she. Something always remained unreleased, some residue, a moment of perspiration and disbelief. Practically speaking, lovers must dis, cover a secret, the mystery of their characters joined, without knowing it, without exposing it, and then protect and celebrate this secret without trying to, don't you think? Otherwise they find themselves stranded inside their own or someone else's body. And now with Marie I expected, on the one hand, nothing, and needed nothing and felt easy with her, and yet, on the other hand, vaguely longed for her to

came

touch me, vaguely expected miracles.

The toilet flushed, a kind of gasp, as though all the air were suddenly sucked out of the house. Marie strolled back into the kitchen, sat down, pointed toward the window behind me, and said, "Wow!" I turned and looked, and we watched the evening sun dis, solve. Across the street somewhere a dog squealed. A bicyclist floated by. Dusk in North Carolina resembles sleep. I needed diversion, pictured a balloonist in remote Texas settling to earth. I knew that Marie had never realized that her ass was beautiful. ass is beautiful," I said.

"You're crazy," she said, gazing out the window at small neglected houses and sky.

"Your ass is the ground of all being," I added.

"Sam!" she said, beaming.

"Your ass," I said, "confirms Pascal's definition of God: a circle whose center lies everywhere, whose circumference lies nowhere."

"Your

When she laughed again and suggested we take a drive, I agreed, though somewhat dismayed. Minutes later we were outside the town in my subtle Karmann Ghia, passing trees. We had invented a new meditation. Marie loved to lean back in the bucketseat stoned and float through the countryside. (Around the world, casual wars erupted like flashbulbs in the distance.) Reared on a farm, I had never really liked trees. Even rocks offended me. Every year they rose like moles to the surface of our fields and had to be carted away. With Marie, drifting through the haze of a Southern summer, I heard trees whisper; I felt my sexual longing spread softly around us like the evening.

260

Idiopathic After coasting for an hour past forests, Marie and I returned to her house. She said, as we walked in the front door, that though she enjoyed my skepticism, I was hurting myself and needed to learn how breathe. (My doctor once described a unique ailment, its origin obscure, as idiopathic. Inside every mystery, I cower, amazed.) Marie lit a candle which opened softly into the darkness like flowers. I stretched out on the bed. She slipped down beside me as deftly as a ghost. In the still evening, we could hear children next door screaming while they played. Marie's benign eyes looked at me kindly. Her blond hair glowed like a halo around her face. She spoke carefully, as though I were deaf, as though I had to read her lips. to

She proposed that my spirit was gripping itself too tightly, that if, breathing properly, I let my soul expand, it might ease gently out of my body; it might move through the universe. My soul would notice there wasn't a thing it could do about anything, would relax. Irregular breathing, she said, makes the soul nervous. Inhaling, count one, two.

Exhaling, count one, two, three. Gradually extend the count. Soon, she said, thought and breath fuse. You'll feel the way you do when stoned, that you can inhale forever. Breathing fully, without distrac­ tion, I'd become one, Marie said, with the actual rhythm of life. I proposed instead that I massage her feet. Smiling, she said sure. Five minutes later I was kneading her poised thighs. A moan rose out of her silently, muffled by the depths of her body. When I asked her to roll over on her stomach, she couldn't move, as though pleasure were a kind of weight, as though the room, its arrangement fixed forever in that moment, and the house, and the world beyond had to turn over with her.

Wouldn't you think such passion would disrupt her life, that she'd attentive man, that she'd wear long dresses and hide, wary and expectant? As I moved my hands over her precise body, oh God, removing clothes, squeezing carefully, she relaxed more and more, her caress an

body expanding, sprawling out over the bed, sinking deeper into the mattress. I turned her back over gently, as though I'd just rescued her from drowning. I glanced at her face, expecting devotion, but her eyes, closed, drifted inward. I parted her legs as in another life and stared.

On the one hand, I wanted never to move again, to remain poised in that impossible delight; on the other hand, I wanted all the energy in the world to coalesce at just that spot. Blond hair, almost transparent, surrounded the opening of her flesh, a kind of inverted question mark, 261

moist and remarkably neat, as though her passion wasted nothing. She

smelled like sunwarmed straw. For a moment, I sympathized, as only an atheist can, with God, how stunned he must have felt at the moment of creation.

Marie carne quietly, and for a long time, her legs engulfing my face, my tongue dancing softly. It was as though, corning, she listened to

animals gathering silently on a distant plain. Each hoof touching the earth touched her.

Then she slept, briefly, and awoke fresh. She dressed and asked if I'd like a salad for dinner. Nothing had happened. My tongue felt like a tuning fork. Dismayed, I chatted, and sat, in my uncertain anger, at the kitchen table. I looked from Gladys, the cat, staring at me from the top of the refrigerator, to Marie at the sink, in profile, tearing lettuce in a perfect dream. I thought of the Mona Lisa's twisted smile. Now Marie and I had a secret, the kind that is remembered, but not shared.

I'd been a tourist, demanding, as a tourist does, only beautiful views and a massage. Unable to scream, I smiled, and Marie, turning from the sink, smiled too. She was crying. Staring, I sat very still. We were like people in a cold room who can't wake up enough to retrieve the blanket.

The Ocean A month later Marie telephoned from her new horne at a small the North Carolina coast. Though warm and pleasant

resort town on

conversation was elliptical. When she mentioned disliking the seafood restaurant where she worked, I asked about her tips. She replied that twice after her day shift the past week, a strange man had followed her horne. Tall, dumbly intense, he peered in her window and looked around, as though everything in the house were for sale.

The police assured her the man was harmless, a local character, always wearing the same pink jacket, and now she wondered if I could visit for the weekend. our

The telephone felt strange in my hand; it didn't fit against my head.

My room carne suddenly into focus around me: books open on the bed like people about to speak. I pictured Marie at the ocean holding a telephone to her ear like a shell. There she was, in a flimsy house, her whole life gathered at just that spot, the blond sand outside her room glowing, her voice moving implausibly through the distance. I saw 262

myself driving to the coast and finding her house, where I pause in my car. Like a bank robber, I keep the motor running and stare through the car window at the house, the afternoon heat shifting around me like a huge animal, and I see then that all the windows and the front door have been left open, as though the place were abandoned or the scene of a great celebration, and Marie, eager or desperate, running toward the car.

263

Three poem.s Michael Collier

Practicing stalls Long ago, you lay in your backyard listening to planes circle for the dirt strip near your house.

They droned loudly at first, but when they throttled back, almost to silence, your heart stopped for a moment.

Though you couldn't see the planes and after a while there was only the gentle sound of your breath near sleep, in that instant when your heart stopped, something uncontrolled and heavy began falling in you: a sense that a life had passed nearby, or the falling you already knew from dreams, or the completely imaginable kind that kept you from jumping off the roof. Whichever, a space opened, and you quieted so as not to miss the crash that never came. *

*

*

Now, when the propeller's blade unwinds like a broken film and floods the cockpit with the sudden bright light of a projection lamp, 264

heart stops. Wind blows through the engine cowling, beats the plexiglass like a desperate hand, and a voice says, let me in before I fall,

your

and falling, you hear another voice rise to its last plea, let me in. You trim the elevators, and the nose rises to a saving attitude. You practice stalls again and again until everyone is safe. *

*

*

Years from now, you may lie in your backyard

and through half-closed eyes watch the flat jets too high to be heard leave their white trails behind, and though friends of yours have died, and you haven't yet stopped dreaming of falling, you know that when a propeller unwinds and a voice cries, let me in, it is your own death that spins as slowly as a blade before you.

