WALKING INDETERMINATELY, WITH CAGE AND KIRK

And speaking of John Cage – do you want to see a piece about walking written by John Cage?  Well of course you do.  It’s from Indeterminacy (and it’s sometimes given more orthodox layout):

And do you want to to see a picture of the great man walking?  Well, why wouldn’t you?  This is a still from the 2012 documentary Journeys in Sound.

There's a trailer for it here:

I also found an extraordinary, and not entirely easy to watch, documentary titled Sound?? From 1966 or 67 (scholars seem to differ).  It’s about Cage and Roland Kirk.  There’s a lot of free-blowing from Kirk at Ronnie Scott’s club, and there’s some 

electronic noise from Cage – and the two do kind of come together. 

 

And we do see them both walking, apparently in London.  Kirk walks along causing some (unnecessary) consternation to the passersby.  

And we see Cage walking in a children’s playground, somewhere near Spitalfields I think, and finally in an anechoic chamber.

WALKING IN SILENCE

You know, the older I get, the more and more I love John Cage; his music, his philosophy, his Zen attitude.  Also, judging by the photographs, he smiled and laughed more than any serious artist I’ve ever seen.

If you go to youtube you can see him performing “Water Walk” on the tv game show “I’ve Got a Secret,” which does in fact have moments of vague insult and agony, but Cage holds up very well, as in fact you’d expect him to, and when the tv host asks him to explain that title “Water Walk”, he says “because it contains water and because I walk during the performance.”

Elsewhere on youtube, and in other places too, you can find him reciting a text sometimes known as “At the Middle” and sometimes as part of “Lecture on Nothing” and it is certainly included in “Silence.” In any case, below is not precisely that text: I have “appropriated” it for my own dubious pedestrian ends, replacing his word “talk” with my word “walk.”  I hope and trust Mr. Cage would not have objected.  My typographical layout is considerably more orthodox than his usually was.

Here we are now at the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk.  More and more I have the feeling that we are getting nowhere.  Slowly, as the walk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.  It is not irritating to be where one is.  It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. 

Here we are now a little bit after the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk.  More and more we have the feeling that I am getting nowhere.  Slowly, as the walk goes on, slowly, we have the feeling we are getting nowhere.  That is a pleasure which will continue.  If we are irritated it is not a pleasure. 

Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.