Yale University, School of Architecture

Questions
Author(s): John Cage
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 11 (1967), pp. 65-71
Published by: MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566936
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Questions John Cage

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Would you like to ask any questions or make any statements of your own ?

Yes ?

What are you thinking about now?

I'lltell you. A year and a half ago I was invitedto the Universityof Hawaiiwhich has an East-WestCenter. They have a festival of music there which brings
two people from the Orientrepresentingmusic and art and two people fromthe Occident. I was there for a month, and while I was there a man from our State De-
partmentgave a talk at the University. I didn'thearthe talk but I readabout it in the newspaperthe next day. The headlineswere: We are living in a global
village,whether
village, we like
whether we like it or not.
not. And then to prove it he said there were 55 global services then in operation which could not observe political boundaries because
of the techniques involved. As I say here, slow-wittedness so that I just let that come in. I didn't let it go out the other ear, though, it just stayed in my
head, but I didn't do anything. Then this Septemberon the way to Ann ArborI was in KennedyAirporthaving a cup of coffee and there was a group of Japanese
people and one Americanstanding near me. Since I'd been in Japan twice, I feel friendlyto all Japanese. So I began chatting with them, and after I told them
what I did I asked them what they did, and they were all telephone men and the Americanwas from Los Angeles and the Bell Telephone Company. So I thought
I'd mention these global services, and I did, and the Americancalmly said, It's now 61. Again, I was slow-witted and I didn't say: Where do I get the list? But
in the meantime I had thought about the island of Oahu where I had been living that month. It's divided by a mountain range and it's crenelated at the top and
that crenelationwas for the purpose, formerly,of protecting oneself while he sent poisoned arrowsdown on the other side. Now that mountain range is tunneled
and the utilities are in use for both sides, that is to say electricity,telephones, etc. I deduce from this whole business that we are in a period of historywhen all
the things we are presently complaining about are of a dying structure of politics and economics and that coming into being without our being informed, is an utterly dif-
ferent global village social situation. And this is what is interesting me now. And this is what art it seems to me has been involved in too. And in this
connection the two minds who are articulateand write books and so forth that seem to me pertinentare: BuckminsterFullerand MarshallMcLuhan.

Yes?

I believe you said that what we want now is quantity. We get quality automatically. Could you expand on that, please?

I said in my talk that what we want now is quantity; we get qualityautomatically. It seems to me to have been the effect of modernart in this centuryto change our
way of seeing such that wherever we look we may look esthetically. This is what is happening in the field of music, now, and when it finally gets aroundto all of
our ears, we will discover that our ears are open to the ambient sound, no matterwhere we are, and that we will be able to enjoy it esthetically. This applies also
to theater. In other words, wherever you are you will be able to look, listen, etc. to the experience aroundyou esthetically. Now, since this is true and since
these changes that I just now spoke of socially and technologically and so forth are taking place, what we would like is to live longer. And furthermorewe
may very well maybe not I because I'malreadydisintegratingbut those who aren'tso much so. You alreadyknow (don't you ?) or sense that life is going to
be extended far beyond what we now think reasonable.

Yes ?
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Do you think that there will be a further need for artists after this change comes about?

We're alreadyat the point where we don't take that Germanidea of only doing what is necessary.

I'm sorry, let me rephrase it. Do you think they will exist?

What else will exist? McLuhanon this point is extremelyinterestingand I referyou in particularto a text of his which I think is perhapsthe most concentrated and
the best in manyways. It's called The Agenbite of Outwit and it occurs in the magazinecalled Location,Vol. 1, No. 1. It's a very short article. He
mentions one of his premises one of his notions I think you will all recognize to be true that now everything is happening at once everywhere. All the
informationis just everywhere. This means that we are living in this world not partiallybut totally involved. Work,if it is for money, is obsolete because it's
partial involvement. The work of artists, poets, etc. or even I would say scholars, that work is not partial involvement but total involvement always was.
The only realisticway to spend your time in this electronic time is to spend it totally involved in what you're doing. Now, if that turns you into an artist, okay.
Fullersays (speaking of a society where automation does the work that we would only partiallybe involved in and where there simply won't be anything to do) that
if you want something to do you can move the sand from one partof the beach to the other. But he furthersays that the only thing there will be to do is the Uni-
versity. Now think whether you would like to spend your life at Yale. Which remindsme this is frivolous when Bill de Kooningwas teaching up
here I asked him what he was doing and he said I have to go up to jail.

Yes?

What attracted you to mycology and your ideas that have any relevance to that field?