It's not like the beginning near the dirt strip, or when practicing stalls: you could lose all that altitude and never fall.

265

The lacquered table All morning I've sanded gently the blistered surface of this old table your father brought from Brazil and left outside for years.

I rub a wax-clogged tack rag over the powdery

varnish and the scene that must've brought this ratty table so far rises.

I see you above, in the window, and point

what's emerged. Dust flies from the rag when I shake it, and how can I tell you what this table says to me? That lovers who won't stop forgiving each other to

spread a black undercoat of patience over a large area, maybe twice, then draw red borders of specific wooing, of long sleepless acquaintance, and then the daily parrots and fruits, equatorial flowers and vines that perch and root over the black field?

Without looking, I know you are gone.

Fresh varnish bubbles clear and seeps, darkening the lush painted garden.

Perhaps we have wakened from our forgiving selves and see only water-stains, buckling veneer. Nothing that would stop

from separating, not even maintenance which love abides. us

266

Eye-piece I had been thinking about the moon,

how you see it from the back of a truck at a neighbor's house­ emerald with a little goldwhile the neighbors remind you not to press too hard on the eve-piece.

I did once and the moon disappeared, or something shut down inside the telescope, and I was alone, on the truck, smaller than the tripod, wondering how I'd lost the big moon in the big sky.

Like last year, home late from a party, I stopped in the yard

gray-white in moonlight.

The grass, a blue bristle, blew back and forth unevenly, to turn

and when I closed my eyes a light filled my head.

Then my lover came outside and found me lost in a privacy that scared her. In bed I told her I had been thinking about the suicide of my college roommate.

Then I reassured her and we tried to make love, but when that part of ourselves that had shut down so we

long ago began to open, pressed too hard

and were alone again. In a few weeks I was too sullen to live with, and like the moon that disappeared from the eye-piece at my we

neighbor's house,

couldn't be restored, not even a steady hand 267

and a little patience. Eventually, those neighbors disappeared from the block because of divorce.

How we all disappear under a moon

which, my roommate once said, hangs high in every neighborhood.

268

Angel Arturo Vivante

"It is a time-proven rule of fiction never to introduce an important character toward the end of a story," says a well known author in one of his books. But life has no such rules, so why should fiction, which of life is the reflection, have them?

It was 1946, and Olga had come back with her family to Italy from England, where they had spent the war years as refugees. She was sixteen, an unruly, impetuous girl. Spoiled, some said of her, placing the blame on those who had brought her up. But her parents objected to the term, reasoning that they had done no more, no less, for her than for her three brothers-Piero, Damiano and Sergio-who were comparatively tame, quiet, and rather shy. Heredity and environment, her father-a philosopher-tended to discount, stressing instead an underived, spontaneous quality at work in any human being. They spoke of her as capricious, wild, inconstant, but not as spoiled. They were even apt to admire her wildness, seeing in it an element of individuality not attributable to any cause. Only sometimes, when she got insulting and swept her frail father out of the way with a strong push, did they have second thoughts and wonder. But they couldn't control her. Scolding her was useless. Physical punishment, even if they had been able to administer it, was quite alien to them. They deplored her bad behavior and implored her to be good, but she would not heed, never having any doubt that she was right.

If she was looking for something in the house and couldn't find it, she would go from room to room, pull drawers out of chests, dump their contents on the floor, refuse to pick them up, expect the maids to do it, scream, order them about, and, unmindful of the hypocrisy of it, sit down at the dinner table and speak as if she were the champion of the downtrodden people of the world. Locked doors infuriated her, and she would rattle them till they gave, or rouse the household till the key was found. She would appropriate any object she fancied and often, as if possessed by a destructive urge, leave it in unusable condition. At meals her greed was astonishing. To get more of the icing she would ruin the looks and shape of any cake, and turn

269

insolent if one made a remark. Years later, thinking about his sister, sometimes Damiano almost laughed in disbelief, her behavior was so bad. And yet, despite her ways, he felt close to her-closer than to his brothers. Was it her physical resemblance to him-the shape of her nose (a little rounded), the straight brown hair? Was it her artistic temperament?-she painted, he wrote poems. Was it just that she was a girl? Or was it that her outward display of force might cover a weakness, shield a vulnerable nature deep within her? Weakness was such a human trait. Though he wrote, he was going to be a doctor, and weakness, and sickness, interested him more than perfect health. And so, while critical and disapproving of her, he watched her with a certain fascination, as one watches a curious phenomenon.

She hardly ever cried or said that she was sorry. Rather, in a sudden change of course, to make up for her faults, almost as if tired of them, she would get over her rages and turn endearing-hug, kiss, laugh, dance. Her parents soon forgot her mischief. "She was made to bruise and bless," said her poor father, and smiled. At some cost, he had found in her one who was absolutely familiar with him-far more so than any of his sons or than his wife, who all respected him too much for any effusion. He delighted in the showers of kisses that she gave him, or to suddenly find her sitting on his lap, fondly hugging his shoulders, jostling him about and calling him "papaino."

Why were people so ready to forgive her? Partly because she had a way of making you laugh. Certain persons struck her as funny, and when she talked about them you saw them as she saw them-cari­ catures-and you laughed with her. One could take a lot of nonsense for a laugh. It could make up for many frowns. You laughed and you forgot. One had to admit she wasn't boring. She had more life than most. Though no great dancer or singer, when she danced or sang one watched her, astonished by her grand and sweeping movements, and by her voluptuous voice. Perhaps it was the enormous change taking place-the petulant turned pleasing, her better nature coming to the fore, the manifestation of indubitable grace, sunshine after a storm, the contrast. The relief one felt! The transformation seemed a miracle, and like fair weather it gave you the illusion it might last. One then remembered amusing things about her-of how once, for instance, at elementary school, she had found the toilet messy, and, according to her teacher, had swept it up and cleaned it and polished all its fixtures till they shone; and of how the geese, craning their necks and hissing, chased her, and she came running toward you in the long frock her mother had made her; of how fearlessly she rode Turbo, their fiery horse, bareback, and climbed cherry trees to pick the ripest cherries of on the topmost branches, branches such as only the birds reached; 270

how she would return from the woods with bunches of cyclamens and from the riverbank with violets, enough to make several little bou­ quets, which she would put in pots even in her brothers' rooms; and of how once at a hotel by the sea, hearing the waves break, she asked if someone was turning a flour sifter-"You're a real country girl," her mother had said.

The maids and the cook, too-who had taken care of her from birth and through her childhood-were willing to overlook her excesses.

The maids found excuses for her. "She's still a child," they said to her mother, who kept apologizing to them. Then, remembering that as a child she had been sweet and gentle, they tried to account for her change. "It's the illness that she had when she was little," they said, referring to a low-grade fever that she had when she was six or seven.

