ABSTRACT
These mesostics work through some recurrent themes from Cage’s work. They are what Cage called ‘100% Mesostics’: between two consecutive capitalised letters, neither of the two letters may be used. That there are twenty-six mesostics is a homage to Marcel Duchamp and James Pritchett: the former was the subject of two texts by Cage, ‘26 Statements re Marcel Duchamp’ (there aren’t twenty six) and ‘36 Mesostics Re and not Re Marcel Duchamp’; in a rare confusion, the latter’s wonderful ground-breaking book on the composer mis-labels Cage’s two texts. The alphabetical presentation of the mesostics below is arbitrary, the result of the same relations between choice, judgement, and decision making that Cage investigated throughout his creative life in so many varied and unpredictable ways. The choice of themes is itself also arbitrary, though hopefully reasonable. Taken together, the constellation formed by these twenty-six themes embodies something of the immense variety of Cage’s work as a performance philosopher.
