Art Against the State; Or What I Lived For

by Elizabeth Willis

What is it to be cheerful in the face of history? What is history’s face? What does it mean, humanly, to look into it?

For me, John Cage’s work has the simplicity and satisfaction of cleaning up, a timeless act of ritual attention. His work is a form of loving even the random facts of existence — as rereading a poem is a way of loving it, an act repaid by the poem’s sudden fanning out of unseen meanings, a dance of the intellect or moveable feast. The pressure of imagination leaving its imprint on the world, invisibly, repeatedly — whether as a manifestation of Cagean silence or meteoric Brownian impact.

How is this imprint felt? The artist votes with acts of attention, an attention driven by the pleasures of intellectual and artistic discovery. What is a more "beautiful" undoing of disciplinary boundaries than Brown’s voracious Dionysian eye in love with Cage’s cheerful Apollonian ear?

At times, another’s words seem to gather the energy one is unable to gather for oneself. "We gather our energies in order to make this intolerable world endurable." Such a sentence signals the relief in understanding that the battles we fight individually may be nonetheless shared. With the political right collecting its energies — its "natural’’ and ideological resources — in plain sight, Brown’s distinctly American outrageousness is an anodyne of grassroots intellectual power. It is deeply rooted in a thinking through of collective experience, a performance of imagination in battle with imperialism of many kinds. It concentrates, or gathers, "our energies." It stands up against the noisemakers of the Reaganomic axis on which even the new century continues to turn.

In 1988, when Norman O. Brown delivered his talk on Cage at Wesleyan, George Bush, Sr. was in the throes of his read-my-lips campaign. Had the electorate gone deaf? Was this something Silence could cure? In Bush’s attacks against Michael Dukakis and Willie Horton, America was being taught a lesson about corporate power, about crime and punishment. I was a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo who wanted everything to be "anti-didactic." I wanted texts to mean many things but for their ultimate meaning to be indeterminate. And yet, what appealed to me most about both Norman O. Brown, whose books I had dog-eared, and Cage, whose work I was just beginning to read, was precisely the certainty and conviction of their statements. These were figures who seemed to suggest a new life for didacticism, a new life for literary and literary-critical form itself. Like Robert Creeley, who had kept the Black Mountain ethos alive at Buffalo, they seemed to propose that "higher learning" was simply an extension of the kinds of knowing that might be encountered through observation and apprenticeship in the world at large. Both Brown and Cage sustained my fascination in remarkably similar ways, mainly in the unspoken premise behind their work, that life was being performed, by us, and that the question of how to perform it was inseparable from other daily questions. Daily life was composition: how to live, what to do.

A few weeks after Brown’s talk at Wesleyan, John Cage visited Buffalo to talk about silence and anarchy and to read from the phonebook in the Music building. Alone on the stage, Cage was unfazed as his audience steadily dispersed. Choices created real-time patterns, and even acts of refusal could create a kind of art, a performance of the moment. The event was mesmerizing and, in unexpected ways, moving. If connectedness had been bought out by corporate telecommunications — it was certainly being exploited in their reach-out-and-touch-someone ad campaigns — what was interesting was its form, the thing that had been there all along and would continue to be there in the ancient beauty of the catalog, just one thing after another, a life of parataxis, each of us a five-second presence called into being, momentarily located. If one paid attention to the aesthetic depth of such an ordinary and familiar act as looking up a number, would life not be unimaginably rich? Rather than seeming impoverished by the daily tasks of living, could the simple act of paying attention to them buy them back, bring them back to the realm of art?

The wildly expressionist Brown shared with the quietly procedural Cage a vision of art as elemental rather than ornamental—as lived experience, as method, as process and reality. When I have fears that I may cease to be, and when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, and when everything is the war, and the only war is the war against the imagination, I find in Brown’s declarative, monumental address not so much solace as fuel for the Heraclitean fire, the Thoreauvian fire, the fiery furnace of biblical legend, the cataclysmic power within everyday acts of attention and resistance. Brown called it apocalypse and/or metamorphosis. Cage said: "There’s nothing we really need to do that / isn’t dangerous." What Brown and Cage shared, and what continues to make their didacticism useful is the turn of attention from where we’re going to how we’re going to get there. Such attention is the only thing that seems to make cheerfulness possible again, regardless of the ways the end is being written around us.

Notes

Men Against the State: James J. Martin
what I lived for: Henry David Thoreau
dance of the intellect: Ezra Pound, Marjorie Perloff
moveable feast: Ernest Hemingway
the pressure of imagination: see Wallace Stevens
"cheerful," Apollonian: Brown on Cage
we gather our energies in order to make this intolerable world endurable: Brown on Cage
how to live, what to do: H.D., Adelaide Morris
read my lips: Clint Eastwood, George Bush
Silence: John Cage
reach out and touch someone: AT & T
Process and Reality: Alfred North Whitehead
when I have fears that I may cease to be: John Keats
when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes: William Shakespeare
everything is the war: see William Carlos Williams
the only war is the war against the imagination: Diane Di Prima
Thoreauvian fires, fiery furnace: see Brown on Cage
Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis: Norman O. Brown
there’s nothing that we really need to do that isn’t dangerous: John Cage

© Elizabeth Willis. All rights reserved.