SIX: His Writings

I left college actually before the thirties; I dropped out of college. And I had the intention of becoming a writer, first of all, and I went to Europe. What had impressed me in art was the art of the twenties; and in literature, transition magazine, Joyce and Stein, Pound and Eliot, and Cummings. The socially conscious poetry that came up during the thirties didn’t interest me. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t see eye to eye with the Communists of the period, who were very lively, but they weren’t really interested in experimentation; and I am the son of an inventor, and the only way I would make myself useful was to discover new things.—Irving Sandier (1966)

Why are you in the habit of presenting your lectures in some unusual manner?

If a lecture is informative, then people can think that something is being done to them, and that they don’t need to do anything about it except receive it. Whereas, if I give a lecture in such a way that it is not clear what is being given, then people have to do something about it.—Roger Reynolds (1962)

[What about your much-reprinted art catalog essays on Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and Jasper Johns?]

How did I write the texts?

The Rauschenberg text was written rather quickly and followed a musical score of mine. It has been my habit for some years to write texts in a way analogous to the way I write music. Say I have four subjects that I am willing to discuss. Then I take a sheet of paper with four shapes on it. Over that I place a circle which in the case of music refers to time and in the case of a text, such as these, refers to lines on a page. I have the lines, I have another sheet with points on it (these sheets are transparent); and as the points fall over the one that has shapes, some of the points are within the shape, some are outside. Now the circle with the numbers and other circles—another page not with points, but with Os (circles) also is laid over this complex, then a dotted line that is wiggly (meandering) is laid over this so that it intersects at least one of the points which is within one of the shapes and intersects also the first circle. It will possibly, very more likely than not, intersect with other points that are either within or outside of this shape, and the circles. In the case of the Johns’s text, if it intersects with the circles, then I am obliged to present an idea. If these points and circles are within the shapes, the stories and ideas are relevant to his work; if outside, relevant to his life. And all of that within the number of lines that is given by the intersection of the dotted lines with the first circle.

The Duchamp text was written in a simple way. You know the I Ching business of tossing three coins six times to get a number from one to sixty-four, and I got the number twenty-six which meant that I had only to write twenty-six statements. Then I tossed coins for each one of the statements to see how many words were to be used in each one. That is why there are sometimes single words, because I got the number one.

Now I searched and searched for a way to write about Johns which would not only fulfill my musical obligation but would somehow suggest his work, or something that I felt about it. And one of the things I feel about it, that I don’t feel about, say, Rauschenberg, or some other painters, is that the whole surface of the painting has been worked on. There is no emptiness in it. There is no place that something hasn’t been done. There are a few exceptions to that, but few. So I made a text, fulfilling this obligation that I mentioned that produces jobs like this. And then I filled in the gaps, so that I too would have filled up the time, whereas in the Rauschenberg one I tried to give some reflection of that by the spaces that I left in time—there were spaces between these various obligations that I had to write. To write the Johns text, the actual writing took me, I think, about three weeks; but the coming to how to write it, this way of writing, took me five months of constant application to this problem of writing about it.—Artforum (1965)

Originally my idea for Jasper Johns was to write a text in which I myself didn’t write anything. This came perhaps from thinking about his involvement with things that are not himself—letters, numbers, flags. There’s also obviously the element of great complexity—things over things, many layers—in his work.

So I had the notion of making a text having superimposed letters and words, of different sizes. Perhaps I was thinking of music in general (which is many things going simultaneously), or my piece for twelve radios in particular. Or even “Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?” which is four lectures at once. Here I decided to do eight things at once, and so I made on graph paper eight things at once, each made up of a series of letters and/or numbers of different sizes. I used I Ching chance operations. If I have eight lines, there is the possibility of a letter being in every place, in each line—a thick block of print. But through chance operations, a letter can be twice as large and take the place of two. And if it is two, it could be in any position; but another might come that would take up all eight. Meanwhile, the text is running along underneath.

The question then arises: do these texts connect from this letter? What I wanted was a text that would come out of little letters into a larger one and then continue. That’s very difficult; it becomes like a puzzle. I worked eight months on this, and finally abandoned it. That’s not exactly faithful to Johns. He would not have given up.

How I was going to complete them was again determined by chance operations—a text of 453 characters, letters, would have been written by someone whose name began with S, on a subject having nothing to do with Johns, whereas another one having 23 characters, whose author’s name began with B would have been written with Johns in mind. This was going to be a collage in which I had written no words, but for which I had determined the whole process. The result would have been a composition of mine. That might be able to be done where one wasn’t so…in love, because I was wishing to convey a love of the work of Jasper Johns.

In other words, I was confined in my use of words to the notion of communication, which in the case of sound I have been willing to abandon. Towards what I have to say, I haven’t been willing to change my notion of communication from what is conventional and accepted. My own use of language tends toward saying what I have to say, rather than what the words themselves have to say. I did tend in this direction, but I abandoned it.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson (1965)

Words and information have a terrible way of getting in and sticking and preventing anything else from getting in. They merely clutter up your head. —Susan Reimer (1973)

I’ve been asked to make a text for Art in America dealing with Marcel Duchamp whom I knew quite closely in recent years, particularly in Cadaqués [his Costa Brava home]; before he died we were sometimes two weeks together. So I agreed, naturally, to do something but said I would like to do what I’ve been wanting to do: to make a text that had no syntax. And so I subjected the dictionary to chance operations—the I Ching. All the words, so that I could divide all the pages of this dictionary—1,428, including the boys’ and girls’ names at the end—I could divide that by 64, producing groups of pages of 22 or 23. That comes out to 64. Then I subject 22 and 23 to 64, to get groups of 2 or 3, so that when I get a second hexagram I know precisely which page I’m on. Then I count the words on the page and relate that to 64 and know immediately what word I’m dealing with. Then I ask how many forms does the word have—if it’s a noun, if it’s a verb; is it singular or is it plural. If there’s an illustration, is it the word or the illustration, etc. So that I finally pinpoint what it is I have to do in the text. Then where on the page does it go?—The page is likewise submitted to the I Ching. And I did it very finely so as to avoid a module. Again, by means of abundance; quantity not quality.

