why I didn’t read it all the way through. (pause) Well the reason I didn’t was that I get involved in too many different things. There are things that take my time. (laughs)
JR: Time! What is your—
JC: Attitude toward time?
JR: What is your sense of time in this piece? When you’re working on a piece like this—
JC: When I do it?
JR: Well, both in the process of composing, and then your sense of what it does with the reader’s or auditor’s experience of time. Is it related to your sense of time in music?
JC: Well you see what I do, Joan, is … the computer gives me the center word for the string, but it doesn’t give me the wing words. To find the wing words—to right or left of the string—I go into the source material and I go in linearly with respect to the source material, so that if the word is “just,” down the middle, then I go back to the source material which the computer sends me to and I take the words from here up to “just” or here if they still follow the rule about the letters, and I make my choices, oh, for one reason or another, but not by chance.17 I make them according to my taste. With regard to sound, for one thing. Sound is very convincing, often. (laughter) Rhyming … or not rhyming. Opposition of sound, or similarity of sound. Or, then we could go off into what you were bringing from Dewey the other day, about ideas and intellectual [content]. In other words, there are all sorts of things that happen that make us … that let us make one choice rather than another, hmm? And I do that more or less the way Schoenberg used to do this with his composing. He said one of the ways to compose is to go over what you’re doing and see if it still works as you add something else to it. Just go over it again and see how it continues, how it flows … so as to make something that flows.
JR: “Flows.” So is that saying something about time?
JC: I think it is. Or … I would rather say it’s saying something about breathing … than about time. Because we have … we have all the time in the world.
JR: Until we don’t.
JC: I mean a line could be long, or it could be short, and sometimes a short line works, and sometimes a long line is necessary. I think they vary. When I was working on the Norton lectures, I was working quite constantly over a longish period of time and I used to think as I was struggling to get something done … in the spirit of working against a deadline … I used to think, well I’m beginning to know something, and I would no sooner have that feeling and I would discover I knew nothing. And I wouldn’t know whether a line should be short or long or what should be done or whether I should do this or that, but I knew that I would find some way to continue. And mostly it was through perseverance. Through a kind of … when the problem became, as it were, insoluble, then to just stick with it until the solution appeared.
JR: Breathing. You said the flow was more about breathing than time …
JC: That’s why I use these apostrophes.
JR: Which gives another overlay of form.
JC: Yes.
JR: There’s the vertical movement down the page, there’s the horizontal line length, and then there’s that undulating breath spiral charted by the apostrophes.
JC: Yes, and you see this, now, is quite nice.
reserve i Think
is perhaps dependent on real things i’M not willing to
arts thE terms’18
to turn that word “arts” into a verb. Isn’t it? It’s quite nice. Weren’t those called spondees, when everything is accented? That’s also like a complaint, isn’t it? (laughter; reads on, 15 lines down the page) … “In painting it would amount to/constant negation of/painting.’ ” That’s very exciting, isn’t it? And I think he [Johns] would say that’s exciting, hmm? In fact—and he didn’t say that, hmm?—but it’s in the spirit of what he might be thinking … I think.
JR: There’s so much of that in this.
JC: It happens.
JR: Did you find the pauses and the stresses by reading it aloud?
JC: By reading it, by improvising. But that was partly found by writing it that way. My practice to begin with was to write it without those pauses. But to write it because I was making the pauses as I was writing it. But then of course forgetting them, and then having—when I finally decided to put them in—to then read it [aloud] and put them in. And that happened while I was up at Harvard—that I recognized the need to put them in.
JR: One thing the presence of the apostrophes does is to stabilize the meaning of the text—
JC: There’s greater ambiguity without…
JR: Yes. And I’m wondering how you feel about that.
JC: I would rather—I … I feel … ambiguous … ambivalent! (laughter) I like ambiguity more in terms of a number of readers, because that would enable different readers to find their own breathing. But if I have to be the reader, then I like better to put the things in so that I know what I’m doing. So, actually those things are for me more than they are necessarily for someone else.
JR: I don’t feel they’re a dominating set of instructions.
JC: Sometimes I use them to take something too obvious out. Let’s see if I can find … for instance, “It/became’ a conStant negation of/myself …” That probably is some kind of refrain. And so I wanted to stop the refrain, “my work to haVe some than / It became’ / my work to haVe some than / It became’ …” What is fun is when—you see, in each one of these thirteen sections there’s the string, which is [picked out] by chance, and then the total amount of the source material changes, and the source material changes for that section. So, when the material is very slight … then you get this ceaseless repetition. There’s a very funny one, you know, where it’s just repeated over and over—“the psychological … infantile and psychological.” And that was the only source material there was.19 So that’s why all the repetition. [Section 11.]
JR: I know you’ve thought a lot about the structure of DNA, relating it to the sixty-four hexagrams in the I Ching. The visual outline of the mesostics on the page reminds me of the helical structure of DNA—wing words bonding in the spiraling—
JC: Yes, it looks that way, doesn’t it?
JR: —Around the generative letters of the mesostic strings. I wondered if that was part of your—
JC: It wasn’t in my awareness, no.
JR: —The pleasure you get from using—
JC: No, I admit to liking the shape. And the variety of shapes that develop.
JR: You have spoken of the lettristic principle in your practice with mesostics. The meso-letters are formally generative. But do you think as a lettristic principle they have any content? Is there any way in which lettrism is similar to a form of numerology for you?
JC: Not in the sense of having anything to do with the content. Numerology in the case of Schoenberg did have to do with the content.
JR: Yes.
JC: And with the expressivity even. But I don’t think of that as taking place. I don’t notice it. I don’t know … of course it must have something … certain letters will have, will of course draw up the same—not the same, but related—bits of the source. So they are really, actually doing something. But some of them are more active than others. And there are some letters that are very inactive as the word game Scrabble shows. Qs are impossible, for instance. Zs, and so on. But vowels are very active. And there’s a kind of, a kind of middle ground for some letters, like P and M and B—between very little action [and a lot]. There’s some sort of slight action, some with more action than others.
JR: You speak of