interviewer asked, “Why is there so much noise in Variations V? You used to be gentle, tender, how could you have become so violent?”
He answered, “What is a quiet mind? A mind which is quiet in a quiet situation? Let’s say there are only a few sounds. Let’s say they’re loud. What shall we do?”
(If I was sound you thought you wanted then found you didn’t want, did that mean you should choose not to hear me? Maybe I was the texture of your mind, the hidden noises and workings of your mind.)
He used the I-Ching to make pieces through “chance operations.”
(I remember Plato wrote that chance builds more wisely than art.)
For one piece he used star charts placed on a musical staff.
In 1985 he composed Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible). The first performance began on September 5, 2001, in Halberstadt, Germany. On February 2, 2003, the first chord was sounded. The piece is scheduled to take 639 years.
“Nothing was lost when everything was given away.” “I write in order to hear.”
(These notes I throw to the wind … but what would I even hear without them? My rough scrawls on paper scraps, old shopping lists, torn pages. Even so I know so little.)
He was a lover of mushrooms, pointed out that “music” and “mushroom” stand next to each other in many dictionaries, though for him their link was random.
He won a mushroom quiz contest on Italian television in 1958.
Lactarius piperatus burns the tongue when raw but is delicious when cooked.
“beware of that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane come down”
(If I had said those words to you, bright shudderings I still hold inside my mind …)
He wrote: “we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure”
He died in New York City, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday, on August 12, 1992.
Notes on Genetic Privacy
The Nuremberg Code states, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” It calls the patient the “experimental subject.” (What would you have called me?)
It holds that experiments must not be “random in nature.” (Yet doesn’t much that’s beautiful and good arise from what’s random? My mind spins as I think this.)
(In “consent” I hear “sent.” You sent me forth into my self, my body, but that self was made of otherness and strangeness, in darkness and in shame. The experiment I was wasn’t mine. I was sent into a foreign country, but that country’s inside me, and I never meant to go.)
In October 1976, John Moore was diagnosed with hairy-cell leukemia.
After “withdrawing samples of blood, bone marrow aspirate, and other bodily substances,” Dr. David W. Golde confirmed the diagnosis and recommended Moore’s spleen be removed.
Moore signed a consent form authorizing the operation.
(Forms, signatures, codes—how far from what happened in your laboratory. Yet when I think of the doctor in his white coat behind his desk, and the patient on the other side, lost in the strange country of his illness, I think of all that passed between us. So much unspoken. So much before my eyes had even opened.)
On October 20, Dr. Golde removed John Moore’s spleen. He’d made arrangements to keep it for his research, but Moore didn’t know this.
He was using Moore’s T-lymphocytes to establish a cell line of lymphokines for medical purposes. From 1976 through 1983, John Moore returned for additional visits at Dr. Golde’s request. Each time he left samples of “blood, blood serum, skin, bone marrow aspirate and sperm.”
(Strange to think how part of oneself can thrive, exist, outside oneself, can have a separate life apart.)
(“The Truth, is Bald, and Cold—”)
Moore thought giving samples was an ordinary part of follow-up therapeutic care.
(How little we know of our lives. The mind sees but doesn’t, knows much but also doesn’t.)
His T-lymphocytes were “interesting” to Dr. Golde because they “overproduced certain lymphokines, thus making the genetic material easier to identify.”
On January 30, 1981, Dr. Golde, his colleague Dr. Shirley Quan, and the Regents of the University of California applied for a patent on John Moore’s cell line.
(Unlike them, you hid in shame what you had done. Should I respect the shame you felt? Feel tenderness toward the way you suffered, lived in secrecy? But what might have happened if I’d turned out as you wanted? What if you’d liked what you had made, hadn’t felt ashamed, disgusted? That question haunts me.)
On March 20, 1984, U.S. Patent No. 4,438,032 named Dr.