Or, "It's her age." And the cook, who was very superstitious, whis­ pered, "Someone put a hex on her. It's not her fault, Signora." She even claimed she knew who to blame-a friend of the family, a woman who had taken part in seances in the house. "She was jealous because she had no children-only cats," the cook affirmed. But Olga's moth, er recalled that even as a baby, Olga, if she didn't get what she wanted, would turn white with rage, quite unlike her brothers. At times, she would get into long, hearty discussions with the cook and with the maids, show them her paintings, take seriously their comments, alter her work, ask them up to her studio again, and be altogether as nice to them as she had been mean. Oh yes, she could be quite engaging.

"You see, when you are good there is nothing we wouldn't do for you; you could have everything."

Immediately, she might turn resentful at the implication that she had been bad, and leave them with a frown.

Sometimes, they were quite proud of her-when, for instance, in a new, elegant dress, she would twirl in front of them with a flourish.

Slim, tall, smooth-complexioned, almond-eyed, and with her straight dark hair down to her shoulders, she had something Gauguinesque about her. Showy, flamboyant, haughty, never shy, her awareness of being good-looking didn't help. It made her more proud and more requiring. She must have one new dress after another, and her mother, perhaps seeing in her the dashing image of herself she had missed being, did not begrudge them. Though not exactly vain, Olga wasn't modest. She praised her own work lavishly. And, scattering names and quoting, she displayed what knowledge she had of art and other never admitting ignorance on any subject. She denied the value of money, said that she despised it, sounded absolutely dis, interested in all worldly possessions, and argued for a brotherhood of man. Her brothers smiled, but strangers were impressed.

matters,

271

Gratitude wasn't her strong point. If you asked for it, she would

immediately accuse you of trying to ingratiate yourself. Once, she and her brothers went to the sea, and, shoving herself off a rock, she kicked a sea urchin. Damiano took the spines that had stuck to the ball of her foot all out for her, painstakingly, one by one. She didn't thank him. In a moment she was inveighing against him for using her towel.

Often, her effrontery made him wish she had never been born-or worse. And still, getting over his bitterness, he wondered about her.

When they were children he had once asked her to close her eyes and handed her a red-hot chestnut and slightly burned her. Had she lost faith in him from then?

The high school in the hill town, with its strict curriculum, wasn't suited to her. Though fairly well-read and fluent in English and French, there were certain subjects she would just not take. Her parents decided to send her to Florence, two hours away by train, to an art school whose director they knew, and got her a room in a pensione. Let her have the independence she was seeking, and every­ body a rest. Piero, her elder brother, was doing graduate work in classics at Oxford; Damiano was a medical student in Rome, and Sergio was studying architecture in Milan. Damiano heard from home that she was happy in Florence, had made great friends with a girl her age, and that the two often visited and filled the house with joyous

laughter.

And then, a few months later, on the eve of an exam, Damiano got that Olga had fallen seriously ill with tuberculosis. "They found a cavity in her right lung," his mother said. "She has a fever, too."

That night, he couldn't sleep. All her faults vanished. She was a saint, an angel. He was a fool ever to have thought otherwise. Her recovery was the only thing that mattered, urgent, crucial-and un­ likely. It was one thing when a weak person got sick, another when someone strong, flourishing and healthy as she had seemed did. My God, she had been so very vital, so vivacious. Life itself, bobbing, exuberant, ebullient, seething. And now she was prostrate, in bed, sweating, with a fever, and a cavity in her lung. He could visualize the germs, that so often he had looked at through a microscope, multi­ plying in her precious tissue, pullulating, a myriad crowd, and her defenses pathetically drawn up against them in an effort to circum­ scribe them, isolate them, check them. And he thought of Keats dying only a few blocks away, in Piazza di Spagna, and of Modigliani, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence, and Gozzano. "They die young," he had read, "those who are dear to the sky." He thought of a news

272

friend of his, a girl he had gone to school with in the hill town, dying­ dead now-and the deceptively florid look of her face, a rosiness in the cheeks that had something clammy, humid, about it, that tended ever so slightly to the violet-a cyclamen pink-and that betrayed a deficiency in the oxygenation of her blood. He thought of their hill town and of Florence, both of which had such a high morbidity and mortality, especially as regards tuberculosis, and of the ads and posters on the school walls about the fight against TB, the pictures of flies and of the sun-enemy of germs-and of the warnings about the dangers of spitting and coughing in public places. All those hideous cartoons and signs came back to him, and he could see the polished smooth walls of the hospital corridors. The hill town with its narrow dark streets and unwholesome grimy corners came back to him, and the death notices and the funeral processions and the men in black hoods leading the processions. His home was outside town, in the country, in a sunny place, in a house that-it seemed ironic now-was called Solatia, sunny. But what good did that do, had it done? She was sick, in danger. And not so long ago he had wished she had never been born, wished worse for her. He couldn't sleep. All night he sat up staring at his books, not reading, deep in thought, and so alert that sleep held no sway over him, any more than wakefulness over a person deeply drugged. So alert was he still in the morning, that when the exam came, he passed it with full marks, easily, though it was unusual for him. And, after the exam, he took the train to Florence.

She had been taken by her mother, on the advice of the doctor and of friends, to a nursing home in Fiesole, overlooking Florence. The nursing home had one of those names that are supposed to suggest serenity, or green pastures, or beautiful views outside, but that give no inkling about the inside, and for that reason one immediately becomes suspicious of them. One wing had patients with nervous breakdowns, the other served as a sanatorium. And there was his little sister, in bed, in a single room. She smiled at him and he kissed her, the way one kisses a rose. "You'll see you'll get better in no time," he said and felt the vainness of his words.

"She has already broken two thermometers," said their mother, who was sitting on a cot beside her.

He laughed. They'd forgive her anything now-anything. It was her right to break them.

"Well, how is it here?" he asked.

"Oh, these nursing homes," his mother replied. "You know. But it's the best that we could find."

"I'm going to die anyway," his sister said.

"What are you saying?"

273

"She's always saying that."

They X,rayed her and made many tests, which all confirmed what the doctor who first saw her had diagnosed, then gave her, every day, injections of calcium chloride (in the hope of calcifying the lesion), and vitamins, and began artificial pneumothorax-the introduction of air into the pleural cavity to induce a partial collapse of the lung, something that was supposed to promote its healing by putting it to rest. It was a procedure that, at that time, before effective drugs came into use, was practiced widely, especially in Italy, ever since it had been conceived by Forlanini, an Italian chest specialist, in the 1920s.

A large sanatorium in Rome was named after him-The Forlanini­ and the name in the city had taken on a dismal connotation. Many years later, Damiano read in a medical manual, "Such collapse proce­ dures as pneumothorax have no role in the treatment program [of ...

TB]."

She was in the nursing home for a few months, but her condition didn't improve. From there she went with her mother to a sanatorium in the Alps, near Cortina, for the fresh, cool air. And, in Rome, Damiano thought of the hostile peaks of the Dolomites, and the frozen air, and balconies and terraces and chaises longues and beautiful young women in shawls, and of The Magic Mountain. She didn't improve there either, and finally it was decided to take her back home, where she wanted to be.

