“Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” (1965)

[64. Wei Chi / Before Completion, Unchanging.]

IV:           We

see symmetrically : canoe on northern

                       Canadian lake , stars in midnight sky

repeated in water , forested shores

    precisely mirrored.           Our hearing’s

asymmetrical:  noticed sounds surprise us,

echoes of shouts we make transform our

voices, straight line of sound from us to

                                shore’s followed by echo’s slithering

                around the lake’s perimeter. 

Another great I-Ching reading for today’s essay – I am always struck by unchanging hexagrams because they are statistically quite rare, and an unchanging hexagram on one of the four encircling hexagrams of the I-Ching (1,2,63,64) is the rarest. So far I have received three unchanging readings, and two of them are from the outward poles. The last strong unchanging  reading was 1. Ch’ien, the Creative, for Cage’s essay on Robert Rauschenberg.

Hexagram 64 represents the opposite end of the spectrum from Ch’ien, as I understand it. While the first two hexagrams, consisting of all solid lines or all broken lines, represent the interpenetration of yin and yang, the last two hexagrams consist of alternating broken and unbroken lines, which stand for transition from disorder to order. For reasons I am unfamiliar with, hexagram 64, which starts with a broken line and alternates, represents instability, while hexagram 63, which starts with a solid line and then alternates, represents completion. This likely has to do with the trigram images: in hexagram 64 fire is over water, while in hexagram 63, water is over fire, but again I do not pretend to have a complete answer here. I am fond of the reading itself though and the fox metaphor:

THE JUDGMENT

BEFORE COMPLETION. Success.

But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,

Gets his tail in the water,

There is nothing that would further.

The conditions are difficult. The task is great and full of responsibility. It is

nothing less than that of leading the world out of confusion back to order.

But it is a task that promises success, because there is a goal that can unite the

forces now tending in different directions. At first, however, one must move

warily, like an old fox walking over ice. The caution of a fox walking over ice

is proverbial in China. His ears are constantly alert to the cracking of the ice,

as he carefully and circumspectly searches out the safest spots. A young fox

who as yet has not acquired this caution goes ahead boldly, and it may happen

that he falls in and gets his tail wet when he is almost across the water. Then

of course his effort has been all in vain. Accordingly, in times "before

completion," deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.

I’m impressed by this reading mainly because this is a big transition point in this project. I am moving beyond Silence, as I mentioned last week, and on to Cage’s second book, A Year From Monday (1967), and after this I will be near the end of the project, a year from Monday, on September 5^th 2012. Cage’s “diary” is an important part of this and later books, and like “Indeterminacy” framed some larger concepts surrounding Cage’s approach to writing, poetry, memory, and text.

The idea for “Diary” came out of an essay I’ll discuss in-depth next week, “Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965.”  Cage set up specific writing objectives every day in order to complete a commissioned project. For “Emma Lake” Cage decided to write 100 words of text for 15 days, and for “Diary,” Cage determined by chance how many elements of the mosaic he would write and how many words would be in each. He chose twelve different typefaces, and chance procedures determined the typeface and marginations of each line and section. The result is a rather beautiful text. Here are some excerpts from the beginning (I’m just choosing random fonts to give one an idea of the text):

I.          Continue; I’ll discover where you

                          sweat (Kierkegaard).       We are getting

                                         rid of ownership, substituting use.

     Beginning with ideas.         Which ones can we

                                      take?           Which ones can we give?

Disappearance of power politics.       Non-

                                measurement.      Japanese, he said: we

                                also hear with our feet.                        I’d quoted

Busoni: Standing between musician and

music is notation. Before I’d given the

history: chance operations, indeterminacy.

     I’d cited the musics of India: notation

     of them’s after the fact.                   I’d spoken of

                                                direct musical action (since it’s

ears, not interposing eyes). 2::00 A.M.,

            Jensen said, “Even if you didn’t like

     the results (Lindsay, etc.), we hope

you liked the telling of it.”           Telling

            (?) of it!  We were there while it was

happening!

And so on. Like the anecdotes in “Indeterminacy,” Cage’s “Diary” installations are a window, meant to allow the spectator a glimpse behind the curtain of Cage’s inner world of artists and intellectuals, a sort of voyeuristic activity not unlike other forms of celebrity intrigue. He is decidedly elusive in his name-dropping; even as a Cage scholar it is hard to pinpoint all of these subtle and intimate connections. What happened that night at 2am, and why was it so funny?

