SOURCE: Sabatini, Arthur J. “Silent Performances: On Reading John Cage.” In John Cage at Seventy-Five, edited by Richard Fleming and William Duckworth, pp. 74-96. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Sabatini describes the various media and genres of Cage's works, analyzes his experimental forms and styles, and attempts to explain his use of space and visuals to enhance poetic and artistic impact.]

At any rate, my musical words, strictly speaking, have managed to arouse either indignation or sympathy—nothing compared to my books. You can't imagine how many people were touched by Silence! I received many letters, sometimes extremely lucid, always interesting. Next to that, the reactions to my music are predictable.

Cage to Daniel Charles

The writings of John Cage are destined to provoke more varied, and ultimately more enduring, responses than his music. This is no doubt a chancy proposition, but since Cage's aesthetic is most widely known because of theories founded upon his concept of “silence,” it is not unreasonable to argue that his art and practice are most dramatically experienced in the context of that realm where silence has reigned most inviolable: reading. Moreover, because nearly everything in Cage's writings directs reading into performance, his texts have the potential to create increasingly unpredictable readerly responses and generate an abundance of “touched” and touchy reactions.

Each reading of Cage is, in effect, a silent performance. The silence associated with reading, however, differs from the silence, or nonsilence, of music. It is a self-induced, private silence, drawn between consciousness and the page. Though occurring over time, reading is not bound by time measured as in music; nor has anyone ever suggested that the silence that surrounds the trance of reading is pure. The French poet Stephen Mallarmé, who wrote about reading, elegantly described the silence “between the sheets and the eye” as “the condition and delight of reading,” an authentic, luxurious state.¹

But since Mallarmé, Joyce, and a long list of others, the art of reading has undergone a great transformation. As texts broke out of the cages of linear narrative, closed forms, generic definitions, typographic constraints and physical structure, readers assumed and were forced to adopt new roles. Reading evolved from a passive, reactive phenomena to an active, performative state. It also acquired its own elaborate poetics, theoretical formulations, and romance. “Let others boast of the pages they have written,” Jorge Luis Borges announced in a poem titled “A Reader,” “I take pride in those I've read.”² John Cage has echoed that sentiment in practice by often referring to authors and books and by writing on names, in mesostics, and “through” the books of Thoreau, Joyce, Pound, and Merce Cunningham. Cage has even taken Borges a few steps further, for the next lines of the poem are

I may not have been a philologist,
or gone deeply into declensions or moods or those
                                        slow shifts of letter sounds—
the d that hardens into t.
the kinship of the g and k—
but through the years I have professed
a passion for language.

Since his days at Black Mountain, and perhaps before, Cage's attention to language, writing, and writing-as-process has set the stage for performative readings—by himself and others. He has written lectures and works that were specifically for performance. In numerous instances, he has “composed” texts as he composed music for use in performance situations. A 1979 work, Circus On, is a score “for translating a book into a performance without actors, a performance which is both literary and musical or one or the other.” Finally, when compiling his books, Cage has given careful consideration to their style, structure, and the effect on the reader. In many ways, he has “prepared” readers and insured that whoever chooses one of his texts is never a mere page turner.

Cage has not only written, performed, composed, typed, copied, printed, Letrasetted, plexi-glassed, and framed his texts, but, in Themes and Variations, the mesostic “Composition in Retrospect,” and other pieces, he has subjected them to rereadings and rewritings. His more recent writings are, in fact, glosses and reductions of earlier work. Employing a surface of sounds and letters, in mesostics and the “writings through” (Finnegans Wake) Cage seems to be in search of an Ur-language, another form of silence, or not. And, with each new writing—which, of course, reflects off and through all previous writings—the reader warily accompanies Cage. Or not.

For, by now, to read Cage is to knowingly pass (kick, fall, run?) into a galaxy where performance is everywhere influenced by a physics that mixes aesthetics with psychology and politics. The features of Cage's universe are clearly documented. Philosophically and in practice, Cage is concerned with indeterminancy, purposeful purposelessness, nonintention, uncertainty, anarchy, meaninglessness as ultimate meaning, and various states of presence and absence (silence/nonsilence, mobility/immobility, art/life). These unsteady states (of mind and being) are plentiful and unavoidable because of the very structure, intention, and thematic interrelationships among all the writings. In order to pursue any vector within the Cagean system, a reader must negotiate Cage's thought and come to grips with his methods and directives. Where reading Cage was once a matter of “seeking” information or playing with a text's descriptions and formulas, the immensity of his oeuvre now seems to impose other considerations. There are simply too many demands, explicit and implicit, prompted by a Cagean text. The allusions, practices, and sheer density of meaning (encompassing, as it does, nonmeaning) that have accumulated around Cage's every gesture—at this point in his long career—transform reading into a self-conscious and reflexive performative behavior.

