MUSICAGE. John Cage

      NOTES

      John Cage’s “Anarchy” (quoted in chapter epigraph) is printed in John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. Richard Fleming and William Duckworth (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 122.

      The MESOLIST program, used in all of Cage’s mesostics that employ chance operations, was developed by Jim Rosenberg. In his introduction to I–IV Cage credits Norman O. Brown with having come up with the term “mesostics” for the way Cage was writing these acrostic-like compositions with the key letters running down the middle of the text. Early on, Cage wrote his mesostic compositions directly, without the use of MESOLIST, with the capitalized meso-letters serving to gather associations to what were often strings of proper names. Later, as in “Art Is Either …,” he also began to use the more complicated chance operations described in the conversation that follows, where both meso-letters and source text serve as oracles when utilized with the assistance of the MESOLIST and IC computer programs. The IC program was written by Andrew Culver, the composer who worked for eleven years as Cage’s assistant. It simulates the coin oracle of the I Ching.

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

      John Cage and Joan Retallack

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

      THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      JC: She called yesterday, yes.

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

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

      JR: What do you mean?

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

      JR: That’s so “reasonable.”

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

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

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

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

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

      JR: —Antagonistic—

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

      JR: When you said “a kind of global intelligence” what came to mind was our relatively thin layer of neocortex that overlays all of that other brain that isn’t rational, and I wonder if the optimism of which you speak is not the optimism of, again, a high culture—occupying a small part of the brain and a small part of the general population on the globe. I ask this because, in trying to understand the Middle East situation myself—before the Gulf