John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
A good deal of this book is nonsense, which I think Cage himself knew (“I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.”), but then again, I like nonsense, especially if it’s the right kind of nonsense. (Kay Ryan once said “nonsense is extremely close to poetry… nonsense operates by rules.”) And, in fact, like his music, a lot of these lectures were composed with rules, Cage using chance operations to compose them. (“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / that is poetry.”)
The book begins with this wonderful thought:
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
Those three sentences alone could change your life. (Read them again.)
It is not irritating to be where one is / only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.
Here’s his story of visiting a “sound-proof” chamber:
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
Cage sprinkled the book with little stories and Zen parables, “playing the function that odd bits of information play at the ends of columns in a small-town newspaper.” These are my favorite parts of the book. Here’s one:
After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher or his choice was living in a small house he had made. When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves. Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return. And to all his questions, there were no replies. Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention, the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house. Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened. He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.”
That’s another big lesson with Cage: if you want to hear something, you’ve gotta keep your mouth shut. If you keep your mouth shut, things will happen. Elsewhere, outside the book, he told a similar story about his own life:
[O]ne day I got into [a cab] and the driver began talking a blue streak, accusing absolutely everyone of being wrong. You know he was full of irritation about everything, and I simply remained quiet. I did not answer his questions, I did not enter into a conversation, and very shortly the driver began changing his ideas and simply through my being silent he began, before I got out of the car, saying rather nice things about the world around him.
Here’s another favorite of mine, about dumpster-diving:
George Mantor had an iris garden, which he improved each year by throwing out the commoner varieties. One day his attention was called to another very fine iris garden. Jealously he made some inquiries. The garden, it turned out, belonged to the man who collected his garbage.
A story about Arnold Schoenberg and his eraser:
I was studying with Schoenberg one day as he was writing some counterpoint to show the way to do it, he used an eraser. And then while he was doing this he said, “This end of the pencil is just as important as the other end.”
It’s a lot easier to “get” Cage when you know a little bit about Zen Buddhism. (A good book that explores this is Where The Heart Beats.)
I like how much Cage talks about boredom:
[T]he way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds.
This is an idea he got straight from Zen:
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.
He said when your ears are “in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is…”
I like how he describes art as “a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”
This play, however, is an affirmation of life — not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
His fascination with the I Ching and chance operations led him to emphasize that not-knowing is one of the keys to making art.
when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing
He quotes Robert Rauschenberg:
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
There is a reduction of the ego that is essential to doing the work:
Some more parables. About freedom:
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.”
Standing in line, Max Jacob said, gives one the opportunity to practice patience.
Probably not for everyone, but a very interesting read.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
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