Inevitably the dynamics of Cage's discourse entangle and perhaps threaten the reader. Then, as Cage quotes Sri Ramakrishna, the plot thickens. For a reader's silence, though active, is above all circumscribed by the need for security and affirmation. Reading is a one-on-one game which flows toward resolution, order, and meaning. Yet, with Cage, reading becomes risky, unpredictable. Readers are confronted with the possibility of a reading/performance that results in the production of a text that is the very antithesis of the agenda of reading. Stated directly, reading Cage creates the conditions for the production of nonmeaning, purposeful purposelessness, uncertainty, etc.—and the reader is an adjunct to the process. As an aesthetic gesture—or a social one—conspiring to produce nonmeaning, even within the privacy of the readerly cocoon, is an act of some consequence. At the very least, nonmeaning is a noise neither desired nor easily accommodated in the silent orbit of a reader's journey and, at its farthest reaches, nonmeaning is a notion (Cagean, Zen-like, nature-like) that is problematic with regard to reading and consciousness.

Reading through the works of John Cage raises these and other issues. Cage's texts, and his performance theories (of music, writing, reading) are elaborate and complex. In this essay I want to wander/wonder through the near and far territories of Cage's writings. I will begin by surveying the multiplicity and character of Cage's texts, since the sheer quantity and variety of them poses questions for any would-be reader. (For the most part, I will focus on writings in books and collections.) The second matter I'll address is the physical structure and composition of the writings, with particular attention to Cage's use of mesostics and open formats. The third part of the essay is more speculative and referential, as I gauge Cage's work according to schemes of reading/writing that are simultaneously ancient and postmodern.

I believe Cage's writings will eventually gain more attention than his music because, McCluhan notwithstanding, we remain a culture of print and the book. The writings are, unarguably, stunning repositories of original insights, aesthetic theory, and poetries. They include valuable critical commentaries on musicians, composers, artists, dancers, and social theorists as well as an intriguing personal history of the avant-garde from the 1930s to the present. And they are plainly fun to read.

As an author, Cage has been prolific. He has written, coauthored or contributed to twelve published books under his own name. Several books are collections of previously published material; three (For the Birds and Kostelanetz's books) include extensive interviews and articles by others; a few books, usually collaborations (Another Song, Mud Book), are primarily photographic or graphic. In addition, he has written innumerable pieces for periodicals, catalogues, and other sources which have yet to be collected.

The most striking and obvious facts about Cage the writer is that he is stylistically consistent, ceaselessly inventive, and never at a loss to meet the demands of the occasion or the page. The hybrid quality of his writing—part essay, part narrative, part word/text play, part score—is always maintained. All of which poses the first question to any would-be reader: what, precisely, is a Cagean text? Is it to be read as diversion, as instructions, as a continuation or development of theses? Do the writings in a given collection add up to a “statement” or “position”?

Throughout his career, Cage's range has been astonishing. He has written reviews, program notes, essays, lectures, diaries, scripts, sound/text pieces, scores, mesostics, letters, books, and more. Scattered among the work are biographical notes, anecdotes, commentaries, dialogues, forewords, afterwords, and explanations concerning methods of composition or the circumstances that surrounded a particular writing. When editing collections, as he does periodically, Cage augments his books with fillers, minutiae, photographs, and etchings.

Amidst this plethora of texts, a reader's first questions echo titles of some of Cage's early lectures: where to begin? what order to follow? where to go next? how to read? and what am I reading for?

If one's impulse, or method, is to “read in order,” a first question is what type of order? Cage's writings, it is true, are scrupulously identified chronologically, but reading pieces according to their dates quickly reveals little in the way of a systematic development of ideas. Cage often wrote essays or delivered lectures on specific subjects to fulfill commissions. On given occasions he repeated himself; or reused serviceable anecdotes or comments as a source for continuing a thought. In “45' for a Speaker,” for example, he notes that “the text itself was composed using previously written lectures together with new material.”³ After reading any number of pieces, the same material about his teachers reappears: D. T. Suzuki (“Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains), Satie (“You'll see when you're fifty, I'm fifty and I've seen nothing”), Schoenberg (“The eraser is more important than the point of the pencil”). By the time Cage writes Themes and Variations, he acknowledges “fifteen men who have been important to me in my life and work” and “one hundred and ten ideas” he “listed in the course of a cursory examination of my books.”⁴ The repetitiousness of Cage's thoughts and sources in different types of texts thus belies reading in “order.”

Nevertheless, it is possible to approach at least one of Cage's efforts chronologically. The Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) dates from 1965 and numbers eight sections (to 1982, as published in X). It is a remarkable documentation of Cage's interests, travels, readings, friendships, and enthusiasms. The nominal “theme” of the Diary is “improving the world.” For Cage, this involves observations of daily events, incidental notes and remarks on the way things ought to be, according to his “teachers” (Norman O. Brown, McLuhan, et al.) and his own good uncommon sense.

Although wonderfully engaging and diligently kept, the Diary remains more of a listing than a reliable chronicle. It details Cage's activities but does not disclose a reasoned development of his thinking. Cage, for instance, often quotes Fuller or McCluhan, but (intentionally) refrains from analyzing or reviewing issues. He cites Mao Tse-tung, but never considers Mao in the context of the negative, often murderous circumstances of the Cultural Revolution. The chosen abbreviated form of the Diary, which Cage calls a “mosaic,” prohibits elaboration on his part. Reading the Diary offers a chronological glimpse of Cage's life and times, if that, but little else.

