removed from the flow of life’s discourse. People who, knowing of his legendary sense of humor, told jokes to John Cage were baffled and even embarrassed when he responded with a long soulful look rather than laughter. My understanding of Cage’s humor—his laughter, his mirthfulness—as I experienced it and as I think it was central to his work, is clearly related to the surprising conceptual/perceptual shifts and accidental swerves of the Zen Buddhist “sudden” school of thought.39 But it is also very close to the etymology of the word “humor” in English40—a history which connects it (via Latin and Old Norse) with moisture (humidity), fluids, fluidity. In medieval and Renaissance usage this became a model of a kind of temperamental fluid dynamics. I’m referring, of course, to the idea, current in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that shifting “humors” were responsible for both characterological and perceptual shifts. Once fluidity has entered into the picture we are not far from figure/ground shifts of the sort we experience with ambiguous figures, or paradoxical swerves like hearing silence as sound. Nor are we far from the conceptual fluidity of Dada (which reappeared in the minimalism of the seventies under the rubric Conceptual Art) or the humor characteristic of Zen Buddhism—the sudden conceptual shift that collapses divisive categories and reveals the strange and delightful interconnectedness of things. A constant, generous awareness of this is what might be called mirth—a light frame of mind that refuses containment by categorical divisions such as the joke as set piece on the one hand, and the logically encased argument on the other. (We all know by now that in Zen there is only one hand.) Or the comic and the tragic. It is a lightness of spiritual and conceptual valence.
Cage called me on the phone one day, after we had been talking about the role of humor in his work, to say he had remembered a book he thought might bear on my questions. I had remarked, during one of our conversations, that I thought all his work, including his music, was humorous; did he? He had reservations about this, particularly because of his sensitivity to what was at one time a prevalent misunderstanding of his music as being a joke. Cage hadn’t at all liked being thought of as some sort of Dadaist clown. The book, he said, was a collection of Japanese poems in a humorous form of haiku called senryu, but “You may not like it.” He wanted to warn me before sending it that it had some offensive views of women: “But there is much that’s marvelous in it…. Maybe you can just skip around.” A few days later Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, edited by R. H. Blyth, arrived in the mail. I opened it and found:
I would have them laugh
At the strangeness
Of being alive.
(Jiichirô, p. 513)41
and then
Quite recovered,
But his nose
Has fallen off.
(Unattributed, p. 311)
Blyth’s introduction was full of descriptive commentary very close to Cage’s spirit. For instance, this seems to relate quite directly to Cage’s often stated “need for poetry”:
The fundamental thing in the Japanese character is a peculiar combination of poetry and humour, using both words in a wide and profound yet specific sense. “Poetry” means the ability to see, to know by intuition what is interesting, what is really valuable in things and persons. More exactly it is the creating of interest, of value. “Humour” means joyful, unsentimental pathos that arises from the paradox inherent in the nature of things. Poetry and humour are thus very close; we may say that they are two different aspects of the same thing. Poetry is satori; it is seeing all things as good. Humour is laughing at all things; in Buddhist parlance, seeing that “all things are empty in their self-nature” … and rejoicing in this truth. (P. 4)
Blyth goes on to describe the role of humor in complicating the idea of beauty in Buddhist-influenced Japanese thinking:
The love of beauty we see everywhere in Japanese life and art, and yet strictly speaking it is a subordinate thing. Beauty is a part of something much larger that we may call significance. Significance includes ugliness, or transcends both beauty and ugliness…. There is no true or false, no good or bad, no ugliness or beauty, no pleasure or pain…. (Pp. 5-6)
and then Blyth quotes the seventeenth-century poet Bashô:
The old pond;
A frog jumps in,
The sound of the water.
There is just poetry, or rather, there is just the sound of water…. We see how essential it is that humour should perform its double task, first destructive, of getting rid of all traces of sentimentality, hypocrisy, and self-deception; and second, of making us rejoice at things. (P. 6)
The same spirit that produced senryu modified the Indian-Chinese Buddhism that came to Japan, and made it witty without cynicism, humorous without blasphemy or impiety…. The humour that is inseparably associated with satori (enlightenment), and with Zen writings and pictures, was … the faculty to see the vast, the cosmic implications of a slip of the tongue, a suppressed fart, a false smile, a balding head, and yet never to leave these concrete particular things, —in other words the power to be both wise and poetical, practical and transcendental. The philosophy of Zen is one of contradiction and paradox, and this suits well with the comic spirit, but there is also in senryu a certain mellowness, an all-inclusiveness, an unwillingness to reject, a non-choosing, a balance of strength and delicacy of feeling, a going to extremes but preserving moderation and suavity…. (Pp. 8-9)
Cage’s response to the chaos of our world was, significantly, to welcome both its order and its disorder to the greatest extent possible in the life of his art, the art of his life. (“Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”42) This project required an enormously accommodating humor, a humor that converged in him from multiple sources—from his early, Californian “sunny disposition” to Dada and Zen. It was Cage’s humor that made his extraordinarily generous invitation to possibility via chance operations possible in the first place. And it is in turn the idea of the possible which links the exigent, pragmatic-realist circumstances of his art to the utopian imagination. The central driving question for Cage was, in infinitely simple complexity, What is possible? What is possible given the complexity of the circumstances in which we live, given the material character of the medium in which we happen to be working, given the hellish interpenetrations of history, given the hope that material process and experience will come together in a manner useful to society?
In advance of a broken spirit is the sense that there can be no new thing or act or thought under the sun. The humors of possibility shift when we, with Cage, attend to, enter into, silence (all that our present disciplines of attention do not admit). Inviting silence, by chance, to have its say in his work just as it always has in the rest of the world, Cage threw open the doors of the concert hall, the museum, the library to previously estranged processes of the continually surprising, complex real. In this he curiously and delightfully conflated certain old-line Western dichotomies. He was apollonian and dionysian, purposeful and purposeless, serious and playful, calculatedly spontaneous. Cage was apollonian in needing to have a reasoned structure for every new composition, liking to work from starting points with grids and symmetry in order to give chance a level ground on which to play with the elements of the art. He was dionysian not only in the hearty sensual delight he took in material presence (sounds, words, paper, color … people, food, conversation, nature…) but in his enduring enthusiasm for the degree to which chance took things out of his control. What this really means is that his aesthetic framework was both intricate and commodious enough to allow an exploration of the range between/around/above/below/before/after the polarities that have defined the dialectical agon of both romanticism and modernism in Western art. In this sense Cage’s conversations with history, silence, chance, and us were grand postromodern polylogues.
The contrast between the Western tragic sense of life and the Eastern comic sense interested Cage. He thought that when you believe the gods are separate from everyday life, you see separation everywhere and experience it as loss. But if you think of the sacred and the profane as right next to one another, you can’t help but delight in the fullness of