“62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham,” “36 Mesostics Re and Not Re Marcel Duchamp.”

[48. Ching / The Well, Unchanging.]

                                     we reMember

                                           thAt

          he had stopped woRking

even though we’re now Conscious

                                             hE

                                never reLaxed for a moment

Today I am reading through the inaugural installations of Cage’s unique poetic form, the “mesostic.” In essence, a mesostic follows the rules of an acrostic, where a single phrase is highlighted amidst the text either through boldface or capitalization, aligned to one margin. It was often used as a mnemonic device, and Cage took the concept one step further by creating a limiting procedure or rule whereby, between any two capitalized letters, you can’t have the second letter appear again. This simply means that one must start a new line or choose a new word or phrase to continue the poem. Here is a simple example:

I’ll start with an acrostic, BOB, and my text is “Buy Our Books online,” which would look like this:

                                Buy

                                Our

                                Books online   

Now I’ll construct something more elaborate, applying Cage’s “50%” mesostic rule:

if possiBle we will buy Our digital Books online

This was the format for Cage’s first mesostic, written for his friend Edwin Denby, in 1963:

rEmembering a Day i visited you
seems noW as I write that the weather theN was warm

The simple rule of succession means that, once we reach the next letter of the core text, we must capitalize it, and the poem is over when the letters are all used. The next step was to align the core text center, thus creating, as Norman Brown observed, a “mesostic” rather than an acrostic, after the Greek term mesos, or middle, rather than akron, which means extremity. Applying these rules to the BOB mesostic, we get this:

  if possiBle we will buy

                                Our

                  digital Books online

Here is where the decision-making is dictated by the structure; my first inclination was to write “if possible we should buy our books online,” and this would force the following layout according to the rule of succession:

  if possiBle we

           shOuld

Buy our books online

And so on. Cage later conceived of a more elaborate “100%” mesostic, whereby the rule of succession goes both ways, neither the previous nor the next letter can occur in between. This is far more restrictive, and only the second version of my acrostic would fit the rules, and only if I removed “our books online” with something like “them,” which would destroy the meaning of the sentence, since the preposition “then” is ambiguous; thus, one must get more creative.

These are great examples of the kinds of riddles or puzzles built into many of Cage’s works, providing a platform to engage in some creative dislocations of familiar syntactical structure while still maintaining some semblance of a coherent and decipherable message. The first mesostic series I am reading through, “62 mesostics re Merce Cunningham,” are not really even mesostics; if fact I am a little confused as to exactly what procedures Cage used, since he only mentions the ubiquitous term “chance procedures” in the preface. I imagine one could decipher the process by going through the notes for the project, which are at Wesleyan University.

As with almost all of Cage’s projects, he first assembled a set of materials for the content, then devised methods for arranging their layout on the page. The material for Cunningham’s mesostics consisted of syllables and words from Cunningham’s publication Changes: Notes on Choreography, along with thirty-two other books Cunningham often referred to for his own work. Cunningham’s name proved too long for the mesostic method, not to mention the fact that his full name included two e’s, three n’s, two c’s, and four of the five vowels, which would make even the 50% rule difficult. Instead Cage devised an elaborate typographical layout of 700 different typefaces and font sizes, and rather than connecting words via a center aligned core text, he connected letters both vertically and horizontally. I am not entirely sure how to decode this, but the end result is quite fantastic. Even sections that contain complete words are difficult to decipher, and because the gamut of words was so large, there is no specific meaning to individual phrases like there are in the mesostics.

I mentioned before that Cage never wrote a traditional essay on Cunningham in any of his major publications, and I feel it is notable that Cage’s longest essay (if you can call it that), focusing on his partner is also the most difficult to decipher. I would venture to say that it is purposefully coded for a number of reasons. Cunningham and Cage were adamant about keeping their personal life separate from the public, and the story of their life and work together followed many of the pivotal moments in the gay rights movement, each inching one more step toward equality that we are now finally seeing today, at least among more progressive circles in American and abroad. This again is a side note to this project, and I do not consider myself qualified to truly give the topic justice, but it is noteworthy nonetheless, and I look forward to future examinations of the topic by gender scholars in the future.

Turning to the second essay, a collection of mesostics “re and not re” Marcel Duchamp, here we are introduced to the formal 50% mesostic format. The occasion for these mesostics was a small publication by Shigeko Kubota, wife of Nam June Paik, documenting Reunion, an 1968 interactive work conceived by Cage and executed by Lowell Cross, where a chessboard was wired into a sound system, and each successive move triggered noises in the auditorium. The original premiere consisted of a game between Cage and Duchamp (which Duchamp won easily), followed by several more games with Marcel’s wife, Teeny. The entire performance lasted about five hours.