Surveying Cage's entire output as a writer, any “order” for reading would be arbitrary. Cage's writings do not handily fall into genres or categories. Lectures are simultaneously performance works, essays are rewritten interviews or radio transcriptions; and what of the mesostics? They are at once formal structures and about a variety of subjects. As in the case of any number of Cage's compositions (Fontana Mix comes to mind), the materials for performance are available ultimately for the reader to select and define.

And the materials are abundant. But, even as one chooses, say, to proceed through the Diary, or only read lectures or mesostics, the complete contents and structurings that surround Cage's texts influence the readerly effort. In each of the books and collections, Cage is at pains to identify occasions, clarify his method for composition or otherwise append notes to the writings. The books are dense with prefaces, introductions, opening statements, afterwords, parenthetical notes, and interludes. Often italicized, this considerable body of information appears useful; but it subtly complicates matters.

These italicizations, to name this material, form something of a multitracked tape that loops around and through the Cagean galaxy. One track is inscribed with names: Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Mother, Erik Satie, Jasper Johns; another with places and occasions: Juilliard, Emma Lake, a lecture series, Darmstadt, a birthday, New York City; another with tools and numbers: the I Ching, 100 words a day, two weeks, Letraset, 2 pages, forty-eight measures; and another is imprinted with quotations from letters and comments by friends. In cases where published writings were first delivered as lectures or performances, Cage italicizes the precise requirements for reading: “Each line is to be read across the page from left to right, not down the columns in sequences.”⁵ “The following text was written to be spoken aloud. It consists of five sections, each to take twelve minutes. The fourth is the fastest and the last one is the slowest.”⁶ In a few instances, he notes that original versions of pieces, or small printings of special editions, differ or were printed with photographs or in colored ink.

To whom, even a slightly self-conscious reader must ask, are all these italicizations addressed? What are they about? Are they meant to be informative or directive? What is their cumulative effect? What value am I supposed to place on the fact that Cage completed this work in six days, or that it was done in script, or produced in Ann Arbor? If I choose to read at my own pace, am I missing something essential to Cage's meaning? How accurate is Cage's information? What relation does one set of descriptions bear to another? Do I have to read aloud?—knowing that Cage himself wonders about “Searching (outloud) for a way to read.”⁷

I find the italicizations winding through Cage's writings to be functional yet unsettling. Functional in that they serve as a framing and a connecting device that locates both Cage and a reader in the scheme of a long, peripatetic life through the twentieth century's worldwide avant-garde. The frequent reappearance of friends, predictable allusions or ideas permits the unfolding of each new text against a familiar background, establishing something of a narrative structure for readers. There is a comforting quality to this, on the one hand, and, on the other, it affirms Cage's belief in the continuity of art and life.

Yet this persistent, detailed identification of times, dates, instructions, and notes on methodologies also instills a feeling of alienation (to borrow a notion from Brecht's theory of acting). Like an actor, according to Brecht, who does not intend to create “empathy” but to read his lines so as to show the nature of an incident or character, Cage's instructions turn a text into just such an “exemplification.”⁸ Each explanation over-explains and over-determines the text, like too many stage directions underscoring the action. The printed italics also serve as a reminder that reading is a partial act, a secondary performance that follows after the specific, recorded act of composition or life experience. Reading is only truly reading, the italics imply, when it follows Cage's rules (e.g., each story in “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run” takes one minute to read).⁹

To a degree, Cage creates conditions which undermine, or challenge, the reader. As with the A-effect, the reader is poised not to rush into a pursuit of the text's meaning, but to cooly assess its declarations, possibilities, and technical requirements.

When there are extensive proscribed formulas for following a text, reading becomes more problematic. After being instructed that the text requires a reading of one line per second, what is the measure of a reading that lingers over a phrase or skips to the bottom of the page? Or, consider two other subtle forms of insistence by Cage. When a text—the essays on Jasper Johns or Morris Graves—is meant to “relate somehow to the canvases and personality of the painter” or “Graves in the act of painting,”¹⁰ isn't a reader at a disadvantage without a clear image of the painter's work? Similarly, when Cage indicates that a given piece was written as he composed a musical work (in the above instance, the Johns essay followed the plan of Cartridge Music) or according to the pattern in a musical composition (the Graves essay derives from the “fourth movement of my Quartet for percussion (1935)”), isn't the reader meant to hear the work in the background?—in the silence?

Another complicating factor is the presence of Cage's italicized “voiceovers” incessantly pointing to this, emphasizing that. This voice, albeit a soft and friendly one, flows as metatext surrounding the reader at every step. (For many, this voice is potentially Cage's actual voice, remembered from conversations and performances: a factor that could enhance or detract from one's silence).

