using itself, hmm?
JR: It consumes itself in the form.
JC: It consumes itself. (laughter) So I then made an arrangement through chance in which different people read. Any number could read. I put it all in stanzas and the stanzas were never say more than three or four lines. So in a single minute each reader could find one stanza and read it any time during the minute, hmm? Then in the next minute any other stanza, or two, as the case may be. And that was read to celebrate his birthday and of course he was delighted because these little fragments of his favorite poem kept cropping up, out of context, out of rhythm, everything—but making some kind of music, you see?
JR: Was it beautiful in this new form?
JC: I wasn’t there, but I’m told that it brought tears to his eyes.
JR: I can imagine that for someone not familiar with the poem, so that it would invoke neither dismay nor nostalgia, it could be a beautiful piece.
JC: It could be interesting, yes…. I’ve done that with a number of languages—Spanish, and German … and I’ve even done it with Japanese. Toru Takemitsu in particular asks me, or [that is] other people ask me to write about him, for one birthday, or for one reason, or another. And that’s how I originally used mesostics—in order to answer commissions like this with respect to birthdays and celebrations—and it enabled me to do something relevant without knowing what I was going to say, you know? And not having to fall back on clichés of sentimentality. So I have written even in Japanese by searching for characters that belong to someone’s name, and then searching for them in a text of his.
JR: And you’ve done this search yourself, not using a computer?
JC: Myself. Of course, having a kind of guide or assistant in the language. I didn’t have an assistant in the German language, nor do I when I do that with Duchamp’s work in French. I know more French so I can tell where my mistakes are. The big problem in the European languages is the presence in French and German of the sexes, whereas we don’t have that problem in English. But apparently the French and Germans are willing to give that problem up. I mean they’re not offended apparently by misuse. It doesn’t seem to disturb them anymore.
JR: Huh! That’s—
JC: Unexpected, isn’t it?
JR: Unexpected, particularly for France.
JC: But I think they see that it’s rather silly. That if barbershops are willing to have only one sex—
JR: Then so can—
JE: So can language, (laughs)
JR: To return to the question of “oracle,” what does “oracle” mean in the sentence “The source text is used as an oracle”?
JC: What does oracle mean? Well, the source text is the one who’s going to speak, so, chance operations are used to find what it says. Say for instance it says “the” or “a” or “and” (laughs)—that seems very stupid. But it’s for that reason, and mostly for that reason, that I’ve put in the program that the source text must identify at what point it said that. So that we know which “and” among all the “and”s in the source, which “and” was speaking. And that makes a difference to the wing words that are available.
JR: So you’ve programed a smart and knowledgeable oracle.
JC: Well it at least can tell from which part of the source it’s speaking.
JR: What about the traditional association—
JC: With oracle?
JR: —With oracle, which is prophecy …
JC: Yes, I hesitate to say anything because there I would go along with Duchamp, that the final speaker is the listener. And how the listener is listening we don’t know, because he or she hasn’t done it yet. So we don’t really know what the significance of anything is until it is heard. Isn’t that true? That every person responds in their own way? It must be true.
JR: It certainly moves into Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as use—the listener then enacts the meaning through its use.
JC: Yes, the work of art, as Duchamp said, is finished by the observer. I think it’s true. I, at least, believe it … to be true. And it explains so many things that happen that otherwise would be intolerable—that is to say, many books on the same subject all in disagreement, (laughter)
JR: What about your conscious choices of words like “to make’ a poem,” or “to make’ a lecture,” rather than “to write”? I’ve noticed that you tend to say “to make.” Why?
JC: Here I think I need an instance.
JR: Well, in here [I-VI], when you speak of the process of putting the lectures together, you always say, “when I made this lecture” or “when I was making …” instead of “writing.” You’ve spoken of “writing through a text” elsewhere, but here, I don’t think you use the verb “to write.”
JC: “Making” is more inclusive, isn’t it? For instance, it would include breathing with writing, hmm? It could include other things than just writing. It could include breathing … it could even include listening, so one would “make” a text partly by writing, partly by breathing, and partly by listening, don’t you think? “Making” seems to include more variety of possibilities, of kinds of action. That could even include, for instance, assistance from the computer, hmm? or calling upon the computer, or chance operations. Whereas “writing,” if I said I was “writing” something, that would leave out the fact that I was using a computer, hmm? Or one would have to say, while I was writing this, of course, I used a computer.
JR: You speak somewhere of liking the fact that Wittgenstein spoke of “doing” philosophy.
JC: Yes, I like that very much, don’t you?
JR: Yes, and it seems to me—
JC:—To fit.
JR: —That “making” in the way you use it is a similar sort of thing. (pause) Back to the question of time—I know in your musical compositions you factor into the computer program silences, and that of course has a good deal to do with the way in which the listener experiences time. Is there any equivalent to silence here [in “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” or in I-VI] in your poetic composition?
JC: Not here, but there could be if there were a performance given of this, as was given of the German poem where [each reader] did so many things in a minute. Or if, say, during a question-and-answer period, after having given this, I then passed out this lecture to everyone in the audience and I said, now you can do it all together. And you just say one—it would be hard here—one thing between two of these apostrophes, any one thing between two apostrophes. One phrase, in other words. Then it would work. And you would get a spatial time event that would be fascinating to hear. And especially when the people had all heard, or had access to, the material. This would then become the material, or the source of something else that had more to do with time than this has, hmm? What I’m trying to say is, if I make time brackets, or have time limitations—which I didn’t have when I wrote this—then time would enter.
JR: I think time can become space on a page.
JC: Yes.
JR:
