Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

12. Time Brackets

12 · TIME BRACKETS ca. 1983–1987 Stones SPEAKING BEFORE the National Council on the Arts early in 1983, Cage summed up his last two years: “I’ve written two 30-minute works for orchestra, another for 20 harps, several for dance’n’voices ’n’radio . . . published three books, made 5 editions of etchings, toured alone and with Cunningham Dance Company, and kept macrobiotic diet going.” Hopping him about from Boston to Rome to Tokyo, his schedule had become like an advertisement for some airline , he said: “It is quite crazy.” Later in 1983 he was invited to apply for an opportunity likely to become available in the next few years—to be one of the first few selected artists to work in NASA’s space station. However busy in the recent past, between 1983 and 1987 Cage became much busier—probably laboring longer, more intensely, and on more things at once than ever before. He took time to care for the indoor garden of his loft, cook macrobiotic food, and play chess. Otherwise , he said, “I genuinely have no leisure.” He considered an invitation to perform and offer lectures/workshops in Israel. But three matters preoccupied him. He accepted a commission to undertake the longest most elaborate musical production he had ever conceived, discussed in the following chapter. He applied bold new ideas about drawing, writing, and composing. And he had a new passion: “I have become crazy about stones.” Ryoanji Cage’s fascination with stones began when he was asked to design a cover for the French translation of his 1972 Mushroom Book. The volume would appear as part of a series called Editions Ryoan-ji. Accordingly , he decided to create a cover showing the outlines of fifteen small stones—the number of stones set into Ryoanji, the rock and sand garden of the Buddhist temple in Kyoto he had visited twenty years ago. Soon he was collecting stones from all over the world. He embellished his indoor garden with stones bought, found, or sent to him by friends—fossils, smooth river stones, jade from India. For a long time he had shunned sculpture. When Alexander Calder gave him a mobile he decided it took up too much room and passed it on to a friend. “Though when I was younger I couldn’t live with sculpture,” he discovered , “now I find I love the immobility and calm of a stone in place.” Cage took the fifteen small stones with him in January 1983 for his annual two-week stay at Crown Point Press. Intending to make prints of their shapes, he drew around the stones in drypoint, but found the result dull. “Then it occurred to me to have recourse to multiplicity,” he recalled; “I drew around each one of the fifteen stones fifteen times.” These R-squared prints he found visually satisfying— interesting at first glance, and of increasing interest when viewed a long time, continually revealing something unnoticed before. Over the next two years Cage created with his fifteen stones at least three different series of prints. For the drypoint series Where R=Ryoanji (1983) he used an I Ching program to arrange the stones on a rectangular engraving plate—the shape of the Kyoto garden. For each successive print in the series he increased the number of times he drew around the stones. For the sixth and last print, entitled Where TIME BRAC KETS · 325 R=Ryoanji: R3 , he R-cubed the number of times, i.e., 15×15×15 or 3,375 times. The outlines fill the rectangular field with a dark, brambly mesh of tangled circles. Returning to Crown Point in the summer of 1983, Cage began a series of stone drawings using seventeen different pencils, their hardness ranging from 9H to 6B. I Ching prescribed the number of stones to be outlined on each sheet and the number of different pencils to use. Cage’s drawing 8R/12, for instance, consists of 120 (8×15) rings drawn by twelve different pencils. For the 1985 Ryoku series— Ryoanji plus haiku—he traced each stone onto one of seventy-five separate copper plates. He tinted the drypoint images with colors made from seventeen pigments—for the seventeen syllables of haiku. A Fifty-seventh Street gallery took fifteen of his Ryonaji prints for show, selling them for two thousand dollars each. Not surprisingly, Cage also musicated his fascination with stones. He found himself...