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

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

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

                                                                                                         I wAs standing on ;

                                                                               noticed no differRence between

         looKing at art or away from it.

                                                                                                    each   Thing he saw

                                                                                       he asked us tO look at.

                                                                                                                By

                                                                                                            thE time we reached the Japanese restaurant

                                                                                                      our eYes were open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                  the rooM

                                                             dAvid has in the attic

        is veRy

                good for his worK. 

“Mushroom Book” (1972)

[38. K'uei / Opposition, Unchanging.] 

remarks about:

Life/Art,

Art/Life,

Life/Life,

Art/Art,

Zen,

Current Reading,

Cooking (shopping, recipes).

Games, Music mss., Maps,

Friends,

Invention,

Projects,

₊

Writing without syntax,

Mesostics (on mushroom names).

“Mushroom Book” is an interesting interlude in the “Diary” series, written in a loose format similar to the other diary entries (and meant to function as an interlude to the 6^th and 7^th diaries), with the overarching subject of mushrooms as the topic. Cage inserts recipes and anecdotes surrounding his fascination with mushrooms, and in certain sections, composes in a fashion similar to Thoreau’s journal entries by observing the seasonal growth of specific mushroom species at favorite locales across the United States and abroad.

“Mushroom Book,” as the title implies, was also published in a limited edition of 75 copies, with lithographs by Louis Long and additional text by Alexander H. Smith. I have yet to see a copy of the book, but judging from online sources, the text included in M was handwritten on pages opposite the lithographs by Long, with captions by Alexander Smith. Next time I visit JCT I will be sure to peruse this volume.

Cage indicated in the introduction to M that “Mushroom Book” alternates between syntactical and non-syntactic sections, but overall the form is mostly syntactical, with several mesostics on specific Latin mushroom names, and many anecdotes and recipes for mushrooms. I found myself enjoying this much more than the previous diary entries, which after a point feel a bit monotonous, and Cage’s gentle wandering between syntactical and non-syntactic sections is wonderfully smooth and effortless. Consider a passage:

                We only need boots, basket, paper bags,

                                                and knife.

                                                                                head are work

and, it caps. Huautla

                         base species along

                                diam ; Mounce Amanita

beautiful be coniferous edible

                                                clavipes view of

                                       drying (“snuff-brown”)

germinated to to an

                hues

                                                an

 Gylden Sabina fungi. From Huautla,

                the taette. body

                                                gills

                                reason of

                                                                August

“Mushroom Book” is a rather long essay, and takes up a considerable amount of M. I see this text as a mediation between ideas stemming from “Mureau” and the “Diary” series, and it is the juxtaposition or dialectic of these two ideas - the development of non-syntactic randomization procedures for dissolving language on the one hand, and the collage process of “writing through” on the other  - that most accurately characterizes Cage’s later poetic writing style. I’ll be focusing on these two concepts at length in the final month of this blog, as I consider it an integral part of “late period” Cage, and something that closely resembles his approach to musical composition and visual art as well.

                                                Who’s been killed

by a work of art?           

“Song” (Solo for Voice 30), 1970; “Six Mesostics,” 1972

[ 7. Shih / The Army, Nine at the Top. Changing To:  4. Mêng / Youthful Folly.]

This will be another short post; I’m taking some much-needed time off, and I can’t imagine many people out there are digging deeply into this blog over the warm summer months. I promise to pick up the pace starting next month and leading to the centennial, as I prepare for fall teaching and gear up for another academic year.

The first essay I am reading through is an excerpt from Cage’s massive 1970 composition, Song Books, which consisted of ninety solos for voice, each written according to different compositional methods related to the I-Ching. The overarching theme of the 317 page collection was taken from his 1969 diary entry “We connect Satie with Thoreau,” and individual songs were alternately related to the topic or another that might have interested Cage depending on chance procedures. In the case of “Song,” which was derived from Solo for Voice No. 30, printed in M,  the text is from Thoreau’s journal, and was accompanied by excerpts from Cage’s other major transitional composition from 1969, Cheap Imitation. Other excerpts in the series included live electronics, aleatoric, and graphic performative scores, creating a handbag of Cagean compositional approaches in one elegantly bound score (looking not unlike his anthology of contemporary scores from the period, Notations, which can be found online HERE.)