You see from Corbusier’s point of view, which is quality, a module becomes of great importance. From a quantitative point of view, which I’m trying to work with, a module becomes, if necessary, then something to obscure. Anyway, the place, the direction of the word, and then submitting each letter to the chance operation—is it present? Is it in the process of disappearing, as Duchamp himself had disappeared, you see? Is it disappearing structurally? If it’s an E, it has four parts, the three horizontals and the vertical; which one of them is missing, if one is missing? Or is it being eaten by some disease—as the poor man, too, was. Then you have in the end when you superimpose many realizations of this process with that instant lettering business, you know, when you have 261 typefaces, you then work into a very rich situation. And some of the typefaces are—from a value point of view, qualitative point of view—clearly poor typefaces, but from an abundant point of view, they are Yatha butham—just as they are. And when they are just as they are in this rich configuration of things, they are beautiful. And the Lord must have had a similar idea in mind.

Have you seen the book on notations that was just published [Notations, 1969]? This is the collection that I made for the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. Painters had given the Foundation paintings and they had been sold and so we got money for music, theater and dance, and so on. Then I thought of this project of collecting musical manuscripts, hoping that musicians could help themselves by ultimately selling it to a university or to a library, and then using the money to support the works of the musicians, dancers, and performing artists. And the book has this character that I’ve been speaking about of no value judgment placed —so that in one and the same collection, there are good things and what people would say are poor things. And there are things of all kinds, and they’re not organized into any categories. So that it’s like those aquariums where all of the fish are in one big tank. As a result I think it’s very beautiful. And then the text is mainly different intensities of typefaces, like music notation which has light and dark in it.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

Let me show you my recent text. It is called Mushroom Book. I had for many years wanted to write a mushroom book, and I found that when I concentrated on mushrooms it was not interesting. So what I did was to list all the things that interested me. So: mushroom stories, excerpts from mushroom books, remarks about mushroom hunting, excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal about mushrooms, excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal— anything, remarks about life and art, or art and life, life and life, or art and art. By that I mean life becoming art, and I think of Fuller.—Nikša Gligo (1972)

I have become interested in language without syntax. One of the things that separate the people of the world is not only the various cultures, but the different languages; and we see already the development of language which is graphic—anybody can understand it, regardless of where they come from. This has become necessary through travel by air. I noticed in the plane I took to San Francisco recently that it didn’t say No Smoking. Instead, it has a picture of a cigarette with an X across it and the same for putting the belts around yourself. Also, when people love one another, they don’t speak so much; or if they speak, they don’t make sense. They tend to make nonsense, when they love one another; so I think we need to have more nonsense in the field of language, and that’s what I am now busy in doing.

In other words, your words will have no meaning?

I have noticed that people looking at these things I am doing, instead of following a line, begin jumping over the page, inventing words that I don’t even know are there; and that is what I wanted to do with music—to let people hear it in their own way. And now I am hoping to find a language in which people can read in their own way, no matter where they come from. —Alcides Lanza (1971)

Having agreed to write a text about electronic music, and having noticed that HDT—that’s Thoreau—listened to sound as electronic composers listen to it, not just to musical sounds but to noises and ambient sound generally, it occurred to me that making a chance-determined mix of his remarks in the Journal about sound, silence and music would make a text relevant to electronic music. Therefore, I gave it the title Mureau—Mu (music) reau (Thoreau)

What was your method?

I went through the index of the Dover edition of the Journal, and I noticed every occurrence in the index of anything that could be remotely thought to be connected with music, and then I listed all of those appearances; then I subjected it all to chance operations in terms of sentences, phrases, words, syllables, and letters. I made a permutation of those five possibilities, so that it would be each of the five alone, or in any groups of two, or any groups of three, or any groups of four, or finally all five.

In gathering the original material for Mureau, you took phrases out of Thoreau and sentences out of Thoreau and words out of Thoreau.

First I listed all the things having to do with sound.

Listed in what form? Sentences? Words? Page references?

Page references, just as they appear in the index. Then I asked, what it was of all those permuted possibilities I was looking for, whether I was looking for all five together or a group of four of them, or a group of three or a group of one or two. And when I knew what I was doing, my next question was for how many events was I doing it? And the answer could be anywhere from one to sixty-four. Let’s say I got twenty-three. Then if I know that I was looking for twenty-three events which were any of these five, then I ask of this five which one is the first one. Which is the second? Which is the third? So I knew finally what I was doing. And then when I knew what I was doing, I did it.

By what kind of process did you identify a syllable?

I used the syllables as they appear in the dictionary—the breakings of the words.

You took the words as they existed in Thoreau and simply broke them apart and thereby made them pan of your syllable collection.

If I was looking for syllables.

