Cage in Principle

My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it.

John Cage

John Cage's commitment to direct experience in writing, expressed in this first of many citations in Kay Larson's extraordinary new biography, states a core intention of his writing and lecture-performance, and it seems designed to alert Larson's reader to an unusual agenda of her own book: to do much as Cage himself would do. That's because Where the Heart Beats is far more than a biography in the classical sense, of which there are already useful, if limited, precedents.¹ Larson sets her intentions at the level of Cage's out of a deeply felt conviction that what is at stake in his life, work, and influence is of the greatest importance. She presents this in terms of historical impact on artists and art of all kinds, but also with respect to being itself. The latter concern can be viewed as ontological or philosophical or spiritual/religious, depending on context; I would more neutrally call it a matter of core principle, at least as regards a life practice in art. A key focus of her book throughout is Cage's influential insistence on the non-separation of life and art, which she shows to be highly realized in the man and how he lived, thought, and practiced his various arts—what might be called a highly integrated working life.

In a long, richly detailed, yet highly selective account of the composer-poet-artist's development, Larson gives her sense of what is relevant according to issues pertinent to Cage himself, as well as to the many he inspired along the way. And she does it with a freshness and tonal accuracy, an aliveness in the writing, that amounts to a discriminating embrace of her subject's process of realization. In this way too she embodies an attractive Cageian virtue, a spirited storytelling where the subtext is a celebration of life as it actually manifests, especially at its most intensely meaningful. I think here of Cage's famous response to the question of how he endured so much audience (and critical) abuse throughout his life: "Fortunately I was born with a sunny disposition." We get the subtle force of that disposition throughout this book.

In contrast to academic biographies that include personal facts and historical data mainly because they're available, previously unnoticed, newly discovered, or they just make a good story, Where the Heart Beats sticks to what matters—information that resonates often enough on multiple levels both personal to Cage and significant in context. The standard of what matters is, in part, thesis-driven, yet it's not a self-important demonstration that bends a subject to its own agenda. There's a humility in the writing that allows the important things to surface rather naturally and that gives this book a shape all its own. Its surefootedness in claims large and small seems born of long immersion in Cage's life and work. Clearly Cage's experience resonates in quite appealing ways with that of the author. A key here is the indisputable, and of course controversial, importance of Zen Buddhism in the life and work of Cage and many of those he influenced, particularly by way of D.T. Suzuki (and Alan Watts too). A parallel fact is the importance of Zen (and Tibetan) Buddhism in the life of Kay Larson and her writing, most especially this book. That would be something like the ground of the thesis. But not the thesis itself.

To state the main thesis here is almost a spoiler, given the careful way the author prepares us, indeed initiates us by way of a stylistic élan, for seemingly inevitable conclusions. Most generally stated, following the book's subtitle, John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life...