She was given the guest room-a large, airy room with a terrace and a double bed, the bed on which she was born. Soon, Damiano went home for a weekend. Her beauty, from her loss of weight, was even more apparent. Her eyes had a luminous quality, new to him.

UWe've found a good doctor," his mother said, "the director of the sanatorium here. Very serious, but also a dear. The real medical man.

Sardinian. A man you can rely on. You'll meet him-he'll be here at four. He was very interested to hear that you are studying medicine."

He came, the doctor, a short unassuming man with gold-rimmed glasses, a reddish face, and slightly protruding yellowish teeth. He

played the pitifully cheerful role doctors often play when they come into a patient's room, especially a young patient's. His smile seemed genuine and it made you forget his homely look. As they shook hands, Damiano felt his soft, gentle, pudgy hand. He was shy, and Olga had already got familiar with him. "But when are you going to cure me?" she said. UI feel no better. I feel worse. Why don't you cure me now?"

"Eh, signorina, you must be patient."

"Patient? I'm tired of being a patient."

274

"Calma, calma. I know. You'll see that little by little you'll get well.

It takes time. You can't get over it like that," he said, and flicked his thumb, then, turning to Damiano, added, "We are going on with the

pneumothorax," and talked about it in detail-the amount of air that he introduced each time, its purpose, and so forth. Damiano nodded at everything he said, as behooved a student. Then the doctor showed him some X�ray pictures, and he saw the cavity quite clearly. "Little by little," he said, "it will get smaller and smaller, and finally close up and calcify. I've seen so many cases."

"But mine won't."

"And why shouldn't it? Why is yours so special?"

"Because I have bad luck."

"Oh, but how superstitious we are today, signorina. You must be cheerful. You've got to fight the thing. It helps to be cheerful."

"I want to die," she said. Why did she say it? Why such dark fatalism? Did she think of herself as one of those unlucky poets or painters whom she loved? Or to make herself dramatic? Did she have pangs of conscience and see death as her due? Or did she view it as a kind of liberation? Or was it simply said to evoke reassurance? Prob­ ably all of these to some degree.

"What? Why so pessimistic?" the doctor said.

"What is there to be optimistic about?"

"You. This. You'll see," he said, and turned to open his bulging leather bag.

"What do you ever carry in that bag? Hopes that hold no promise.

Lies. You come to me with lies."

"Olga!" her mother said. "Be a little quiet. Forgive us, doctor."

The kindly doctor smiled. He swabbed a small area of her chest with iodine, then with a large needle and syringe slowly pushed air into her pleural space. She winced, but stood the pain better than Damiano expected, and he remembered a professor in the classroom saying that women faced pain more bravely than did men.

"Brava," her mother said to her when the ordeal was over, and kissed her, and affectionately called her "Olgussi."

Coffee was brought, Olga's father came in, and they began talking about politics, for the general elections were coming up. Olga had strong opinions, and the subject was one that could make her forget her present state.

When it came time for the doctor to leave, Damiano accompanied him to his car. He was as hopeful as he had been in the room. When Damiano asked him about the effectiveness of artificial pneurno­ thorax, he reconfirmed his belief in it. With it, calcium, and bed rest, he thought she would recover.

275

But the fever continued and the cavity would not heal. Weekends, Damiano would come home. One day, he found his sister crying, weeping on and on, with tears and a soft moan that would not cease, and her mother quite unable to console her. "See what you can do," she said to Damiano with despair, and Damiano, who was fond of movies and who had seen an American one about zoot-suiters, irni­ tated them and a Los Angeles policeman. And soon his sister was laughing so loud he got worried about the lung that the pneumothorax was

supposed to give rest to.

The next day, her despondent mood returned. She was reading a poem of Gozzano, who had died of TB in 1916, a poem about his illness, "At the Threshhold."

"Listen to this," she said, and read it aloud to him.

My heart, playful child who laughs even when sad, heart, you who are so glad to exist in the world, enclosed in your shell, do you not seem to hear outside my

often someone who is knocking, who is knocking?

They are the doctors.

They percuss me in their varied measure spying I know not for what signs, they listen with their stethoscopes to my chest in front and behind ...

....

And so, following such melancholy tunes, the days passed, and the weeks, gloomily, wanly, though the doctor wasn't discouraged. "It is a chronic ailment," he said. "The healing is gradual."

"What healing?" she said. "There is no healing."

It was true, the measures that he and the others had taken did not work. And she grew weak and pale, consumed by the fever that would not

remit.

But in America, in New Jersey, at Rutgers University, Abraham Waksman-a Russian emigre, expert on the molds within the soil­ found one that no microbe seemed able to destroy, and from it, with his assistants, he obtained a substance-streptomycin-active against the tubercle bacillus. Now it was being tested in America with good results. Damiano had read about it in The Journal of the American Medical Association and in The Lancet, to which he subscribed. Olga's doctor, too, knew of it. Indeed, articles about it were appearing in the newspapers. When the subject came up in Olga's room, the doctor's eyes lit up at mention of the new wonder drug. Everyone's interest was stirred.

"But who is this man who discovered it?"

"His name is Abraham Waksman."

276

"But what a wonderful man! Che simpatico, che caro, what a dear! I love him. Oh, I love him. I want to hug him. Does he have a beard?"

"I don't know."

"And this stuff-this streptomycin-really kills these little creathat are trying to kill me?"

"Yes," the doctor said.

"What are they like, these little creatures?"

"They are tiny rods. Under the microscope, dyed, they show up

tures

red."

"Damn them. And you can't get it here?"

"Not yet," the doctor said, and raised his hands in a gesture of

frustration.

"But in America you can?"

"There is a limited quantity of it, so far."

"I know I'll die before it's available here." "

"Signorina, your pessimism really "In America," her mother said, "we have relatives. Catherine, a ...

very rich woman."

"A millionaire," Damiano said.

"We could write to her. We could," her mother said.

"We could send a telegram now," her father put in. "And we could send her the money, whatever it costs."

"How much does it cost?" Olga said.

"I think it is very expensive," the doctor said. "They talk of thousands of dollars for a course. A course-a full course-would be perhaps 300 vials. Each vial a gram. A vial a day. It has to be given over a long period of time."

"By injection?" Olga said.

"Yes, by injection."

"Oh, dear, what pain! But it wouldn't be any worse than what you have given me so far."

"No, no worse."

"Then shall we try to get it?"

"If you have the possibility, there's no harm in trying."

Her father had already got a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote the telegram, his wife and the doctor helping him. The doctor looked bright with anticipation at the prospect of being the first to try streptomycin out in his district, perhaps the first in Italy. The telegram was longer than any Damiano had ever seen. He went into town that very day and sent it off.

Within twenty-four hours a cable came back. "Streptomycin avail­ able. Will send it airmail care of American Embassy in Rome."

Damiano picked it up there and brought it home. They opened the

277

tightly packed cardboard box in the presence of the doctor. It had several layers of little bottles, each with a white powder at the bottom and a rubber cap under an aluminum seal. And there were as many vials of diluent as there were bottles. The doctor gave the first injec­ tion.

And soon, very soon-in a matter of weeks-almost miraculously, the fever disappeared. She gained weight. The doctor took Xvrays. The cavity had shrunk.