The real subtext of these mesostics is not the performance, but rather Duchamp’s death, which occurred just eight months after the performance, along with the subsequent unveiling of Duchamp’s seminal work, Étant donnés, an monumental installation artwork Duchamp secretly worked on for over 25 years, which was installed in a permanent exhibition space at the Philadelphia Music of Art. This was quite a shock to the art world, as most were under the impression that Duchamp had given up on art in favor of chess for the last twenty or so years. The work is far too intricate to discuss in a short blog post, but needless to say Cage was likely surprised as well about the project, especially the explicit sexuality that was foregrounded. I remember vividly spending hours in this small alcove in the corner of the museum, pondering Duchamp’s work, and leaving with more questions than answers. I’ll conclude by saying that I find these mesostics quite sad and full of melancholy; Cage had such an affinity for Duchamp, and owed so much to his precedent, and his death was in my mind quite significant: is it a coincidence that, the following year, Cage famously retreated from his monumental multimedia installation period toward a final “late period” of introspection?

                                                                         since other Men

                                                                                           mAke

                                                                                             aRt,

                                                                                         he  Cannot.

                                                                                         timE

                                                                                       is vaLuable. 

“Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued, 1968 (Revised)

[42. I / Increase, Unchanging.]

What we have would be no uglier called by another name. Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It’s probably no more than ninety-nine people who don’t know what they’re doing. They’re involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

Today is the first reading from M: Writings ’67-72, which marks a step toward the final portion of this project. Since this also week marks the beginning of summer, and since I will be away often with research and travel, these posts will be a bit shorter.

M  is organized much like A Year From Monday, with several installations from the ongoing “Diary’ project interspersed with specific essays. It also introduces the “mesostic” concept in its earliest form. Gone are the traditional essays from the earlier books; instead, almost all of the texts are written with unique and individual layouts and designs, each according to different operations involving chance or other indeterminacy methods. I’ll discuss each method individually as I move along, but the important point in general to glean from this, in my mind, is the transformation of Cage’s publishing career and the parallel shift in his personal and professional career toward late period introspection, to again borrow the classic musicological biographical divisions.

M thus takes on the character of a published diary or memoir rather than a series of polemics, as was the case in Silence. Cage had, by this point, more or less proven his point and established his artistic program within intellectual circles, and these final books develop and hone his individual approaches to syntax, language, and poetry in a highly refined and unique manner.

One item I must bring up again here, as I did in the first entry to this blog, is Cage’s sudden admiration of Mao Zedong in the introduction. This was another odd turn for Cage, and in my mind it was as much a misreading of communism as anything, something that was quite common in many leftist intellectual circles in the late 60s and especially early 70s. That is a topic worthy of a book in itself, and I’ll leave it at that here, and focus on the first diary entry.

Cage states that the diary was written in 1968, but I have reason to believe portions of it were written as late as 1970. Halfway through the installment he mentions a visit to the Sanibel wildlife sanctuary in southern Florida, and as far as I can tell, the only time he visited the area was in 1970, when he was in residence at nearby University of South Florida. He could have easily visited the area earlier for personal reasons, but this seems unlikely for someone who’s life revolved around professional speaking engagements, where travel was always dictated by professional agendas. Thus, it is possible that Cage did some reworking for the final publication, and I think it is safe to assume that, at some level, this is a mosaic of entries from a given time period rather than a strictly chronological diary of events in the traditional sense; but I could be wrong, and would welcome any evidence to the contrary.

I mentioned that the last diary entry seemed to focus primarily on technological innovations, and this entry seems more well-rounded, mixing ideas for innovative and eclectic new inventions with the usual gamut of east Asian heuristics, political tirades, and personal anecdotes. Cage introduces his famous Throeau quote, as he had just been introduced to the American transcendentalist in 1968:

Reading Thoreau’s Journal, I discover every idea I’ve ever had worth its salt.

I’ll spend some more time with Thoreau later, but for now, I feel Cage found a comfortable equilibrium with his “Diary” format, and like the mature mesostic, reading through the brilliant mosaic of ideas and anecdotes becomes a wonderful, living ,yet ephemeral experience; a “moment in the life,” whatever real period that may be.

Spent several hours searching through a book trying to find the idea I’d gotten out of it. I couldn’t find it. I still have the idea. 

“Diary: How To Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),” Continued, 1967

[4. Mêng / Youthful Folly, Unchanging.]

Begin again, assuming abundance, unemployment, a field situation, multiplicity, unpredictability, immediacy, the possibility of participation.

