be grim and … difficult. You just can’t be … you can’t be sure until you actually have the experience of being with him. Each time is fresh. It’s quite amazing. And his work, of course. I don’t know if you know my mesostic about him. He was awarded the gold medal for print-making by the Academy of Arts and Letters and I was asked to give it to him, and so I wrote a mesostic on his name saying this is not really a gold medal, something like that, this medal is not pure gold. It was to the effect that he’s created the greatest difficulties for me. And the difficulties that I cherish the most. (laughter) That’s what he is—I think—as far as I can tell.
JR: “That,” meaning the difficulty?
JC: Yes, and the unpredictability. That’s why he’s so marvelous. I just had the experience after the meeting—I asked him to show me what he was working on now.15 He showed me a calendar that he’s made. He’s made twelve pictures to represent the different months for a gallery in London that has for the last five years published calendars by artists. His [pictures] are derived from a knowledge of the face. In other words, a knowledge that there are eyes, there is a nose, there’s a mouth—but they’re completely displaced in the twelve images. So that you know it’s a face, but it’s not a face, you know? It’s very beautiful. The eyes maybe over here and the ears …
JR: He says [in “Art Is Either…”] “My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented.”
JC: Yes, it’s that. The fragmented face, yes.
JR: This whole piece [“Art Is Either …”] is fragmented, or rather has a fractal quality—of the sort described in the chapter on Mandelbrot in Chaos.16
JC: Yes, I don’t know why I didn’t read it all the way through. (pause) Well the reason I didn’t was that I get involved in too many different things. There are things that take my time. (laughs)
JR: Time! What is your—
JC: Attitude toward time?
JR: What is your sense of time in this piece? When you’re working on a piece like this—
JC: When I do it?
JR: Well, both in the process of composing, and then your sense of what it does with the reader’s or auditor’s experience of time. Is it related to your sense of time in music?
JC: Well you see what I do, Joan, is … the computer gives me the center word for the string, but it doesn’t give me the wing words. To find the wing words—to right or left of the string—I go into the source material and I go in linearly with respect to the source material, so that if the word is “just,” down the middle, then I go back to the source material which the computer sends me to and I take the words from here up to “just” or here if they still follow the rule about the letters, and I make my choices, oh, for one reason or another, but not by chance.17 I make them according to my taste. With regard to sound, for one thing. Sound is very convincing, often. (laughter) Rhyming … or not rhyming. Opposition of sound, or similarity of sound. Or, then we could go off into what you were bringing from Dewey the other day, about ideas and intellectual [content]. In other words, there are all sorts of things that happen that make us … that let us make one choice rather than another, hmm? And I do that more or less the way Schoenberg used to do this with his composing. He said one of the ways to compose is to go over what you’re doing and see if it still works as you add something else to it. Just go over it again and see how it continues, how it flows … so as to make something that flows.
JR: “Flows.” So is that saying something about time?
JC: I think it is. Or … I would rather say it’s saying something about breathing … than about time. Because we have … we have all the time in the world.
JR: Until we don’t.
JC: I mean a line could be long, or it could be short, and sometimes a short line works, and sometimes a long line is necessary. I think they vary. When I was working on the Norton lectures, I was working quite constantly over a longish period of time and I used to think as I was struggling to get something done … in the spirit of working against a deadline … I used to think, well I’m beginning to know something, and I would no sooner have that feeling and I would discover I knew nothing. And I wouldn’t know whether a line should be short or long or what should be done or whether I should do this or that, but I knew that I would find some way to continue. And mostly it was through perseverance. Through a kind of … when the problem became, as it were, insoluble, then to just stick with it until the solution appeared.
JR: Breathing. You said the flow was more about breathing than time …
JC: That’s why I use these apostrophes.
JR: Which gives another overlay of form.
JC: Yes.
JR: There’s the vertical movement down the page, there’s the horizontal line length, and then there’s that undulating breath spiral charted by the apostrophes.
JC: Yes, and you see this, now, is quite nice.
reserve i Think
is perhaps dependent on real things i’M not willing to
arts thE terms’18
to turn that word “arts” into a verb. Isn’t it? It’s quite nice. Weren’t those called spondees, when everything is accented? That’s also like a complaint, isn’t it? (laughter; reads on, 15 lines down the page) … “In painting it would amount to/constant negation of/painting.’ ” That’s very exciting, isn’t it? And I think he [Johns] would say that’s exciting, hmm? In fact—and he didn’t say that, hmm?—but it’s in the spirit of what he might be thinking … I think.
JR: There’s so much of that in this.
JC: It happens.
JR: Did you find the pauses and the stresses by reading it aloud?
JC: By reading it, by improvising. But that was partly found by writing it that way. My practice to begin with was to write it without those pauses. But to write it because I was making the pauses as I was writing it. But then of course forgetting them, and then having—when I finally decided to put them in—to then read it [aloud] and put them in. And that happened while I was up at Harvard—that I recognized the need to put them in.
JR: One thing the presence of the apostrophes does is to stabilize the meaning of the text—
JC: There’s greater ambiguity without…
JR: Yes. And I’m wondering how you feel about that.
JC: I would rather—I … I feel … ambiguous … ambivalent! (laughter) I like ambiguity more in terms of a number of readers, because that would enable different readers to find their own breathing. But if I have to be the reader, then I like better to put the things in so that I know what I’m doing. So, actually those things are for me more than they are necessarily for someone else.
JR: I don’t feel they’re a dominating set of instructions.
JC: Sometimes I use them to take something too obvious out. Let’s see if I can find … for instance, “It/became’ a conStant negation of/myself …” That probably is some kind of refrain. And so I wanted to stop the