One cannot necessarily blame Cage for this; he was after all quite explicit about this being a diary. However the restrictions with word count forced Cage into corners where he specifically had to make choices regarding the tone and the amount of revealing information that any specific segment allowed. Surprisingly, there are very few detailed analysis of Cage’s methodology in assembling these texts. The most extensive is   by Christopher Shultis, which one can read HERE. Chris spent a great deal of time with Cage’s extensive manuscript collection at Wesleyan University, and traced his compositional process for a few specific essays from this period and beyond. Chris argues that Cage essentially was applying similar chance procedures to writing as he had for his musical works: selecting a gamut of possibilities and then arranging strict chance-determined methods of execution. This is, as I and Chris have noted, an outgrowth of earlier essays in Silence, and the ultimate goal, as I will examine later, was the reduction of syntax and grammar to nothing more than a succession of nonsyntactical sounds, so that when one “performs” an essay, all one hears are sounds rather than words, thoughts, or ideas. Cage later applied similar methods to his Song Books and later non-syntactic essays. 

However there are many problems with this strategy. Other concrete poets were exploring the implications of nonsyntactical grammar and visual layout to different ends, and Cage’s approach to randomization of textual objects was in many ways incomplete. I’ll elaborate on this more with later essays that really start to dissolve grammar, but for “Diary” I want to focus on the content that remains after the randomization methods are applied.

Based on biographical evidence, I believe it is safe to pinpoint this first essay as starting in late October 1965 and ending around December the same year. There are references to Cage’s travels to Salt Lake City, where he performed with the Cunningham Dance Company on Noveber 10^th, and many references to art and electronics, which were the result of another essay composed with the same strategy in October of the same year on Nam June Paik. Paik unveiled his famous exhibition at the Galeria Bonino in November, “Nam June Paik: Electronic Art,” for which Cage provided the exhibition essay, “Nam June Paik: A Diary” (which I may discuss later).

The intellectual threads that encompass the first diary entry are closely related to Paik’s discourse on art and technology, and for the first time we are introduced to Cage’s two idols of the period: Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. Both replaced many of the familiar Zen and East Asian herisitics that dominated Silence, and are reminiscent of Cage’s interest in technocratic utopianism during the 1960s. Cage’s loosely-defined anarchic theories of technological determinism can be described as a network or utility theory, in keeping with Buckminster Fulller, that prophesied a future in which all of one's needs would be met by automatic machinery, thus leaving us free to explore intellectual and creative pursuits rather than toil away at tasks meant merely to provide us with sustenance, shelter, and security.

I’ll slowly work through this theory as I make my way through A Year From Monday. Needless to say it is idiosyncratic and contradictory, and more than anything reflective of the general optimistic atmosphere of the 1960s boomer generation. There are dangerous tendencies of hegemonic liberalism, or perhaps better libertarianism here, as I’ve mentioned in the past, and social and economic pressure eventually thwarted many of these idealistic proclamations by the 1970s, to which Cage vehemently decried the failings of American society thereafter in his later texts. A touchy issue in the current political climate, to say the least, but one worth investigating nevertheless.

But returning to the method in “Diary.” As with any of Cage’s various randomization techniques, there are competing forces of self-expression and indeterminacy throughout. Moments of poetic clarity are juxtaposed with confusing transitions. For example, the beautifully worded passage quoted in the beginning of this post reflects Cage’s stream-of-consciousness writing, and reveals in my mind some very wonderful descriptions of nature and environment. I appreciate these breaths of fresh air, of clarity and emotional depth, as much as I revel in the confusion of other moments. Providing a tension like this is what makes many of Cage’s indeterminate works work. We are suddenly given small breaths of air amid a sea of chaos, anchoring our incessantly analytical and emotional minds with something, preparing us as we enter again into the abyss of indeterminacy and scattered glossolalia.  

I’ll continue this approach to analysis in future essays, along with a more in-depth investigation of the specific randomization techniques in future weeks. In the meantime, another beautiful passage:

The lake is undefined.          The land around

rests upon it obscuring its shape, shape

                that needs to remain unrevealed.       Sung.