I recently provided a little bit of consultation to Yuval Sharon, a Los Angeles area artist and producer, who was hired as scenic designer for Michael Tilson Thomas’ “American Mavericks” festival in San Francisco. Many wonderful reviews from the performance can be found HERE and HERE. I also recommend Amelia Cuni’s performance and recording of Solo 58, and recently Ne(x)tworks performed for the big Cage festival during the Berlin MaerzMusik festival.

Jessye Norman, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Meredith Monk performing in SF

Reading through the text of “Song” really belies the vast array of performative tools necessary to really experience the work, and left on its own I must say it is just rather pleasant, and little more; like opening a page of Thoreau’s journal and enjoying the gentle narration of outdoor scenery (which again is why I think these journals were so appealing to Cage for their very literal descriptiveness).

The second essay for this week consists of six mesostics written for various friends, the first for Edwin Denby was apparently the very first and most primitive of the mesostics, as I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago. The second, for dancer Carolyn Brown’s partner James Klosty, is another gentle and affectionate token, and the third, for Stefan Wolpe, a kind memoriam. The fourth was written for a kind hostess in Frankfurt named Verenza, the fifth for Aaron Copland, and the final for art dealer and impresario Leo Castelli, written in the primitive mesostic method.

I’ve come across many of these short and intimate mesostics written for various colleagues and friends, and as Cage honed his method he passed them along in letters, for exhibition catalogs, memorials, program notes, monographs, and any other occasion where his valued input was needed. A special token from a unique friend, to say the least. Here is one of my personal favorites:

when  yOu

                                                                                Said

                                                                           eaCh

                                                                          in  Animate object

                                                              has a SpiRit

                                              that can take the Form of sound

                                                                     by beIng

                                                                               Set into vibration

                                                                         i beCame a musician

                                                           it was as t  Hough

                                         you had set me on fIre

                                                                          i raN

                                                  without thinkinG

                                                                  and thrEw myself

      into the wateR

“Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1969, 1970-1, 1971-2.”

[64. Wei Chi / Before Completion, Nine in the Second Place, Six in the Third. Changing To:  56. Lü / The Wanderer.]

I don’t believe, Duchamp said, in the verb, to be. “I do not believe that I am.”

A newspaperman wrote asking me to send’im my philosophy in a nutshell. Get out of whatever cage you happen to be in.

I’ve decided to finish the remaining “Diary” installations from M in one post, as I’ve already spent a considerable amount of time discussing their method and context. Together they make up almost half of M, but I want to save some time at the end of this project to discuss some other texts. The last three entries cover 1969-1972, but as I mentioned before, there is reason to suspect that the chronology is not entirely accurate, based on some of the geographic locations Cage discusses in individual entries compared to his touring schedule.

As I’ve mentioned before, 1969-72 was a significant transition period in Cage’s career, toward what I would refer to as a “late period” following the monumental multimedia installation works such as HPSCHD (1967-9), leading toward introspective and perhaps even somewhat expressive works such as Cheap Imitation (1969). In 1969 Cage’s last surviving parent, Crete, died; in 1970 he moved back to New York City from Stony Point, and overall his touring pace slowed considerably. His primary engagements were European tours in the summers, accompanied by regional engagements in New England—a quieter pace that he would maintain for the remainder of his life (Europeans proved far more supportive and encouraging of his work until the end of his life, and still are today).

A few general notes from the diary entries: Cage for the first time mentions Andy Warhol in a publication, notes Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and spends a considerable amount of time quoting Mao Tse-tung; again it’s a bit beyond this project to really engage in Cage’s later political associations, if they can even be called that; I would more call them curiosities, but that’s another matter. There are two pretty funny stories interspersed in the last entry: the first about a countess struck with a sudden case of diarrhea, and the second a rather long recount of Cage losing his wallet. Otherwise, we have many of the familiar topics: politics, world population, anything related to Buckminster Fuller, and the decreasing references to anything Zen.  

“Mureau” (1970)

 [38. K'uei / Opposition, Unchanging.]