So you have a syllable collection, along with a word collection, along with a letter collection.

My letters become quite interesting. Letters are either vowels or consonants. But it was the diphthong that taught me to think of letters as possibly being in combination. AE, for instance, is a diphthong. Therefore, I thought if vowels can join together to make diphthongs, why can’t they join in larger groups and why can’t consonants join one another? And I decided that they would. Then, if I landed, by chance, on the letter T in the word “letters,” the T is connected with another T. My next question would be: Do I take just the T that I landed on, or do I take the one adjacent to it also? And if it were B and J in the word “subject,” and if I landed on the B, I would accept the J if chance said I should.

By what process did you land on the B?

Well, by counting the letters in the line, and then relating that number to the number sixty-four and the I Ching, giving me the number that would give me the B.

I think you’ve skipped a step of your process. Let’s say there are one hundred and twenty-eight letters on the line; you consult the I Ching and get, say, the number four. That would mean you’d use the numbers eight and nine? I’m making a very simple example-one hundred and twenty-eight letters. Let’s make it really simple—sixty-four.

And we get the number fifty-three, so it would be the fifty-third letter. The letter, say, is a B and it’s adjacent to J and preceded by a vowel. So we ignore the vowel, since we’re dealing with consonants—

And the word in this case is “subject.”

And I ask whether I use just the B or the B and the J.

You make it then an either/or question.

If I throw one to thirty-two, it would be the B alone, with the J being thirty-three to sixty-four. But say there were five consonants. Here are four: N, G, C, H—the NG from the word I Ching and the CH from “chance.” Then my question is, since I’ve landed on the G, do I take the N in front of it and the C and H after it? Or what do I do? My first possibility would be to take the G alone. My second would be to take the NG, because it’s in the same word. The next would be to take NGC, and the fourth would be to take NGCH. Is that right?

There are more possibilities.

What are they?

Well, if you landed on the G, why not take just the G and the C that follows it?

Because the N came before and belongs in the same word. That’s how I worked anyway. I did leave out the GC; you’re quite right. Or the GH too. I took the G as being primary—

If you took the G as being primary, therefore the G is necessarily connected to the N because both come from the word “Ching,” but is not necessarily connected to the letters of the second word.

Well, you’re quite right. Now I think that that’s a very good question. What you suggested could bring about a change in the way I work, because I realize I’ve omitted certain possibilities. I didn’t mean to. What would you do? You would have the C, the NG, the CG, the NCG, and the NGCH; would you accept that as the limit? That’s five. Then one to twelve will be the first, thirteen to twenty-five the second, twenty-six to thirty-seven the third, and thirty-eight to fifty-one the fourth, and fifty-two to sixty-four the fifth.

And that’s how you divide the sixty-four options of the I Ching when there are five alternatives.

That’s how that works.

One reason why your poetry is so distinctive is that no one else writes poetry in this way—no one. Then how did you decide to begin work, in the case of Mureau?

I wanted to make a text that would have four parts, and it was written for a magazine in Minneapolis called Synthesis. And they were written to be columns.

Written to be columns?

I was a columnist for the magazine. I don’t think of these texts as lectures. They were conceived as columns, initially, and if you’ll notice, the columns have different widths. I did that on purpose.—Richard Kostelanetz (1979)

You call this work Mureau. In the initial MU (abbreviation of music), isn’t the Japanese character of MU hidden, meaning nothingness, emptiness.

That’s wonderful. I did not know that, and I am happy that you’ve pointed it out to me.—Alain Holland (1981, in Dachy 2000)

But I’m really interested in the piece you’re writing now about the weather.

It responds to a commission by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in relationship to the Bicentennial of the United States. Since it came from Canada, I accepted immediately. The man who wrote me in the first place suggested that I work with the writings of Benjamin Franklin; but after reading a little bit of Franklin’s work, I felt that I couldn’t do that, that I was still, as I have been for many years, devoted to Thoreau. I tried to take myself for this occasion away from Thoreau; and I bought several books that are anthologies of American writing. But I found that I can’t take myself away from Thoreau. I’m still too fascinated.—Walter Zimmerman (1975)

Are you going to do music for dance soon again?

Well, I’ve written this text which I’m beginning, and I’ll go on with it, called Empty Words; and I think it will be very suitable for dance accompaniment. It doesn’t make any ordinary sense, but I think we know now from our own experience (and we may as well cite Artaud again) that there isn’t such a thing as a thing that doesn’t make sense. So language that we thought had to make sense in a particular way can make sense in other ways. I can read you a little passage of this, which I think makes a great deal of sense, but what sense it makes we’re not sure what it’s saying, but you can get some kind of an idea.—Robert Cordier (1973)

In Empty Words you went back—

I was continuing Mureau, but extending it beyond Thoreau’s remarks about sound and music to the whole of the Journal. To begin with, I omitted sentences, and I thought of Empty Words as a transition from literature to music.

You would agree then, that Mureau is a literary work basically. It’s meant to be printed in a magazine or book.

Yes. In the first notebooks of Empty Words, each part is called a lecture.

So Empty Words was initially conceived as a performance piece.

It was something to be read aloud, and therefore I made it a length that some people would consider excessive; I made a length of two hours and half for each lecture.

How did you determine that?

Most people consider this excessive, and they don’t want me to give it as a lecture. I think that’s because the average lecture, say, in a college, should be forty minutes.

Why did you make your own lectures nearly four times as long?

