Afterword(s)

[23. Po / Splitting Apart, Unchanging] 

Not knowing exactly what day a year from Monday—the day eight of us had arranged to meet in Mexico—would be, I decided it was early June 1967. When people wrote or called asking me to do something that month, I said No…then it occurred to me—see the last paragraph of the Foreword—that I was the only one taking the trip to Mexico seriously…What we have to do, then, is not to say Yes or to say No, but simply to go straight on illiterately, updating the way of life Meister Eckhart proposed (just following the general outlines of the Christian life, “not wondering am I right or doing something wrong”)…

—John Cage, afterword to  A Year From Monday

  

Today marks the end of this blog, a year from Monday, September 5^th, 2011 on the centennial date of John Cage’s birth, right here in Los Angeles at Good Samaritan Hospital, just a few miles from my small apartment in East Hollywood, where I began and ended this project. It also marks the end of my dissertation fellowship, which means many long hours of teaching music history, the long and epic tale of a tradition that was in many senses anathema to Cage’s artistic program (and in others wholly in line with it), but which is nevertheless a way of life for academics such as myself. I am preparing many exciting events for this fall, including a panel discussion on “Cage Studies” at the national convention of the American Musicological Society this November, with Laura Kuhn and a host of Cage scholars, along with several publication preparations.

I have been pondering how to end this blog, and asking myself if an ending really matters, as Cage alluded to in the afterword to A Year From Monday. In every sense, it was the concept behind this blog that kept me going, week after week, even during vacation months, hectic writing deadline schedules, and all the daily, weekly, and monthly distractions that go along with the messiness of everyday life. I feel that some posts were especially enlightening for my own research, others perhaps a bit by the book, and others even still less than engaging, but it was the process of reading through, week after week, that I found most valuable, and I hope some of these posts will provide a valuable, or at the least provocative, resource for others to build on. As I’ve told many people over the last year, at the very least, I am proud of the concept behind this blog, and the title.

I did not intend to cover all of Cage’s writings in one year, as some may have guessed from the title of this blog, but rather to pick one or two essays each week and write between 1000-2000 words; a few weeks were a bit slimmer, and several were much longer - in total this blog amounts to approximately 80-90,000 words. The writing style varied, from slips of colloquialism to discursive academic prose, all fitting for a forum that is meant to be an informal discussion of ideas, links, images, and content to be cataloged and indexed in the endless algorithms of cyberspace. If and when I take down this blog, I have little doubt that remnants will remain cached on servers for years, ghosts of information once gained and again lost, in an endless cycle of rebirth that, even in the cyber age, continues to frame our corporeal existence.

For those of you first reaching this page, welcome. For those returning one last time, goodbye. If you are wondering what any of this means, please click on the link on the right margin labeled “About This Blog.” A special thanks to ARK, who followed me from beginning to end, adding notes of encouragement and criticism nearly every week, and  cultivating something personal and wonderful that I will cherish for the rest of my life. 

I found the final I-Ching reading to be wonderfully apt, as it often is when one is asking the right questions. The first post to this blog received the unchanging hexagram No. 35. Chin/Progress, which, according to the Bollingen translation, "represents the sun rising over the earth, a symbol of rapid, easy progress, which at the same time means ever widening expansion and clarity." Today's reading was another unchanging hexagram, No. 23. Po/Splitting Apart, and the image represents an end to all things corporeal: 

THE IMAGE:

The mountain rests on the earth;

The image of SPLITTING APART

Thus those above can ensure their position

Only by giving generously to those below.

I’ll conclude with one final note of thanks, to the one individual who made this all possible, Mr. John Milton Cage Jr. himself, born September 5^th 1912. Happy Birthday Mr. Cage. 

