ABSTRACT
In his ‘Lecture on Nothing,’ the American composer, poet, multimedia artist and mushroom collector, John Cage (1973: 109), famously declares: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.’ As Susan Sontag (1972: 57) was to quip, regarding the paradoxical calls for an art of silence: ‘The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence.’ But is this embracing of silence, and the desire to get in touch with what lies beyond representation, so new? As we have been stressing throughout this book, the search for an art that
explores what lies beyond order and communication has been central to modern art since the advent of Romanticism in Western culture (Martin, 1981: 84). In ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,’ Weber (1948a: 342) had already detected that the artists of this time were driven to be ‘absorbed into the “All-oneness” which lies beyond any determination and form.’ In this, and many other respects, the modern artistic persona comes to resemble the religious mystic who withdraws from the world and despises the constraints of form and the imposition of order. As Weber (1948a: 326) summarizes the ethos of the mystic: ‘For the true mystic the principle continues to hold: the creature must be silent so that God may speak.’ Weber’s typology of the mystic relies on a contrast between ‘exemplary’
and ‘emissary’ prophecy. There is, on the one hand, an ‘active’ form of prophecy where the prophet is a ‘tool of the divine,’ and engages in ‘Godwilled action’; and, on the other hand, a model of prophecy involving the ‘contemplative possession of the holy, as found in mysticism’ (Weber, 1948a: 325). The mystic proves himself by an attitude of ‘broken humility, a minimization of action, a sort of religious incognito existence’ (Weber, 1948a: 326). The source of his charisma is neither self-righteousness nor the passion with which he or she struggles against the world; rather, the mystic is
renowned for his indolence and his indifference. Since, for the mystic, the world is ultimately irrational there is no point in taking one’s actions too seriously; indeed, too much activity breaks the circle of magical charisma. In the case of the mystic, Weber asserts, influence is exercised through exemplary behavior, especially the ascetic renunciation of the self, rather than through self-aggrandizement. From the mystic’s point of view, there is little point in proselytizing or in promoting one’s own views. In the case of music, we also have our ‘emissary’ and ‘exemplary’ pro-
phets. We have prophets such Wagner and Schoenberg who saw themselves as, and successfully transmitted such a view to their followers of, the modern artist as a kind of ‘genius’ struggling against the world. This kind of artistic charisma is often tragic, usually disdainful of public taste and/or morality, and derives self-validation from the struggle to impose its aesthetic ideology on the world. As we saw in Chapter 7, this type of charisma can descend into a form of demagoguery, and discipleship requires complete submission to the artist-cum-prophet. But modern music also has its ‘exemplary’ prophetic types: the Scriabins,
the Iveses, the Ruggleses and the Cages (why so many American composers fit this artistic type will be covered later in this chapter). Here I will concentrate on Cage as the quintessential modern composer as mystic. In his case, the label is not purely analytical. As David Revill (1992) notes, Cage started attending, in either the late 1940s or early 1950s, the classes on Zen given at Columbia University by Daisetz Suzuki and they had a marked effect on his art and his sense of self:
The teachings of Suzuki had a startling effect on Cage. He felt that they catapulted him into conceptual and emotional adulthood; that they fulfilled for him the function of psychoanalysis. Engagement with Zen provided an existential placement which was suddenly adequate to the whole range of Cage’s temperamental inclinations, allowing him to clarify them in thought and action.
