Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art

Cross Currents, Fall, 2000 by Jack Miles

Suzuki, who had acquainted himself with this Western movement by reading Ralph Waldo Emerson while still in Japan, seems to have recognized Emerson's ideal as analogous to the satori sought by the Rinzai Zen sect to which he belonged. Among American artists, this school of Zen--which Americans initially equated with the whole of Zen--provided an artistic evolution that was already under way with a new rationale and a thrilling acceleration.

"Suzuki's satori," Leonard writes,

is largely identical to transfiguration of the commonplace. "Satori finds a meaning hither-to hidden in our daily concrete particular experiences," Suzuki explains, regarding the world from the "religious aesthetical angle of observation...." The "artist's world," therefore "coincides" with that of the Zen man except that the Zen-man, Suzuki was teaching by 1938, has freed himself of art objects. "While the artists have to resort to the canvas or brush or mechanical instruments or some other mediums to express themselves, Zen has no need of things external.... The Zenman is an artist," but he "transforms his own life into a work of creation!" (Leonard, 161)

The path from Suzuki's classroom to Cage's silent recital hall is extraordinarily well-marked. Cage's 4'33" announced the end of art, the ne plus ultra of a hundred-fifty-year process, more radically and years earlier than did the Brilo boxes of Andy Warhol, who indeed frankly acknowledged his debt to Cage. And though Cage came decades later than Marcel Duchamp and his famous urinal, Duchamp was celebrated for epitomizing what at the time he intended to satirize. The French artist eventually came to accept his artistic destiny, but in 1917, when he first displayed the urinal, the gesture bespoke not Zen but Dada.

4'33" is aleatory music inasmuch as chance determines what real-world sounds will fill the silence. During the first performance of the work at Woodstock, New York -- the same Woodstock of the later, legendary rock concert -- a rainstorm broke out, and the silence was filled by the sound of raindrops on the roof of the concert shed. Cage has written other kinds of aleatory music, but he and everyone else regards 4'33" as his most important and most visionary work. For that reason, it is interesting and much to the point of today's investigation to learn, as one does in Leonard's book, of the degree to which he later turned against his own vision.

To speak poetically, what John Cage eventually heard in the silence he had created was the sound of the world dying, and he could not bear to hear it. During the last thirty years of his life, he was what George Leonard sees fit to call an ecology activist, though Cage's activism seems to have consisted mainly of writing fragmentary poetry in defense of the environment. This was, in effect if not by intent, the composer's response to his critics, and he did have his critics. In 1969 the Harvard theologian and culture critic Harvey Cox in a book entitled The Feast of Fools faulted him sharply for "assum[ing] a creation that is not only good but perfect." To Cox, though he astutely recognized the theological dimension in Cage's work, the composer's stance risked becoming "a supine acceptance of the world as it is." And there were artists and art critics who had similar objections. Rather than awaken her audience to "this excellent life," one performance artist said in 1981 she wanted to awaken it to "the ways in which we have been led to believe that this life is so excellent...." And as late as 1989, performance art critic Henry Sayre faulted Cage for being "so vastly apolitical, so vastly unconscious of social and political reality." (Leonard, 175-76)