Cage with Cake - The John Cage Trust 

Richard H. Brown
September 5th, 2012
Los Angeles, California

“Series re Morris Graves” (1973)

[20. Kuan / Contemplation (View), Six in the Third Place. Changing To:  53. Chien / Development (Gradual Progress)]

                                                3:00 A.M. Irish tenor singing

loudly in our living room. Without knocking, having left

       his bed, Graves entered, carrying wooden

birdcage, bottom of which

was missing, plopped it over the tenor’s head, said nothing, left the

room. No further singing that

night.

This is the final Monday post of this blog (I’ll end with a final post a year from Monday, September 5^th 2011 this Wednesday), and I decided to end my weekly ritual with an interesting later essay, “Series re Morris Graves,” where Cage looks back reflectively at his time in Seattle, where he first met Graves at the Cornish School in Seattle. I’m feeling a bit reflective myself, but I’ll save the retrospective for September 5^th.

Cage’s essay on Graves was composed in a format similar to the “Diary” entries and other essays from his later period, whereby he arranged a series of anecdotes with differing page layouts, indents and so forth across the page. Interspersed among the anecdotes are a series of nonsyntactical dance-chants of I-Ching determined syllables of names and words from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna arranged according to metrical patterns from one of Cage’s first works for percussion, his Quartet (1936 or 1937 – not 1935 as Cage later annotated in the autograph score).  The anecdote surrounding Cage’s first meeting with Morris Graves was repeated often, and is outlined and referred to throughout the essay. Cage was performing his Quartet, along with several other percussion works at the Cornish school in 1939 and Graves, ready to play the part of resident heckler, arrived at the concert with a bag of peanuts and pretend-lorgnettes. At the start of the third movement, he threw his head back and screamed “Jesus in the Everywhere!,” and was subsequently dragged out of the concert hall. The two became friends the next day.

Graves’ Dada antics surely influenced and amused the young Cage, perhaps more so than his actual paintings; Cage speaks less of Graves’ style and aesthetic than other contemporaries of the Pacific Northwest school of artists. As I mentioned in an earlier post on Mark Tobey, there is an excellent book on the relationship between Graves, Tobey, and Cage assembled by Wulf Herzogenrath, Sounds of the Inner Eye.  

I’ll admit that some of these anecdotes are harder to pin down, as I am not as familiar with Graves’ oeuvre, but the undertone is, like many other artist essays, very personal and affectionate, outlining the various interactions between the two artists throughout their careers. The nonsyntactical interjections are particularly striking. Take the following example, which highlights the memorable first encounter:

CHAI yaCHAI

                     TANyaCHAITANyaCHAITANyaTANyaCHAITANyaTAN

                    yayaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAITAN

                 yaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAI

                                                                                    Finally, the master himself

                                                 sends various things to the house, such

                      as a carpet, a hubble-bubble for smoking, and the like.

                                Friedman-Kein saw thirty Instruments for New

                                  Navigation, elements for forty more. Told Duncan

                                                         Phillips how marvelous they were. NASA

                  invited Graves to Goddard Space Flight Center and Cape

                        Kennedy to discuss aesthetics of orbital travel. Came

                    to the concert with friends, a large bag of peanuts, and

                                       lorgnette with doll’s eyes suspended in it. “If

                                                he does anything upsetting, take him out.”

                                                                     After the slow movement, he said:

                    Jesus in the Everywhere. That was taken as the signal

It would be tempting to correlate the specific excerpts to the exact rhythmic groupings in the final movement of Cage’s Quartet, perhaps revealing a bit about this underanalyzed early piece.

As the text progresses, the font alternates between very large and very small, perhaps reflecting the “pontifical” nature of certain anecdotes, as Cage had done with his Darmstadt lectures.

Lost in the forest, don’t move around; stay in one place. That way you will be at the center, and the center will act as a magnet, a magnet for those who are searching.

“Where are We Eating? and What Are We Eating?” (1975)

[17. Sui / Following, Nine at the Top. Changing To:  51. Chên / The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)]

After Merce got the Guggenheim Fellowship, someone asked him what he was going to do with all that money. Answer was monosyllabic: eat!

