John Cage - Great Waster of Time

Time Squandered

John Cage was a believer in the therapeutic value of boredom. One way to induce boredom is to raise expectations that something will happen in time either inside the one who waits, as in enlightenment, or outside in the external sensory world. The disciplined audience according to Cage will learn how to wait for this effect.  Nothing however is guaranteed.  The longer the expectation is unfulfilled, the greater the delay, the sheer quantity of time wasted in the mode of suspended activity, the greater the boredom suffered by the audience, the more acute its disappointment - the higher the spiritual benefits all around.  This rack of waiting resembles the structure of any false promise — “make them live in hope” says Gaveston, “upstart” and favorite of the King, at the beginning of Marlowe’s “Edward the Second”. False promises are also potentially fatal - “Aspettare e non venire è cosa da morire” is a popular Italian folk wisdom — futile waiting is a cause of death.  Cage’s performances were based on the principle of indefinite postponement.  Although for Cage the false promise is more like an implicit contract.  Boredom given by the performer must be equalled and paid for by boredom received from the audience.

Cage spoke freely of these matters in an interview conducted by David Sylvester and Richard Smalley in 1966 included in Sylvester’s collection “Interviews with American Artists” (2001).

Reading the interview now, freed from the dross of social and political trappings so important in ‘the Sixties’ for Cage and others, the bareness and harshness of Cage’s boredom therapy is fully exposed. Sylvester asks him why he likes to bore his audience to the verge of tears:

DS:    But you are asking them to give something?
JC:    Give in terms of the person who is disciplined to giving.
DS:    But the giving of time, you feel, is a part of that which has to be given?
JC:    Well, if something that is being given takes time, 

           then its receiving must take an equal time.

At some point John Cage ceased to be primarily a musician or composer and became instead a thinker or speaker.  He regarded his lectures though as a musical performance of speech, noise or silence.  Cage’s switch took place at a time when renouncing of art by artists in favor of silence or social activism was quite en vogue.  One can hardly imagine this urge today, perhaps because activism now is an obtrusive Doppelgänger of art. ‘Artists-activists’ are a sub-division of the so-called “activism industry” - involved in symbolic and ‘practical’ incursions in the pores of ordinary politics and geopolitics.  As such they are a sign of the further eroding of the distinction between art and ordinary life, which began in the ‘Sixties’. 

In an essay from the same period as Sylvester’s interview, Susan Sontag coined the expedient term “aesthetics of silence” for the bizarre renunciation of art of those days.  Sontag’s view of Cage is adulatory, whereas Sylvester is almost hostile. Curiously, Sylvester’s paring away of Cage’s declarations that ‘art is over’ seems far more contemporary now than Sontag’s affirmation of Cage’s “spirituality”.  One sees Cage’s true assault upon the audience (and indirectly the artist) in far more explicit terms.

“The proper goal of each activity is its obviation.”(John Cage) 
Sylvester almost turns him into a penseur maudit, which flatters Cage in a far more subtle fashion.

JC:    Why are people so stingy about their time?
DS:    Yes.
JC:    Why are they so ungenerous? What in heaven’s name

           is so valuable about 30 minutes or 45 minutes? Or an hour and a half?

Cage had a taste for mental torture like any evangelist.  People must pay him for the generosity with which he wastes their time.  The model for his own behavior is nature itself: “If you look at nature, for instance, it often seems to be wasteful, the number of spores produced by a mushroom in relation to the number that actually reproduce (...). I hope this shift from scarcity to abundance, from pinchpenny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness, will continue to flourish.” (John Cage, 1968)
Cage wasted his audience using whatever means were handy. Prodigious waiting for nothing was the audience’s forced renunciation to match the chosen renunciation of the artist. Cage of course did not give up anything.  He didn’t consider himself redundant.  He was the waster not the wasted.  Cage muted his prepared pianos as a hitman might put on a silencer.

 

Narrow World of Chance

The Chinese, writes Baudelaire, tell time by looking into the eyes of a cat.

I looked into a book about John Cage smelling of mice.  Hemlock also smells of mice.  It grows in weedy places, in moist, loamy soils next to streams.  Growing forked from the root, it produces many unspectacular umbels.  John Cage was very interested in poisonous mushrooms.  He served them to his friends but ate more than anyone else.  John Cage liked poisonous mushrooms. He served them to his friends and almost died.  He also liked Satie, especially his piece “Socrate”. He would have devoured it too but was prevented from doing so by French copyright law.  Instead Cage made his “Cheap Imitation” which is slightly longer than the original. Socrates committed state suicide by drinking the cup of hemlock, thereby carrying out the death sentence passed by the Athenian polis. John Cage’s poisonous mushroom mess of ‘skunk cabbage’ was a cheap imitation of hemlock.

Adorno said about John Cage and the ‘New Music’ - and then John Cage came crashing into it.... 

Random Time

Random time measured by clocks as the duration of minutes and hours is wrongly called abstract. It is neither abstract nor aesthetic.
The basic mode of time as a quantity is error and inexactitude. Duration implies time as sheer quantity. It can be planned or random. This matters very little. But either way, it is never more than an approximation, hence merely empirical or accidental not necessary — ultimately tainted by those fixed ‘permanent emotions’ so necessary to John Cage.
Paradoxically, the only aesthetically useful emotions are the vague metamorphosing temporary ones. They may be false, but never inexact, inaccurate. That which measures time is not time.  Boredom is a good measure of time in Cage’s works.

Aesthetic time is in the mind and not in the clock. Time as a quality of reality implies the apriori perception that phenomena succeed or precede one another in sequence.

