You were in touch with their work around the same time?
JC: Yes, I gave a class in experimental music composition at the New School for Social Research, and Jackson was in the class. The major activity of the class was the performance of the work of the students, and Jackson always had done something, so we heard a great deal of his work.
JR: And how did you come across Clark Coolidge?
JC: He made a magazine—I don’t now remember the name of it—I think when he was still at Brown University as a student, or maybe he was a teacher or a graduate student.22 But he began a magazine up there and that was how I began “Diary: How to Improve the World”—it was for him. And it tells that in A Year from Monday and says what the name of the magazine was [Joglars, Providence, R.I., V. 1, No. 3]. He wasn’t yet known as the poet he is now. And you see what I did for him was not in any sense what I’m doing now, but it did go into another field than I’d been in. So when he saw what I had done, he said it was a kind of a breakthrough. And all it was of course was that I was fragmenting the text and then writing it, not linearly, but according to how many numbers of words I needed to write. I would frequently write near the beginning, and then near the end, and then in the middle, and so on until I got the whole thing filled up. That was a different way of writing from this. This is back to a kind of—you could say it’s a chance-controlled linearity. But, coming from different parts of the source text, it has a curious kind of globality which is not linear. It’s like, you said this a moment ago too, it seems to be this and that—to combine different kinds of qualities.
JR: Well it seems to have multiple vectors.
JC: Uh huh. One thing I like too is that from poem to poem there will be, because of the difference and sameness of the source texts, there get to be resonances here and there of different things in different lights of different things. But that, Joan, is in terms of what we call content, or meaning, and where I would say that it’s different for every person reading it who recognizes how it hits them. And the same thing will hit two different people differently.
JR: Do you feel that absolutely? If someone attends closely to this text—
JC: That two people will feel differently?
JR: —And someone else doesn’t attend closely, could one “get it wrong”?
JC: No, because it isn’t right to begin with. (laughter)
JR: What do you mean by that?
JC: Well, I probably am not being honest. Because, relying on the breathing would make me want it to be one way rather than another. And there is something of that in it. But the fact that there’s no ordinary syntax in it makes it so that someone reading that breath could feel it differently. And then the question is, is the one breath—the one I had—right, and someone else’s breath wrong? I don’t think so. (pause) It’s hard to say. Or to say honestly.
JR: To say honestly …
JC: With certainty. With certainty.
JR: Critics and educators are concerned about this question: is there a totally open field of response to a text, or does the nature of the text delimit an “appropriate” range of response? Is it that whatever you feel at the moment, whatever comes to mind when you are experiencing a text is the meaning of that text? Or do the particularities of form and content have some kind of stabilizing effect on meaning? So that it is possible to get it wrong in a way that it might not be possible to get a piece of music wrong—just because a text has a cognitive component. You might misunderstand something.
JC: Because of the nature of language.
JR: Yes.
JC: (long pause) I, I’m inclined to think, oh, that each way of hearing it is right. I’m inclined that way. I can’t see anything wrong in each way’s being right. (laughter)
JR: Do you have a sense of being a realist as an artist? Actually, what I have written here [in preliminary notes] is, “Will you say something about your complex realism’?” Does that term sound right to you?
JC: Yes. Yes, I think so. One of the first persons to draw this kind of feeling to our attention, or my attention, was Mondrian. He spoke about reality. How did he say it, do you know? He wrote a number of very interesting texts about his work, I mean his late work. And he was objecting to representational art as being … realistic work as being … too abstract. He said that representational work was too abstract. That he required realistic painting like his own. (laughter) Yes, it goes that way. It’s very impressive. And when you agree with him it’s very mind-opening. Because you do see that representational painting, is, as Jasper says, a tragedy (laughter) and that he much prefers the real thing—the real fork. And what Mondrian wanted to paint was really what he was painting, hmm?—that couldn’t be mistaken for something else.
JR: You spoke in the seminars [accompanying the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and transcribed in I-VI] of science as a corroboration of your work.
JC: I was thinking of this book that I haven’t read (laughter)—the “chaos” book, you know. It’s in the air. We know enough that the book exists. And we think of that as being a kind of corroboration. It makes using chance operations seem not foolish, hmm?
JR: Yes. For me it was corroboration of an aesthetic of complex realism. Does the term “strange attractor” [from chaos theory] mean enough to you for you to have an opinion on whether the working, composing mind is in some sense a strange attractor?
JC: Oh tell me a little bit about that.
JR: Well, this is how I’m trying to understand it, one question with chaotic patterns is why or how they manage to have elements of both randomness and order. There’s pattern there but not predictability in the sort of system that is subject to the “butterfly effect.” So, generated by a set of nonlinear equations and a computer time-development, you might get a pattern that you can see is a bounded system, but the location of any given point within that system as it develops is unpredictable. The organizing principle in a nonlinear pattern like that has been called a strange attractor. Since the human mind is itself a complex system whose neural networks are characterized by open-ended unpredictability (the normal human brain produces irregular neural impulses, which some scientists feel is what accounts for our ability to work in an open-ended way on long-term, complex problems), I wonder whether in its organizing of experience within certain kinds of complex aesthetic procedures, the artist is allowing the mind to behave as a strange attractor.
JC: Well, that of course leads toward habit, doesn’t it?
JR: Well, it would lead away from habit if it were truly a strange attractor.
JC: So this would change distinctly from one thing to another?
JR: Yes, it would lead to constant change, though within a bounded system. Within an overall recognizable pattern there is constant change in all the details, which is why a complex system like weather, for instance, has large recurrent patterns but becomes less and less predictable as you try to pinpoint it locally.
JC: I’m led to think of a discussion I had with Pat Colville. She teaches painting at Cooper Union. And she was down in North Carolina when I was making edible paper.23 We got to talking in one circumstance or another about the work of Mark Tobey, which is characterized by a great deal of variety from one painting to another. So much so that he used to refer to himself as America’s Picasso. He went in so many different directions, as Picasso