I don’t know whether I can answer that question. I had been very impressed by an experience I had in Japan, in 1964, of going to a Buddhist service in a town called Nagoya, the one where all the temples are. It’s in the same valley as Kyoto. Anyway, we went to an evening service there that went on for hours and hours, and we had been warned that it was going to be tiresome. I was with Merce Cunningham and the Dance Company. It was very cold, and we were not protected by any warmth. They had told us it would be uncomfortable and long, but we were told also that we didn’t have the right to leave once we had decided that we wanted to stay. So we all suffered through it, and it went on and on and—

How long? Three hours?

No, more than that. It was like six, something like that. And then a few days later, or maybe it was on another trip to Japan, I was in a Zen temple in Kyoto. When I was invited to go to an early morning Buddhist service, I did. I noticed that after a lengthy service they opened the doors of the temple, and you heard the sounds coming in from the outside. So, putting these two things together, the long night business and then the dawn of the opening of the doors, I thought of the opening of the doors occuring at dawn, and making four lectures and the fourth would begin at dawn with the opening of the doors to the outer world so that the sounds would come in—because, you see, it was a transition from literature to music, and my notion of music has always been ambient sound anyway, silence.

Let me go back to the origins of the work. Why does it have the title Empty Words?

It comes from a description of the Chinese language that was given to me by William McNaughton, who has made marvelous translations of both Japanese and Chinese texts. The Chinese language, he said, has “full words” and “empty words.” Full words are words that are nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs. We don’t know in Chinese which of these a full word is. The word is so full that it could be any of them. For instance, the word “red” is an adjective. It could be—I’m hypothesizing now—it could be the same as ruby or cherry, if those were names for red.

It is a full word because it has several semantic possibilities?

It can mean any one of those things.

An empty word, by contrast, is—

A connective or a pronoun—a word that refers to something else.

Or it has no meaning by itself. For example, if I say to you “it,” that would be an empty word.

Yes. I’m not being at all scholarly about my use of the term “empty words.” I’m suggesting something more in line with what I’ve already told you, namely, the transition from language or music, and I would like with my title to suggest the emptiness of meaning that is characteristic of musical sounds.

That is to say, they exist by themselves.

Yes. That when words are seen from a musical point of view, they are all empty.

They’re empty semantically?

How do you mean?

“Semantic” refers to meaning. They are also empty syntactically.

I would rather say that they’re empty of intention, And now we come back to the emptiness of full words. Because we don’t know if the full word intends to be an adjective or a verb or a noun, it’s the reader who brings the intention to it.

Which is to say, when you say the word “red” in Chinese, you can—

You can go in any one of four or five different directions. And the person who lets it go there is the receiver.

No, but when you say the word “red,” you may mean nothing more than the word “red”; but when I hear the word “red,” I think of red apples, red cherries, red beans, and so forth.

I think this is going even further than I meant to go. I would like to go back to the difference between red and blush and cherry—because that’s very basic—that’s more basic than a red apple or a red cherry. It’s whether it’s a noun or a verb or an adjective. In other words, we don’t know at all what it is.

It doesn’t know what it is. We give it a syntactical context.

And it could be any one of these things. It is without intention. And I think haiku poetry is somewhat without intention. I think it may be that the author, if not without intention in writing a haiku poem, has a plurality of intentions, more than one.

How so?

In writing a haiku poem, which as you know is just five, seven, five syllables, there are so few ideas present. An example is: Matsutake ya/ Shiranu ko no ba no/Hebaritsiku, which is “Mushroom/ignorance, leaf of tree/ adhesiveness.” That’s all there is in the poem. And it’s by Bash . And what does it mean? R.H.Blythe translates it: “The leaf of some unknown tree sticking on the mushroom.”

He inserts a lot of syntactical connection that is not present in the original.

He has to; he is obliged to. Now we don’t know what Basho meant. It could be, “Mushroom does not know that leaf is sticking to it.”

There are all kinds of connectives the translator or reader can put between Bash ’s words.

Many.

Those words are full words.

Yes, but you see, what I’m saying now is that, full as they are, they are somehow in Basho, too, devoid of intention. But then if he was intending something, why wasn’t he more explicit?

So you had this notion of Empty Words in your mind at the beginning. You also had the notion of developing a piece that would be away from something that was just read on the page to something that would be performed, as it approaches music.

The approach to music is made by steadily eliminating each of the aspects of language, so that as we start Lecture One of Empty Words, we have no sentences. Though they did exist in Mureau, now they’ve gone. In the second one, the phrases are gone, and in the third part the words are gone, except those that have only one syllable. And in the last one, everything is gone but letters and silences.

So you’ve had a further reduction within the piece. But let me go back a step. Were the same compositional methods used in manipulating the material from Thoreau in Mureau as were used in Empty Words?

Yes.

Then why is Mureau generally written continuously, like prose?

Because it was a column to be printed in a magazine.

And as we can see, Empty Words was written with lots of white space between the various parts.

Empty Words is a lecture. In fact, the whole thing is, through chance operations, put in the form of stanzas.

Poetic stanzas or musical stanzas?

Well, just stanzas. That is to say that one part of it is separated from another part.

Okay, parts; let’s say parts.

And the parts were determined by the appearance of a period following whatever word, syllable, or letters that were chance-obtained.

When you found a period in Thoreau, that punctuation mark ended your stanza and forced you to go on, vertically to another part.

That made a situation that brought about too many parts. Let’s see if I can give you an example—

You re now showing me notebooks that have Roman numerals.