Through the mind’s innate ability to perceive sequence comes the certainty of substance (phenomena).  Substance is that attribute of phenomena which is extended (endures) in time.  One perceives substance as Being.  No substance or art is outside of time.  If it can be perceived it is temporal. Hence it is physically and metaphysically nonsensical to demand as John Cage did that people give him their time.  They could have more easily given him their soul.

What do the Chinese see in the eye of the cat?  They see the time of eternity says Baudelaire.  Time undivided by minutes and hours - “an immobile hour unmarked by clocks, yet light as a sigh, rapid as the blink of an eye(...)” (Baudelaire, “L’Horloge”). In Chinese time there is no ‘duration’, nothing ever passes.  The ghosts are here and the enemies of the ghosts are here.  The Chinese do not measure time with chronometers.  Neither did Beethoven, one of Cage’s declared enemies.  In Beethoven’s music there are vast passages of unmeasured space and time under the ghostly rule of the ever-metamorphosing fugue.  This rule is both light and inescapable - these are the principles and laws of universal simultaneity and sequence referred to as counterpoint.
Then I saw a cat come out of the bushes with a mouse in its mouth, not knowing how to get rid of it.

Romantic Fugue Sequence

Fugue forms occur freely in nature. They are naturally occurring formalisms. The golden age of artificial fugues is generally considered to be the 18th century — in particular the music of Bach. The 20th century produced some known masters of the artificial fugue not only in sound. Czech Orphist Frantisek Kupka painted color fugues in Paris before World War I. Orphism, a movement related to Cubism was sometimes known as simultaneism. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling drew contrapuntal orchestrations in black and white. Marcel Duchamp’s Tum’ (1918) is a fugue piece.

But fugues are common in any time, in any medium — spatial, temporal or inside human will and will—lessness.

A fugue is a paradoxical form. It is both immediate and complex. In its immediacy it is highly organized, in its complexity it is wild. A fugue is in a state of rapid metamorphosis even if it is slow. Thus it is both elaborately formed and formless. Forms appear suddenly, seem eternal and disappear just as suddenly. This may seem by chance and maybe it is. Chance being nothing more or less than a set of all possible occurrences at any given instant. The acts of human will are as much chance as not chance. How useful is chance?

A fugue starts simply and becomes inestimably complicated. Fugues are composed of riddles — subject and counter subject, question and answer. Fugues are sphinx like, mysterious or cryptic.

A subterfuge is a very common natural fugue. At any given instant it is completely present in total but equally distant and complex throughout its extended whole which is the deception.

Any given moment is called an ‘episode’ of the fugue —essentially a device to distract attention from the subject. If the subject is the subterfuge, the episode is the subterfuge of the subterfuge and so on.

The fugue is such a magnetizing mesmerising force — you are transported by it whether you will or not.

Our street had a nocturnal fugue recently and we were caught up in it. The night started in the morning. No fugue comes totally unprepared or unannounced. But the climax is mostly still a surprise. An artificer of fugues must be very inventive to come close to the surprise of a natural fugue.

It was a Strindberg day of tormented paradise. The air came straight from the asphalt turbine desert.

A kind of dervish madness all around and up and down the street. All day long people did unexpected things or turned up in unexpected places but the evening or night scene was the most forbidden and unexpected.

We passed the waiters’ house on the corner as we do almost every night. This was an act of supreme repetitiveness on our part. It is a habit we just can not break. It’s the robotic part of our organism —the one which makes us brothers of machines. As we approached the corner we saw the end of a group scene. A tall blond man in white clothing broke away from a man and a woman, crossing the street and shouting all the while. He had a few words with an old timer amongst the waiters, black and secretive as the night. The couple moved stiffly around one another like cats on the street. The blond man looked at us too. We turned the corner nearly together. He was everywhere at once.

Saying as we passed to the black waiter, “voilà, see you”.

Otherwise they seemed to be speaking in a sort of pidgin Norwegian. See whom? They certainly had the evil eye.

It just proves habits are dangerous. They know we pass that way every night. Someone once spoke to us quite close out of the darkness: “Have you ever wondered how rich you’d be if you had a pound for each time you walk around the block?” When we looked no one was there. The cold servant eye sizes you up — you don’t feel them doing it, their only revenge. The Genet look. An instant travesty. If we had a dog, we’d go out too.

But we weren’t really the subject of the fugue.

The ‘Viking’ walked on in front of us, kicking lamp posts, moving works signs around, talking to himself, then disappearing up an alley. On our way back — we repeat the way not just the walk every night, all of a sudden he came back out of the alley. He looked straight at us looking at him. As if he knew we would be passing that way again. Danger was palpable. If not imminent. But still undirected.

We tried to ignore him naturally but we felt him right behind us. So all of us saw what came next more or less simultaneously if at varying angles and tempi. The couple was no longer in the middle of the street but they weren’t gone either. They had moved halfway into the shadows but in our curved line of vision. In the secluded corner formed by a boundary wall and the glass front of Ladbrokes betting shop they were having sexual intercourse. At least it seemed to be so — the man’s legs were now naked pale and long in the greenish light and he was covering the woman’s body squeezed up against the wall and glass with his body. The woman was in the shadows. It was quite a breathtaking view. As one would imagine soldiers raping the natives when they conquer a village on a cold night.

Unfortunately the sequence did not end there. The fornication in the corner had consequences. Whilst we were sleeping someone took a long old screwdriver from a tent next to our house and used it to penetrate the ‘petit verre’ of our car. The unknown robber stole only a pair of transparent gloves and green paper towels you can take for free from the petrol stations. He left his tool on the front seat of our car. The bride had been stripped and laid by the rival bachelor against the ‘Grand Verre’ of the betting shop. In the roofless baraque for pissing, fucking and weddings. The robber broke some other glass hymen down the road with a borrowed screwdriver driven by an indiscriminate transitive ecstasy whose danse macabre had engulfed everyone on the street except the cold black waiter.