“Floating world.”                Rain, curtain of wind-

swept lake’s surface beyond: second view

     (there are others, he tells me, one with

mists rising).         Yesterday it was stillness

                                and reflections, groups of bubbles.   An

                                      American garden: water, not sand

                                                vegetation, not stones.         Thunder.

“Music Lovers’ Field Companion” (1954)

[59. Huan / Dispersion [Dissolution], Six In The Fourth Place. Changing to:  6. Sung / Conflict.]

I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.  

I have nearly reached the halfway point of this blog and, coincidentally, the final essay in Silence, “Music Lovers’ Field Companion.” The essay is tucked at the end of the book, after the first collection of “Indeterminacy” anecdotes discussed last week, providing a nice bookend to John Cage’s first and perhaps most influential publication. It is a bit sad to have to wander away from Silence from now on, but as Kyle Gann notes in his introduction to the 50^th anniversary edition, each new reading at different points in life is an enlightening and invigorating experience, and I look forward to my next close reading of the text, where I will no doubt have very different opinions and thoughts.

This again is an important part of this project—I am “reading through” the texts, not as an exercise in hagiography or hermeneutics per se, but as a process of writing and reflecting, a journal of thoughts, all incomplete and perhaps a bit discursive, but nevertheless representative of a particular moment, the moment surrounding the centennial of John Cage’s birth.

“Music Lovers” is about mushrooms, a rhetorical trope in Cage’s writings starting in 1954 when he moved to the Stony Point Artists’ commune outside New York. Mushrooms represent many things in Cage’s writings, and I think I’ll explore a few of these tropes; whether they are metaphorical, allegorical, or anecdotal, mushroom stories in Cage’s writings remained a curious sidetrack in his long and productive life. There are many wonderful photos of Cage mushroom hunting online, and I’ll stick them in throughout the text.

Cage’s essay is written with a literary tone, where he equates mushrooms and mushroom seasons to the indelible classical music seasonal concert schedule. The winter is a sorry season for both, and “only in caves and houses where matters of temperature and humidity, and in concert halls where matters of trusteeship and box office are under constant surveillance, do vulgar and accepted forms survive.” And so on. The summer is the best for both, with an abundance of both contemporary music festivals and warm humid temperature for mushroom sprouting.  

Mushroom hunting is an interesting aspect of the overall mushroom trope in Cage’s career; his comments on the experience of hunting, on interacting with nature and environment and the pleasure found in the act of discovery, fit squarely with larger aesthetic tenants running the course of his career. He even mentions in the essay his silent piece, 4’33” (for the second time only in Silence, mind you, and only with an indirect reference as his “silent piece”), where he equated the concert hall performance with the mushroom hunting experience – situations that in my mind are very different, one a critique of formal social hierarchy and performative structures in classical music performance practice, the other a rumination on the phenomenological present, but no matter. Cage’s acoustic self awareness epiphany moment is focused equally on the actions of the forest – nature in the purest sense. The first movement passed “by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified,” the second a dramatic scene of a buck and a doe leaping through the forest in front of him, and the third a return to the theme of the first, giving the piece some of the “profound, so-well-known alterations of world feeling associated by German tradition with the A-B-A.”

I think the “turn to mushrooms” phase in Cage’s career has many parallels with the evolving dynamic of the aesthetic of silence. From a biographical standpoint, Cage’s move to Stony Point provided a bit of psychological relief after years of city dwelling, and his early interactions with the forest surrounding his infamous glass house built by architect Paul Williams (about which Branden Joseph has written several brilliant commentaries on themes of transparency) brought about a situational awareness not unlike the anechoic chamber experience. Cage could have focused on other aspects of nature, but there is something unique and elusive about mushrooms. As one who has spent a considerable amount of time in the many wilderness areas of California and the other great National Parks in this country, I can attest to the striking presence of mushrooms wherever you wander. Fungi, remember, are a separate kingdom of organisms, and contain an incredible species diversity (some estimates are around 1.5 million unique kinds). Elusive and mysterious, fungi provide a perfect metaphor for otherness in Cage’s artistic program. 

After foraging and studying mushrooms for some time, Cage quickly absorbed the extensive taxonomic collections known as “field companions,” hence the essay title, and he soon developed an encyclopedic knowledge of common species. This was of course the subject of his famous game show appearance in Milan in 1959 I have mentioned in the past, and which is outlined in detail on Laura Kuhn’s blog – along with several other great posts about mushrooms here. Cage won a considerable amount of money for displaying his knowledge of mushroom species, which was a brilliant novelty to the Italian audiences, especially in conjunction with his outlandish theatrical productions that accompanied each episode.

