“Two Statements on Ives” (1964-1966)

[29. K'an / The Abysmal (Water); Nine in the Second Place, Six in the Third Place. Changing to:  39. Chien / Obstruction]

[speaking of a recent composition by Ramon Sender]…it made me think of the complexity of Ives and the way one perceives something. Does it emerge? Or do we enter in? I rather think it emerges in his case. And that nowadays we would tend toward doing it ourselves (we are the listeners), that is, we would enter in. The difference is this: everybody hears the same thing if it emerges. Everybody hears what he alone hears if he enters in.

These two statements are the only extensive writings by John Cage on Charles Ives, a figure that looms large over American music history in the twentieth century. Cage deftly works through similarities and differences between Ives and himself, while carefully plotting a bit of lineage between their artistic programs. One of the real strengths of Cage’s writing style is that it rarely if ever comes off as disingenuous, even if it occasionally is. This is particularly true when discussing artistic lineage, which is perhaps one of the touchiest topics in Cage Studies. Cage was enmeshed in virtually every major artistic movement in America midcentury, and one could juxtapose just about any artistic movement or style with Cage’s program merely by arguing for its literal proximity.                           

Cage himself however was prone to pick and choose which artists directly influenced his ideas, and Ives was never part of this group. However, many scholars, particularly Chris Shultis, have presented very good arguments for an American transcendentalist movement that ends with Cagean poetics. According to this argument, Ives is presented as one part of a large and all-encompassing dichotomy between the Emersonian pull of American intellectualism that complements the driving libertarianism of Thoreau. Like Jackson Pollock, Ives is a sort of yin to Cage’s yang, a force of determined determinacy, while Cage’s passive provocations of nonsubjectivity are a gentle but equally forceful opposition of determined indeterminacy.

Thus it comes as no surprise that Cage would pick apart the determinate elements of Ives’ music, while admiring the indeterminate elements of his bucolic pastiche of nineteenth century Americana. The most often-cited portion of these essays occurs at the end of the second statement, where Cage compares the idyllic Ivesian situation of “sitting on a porch in a rocking chair smoking a pipe looking out over the landscape which goes into the distance,” where Cage “imagines that as that person, who is anyone, is sitting there doing nothing, that he is hearing his own symphony.”

There are some clear parallels between Ives and Cage regarding listening. Both artists sought out a situation of musical cacophony, an immersion of materials and ideas in a single setting. However, Ives’ music, as Cage notes in the quote above, is strictly determinate, meaning that the cacophony that he presents is final and absolute, and evokes a specific memory, namely his own, of the pastoral New England landscape of band music, country tunes, and nineteenth century romanticism.

There are of course contradictions within this dichotomy that one could point to, particularly when questioning the larger notion of indeterminacy and the determinate product of indeterminacy. For example, Cage’s Williams Mix (1952) presents a cacophony of sounds indeterminate in respect to ordering, but determinate in their final arrangement. Yes, the ordering of these sounds was determined by random procedures, but the selection of them was determinate, meaning Cage chose what materials to use and arrange on the splicing table. Thus, the amalgam of sounds that scatter over the sound art composition are not all too different from Ives’ brilliant introduction to the Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass (1911, 1947). I dug up an old analysis of the opening phrases of the sonata, which is rich with internal references, allusions, and other programmatic tidbits of Americana that make it such a brilliant work.

One could perhaps argue that Ives’ pastiche is not so different from a site-specific work of sound art that captures the materials and emotions of a specific soundscape and all the emotions that such an environment might engender. The standard argument, of course, is that a work of sound art and site-specific sound in general rely on the direct connection between sonic events and their inscription on a recording apparatus, thus making them arguably more “real” and “realistic” than a composer assembling notes on a page to reflect the experience of a specific emotional moment in time. However, the “recording apparatus as truth” argument is quickly losing ground; we realize that even the purest of scientific recording situations are rife with subjectivity, whether it is the placement and accentuation of the microphone, the editing and aftereffects applied to the soundwaves, or the overall presentation in an autonomous setting of seemingly disparate experiences, subjectivity creeps into any attempt to replicate the “real” experience of life, and thus again, the two works are not so different after all.