Yet another unchanging I-Ching reading, on a very fitting Cagean topic. This is the last essay in A Year From Monday (I’ll return to the afterward at the end of this project on September 5^th), and it is the third installment of the diary in the book. As I mentioned before, the diary entries bifurcate the book, with entries at the beginning and end, and one in the middle. I’ve discussed the method for determining the length, font, and layout of the diary at length in the last post, and I think I’ll spend some time today discussing the content.

1967, or at the least, the end of the sixties, is a very convenient dividing point in Cage’s career. Perhaps a better point is that following Cage’s monumental Gesamtkunstwerk, HPSCHD (1967-69), followed by his sudden return to composing for acoustic instruments in 1969 with Cheap Imitation. The eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin coyly titled this the end of Cage’s “heroic” period, after Beethoven, as the remaining years of his career were devoted to an in-depth investigation of American transcendentalism (among many, many other things, of course). I am hesitant to call this period a “retreat” in any sense, but American culture overall did experience somewhat of a reactionary backlash in the 1970s and 1980s, and Cage’s liberatory politics were gradually absorbed into institutional enclaves and European, especially German, centers of support. This general topic will be the focus of the last third of this project, while I read through Cage’s later works, all of which take up the diary concept in their structure and method.  

This third installment of the Diary likely picked up shortly after the second, sometime in the summer of 1966 when Cage was touring Europe with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. This tour, as I mentioned before, featured the multimedia immersive work, Variations V, in a pared-down version that could tour well. However, as Carolyn Brown mentioned in her memoirs, the logistics for traveling with such a wide variety of electronic equipment were horrendous; at one point customs officers were convinced it was some sort of espionage equipment, and the tour manager, Lew Lloyd, was forced to charter an airplane and ship the equipment across the border after having come to an “agreement” with the border officers. Thus the tour went on.

As with the other diary entries, Cage’s proclamations cover the gamut of contemporary political, social, and economic issues. The Vietnam War, economic inequality, technological innovations and curious inventions, and many more ideas pop up in the endless stream-of-thought writing. There are fewer mentions of personal experiences, interactions with artists, etc., and many more radical ideas for new technological innovations, especially in the field of transportation. Here are a few new examples:

Deep drilling, a rapid underground transportation tunnel between Boston and New York City, wrist watch alarms to track individual dietary intake, graphical user interface, a “global Telstar facility” for translating international communications, behavioral psychology, human regeneration as a solution to ageing, electronic reincarnation, electric clothing rechargeable at public couches with adjustable climate-controlled domes, climate control, John Cage’ Sr’s infamous cold remedy, “Mist-A-Cold,” genetic modification, “privacy to become an unusual rather than expected experience,” satellite teleconferencing, biomechanics, implanted television receivers in politicians, teleportation, Synchroveyor travel, razor shrapnel, skybusses, and biomass fertilization -  all of this, mind you, written in 1966 and 1967.  

There are mentions of several concerts, including Gordon Mumma’s premiere of Mesa in 1966, the monumental  “Experiments in Art and Technology” extravaganza at the armory in New York in the fall of 1966, and computer music -  but noticeably, music as a general concept and the familiar Cagean aphorisms are absent in this diary. Instead we are given an assault of technocratic utopianism, with a rather serious political tone. This, in my mind, was the focus of Cage’s career at the end of the sixties, culminating with several world tours and multimedia extravaganzas, what James Pritchett described as “Music, not composition,” where Cage functioned as a ringleader, a multiplatform artists that was as much a facilitator and organizer rather than merely a composer. Cage took on countless roles during this period, with many university residencies and world tours with the Cunningham Dance Company, and his endless series of connections to visual artists, engineers, and media theorists was intimidating. I find it interesting whenever I discuss my research on Cage to older colleagues and friends, almost everyone involved in contemporary music over the last four decades recalled hearing Cage speak at some point during this period, and the effect was always the same: amazement and inspiration mixed with a marked feeling of confusion and disorientation. Where was all this going?   

If we get through 1972, Fuller says, we’ve got it made. 1972 ends the present critical period. Following present trends, fifty per cent of the world’s population will then have what they need. The other fifty per cent will rapidly join their ranks. Say by the year 2000.

“Talk I” (1965)

[49. Ko / Revolution (Molting), Six at the Top. Changing to:  13. T'ung Jên / Fellowship with Men.]

Jasper Johns                           Date book                               Name-dropping/omission of names

Duchamp                               Voice as Poetry                     N.Y.C./India. Shocking?