Now that I’m getting older, I think I understand what Wittgenstein had in mind. He said if he found anything he could eat he would stick to it and not eat anything else.

“Where Are We Eating…” was originally written for James Klosty’s 1975 book, Merce Cunningham, and is a play on the theme of his 1961 essay published in Silence, “Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?” The latter essay, as I mentioned in an earlier post, consisted of four simultaneous conversations that formed a sort of analytic joke built around Cage’s encounter with Wittgenstein, and the former essay contains the same ethos and tone, in contrast to the other nonsyntacitcal investigations Cage was undergoing in his later text-based works.

As the essay title alludes, the topic here is simple: food. Cage and company, whether it was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, David Tudor, or any other group of traveling artists surrounding his life and work, always integrated food and dining into the overall aesthetic of art and life, interpenetration, and silence. Food for Cage was an important ritual bonding experience, a site of social activity and interaction, curiosity, exploration, and daring; nothing was beyond Cage’s palate, and as the MCDC tours increased in their regional and international scope, so too did their culinary forays into multicultural and ethnic delicacies.

I find the tone of this essay very down to earth; Cage is not afraid to expose colloquialisms, (Merce “got” a fellowship, *gasp* - how provincial!), and the essay, like many of the anecdotes peppering earlier books, is reassuringly homely, like discussing the weather with an old uncle.

Cage opens the essay discussing his recent conversion to a macrobiotic diet, a regimen that avoids refined or process foods that was very much in favor in the 1970s social circles in New York. It was Yoko Ono and John Lennon that famously introduced Cage to the diet, as the star-studded anecdote famously goes, and by all measures Cage added a decade or more onto his life by moving away from the artery clogging Midwestern diet of butter, cream, hard liquor and cheap starches.

The essay itself reads like an excellent cookbook peppered with food reviews, and moves along in a decidedly relaxed pace; I found myself easily skimming through it, in contrast to other more difficult essays, such as “The Future of Music” from last week, where Cage tends to fall prey to the academicization of text through heady clauses buried beneath commas, dashes, and semicolons.

This is as much a diary of the comings and goings of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as it is about food or anything else in particular, and it alludes to the carefree early years, when Cage and company hopped in the VW microbus and toured the country, pulling over at roadhouses for the best hamburger or fried chicken in the tri-state area, or cozying up to the fire while grilling streaks in a national park. Carolyn Brown described these idyllic pastoral years, when, to assuage the internal tensions between dancers and Merce, Cage maintained a carefree and adventurous atmosphere as company cook, driver, accountant, and, oftentimes, company therapist. Consider this paragraph, which quickly moves through a collage of scenes, imagery, tastes, and emotions:

In order to crossover backstage you had

to go outdoors and around the

back. No matter how much authority

and energy the dancers displayed to the

audiences at Wheeler Hall, offstage

they were immediately forced to be

timid and cautious: it was dark; stage

wings were dangerous stairways.

Dancers’ requirement: swimming pool and

color TV. At home over chicken dinner,

Victor Hamburger described his work with

chickens. He alters their embryos so

when they hatch they have more or

less eyes or legs, for instance, and

in different places than chickens

normally have and do. I was

hungry. Jean gave me a bag of peanuts

in their shells. Barbara said I

sounded like a squirrel. We stopped and I

had a bowl of chili. Returned to

the bus and began shelling peanuts

again.

Equal parts wit, humor, and caricature, and altogether odd; if ever there were a way to describe Cage’s own personal natural voice (an intentions mind you…), this essay is it. But at the same time, this is not an artistic manifesto, nor is it a statement on the aesthetic of silence or any other ideological dogma - it is Cage recounting a lifetime of touring, food, good company, and pleasure, an essay penned for a book on his life partner, and it isn’t until the final paragraph that the subject of not just this, but likely many other essays in some shape or form, emerges:

There’s a

rumor Merce’ll stop. Ten years ago, London

critic said he was too old. He himself

says he’s just getting a running start.