Cage also offered several courses on mushroom hunting at the New School for Social Research, alongside his infamous courses on experimental music, and as the anecdote goes, Cage eventually realized that most of those enrolled had simply signed up for the cheapest throwaway course so they could receive a generous flight voucher from Pan American Airlines for “full time” students. Cage amassed an incredible collection of books on mushrooms, which is now housed at the Special Collections Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He later helped form the New York Mycological Society, and in 1972 assembled a brilliant small publication entitled Mushroom Book, a rare item I have yet to dig up. Laura Kuhn again has a far better summary of Cage's fascination with mushrooms here.

I’ll add one final point to the mushroom trope in “Music Lovers’ “ – the “music of the spores.” Like the “music of the spheres,” or musica universalis, the metaphysical principal of interval structure explored in treatises on acoustics throughout history, Cage's “music of the spores” sought out a plurality emanating from what is now known as "microsounds," the minute or microscopic sounds internal to a living organism – the sounds of life itself. I’ve discussed Cage’s interest in a moment of transduction, or direct and unmediated perception between objects “beyond ears,” or beyond the inferior situation of musical subjectivity, and through direct contact between objects, generally via contact microphones or extreme amplification, Cage provided an allegory for unmediated perception of objects. Cage describes the situation as thus:

To begin with, I propose that it should be determined which sounds further the growth of which mushrooms; whether these latter, indeed, make sounds of their own; whether the gills of certain mushrooms are employed by appropriately small-winged insects for the production of pizzicati and the tubes of the Boleti by minute burrowing ones as wind instruments; whether the spores, which in size and shape are extraordinarily various, and in number countless, do not on dropping to the earth produce gamelan-like sonorities; and finally, whether all this enterprising activity which I suspect delicately exists, could not, through technological means, be brought, amplified and magnified, into our theaters with the net result of making our entertainments more interesting.

“Indeterminacy” (1958-61)

[42. I / Increase, Nine in the Fifth place. Changing to:  27. I / Corners of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment)]

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, “You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.”

The collection of anecdotes that pepper Silence known as “Indeterminacy” are perhaps the best-known portion of John Cage’s written works. Collectively they capture a zeitgeist and project Cage's persona of deadpan humor, lighthearted introspection, and gentle curiosity, fashioning an image of Cage in what cultural historians like to call the “contemporary imaginary.” These are the stories that define the Cagean aesthetic for the general public, and it is amazing how enduring they are; even biographers cite them, oddly enough, as historical evidence.

I’ve discussed many of the anecdotes at the end of essays in prior posts, and I have noted their resemblance to Zen kōans: a simple structure that begins with a small premise, goes out to a seemingly disparate extreme, and ends with a poignant twist at the end. As Gordon Mumma has noted to me in conversation, these aphorisms emerged out of circumstances familiar to any musician: traveling across the country during the bucolic days of the 1950s with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in their infamous Volkswagen microbus, Cage was the storyteller, the entertainer, the cook, the therapist, and the artistic counterweight to Merce, and these stories reflect the vagabond lifestyle of a touring dance company.

There are many more stories that were not fit to print, even in the 1960s, and the collection that made it into Silence represents just a fraction of the total. Laura Kuhn has assembled a fascinating website that archives all 190 of the stories HERE. You can click on the random generator to jump to another story, and an index of links to connected stories helps one navigate the complex web of anecdotes that frame the Cage legacy. A selection of 90 stories were recorded for Folkways Records in 1959, where Cage famously set up a performative strategy of reading each anecdote over the course of one minute, spacing the text evenly. Some were nearly impossible to fit within a minute, others were impossibly slow. In the background David Tudor performs from Fontana Mix. The complete recording is available for purchase, or on YouTube:

Laura Kuhn recently performed “Indeterminacy” at the 50^th anniversary of the ONCE festival, and you can check out a video of her performing alongside DJ Tadd Mullinix:

                                          
John Cage Trust: John Cage's Indeterminacy, with Director Laura Kuhn from UM Art & Design on Vimeo.

