MUSICAGE. John Cage

procedure, as I understand it, appears to have no semantic relation to the source text.

      JC: “No semantic” means the connections of one are different from the connections of the other?

      JR: Yes, there’s no attempt to “be true to” the spirit or the meaning of the source text in the way you are trying to be. It strikes me as very interesting that you are exploring similar territory and yet—

      JC: Working differently. I think we’re very fortunate to be living in a period when poetry is more interesting, more useful than it has been. I’m astonished at the number of things I receive in the mail that are actually readable, (laughter) And enjoyable. There’s a little magazine—have you run into it?—called Lynx. It comes from the Northwest and it’s a journal of renga. And, there’s another field where the kind of poetry has been, I would say, inferior [as] practiced in the United States. That is, haiku and renga and things like that have been taken over by the sort of artsy and craftsy people, hmm? It’s a very difficult thing to do. I suspect that in the use of those [Japanese] characters there’s more ambiguity than there is in the use of English words. Apparently you can take a few characters of Japanese, or Chinese, and not know for sure what’s being said.

      JR: I learned that from you in the introduction to Themes & Variations, where you say there isn’t the same mono-directional syntactic order in Japanese.

      JC: Right. And we need to change our language if we’re going to have that experience.

      JR: I agree that this is an exciting time for poetry, and particularly in this country.

      JC: Yes, you can actually read what you find.

      JR: And I think a lot of what is good and readable is related to your work.

      JC: Don’t you think the idea of working with language in an exploratory way is in the air? And many, many people are doing it, and, as you said, in different ways. That’s what’s so refreshing about it. It’s not as though it were a tic on the part of one person.

      JR: I see links with the turn-of-the-century Vienna that spawned Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s fascination with language, and Karl Kraus too, who was doing analyses of public uses of language. It was a time when public usage had become frighteningly detached from a sense of reality—was no longer helpful in trying to figure out what to think and how to live in the world situation that was developing—very much in the way our language appeared, from Vietnam on, to become increasingly detached and skewed in the public arena. There seems to be some sort of dialectic between public use of language and what poets begin to feel they need to do—those who feel the need to explore the medium of language itself…. Poets often feel that audiences are much more resistant to experimentation with language than they are to experimentation with any other medium. Part of that seems to have to do with an almost biological conservatism about language—because of the sense that you have to use it in practical ways, for survival.

      JC: To make sense.

      JR: To make sense. I wonder how you feel about that?

      JC: I think this actually benefits poetry now, that conservatism. Because it enriches the field in which one can work. You don’t have to search for things to do. You can do so many different things … to bring about change. It’s because of the fixity of convention, that the unfixity of experimentation is increased, (laughs) It’s … it’s a rather silly idea to express, but it makes the field of possibility greater.

      JR: Do you have a sense that the medium [language] itself is somehow resistant in any way? Does that ever feel like a limitation to you?

      JC: Not now. It probably did to begin with. It’s actually through Jackson’s work that I was stimulated to do as I’m doing. And Clark Coolidge. Both of them.

      JR: You were in touch with their work around the same time?

      JC: Yes, I gave a class in experimental music composition at the New School for Social Research, and Jackson was in the class. The major activity of the class was the performance of the work of the students, and Jackson always had done something, so we heard a great deal of his work.

      JR: And how did you come across Clark Coolidge?

      JC: He made a magazine—I don’t now remember the name of it—I think when he was still at Brown University as a student, or maybe he was a teacher or a graduate student.²² But he began a magazine up there and that was how I began “Diary: How to Improve the World”—it was for him. And it tells that in A Year from Monday and says what the name of the magazine was [Joglars, Providence, R.I., V. 1, No. 3]. He wasn’t yet known as the poet he is now. And you see what I did for him was not in any sense what I’m doing now, but it did go into another field than I’d been in. So when he saw what I had done, he said it was a kind of a breakthrough. And all it was of course was that I was fragmenting the text and then writing it, not linearly, but according to how many numbers of words I needed to write. I would frequently write near the beginning, and then near the end, and then in the middle, and so on until I got the whole thing filled up. That was a different way of writing from this. This is back to a kind of—you could say it’s a chance-controlled linearity. But, coming from different parts of the source text, it has a curious kind of globality which is not linear. It’s like, you said this a moment ago too, it seems to be this and that—to combine different kinds of qualities.

      JR: Well it seems to have multiple vectors.

      JC: Uh huh. One thing I like too is that from poem to poem there will be, because of the difference and sameness of the source texts, there get to be resonances here and there of different things in different lights of different things. But that, Joan, is in terms of what we call content, or meaning, and where I would say that it’s different for every person reading it who recognizes how it hits them. And the same thing will hit two different people differently.

      JR: Do you feel that absolutely? If someone attends closely to this text—

      JC: That two people will feel differently?

      JR: —And someone else doesn’t attend closely, could one “get it wrong”?

      JC: No, because it isn’t right to begin with. (laughter)

      JR: What do you mean by that?

      JC: Well, I probably am not being honest. Because, relying on the breathing would make me want it to be one way rather than another. And there is something of that in it. But the fact that there’s no ordinary syntax in it makes it so that someone reading that breath could feel it differently. And then the question is, is the one breath—the one I had—right, and someone else’s breath wrong? I don’t think so. (pause) It’s hard to say. Or to say honestly.

      JR: To say honestly …

      JC: With certainty. With certainty.

      JR: Critics and educators are concerned about this question: is there a totally open field of response to a text, or does the nature of the text delimit an “appropriate” range of response? Is it that whatever you feel at the moment, whatever comes to mind when you are experiencing a text is the meaning of that text? Or do the particularities of form and content have some kind of stabilizing effect on meaning? So that it is possible to get it wrong in a way that it might not be possible to get a piece of music wrong—just because a text has a cognitive component. You might misunderstand something.

      JC: Because of the nature of language.

      JR: Yes.

      JC: (long pause) I, I’m inclined to think, oh, that each way of hearing it is right. I’m inclined that way. I can’t see anything wrong in each way’s being right. (laughter)

      JR: Do you have a sense of being a realist as an artist? Actually, what I have written here [in preliminary notes] is, “Will you say something about your complex realism’?” Does that term sound right to you?

      JC: Yes. Yes, I think so. One of the first persons to draw this kind of feeling to our attention, or my attention, was Mondrian. He spoke about reality.