All of the italicizations in Cage's writings cause, however slight, an adjustment in any reading/performance. Reading according to the instructions of a text amounts to a form of readerly complicity that contradicts the unstated law which maintains that a reader determines the nature of the action. To have the space between the self and the page “directed,” even if the directions aren't followed, establishes a set of relations between reader and writer that, as is the case with Cage's music, demands a rethinking of readerly postures, strategies, and ethics. This is the case for new readers as well as seasoned ones. Richard Kostelanetz, in an interview in 1979, seemed to be taken up short after Cage explains how he should read: “I'm sorry, John; do you want me to read Empty Words with a stopwatch?” And Cage replies, “Yes. Then immediately you become fascinated with the whole problem of reading it.”¹¹

Any event that follows a space is a new event. Making music by reading outloud. To read. To breathe. IV: equation between letters and silence. Making language saying nothing at all. What's in mind is to stay up all night reading. Time reading so that at dawn (IV) the sounds outside come in (not as before through closed doors and windows). Half-hour intermissions between any two parts. Something to eat. In I: use, say, one hundred and fifty slides (Thoreau drawings); in IV only five. Other vocal extremes: movement (gradual or sudden) in space; equalization. (Electronics.) Do without whatever's inflexible. Make a separate I Ching program for each aspect of a performance. Continue to search.¹²

To this point (space?), I have been suggesting that the silence surrounding the reader of Cage's works is precarious. Cage's writings, a career-long commitment, are extensive and each piece inflects a reading of another. There is no order to speak of when attempting to read Cage, and what order there is—a chronological one—reveals but a vague biographical montage. Cage's writings also present a chorus of voicings, directives, instructions, and allusions that invoke a sense of an “other” hovering around and through each text. (Assessing a book by Derrida, the literary critic Geoffrey Hartman comments that for certain writers the “less ego the more echo seems to be the rule,”¹³ which surely is apt in this context). Reading Cage, I find, cannot merely “proceed” because processions are predisposed by Cage's italicizations (never anything but helpful, nevertheless intrusive). Then there is Cage's explicit intention to remove intention, to replace meaning with meaninglessness, and to otherwise change minds. Thus the multitude of distractions, shifts, adjustments, queries, and modulations that comprise Cage's texts lead me uneasily toward fulfilling Cage's desiderata. This possibility is, I think, emphatically reinforced when I consider not only the words, but the pages and books.

But the reading I've been discussing so far pertains to the content, general outline, and order of the writings—the common ground of texts. A decidedly more complicating issue is Cage's conception of texts and books: lettering, shape, page formats, etc. Since his earliest lectures, Cage has toyed with typography, graphics, and the limitations of the white rectangle of the page. He has always expressed an awareness of the tools and conditions of writing; all of his collections are printed in different typefaces and some with drawings. “How is this text to be presented?” he notes at the beginning of Empty Words, “As a mix of handwriting, stamping, typing, printing, letraset?”¹⁴ Cage answered this query in the 1958 “Composition as Process” lecture in Silence.

To cite another example, Cage's Diary was fastidiously planned with irregularities of type in mind. They were written, he notes, for Clark Coolidge's magazine Joglars and since it

was printed by photo-offset from typescripts, I used an IBM Selectric typewriter to print my text. I used twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statements. So, too, the left marginations were determined, the right marginations being the result of not hyphenating words and at the same time keeping the number of characters per line forty-three or less.¹⁵

Cage regularly acknowledges such chance-determined, self-imposed word limits, or the printing formats of publications. A work for Dance Magazine is titled “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance” because of the number of “dummy pages” sent to Cage for a piece. After selecting the number of words by chance operations, Cage positioned them according to the “imperfections in the sheets of paper.”¹⁶ In Music for Piano, Cage placed notes on the score, in ink, according to the imperfections.¹⁷Muoyce is printed in columnar form

bling fingers to Caer Fere rd'sc weyou king a of willy wooly woolf on ben aon watchbeupytamong Luggelawecurband that yrain may love that golden silence mud Cicely oshis agrammatical partsm typ d llbnf o b nds en'sgr t tk satw e o ci-d r ntpe ong le rwhoiIrchy ea erd a sj rby e ypsr lwhts o w a t ty were unde-cidedly attachedlifting upu in brother handhiswherever emanating deafdein the porchwaylonely one Maasshowseno sense-by memoryshall have beenbarcelonas has when the rothMutt for Felim in request how starringthetollermight factionwith our obeisant servants was sitting even provisionally who red altfrumpishly OF THE PASTthenPap IIhim Itand swarthythe ladwigs babel with any WiltAnd Kevwith the twirlers continuallyatloftaredon't Shoal effectand TROTHBLOWERSand andis-bar TRADITIONor Meynhircurfewhobblede-

in order to “facilitate the publishing in Japan.”¹⁸ Of the “Indeterminacy” lecture in Silence, Cage italicizes “The excessively small type in the following pages is an attempt to emphasize the intentionally pontifical character of this lecture.”¹⁹

The adherence to chance operations and arbitrary limits reinforces Cage's belief that “Artists who use disciplines to free their work from their intentions start the flow moving in an outgoing direction.”²⁰

                                                                                          Devote myself
                                                                      to askIng
                                                                                queStions
                                                                                          Chance
                                                                      determIned
                                        answers'll oPen
                              my mind to worLd around
                                        at the same tIme
                                                                                chaNging my music
                                                                                          sElf-alteration not self-expression

[X, p. 132]

On another level, as Cage remarked to Daniel Charles, “Typographic changes, like the ‘mosaic’ form, are noises which erupt in the book! At one and the same time, the book is condemned to nonexistence and the book comes into being. It can welcome everything.”²¹

For the reader, these pronouncements about the numbers of letters and words, and this consciously designated placement of graphic “noise” (?), is yet another challenge to the social and psychological contract of the readerly code which normally separates the writer's toil from the reader's pleasure. I may know that Hemingway woke up each morning and sharpened his pencils and when he finished writing he literally counted his word production. But I don't expect lead shavings to fall on my lap when I open The Sun Also Rises. Ezra Pound, Charles Olson (and before them Futurist poets, Apollinaire and others) all seized on the mechanics of lettering, typesetting, and the typewriter to visually engage readers and break down expectations of the printed text. But Pound and Olson measured lines according to breath and poetic beats, not by counting letters! (There are of course numbers of novelists, sound-text, and “concrete” poets who expose, and espouse, composition employing visual methods. Much of what Cage does easily fits into their contexts.)