I’ll add one note here to the structure of Cage’s second essay, which is unique. It is a literal transcription of a prior speech, and instead of editing the content to reflect the style of written versus spoken prose, Cage chose instead to notate the speech inflections through graphic shapes; triangles represent breathing, circles swallowing, etc., and the result is as accurate a transcription of literal sound that language can provide in comparison to a recording. Cage did not really pursue this idea further, but I wish he had, because it represents a very important step in the deconstruction of language in his later works, using symbols rather than letters, and has many affinities with the notations for Song Books.

“Happy New Ears!” (1964)

[32. Hêng / Duration, Six in the First Place, Nine in the Fourth. Changing to:  11. T'ai / Peace.]

Max Ernst, around 1950, speaking at the Arts Club on Eighth Street in New York City, said that significant changes in the arts formerly occurred every three hundred years, whereas now they take place every twenty minutes.

Another fitting I-Ching reading, hitting on “duration” again, which I received last week unchanging. The changes in the first and fourth place add some depth to the concept, with helpful notes that “seeking duration too hastily brings misfortune,” and “a man who persists in stalking game in a place where there is none may wait forever without finding any.” But most interesting is the changing hexagram, which I had yet to receive: 11 T’ai/or Peace, a truly beautiful reading, both for the prose and the symbol. I have come to appreciate the relationship between divination texts, imagery, and numerology in the I-Ching system, and I am slowly beginning to understand the nature of the fundamental notion of changing and changes. T’ai places the two pure trigrams of broken (K’un, The Receptive, Earth) and unbroken (Ch’ien, The Creative, Heaven) lines together, and the two versions, all broken on top, or all unbroken on top, both relate to a similar concept, but with different implications for direction. T’ai, which represents spring, is peaceful, the creative fuels the receptive, while the opposite, 12. P’I / Standstill (Stagnation) represents fall, the decline of activity and stagnation.

“Happy New Ears!” is an interesting essay for two reasons. First, it is Cage’s first attempt to direct his reading of Eastern philosophy to persons actually from that culture, namely artists in Tokyo at the Sogetsu Arts Center, a venue he visited several times in the 60s that was the cultural hub of the Japanese avant-garde scene. It’s the first time we witness some of the cultural realities of 60s-era global politics; think Pan-Am and American commercialism abroad. Second, the beginning of the essay outlines a slightly different conception of the “field theory” that Cage toyed with in the aesthetic of silence.

I’ll start with the field theory. I think Cage was reading Bergson at the time, particularly Creative Evolution (1907), as his opening lines reflect some of his vitalist ideas on the relationship between plant and animal organisms fundamental to his thesis on duration and time, and Cage opens with a note about myxomycetes, or slime molds, as they are commonly referred to, and he relates this concept of classification to the definition of art. Slime molds are alternately categorized as animals and plants based on their characteristics, and they represent one of the many species on the cusp of an evolutionary breakthrough.

Mycetozoa from Ernst Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) 

Cage takes the idea of classification according to scientific knowledge and transplants it onto his favorite Coomaraswamy quote on “nature in her manner of operation,” noting that “Our understanding of 'her manner of operation” changes according to advances in the sciences.' ” This is an interesting leap to take; it really has nothing to do with Coomaraswamy’s philosophy, and it is applying a bit of empiricism to the Cage doctrine. Cage continues by discussing “space-time,” again echoing Bergson, as a way to characterize a new mode of scientific inquiry that includes duration and time in the equation. This was essential to early relativity theory, and was something Cage’s father was very much interested, and I won’t pretend to have a complete understanding of these ideas as of now; not that that matters necessarily, for I doubt Cage grasped them from a deep philosophical or mathematical level either; as always, he was primarily concerned with music and the arts.

Since visual metaphors are the easiest to grasp, Cage begins by demonstrating this concept of “space-time” analysis in relationship to the experience of viewing a painting; we enjoy a work of art by scanning, selecting portions or the totality to view at any given moment, and our experience is thus one of succession, of absorbing memories of portions of a painting to assemble a totality of experience. This is simply how the eye works; we can focus on the macro or micro level at any given moment, and quickly adjust back and forth, creating a composite memory-image that the mind assembles into a thought or idea.