"Healing," she said, "I can hear, feel, the cells healing. It's almost worth having been sick, this feeling."

She was up and about the house. Her appetite returned and her old vigor. But she still had to take the injections and keep a temperature chart. Then, one evening, around Christmas, when Damiano was home, the doctor came to the house with an Xvrav picture that showed no cavity. In her enthusiasm, Olga dropped the thermometer and it

broke.

"What a silly," her mother said, picking up the pieces. "I don't know how many she has smashed. Now we'll have to buy another."

"No need," the doctor said.

"Really?" Olga said, and shrilly laughed and hugged him. She took the picture and held it against the light. "It's true. It was there and now I can't see it. What is that scientist's name? The one who discovered

streptomycin?"

"Abraham Waksman."

"Simpaticissimo!" she said.

"A kind of deus ex machina," Damiano said.

"An angel," said her father.

"Really."

The doctor smiled. "Olga, do you remember how pessimistic you were? So sure that you were going to die?"

"If it weren't for that medicine I would have."

"She's always got an answer," her mother said. "Why don't you

thank the doctor, instead?"

"Thank you," she said, in a slightly affected tone, though looking into his eyes.

He smiled modestly.

A moth was flitting around a lamp.

"Whatever did moths do," she asked, "before man came along with fire and electricity? Did they dance to the moonlight?"

"That's a good question," the doctor said.

"Something absolutely artificial and unforeseen comes along-a drug, in my case; electricity in the case of that moth-and I live though I would have died, and it dies though it would have lived."

278

"She's philosophical, Olga."

"Let's just thank God things went the way they did," her mother said.

"God? If you left it to God I'd be dead already."

"Here we go again," the doctor said.

"You and Waksman, not God, I have to thank."

279

Reviews Michael

Rvan, In WinteT. Holt, Rinehart, and Wiruton, 1981. 49 pp.

Hh, $9.95; ph, $5.95.

So much unshaped and unconsidered emotion feeds (but doesn't inform) so many poems around us, that when a book of genuine distinction and power,

ful, very personal, feeling appears, we run the risk of misjudging it. It would be a great loss to any reader who made this mistake with Michael Ryan's second book of poems. If there are repetitions in it of the kind of poem contained in his first book, these are confined to the sec, tion called "Seven Annihilations and a Slight Joke." The rest of the book is strong, honest, formed with grace and force, and unstintingly intelligent.

Three poems of one hundred lines each, separated by two sections of short' er poems, allow Ryan to think poetically about his obsessive themes: loneliness, sex, and death, while at the same time exercising his lyrical gift and an odd but affecting sense of humor, a humor so tied to the loneliness and the sex that it may be missed by some readers who expect humor to be predictably light or obvious, and are not prepared to see the depths out of which it rises.

Ryan is one of the few young poets writing now who has the discipline and power of emotion to write serious poems out of the same narrow themes of most bad contemporary writing, themes that bad writing seems threatening to drive out of the reach of serious readers. Mom and Dad are here, and ordinary midnight melancholy, and madness, and always each subject is taken past the obvious and the expected reach of emotion to a place where unexpected intensity is given a voice I have heard called, with adrnira­ tion, "metaphysical." In addition, Ryan has studied his predecessors in a way that has become rare nowadays, and knows

280

that it is that illustrious group on whose

judgment he waits, not the vapor-thin self-indulgence of our moment in the his, tory of poetry. Merely to give an example complex enough to include the humor I've mentioned, I will quote the last two

quatrains of "Where I'll Be Good": Let me not cruise for teens in a red sports car, or

glare too long at what bubbles their clothes.

Let me never hustle file clerks in a bar.

Keep me from the beach when the hot wind blows.

If I must go mad, let it be dignified.

Lock me up where I'll feel like wood, where wanting can't send me flopping

outside, where my bones will shut up, where I'll be good.

Ryan's

discipline

as

a

poet,

like

Kunitz's, fills his lines with the power of the obvious things he has chosen not to say, the slack or monotonous rhythms he

has chosen not to indulge, the farfetched or strained images he has rejected in fa, vor of more direct and honest ones.

This power, which requires some reti­ cence, gives each line its own weight and integrity, each its own increment of

feeling and understanding. His images work almost as forcefully as metaphysical conceits, but they are for our own time, which is not one, in poems, of involuted contradictions but of outward and sad,

dening ones.

At thirty the body begins to slow down.

Does that make for the quiet on this

porch,

chemical ability to relax and watch?

If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain-link fence,

a

bounces so metal sings and it seems she must be hurting her­

self, how old must I get before I tell her to

and now pokes out of my particular brain into these words, taut as a thorn, and demands a brief life of its own,

stop? so, too,

Right now, I let her do it.

She's so beautiful in her filthy Tsshtrr and gym shorts, her hair swings with each clang, and she can do no wrong.

I let her do it as background music to storm clouds moving in like a dark army.

I let her do it as a fond wish for myself.

I feel the vibration of the fence as a

I want to be done

lugging through the gloom, and wish I could walk deep into a field, stretch out my joined limbs, and hold on.

Ryan explicitly rejects prettiness or even the stark accuracy of any word too self­ conscious, for the sake of hammering the poem tightly around the core of honesty that is most important to him:

wasp feels voices on a pane of

glass.

The song in it I can't make out.

Who gives a shit about carcajou in the boscage, or pansies freaked with

jet?

Those lines are from the opening "Poem at Thirty." .It would be happiest if there were space here to quote the last of the three long poems, "Why," in its entirety.

This most philosophical poem of the book also seems as fully felt as even the strongest of the shorter poems (like

"Memory"

or

"In

Winter"). "Why"

takes a vague and almost unbearable pain and finds a way to place it among the familiar disappointments that add up, in our ordinary lives, to shape our sense of difficulty and loss.

Why can enter your dreams like a de­ mon

and you wake up the next morning not the same.

It always starts this way, breeding inside until it swarms into

things, blackening the sky, wind

in

chorus with

...

Tonight, in summer. cornered in my room,

jamming my hard feelings into a word­ less song that has hummed for centuries snagged in the genes

I'd like to write a daylight poem that pretends the world's a good

friend, but what relation to things makes a link that won't snap with all the shaking it

gets?

The loneliness that looks like a mask of death, that appears in the mind after "the delicious burnish of things / melts into the dark," will find its occasional solace not in effects like those he rejects, and the sort of perception and experience they represent, but in the intimacy, how­ ever flawed, between honest lovers and friends. And this poem ends with lines both ominous and comforting, an accep­ tance of our solitariness, and an almost casual gratitude for the moments when, not out of desperation or aggression but out of a companionable sharing of our fears, we greet each other and see a possi­ bility, with luck, of love.

Still it pleases me to think of you reading this in another time and place, at

another chance axis of those old

infinites, while I sit in this green chair in Mas­

sachusetts, 281

while I think even at this moment we

orbit, this moment we wave past with a faceless prehistoric minding­ our-business which is neither desperate nor mali­ cious, like two similar beasts at a brief distance when the whole world was a forest.

even at

It is not intimate revelation that makes a

poem seem self-indulgent, but the lack

of any evidence that choices were made in the discovery of the right words for powerful feeling, and that artistic, not

simply emotional, possibilities were con­ sidered. Ryan has considered the possi­ bilities, and has made his choices. If he is a kind of metaphysical poet, it is because he knows his poetic choices are no easier for the artist in him than the personal choices that determined his friendships, loves, and losses, were for the simple man in him. That is one definition of a serious artist, whatever the flaws in his or her work.