Annalie Newman says he’s like wine:

He improves with age. 

“The Future of Music” (1974)

[26. Ta Ch'u / The Taming Power of the Great, Unchanging.]

Silence isn’t as generally upsetting as it used to be.

Today I am reading through Cage’s summit statement on “The Future of Music,” a rhetorical trope begun with his influential and often misdated ca. 1940 essay, “The Future of Music: Credo.” Noticeably, this is the last essay from Cage’s published collections that is entirely in essay format, devoid of any precompositional limiting or randomization procedures. It is a direct statement on the state of contemporary music, similar in effect to “History of Experimental Music in The United States” (1958), but written in a less emphatic tone of ethical necessity.

Cage was 62 years old when he wrote this essay, and in many ways I consider it a summit statement on the range and influence of his life and work, at least in the traditional sense. Certainly there are later essays that, through many levels of coding, assert some form of ideological Cagean discourse, but this essay in particular comes at a critical juncture in which the Cage aesthetic had, as Cage himself notes, more or less been adopted by a new cadre of artists—the first of many “post-Cage” generations. And, once again, it is his last published essay in the Wesleyan series that follows a linear narrative structure.

Thus the initial shock of experimental music, as Cage notes in the first few paragraphs, has waned as more and more people adopt and absorb the new intellectual and creative license granted by the neo-avant-garde generation and beyond.  “Almost anyone who listens to sound now listens easily no matter what overtone structures the sounds have,” Cage observes, and thus, “we no longer discriminate against noises.”

Cage makes many allusions to racial and social justice in conjunction with this newfound musical and artistic plurality: the ultimate goal of liberal politics, and the summit achievement of Cagean discourse. Out of tune sounds are now identified as microtones, and the notion of “world” music in the early post-colonialist stance has lead to a homogenization of international styles and tastes. Silence, rhythm, harmony and the general notion of process have been absorbed by a diverse range of artists, including La Monte Young, Ben Johnston, Elliot Carter and Conlon Nancarrow (although these two are admittedly from Cage’s generation, yet he seems to want to categorize them in the new expansionism of post-Cagean discourse).

Everywhere Cage seems to situate artists and performers in and around his own social and artistic milieu, as he had done in many past essays. This is certainly not a fault, the essay is meant to summarize the state of contemporary music and possible future directions, and Cage was particularly adept at formulating a specific historical narrative that outlines methods, attitudes, and philosophies within the general trajectory of the neo-avant-garde in America.

On the third page of the essay Cage demurely describes the current state of acceptance as a general attitude of conviviality; minimalist composers in particular, such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, are lumped into a category that Cage seems to want to push away from, although his formulation for a stance in opposition to the minimalist aesthetic is somewhat convoluted:

The difference between closed-mindedness and open-mindedness resembles the difference between the critical and creative faculties, or the difference between information about something (or knowledge even) and that something itself.

This seems to be a formulation similar to the minimalist goal of eradicating illusionism and a priori systems by creating an anti-gestalt object. This, however, overlooks the difference between minimalist aesthetics in sculpture and those in music, particularly Reich’s thesis of music as a “gradual process,” and it seems that  Cage was attempting to equate his own notion of “sounds as sounds” with minimalism. This is something that is worth looking into, as several scholars are now realizing, but in the context of this project such an essay would be beyond the project of reading through.

Instead of following through with this inquiry, Cage, as usual, jumps to something entirely different, equating the minimalist aesthetic and open-mindedness with a new cultural plurality that would have many post-colonialists shudder. But, as I have mentioned before, this continues to be a difficult aspect of Cage’s high modernist liberalism for cultural theorists and critical musicologists to parse. Noticeably, on the following page Cage equates cultural plurality with technocratic idealism; it is through advancements in communication and recording technologies that we are given a global sense of musical identity. This again is an academic notion that quickly fell out of favor, although there is a resurgence of global cultural identity in the post web 2.0 millennial age, but it’s too soon to really give this any theoretical grounds.  

