In 1952, a wealthy young architect named Paul Williams bought one of the first commercial tape recorders so that Cage could produce one of the very first pieces of electronic music. Cage tossed I Ching coins thousands of times to decide every aspect of what would become known as the Williams Mix. It was four minutes long, composed of sixteen layers of sound, hand-spliced onto eight tape tracks, and every decision regarding the frequency and amplitude of five or six hundred different sounds was generated by the I Ching.
Normally, Cage and his editing assistants—a young composer named Earl Brown; Brown’s wife, Carolyn, a dancer who’d later become a star with Merce Cunningham’s dance company; and David Tudor, a pianist who came to specialize in the recital of Cage’s piano works—spliced twelve hours a day. Every Friday afternoon, at a little before two o’clock in the afternoon, they put down the razor blades, talcum powder, and sticky tape—which were then the tools of the editor’s trade—pushed back from the glass-topped table in a studio at 9 West Eighth Street, and took the subway uptown to Columbia University to listen to D. T. Suzuki.
Precisely at 4:00 P.M., Suzuki, accompanied by Mihoko Okamura, his very pretty, very young, very devoted secretary and companion, would enter a lecture room in the northwest corner of Philosophy Hall. Stroking and caressing his books—which he often referred to as his “sins” because, as he frequently acknowledged, writing about Zen was an impossibility—Suzuki began to discourse very quietly and at great length on the philosophy of Zen.
Though Suzuki was formally appointed a visiting professor in the Department of Religion, his class was unusual for Columbia because it straddled the religion and philosophy departments. It was also unusual because, at the insistence of Suzuki’s sponsor, plumbing fixtures mogul Philip Crane, nonstudents were allowed to take it, and many did. Few did so for credit, yet the chairs were always filled. In addition to Cage and his friends, the auditorial overflow spilling out the door represented a cross-section of the New York avant-garde. Frequently, it included Eighth Street Artist’s Club members like Ad Reinhardt and Philip Guston. Betty Parsons, Jackson Pollock’s dealer, attended the class. After their love affair fizzled, Karen Horney, the first important woman psychiatrist in the United States, and Erich Fromm, the radical psychoanalyst and social philosopher, found themselves taking Suzuki’s class.
As Suzuki crisscrossed the blackboard with his notes, illustrating his points with a bewildering maze of diagrams and catchwords, speaking in a kind of analog English-Tibetan-Sanskrit-Sino-Japanese, his eyebrows flaring upward like the wings of a gull, it was not uncommon for many of his bewildered students to nod off. Occasionally, even he himself would “do a Suzuki,” as his students started calling it, closing his eyes for long minutes until no one could tell whether he was meditating, entering samadhi, or simply fast asleep. No one ever found out: maybe the students were too polite, or too bewildered or too cool to ask.
“Suzuki never spoke loudly,” Cage later recalled. “When the weather was good, the windows were open, and the airplanes leaving La Guardia flew directly overhead from time to time, drowning out whatever he had to say. He never repeated what had been said during the passage of the airplane. In Suzuki’s class, you could easily ask yourself whether you had learned anything or understood anything. Understanding came later—or not at all.”
Suzuki never argued. He had a genius for deflating windy argument or academic pedantry without giving offense. “He had a certain comfortable quality,” one student remembered, “which immediately set me deeply at ease in body and mind.” Suzuki liked to talk about satori, the “turning over of the mind,” which he called the essence of Zen, the fundamental experience of awakening from dualism. “When you have enough faith,” Suzuki would explain, “then you have enough doubt. And when you have enough doubt, you have enough satori.”
Suzuki’s Buddhism was optimistic. It could be summed in a single mudra, the Buddha’s stylized hand gestures. The Buddhists say the abhaya mudra originated when an angry elephant charged the Buddha. The Buddha raised his right hand in the universal, open-handed gesture of friendly greeting, and the elephant stopped dead in its tracks. Henceforth, that gesture became known as the abhaya, or “fear not,” mudra. “Peace,” Suzuki reassured his students, be cool. In the end we will all become Buddhas. Suzuki took it further, though. Once we become Buddhas, he taught, we have to come back to the world, cool as a bodhisattva, and assist all sentient beings to become Buddhas, too.
As one of the best known Buddhists in Japan during the 1930s, Suzuki was inevitably tainted by the Japanese Buddhist establishment’s eager embrace of Japanese militarism, though his age and his venerable reputation allowed him to stay aloof from direct involvement. General Hideki Tojo, widely regarded as the architect of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the creator of the notorious Unit 731, which conducted biological experiments on Chinese captives, who later was hanged as a war criminal, had been one of Suzuki’s students. When asked by his class what he thought of Tojo as a student, Suzuki replied, “Not much.”
In his class, Suzuki excoriated the Buddhist religious establishment for its lack of education, its failure to take a worldview that stretched beyond the islands of Japan, its simple ass-kissing of those in power—Buddhism might be better off, he suggested, if all the Buddhist monasteries were burned to the ground—and its overemphasis on satori. Just being enlightened wasn’t good enough. There had to be some sense of social responsibility. John Cage took from Suzuki’s class that it’s not enough just to be cool. You have to teach cool to the world
In its twenty-five years of hardscrabble existence, Black Mountain College never had more than 125 students. The school had been founded in 1933 by dissident academics led by John Andrew Rice, who’d been driven out of Rollins College in Florida in a dispute over academic freedom, and decided to start their own college. They located a YMCA conference center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, eighteen miles east of Asheville, North Carolina, and booked it for the winter. Their guiding principles were vague. “If there was any general statement of the college’s educational aims and ideal,” Rice remembered, “it was certainly nothing more definite than ‘we shall see what we shall see.’”
The faculty at Black Mountain received little more than room and board in return for their teaching. In an effort to create a more democratic learning community, everyone worked on the school farm, which produced much of the meat and vegetables consumed on campus. Everybody, male and female, wore blue jeans, overalls, slacks, or shorts during the day, and dressed for dinner. Regulations that normally guided students through the academic year during that era did not exist. There were no required courses, and so few people ever graduated that every diploma was handmade. The students had only one rule: “Be intelligent.” To the surrounding communities, the college’s lifestyle and its large number of Germans, Jews, and Yankees made it seem like a hotbed of radicalism. To the students, it was something more. Many books have been written about Black Mountain College, but only one by an actual student there. Writer and artist Fielding Dawson arrived at Black Mountain during the summer of 1949. In The Black Mountain Book, he recalled what attracted him in the first place. “Black Mountain was freedom. . . .It had an organic understanding of itself being transient. . . .It was not uncommon for people to drift in off the highway, strangers who were not strangers at all, but kindred souls.”
Dawson arrived at Black Mountain at the end of an era that had been shaped by intellectual exiles from Nazism, many of whom were associated with the Bauhaus. Josef Albers, the rector of Black Mountain until 1949, had been in the experimental German school’s first graduating class, and the head of its furniture studio. His wife, Anni, a brilliant weaver, had been his student. History has come to regard the essence of Bauhaus style as pared down and without ornament; but during its brief existence, the school was notorious in Germany for its flamboyant lifestyles, its long-haired boys and short-haired girls. One of the Bauhaus’s most famous professors was Johannes Itten, who advocated Mazdaznan, a macrobiotic regimen that alternated fasts with a garlic-flavored mush that turned its devotees’ skins green. The Nazis shuttered the Bauhaus as soon as they came to power. When asked on his arrival what he hoped to achieve at Black Mountain, Albers answered simply, “To open eyes.”