Well, the building that I lived in in Manhattanhad a marvelous situation. It was at GrandStreet and Monroe and I had half of a top floor of the tenement and
I could look up to 59th Street and I could look down to the Statue of Liberty,and I was spoiled by this involvementwith the sky and airand water and so forth. When
they tore this building down I went to the people in charge and I said could I have an apartmentthat would have the same view when you put up the new building.
And they said we can't take such things into consideration. And so at that moment it was a coincidence, as it generallyis some friends of mine, who had
come together through one association or anotherwith Black MountainCollege had the notion of starting a co-operative community in Stony Point, New York, up the
Hudson and asked me to join in and I did. And it was August. I had lived in the privacyof New York,and I was suddenly introducedto a farmhouse in
Stony Point before the buildings that we now live in were built and I found myself living in small quarters with four other people, and I was not used to such lack of
privacy so I took to walking in the woods. And since it was August, the fungi are the flora of the forest at that time the brightest colors (we're all
children) they took my eye. I rememberedthat duringthe Depression I had sustained myself for a week on nothing but mushroomsand I decided to spend
enough time to learnsomething about them. Furthermore,I was involved with chance operations in music and I thought it would just be a very good thing if I get
involved in something where I may not take chances. However, I've learned to experimentand the way you do that is if you don't know whether a mushroom
is edible or not you cook it all up and you take a little bit and then you leave it until the next day and watch to see if there are any bad effects. If there aren't any
you eat a little more, and presentlyyou know something.

Yes?

Do we come with proportion buitt in or do we acquire it?

I thinkthat it's something that we don't have built in, that it gets built into us by the process of studying and conventions and the effect of society and that we'd do better
to get rid of it. Now I'd like to say one other thing. I think people are born at differentages. I've noticed that some people who are younger than I am
appearto me to be older. So that when I say what I just said you might have to say something else for yourself.

Yes ?

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Is there a difference between reason and proportion? Logic and proportion ?

Oh, you mean reason to give a reason for something. No, they're awfully similar. They're drawing lines between one thing and another, and
in one case, reason, things sort of tend to go on and on, one thing leading to another, proportiontends to close them in, one to the other. Both are unrealisticwith
respect to one's world because they minimizethe complexity of the situation we're actually in.

You seem to be against limitations in art, yet you were practicing limitations now when you address us, vocabulary and things like that.
Do you think that limitations in music can help to create a vocabulary for communication and do you think it should?

Well, this has always been the excuse for those limitations. It was that they gave us freedom, was it not? But when we give them up we see that communi-
cation takes place, too, but it's not a communicationthat was had previously. It seems to me that in the Renaissance the notion was than an artist had to have
something to say and that he accepted these limitations which were in turn understood and socially accepted in society and that through them he said something that if
you listened or looked, you had to try to get out what it was he had in mind, not at all what you might have had in mind, that you could be, in looking or listening, wrong,
and that you should go on until you were right. Well. I think things are changing now. As I have said we do our own listening and I think everythingis
communicating. And since everything is communicatingnow, we don't have to speak about communication. What I would like is that we get to the point of
doing our own thinking,our own experiencing, our own seeing, our own listening.

Do you think one person can do this thinking as extensively as say groups of ten and twenty?

I think that the fact of society is the fact of dialog not only in arts but the sciences, too, but I think that finallyyou must do your own thinking,your own experienc-
ing. That'swhat I meant in the partwhere I get to the business of pure subjectivity.

What?

In the same line is it better then to acquire a sense of proportion in order to do this later, or not to acquire it at all in the first place?

There I would say is the business of how old you were when you were born. I think that makes sense. How people change their ways of looking?
I thinkwe change by what we do. Ifyou do something yourself,then you will see things throughthat fact of your activity. Now that doing might be in the realm
of art, or it might be some other doing, but try to make whatever it is that you do open you to what there is. You can test, actually, whether what you're doing is
lively by how lively your response becomes to what other people are doing.

Yes?
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In this new world, do you envision any place at all for traditional art besides?

Yes, it seems to me that it appears doesn't it that we have people who like to preservethings. This place in particular. What do we have here? We have
the manuscriptsof CharlesIves, don't we? We have all sorts of things. You have all the manuscriptsof GertrudeStein. People are going to be keeping all
of these things, and the ones we fail to keep people will discover that they should have been kept and they will find them and keep them. And we're going to get
more and more new things. It'llgo on and on.

Yes ?

You used the word play several times, speaking against it?

Yes, I don't like it. I mean I don't like the idea that that is what art is. The reason I don't is because my I read partof that book called Homo Ludens do
you know it? It discusses man as the playing one and the whole business of setting up rules whereby a game may be played, furthermoresetting up a place in which
to play in all kinds of ways producing separationfrom the rest of the world. All of that annoys me. And then invention, you see, which I'm so involved in, is
bad because it changes the rules. And that's what I mean when I referto spoilsport because an inventorsimply ruinsthe game. But I don't think we're play-
ing games. I like to play games, but I don't think of art as being that. I thinkthat we should treat politics and economics, as they are now dying, as games, and
I think we should treat this new thing coming into being as inviting celebration. Now, I don't think that it is we who are celebrating. I think that it is it that's
celebrating. I preferthat notion to the notion of games.

Yes?

How close a contact do you maintain with composers on the continent?

Well, I see them when I'mthere and they see me when they're here.

What do you mean?

Do you find ties between what you're doing presently and what they're doing?

Well, the Europeansare mostly involved in all sorts of things that I'm not involved in, control, center of interest,all such things. And I'm not involved in that
and they tend to think well, we can take these ideas of indeterminatethings so far and include it in a total picturewhich we will, of course, control. And I'm not even
interested in whether they win and I lose.