The Roman numerals are volumes of Thoreau’s Journal.

Page numbers, and then occasionally English words.

Right. Now I’m trying to find an example of too many periods close together. Well, here’s one. There’s period. “Hauling off” period. And before it is “teenth” period.

As part of, say, “nineteenth,” you had just a syllable there.

And “hauling off.”

Which you took as a phrase.

And each was followed by a period. And I did not want there to be so many parts that every time a period came that would be a stanza. So when they are adjacent like that, I asked the question, Which one of them disappears?

By a decision of taste, you decided that one of them should disappear?

Yes.

Then you used the I Ching to decide which one should disappear.

Now when they were that close I had another device to see whether one of them disappeared and in this case they didn’t necessarily disappear. It was just more difficult for them to disappear. So that sometimes two words can make a complete stanza, as in this case: “comes hawk.”

These two words are vertically aligned. Where do they come from?

One comes from the eleventh volume, and the other from the sixth volume. But they were both…let’s see what…they were both words.

Now I’m lost. Go back again.

Here I have the notation “W 32.”

That means you had to choose a word. And “32” means—

There are thirty-two words to be found. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

Thirty-two words in that section.

And now we have phrases, words, and syllables, and there are fifty-four of them.

So then you found fifty-four, and once you found fifty-four—

Then I found word, syllable, word, syllable, syllable, word, phrase, phrase, phrase, phrase, word, phrase, word, phrase…. It’s an interesting way to work, and it follows the title—it’s empty-headed.

I understand that. But it’s still dealing with a very pregnant, resonant, and, to you, very relevant, text in Thoreau’s Journal. So there was an exercise of choice in selecting it, rather than another book, and that choice would influence an awful lot.

I know, as you know too, that, were the same kind of thing done with Finnegans Wake, the result would be entirely different.

Or if it were an urban writer, it would be different. If it were done with a—

Or with a different language. Or with a combination of languages. It was certainly suggested by Finnegans Wake that one should do that.

Since Finnegans Wake is a combination of languages—that is its principal linguistic characteristic—any work derived from it would reflect that fact.

Let me go back to the question of the four major sections, or “Lectures” as you call them. When did one of them end?

When there were 4,000 events at least.

In other words, there had to be 4,000 separate extractions from Thoreau.

In the case of the First Lecture, there are 4,061, and the reason for that excessive number is this: when I got to the 3,997th event—

You threw a sixty-four.

Right, I threw a sixty-four, and it took me up to 4,061.

What are those half-moon marks in your notebook—half-moon marks that we use to connect letters to each other over space, as when we make a superfluous space in typing. You have these all over the text; what are they about?

It was the last thing I did before I finished the text. I went through and found out which things were to be read as connected to each other, so that this “R” from “hear” instead of being separate from the “TH” of “the” in the following word goes together with it, so it’s “RTH,” instead of “R, TH.”

The letters are printed together in the text, and pronounced together when you speak them. So these were derived from an either/or situation with the I Ching. So, half the bits—should we call them “bits,” or is “events” your word?—are concerned, and half of them aren’t. How did you decide, in typing out this work, to go on to another line? How did you decide that the space should not be a space between words, so to speak, but a space between lines?

I set up a certain number of characters for each line, a maximum, and I did not permit the breaking of a word, and I used commas as ends of lines.

So, whenever there was a comma in the original text, that indicates the end of a line.

Or any other kind of punctuation.

Including a period—a period that you ruled would end a stanza. So, it’s simply a matter of when the words or bits fill up the available line, then you go on to the next line.

I hope I can show you that.

We’re looking now at Empty Words, Part One, as it appears in your book.

…“notAt evening comma,” so that was the end of the line.

A comma in the original ended the line in your text, but that comma is not reproduced here in the book.

That’s right.

“Right can see,” and there’s a hyphen. And those three words are separated.

“Suited to the morning hour.”

And those five words are separated from the following stanza. Now, in the opening line, the first two words “not” and “at” are run together, into “notAt,” because by the I Ching process that was thrown they had to run together. You kept the capitalization of “A” in “at,“ which was in the original Thoreau.

Yes. Then the indentation here is obtained by subtracting the number of characters in the line from the maximum number, which is probably something like forty-two or forty-three.

If you have forty-three characters in a line, what do you subtract?

Subtract the number of characters in the first line from the maximum. And then subject that number to chance operations to discover where the indentation was.

I’m lost; I’m sorry.

There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen characters in “notAt evening.” I subtract that from forty-three, and I get thirty. And now I relate thirty to the number sixty-four to find out how many spaces in from the edge I should indent the line. Say I got the number two. I’m working with thirty characters here. The I Ching works with the number sixty-four. So looking at the table that relates thirty to sixty-four, taking my next I Ching number, I found out, if I get the number one, for instance, I got something very small. I have to begin the line one space in from the left. But the next line, instead of being right underneath the first line, is indented toward the middle.

In the second line again, by the same procedure, you counted the number of characters, subtracted that from forty-three, put that number through the I Ching with its sixty-four options, and thereby determined where your second line begins.

Now, when there was no comma, because it looks like there wasn’t one here, then I went as far as I could in the line, up to the maximum, without breaking the line and without breaking the word. If there were only one or two, then I left just an either/or about the indentation, and it looks like it—

Started flush left, until you go to one of those punctuation marks that would prompt you to go on to another line.

That’s right.

And continued to do the same thing.

Right.