As for certain techniques Cage selects, the utilization of common typographic materials serves to collapse the reading/writing process—by implying that the commercial intermediaries (editors, publishers, printers, distributors) between author and reader are nonexistent. But, ultimately, these meanings are part of the invisible operations that constitute the history of a book or inform that realm of “biographical” subtexts. (Though, again, postmodern writers often precisely incorporate this material as a way of emphasizing the performative role of the reader.)

Cage supplements the inherent significations of postmodern writing and extends them through the introduction of Duchampian aesthetics. Page measurements, type fonts, printing requirements, ink colors—and words themselves—all become found objects, fields upon which imaginations play. “My work was only sometimes that of identifying,” he says in reference to his writings through Finnegans Wake, “as Duchamp had, found objects.”²² The physical fact of a page becomes a field of possible meanings not determined by the author—in the same way that Duchamp allowed the accidental breakage of “The Large Glass” to contribute to its history and mythology.

One of the questions raised by this process is how should a reader account for semantics or “meaning” of Cage's text knowing that, in many cases, the choice of language was the result of a purely visual requirement or numerical calculation? Readers, like mathematician Lewis Carroll's Alice, don't mind ambiguity, puns, and language play, but they expect authors to write with some precise meanings in mind.

Of course, Cage's “exemplifications” of ideas and meanings are resolved in the context of performance/readings, by himself or others. At least that was the case in writings included in books up to A Year from Monday. Through that collection Cage's pieces were essentially scores from lectures or reprints of introductions, statements, etc. Much of the work exhibited word and page play, but except for “Talk 1,” where phrases and words are splayed across the page in a representation of the seating pattern of the audience at a lecture in Ann Arbor, Cage still remained within the bounds of conventional linear form and the writings employ ordinary syntax. But with M: Writings '67-'72, everything changes.

The title of the work was chosen, Cage notes, by chance. Nevertheless, the letter M references

many words and names that have concerned me for many years (music, mushrooms, Marcel Duchamp, M. C. Richards, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Merce Cunningham, Marshall McLuhan, my dear friends the Daniels—Minna, for twenty-three years the editor of Modern Music, and Mell, early in my life and now again in later life the painter)—and recently (mesostics, Mao Tse-tung).²³

M, he adds, is also the first letter of Mureau, the first of Cage's “writings through” another text, in this case the remarks of Henry David Thoreau. M, it is worth noting, is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet; it is the favorite letter for characters in the works of that literary master of silence, Samuel Beckett (Murphy, Malloy, Malone); and it is that curious, universal nasal consonant that connotes primal soundings and the border between sound and silence: mama, mu, mute, om, mum, mmmmm …

With M, Cage's writings become more minimal, graphic, and harshly disciplined. M includes sixty-two Letraset mesostic constructions taken from syllables and words from Cunningham's Changes: Notes on Choreography and thirty-two other books used by Cunningham. Based on the name Merce Cunningham, Cage uses “seven hundred different typefaces” meant to ideographically image Cunningham the dancer. Other mesostics appear throughout the collection. Mesostics subsequently dominate Cage's next books, Themes and Variations, Empty Words, and X. Cage's mesostics and the “writings through” (Finnegans Wake, The Cantos) follow various rules established for each piece. Chance is of course essential to the process of composition.

This by now twenty-year-old practice of writing mesostic texts, writings without syntax, and syllable/sound-text constructions (from Mureau to Muoyce) marks a profound remaking for Cage—and any reader. For, although the early writings intimate radical possibilities, Cage's game changes substantially when he chooses to forgo logically developed texts, ignore ordinary syntactical relations, write almost exclusively in the mesostic form, and intentionally compose sound/text compositions. If reading Cage previously was fraught with self-consciousness, A-effects and an aura of complexity, this turn toward letterism, vocables, and vertical schematics goes further in undermining thorough or nondiscursive readings.

There are several points to be made regarding the page, letters, and Cage's “rewritings” since M. The most obvious physical change in Cage's newer texts and books is the presence of the whiteness of the page. It dominates. Mesostics, like unattended scrabble games, lay on pages. The whiteness, with all its imperfections, wraps around the oddly constructed ideograms and thickset letters of the Cunningham mesostics. In the 8 [frac12]″ × 11″ format of Themes and Variations, the text skitters up and down the center of each page like individually planted corn stalks. In Empty Words reproductions of Thoreau's drawings are scratched alongside the frail typeset lettering; and in “Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake” punctuation, like small blemishes, are flecked through the pages. By contrast, Mureau and Mouyce are printed in dense, nonparagraphed, nonjustified form so that the white margins function as tailored borders around the formal rectangular blocks of letters.