Music, and sound in general, takes a bit longer to assemble; sometimes the thought-image never fully develops, especially if the sound amalgam is complex, and thus it is harder to apply the space-time or sound field model to music, and it is also a reason that, according to Cage, contemporary music was slower to develop this same sense of simultaneously expressing a local and global perspective (sort of like the foreground/background idea in Schenkerian analysis). Cage goes on to extend this idea to performance, composition, and the art/life dichotomy, and I’m not convinced that these ideas really are as good as the direct observations on audition and duration.

The second part of the essay is a brief review of some of the Japanese composers Cage worked with, particularly Toshi Ichiyanagi, the famous first wife of Yoko One. Yoko was by this point living in downtown New York, and her famous scandalous relationships ensued for the rest of the decade. However, most do not give her due credit for the incredible power and influence she had already acquired in the downtown music scene starting in the early 1960s. But that’s another matter I may come back to later.

I do want to focus a bit on Cage and global politics in the 1960s to conclude (I’m short on time this week). Cage’s exploration of Zen philosophy and Eastern thought represents, as many have argued, American apologetic attitudes within the postwar generation, and America's complex interaction with artists and intellectuals from these regions only heightened the colonialist tensions between east and west. We are still in the thick of this tension, particularly with Chinese-American relationships, although I, and many others, think that the current millennial generation has a new sensistivity that does not include the colonialist baggage that burdened the baby-boomer generation; I guess only time will tell.

For Cage’s generation, however, Japan in particular represented one delicate tension. In “Happy New Ears!” he celebrates the internationalism of Japanese society in the postwar period; but remember, this was a sharp cultural backlash similar to Germany’s denazification, and Japan’s celebration of all things western, including commercialism, sparked a generation of consumers that peaked in the 1980s, then famously collapsed, and the long-term effects of this sudden shift in cultural priorities remains a hot topic for postcolonialists and cultural historians.

I guess I’ll leave it at that for now, with an note to say that I am not necessarily implicating Cage’s artistic program in this complex global absorption of the American consumerist imperative; I think he was in fact one of the first to  advocate for a cultural acceptance that is more in line with the current generation rather than the baby-boomers. However, it would be historically unjust to extradite him from contemporary politics; his participation on any level makes him complicit in a cultural milieu that is now little more than a popular television farce a la Mad Men and PanAm.   

“Seriously Comma” (1966)

[32. Hêng / Duration, Unchanging.]

PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

I’m beginning to feel that my I-Ching coins are weighted, since this is the second week in a row I’ve received an unchanging reading. In reality, this has more to do with the deficiencies with the I-Ching model for complete randomization, and for the general theory of randomness. One would think that a random number generator would give us readings that are constantly changing. However, an expert in randomness theory can always spot a fake number set for example, in test groups of dice-rolling. Usually what happens in these cases is two sets of persons are asked to toss a coin over and over and write the results up. One group is asked to fake the results and give an order they consider random. Almost always, the group that actually tosses the coins comes up with a common localized anomaly: many long successions of one side of the coin or the other in a row. The other group attempts to “fake” it by alternating constantly between heads or tails. This is in fact the true nature of randomness on the local level. It’s why gambling works so well; nearly everyone who has gambled will experience a “streak” where against all odds they suddenly keep winning, and nearly everyone who gambles long enough will experience an equal balancing moment in which they consistently lose every hand or roll of the dice; in the end, the house always wins—that is statistical randomness on the global scale.

This is something that John Cage realized in the 50s with the I-Ching coin tossing technique, and he eventually moved to star charts and paper imperfections to generate random sets of data to correlate to musical actions. Many see this as a simplification of the entire compositional method of chance, and in a sense Cage was trying to save time not having to toss coins thousands of times; but what he may or may not have realized, star charts and other random number generators that do not use a set means of variables that generate data are in fact statistically more random; with these methods you get a better localized sense of randomness, because nature in itself is much more random than any model mankind has come up with. Just visit www.random.org, which uses atmospheric noise to generate number sets rather than computer programs, and is currently one of the most successful commercial generators of random figures or information.