I've read these stories so many times and spent so much time with Cage biography that I've found myself quoting them to friends at dinner parties and the like, and this is one aspect of the Cagean legacy that I feel will remain firm for some time to come. Artists and musicians can’t resist stories, especially funny ones, and once they're told enough times they become a sort of truism, establishing a mythology surrounding an artist. This is the case in countless situations regarding celebrities and public figures; we tend to mythologize personas naturally, and I am certain Cage was aware of this when he formally assembled the anecdotes for publication. It is hard to categorize the stories, but they generally fall into a few historical periods: recollections from Cage’s childhood, including many stories about his parents (which I’ve commented on in the past), his wife Xenia, and many stories of mushroom hunting and dinner party conversations surrounding Zen philosophy. “Indeterminacy” is rife with name dropping, and it is difficult to keep everyone straight (thankfully Kyle Gann provided a brief listing of names in his new introduction to the 50^th anniversary edition of Silence).

Cage was essentially providing  a look at the “inner lives” of his coterie of artists, but like any self-constructed identity, he presents a select discourse meant to project a lively atmosphere of excitement, while carefully avoiding the many moments of conflict in his life. There are many periods that are noticeably absent in the anecdotes. There is little mention of Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, or many other composers that arguably had a great effect on his career, and the stories tend to again highlight two periods: early childhood and the touring days of the 1950s. Cage stresses his Schoenberg tutelage, but avoids mention of Henry Cowell; he overemphasizes his time with Suzuki yet barely mentions Joseph Campbell; his stories about his childhood are generally kind of sad.

I don’t really have much else to say about these stories than what has already been said. I appreciate Cage’s later remark that their interjection between essays within Silence was meant to reflect the trend in early 20^th century local newspapers to fill out extra page space with tidbits of local gossip or marginalia, and it a sense that is what they do. I think I’ll just post a few of my favorites here and let anyone who is interested spend some time on the “Indeterminacy “ website to enjoy on their own. The texts are arranged in the same layout as Cage’s performance notecards, spaced to aid one in reading it aloud over the course of one minute.

#102:

Richard  Lippold  called  up  and  said,
“Would  you  come  to  dinner  and  bring  the
I-Ching?”      I  said  I  would.                It
turned  out  he’d  written  a  letter  to  the
Metropolitan  proposing  that  he  be  commissioned
 for  a  certain  figure  to  do  The  Sun.
       This  letter  withheld  nothing  about  the
 excellence  of  his  art,            and  so  he
hesitated  to  send  it,            not  wishing  to
 seem  presumptuous.                Using  the  coin
 oracle,  we  consulted  the  I-Ching.
  It  mentioned  a  letter.                Advice  to
 send  it  was  given.                Success  was
promised,  but  the  need  for  patience  was
mentioned.                A  few  weeks  later,
      Richard  Lippold  called  to  say  that  his
 proposal  had  been  answered      but  without
commitment,            and  that  that  should  make
 clear  to  me  as  it  did  to  him      what  to
think  of  the  I-Ching.                A  year
passed.                The  Metropolitan  Museum
finally commissioned The  Sun.                Richard
 Lippold  still  does  not  see  eye  to  eye  with
 me  on   the   subject   of   chance   operations.

#140

One   Sunday   morning,

      Mother   said   to   Dad,

                                      “Let’s   go   to
 church.”

     Dad   said,
      “O.K.”

       When   they   drove   up   in   front,

                                                       Dad
  showed   no   sign   of   getting   out   of   the
  car.

                                               Mother
said,                                             
“Aren’t   you   coming   in?”

                            Dad   said,
                                                       “No,

              I’ll    wait     for     you     here.”

#177

Xenia   never   wanted   a   party   to   end.
                  Once,   in   Seattle,
  when   the   party   we   were   at   was   folding,
                 she   invited   those   who   were
still   awake,                  some   of   whom   we’d
  only   met   that   evening,                  to 
come   over   to   our   house.
  Thus   it   was         that   about   3:00   A.M.
                        an   Irish   tenor   was 
singing   loudly   in   our   living   room.
                 Morris   Graves,                  who
  had   a   suite   down   the   hall,
   entered   ours   without   knocking,
      wearing   an   old-fashioned   nightshirt
     and   carrying   an   elaborately   made   wooden
  birdcage,                   the   bottom   of   which
  had   been   removed.                          Making
  straight   for   the   tenor,                 
Graves   placed   the   birdcage   over   his   head,
                   said   nothing,                    and
  left   the   room.                             The
effect   was   that   of   snuffing   out   a 
candle.                             Shortly,
           Xenia   and    I            were    alone.

