Each grid bears its own particular irregularities, minute fluctuations, intervals, exaltations. Yet how orderly they seem overall, each speaking to the others over space and time, as if to say, each of us is isolate and odd but not singular only, not just that.
(As I’m not just singular, after all. As a mind’s patternings partly recognize another’s.)
(She marked such minute gradations, zones of transitivity, of becoming, how did she do that? It’s what you couldn’t meddle with in me even as you made me—somehow it escaped—that grid of thought materializing, dematerializing, in this place inside myself I can hardly grasp or name.)
“When I cover the square surface with rectangles it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”
(I watch her fields of powerlessness float. They’re strong in themselves and do no harm.)
In 1967 she gave away almost all her possessions, left New York City, drove in a pickup truck across Canada and the West. She didn’t paint for seven years.
Then she settled in Cuba, New Mexico.
She had no studio assistants: “I don’t know what they do.”
She didn’t own a TV.
(I don’t have a quiet mind, but the thought of a hand moving across a surface sometimes quiets me. The way marks create a merging and dissolving, a setting out, a dissonance or peace, a flickering, a membrane, a rough bloom—)
She titled her paintings: Untitled, Grass, Rain, Leaf, Wheat, The Spring.
What is it that consoles?
She said she was painting joy. (I only partly believe her.)
She wrote, “I would rather think of Humility than anything else. She cannot do either right or wrong. She does not do anything. All of her ways are empty.”
She died in a retirement community in Taos, New Mexico, on December 16, 2004.
Notes on John Cage
He believed there’s no such thing as silence. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.”
Even in the most quiet moments: breathing, hum of electrical appliances, rustling pages, trucks in the distance shifting gears.
(When I couldn’t speak, I heard the blood-taste in my throat, the fear inside my body, everything withheld, unsettled; Mary’s hands holding pebbles as she waited, the tossed quiet of her leaving.)
He said, “quiet sounds were like loneliness”
“I was a ground in which emptiness could grow.”
All this is music.
Years earlier, he’d entered an anechoic chamber expecting to hear silence, but instead heard two sounds. “When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me the high one was my nervous system, the low one my blood in circulation.”
After this he wrote his “silent piece,” 4′33.″
The first performance was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952. He walked out onstage, sat down at the piano, closed the keyboard’s lid. After a period of time he opened it. This marked the end of the first movement. He did this again for the second, the third, his hands never touching the keys.
(There’s so much sound in waiting and thinking, in stillness and absence, your face rising in my mind then disappearing.)
He said, “Everything we do is music.”
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the stations. Rain.” “I found that I liked noises.”
(Was I noise to you, but noise you couldn’t hear as music? As if such sound must be a wrongness, a crude disordering of thought and feeling.)
He sought no summations, built no walls.
(He found the beautiful in what’s dismissed or overlooked as ugly. Found such terms, in any case, not useful. I look at my body and wonder: if I’m noise and that noise is part of the ongoing texture of the world, why must I think in terms of ugliness, beauty, aberration? Still I hide, never look in a mirror.)
His pieces include: Cheap Imitation, First Construction (In Metal), Etude Borealis, Imaginary Landscape No. 1.
He designed a prepared piano, placing screws, bolts, rubberized strips, and other objects between the strings.
(You worked to make the parts of me combine to form a new, amazing being. But I think you didn’t want me new or different after all, wanted, instead, a replica of the known. Why must difference frighten?)
“If you think you are a ghost you will become a ghost”
(I feel myself a ghost when I think of you, even after all these years.)
“Sounds need to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order.”
(The living fact of my body broke all your ideas of order.)