I’ve been terribly short on time the past month or so, so apologies in advance for poor writing, typos etc. This is dissertation defense season, where thousands across the country are entering footnote void, frantically rewriting, and fretting about hordes of problems that are insignificant to everyone around them, including their committees. I am sad to say that I am joining this crowd, and needless to say it’s not a terribly pleasant experience. But, as the I-Ching reading notes, “duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances..duration is the self-contained and self-renewing movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every end.” I just need to remember to breathe….

“Seriously Comma” is a short essay, and it mainly concerns Marshall McLuhan, whom Cage admired and whom he met in 1965. I don’t think Cage was truly as invested in McLuhan as he was in Fuller, but it was hard for anyone to avoid the cultural trendiness of a public figure like McLuhan; he was sort of like the Malcolm Gladwell of the 1960s, shamelessly culling from hard-earned academic research in the social sciences and digesting it into an easily readable populist message. McLuhan’s famous motto, “The Medium is the Message” (originally misprinted in the first edition as “The Medium is the Massage”), sparked a generation of technological determinists in communications studies, and it took quite some time for the field to leap out of the mess of theories to morph into its quantitative/qualitative bifurcated pseudo-humanities form it is today.    

 The main ideas that Cage culled from McLuhan were, roughly, as follows: 1.) the modern mediated subject has evolved into a technologically sensitive being, who consumes information in a fundamentally different way than his predecessors. 2.) modern communications technologies are thus an extension of our nervous systems, transporting knowledge and ideas into electrical current transmitted across international boundaries, and 3.) ideas and information are transmitted in symbolic forms through visual codes that are increasingly becoming universalized in the globalized world. McLuhan had many other ideas and theories, of course, but these pop up over and over in Cage’s writings, and it seems logical that he would grab on to them in relationship to his artistic program.

My research has  focused on Cage and the audiovisual experience, and what role it might have in his general aesthetic, and McLuhan’s message (or culturally mediated massage), promoted the familiar messages of western culture since the enlightenment, which gave primacy to the visual over the auditory. Semiotic studies have covered the relationship between signs and objects in advertising and popular media for several generations, alternately embracing and rejecting the  bonds between objects and ideas as part of our overall consciousness. Almost all of these studies use visual examples as the a priori condition for any type of bond, be it indexical or symbolic, and the secondary action of articulating meaning through vocal phonemes is wholly arbitrary; thus sound is inherently subjective in this model, while visual signs are concrete and definable.

Cage of course, gave primacy to the audible in his metaphor of being through the negative aesthetic of silence, and thus his interpretation of McLuhan generally involves transplanting visual metaphors on to auditory ones. This formed an important precursor to sound art theories of the cochlear versus the optic, and it is helpful to keep this in mind when investigating Cage’s written works, which were “musicalized” in a sense, meaning that the auditory phenomena in performance were just as important as the word relationships on the page, at least in Cage’s more abstract writings. 

“Seriously Comma” is written to reflect McLuhan’s notion of scanning or jumping, where individual pockets of information (all are which are, coincidentally, the length of a tweet) are placed in different fonts on the page. The scattered layout of ideas and comments are meant to be read in random order in the same way that the eye jumps from object to object on a newspaper page. McLuhan was writing at the dawn of the 60s, when the American consumerist imperative had catapulted advertising into the household in unprecedented ways through print, radio, and television, and his argument was that humans, as evolving beings, simply adapted to this new form of information processing. Perhaps the best example of what was derided as schizophrenic visuality is the use of “jump cuts” in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Rather than presenting cinematic narrative through the traditional method of three camera setups and shot-reverse-shot, scenes “jump” ahead of the action, cutting out moments of reality and turning filmic reality into something else.

Cage’s essay was written for a special edition of the French journal Preuves entitled Serial Music Today, and his point was to demonstrate the fundamental flaw with serial composition and the modern mediated listening subject: according to McLuhan, and Cage, listeners are unconcerned with continuity, they have adapted and no longer follow or think chronologically; they instead jump, scan, and skim, considering an object simultaneously from the global and local perspective. Thus, to advocate a compositional method that is entirely predicated on the logic of succession was anathema to contemporary music. Cage puts it nicely when he notes “At present, it appears to be a series of components—a sound system—but it is a series of components, not a series of components.”

