Joan Retallack
The role of the composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place…. We talk, moving from one idea to another as though we were hunters…. (By music we mean sound; but what’s time? Certainly not that something begins and ends.) … (Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby. Got lost.) … A teacher should do something other than filling in the gaps…. What we learn isn’t what we’re taught nor what we study. We don’t know what we’re learning. Something about society? That if what happens here (Emma Lake) happened there (New York City), such things as rights and riots, unexplained oriental wars wouldn’t arise. Something about art? That it’s experience shared?—JOHN CAGE, Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 19651
Not long after John Cage died, I received a phone call from a scholar who was writing an essay on Cage’s Europeras. He told me it had just taken him two days to put everything in the past tense. Through no fault at all of that very nice man, I found this chilling. I vowed I would never put anything having to do with Cage in the past tense. A vow I of course had almost immediately to break.
I had found myself shaken by the past tense before. There came a time in my life as a reader—partly due to Cage—when I no longer wanted fictive time-machines to whisk me away from that resonant, chaotic here-and-now that is, with all its entanglements, our only source of history. The chosen afterimages of a narrative past are as removed from the complex real as a sci-fi future. They are an exercise in past perfected, scything through the thicket of intersections that constitute real life, clearing out complexity and possibility. How to present the phenomenon of Cage now, without stopping time, stopping breath; without falling into the narrative fallacy that the micrologic in a string of sentences is the way things were? In philosophy this is known as the problem of reference. For me, a poet, it is a crisis of linguistic life against death. I bring it up partly to confess from the outset that I’ve found no solution in this awkward prologue to the real event, the transcripts of the conversations themselves. Despite my short-comings as Cage’s interlocutor, the conversations in their expansiveness impart a sense of Cage’s everyday life. They do not fall into that category of “forms that erase all trace of arbitrariness”—Adorno’s phrase for the kind of literature that makes us impatient with signs of life.2 Many twentieth-century writers have felt, like Adorno, that complex, fragmented, performative forms were the only hope for retaining vital principles, thinking new thoughts, changing minds. Cage in his own writing produced a catalogue of such possibilities and, finally, counted conversation among them.
John Cage often acknowledged that his sense of poetry and prose style began with the example of Gertrude Stein. The writing collected in his early books (Silence, A Year from Monday, M …) enacts the very process of forming a revolutionary aesthetic with language that is both crystal clear and enormously complex in its implications. It is language whose radically reorienting energies register graphically and syntactically on the page. In mentioning the debt to Gertrude Stein I’m not referring to that misleading tag “continuous present.” What one might call cheap imitations of Stein (and early Hemingway) demonstrate the limits of a pure and simple use of this device. It produces literary artifacts in which a terrifying purification has taken place—history obliterated in a grammatical disaster whose aftermath is a single glistening strand of narrative events. Cage appreciated the odd and wonderful fact that we don’t live our lives in orderly tenses or mono tonic modes.3 We live in messy conversation located at lively intersections of present, past, future—where future is not just a hypothetical, but is always actively emerging out of our exchange with the world. One learns this from Cage’s work. He saw the past as exigent and instructive resource, the future as his now.
Conversation necessitates what it etymologically denotes—living with (con), turning (verse) toward—turning, that is, away from self alone. The verse of poetry and the verse in conversation are related in just that way, as a literal turning—at best, unexpectedly, toward our many pasts, presents, futures—that is, toward possibilities, contingencies, recognitions, unintelligibilities. There is as much unspoken in conversation as enters the realm of what can be said. Both parties must be comfortable with silence. Silence is the one thing that can be counted on. Silence is the authoritative presence.
During the taping of our conversations there were numerous silences, pauses, and interruptions. Most are noted in parentheses, though it would have tried readers’ patience beyond all reasonable bounds to have noted every one. I did feel, however, that it would be of interest to those wanting to better understand Cage’s thought processes to preserve the distinctive rhythms of the interchanges that occur in the course of thinking things through aloud. The pleasure of conversation is as strange and humorous as any form of life by virtue of its empty words as well as full, its digressions and improbabilities as well as strenuous efforts to make sense. It is not most honestly and productively about filling in all gaps, pinning things down so terminally they will never wiggle out of discursive traps.
Cage and I had wanted, insofar as we could, to tape “real conversations” rather than formulaic interviews. Though the shadow format of the interview always remains, the conversations did begin to overflow our taping sessions, continue over lunch, in taxi cabs, on the phone, and during non-taping encounters and visits. My major editorial intervention has been in several instances to make a continuous sequence of a line of discussion that left off and then came up again in entirely unrelated contexts as further or afterthoughts and addenda. I have also omitted certain personal exchanges never intended to be “on the record.” On the other hand, during one of the conversations printed in this book, the one that included the cellist Michael Bach, I left the tape recorder on during lunch and transcribed everything that transpired.4 This particular interview captures a hefty slice of the life of John Cage, cook, solicitous host, and composer. He begins a new composition as we talk.
My friendship with John Cage was for me so large and diverse in its implications that it’s been difficult to know how to begin and middle through an introduction. Ultimately, I have taken to heart (once again) something Cage said in response to my mentioning the same problem years ago, during one of our first conversations in the sixties. He said simply, “You know, you can always begin anywhere.” So too a narrative, in the midst of time, which neither begins nor ends, can in principle begin anywhere. But perhaps what we most urgently learn from Cage is that the narratives we use as our “history” begin in some potent and generative sense in the future. Whether we call it teleology, utopianism, vision, hope, curiosity, or the simple force of “There must be more to life than this!?” future promise is what draws human events on. Later, in beginning an attempt on what led to what, we participate in that metamorphic retrospect where everything suddenly seems prescient. Particularly things having to do with those who were to such an unusual degree “on time” they seemed to be way ahead of the rest of us.
The name “John Cage” denotes such a figure, and much of this is no doubt an illusion. But if it is possible to distinguish between worse and better illusions, those that are forms of nostalgia versus those that function as a kind of oracle, the rapidly forming Cage mythos is surely the latter. I use “oracle” here, as I think Cage did when he referred to his use of chance operations as an oracle, to mean an active principle that allows us to be guided by questions rather than answers, by an opening-out of inquiry into a suggestive dialogue with life principles not unlike the selective intersections with chance that are the morphology of culture as well as biology. The classic oracles—East and West—present their “wisdom” in the form of unfinished puzzles, polyguous figures that instruct via the stimulus to figure things out for ourselves. They energize and clarify our vision by giving us work—invention—to do. They also serve as the kind of impetus we might associate with the Epicurean clinamen or swerve—the collision with contingency that dislodges us from enervated patterns into a charged apprehension of something new. I have a feeling it’s this kind of thing that is meant when people say, “Meeting John Cage changed my life.” Of course everything changes one’s
