MUSICAGE. John Cage

very stupid. But it’s for that reason, and mostly for that reason, that I’ve put in the program that the source text must identify at what point it said that. So that we know which “and” among all the “and”s in the source, which “and” was speaking. And that makes a difference to the wing words that are available.

      JR: So you’ve programed a smart and knowledgeable oracle.

      JC: Well it at least can tell from which part of the source it’s speaking.

      JR: What about the traditional association—

      JC: With oracle?

      JR: —With oracle, which is prophecy …

      JC: Yes, I hesitate to say anything because there I would go along with Duchamp, that the final speaker is the listener. And how the listener is listening we don’t know, because he or she hasn’t done it yet. So we don’t really know what the significance of anything is until it is heard. Isn’t that true? That every person responds in their own way? It must be true.

      JR: It certainly moves into Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as use—the listener then enacts the meaning through its use.

      JC: Yes, the work of art, as Duchamp said, is finished by the observer. I think it’s true. I, at least, believe it … to be true. And it explains so many things that happen that otherwise would be intolerable—that is to say, many books on the same subject all in disagreement, (laughter)

      JR: What about your conscious choices of words like “to make’ a poem,” or “to make’ a lecture,” rather than “to write”? I’ve noticed that you tend to say “to make.” Why?

      JC: Here I think I need an instance.

      JR: Well, in here [I-VI], when you speak of the process of putting the lectures together, you always say, “when I made this lecture” or “when I was making …” instead of “writing.” You’ve spoken of “writing through a text” elsewhere, but here, I don’t think you use the verb “to write.”

      JC: “Making” is more inclusive, isn’t it? For instance, it would include breathing with writing, hmm? It could include other things than just writing. It could include breathing … it could even include listening, so one would “make” a text partly by writing, partly by breathing, and partly by listening, don’t you think? “Making” seems to include more variety of possibilities, of kinds of action. That could even include, for instance, assistance from the computer, hmm? or calling upon the computer, or chance operations. Whereas “writing,” if I said I was “writing” something, that would leave out the fact that I was using a computer, hmm? Or one would have to say, while I was writing this, of course, I used a computer.

      JR: You speak somewhere of liking the fact that Wittgenstein spoke of “doing” philosophy.

      JC: Yes, I like that very much, don’t you?

      JR: Yes, and it seems to me—

      JC:—To fit.

      JR: —That “making” in the way you use it is a similar sort of thing. (pause) Back to the question of time—I know in your musical compositions you factor into the computer program silences, and that of course has a good deal to do with the way in which the listener experiences time. Is there any equivalent to silence here [in “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” or in I-VI] in your poetic composition?

      JC: Not here, but there could be if there were a performance given of this, as was given of the German poem where [each reader] did so many things in a minute. Or if, say, during a question-and-answer period, after having given this, I then passed out this lecture to everyone in the audience and I said, now you can do it all together. And you just say one—it would be hard here—one thing between two of these apostrophes, any one thing between two apostrophes. One phrase, in other words. Then it would work. And you would get a spatial time event that would be fascinating to hear. And especially when the people had all heard, or had access to, the material. This would then become the material, or the source of something else that had more to do with time than this has, hmm? What I’m trying to say is, if I make time brackets, or have time limitations—which I didn’t have when I wrote this—then time would enter.

      JR: I think time can become space on a page.

      JC: Yes.

      JR: That silence is the white space.

      JC: Yes.

      JR: The gaps, and unfilled line space on either side of the centered text. That is one way I experience silence in this text. I wondered if you—

      JC: No, I didn’t do that. And, because of that, I put in these apostrophes.

      JR: You often say that the principle you operate by in composing is to not make choices, but to ask questions. This work has involved both, more so perhaps than in your musical compositions? In your decisions about the wing words it has been—

      JC: Both choice and asking questions. Yes, I think that’s probably true. As you may have noticed, the people at Harvard were very puzzled over my saying “And then I take out the words I don’t want.” They didn’t see how a person using chance operations could afford to do that. (laughter)

      JR: And remain pure of heart? Does it have something to do with the fact that this is language and not sounds, not noise? Is there a kind of—

      JC: Yes, you see, if it were sounds, I would have been working in a different way. I would have been paying much more attention to time, hmm? I mean when the sound was being heard, arranging for its freedom to be in what I call time brackets—spaces of time, hmm? Here, I was paying attention to what I thought was the nature of language.

      JR: Which is?

      JC: Well it’s full of all sorts of things, like we said—sounds and meanings. The sound sometimes becomes so powerful that one can put meaning aside. And vice versa.

      JR: Can you imagine doing something now—with your mesostic poetry—like the work of Jackson Mac Low, in which the intentional semantic dimension gets entirely suppressed in the compositional methods? In some of his work—

      JC: Yes, it’s quite amazing and marvelous what he does. And I think he’s able to go on a richer exploration than I.

      JR: Why do you call it richer?

      JC: More differences. More kinds of differences. And you can tell that very much from the difference between my writing through Ezra Pound’s Cantos [“Writing through the Cantos,” X] and his; his one about endings and so forth. [Words nd Ends from Ez] And I still don’t understand what he did, but I admire it deeply, what he did, and what happens as he does it. The thing that gives me courage to continue in spite of the fact that he’s working is that he tends to use a more restricted source, a more limited source, a more defined source. And I tend toward a multiplicity I think. And—well, I don’t really know that I have much to say about that difference. His work … but, I love his work, and somehow I think that I’m doing something sufficiently different so that I have a right to do it.

      JR: Last night Jackson was showing me a procedure in which he uses language from some of his intuitively written poetry as source text for new poems subject to chance operations. He’s running the source poems through two consecutive computer programs—DIASTEXT and TRAVESTY.

      JC: It’s the nature of the program …

      JR: It’s the nature of the program to rearrange the language and make selections.

      JC: And it’s with respect to something he’s already written, hmm?

      JR: Yes. Once it goes into the programs, he gives up choice except to select out clumps of lines pretty much, if not entirely, intact. In other words he notices and separates out poems in the continuous readout that the second program gives him. Last night as I was looking over his shoulder he said, Ah, there’s a short one! He took out five successive lines and used the first two words of the first line as the title, so he had that poem. The kind and degree