By the fifth page Cage returns to a familiar notion of what Benjamin Piekut has described as his “hegemonic liberalism,” which I have discussed in the past. Cage’s “freedom of choice” ideology was brought about by advancements in communications, recording, and synthesis technologies, and yet this expansion of opportunity in many circles resulted in a formulation of a new discourse meant to promote a singular version of liberalism, one endorsed by those sympathetic to the fundamental tenants of liberalism in America, and one that continued to exclude many racial and ethnic minorities. Again, it would be difficult and perhaps irrelevant to directly implicate Cage in this complex web of societal change that America went through during the depression of the 1970s, especially when considering the ideological backlash of 1980s conservatism that was soon to come forth after the publication of Cage’s final Wesleyan monograph in the early 80s.

Overall I would consider this one of the most intriguing essays of the “late-Cage” period, primarily for its many contradictions and overt political references. As a cultural artifact it represents the state of Cagean discourse in the 1970s and the gradual adoption of Cagean notions of liberalism in the academy and beyond, creating a platform for subsequent generations to forge their own notions of just what it means to be “post-Cage.” Cage was always elusive and often contradictory, as this essay proves, and it would take more than a blog post like this to truly give the essay justice. To date I have yet to see an in-depth investigation of the post-Cage influence, or of the concept of “late Cage” in general, and in my mind this essay would be an excellent starting point.

In the conclusion Cage cites the infamous anecdote when Henry David Thoreau accidentally set fire to the woods near Walden pond. The fire soon spread to nearby Concord, causing $2,000 in damage ($50,000 in 2010 dollars). Thoreau was for years known as the “woods burner,” an early fumble that could have permanently set his place in history as an eccentric lost in the woods. But as Cage notes, Thoreau embraced the accident, citing the wealth it brought to the forest through rejuvenation of the natural effect of “nature’s broom” on the natural cycles of the forest. In the penultimate paragraph, Cage places a rather stark observation that he very well could have considered similar to his own legacy.

Emerson said that Thoreau could have been a great leader of men, but that he ended up simply as the captain of huckleberry-picking-parties for children. But Thoreau’s writing determined the actions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi, and the Danes in their light-hearted resistance to Hitler’s invasion. India. Nonviolence…The change is not disruptive. It Is cheerful.  

“Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake” (1977)

[20. Kuan / Contemplation (View), Six in the Fourth Place, Nine in the Fifth Place, Nine on Top. Changing To:  16. Yü / Enthusiasm.]

Another post from the dog days of summer as the heat wave finally made its way to Los Angeles. Today I’m reading through Cage’s monumental “writing through” project on the ever complex Joyce text, Finnegans Wake. As I mentioned last week, much like “Empty Words,” this is a performative text, and Cage’s most famous performance of the piece was in conjunction with the 1979 Merce Cunningham Dance Company collaboration collectively known as Roaratorio. This work combined dance with a collection of sounds Cage recorded in the Irish countryside of sounds mentioned in Joyce’s text, Irish ballads, jigs and other instrumental music and, finally, Cage himself reading through the second writing through.

The piece was revived last year for the MCDC legacy tour, and I had happened to be in New York during the final rehearsals, and managed to pop in at Westbeth to see a run-through, sans music. The effect was just as wonderful as the multimedia event, the hot summer sun of New York blazing in the background while the dancers rehearsed the steps in the crowded top floor studio. Mark Swed, who was with me at the rehearsal, felt that the legacy revival was not as strong musically because they chose to project the sounds with eight loudspeakers rather than hire live musicians for the performance, as they had done for earlier productions. But alas, I was unable to see the final live show, and thus I cannot say one way or another.

