MUSICAGE. John Cage

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

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

      —Andrew Solomon³⁴

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

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

      —Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)

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

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

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

      and

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

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

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

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

      JOHN CAGE: HUMORIST

      Q: How could so much humor be so serious?

      A: How could so much seriousness be so humorous?

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

      The (laughter)