#40

During my last year in high school,       I found out
about the Liberal Catholic Church.          It was
in a beautiful spot in the Hollywood hills.
   The ceremony was an anthology of    the most
theatrical bits and pieces found in the principal
rituals,        Occidental and Oriental.       
There were clouds of incense,        candles galore,
       processions in and around the church.
   I was fascinated,        and though I had been
raised in the Methodist Episcopal Church    and had
had thoughts of going into the ministry,        I
decided to join the Liberal Catholics.         
Mother and Dad objected strenuously.         
Ultimately,        when I told them of my intention
to become an acolyte active in the Mass,         they
said,         “Well, make up your mind.            It’s
us or the church.”    Thinking along the lines of
    “Leave your father and mother and follow Me,”
    I went to the priest,          told him what had
happened,           and said I’d decided in favor of
the  Liberal  Catholics.                He  said,
        “Don’t  be  a  fool.                Go  home.
               There  are  many  religions.
      You  have  only  one  mother  and   father.”

#129

Alan Watts gave a party that started in the afternoon, New Year’s
Eve, and lasted through the night and the following day. Except
for about four hours which we spent napping we were never without
food or drink. Alan Watts lived near Millbrook. His cooking was
not only excellent but elaborate. There was, for instance, I
forget just when, a meat pie in the shape of a large loaf of
bread. Truffles ran through the meat, which had been wrapped
first in crepes and then in the crust, in which had been
inscribed in Sanskrit “Om.” Joseph Campbell, Jean Erdman, Mrs.
Coomaraswamy, and I were the guests. Jean Erdman spent most of
the time knitting. Alan Watts, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, and Joseph
Campbell   conversed brilliantly about the Orient,      its
mythologies, its arts, and its philosophies.        Joseph
Campbell was concerned at that time about the illustration of
his Zimmer book, Philosophies of India.        He was anxious to
find a picture which would include certain and several symbols,
     and though he had searched his own library and several
public ones,      he was still looking for the right picture.
      I said,      “Why don’t you use the one in Jean Erdman’s
knitting book?”   Joseph Campbell laughed because he knew I
hadn’t even seen the picture.        Mrs. Coomaraswamy said,
   “Let me look at it.”   Jean Erdman stopped knitting and gave
her the book.        Mrs. Coomaraswamy began interpreting the
picture,      which was of a girl in a sweater standing in a
landscape.        Everything, it turned out,      referred
precisely to the subjects with which Joseph Campbell was
concerned, including the number in the upper right-hand corner.

#45

On another occasion,           Schoenberg asked a
girl in his class     to go to the piano     and play
the first movement of a Beethoven sonata,
 which  was  afterwards  to  be  analyzed.
       She  said,            “It  is  too  difficult.
               I  can’t  play  it.”      Schoenberg
said,            “You’re  a  pianist,  aren’t  you?”
     She  said,            “Yes.”      He  said,
      “Then  go  to  the  piano.”      She  did.
            She  had  no  sooner  begun  playing  than
 he  stopped  her  to  say  that  she  was  not
playing  at  the  proper  tempo.                She
said  that  if  she  played  at  the  proper  tempo,
           she  would  make  mistakes.
He  said,            “Play  at  the  proper  tempo
and  do  not  make  mistakes.”      She  began
again,            and  he  stopped  her  immediately
 to  say  that  she  was  making  mistakes.
       She  then  burst  into  tears      and  between
 sobs      explained  that  she  had  gone  to  the
 dentist  earlier  that  day      and  that  she’d
 had  a  tooth  pulled  out.                   He
said,              “Do  you  have  to  have  a  tooth
 pulled   out   in   order   to   make   mistakes?”