In previous writings, blank spaces and whiteness were intended to signify pauses, breaths, or specific temporal divisons, as in “Composition as Process—I. Changes.”²⁴ Concerning the layout of “Lecture on Commitment,” Cage indicates “The typography is an attempt to provide changes for the eye similar to the changes varying tempi in oral delivery give to the ear.”²⁵ The earlier texts were, in effect, more like scores. But, after M, the whiteness is irregular and purely spatial. It is part of the aleatory numerical/geometric plan. (And oddly in accord with a theory of writing put forth in Borges's story “The Library of Babel.” Borges's narrator conjectures that the reason for so many chaotic books in the “universe (which others call the Library)” is that the originators of writing merely endlessly manipulated twenty-five signs comprised of twenty-two letters, a period, a comma, and a space.²⁶

Cage's writing after M is more for the eye and for the thought and pleasure of the reader. Stripped of its temporal requirements, the whiteness of the page accumulates other meanings and uses. The rectangular shape of the margins in ordinary books is a space where the reader can duplicate the text: marginalia is, in a sense, a scribbling that mimics the printed page. Cage thus opens up other possibilities for the reader, both physically and conceptually.

                                                                                turNing the paper
                                                            intO
                                                  a space of Time
imperfections in the pAper upon which
                                                                                          The
                                                                                musIc is written
the music is there befOre
                                        it is writteN

[X, p. 136]

Mallarmé, exquisitely, says something similar: “To seek support, according to the page, upon the blank space, which inaugurates it, upon oneself, for an ingenuousness … and, when, in a break—the slightest, disseminated—chance is aligned, conquered word by word, indefectibly the white blank returns, a moment ago gratuitous, certain now, to conclude that nothing beyond and to authenticate the silence—”²⁷

In Cage's writings, the extensive whiteness is transformed simultaneously into background and covering, landscape and dreamscape, emptiness and plenitude, space and shape. And, most forcefully, the whiteness reveals the formal schematics of the texts (mesostics and “writings through”) and thereby isolates the printed forms as what they are: lines, marks, patterns; mere movements of the hand, tool, and ink; writings as visual structures—signifiers cut loose from referents and, possibly, meaning. Writing as gesture, nothing more.

Visually, in most printings, the mesostic form focuses the eye on the word or name in the center of the image. It creates a readerly movement down the page, and, secondarily, from left to right. This movement of the eye vertically adds a hitherto unacknowledged geometry (for Western readers): the crease or fold in the middle of two pages is replicated by the spine of letters of the mesostics, which are echoed and enclosed by the edges of the pages on either side. There are thus five “lines” down the center of the pages of the open book (five is the number Cage, repeating Buckminster Fuller, feels is the number of ideas one should use to begin to solve problems).²⁸ The two strings of the mesostics figuratively double each other as well as the centerfold between pages. There are also four white spaces, two per page, surrounding the writing. The forms of the pages with centered mesostics increase the reader's awareness of Cage's process of doubling and repetition.

In practice, Cage's mesostics are nearly always extended compositions on names or concepts long familiar to him, and the repetition within the mesostic follows certain patterns. This persistence of doublings and repetitions in the (re) writings since M, along with the expansion of whiteness and the return to the letter, suggest that Cage's writings are actually readings, of himself, or of himself reading others (Joyce, etc.). These readings—silent performances—ultimately position Cage where readers of his works have been since the beginning: amidst uncertainty and self-referencing, yet surrounded by familiar names and recognizable ideas. In Themes and Variations, Cage cites as one of his themes, “Importance of being perplexed. Unpredictability” and also observes “Influence derives from one's own work (not from outside it).”²⁹

But while Cage is reading/performing Cage, what of his readers? The “writings through” Pound and Joyce in recent mesostics border on cryptic indulgence and, with regard to conventional meaning, seem opaque. Reading Cage of late (since M) is more problematic than ever because none of the questions raised by earlier texts are resolved while others are being posed. And, to complicate matters, as he notes in “Composition in Retrospect” (1981):

                                                                                          My
                                                                                          mEmory
                                                                      of whaT
                                                                                          Happened
                                                                                is nOt
                                        what happeneD
                                                                                i aM struck
                                                                      by thE
                                                                                facT
                                                                                          tHat what happened
                                                                                is mOre conventional
than what i remembereD

[X, p. 124]

Yet, curiously, there is a resonant quality about this work—something paradoxically evocative of ancient poetic impulses and postmodern mysteries. It is as if Cage's selfless, disciplined, thorough pursuits have resulted in the production of texts that so literally “exemplify” themselves as to create the extraordinary—purely Cagean—condition of reading that, like silence, is non-reading. Thus, Cage's “theme”: “Problems of music (vision) only solved when silence (non-vision) is taken as the basis”³⁰ can be reformulated as: Problems of reading (meaning) only solved when nonreading (meaninglessness) is taken as the basis. Or, to say it another way: “Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it; we possess nothing.”³¹ Saying nothing is of course not simple, as attested to by many characters in the works of Samuel Beckett, one of whom, Malone, drily remarks “Nothing is more real than nothing.”³²

For readers of John Cage, nonreading is a consequence of reading, just as listeners to his music encounter silence. Cage's later writings distill and rarify the performance of writing/reading to a point of utter density: a black hole within which all the physics of the Cagean universe simultaneously hold true and are questionable. For both Cage and readers, nonreading is readings' dumb show: a performance that verges on meaning, where signs are ultimately themselves, isolated, yet as full as Cagean silence.