Shapiro, After the Digging.

Elpenor Books (Chicago), 1981. 47 Alan pp.

Hb, $9.00.

Julia Randall, The Farewells. Elpenor Books (Chicago), 1981. 77 pp. Hb, $10.00.

except as a benchmark against which he measures out the cadences. But it is the ease and naturalness of the lines that

shows how a benchmark can serve not as an artifical standard but as the stimulus to build poems that are full of feeling and rhythmical force.

Two things move this reader: the size of the canvas, the importance Shapiro attaches to writing poems about such an immense catastrophe; and the power of his language to convey the misery of those who suffered and the political hopelessness of their situation. Though the poems are versed in the first person, Shapiro does not make use of the dramatic intimacy to reveal what each character wishes to say about himself; instead he uses each character, whose own fullness and authority are implied by the substance of what he says, to give us a report of the world outside himself, the suffering of others. So there is no direct lament or plea for food, only the anguish of those who witness a horrible, sicken­ ing waste of human life and feel the torment of their own powerlessness to do anything about it.

Last week, outside of Erris where the poor like crows swarm, combing the black fields, living on nettles, weeds, and cabbage

leaves, women

and children plundered a meal

cart,

Alan Shapiro's sequence of poems on the Irish Famine of 1846-1849 shows what poetic resources can accomplish when focused on the sort of materials that usu­ ally fit only within a fictional frame. Let­ ters among several observers of the Irish, of 1846, a carriage­ news dispatches driver's rambling talk to his passenger­ these dramatic situations are occasions for poems that are relaxed in their strat­ egy, as they imitate the style ofletters and speech, but formally shaped by Shapiro's use of four- and five-foot unrhymed lines.

When the poem demands it, Shapiro will loosen the line; he is not bound to it

282

fifteen of them tearing at the sacks; enlivened rags, numb to the drivers'

whips, too

weak to drag the sacks off, or to

scream,

they hobbled away, clutching to themselves

only small handfuls of the precious stuff.

("Randolf Routh to Charles Trevelyan") The poetic power of this work comes from the steady authority of each whole poem than from the smaller poetic more

effects, which are minimized in order to retain that urgent naturalness that charac­ terizes good blank

verse.

I have myself inspected the small hamlets in the parish

and would describe to you what I have

witnessed, but anything you picture to yourself which still enables you to kiss your

wife, embrace your son, and sleep until you

spoke of, or the isolated but ritual regularities in Pound's poems, to the three-beat line Philip Levine learned from Yeats, to the vertically fractured sonnets

of Pamela Hadas, the power of

syllables organized in that clearly native English-Language way, cannot be denied.

By setting his poem in the nineteenth

century, Shapiro licenses a more formal

speech and letter-stvle for his characters than we could trust in a poem set in 1980 and centered on, say, the famines in Cambodia or the sub-Sahara.

wake, is not what I have seen, nor what I felt.

("Captain Wynn to Randolf Routh") The Captain continues, however, "But I must tell you something nonetheless," and it is typical of the poem's ability to utilize irony without in any way backing off from strong feeling that, after the Captain's description of the starving and the dead, he ends his letter this way:

Consider, Randolf, what I have recited;

Consider the Captain's log for June 27, 1847, on an emigrant brig to Canada: The dead are going overboard without prayer, and with little sorrow (for few have life enough for grief).

Like spoiled meat, husbands, wives, and children thrown overboard into the deepas if this were their last kind act that now they can relieve their kin who have at last when they lie down room to change position in. ("Passage Out")

some

I am a match for almost anything I meet with here, but this I cannot

stand.

Consider it, for something must be done.

And trust I speak sincerely when I say I hope the winter finds you well, and

please pass on warmest

regards to Randolf

Junior, and kiss your dear wife once for me.

Shapiro wants his poem to speak of something beyond the self, beyond even the ventriloquized observing self of an English officer or sea captain in the middle of the nineteenth century. And his regular line conveys even to dull ears the kind of expressive confidence which, when not debased by conventionality and padding and metrical monotony, is what most good lines of all sorts give us. From the "ghost of the pentameter" that Eliot

That lapidary notation, defying proba­ bility as a "realistic" entry in a logbook, because of its formal rigors, shows how far formality can penetrate such momen­ tous occasions, and it can only be re­ gretted that the sequence isn't longer, and doesn't explore further the poetic powers so clearly in evidence throughout.

Shapiro's publisher, a new small press, has also published a sizeable collection of poems by Julia Randall, The Farewells. It is heartening that a small press has pub­ lished a first book as good as Shapiro's, and has at the same time brought into print a fine late collection of ten years' work by a poet too little known. Elpenor favors poets whose work employs some traditional formal devices (the press has also published books by Kenneth Fields and William Hunt). And Randall often employs full rhymes, occasionally an an­ tique turn of speech, an inkhorn word,

283

or, by modern standards, a stagey sort of

Friday to Sunday over Hartley Mill,

poetical address. But she also puts her

where Creeping Charlie threads the

rhymes at the ends of lines of great vari­ ety, short and long cheek by jowl, and never writes monotonously. A number

and Grumman lobbies for a Light Industrial zone,

of the poems in this collection are very fine, especially her remarkable and intense elegies, on public as well as pri­ vate matters.

I quote "The Sycamores at Satyr Hill" in its entirely:

Our settlers on the valley floor between the ridges, rank and file like gray Confederates light this February sundown white.

No match for birches, proudly down from Massachusetts, or for Towson­ town

moving like Stonewall eastward to consume

Sherwood's and Merrick's and my farm.

It is a colder cause, but still the cry "Sic semper." What if graybeards die,

council and cavalry undo pippina and minnow?

How is it then with Beauty? She survives

rocky holds that energy will kill and we be cast reliant on the sill of space, no Adonais beckoning, only rock and stone and in

star

ravage. Cold war

to

casualties, cold as the will that severed soul from earth, and severs

still.

distance between those last lines and the first stanza of the poem that follows this one in the collection, "Another Part of the Country":

Here, where dogs learn set,

or to

lay down,

and the motorcycles roll

284

between lives, in a pause of August sycamore, immobile before storm,

while words and wheels run over and run down all that we know of form, I feel like the last Indian, squat on Wissahickon schist, the year they chartered this fair country all the way

from Susquehanna to the hills.

Sometimes, when reading Julia Randall, I have thought of Louis Bogan, sometimes of Allen Tate, sometimes ofJanet Lewis.

That is, I have thought of poets whose work is intense primarily because of the formal expression of very intimate and often confused feelings. There are many strong and lovely poems in Randall's book, and they are not less powerful for the unselfconscious use Randall makes of Christian symbols, Greek gods, Italian place names. "It was nothing like / What we have here in Maryland," she writes in one poem. Her metrical (and irregular) lines and her rhyming are an integral part of her gift, it seems to me, and not in any wayan imposed ordering of otherwise unruly material. The power these have in a very personal poem is easily illustrated with "Outliving," a poem in free verse: It is not what they think. You go some twenty years

Julia Randall's range is measured by the

to

lawn,

behind your mother till the day she dies. Some twenty more, in secret, in the thin

disguise

of childlessness, divorce, and a career, you follow her.