And in Empty Words, Three, you removed the possibility of words, so you had just syllables and letters, and then in Four, just letters.

I had one further idea, and that was to sit in profile for the first one, then face the audience for the second one, to sit in profile again but on the other side for the third, and then with my back to the audience for the fourth. And it was actually at Naropa that I sat with my back to the audience, and they became infuriated.

Each of the four works comes with a preface—actually each section has a preface that incorporates the prefaces of its predecessor, until there is a four-pan preface for the last one. What are they meant to do?

All the information, all the answers to all the questions, such as those you now are asking me, are given as conscientiously as I can in these introductions. I tried to imagine what it is anyone would want to know, and then I give them that information in the introduction, but not in any logical sequence.

How were these prefaces written?

The first thing I did was find out how many words I had at my disposal for the first remark or for the first answer: one, two plus three plus two plus two plus two, eleven. I had eleven words. Now I thought, well, what shall I say. And it occurred to me to say at the beginning how it was that I came to be in connection with Thoreau. That seems to be a reasonable beginning. —Richard Kostelanetz (1979)

But isn’t it important for a poet to make sense?

Just the opposite. A poet should make nonsense.

Why?

Well, for example, if you open Finnegans Wake, which is I think without doubt the most important book of the twentieth century, you will see that it is just nonsense. Why is it nonsense? So that it can make a multiplicity of sense, and you can choose your path, rather than being forced down Joyce’s. Joyce had an anarchic attitude toward the reader so that the reader could do his own work.

Do you write with intent?

People read thinking I’m doing something to them with my books. I’m not. They’re doing something to themselves…. What intention could I have possibly had in writing Empty Words?

Well, you may have wished to speak of Thoreau.

No, he was just the source. I picked Thoreau only because his journal had two million words. I don’t want my reader to experience Empty Words except in his own way.

And if I find Empty Words obscure?

That’s your problem. You’re interested in other things.—Lisa Low (1985)

[Did you perform the text as well?]

Ever since I stopped smoking about six years ago a kind of cloud has come over my voice, and more and more my interests move toward the voice and toward the use of the voice in connection with music in performance. I had in mind, for instance, to read all of Empty Words, which could take a whole night long. I wanted to read the first three parts, which would take seven and a half hours or, with two intermissions of a half hour each, would take eight and a half hours. I would have that eight and a half hours precede the dawn, so that the fourth part would begin by opening the door, wherever it is, to the sounds outside. By now I don’t know whether my voice would put up with it. Not knowing whether I can do something leads to a decision to learn how to be able to do it. What it has to do with is breathing—a whole area to be investigated.

That is now a new frontier for you.

Breathing and speaking and the use of them for the voice. I know enough about it to know it has an effect upon the mind.—Rose Slivka (1978)

I still think our time sense is changed, or that we have changed it. With all these pieces that I’ve written in recent years, they can be quite long, hours long. All of them can also be just a few seconds long, did you know that?

No.

They don’t have to be played for any particular length, that is part of the principle of indeterminacy.

But would you prefer them to he longer than shorter?

No, no. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I wish to be, as it were, useful and practical, so that if, say, there was an occasion when one wanted two seconds of music, one could take Atlas Eclipticalis and play it for two seconds; it’s unlikely because it takes too long to set the thing up. You could set up, however, one part of it very easily and quickly and do it for two seconds. Because I conceive that a long work with many parts can be expressed by any one of its parts or any number of its parts for any length of time. When you started this part of the conversation I found that I was thinking about the difference between prose and poetry. I was thinking that Webern particularly suggests poetry, and that this activity on my part suggests perhaps a big book that does not need to be read.

And also can bore you for long pasages at a time, but still leave a mark.

Right, and you could read it, for instance, for any length of time. You could, in other words, have it around, pick it up, put it down, or you could settle down and read it for several hours. And you could, as in the case of Finnegans Wake, read it without understanding anything for a long time, and then suddenly you could understand something.—Roger Smalley and David Sylvester (1967)

Very little of my time is set aside for reading, but a great deal for writing. I don’t read very much; for the last six or seven years I’ve been reading almost nothing but Finnegans Wake. That has obliged me to read a lot of books about Finnegans Wake. I could go on with that for many years.—John Roberts with Silvy Panet Raymond (1980)

A friend of Japan, who is a professor of nonsense in the University of Tokyo, undertook the translation of FW into Japanese. According to him, there are two ways of translating FW: the fast way or the slow way.—Marc Dachy (1980, in Dachy 2000)

Could you say a few words about your present concern with mesostics?

I take a name as a kind of discipline and the first line must have the first letter of the name and must not have the second letter of the name. That must appear in the second line. And so I am able to do that either by having syntactical ideas, as in the case of the mesostics on the name of Duchamp, or I can do it by chance operations, as in the case of the Merce Cunningham mesostics. There I applied the operations to the book on choreography by Cunningham and to thirty-two books from his library that had been useful to him in his work on the dance. So that those, even though they do not make any sense syntactically if you read them, the nonsense is the dance.

Why do you write these mesostics?

Questioning why we do what we do is very curious. I think we do what we do because we slept well and when we wake up we have energy and we try to think of what to do, and we find something to do and do it.

Is your present concern with mesostics a kind of splendid isolation?