#169

Merce  Cunningham’s  parents  were  going  to
Seattle        to  see  their  other  son,  Jack.
                   Mrs.  Cunningham  was  driving.
                    Mr.  Cunningham  said,
    “Don’t  you  think  you  should  go  a  little
slower?                      You’ll  get  caught.”
      He  gave  this  warning  several  times.
                 Finally,                 on  the
outskirts  of  Seattle,                 they  were
stopped  by  a  policeman.                       He
asked  to  see  Mrs.  Cunningham’s  license.
                She  rummaged   around   in   her   bag
  and   said,                  “I   just   don’t   seem
  to   be   able   to   find   it.”         He   then
  asked   to   see   the   registration.
           She   looked   for   it         but 
unsuccessfully.                        The   officer
  then   said,                  “Well,
 what   are   we   going   to   do   with   you?”
      Mrs.   Cunningham   started   the   engine.
                      Before   she   drove   off,
             she   said,                  “I   just 
don’t   have   any   more   time   to   waste 
talking  with  you.                        Good-by.”

“Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing? (1961)

[5. Hsü / Waiting (Nourishment), Nine in the Second Place. Changing to:  63. Chi Chi / After Completion]

It is at this crossroads that we must change direction, if, that is, we are going where we are going. (I know perfectly well I’m wandering but I try to see what there is to see and my eyes are not as good as they were but they’re improving.)

Nothing special. Nothing predetermined. Just something useful to set the thing going.

I mentioned last week that the two large essays toward the end of Silence make up almost half of the book, and I feel that “Where are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” is a sort of philosophical joke. It is very long, and most of the statements in it are of no particular significance. There is little if any mention of compositional techniques, chance, the I-Ching, Suzuki, or any of the other familiar heuristics that pepper the rest of John Cage’s prose. The text consists of four separate dialogues, each one a sort of stream of consciousness writing that does not really stick to any particular idea, but instead flows seamlessly. The instructions are for a performer to read one of the four lines accompanied by tape recordings of the other three (he may choose any one of the four, and the tapes are available for rent by C.F. Peters, of course).

The back cover to Silence has a wonderful image of Cage at his drafting table at Wesleyan University, where he was in residence in 1960, and where he redrafted and assembled Silence. “Where Are We Going?” was clearly written at this desk; there are many references to the space in the stream of consciousness sections, including Cage’s constant complaining about the air conditioning, which he was not used to, and of the maid coming in to clean the space.

John Cage at Wesleyan University

Cage indicated that he used Cartridge Music (1960), one of his early point-to-line transparencies, to arrange the text. Unlike I-Ching operations, this randomization procedure is incredibly difficult to explain or analyze, because it is wholly indeterminate—so indeterminate, in fact, that often scholars have wondered whether Cage consistently followed the intricate measurements in practice…..

Regardless, the text, if one reads it successively, is nearly impossible to decipher. If one reads the individual lines separately, which are each in a different italic or boldface type, a sense of coherence exists, or at least continuity; but each separate strain never really talks about anything in particular. And I think this is the point. Something, anything is happening in each line; it’s almost as if Cage was just looking around him making observations about things. Cage is apologetic in the introduction:

I have therefore made a lecture in the course of which, by various means, meaning is not easy to come by even though lucidity has been my constant will-of-the-wisp. I have permitted myself to do this not out of disdain of you who are present. But out of regard for the way in which I understand nature operates.

Cage brings up his favorite statement by Ananda Coomaraswamy on nature and her manner of operation, and he presents a familiar philosophical problem:

Not all of our past, but the parts of it we are taught, lead us to believe that we are in the driver’s seat. With respect to nature. And if that we are not, life is meaningless. Well, the grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaningless as ultimate meaning.

Few people have pointed this out, but I believe that this essay in particular was influenced by the work of German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. There are notes in Cage’s correspondence that he was reading Wittgenstein’s famous Philosophical Investigations (1953), and possibly his earlier infamous 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). It never occurred to me to make the connection until I came across this line in the middle of the text (on p. 232):

There is a story that is to the point. A man was born in Austria. When he came into his inheritance, he gave all his money away. He engaged in a wide variety of activities one after the other. When the War came along, he went into it. He continued his activity during the War and even his correspondence. Later, he moved back and forth between more or less the same countries and, as I say elsewhere, he started at different times different schools and repudiated both of them which is only partly true. He moved around a good deal and even came to America and then he went back; he had been at one time in Ireland and he began to more and more include it in the places to which he went and he included Norway. He found a rare mushroom and since it was in a dry season he built a protection for it and provided it with water. Fulfilling other commitments and yet studying the growth of the fungus, he involved himself in many trips of 250 miles each. Is that what we are doing?

