MUSICAGE. John Cage

the catalog. I put a space between each one of his remarks. I didn’t really do any eliminating or changing. And when he noticed that mistake, I was worried, and when I went back to the book I saw that I hadn’t made a mistake. Seems silly, but that kind of thing is very descriptive of him, you see.

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

      JC: Yes, yes, exactly.

      JR: Then, when you moved from—

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

      JR: And what role did the mesostic strings play?

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

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

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

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

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

      JR: And what determined the order of the strings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      JR: No. I didn’t know that.

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

      JR: The moment you say that—

      JC: Then you can recognize it.

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

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

      JR: How long has he been reading Wittgenstein?

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

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

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

      JR: I do. Very much so.

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

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

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

      JR: “That,” meaning the difficulty?

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

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

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

      JR: This whole