His earthy contentment GETS EXPRESSIONWhen two or more bullfrogs trump

together, it isit is a ten-pound-tenthe together, IT Is a ten-pound-

ten noteTheir hand-organs remind you of the wild beasts those which reach h

im there stir much more

I must say I am rather surprised by the latest I-Ching streak of unchanging hexagrams; this is the third week in a row where I have not received a single changing line in my coin tossing. In the prior 41 weeks of this project I have only had about four or five unchanging hexagrams – perhaps this is an indication of the comfortable concluding arc of this project? Or perhaps, just as likely, it is yet another example of a localized streak according to randomness or chaos theory…

Today is the first discussion of American transcendentalist author and poet Henry David Thoreau. I am reading through one of Cage’s first nonsyntactical texts, “Mureau,” a morphing of the first syllable of “Music” with the second syllable of “Thoreau.” The essay is a compilation of phrases and syllables from Thoreau’s massive personal journal, published in 1962. The poet Wendell Berry first introduced Cage to the journal in 1967, and as Cage famously noted soon afterward, “reading Thoreau’s Journal, I discover every idea I’ve ever had worth its salt.”

Cage applied familiar methods for assembling his text: a compilation of a specific gamut of remarks from the journal about music, silence, and sounds subjected to “chance procedures” (again it would take many hours of extensive study in the archives to determine the specific method, but rest assured it was complex and detailed), arranged in a dense block justified layout on the page. There are only a few fonts, but Cage compacted many phrases, overlapping sections and “varying the personal pronoun” to bridge each remark in a constant stream-of-thought layout.

This is first and foremost a performative piece; reading the text is difficult, the fonts are hard to read clearly, and anyone trying to extrapolate any sense of continuity will soon be lost in the beautiful clutter. But of course that is not the point; this work, like many others, is a piece meant to be performed, and Cage’s 1972 recording is in my mind just as valuable as the text itself (Courtesy, once again, of UbuWeb):

Setting the text aside for a moment, I find it interesting that Cage first encountered Thoreau not through his seminal works such as Walden or Civil Disobedience, but rather through the journals, a massive collection of over two million words he kept for over 24 years. By 1967 Cage had already embarked on his “diary” project, and he was primarily inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s massive Dymaxion Chronofile, a ridiculously extensive work of obsessive compulsive disorder that documented every aspect of his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. I’ve perused this outrageous chronology at Stanford before (bound in hundreds of volumes along the wall behind the reference desk), and he quite literally scrapbooked every note, memo, piece of junk mail, etc., creating what many have called the most documented life in human history.  

Many of Thoreau’s journal entries, especially later in life, were directly related to his work as a land surveyor of his township, and the journal is as much a naturalist account of environmental ecology as it is a personal memoir. Thus the prose was rife with quotable observations on the sounds of nature. Here are a few good excerpts from later years (the entire journal can be found for free HERE):

Wednesday April 9, 1856. 8 A.M. – By boat to V. palmate Swamp for White birch sap

…I hear the note of a lark amid the other birds on the meadow. For two or three days, have heard delivered often and with greater emphasis the loud, clear, sweet phebe note of the chickadee, elicited by the warmth…in a leafy pool in the low wood toward the river, hear a rustling, and see yellow-spot tortoises dropping off an islet, into the dark, stagnant water, and four or five more lying motionless on the dry leaves of the shore and of islets about…a gun fired at a muskrat on the other side of the island towards the village sounds like planks thrown down from a scaffold, borne over the water. Meanwhile I hear the sap dropping into my pail. The birch sap flows thus copiously before there is any other sign of life in the tree, the buds not visibly swollen.

I really cannot stress just how exhaustive this journal is; Thoreau literally recorded everything around him, the text follows a comfortable rhythm, and after a gentle perusing one slowly develops the true essence of transcendentalism; this is not a self-serving obsessive compulsive act, it is a naturalistic account of the reality surrounding Thoreau; it has little if anything to do with him personally, with his emotions, thoughts or ideals, and everything to do with the literal surroundings. It is as if Thoreau were documenting with a 360 camera the world around him; not from any particular perspective, but as a silent observer performing, as Cage would most certainly have agreed, 4’33” on an endless loop.

I am very much a naturalist and admittedly biased in this respect, but I feel there are very clear connections to make between Thoreau’s journal entries and Cage’s aesthetic of silence. Thoreau is not attempting to impose anything in these entries, he is performing an act that Cage aspired to in the aesthetic of Silence; a moment of unmediated perception with the world around him, unbiased or beyond the human sensory perception; in essence, a transcendental act.

TEAR TO PIECES WHIle they charmu

sreduce thrilling sphrre music to a wail sounds they should hear if the

y were below t Wind comes to wake up the trees r It sounds LIKE MOCKer

y to cheat usbut no sound so brings round summerhe contemplates God’s voice