Did you say that rhythm is anything that seems irrelevant? Yes.

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Do you mean raggedness or something more?

No, I mean what it is when you sit still and listen no matterwhere you are. Do that sometime. Notice how things happen.

Is that enough for you?

I'm perfectlyall right. I don't know how you are. Is that perfectlyclear? That irrelevance. You see, when you're in an environmentand just listening,
the things that happen are bound to be perceived reallyas irrelevance. And the times they happen, they're irrelevanttimes. And watch what your experience
of that kind of rhythm is, that kind of time experience, and then compare that if you like with Bach. Just compare it And this idea of mine is not just
mine. It's an idea that's been growing up in this century. The same time I spoke of, the time in Hawaii, I had occasion to have in my hand one of the 113
copies of the 11 3 Songs of Charles Ives and at the end is an essay and in that essay he envisages the time when each person may sit in a rocking chair smoking a pipe,
looking out toward the hills, the sun setting. That experience being the creation of one's own symphony.

Yes?

Is there any difference between what you may hear in any given moment in terms of random sound and what you're doing? Do you bring
anything different to it than what you just hear anywhere?

You mean if I make a piece of music? In my mind when I make a piece of music is the desire not to interruptthis thing that takes place before I makeany music.
That is to say basically in the spirit of it. Now, of course, I fail, and what changes from one piece to the next is due to my recognition that I should have done
something else, that would be, as it were, more natural,how things are when there isn't any music.

Are you terribly devoted to the way things are?

At any given time, yes. I think I am

Yes ?

I was wondering if you were projecting this to everybody.

Well, I can't force you to do anything. It'sfor you to make up your mind.

Yes?

When you sense something, do you feel that there are relations, no relations? Does this feeling have anything to do with proportion?

That all goes together. The relationand proportion,yes, and I'm not involved in that.
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Well, then do you have an idea?

About it? Yes, I do The place where we most run into this thing of relationshipsis at the single point where we have what appearsto be repetition. Now, in
the presence of repetition I think of two remarks,one of Rene Charwho said, Each act, even the repeated one, is virgin. The other one of Duchamp,To reach the
impossibilityof transferringfrom one like image to anotherthe memoryimprint in other words, if we take the path of looking for relationships,we will slip over
experience-wise all those things that are obvious, like repetition, and we will go where Schoenberg wanted us to go to far-reaching variation. But, if we take
if we change our mind and turn utterlyaround and refuse this business of relationship,to use Duchamp in our own experience, we will be able to see that those things
that we thought were the same are in fact not the same. And this is very useful in our lives, which are more and more going to have what appearsto be repeti-
tion. I think it quite inevitablethat within I don't know how many decades but not too many, all the houses will be geodesic in structure,and our houses will be
as identical to one another as our telephones are. Now, in a worldlike that, the perceivingof difference in the repeated, mass-produced items is going to be of the
greatest concern to us.

Then how do you get a sense of proportion from that?

I don't want a sense of proportion,and Ijust explained why I don't want it. I want the sense of uniqueness. I'mthinking of numberone. I'mtaking the
Buddhist notion, not the Western notion, the Buddhist notion, that each being, each whether sentient or non-sentient, whether rock or person, is the Buddha and is at
the center of the universe and the whole situation is the situation of an interpenetration and non-obstruction of centers.

Yes ?

Why is it necessary to compose?

We spoke about that earlierbut not thinking in these terms of why is it necessary? I'll give you an answer though if you want one I often give. When the
sixth patriarchof Zen Buddhismwas being chosen the sixth one arrangeda poetry contest and each one had to tell his understanding of enlightenment.
The oldest monk in the monasterysaid. The mind is like a mirror.It collects dust and the problemis to remove the dust. There was a young fellow in the kitchen,
Hui-neng, who couldn't read and couldn't write but had this poem readto him and said, That isn't very interesting. And they said, Well, how do you know? And
he said, Oh, I could write a much better poem. And so they asked him to say it and he did and they wrote it and it was: Where is the mirrorand where is the
dust? He became the sixth patriarch. Now, several centuries later in Japan there was the monk who was always taking baths. So a young student
said to him, If there isn't any dust, why are you always taking baths? And the older one replied,Just a dip, no why.

Yes?

At what point in your composing did you become interested in Zen and in Buddhism?

It happened between '46 and '47 and the involvementdidn'ttake place immediately. It began with Orientalphilosophy and then Suzuki came from Japan and was
teaching at Columbiaand I attended his classes for some three years. So that that takes us up to about '51 or something like that. Now the effect it had was
first to change what it was that I was tryingto say in my work. And second, to change how it was I was making my work. And what it was that I was saying
was very much influenced by such Orientalnotions as creation, preservation,destruction,and quiescence and I was most involved in this understandingof the seasons.
And then the Indiannotion of the emotions that are necessary to make a work of art.the four white ones and the four black ones and the central one of tranquility,this
being the one that must be expressed no matterwhat others are expressed. All that I tried to express in certainworks. Then I began composing in that way,
first with charts, in which I made moves on the charts regardlessof my intentions. In other words, a spiritof acceptance ratherthan a spiritof control.
And then testing my life by my art, etc.

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