<<  -- 5 --  Jennifer Paull    UNCAGED JOHN

As I listen, I am inside a cockpit. I take the place of that eccentric multi-billionaire who recently encircled the earth, alone, in the first years of the Twenty-First Century inside his tall, silver balloon; swept by the invisibility of the winds, and the earth's atmospheric casting of the die. The inevitability of random peacefulness engulfs. I breathe more easily letting myself drift away. I feel cleansed and at peace in layered aspects of shimmering whiteness, time, and space.

Cage once asked Arragon, the historian, how history was written. He replied 'You have to invent it'. One can only meekly affirm that John obeyed.

John Cage abandoned college after two years' initial study to become a writer. He moved to Europe and was 'kicked in my pants' by José Pijoan for 'my study of flamboyant Gothic architecture'. The latter introduced him to a contemporary architect who made him draw Greek capitals: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. In his autobiographical statement (any major search engine: enter 'John Cage'), he simply flows on from this lamentation to conclude that he (therefore) 'became interested in modern music and painting'; as though both were the inevitable, logical consequence of much intensive drawing of the capital, Greek (various) or Gothic (flamboyant).

'In Sevilla on a street corner I noticed the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment. It was the beginning for me of theatre and circus'.

I was lucky enough to have been present during a week's collaboration between John Cage and Merce Cunningham and his Dance Company at the Festival of The Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis in the early 1970s. What could have been more exquisite than the juxtaposition of contemporary, seemingly limitless expressions of liquid sound and dance weaving through the carvings and intertwining the pillars of ancient Persepolis (and her capitals)? 'Music and dance are independent but coexistent.' So are the soul of Persepolis present and the ghost of Persepolis past.

This cradle of the Persian Empire stood before Alexander the Great, rising in majesty from once lush gardens. Razed by him, its beauty remains frozen in time, grandeur and ruin in the desert today. For me, something about Cage always spins and holds fast a zephyr of long ago inside his post-modernist web.

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