There are some clues; your sister is one of them-the pretty one, homemaker, and man's woman; every shoe in its bag, and all of them clean.

I am the half that lived deep down.

My body is taking me there, but I will come

down with a difference. At sixty-nine, I am in a place my mother has never been.

I may make seventy, seventy-five, and not a soul alive to scout me. I must make shift in this dispensation, finally free to foot it, shoeless as I came, into my life, her gift.

Those who read Randall's collection and Shapiro's will find honesty of intent, careful craft, seriousness, and the power to move us with strong feeling. These are two unusually good books, in a time of many bad ones.

Richard A. Spears, Slang and Eu­

phemism: A dictionary of oaths, curses, insults, sexual slang and metaphor, racial slurs, drug talk, homosexual lingo, and related matters. Jonathan David Publishers, 1981.448 pp. Pb,

$12.95.

David W. Maurer, Language of the Underworld. University Press of Ken­

tucky, 1981. 417 pp. Hb, $30.00.

Word-freakery and collection, obsessive and excessive delight in outlandish and improbable locutions, in the intricacies of etymologies-such innocent mad­ of many writers and readers will be immensely gratified by books like these two. Drawing on Partridge, Mencken, Maurer, on books like Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases ( 1925), but also on the Dictionary of Psychology ( 1975) and reaching back to the anonymous Dictionary of Love ( 1733) and Sinks of London Laid Open (1848), and to assorted usage by those who have relished a term from Chaucer to Zane Grey and far, far beyond-drawing on all this with indefatigable and omnivorous nesses

energy,

Richard

Spears has amassed

perhaps the most compendious list of synonyms for sex (often metonymical and extraordinarily farfetched, but also often sharp and delightfully lurid), death, feces, psychological pathology, and so on, that can be imagined. There is material here for the coarsest epithalam­ ium and the most extravagantly be­ dizened sexual advice and insult.

The dictionary runs in other direc­ tions, too, and can be enjoyed purely for its inadequate and crazy-quilt cross­ referencing, which may first strike one as an irritation but eventually becomes pretty entertaining and makes the dictionary seem even larger than it is. The inadequacy will, for example, keep you looking for the mother-lode of expres­ sions for the female genitalia until you happen to stumble on "Monosyllable."

(Two pages of synonyms; and those for the male organ are collected under "Yard," it's worth adding, to save someone in a hurry the extended tour.)

Many obvious words and phrases meaning only what we normally intend them to mean ("graveyard," "have sex") could no doubt have been dispensed with, since they head no main lists of

simply help to fill the On the other hand, the apparently obtrusive medical terminol­ ogy, while neither slang nor euphemism,

synonyms but

columns.

properly speaking, does provide some fearsome pleasure when one reaches the phobias, the list of which is astonishing.

Favorites among the uncommon might include "kakorrhaphiophobia," from which writers do suffer as much or more than other sorts of anomalous beings; "siderodromophobia," which might explain the behavior of some persons aboard the 5: 15; or "thaasophobia," which can afflict someone in a movie

theater, at a poetry reading, or in public toilets.

Everything, dust"

to

or

nearly, from "angel is here, and

"DILLIGAF"

merely to whet the interest of those still dozing, one might commend the follow285

ing, selected almost at random for their

dictionary, but there are riches here for

rich quirks and uncommon delight: "box the bishop," "kedgebelly," "dedigitatel"

the idle afternoon, and plenty to make a reader give some thought to the extraordinary powers of invention that the mastery of a few phonemes, and a need for euphemism, can give to anyone, loquacious or laconic, who needs to put the right word-acceptable in terms of precision and ethos-to what he means.-R.G.

"gong-farmer ," "proud cut," "mahoska," and

words for hermaphrodites and skinny persons and beatings and the devil and pimples and murder.

David Maurer's posthumous collec­ tion of lexicographical articles is a different sort of book, though not much less entertaining. Maurer's specialized and scholarly studies of argot reflect his personal intrepedity at an early stage in the study of slang, for he gathered words

from the mouths of those who used them. That included not only North Atlantic fishermen, who were no doubt friendly to a friendly inquirer, and not precisely of the underworld, but also safecrackers (the "jug-heavy," speaking as of 1931), dope addicts (an enormous vocabulary when Maurer, with others, finished his compilation in 1973),

forgers, prostitutes, enforcers, gamblers,

Publishers of books reviewed: The University Press of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506

Jonathan David Publishers, Inc. 68-22 Eliot Ave. Middle Village, NY 11379

Elpenor Books Box 3152, Merchandise Mart Plaza

Chicago, IL 60654

moonshiners, and others of ill repute but precise tongues. Organized by illegal

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

profession, these word-lists do not provide the rambling pleasures of Spears'

383 Madison Ave. New York, NY 10017

286

Contributors

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. His selected essays, The Second Life of Art, translated by Jonathan Galassi, will be published by Ecco Press this fall. Galassi is the co-editor of The Random Review 1982 (Random House and Bal­ lantine Books). Ray Reno lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and has published stories in several magazines, including, most recently, The Literary Ret/iew. "Sacrifice" is the first story published by Grace Mary Garry, who was born in Taylor, Texas, and grew up on a farm near Rice's Crossing. She lives in College Park, Maryland. The chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Robert Fagles is the author of a book of poems, I, Vincent, and a translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia. "The Murder of Laius" is part of his translation of Sophocles' Theban Plays, to be published by Viking/ Penguin in 1982.

Teresa Cader is completing a master's degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She was a the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference last year, and has published poetry in Tendril and the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1980. Jay Wright's latest book of poems is The Double Invention of Komo (University of Texas Press, 1980).

Rush Rankin teaches literature and writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. Although "Smart Men" is his first published story, Mr. Rankin's poems have appeared in several journals, including the Antioch Review, Paris Review, and New Letters. A lecturer in English at George Mason University, Michael Collier was a Discovery/The Nation winner in 1981, and has published poetry in The New Republic, Poetry, and Ploughshares, and elsewhere. After serving as writer-in­ residence at Northwestern University in the winter, Arturo Vivante has returned to teaching at Bennington College. His fiction has ap­ peared in The New Yorker since 1958, and his recent books include a collection of stories, Run to the Waterfall (1979) and a handbook, scholar

at

Writing Fiction (The Writer, Inc., 1981).

287

Contributors to A John Cage Reader Peter Gena is an assistant professor of music theory and composition at Northwestern University, where he directs the contemporary music ensemble. He is co-director of the Chicago Interarts Ministry, an arts presentation group, and of New Music America '82. His recent publi­ cations include articles on the newest experimental music, and an interview with John Cage, to appear this summer in the catalog of New Music America. The Florence Scott Professor of English at the Univer­ sity of Southern California, Marjorie Perloff is the author of Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton University Press, 1981). She currently holds a and is a book about the Futurist Guggenheim Fellowship writing before World War 1.