This is 2012, and in the fifty-plus years since McLuhan and Cage, much has changed, yet we still cling to apocalyptic visions of our minds being changed for the worse. The internet is rotting our brain, Google is making us “stooopid,” spell-check has ruined us; our attention spans have decreased, no one can read anything longer than a 1,500 word blog post without clicking on another link and wandering through the web; advertisements must follow a specific beat and display images of the product in a carefully calculated succession of test-group and cognitive-based assessments of human desire and attentiveness, and so on.

These are compelling arguments, but I think it is important to stress, very seriously, that these are perennial arguments. Ever since the dawn of civilization we have feared and prophesied that changes in the way we think, communicate, live, and work are dangerous turns down the wrong road. Utopian claims are always pitted against apocalyptic cries. Is the internet turning us into human machines, or are we just adapting our habits? Does it really matter?

I’ll end with one more note on the famous passage in “Seriously Comma” that Cage scholars and critics like to constantly quote: “Permission Granted. But not to do whatever you want.” I spent a great deal of time on this blog discussing this in the context of Benjamin Peikut’s recent critique of experimentalism in the 1960s, and it is always considered a lynchpin in the argument against Cage’s “anything goes” aesthetic. Cage allowed for indeterminacy, but only according to his rules, the argument goes, and in a sense it’s a good one. However, the context of the quote is something quite different. Cage was noting that the modern mediated subject has the potential to engage in a new form of communication brought about by technological innovation, but like any new system, it must have a shape and a form that is culturally acceptable in order to be effective—a liberal argument in the truest sense (and wholly unlike today’s form of extremist liberalism). As I’ve mentioned on this blog, the same thing is happening with internet technology as we speak; gone are the days of the “wild west” of internet piracy, net neutrality, and unsponsored information. I imagine that this will continue into the future, when Facebook pops up instantly in our browsers, while far-flung foreign sites will be a thing of the past, lost in the abyss of unsponsored and unregulated information that made this medium such a great message (or massage) in the first place.

Complaint: you open doors; what we want to know is which ones you close. (Doors I open close automatically after I go through.)

“Diary: Emma Lake Workshop” (1965)

[17. Sui / Following, Unchanging.]

The role of the composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place, whether with those concerned or those unaware of what is being said.

Another unchanging I-Ching reading – two weeks in a row! The overriding theme of this reading is adaptation, and the primary image is simple: “In order to obtain a following one must know how to adapt oneself.”

I am going to take a brief detour here to review a performance from last Saturday night of John Cage’s One⁶ (1990) and One¹⁰ (1992) at the Japanese American National Museum here in Los Angeles. The concert was the first in Jeff von der Schmidt’s ambitious Cage 2012 Centennial series with the Southwest Chamber Music ensemble – LA Times review HERE (Though not by Mark Swed). I have been both amused and highly entertained with the series so far, not so much by Jeff’s enthusiasm—which is enduring and inspiring—but more by the makeup of audience members at these concerts. The patrons are use to a typically conservative Southern California classical chamber music series—Mozart at the Huntington Library, etc.—but somehow Jeff has managed to convince a small minority to attend this eclectic concert series and explore some of Cage’s more difficult works. He delicately explains the process involved in each composition, and has a detailed knowledge of Cagean lore that helps soften the blow (or boredom) that many audience members endure.

As is often the case with Cage concerts, the audience consisted of devotees, curious and eclectic elderly patrons, and a small cadre of inspired art school students doing their best to embrace the aura of Cage. There are rarely if ever “regular” classical musicians in the audience, save the small band of performers that have jumped off the cliff into Cage performance-practice.

Noticeably, there are few if any “shocked” patrons awash in disbelief, cursing under their breath or shuffling programs and looking around in agitation. I consider this a real problem with concert attendees in general. Audiences have since Cage’s time become thoroughly acclimated to a contemporary sonic environment that is in many ways much more shocking that Cage’s music, and the only moments I notice that still make audiences cringe are the piercing extended periods of silence in the late number pieces. Sure, there are the usual corporate husbands gently dozing off and checking email on their Smartphones, but even those patrons are shook up a bit when they realize the deadening implications of a mere creak of a folding chair or crumple of a candy wrapper.  

