On love, liberty, and the pursuit of silence.
"Good music can act as a
guide to good living," John Cage (1912-1992) once said. But what, exactly, is good
music, or good living, or, for that matter, goodness itself?
Where the Heart Beats:
John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (public library) is a
remarkable new intellectual, creative, and spiritual biography of Cage – one of
the most influential composers in modern history, whose impact reaches beyond
the realm of music and into art, literature, cinema, and just about every other
aesthetic and conceptual expression of curiosity about the world, yet also one
of history's most misunderstood artists – by longtime art critic and practicing
Buddhist Kay Larson. Fifteen years in the making, it is without a doubt
the richest, most stimulating,most absorbing book I've read in the past year, if not decade
– remarkably researched, exquisitely written, weaving together a great many
threads of cultural history into a holistic understanding of both Cage as an
artist and Zen as a lens on existence.
From his early life in
California, defined by his investigations into the joy of sound, to his pivotal
introduction to Zen Buddhism in Japanese Zen master D. T. Suzuki's Columbia University class, to his blossoming
into a force of the mid-century avant-garde, Larson traces Cage's own journey
as an artist and a soul, as well as his intermeshing with the journeys of other
celebrated artists, including Marcel
Duchamp, Jasper
Johns, Yoko
Ono, Robert
Rauschenberg, Jackson
Pollock, and, most importantly, Merce Cunningham.
The book itself has a beautiful
compositional structure, conceived as a conversation with Cage and modeled
after Cage's imagined conversations with Erik Satie, one of his mentors, long
after Satie's death. Interspersed in Larson's immersive narrative are
italicized excerpts of Cage's own writing, in his own voice.
Where to begin? Perhaps at the
core – the core of what Cage has come to be known for, that expansive negative
space, isn't nihilistic, isn't an absence, but, rather, it's life-affirming, a
presence. Cage himself reflects:
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of
chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the
very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and
desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
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