Telephone book                     “More like a cookie”            Student of weather

Newspaper/discuss              Paula’s letter                    Judith’s telephone/interruption

Food-gathering                     Changes in aquariums        Charleston, West Virginia

Letters                                    Taxi driver press charges   Packaging/Indian problem                                

Today I’m reading through “Talk I,” but there is not really much to read through, since it is a collection of discussion prompts for an improvised multimedia event staged in 1965 at the infamous ONCE festival series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The festivals have been of interest to a number of scholars recently, as the original participants have been recently assembling and archiving all their materials related to the project, particularly Gordon Mumma. I’ve discussed this and other projects with him in detail in the past, and I imagine there will be lots of publications coming out soon on live electronics in the 1960s. I have a feeling that academics are following the lead of what The New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik referred to as the “Forty-Year Itch,” where “the prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade forty or fifty years past.”

In any case, this reading presents an opportunity to expand on the notion of expanded arts or intermedia theories coming from the 1960s, something very much in vogue then, and, following Gopnik’s rule, today in academics. I have a feeling this is in part due to the shrinking humanities disciplines, which are generally being pushed into interdepartmental abysses, thus pushing scholars to literally juggle multiple fields at once and thus provide a greater variety of services to the university, but that’s another matter…

New World Records released an extensive compilation CD of music from the festival, available HERE, and Leta Miller assembled some extensive liner notes, available online HERE. To give one a sense of the atmosphere of these events, here is an excerpt from Miller’s notes of the concert held the evening prior to “Talk I.”

The first night featured the ONCE Group in Unmarked Interchange, a multimedia visual and sonic extravaganza illustrating the theme of anomalous activities superimposed on a social event —in this case a drive-in movie. Borkin and Wehrer designed a giant projection screen, six feet thick and twenty feet high, divided into three levels and fitted out with doors, drawers, louvers, and  platforms that served as sites for various activities. A documentary on Mexico—a reddish-brown film that picked up the hues of the setting sun—preceded a showing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s Top Hat (1935), chosen for its two-dimensional, black-and-white imagery. “It matched—or served as the model for—the geometry of the projection screen,” recalls Ashley. A few minutes after Top Hat began, a weather balloon gradually emerged from the screen, then was cut away and floated off the edge of the structure. Panels, doors, and louvers began to open. Mumma, dressed in white, stood in a doorway reading excerpts from The Story of O, Pauline Réage’s sadomasochistic tale of female slavery. Caroline Cohen emerged from another door, crossed a platform, and planted a meringue pie in his face. A woman in a white slip put on a white trench coat, picked up a white suitcase, and walked along the black and white movie. At the other end she changed to a black trench coat, picked up a black suitcase, and walked back. In the center, a set of six-foot louvers opened to reveal Jackie Mumma hanging up white sheets. On the lowest level a six-foot deep drawer on tracks slid forward to reveal people in white lying on a bed reading a play. In a center room, Larry Leitch stood at an upright piano playing Grieg. 

The giant projection screen was left on the top of the parking lot for Cage’s concert the following night, but it is unclear if anything was projected during the concert; given the atmosphere of the concert series, I imagine someone was up to the task. The premise of Cage’s event was simple: he listed a series of topics that he was interested in discussing, and Tudor arranged a number of contact microphones and various electronic components for manipulating the sounds of Cage’s conversation. Cage began with composer Robert Ashley, and later when he left, Robert Rauschenberg. As he notes in the introduction to the essay, little if anything about their conversations, due to the noise of the electronics, was comprehensible to the audience. Cage decided to arrange the text in the same way that he had arranged the chairs for the audience, that is, haphazardly, and the collage of ideas provides a nice glimpse into the topics Cage was thinking about at the time. Much like his “Diary” installations (which I’ll return to next week), his writing and lecturing focused on a few major figures at the top of his mind in 1965-66, namely Marshall McLuhan (which I discussed in detail HERE), Jasper Johns (again HERE), Marcel Duchamp (HERE), etc.

I find this a fascinating work to glance over, especially after having spent so much time with the essays leading up to this one. It is placed perfectly in A Year From Monday near the end, right before the final “Diary” entry, and almost all of the topics are from previous essays in the collection. It’s like an unorganized index to the book! Consider a few entries, and if you have the time, go back to some of the previous posts from A Year From Monday:

LSD, Emma Lake, Seriously, Mushrooms, Jaguar/Mike/psychosomatic, Amanita muscaria, American Foreign Policy/Fulbright, Variations V, Electronics when lost in the woods, Sixty-one global services.

Without having read through the previous essays in the order presented, this collage would make little sense to the reader, and if one truly followed Cage to the end, literally of the book, and figuratively by embracing his sense of nondiscursiveness and plurality, this would serve as a fitting conclusion to the volume. However, if one merely opened to this passage, I imagine they would succumb to the same fate of many of the audience members in attendance on that cool September night in 1965, as Cage recalled:

After it became evident what they were “in for,” quite a number of people present went away. Those who remained enjoyed themselves, sat in pairs and informal circles, sent delegates off to the town below. These returned with refreshments, six-packs of beer, etc.