M: Writings ’67–’72

Foreword

FOREWORD The title of this book was obtained by subjecting the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to an I Ching chance operation. As I see it, any other letter would have served as well, though M is, to be sure, the first letter of many words and names that have concerned me for many years (music, mushrooms, Marcel Duchamp, M. C. Richards, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Merce Cunningham, Marshall McLuhan, my dear friends the Daniels — Minna, for twenty-three years the editor of Modern Music, and Mell, early in life and now again in later life, the painter), and recently (mesostics, Mao Tse-tung). M is also the first letter of Mureau, one of the more unconventional texts in this book. Mureau departs from conventional syntax. It is a mix of letters, syllables , words, phrases, and sentences. I wrote it by subjecting all the remarks of Henry David Thoreau about music, silence, and sounds he heard that are indexed in the Dover publication of the Journal to a series of I Ching chance operations. The personal pronoun was varied according to such operations and the typing was likewise determined. Mureau is the first syllable of the word music followed by the second of the name Thoreau. Reading the Journal, I had been struck by the twentieth-century way Thoreau listened. He listened, it seemed to me, just as composers using technology nowadays listen. He paid attention to each sound, whether it was 'musical' or not, just as they do; and he explored the neighborhood of Concord with the same appetite with which they explore the possibilities provided by electronics. Many of my performances as a musician in recent years have been my vocalizing of Mureau or my shouting of another text, scattered like pictures throughout this book, 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham. My first mesostic was written as prose to celebrate one of Edwin Denby's birthdays. The following ones, each letter of the name being on its own line, were written as poetry. A given letter capitalized does not occur between it and the preceding capitalized letter. I thought that I was writing acrostics, but Norman O. Brown pointed out that they could properly be called "mesostics" (row not down the edge but down the middle). Writing about Merce Cunningham for James Klosty's forthcoming book of photographs, I tried to write syntactically as I had in the case of the Mesostics Re and Not Re Marcel Duchamp, but the length of Cunningham's name proved to be an obstacle. I suddenly thought that that length together with the name's being down the middle would turn from obstacle to utility if the letters were touching both vertically and horizontally. The poem would then have a spine and resemble Cunningham himself, the dancer. Though this is not the case (these mesostics more resemble waterfalls or ideograms), this is how they came to be made. I used over seven hundred different type faces and sizes available in Letraset and, of course, subjected them to I Ching chance operations. No line has more than one word or syllable. Both syllables and words were obtained from Merce Cunningham's Changes: Notes on Choreography and from thirty-two other books most used by Cunningham in relation to his work. The words were subjected to a process which brought about in some cases syllable exchange between two or more of them. This process produced new words not to be found in any dictionary but reminiscent of words everywhere to be found in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Rereading Finnegans Wake I notice that though Joyce's subjects, verbs, and objects are unconventional, their relationships are the ordinary ones. With the exception of the Ten Thunderclaps and rumblings here and there, Finnegans Wake exploys syntax. Syntax gives it a rigidity from which classical Chinese and Japanese were free. A poem by Basho, for instance, floats in space: any English translation merely takes a snapshot of it; a second translation shows it in quite another light. Only the imagination of the reader limits the number of the poem's possible meanings. Syntax, according to Norman O. Brown, is the arrangement of the army. As we move away from it, we demilitarize language. This demilitarization of language is conducted in many ways: a single language is pulverized; the boundaries between two or more languages are crossed; elements not strictly linguistic (graphic, musical) are introduced; etc. Translation becomes, if not impossible, unnecessary. Nonsense and silence are produced...