Cage’s preface for “Writing through…” is extensive, and he explains the process involved with choosing a full acrostic technique for the second writing, which limited the page length to a manageable amount of material, and overall his comments on Joyce are in my mind rather vague when compared to those on Thoreau. Nevertheless, there are plenty of literary parallels to be made between the two artists, as Marjorie Perloff and others have done.

 I’ll keep this post short, but suffice to say I find the recorded performance of Roaratorio just as much if not more interesting than the printed text; combined with music and outdoor sounds, the collage is far more lush and interesting than the printed words on the page, or the solo voice performance on its own. But I’ll take it in any form, especially in this heat.

“Empty Words” (1973-4)

 [22. Pi / Grace, Nine in the First Place, Nine in the Third Place, Six in the Fourth Place. Changing To:  35. Chin / Progress.]

Today I’ve moved on to Cage’s penultimate collection of essays from Wesleyan University Press, Empty Words, and I am reading through the essay of the same name. This just happened to coincide with two wonderful recent performances of the lecture (which lasts approximately 11 hours and 30 minutes); the first organized by Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust at Bard College, and the second this last weekend in Brooklyn by the Varispeed Collective. Information can be found HERE and HERE.

Both performances followed Cage’s instructional format, which, much like his influential staging of Satie’s Vexations in 1963, spans an entire evening, ending at sunrise with the final movement. “Empty Words” is a continuation of the ideas Cage explored in “Mureau,” where he subjected portions of the collected journals of Henry David Thoreau to chance procedures, creating a constant flow of unrelated observations on sound and silence in the pastoral setting of Concord, Massachusetts. However, as Chris Shultis mentions, “Empty Words” does away with complete sentences, eliminating some of the flowing sentence structure. I mentioned in my reading of “Mureau” how pleasant I felt the text read, like a gentle perusal of favorite passages from Thoreau’s Journal, and I agree that “Empty Words” is much more disjunctive, but I don’t think that necessarily matters.

“Empty Words” represents the next step in Cage’s effort to slowly dissolve grammar and syntax through chance operations, focusing instead on the sounds of syllabic structures and combinations themselves, thus making music out of poetic recitation. He does so in phases with “Empty Words.” The first movement uses phrases, syllables, words and letters, the second only words, letters, and syllables, the third syllables and letters, and the fourth only uses letters drawn randomly from the journal. The idea Cage was stressing here was a progression from familiar to unknown through an evening of meditative immersion. Audience members sat through these long recitations, slowly ignoring sentence structure in favor of the actual sounds of the words, and then, as words dissolved away, focusing only on the sounds themselves: Cage’s ultimate reductionist goal of the thing-in-itself, or "sounds as sounds."

Mode records has a wonderful new release from their vaults of Cage performing “Empty Words” in conjunction with “Music for Piano,” recorded in 1991, and the juxtaposition of the two pieces exemplifies the musicality of written text Cage was exploring:

The title “Empty Words” was inspired by a conversation Cage had with Oriental scholar William McNaughton, who described the classification of classical Chinese language according to two categories. The first, a “full” word has a specific referential meaning, while the second category of “empty” words included conjunctions and pronouns; items that refer only to other terms. Thus Cage culled two meanings from this concept; words can have no “meaning” simply because they are reduced to a form beyond syntax, and instead of having a meaning they are merely a sound, a phoneme uttered by the human voice.

The next question then is how these performative texts relate to any sense of musicality in general. As with several other texts in this project, this “reading through” was more a reading aloud through, (although not all of it according to the original time span, I do have other work to do on Mondays…) and thus I set out, on a hot Monday in my cramped apartment in Echo Park, fans ablaze, with the remnants of a summer cold (which helped to reverberate the sounds of the words no less) and read aloud some portions of “Empty Words” to an audience of the landlord’s dog and myself.

