MUSICAGE. John Cage

of his work, the most astonishing thing about his mode of being in the world. It caught him, and those with him, like a fresh wind, a sudden aperture opening up in the matrix of the moment. His laughter, his humor, became more and more spiritual in its sources over the years, but with no decrease in gusto. Cage’s spirituality was not at all “transcendent” in the sense of removal from daily life but in fact a constant return to pragmatic concerns with a resonant sense of the interconnectedness of things—that we are all, persons and environment, “in it” together. The “it” that we are in is the chaos of this teeming, cacophonic, carnivalesque globe. And though we must all be respected as individual agents, our interconnectedness makes each of us responsible to the overall social and environmental framework we share. The positive (fresh) vision of beauty—the source of humor and pleasure—is anarchic harmony, a multiplicity of voices along the multidirectional staves of paradox. Not Paradise Lost (we never had it) but Paradox Lost (or do I mean found?)—the real tragedy of Western Civ is the separation from complexity.

      JOHN CAGE: PARADOX REGAINED?

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

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

      JOHN CAGE: EXSTATIC

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

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

      —JOHN CAGE⁴⁶

       The dry winter wind

       Brings along with it

      The sound of somewhere.

      (Shinsei, Blyth, p. 530)

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

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

      PARADOX NOW

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

       How can I write sound that is silent?

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

      —JOHN CAGE, remarks at Stanford University, 1992⁴⁷

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

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

      —JOHN CAGE, Stanford, 1992

      JOHN CAGE: SILENCE

       Flowers? Very good

       Play? All right

      I am ready, he will say.

      (Unattributed, Blyth, p. vi)

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

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

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

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

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

      They die

      As if they had won

      A prize in a lottery.

      (Kazuji, Blyth,