All right
I am ready, he will say.
(Unattributed, Blyth, p. vi)
R. H. Blyth gives this as an example of an “incomprehensible” translation in his book of senryu. For me, it echoes Cage’s reply to an impassioned challenge by Norman O. Brown during a panel at Stanford University in 1992. Brown had protested that with all the talk that was going on, the issue most present and least discussed was death: “I do not believe that the past and the present are all here; and that is related to my perception of death…. Death is everywhere present in this room,” he said, turning to look directly at Cage. Cage smiled sweetly, saying, “Nobby, I’m ready.”48
The last conversation in this book took place on July 30, 1992, twelve days before the instantaneous and massive stroke from which Cage never awoke. He died the next day on August 12. In Western culture, 12 × 24 hours of the earth circling the sun equals time for a dozen classical tragedies to take place. Cage’s death did not require even one. It was certainly not tragic. It did not occur in classical time, or even contemporary American time as most of us experience it. It occurred in Cage’s time—along the horizon of his Amerizen consciousness. For Cage there was a very real sense in which the past and present and future are all here, now. For Cage, as Zen-minded composer of music, visual art, and words, imitating nature in her manner of operation, fascinated by the proliferation of detail as art moves into everyday life, the aesthetics of space-time could become an intricately expanding fractal coastline for ears, eyes, and humors to explore. What one discovers is infinite time-space in finite space-time (Or is it the other way around?), breathing room … free of the impacted terminal moment that characterizes possession and control, and that we fear death must be.
“What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?” Cage asked in 1961 in the foreword to Silence. For Cage this was a life and death question that remained for him a long-life-long question-as-practice with a continual updating of the time frame.
Each time I went over the transcriptions of our conversations, listening to everything all over again, I dreaded coming to the last of the tapes recorded on July 30. It takes up only 10 minutes of a 30-minute side. Cage is the last to speak. His words are followed by the sound of the recorder being switched off and then by a blankness that is a stark contrast to the noisy silence of pauses filled by the sounds of the loft. I found myself listening to the blank tape each time, not wanting to turn it off. Listening for more, thinking maybe this had really not been the end. Perhaps there was something more that I had forgotten. Fast forwarding. Wanting more. Finally finding it. At some point that blank silence too became fully audible as a delicate, microtonal whir. A whir of music both in and of silence: John Cage’s gift, again.
Everyone who knew John Cage well knew that he didn’t want to die but that he died just as he wanted to. He always said he never liked to know when a composition was going to end.
They die
As if they had won
A prize in a lottery.
(Kazuji, Blyth, p. 509)
There’s an American expression of this too. The summer of Cage’s death, Walt Whitman was being celebrated all around New York. It was the centenary of Whitman’s death in 1892 and Cage was delighted by the attention to his work, the way it was so much “in the air.” John Cage loved Walt Whitman, the Walt Whitman who wrote:
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.49
NOTES
1. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 21ff.
2. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
3. In acknowledgment of the suspect status of “we”: my use is not meant to be universal, or even global. It refers to “some of us”—an “us” that changes from one context to another.
4. Excluding only a couple of side conversations between Bach and myself when Cage was preparing the food.
5. The series, running from October to December, included seven selections: Alba-Reyes Spanish Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Robert Joffrey Ballet Company, the New York City Ballet’s Edward Villella and Patricia McBride, Nala Najan, Classical Dances of India, Merce Cunninghan Dance Company with composers John Cage and David Tudor, and Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.
6. A Year from Monday, p. 133.
7. All Jung quotes are from The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Foreword by C. G. Jung, Preface to Third Edition by Hellmut Wilhelm, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
8. I take Cage to be enacting the equivalent of Wittgenstein’s move from “picture” to “use” theories of meaning when he decided to “imitate Nature in her manner of operation.” See, for instance, A Year from Monday, p. 31.
9. “When M. C. Richards asked me why I didn’t one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, ‘I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry’ ” (Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961], p. x).
10. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, and New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957. Siu has since published many more volumes, including one on the I Ching, and has founded a new discipline which he calls “panetics”—the integrated study of the infliction and reduction of suffering.
11. Silence, p. 68.
12. A Year from Monday, p. 162.
13. This was actually a chapter from his book The Tao of Science, reprinted in The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, ed. Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage, 1960).
14. If I remember correctly, one watch was set to Tokyo time, one to London, and the third to Eastern Standard.
15. Published in Aerial 5 (1989).
16. Langer’s aesthetic theories, widely influential mid-century, hold that the force of all art, including music, comes from symbolism and the expression of emotion.
17. Actually, contrary to legend, Cage did occasionally turn the phone off in order not to be interrupted, but he preferred not to have to do this.
18. Empty Words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 5. Emphasis mine.
19. Cage took great pleasure in this quote from Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), p. 107.
20. There is a clear parallel to Wittgenstein’s interrogative modeling of “language games,” as well as to Fuller’s “World Game”—a computerized model he first called “Minni-Earth” to be used for regional planning—where the entire planet = the region. Interestingly, paradoxically, “utopia,” a word Thomas More invented circa 1516 to mean literally “no-place,” has become an adjectival category denoting very much “placed,” socially visionary, intentional communities that have been been a