Out of all the performative texts I’ve read through so far, this one feels, perhaps next to the “Song Books” excerpt in M, the most musical in an abstract sense. The first section has remnants of “Mureau,” in that I occasionally caught moments of introspective reminiscences of Thoreau’s landscapes, but as I progressed, it took all of my effort just to follow the syllables and consonants of the text rather than think about any specific associations these words and syllables might engender. The experience was identical to sight reading music, a skill that requires one to let go to a certain extent and let muscle memory and intuition guide you through.  

Granted, recitation is one step removed from intoning or incanting, which, stemming back to the earliest meditative practices and on to the liturgical recitations of the modern Catholic liturgy, create a natural rhythmic rise and fall. I have found that most recordings of Cage’s poetry follow a sort of performance practice that generally aligns with the high recitation style of classical American literature, rising and following at punctuation marks when possible, but often thwarted by the dissolved grammar as the piece progresses.

The final movement, meant to be recited at sunrise, completes the transition from language to music, as Cage describes it, creating a landscape of empty words, syllables, and ideas. The thought behind this structure was, once one has remained within the immersive environment long enough, the sounds of the sunrise would naturally envelop the piece itself, and the end would climax by dissolving into nature itself, leaving off where Cage started, toward something else.

Languages becoming musics, musics becoming theatres; performances; metamorphoses (stills from what are actually movies). At first face to face; finally sitting with one’s back to the audience (sitting with the audience), everyone facing the same vision. Sideways, sideways.  

“25 Mesostics Re and not Re Mark Tobey,” (1972)

[8. Pi / Holding Together [union], Six in the First Place, Six in the Fourth Place, Nine in the Fifth Place. Changing to:  51. Chên / The Arousing (Shock, Thunder).]

            waiting for the bus, I happened to look at the paveMent

                                                                                                         I wAs standing on ;

                                                                               noticed no differRence between

         looKing at art or away from it.

                                                                                                    each   Thing he saw

                                                                                       he asked us tO look at.

                                                                                                                By

                                                                                                            thE time we reached the Japanese restaurant

                                                                                                      our eYes were open.

A very complex I-Ching reading today, in contrast to some of the simple unchanging ones in the past; I am particularly struck by the wording of “The Arousing,” and the many changing lines within “Union.”

John Cage first met Mark Tobey during his brief tenure at the Cornish School in Seattle. Cage was still a precocious young talent searching out his artistic future, and here he encountered many of the primary forces that would push his eventual path to New York in 1942. One of those forces was Mark Tobey.

There are a few good articles out there on Cage and Tobey, particularly Branden Joseph’s contribution to John Cage: Music, Philosophy and Intention, and a nice edition compiled in 2002 by Wulf Herzogenrath, Sounds of the Inner Eye, and most of Cage’s anecdotes about Tobey relate to one particular encounter in Seattle. This one is quoted over and over again:

I remember in particular a walk with Mark Tobey from the area of Seattle around the Cornish school downhill and through the town toward a Japanese Restaurant – a walk that would not normally take more than forty-five minutes, but on this occasion it must have taken several hours, because he was constantly stopping and pointing out things to see, opening my eyes in other words. Which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth-century art – to open our eyes.

Naturally this encounter is alluded to in the collection of mesostics Cage compiled in 1972, when he seemed to have run across Tobey, perhaps during his travels in Europe during the summer, as many of the mesostics describe the trip and Cage’s various interactions. Cage mentions several encounters from the 1930s, including his layaway purchase of a few Tobey paintings (which he eventually sold during his more desperate economic times in the 1950s), and an encounter with Pauline Schindler and Galka Scheyer, likely in Los Angeles.

These feel like gentle accounts of Cage’s comings and goings, less related or penetrating as other artist essays, but this seems rather appropriate for an artist that, much like Cage, was always subtle and refined in his tastes and style.

                                                  the rooM

                                                             dAvid has in the attic

        is veRy

                good for his worK.