[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 5th 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 5th.
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.
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