I don’t know about the mushroom anecdote, but this is definitely a brief outline of Wittgenstein’s famous life story; his abandonment of his inheritance, his various travels, and the repudiation of his two major volumes at various points in his career. I am not terribly familiar with the intricacies of Wittgenstein, and I doubt Cage really dug into the work too deeply, considering all of his other commitments, and considering the fact that by this point he had a clear set of heuristics to sustain his artistic career for some time to come, but I do think that there is something to be said about Wittgenstein’s investigation of language and this essay.

Ludwig Wittgenstein 

To summarize poorly, Wittgenstein’s early work deals with the “problem of philosophy,” and argues that the problem is fundamentally about our use of language. As he explains in the introduction to Tractatus, “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” I always enjoy when analytic philosophers make fun of themselves, explaining that they talk about nothing quite precisely, and this is what Wittgenstein was getting at; the Tractatus in essence voided itself by its very logical precision. This is why people always say, if you understand Wittgenstein, you will give up philosophy. Because of this impasse, Wittgenstein famously retreated from philosophy for quite some time and taught at a primary school in rural England. His final posthumous publication, Philosophical Investigations, returned to the impasse of language, proposing a use-value model of language. In essence, language is a game, governed by rules, and all one can really do is look at how language is used. The meaning of a word is its use, and ”philosophy puts everything before us and neither explains nor deduces anything.” All questions, metaphysical or otherwise, are governed by one's language, hence, “the limits of my language are the limits of my reality.”

This seems to be the point of “Where are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” I would say that Cage’s answer to the meaningless is the same as Wittgenstein’s: meaning is based on use, thus we can see “meaningless as ultimate meaning.” This fits perfectly with Cage’s negative aesthetics: something is what it is based on our use of it, or our ability to perceive it. This goes back to his empirical categorization of sound structure, the anechoic chamber eureka moment in which he discovered his inability to imagine a situation that does not exist within the reality of a sentient human being (silence), the crisis of expression, and the embrace of indeterminacy as a philosophical concept to explain reality. Cage’s introductory paragraph again summarizes this nicely: if we are not in the “driver’s seat,” meaning we are not able to accurately describe all of reality as it exists with language, “life is meaningless.” But, through negative aesthetics, we can, at the least, prove that meaningless is meaning, and leave it at that. Analytic philosophers are content to leave it at that and go home for the day, and so was Cage.

Consider the opening line of “Where Are We Going?” “If we set out to catalogue things today, we find ourselves rather endlessly involved in cross-referencing. Would it not be less efficient to start the other way around, after the fashion of some obscure second-hand bookstore?” A few pages later, when this text continues, Cage states: “You know what we’re doing? We’re breaking the rules, even out own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” Basically, Cage is setting us up for a series of thought experiments; the only problem is it is almost impossible to decipher them; they’re jumbled up in the simultaneous texts running along the page. Consider the same passage in conjunction with the rest of the text:

……………………………………………….

You want to know what we’re doing?

That is what we are doing. In fact

.

.

We’re breaking the rules, even our

we don’t need to go to bring that

.

.

own rules. And how do we do that?

into our action. We tend to rush

.

.

By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

to what we think are the limits

The house had been so well built that

.

.

only to discover how tamed out

even though it burned, it did not

After we have been going for some

………………………………………….

I’m tempted to speculate that Cage was not entirely “pure” with his application of point-to-line randomization for this essay, and that some of this overlap was explicit, for the very reason that it demonstrates the concepts through a series of thought experiments. Cage seems to allude to family resemblances in a number of sections:

We are leaving the machines home to play the old games of relationships, addition and who wins.

Now we get an idea and present it in such a way that it can be used by him who is going to do it. Someone once raised the question who gets the credit. The listener gives it to himself when he gets it. All the people have become active and enjoy what you might call individual security.

Yet at other times it seems like pure stream of consciousness writing:

I wander out in the hall expecting to see someone. It turns out it wasn’t anybody: it was a machine. I’m as crazy as a loon: I’m invited out to dinner. I keep telling myself: Before you go to bed, be sure to close the bathroom door; if you don’t, you’ll just have to get up and close it later.

I am not sure just how far this point can be stretched, because it seems Cage did not take Wittgenstein’s concepts much further in later essays, especially when he got caught up with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan; but it tempting to speculate where it might have gone, and what it might have done.