No, it is my present concern with language. You see, language controls our thinking; and if we change our language, it is conceivable that our thinking would change. I noticed that all over the world language is changing. There was talk formerly of Esperanto, but it was too localized, because it used European languages only. But now, as people fly, we come to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. As people move around the world, language begins to appear as something that separates people from people. Rather than a means of communication, it becomes a means of not-understanding. And so we see, for instance, images. In airplanes, instead of saying No Smoking, we frequently see a cigarette with an X over it, and that can be understood by everyone. And my mesostics became things that you can see and understand the way you understand “No Parking.”

Do you make your experiments with nonsyntactical language because you feel somehow bound by syntactical language?

I think we need to attack that question of syntax. My friend Norman O. Brown pointed out to me that syntax is the arrangement of the army.

Yes, that reminds me of Nietzsche’s saying that our need to have grammar is proof that we cannot live without God. If you are opposed to syntax, do you think that we do not need to have God.

Yes, and Duchamp too, when he was asked what he thought about God, said, “Let’s not talk about that. That’s man’s stupidest idea.”—Nikša Gligo (1972)

What about the mesostics? When did you start with this, and why do you put words in this very strange, but very structured literary form?

People are always asking me to do something, and I heard long ago that the Japanese people, when they wrote letters to one another, wrote poetry; and I found that if someone asked me to write something for them when they had a birthday, or some other reason, that if I used the name down the middle to make a mesostic, it entertained me more than if I just sat down and tried to think off of the top of my head something to say, because that discipline of writing the mesostics helped me get an idea.

And where did you start this?

I started it about fifteen years ago. Now I’m very good at it. I can do it quickly.

And you like more the mesostic than the acrostic?

I like the look of the margins being ragged on both sides. What I don’t like about the acrostic is that the margin is straight up and down. I prefer to have the middle straight up and down.—Klaus Schoning (1983)

Your subsequent literary work has—

To do with Finnegans Wake. It’s quite different from Empty Words. Writing through Finnegans Wake and Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake have been mesostics on the name of James Joyce. That’s a different discipline and doesn’t involve chance operations, but involves something else entirely—painstaking examination.

Coupled with devices in selecting from Joyce’s work to ensure that something other than the original Joyce emerges. What in past poetry have you been relating to?

When I was first aware of literature beyond high school, it was Pound and Eliot and Joyce and Stein and Cummings. And then I lost interest in literature in the thirties. I didn’t become interested in the social concerns of Auden and Isherwood, and who were the others? I wanted a poetry that would continue from these five I just mentioned. It took a long time for that to come about.—Richard Kostelanetz (1979)

Your poetry in mesostics—the process of writing where the name of the person you’re writing about is spelled in a vertical row within the text—led you to discover a means of translating any book into music. This happened while you were composing Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. How does it work?

What I suggest people do is write through a book in order to reduce its length to a reasonable musical length. In the case of Roaratorio it’s one hour, from Finnegans Wake, which is 626 pages to begin with, and becomes in my writing of mesostics on Joyce’s name, something like 41 pages, and those 41 pages can be read comfortably in the space of an hour. The translation can also be identified by page and line, so that it’s like a ruler going through the book.

I can go through the book and find out where I hear something, for instance: if the writer says someone laughed or a dog barked I can jot that down and I can identify that by page and line and I can then insert a barking dog or a crying child at the point that it belongs in relation to the ruler that I’ve already written. And if places are mentioned in the book, I can go to those places and make recordings and put them where they belong in relation to the ruler, and eventually I have a piece of music.—Paul Hersh (1982)

What are you working on now?

I’m writing now, through the Cantos of Ezra Pound, mesostics based upon Pound’s name. And I’m just completing the fourth writing through Finnegans Wake; I’ve also started the fifth writing. It will be like Mureau, you know that text in which I use chance operations to locate different parts of Thoreau’s Journal. This time through the Wake I will not go linearly, as I have been doing with the mesostics, but as in Mureau, I’ll fly backwards and forwards.—Middlebury College Magazine (1981)

Can you tell us about Muoyce?

That’s the first syllable of the word music, and the name of Joyce without the J.

I some years ago wrote Mureau, which is music-Thoreau, and it was the subjecting of the journal of Thoreau to chance operations whereas this does the same to Finnegans Wake; and unlike my first four writings through Finnegans Wake, it is not made up of mesostics but is like Mureau a collage of typescript. Many of the words are brought together, as they are in the thunderclaps of Finnegans Wake.—Charles Amirkhanian (1983)

Instead of going from the beginning of the text to its end, I flew over Finnegans Wake, landing through chance operations here and then there, or on a letter, or a syllable, or a word, or a phrase.

Muoyce can begin anywhere in the book and move to any other point. It’s perfectly aerial.—Klaus Schöning (1983)

And there’s no punctuation. I think it is certainly the most difficult text to read [aloud] that I have ever encountered.—Charles Amirkhanian (1983)

When I first wrote the text, I had great trouble pronouncing it. I didn’t know what the sound of it should be, or could be. I tried everything I could think of, and among the things I tried was whispering. When I whispered it, and voiced the italicized syllables, it clicked for me.—Klaus Schöning (1983)

It makes no sense [semantically]; but as I read it, and I’m sure as people hear it, ideas come into their heads; but the ideas are not so much coming by intention from me but simply as the result of the concatenation of phrases, words, syllables, and letters.

So it’s an evocation of sense.

I hope so, but not an intended sense. I think something automatically comes into it of Finnegans Wake—Joyce’s concern with the church, and also with vulgarity.

How many times have you rewritten Finnegans Wake?

This is the fifth time, and the last time.

Why the last?