I think, after many years of creating a cacophony of noise, that Cage realized the truly shocking element of silence in his later works. We tend to associate silence with Cage’s “Silent Piece,” 4’33”, which arguably diverts our attention to the environment around us, but rarely is the individual considered in Cagean discussions of environment, space, or listening. As I have noted in my close reading of the core aesthetic texts in Silence, Cage sought out a moment of pure audition that quite literally transcended the body, allowing for a moment of transduction between the sonic object and the mind, leaving the body to waste in its dirty and impure physical environment.

This is a rather difficult exercise in self control through pain, which is part of more extreme practice of yoga and other bodily exercises in Eastern meditation practice, not to mention in classical performance routines, which subjugate the body to visceral extremes in the name of perfection at realizing the composerly implications of the written note. Many have come to question the value of imposing such extreme physical pain on individuals through intense meditation and solitary sitting. Yoga instructors often suffer from debilitating bodily injury later in life after years of succumbing to impossible positions and poses unnatural to the fluid moving body, a conflict outlined in detail in William J Broad’s recent study The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards.

A similar impasse has occurred, I believe, in Cage Studies, which has started to examine the brutalism and self-destruction imposed in some of Cage’s more extreme works, and subsequent interpretations of what such an aesthetic tenant might imply. Cage famously suffered from debilitating arthritis late in his life, (not to mention the bodily injuries Merce Cunningham suffered after years of intense study and performance) and I believe there was a sense of reconciliation with the more extreme implications of silence and noise in relationship to individual centering and place.  As someone who has personally suffered with performance-related injuries, I can attest to the cruelty of classical practice routines and the self-destructive patterns among musicians that such a lifestyle inevitably entails, and I feel that within Cage’s larger critique is a sort of commentary not just on the classical performance dialogue of concert etiquette, but also on the cruelties inflicted on performers in musical execution.

Returning to the concert, the number pieces included in the were written in response to an audio-kinetic sculpture created by Mineko Grimmer. The sculpture consisted of two platforms with large pieces of bamboo protruding over a reflecting pool. Within the pool Grimmer placed several brass tubes and piano strings. Balancing the sculpture were two large granite stones atop the twin poles, and suspended above the sculpture was a third object consisting of thousands of tiny pebbles frozen into the shape of a cone. As the ice melted, the pebbles dropped down the maze of bamboo, water, brass and piano strings, creating an aleatoric percussion piece that could last up to five hours.

The combination of sculptural noises and delicate sustained tones and harmonics in the two pieces for solo violin created a restful and enduring sonic environment. I thought that Grimmer’s sculpture provided a wonderful metaphor for the fundamental dynamic inherent in the Book of Changes by juxtaposing solid and unchanging objects (the supporting stones), with fluid and changing stones of smaller scale (the melting pebbles). This actively demonstrated the process and dynamic between opposite poles of matter, environment, and space. The first piece lasts over 45 minutes, forcing audience members to silently listen and observe the unfolding palate of gentle sounds and disruptions. Overall I considered it a pleasant enough experience, but again I could not stop thinking about the impositions such a piece puts on the audience. Much like the subjugation of performers to the tyranny of the authoritative performance score, Cage forcibly put audience members in a state of perpetual unrest, with the idea that such an uncomfortable environment would eventually lead to self-realization in the sense of a meditative experience.

Whether one chooses to endure or engage with such an aesthetic is, in my mind, a moot point with Cage at this point. Audiences are well-versed in the aleatory aesthetic, and I feel that they engage in these artworks no differently than they would a late Beethoven quartet: through the intense introspection of authorial intent and creative expression. We want to feel what Cage allegedly felt under any circumstances, no matter how absurd.

