MUSICAGE. John Cage

for the world’s problems from the work of, most notably, Buckminster Fuller, but also Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Huang Po, and other Western socio-philosophical and Eastern spiritual thinkers. Both Fuller and Cage, like most of the reformers and revolutionaries of the sixties, believed at that time that if the means to dramatically improve human life on the planet were made clear and available, people would have the good sense to use them—to do what needed to be done. Cage’s lifelong project could in fact be summed up as trying to figure out what needed to be done and doing it. In 1958, in his “History of Experimental Music in the U.S.,” he had written,

      Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)? And I would answer, “In order to thicken the plot.” In this view, then, all those interpenetrations which seem at first glance to be hellish—history, for instance, if we are speaking of experimental music—are to be espoused. One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be done.¹¹

      Cage’s 1967 “Diary” entry ends on this hopeful note, conceived as both utopian and pragmatic:

      If

      we get through 1972, Fuller says, we’ve

      got it made. 1972 ends the present

      critical period. Following present

      trends, fifty per cent of the world’s

      population will then have what they need.

      The other fifty per cent will rapidly

      join their ranks. Say by the year 2000.¹²

      I, for one, certainly wanted to contribute to the coming of this kind of world, which at that point, 1968—with student uprisings in the name of “the revolution” going on around the world—seemed already visible on the horizon. I felt the Justice Department could benefit from the sources of that vision. Some of my long-range ideas, in what actually turned out to be a very short-run situation, had to do with rethinking the language of government in the U. S. (specifically at “Justice”), and community arts projects along the lines of things going on at the Institute for Policy Studies, both as substitutes for incarceration and to begin conversations between the Justice Department and citizens from disparate economic classes and communities. Cage found this of interest and suggested that we meet at what was then his favorite Greek restaurant in New York, the Parthenon on West 42nd Street. When he arrived he was in a particularly ebullient mood, saying that it really was heartening that the Justice Department had hired R. G. H. (Ralph) Siu, whom I think he knew through Siu’s essay “Zen and Science—‘No-knowledge’ ” in Nancy Wilson Ross’s book, The World of Zen.¹³ He found it equally heartening that Siu had hired me to do what I was doing, and absolutely marvelous that others in the Justice Department (Robert Emrich had come with me to tape the interview) might be interested in the opinions of Buckminster Fuller and himself! Cage always felt that he and Fuller were working on the same social project in different ways.

      Unfortunately, this is about all I remember of our conversation. Cage had ordered a bottle of Retsina for the table. He thought it was wonderful and generously refilled our glasses. When the first bottle was empty, Cage ordered a second. I got through the lunch conversation with some superficial level of coherence but by the time it was over I was completely drunk. I had a blinding headache throughout the next day, which rendered the whole experience a blurred and fragmented memory. I do recall that Cage himself was tipsy by the end of our long, two-bottle lunch. When we left the restaurant he stepped off the curb to cross the street, smiling and waving goodbye, and came very close to being struck by a speeding cab.

      Buckminster Fuller arrived in Washington wearing three wrist-watches and sprinted about like a 73-year-old, turbocharged elf.¹⁴ He was also delighted, even excited, by the “Justice Department’s” interest in his and Cage’s opinions. He seemed to think (as I think many of us did at the time) that the new era was beginning. The Fuller interview took place over an entire day, beginning in the morning at National Airport, moving on to my apartment, then to a downtown restaurant, and finally to his room at the Mayflower Hotel. Fuller had room service deliver a large urn of hot tea, an extra pot of hot water, and a dozen tea bags. He explained that his dietary convictions included eating a single meal a day and, as much as possible, flooding the system with a constant stream of hot liquid. This meant that the interview—which at the Mayflower became a dazzling monologue—was taped in 10- to 15-minute segments between Fuller’s trips to the bathroom. His talk throughout the day had ranged from the way in which social values are reflected in public structures to prison reform to structural integrities, which, at around 8 P.M.—close to his bedtime—turned into a theory of eternal life. Fuller, who had turned off his hearing aid while maintaining almost unblinking eye contact (never closing his eyes as I saw him do on other occasions), said this was the best explanation he had ever given of these matters and asked that a transcript of the tapes be sent to him as soon as possible.

      I gave the Cage and Fuller interview tapes to a secretary at the Justice Department for transcription. Not long afterwards, with Johnson having relinquished his bid for a second term, Humphrey lost the election to Nixon, and the secretary, probably daunted by the unfamiliar content of the tapes, was taking such a long time on them that, before I could get them back, the Nixon team took over. Ralph Siu was immediately replaced, and a Nixon appointee, Charles Rogovin, lost no time in requesting that I write a memo and then meet with him in order to explain just what it was I had been doing. He declined to renew my contract. Everything I had done—notes, memos, seminar papers, tapes, and any transcripts that may have existed—was confiscated and “classified.” My request for the return of my materials, particularly the tapes, of which we had not made copies, was refused.

      Of course I was mortified—about, among other things, having wasted Fuller’s and Cage’s time—as well as depressed at the enormity of what Nixon’s election meant for the country. I saw Cage now and then at concerts after that but didn’t approach him. I had retreated into a period of my life that’s hard to characterize; I was trying to come up with a way of continuing to work—in visual art, and as a poet and essayist. The next time I spoke to John Cage was when he came to D.C. for events in celebration of his seventieth birthday. After his reading performance at the Washington Project for the Arts, I said hello without really reintroducing myself. He seemed very remote and I had the feeling he didn’t remember me.

      Around that time, the early 1980s, I was writing multidirectional essays that often began or ended with Wittgenstein or Cage. I was invited to participate in a symposium at the Strathmore Hall Arts Center Cage-Fest in May 1989 in Rockville, Maryland, where I read an essay entitled “Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2: John Cage—May 18, 2005.”¹⁵ Among other things, it placed Cage’s work within the American pragmatist aesthetic articulated by John Dewey in Art as Experience. Cage thanked me for the essay, saying with great emotion, “With what you say about Dewey it all makes sense. For years I have lived under the shadow of Susanne K. Langer.”¹⁶ After that, as we came to work together on the conversations project, and as we came to be friends, he would say periodically, more or less out of the blue, “You know, Joan, that essay says it all.” This was, of course, gratifying to me. But it also made me feel, periodically, not so much that I had said it all, but perhaps that I had said enough. That saying more would be too much. That may indeed be the case. But the work on and with Cage has continued, up to this book.

      In the summer of 1990, Rod Smith, the publisher-editor of Aerial magazine, who had attended the Cage-Fest in Rockville and become a great admirer of Cage’s work, decided to dedicate a large portion of his next issue to John Cage through the publication of the long lecture-poem Cage had read in Rockville, “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else,” along with a selection of his macrobiotic recipes. (Cage was no longer drinking Retsina, nor for that matter eating most of what his favorite Greek restaurant had served. He had also, by this time, come to love Wittgenstein.) Rod Smith asked me if I would consider interviewing Cage for the issue. I had some trepidation about this, given what had happened the first time around, but my delight at having a second chance won out. I called Cage to ask him whether he would be willing to do this and he said yes.

      So,