Cage insinuates the reader into nonreading by seizing on a writing process that identifies the atoms, the ABCs, of the writing system and reveals their negative charge. For Cage and readers, the letters of the alphabet literally become the formal units of practice/process/performance. Letters: a script in mime that is both a sign of itself and the source of other meanings.

The alphabet. Alphabets order sound and signs; they are social and intellectual tools that contribute to the possibilities of shared meaning. The use of an alphabet is, for Cage, a way of employing a system of notation not unlike musical notation—given that the vocalization of the sounds of letters have, of course, a different value and relationship than pitches. (The ancient Egyptian myth of the god Treuth, related by Socrates in Plato's Philebus, interrestingly relates how both the alphabet and musical intervals were selected and ordered from the sounds in nature.)

                                                                                                    To raise language's
                                        temperature we not only remove syntax: we
                              give each letter undivided attention,
                                                  setting it in unique face and size;
                                                  to read becomes the verb to sing.

[M, p. 107]

The mechanism of the I Ching, on the other
                              hand is utility.                              Applied to
                                        letters and aggregates of letters, it
                    brings about a language that can be
enjoyed without being understood.

[M, p. 215]

Cage's use of the alphabet assumes two forms, with many variations. In works such as Empty Words and the “writings through,” he employs chance operations to select syllables and individual letters. In the mesostics, the letters of selected names, arranged vertically, become the structure for the text. In both cases, individual letters retain their visual and phonetic character.

Cage has written why he chose to write in the mesostic form, an alphabetic reduction: “Due to N. O. Brown's remark that syntax is the arrangement of the army, and Thoreau's that when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsyntactical “demilitarized” language.”³³ Apparently he missed McLuhan's analysis of alphabets in Understanding Media, although he does note in “Seriously Comma”³⁴ that McLuhan says that the inflexibility of the order of the alphabet made the Renaissance inevitable. But McLuhan elaborates, arriving at the conclusion that the alphabet created a new literacy and a sense of individuality accessible to everyone. When the language of the tribe broke down, clans separated and travel between language-distinct regions was facilitated. This, he noted, enhanced those who sought power and the “freedom to shape an individual career manifested itself in the ancient world in military life.”³⁵

The alphabetic writings derive from names or other texts, and elusively refer to their predecessors. Cage ingeniously taunts readers with the possibility that his reductions offer yet another method for reading Joyce, Thoreau, or others. His processes, not far removed from certain computer analyses of linguistic structures in texts, raise questions about how we read and understand literary works.

Cage's alphabets are approaches to reading and writing. Like a minimalist Pierre Menard (a character in a Borges story who successfully “writes” Don Quixote in 1934 by writing the exact words from Don Quixote), Cage recycles all that he has read and written by the letters, as if they retained a mystical or coded meaning.

Perhaps they do. For the notion of the alphabet holds other significations for Cage. A longish lecture/performance mesostic titled “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet” (1981) begins with Cage's comment that “It is possible to imagine that the artists whose work we live with constitute not a vocabulary but an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.”³⁶

He amplifies this statement with references to the poetry of Jackson MacLow, whose work he has known for many years. MacLow, Cage remarks, has many vocabularies “restricting each to the letters to be found in the name of a particular friend.”³⁷ Cage then recounts the effects of Joyce, Satie, and Duchamp on his life and work. He explains how he came to write their names as mesostics and, for this work, thematically bring them “on stage” as ghosts. He also quite pointedly states that he has never understood the work of Duchamp or Joyce.

Nonunderstanding is nearly a Cagean axiom, though it neither restricts him from thought or work. As a response to “not understanding” his teachers, Cage sets their names in mesostic form, as alphabets, and pursues “a way of writing which though coming from ideas is not about them; or is not about ideas but produces them.”³⁸

Cage's writing process is directed toward liberating him from conscious choice while imposing discipline. He has said as much and there is little to argue with in Cage's adoption of “Eastern” techniques for both “freeing the self” and not pursuing “self-expression.” Cage's specific “alphabetic” method, however, not only reminds one of ancient disciplines but it is curiously postmodern. His practices are reminiscent of the mysteries of incantation and the decidedly conscious postmodern practice of writing intertextually.

Many of Cage's mesostics are based on the names of individuals. This form of “alphabeting” is analogous to the peculiar process of “anagramatic” writing explored by linguist and phoneticist Ferdinand de Saussure. This investigation, never published by Saussure, is recollected and enclosed within a commentary by Jean Starobinski in a small book titled Words Upon Words.

