Afterword(s)

[23. Po / Splitting Apart, Unchanging] 

Not knowing exactly what day a year from Monday—the day eight of us had arranged to meet in Mexico—would be, I decided it was early June 1967. When people wrote or called asking me to do something that month, I said No…then it occurred to me—see the last paragraph of the Foreword—that I was the only one taking the trip to Mexico seriously…What we have to do, then, is not to say Yes or to say No, but simply to go straight on illiterately, updating the way of life Meister Eckhart proposed (just following the general outlines of the Christian life, “not wondering am I right or doing something wrong”)…

—John Cage, afterword to  A Year From Monday

  

Today marks the end of this blog, a year from Monday, September 5^th, 2011 on the centennial date of John Cage’s birth, right here in Los Angeles at Good Samaritan Hospital, just a few miles from my small apartment in East Hollywood, where I began and ended this project. It also marks the end of my dissertation fellowship, which means many long hours of teaching music history, the long and epic tale of a tradition that was in many senses anathema to Cage’s artistic program (and in others wholly in line with it), but which is nevertheless a way of life for academics such as myself. I am preparing many exciting events for this fall, including a panel discussion on “Cage Studies” at the national convention of the American Musicological Society this November, with Laura Kuhn and a host of Cage scholars, along with several publication preparations.

I have been pondering how to end this blog, and asking myself if an ending really matters, as Cage alluded to in the afterword to A Year From Monday. In every sense, it was the concept behind this blog that kept me going, week after week, even during vacation months, hectic writing deadline schedules, and all the daily, weekly, and monthly distractions that go along with the messiness of everyday life. I feel that some posts were especially enlightening for my own research, others perhaps a bit by the book, and others even still less than engaging, but it was the process of reading through, week after week, that I found most valuable, and I hope some of these posts will provide a valuable, or at the least provocative, resource for others to build on. As I’ve told many people over the last year, at the very least, I am proud of the concept behind this blog, and the title.

I did not intend to cover all of Cage’s writings in one year, as some may have guessed from the title of this blog, but rather to pick one or two essays each week and write between 1000-2000 words; a few weeks were a bit slimmer, and several were much longer - in total this blog amounts to approximately 80-90,000 words. The writing style varied, from slips of colloquialism to discursive academic prose, all fitting for a forum that is meant to be an informal discussion of ideas, links, images, and content to be cataloged and indexed in the endless algorithms of cyberspace. If and when I take down this blog, I have little doubt that remnants will remain cached on servers for years, ghosts of information once gained and again lost, in an endless cycle of rebirth that, even in the cyber age, continues to frame our corporeal existence.

For those of you first reaching this page, welcome. For those returning one last time, goodbye. If you are wondering what any of this means, please click on the link on the right margin labeled “About This Blog.” A special thanks to ARK, who followed me from beginning to end, adding notes of encouragement and criticism nearly every week, and  cultivating something personal and wonderful that I will cherish for the rest of my life. 

I found the final I-Ching reading to be wonderfully apt, as it often is when one is asking the right questions. The first post to this blog received the unchanging hexagram No. 35. Chin/Progress, which, according to the Bollingen translation, "represents the sun rising over the earth, a symbol of rapid, easy progress, which at the same time means ever widening expansion and clarity." Today's reading was another unchanging hexagram, No. 23. Po/Splitting Apart, and the image represents an end to all things corporeal: 

THE IMAGE:

The mountain rests on the earth;

The image of SPLITTING APART

Thus those above can ensure their position

Only by giving generously to those below.

I’ll conclude with one final note of thanks, to the one individual who made this all possible, Mr. John Milton Cage Jr. himself, born September 5^th 1912. Happy Birthday Mr. Cage. 

Cage with Cake - The John Cage Trust 

Richard H. Brown
September 5th, 2012
Los Angeles, California

“Series re Morris Graves” (1973)

[20. Kuan / Contemplation (View), Six in the Third Place. Changing To:  53. Chien / Development (Gradual Progress)]

                                                3:00 A.M. Irish tenor singing

loudly in our living room. Without knocking, having left

       his bed, Graves entered, carrying wooden

birdcage, bottom of which

was missing, plopped it over the tenor’s head, said nothing, left the

room. No further singing that

night.

This is the final Monday post of this blog (I’ll end with a final post a year from Monday, September 5^th 2011 this Wednesday), and I decided to end my weekly ritual with an interesting later essay, “Series re Morris Graves,” where Cage looks back reflectively at his time in Seattle, where he first met Graves at the Cornish School in Seattle. I’m feeling a bit reflective myself, but I’ll save the retrospective for September 5^th.

Cage’s essay on Graves was composed in a format similar to the “Diary” entries and other essays from his later period, whereby he arranged a series of anecdotes with differing page layouts, indents and so forth across the page. Interspersed among the anecdotes are a series of nonsyntactical dance-chants of I-Ching determined syllables of names and words from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna arranged according to metrical patterns from one of Cage’s first works for percussion, his Quartet (1936 or 1937 – not 1935 as Cage later annotated in the autograph score).  The anecdote surrounding Cage’s first meeting with Morris Graves was repeated often, and is outlined and referred to throughout the essay. Cage was performing his Quartet, along with several other percussion works at the Cornish school in 1939 and Graves, ready to play the part of resident heckler, arrived at the concert with a bag of peanuts and pretend-lorgnettes. At the start of the third movement, he threw his head back and screamed “Jesus in the Everywhere!,” and was subsequently dragged out of the concert hall. The two became friends the next day.

Graves’ Dada antics surely influenced and amused the young Cage, perhaps more so than his actual paintings; Cage speaks less of Graves’ style and aesthetic than other contemporaries of the Pacific Northwest school of artists. As I mentioned in an earlier post on Mark Tobey, there is an excellent book on the relationship between Graves, Tobey, and Cage assembled by Wulf Herzogenrath, Sounds of the Inner Eye.  

I’ll admit that some of these anecdotes are harder to pin down, as I am not as familiar with Graves’ oeuvre, but the undertone is, like many other artist essays, very personal and affectionate, outlining the various interactions between the two artists throughout their careers. The nonsyntactical interjections are particularly striking. Take the following example, which highlights the memorable first encounter:

CHAI yaCHAI

                     TANyaCHAITANyaCHAITANyaTANyaCHAITANyaTAN

                    yayaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAITAN

                 yaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAI

                                                                                    Finally, the master himself

                                                 sends various things to the house, such

                      as a carpet, a hubble-bubble for smoking, and the like.

                                Friedman-Kein saw thirty Instruments for New

                                  Navigation, elements for forty more. Told Duncan

                                                         Phillips how marvelous they were. NASA

                  invited Graves to Goddard Space Flight Center and Cape

                        Kennedy to discuss aesthetics of orbital travel. Came

                    to the concert with friends, a large bag of peanuts, and

                                       lorgnette with doll’s eyes suspended in it. “If

                                                he does anything upsetting, take him out.”

                                                                     After the slow movement, he said:

                    Jesus in the Everywhere. That was taken as the signal

It would be tempting to correlate the specific excerpts to the exact rhythmic groupings in the final movement of Cage’s Quartet, perhaps revealing a bit about this underanalyzed early piece.

As the text progresses, the font alternates between very large and very small, perhaps reflecting the “pontifical” nature of certain anecdotes, as Cage had done with his Darmstadt lectures.

Lost in the forest, don’t move around; stay in one place. That way you will be at the center, and the center will act as a magnet, a magnet for those who are searching.