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

Cross Currents, Fall, 2000 by Jack Miles

These critics were, if you will, the reassertion of classic Western prophecy against Cage's fusion of a form of Western aestheticism with a form of Eastern mysticism, but by the late sixties Cage had begun to find his own way back toward prophecy and, in principle, toward activism. His was, however, a halting retreat. His 1968 collected essays, A Year from Monday, began with the sweeping proclamation, much in the spirit of that revolutionary year: "Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution." But the first long poem in the collection was entitled: "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)." Obviously, the activism of "How to Improve the World" and the quietism of "You Will Only Make Matters Worse" contradicted each other. To judge from Leonard's extended report, enriched by long interviews with the composer, Cage never resolved this contradiction.

I am drawn to Cage's struggle because it seems so much to be our own, only the more acutely ours as the ecological crisis worsens. The pre-crisis Cage, asked on one occasion if there was too much suffering in the world, said that, no, there was just the right amount. Consistent with that view, the early Cage, contemplating the prospect of the death of Mother Earth and all her children with her, might have said, as we say when one of our own mothers dies, "It's sad, but then she had a rich and full life." In other words, the early Cage, rewording his famous interpretation of 4'33", might have exhorted us to awaken to species death as "excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act on its own accord." If resignation to death is good counsel for the individual, why would it be bad counsel for the species?

The post-crisis Cage, however, the composer turned ecological poet, could only counsel other artists to follow the example of artists like Newton Harrison (a sculptor who destroyed his sculptures to devote his time to reclaiming rivers and waterways), even though he himself could not do so. Once it became clear that the sound wafting through the window of the concert-less concert hall was indeed the voice of Mother Earth crying murder, the concert would have to be canceled -- not canceled in favor of some more prophetic or political performance, something that would necessarily keep the artists employed as artists, but canceled in favor of direct, urgent action -- a general mobilization as in wartime with guarantees for nobody.

The hope was once entertained for art -- perhaps, above all, for poetry -- that it could become a secular substitute for religion, but in our day that hope has been dashed by the termination of the very process that initially raised it. Natural supernaturalism, to borrow M. H. Abrams's famous phrase, began in the belief that artistic attention could bless ordinary reality and make it holy. But at the end of that process, when there is nothing left that is not art, and therefore nothing that is not holy, nothing toward which we cannot take Suzuki's "religious aesthetical angle of observation," then even the death of the human species will seem just the last produce of the last day: nothing to do but watch it happen. Perhaps if the planet could be returned to and kept in the condition in which it stood during the lifetime of Matthew Arnold, then art in the condition in which it stands today might be a passable substitute for religion. Art as we have known it scarcely seems able to play that role on the eve of human extinction.