I personally believe that the immersive collaborations with Merce Cunningham epitomize the Cagean aesthetic of unimpediness and interpenetration, precisely because they reinsert body and movement into the aesthetic experience. Along with experiments with live electronics, these works create an audiovisual kinetic experience more in line with contemporary theories of audiovisuality than the highbrow concert-driven pieces for solo instruments. Perhaps a better way to experience a number piece would be an open interactive environment, where audience members were encouraged to wander in and out of the performance space and to engage with the sonic elements as they see fit. This would in my mind be more in line with Cage’s libertarianism, but it would be hard to sell subscription tickets.

…….

Returning to the essay for this week, as I mentioned in the last post, Dairy: Emma Lake Workshop was the first text where Cage applied a daily ritual of writing in conjunction with chance-determined textual variety in the page layout. Diary applies a simple formula: to write 100 words per day for the fifteen days in which Cage was artist in residence at a music workshop at Emma Lake in 1965, thus giving him a 1500 word text for a commission by Canadian Art journal.

Diary is a pleasant essay to read; it is a literal diary of the comings and goings of a retreat workshop where students and faculty eat, sleep and explore the nature around them and the implications for their artistic endeavors. Cage staged a performance of Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? halfway through the workshop, and famously lost his way while hunting mushrooms two nights later. The diary entry is terse and witty, outlining the absurdity of the whole situation:

Several after lunch off to Lindner’s muskeg. Found a large stand of Hydnum repandum. When others left for a nearby lake, refused to leave. Arranged to meet on road at 4:00. 3:30 started back. 4:00 hurried. 6:00 lost. Yelling, startled moose. 8:00 darkness, soaked sneakers; settled for the night on squirrel’s midden. (Family of birds; wind in the trees, tree against tree; woodpecker.) Fire. ¶Roasted L. aurantiacum. Rationed cigarettes (one every three hours: they’d last ‘till noon). Thought about direction (no stars). Where is north? 6-ft. radius. August 24. 5:30 sky overcast. 6:00 aiming for solid dry spots, angry (7:00): full circle back again (checked that fire was out). Goal: walk in one direction. Mushrooms. Lost cigarettes and wax paper. Recognized path connecting two lakes. Visiting the larger one, passed by Amanita virosa. 9:00 heard horn. Shouted. Received reply! Don Reichert and Rick Shaller picked me up. Friendship vs. nature: St Ives denim, ham sandwiches and canoe. (Distinguished between sounds and relationship of them: no sounds.) Cooked hydnums. Gave reading. Search organized by Jack Sures, potter. DNR men. Fifty people, mostly artists. helicopter. Dog. Jeep. At night, searchlights, shouts, horns. That night also: loss of mind, cabin destroyed by fire, Mrs. Kaldor hospitalized.

I think this paints an amusingly appropriate picture of Cage’s persona. Even though Cage is caught up in a potentially dangerous circumstance of getting lost in the woods, he transcends the situation in a moment of Zen-like clarity. He observes the natural world around him, the many fungi popping up as he attempts to find his way back, the wildlife that suddenly pops up in front of him  around every corner, the frustration with navigation and the relief involved in finding ones way back to the path, back to civilization. I have encountered every one of these emotions in the forest, and the electric environment of finding ones way, combined with the sudden chance encounters with wildlife , are among the most exhilarating aspects of nature. I remember hiking once with a friend where we suddenly found ourselves quite lost, dozens of miles from civilization, toward the end of the day. I asked him: “Are we on the trail?” To which he replied in a very Zen-like moment: “We are always on the trail.”

…..

One winter David Tudor and I were touring in the Middle West. From Cincinnati we drove to Yellow Springs to drum up an engagement for Merce Cunningham and his Dance Company. In this way we met the McGrarys. Keith was teaching philosophy at Antioch College and Donna taught weaving and dancing. My conversation with Keith McGrary had no sooner begun that we discovered our mutual interest in mushrooms. I told him that I’d never seen the winter-glowing Collybia velutipes. He opened the front door and, using the flashlight, showed me the plant growing in the snow from the roots of a nearby tree. He told me what difficulty he was having finding books about fungi. I gave him a copy of Hard which I’d brought along. This book deals especially with Ohio mushrooms. The next day I located two copies of the book in a second-hand bookstore in Columbus. I bought them both. Each winter I find the Collybia, the velvet footed, in quantity. How is it I didn’t notice it during the winters before I met Keith McGary?