Briefly, while studying Saturnian Latin poetry, Saussure realized that each text seems to contain a “theme-word” which provides the poet with a phonemic source for the writing of the poem. Anagrams, as he designated these words, were generally names of gods, rulers, friends, or lovers. In effect, the letters of the poem's “theme-word” functioned as the structure for a given poem. This practice, Saussure notes, occurs in Vedic poetry where there is often a “reproduction in a hymn of the syllables of the sacred name which is the object of the hymn.” He also conjectures that Indo-European poetry might have conformed to a process “invoked in relation to superstitious fixation on a letter.”³⁹

Saussure develops his theory by diligently counting (à la Cage) the repetition of syllables and letters of anagrams in poems. In the course of his work, he recognizes that it is possible that anagrams do exist, not only in the poems he analyzes but in all texts—simply by the chance occurrence of the letters and sounds of any given word or name. He is also troubled by the fact that he cannot locate any written rule that instructs poets to employ anagrams.

In Starobinski's reflections, he suggests, in accordance with Cage, that the strict adherence to a method leads to a condition not of self-expression but “literary production,” as opposed to “literary creation.” He comments further on the “inspiration” provided by “theme-words” or magic names. In concluding arguments, he addresses notions of nonintention, antecedent words, and the poet's silence: themes directly relevant to Cage's activities for decades.

Cage's alphabets—even those, as in “Composition in Retrospect,” that are based on words (discipline, method, etc.)—provide a contemporary exemplification for the theorizing of Saussure and Starobinski. Cage has always attempted to avoid self-expression and deliberation by the ego. His choice of influences both satisfies the dynamics in his personal pantheon and, subtly, inspires him to produce new work. The fact that Cage is absolutely overt about his practice, unlike the Latin poets, promotes it as an object lesson. This exposure and focused attention to the facts of his writerly performance also marks the postmodern direction of Cage's writing.

Several qualities identify postmodern texts: they are performative, self-conscious, open-ended, process-oriented, self-referential, polyvalent, combinatory, dialogic. Cage's texts, taken as a whole, fulfill all these criteria. The postmodern text also recognizes itself as one text among many, part of the circularity and intertextuality of all writing. Cage's Duchampian obviousness about his sources and references underscores this proclivity. Moreover, several of Cage's sources are themselves postmodern in their referentiality, notably Joyce, Brown, McLuhan. And Cage, like Borges, Calvino, Raymond Federman, and so many others, rereads himself: a double performance for the reader who finds himself reading through Cage-reading-Cage.

Cage's writings, readings, performances—and silences—seem, finally, to curve back upon themselves. Letters, scattered or structured on the page, chance selections from other texts, the whitenesses and italicizations are warped and woven together as language to be “enjoyed without being understood”:⁴⁰ readings for nonreading, texts for nothing, indeterminate, nonintentional performances of silence in silence.

What, then, can a reading of Cage be? Nothing but a ceaseless series of performances, perhaps in silence, bounded by uncertainty: nonreading without goals or meaning? Pure play!

For this reader/ing a response is embedded in an untitled poem in X (X, incidentally, was a letter picked by chance, but, no matter, its significations are enormous) and Starobinski's last two sentences in Words Upon Words (p. 123). The poem is about readers, as is the quotation.⁴¹

                                                                      if you exi ted
                                                                                becauSe
                                                                                we mIght go on as before
but since you don't we wi'Ll
                                                                                mak
                                                                                changE
                                                                                our miNds
                                                                                anar hic
                                                            so that we Can
                                                                                                              d to                              let it be
                                                                                convertEnjoy the chaos / that you are /
                                                                                                                                                      stet

[X, p. 117]

“But the poet, having said all he has to say, remains strangely silent. One can produce any hypothesis about him: he neither accepts nor rejects it.”

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 175.

2. Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Darkness, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (London: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 121.

3. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 146.

4. John Cage, Themes and Variations (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1982), introduction.

5. Cage, Lecture on Nothing,” Silence, p. 109.

6. Cage, Themes and Variations, introduction.

7. John Cage, Empty Words: Writings '73-'78 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 51.

8. Brecht on Theater, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 135; and Silence, p. ix.

9. John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 133.

10. See Cage, Year from Monday, p. 73 and Empty Words, p. 99.

11. Richard Kostelanetz, The Old Poetries and the New (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 263.

12. Cage, Empty Words, p. 51.

13. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 9.

14. Cage, Empty Words, p. 33.

15. Cage, Year from Monday, p. 3.

16. Cage, Silence, p. 96.

17. Ibid., p. 26.

18. John Cage, X: Writings '79-'82 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 173.

19. Cage, Silence, p. 35.

20. Cage, Themes and Variations, p. 5.

21. For the Birds (John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles), trans. Richard Gardner (Salem, N.H.: Boyars, 1981), p. 117.

22. Cage, Empty Words, p. 136.

23. John Cage, M: Writings '67-'72 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), foreword.

24. Cage, Silence, p. 18.

25. Cage, Year from Monday, p. 112.

26. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. and trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962), pp. 79-80.

27. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 178.

28. Cage, Themes and Variations, introduction.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 192.

33. Cage, Empty Words, p. 133.

34. Cage, Year from Monday, p. 26.

35. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 90.

36. Cage, X, p. 53.

37. Ibid.

38. Cage, Themes and Variations, introduction.

39. Jean Starobinski, Words Upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 22 and 24.

40. Cage, M, p. 215.

41. This paper was written with support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (Visual Arts Panel) and I wish to express my thanks to the Council.