Another on Ms. Perloff will poetic essay Cage by in The American Review in late summer. Natalie Crohn appear Poetry Schmitt is an associate professor of theater at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle.

M.C. (Mary Caroline) Richards is a poet, painter, potter, free' lance teacher, and the author of Center, The Crossing Point, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Wesleyan University Press, 1980), and The Public School and the Education of the Whole Person (Pilgrim Press, 1980). Her clay icons of the seven "I am's" of the Gospel of John were hung recently in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. She is currently taking a sabbatical "to practice metanoia, changing the ground of the mind." Morton Feldman, one of the four original New York experimental com' posers, is the Edgard Varese Professor of Music at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He participated in the tribute to John Cage, "Wall to Wall Cage," performed in March in New York City.

Christian Wolff, the youngest of the four New York experimental, ists, also took part in the tribute to Cage. He is the Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. William Brooks, who teaches in the music department at Wesleyan University, has published widely on the new music. Paul Zukofskv, violinist and conductor, is one of the world's leading specialists in contemporary violin literature, and has made over sixty recordings. He is president of Musical Observations, Inc., and Cp2 Recordings; program coordinator of the American Portraits series at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C.; and music director of both the Zukofsky Seminar, in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Colonial Symphony, in New Jersey.

In addition to presenting a season at the City Center, in New York City, Merce Cunningham and Dance Company have toured this year on the West Coast and in Mexico and Holland. His most recent 288

film/ dance, made with Charles Atlas, premiered in New York in March. Lilah Toland is a master printer at Crown Point Press, in

Oakland, California, where she has worked on six etching projects with John Cage since 1978. Kathan Brown is the director of Crown Point Press, which she founded in 1962. After studying with John Cage at The New School for Social Research from 1957 to 1960,

Stephen Addiss toured in four continents as part of the team "Addiss and Crofut," performing traditional music of many cultures.

He teaches, paints, and composes at the University of Kansas. In his

collection of essays, The Old Poetsies and the New (University of Michigan Press, 1981), Richard Kostelanetz includes an interview with John Cage about the composer's Empty Words. Mr. Kostelanetz has also published a documentary monograph, John Cage, (RK Editions, 1970), and other books and articles on contemporary art and culture. Minna Lederman, editor of the late magazine, Modern Music, and of the anthology, Stravinsky in the Theatre, is at work on a book tentatively called Then and Now, of which her essay on Cage forms a chapter. Professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Alexander H. Smith has spent his professional life studying the mushrooms of North America north of Mexico. He is a past president of several organizations, including the Mycological Society of America, and has published several books and articles on mycology.

289

Ulysses: The Mechanics of

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The result is a startling recreation of his own intellectual and spiritual journey.

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Guerard, David Caute, Richard Pearce, Tony Tanner, John Hawkes and Philip Stevick. 140 p. $2.95 #31

Contemporary Asian literature: co-edited by Lucien Stryk. With Lu Hsun, Chairil Anwar, Ho Chi Minh, Shinkichi Takahashi, Yasunari Kawabata and others. 244 p. $3.50

#33

Ongoing American Fiction III: James Purdy, David Kranes, Alan Sillitoe, Paul Bowles, Daniel Halpern, Morris Dickstein, Robert Alter and more. 340 p. $3.50

#34

Ongoing American Fiction IV: Charles Newman, Ian McEwan, Robert Creeley, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ron Sukenick, Joseph

McElroy, Robert Scholes and nine others. 256 p. $3.50 #35 A special two-volume set-Minute Stories: 87 tiny fictions by

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Ongoing American Fiction V: Robert Coover, Ursule Molinaro, Paul West, Ian MacMillan, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Michelson.

256 p. $3.50

#37

Going to Heaven: a fantasy about love and death, narrated en­ tirely through photographs. Produced by Elliott Anderson, directed by Lawrence Levy, and photographed by Michael Vollan. 96 p. $4.50

#38 In the Wake of the WAKE: co-edited by David Hayman. With Samuel Beckett, John Cage, William Gass, Italo Calvino, Arno

Schmidt, Gilbert Sorrentino. 256 p. $3.50 #39

Contemporary Israeli literature: fiction by Amos Oz, David Shahar, Yehuda Amichai, Pinchas Sadeh, A.B. Yehoshua.

Poetry by Amichai, Dan Pagis, Abba Kovner and others. After­ word by Robert Alter. 342 p. $4.25

#40

Ongoing American Fiction VI: Sean Connolly, Paul Theroux, Mary Morris, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Anania, Cynthia Ozick, Virgil Burnett, Joseph McElroy and 14 more. 280 p. $4.25

#41

Longer Fiction: novellas by Charles Newman and Arthur A. Cohen. A section of "LETTERS" by John Barth. 242 p. $4.25

#42 Men and Women: featuring Manuel Puig, Penelope Gilliatt,

Joseph McElroy, Maxine Kumin, William Gass, Joy Williams and 12 more. Illustrated by Brad Holland. 380 p. $4.25

#44 Four NoveUas: by Virgil Burnett, Peter Collier, Stanley Elkin and Oakley HaU. Illustrated by Jim Matusik. 380 p. $4.50 #45 War Stories: 14 stories by Jay Neugeboren, Milovan Djilas, Ian

MacMillan, Arnost Lustig, Kent Anderson, Larry Heinemann, Benedict Kiely and others. 320 p. $4.50 #46 Fiction: by Arturo Vivante, Maxine Kumin, Francine Prose,

Nicholas Delbanco, John Hawkes, Bruce Chatwin, Cyra McFad­

den, Ted Solotaroff, William Kittredge, Meredith Steinbach and nine more. 296 p. $5.95 #47 Love/Hate: fiction by Robert Stone, Oakley Hall, Joyce Carol

Oates, Angela Carter, Herbert Gold, Alfred GiUespie, Victor Power and seven more. lllustrated by Diane Blell. 352 p. $5.95 #48 Western Stories: 19 stories, by Cormac McCarthy, Ivan Doig, John Sayles, Thomas McGuane, Leslie Silko, Raymond Carver,

Dorothy M. Johnson, and others. 298 p, $5.95 #49 Science Fiction: featuring Thomas Disch, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany and others. With an introduction by A.J. Budrys, 262 p. $5.95

#50 Fiction: by Thomas McGuane, Jonathan Penner, Robert Stone, Alan Sillitoe, Helen Chasin, Arturo Vivante, Arnost Lustig,

Richard Stem and others. 256 p. $5.95 #51 Fiction: by Gunter Grass, Joseph McElroy, Mary Morris, Pam

Durban, R.L. Shafner, Amos Oz, James McManus, Janet Beeler Shaw, Tobias Wolff and others. 284 p. $5.95 #52 Freedom in American Art and Culture: Theodore Lidz, Robert

Coles, Jonathan Schiller, Richard Schechner, David Hayman, Peter Gena, Greil Marcus and others. 296 p. $5.95 #53 General issue: fiction by Arnost Lustig, Stanley Elkin, Arturo

Vivante, Joseph McElroy and others; interview with Robert Stone; essay by Thomas LeClair. Photographic portfolio of

sculpture by Magdalena Abakanowicz. 280 p. $5.95

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