A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

HOW TO PASS, KICK, FALL, AND RUN

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham's cheerful dance,zyxwvuts How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one's doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed. Most of the stories that are in this book are to be found below. (The first thirty zy formed the text of a lecture titledzyxwvut Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, which I delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958. They were printed under that title in Die Reihe No. 5 [German edition copyright © 1959 by Universal Edition A.G., English edition copyright © 1961 by Theodore Presser Company] and are here reprinted by permission.) Other stories appear elsewhere, giving, it is hoped, what adjacent articles in newspapers sometimes give: an occasion for changing one's mind. HOW TO PASS, KICK, FALL, AND RUN One evening when I was still living at Grand Street and Monroe, Isamu Noguchi came to visit me. There was nothing in the room (no furniture, no paintings). The floor was covered , wall to wall, with cocoa matting. The windows had no curtains, no drapes. Isamu Noguchi said, "An old shoe would look beautiful in this room." You probably know the one about the two monks, but I'll tell it anyway. They were walking along one day when they came to a stream where a young lady was waiting, hoping that someone would help her across. Without hesitating, one of the monks picked her up and carried her across, putting her down safely on the other side. The two monks continued walking along, and after some time, the second one, unable to restrain himself, said to the first, "You know we're not allowed to touch women. Why did you carry that woman across the stream?" The first monk replied, "Put her down. I did two hours ago." Once when several of us were driving up to Boston, we stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. There was a table near a corner window where we could all look out and see a pond. People were swimming and diving. There were special arrangements for sliding into the water. Inside the restaurant was a juke box. Somebody put a dime in. I noticed that the music that came out accompanied the swimmers, though they didn't hear it. One day when the windows were open, Christian Wolff played one of his pieces at the piano. Sounds of traffic, boat horns, were heard not only during the silences in the music, but, being louder, were more easily heard than the piano sounds themselves. Afterward, someone asked Christian Wolff to play the piece again with the windows closed. Christian Wolff said he'd be glad to, but that it wasn't really necessary, since the sounds of the environment were in no sense an interruption of those of the music. 133 One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mecha­ nized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the mo­ tions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Cen­ trally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for Ihe per­ fection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. The pen was tear­ ing the paper to shreads and splattering ink all over the win­ dow and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible. It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly tell­ ing it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high...