Empty Words: Writings 1973-78 [Paperback]

John Cage was busy during the 1970s, and his book Empty Words reflects that busy-ness in ways obvious and hidden. As a book of essays on music, it's a satisfying and provocative read. As poetry, that depends on what you make of his procedural driven work in the field, and also how much you like what seems today like frankly occasional poems, the bread and butter notes of another, more polite age. Cage interestingly foregrounds his lack of fixed address, what one might call his transnationality, early on, in the epigraph, which involves a typically charming anecdote among houseguests, one from the US, one from Melbourne, who find themselves at the same breakfast table in Paris. As many attest, Cage was an enchanting conversationalist, the equal of Wilde or Lytton Strachey, but perhaps with more of a Buddhist pacific nature. In Empty Words we find him singing for his supper over and over again, and like Coleridge's Table Talk, there's something sort of sad about him having to amuse the rich and curry their favor, but he also felt comfortable among them, could let his hair down to a certain extent. It was thoughtful of his patrons to give him an annual stipend so he didn't have to work, but it made him into a pet. Someone is probably doing an analysis right now of Cage and capital, but it speaks between the lines of every other mesostic on display here.

"The Future of Music" is Cage at his happiest, an essay in which he asks us to consider what is missing from today's music (well, the music of the mid 1970s). In generally advancing concentric circles of prose, he makes the circle more and more inclusive, asking us to consider what soldiers (instead of being shipped out to war) might offer to music, what the elderly can give--the "senior citizens whom we have persuaded to leave us in favor of sunshine, fun and games." (Florida perhaps?) Music ignores prisoners at its peril, and the retarded and disabled as well. He would see a world in which social interaction was everything, and to hell with the hierarchies which have divided music into a specialized labor force of performers, and a lumpenproletariat of listeners. In this gradual widening of effort and access he sees something of what he calls, after George William Mead, the "religious spirit."

Another major work is the fascinating "Series re Morris Graves." I have no idea how this long poem got itself written but it is a Bressonian meditation on what it's like to live in one fabulous place after another, from the point of view of the eternal houseguest, one with a wry eye for his ridiculous hosts. With his vegan and raw foods diet he himself wasn't the simplest guest to feed, but he acknowledges this in a dashing way and he never lost his aplomb, nor his sense of wonder.

If you are familiar with John Cage's thinking you will enjoy and understand this book as well as his other numerous writings, and fantastic music. If you are new to Cage's work, well, be patient and try to follow. Perhaps some previous reading of his poetry and writings will guide you more towards this book. I am a fan and admirer of Cage's work, so I loved it.

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