I’m not going to do it any more. That doesn’t mean I’m through with the Wake, but I’m through writing through the Wake; but I enjoy reading it.—Charles Amirkhanian (1983)

Recently I wrote mesostics on the name of Ezra Pound all the way through the Cantos, which is over eight hundred pages; and I felt a little foolish doing it. I had never read the Cantos and there was a magazine editor who wanted me to do it, and so I thought I’d take this opportunity to get through the Cantos. Now that I’ve done so, I must say that I don’t regard them as highly as I do the Wake. The reason is that there are about four or five ideas that keep reappearing in the Cantos, so that in the end the form resembles something done with stencils, where the color doesn’t really change. There’s not that kind of complexity, or attention to detail, as there is in Joyce. In the Cantos when something changes you can say, “Oh, there’s that again.”

In my book Themes and Variations, which was published this year, I wrote quite quickly and spontaneously about certain ideas whose subjects came about by chance operations. But then I used chance operations with regard to several such spontaneous writings, in order to get a final form, which I say in the introduction to the book, is not about ideas but hopefully is in a form which produces them.

Themes & Variations is not only composed in mesostics but utilizes renga, a classical form of Japanese poetry in which several writers contribute one line each. How does renga affect the spontaneous production of ideas?

If I have five texts and make a sixth text from the first line of any one of the five (as chance determines), and the second, again, from any one of the five, I then write a text which was not spontaneous but which was written by different poems, even though they were all written by me. It’s as though they were different people or different times, so that something happens that was not in my mind, and which is not glued to my intentions.

Themes & Variations is another step toward a text without syntax, something “polymorphic” in the Norman O.Brown sense and thus seems tied to the Musicircus or Roaratorio.

Yes. This is what I enjoy most in art: some kind of activity which is not stuck to the creator’s mind, but is free of it, so that it can be enjoyed in different ways by different people. I think fundamental to all these activities is the absence of intentions. You can, in the Musicircus, have an absence of intention through the multiplication of intentions.—Paul Hersh (1982)

When you were working with Joyce, did you feel in contact? You’re not doing a mustache on his Mona Lisa, you’re not transgressing him. Or do you think it is transgression?

It has nothing to do with him. It’s something else. He would have enjoyed it, and there are some Joyce scholars who think that Pound would have enjoyed my writing through the Cantos. Certainly there are more Joyce scholars who enjoy my writings through Finnegans Wake than Pound scholars who enjoy my writings through the Cantos.

And in a traditional paradise, you wouldn’t have thought of presenting it to Pound or Joyce as a gift in your mind?

I would have, yes. I would have thought that. Not in my mind, but I would have actually sent it to them. I’ve always thought if I did work with somebody’s work or have some kind of connection, I should let them know, if they were alive to know. For instance, one of my first such works was the setting of three short texts of Gertrude Stein, and I wanted very much to meet her then, and I remember thinking that anyone I wanted to meet might be in the neighborhood. So I actually looked through the telephone books of the Los Angeles area, thinking that Gertrude Stein might have a summer place or something, or a winter place. And I came up with some Gertrude Steins, but never with the real one.—David Shapiro (1985)

The Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos says that some of my writing appears to be the fruit of a love affair between Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.—Christian Tarting (in Dachy 1984)

Do you react to [Finnegans Wake] in a musical way or in a literary way?

There’s a strong connection between music and literature. The obvious connection produces songs and operas, and so forth; so that the arts which are so friendly are music, theater, literature, and dance—in other words, literature, when it is not read but comes into the theater or into the concert hall. I have recently written a number of texts in different languages which I don’t know. And I also responded to a poem in Swedish, which I could not understand. Imagine the sound of the poem in Swedish and write it in English with a similar sound. It’s very funny. I didn’t think of doing that myself. I was asked to do it by Dick Higgins. He asked a number of people who did not know Swedish to translate the poem into English. It made a very funny poem, but then one work that I like very much that I made this year is the French text, and the previous year I made a German text; and then when I was in Japan, I wrote a poem in Japanese. These I could not hear. All I could do was look. I could see Japanese, and so I wrote according to what I saw. And then I wrote a poem under the name of Octavio Paz in Spanish. So I’m getting to be multi-lingual, like a kind of hamburger.—Thomas Wulffen (1985)

What would Joyce think of your two writings through Finnegans Wake?

I don’t know, but I suspect he would enjoy them.

Do you have a favorite masterpiece that hasn’t been “deconstructed” or “declassified” yet?

What do you mean? Written through? At present I am in the process of writing through whistlin is did by the Australian poet Chris Mann, The Agenbite of Outwit by Marshall McLuhan, and the Bible.—Jay Murphy (1985)

We were wondering what you are working on now?

I’m writing a piece for orchestra “A Collection of Rocks”, and I’m planning with the help of a mesostic—intelligent word processor, being programmed for me by Jim Rosenberg, to write through the Bible, the New King James Version. (It doesn’t have as many “beholds” in it.) Left to myself I would have written all the mesostics on the name Jehovah, that is, for the Old Testament; for the New Testament, I will change to Jesus Christ. But at the suggestion of Klaus Reichert I am going to use not just this Christian name of Yahweh but the earlier Hebrew names as well. The first two mesostics on the name Jehovah go this way:

It’s sort of Genesis in a nutshell. It’s quite terrifying. That takes us through Genesis 6:12 in, so to speak, two steps. This is an example of a too percent mesostic. That is, between two capitalized letters of the name, neither letter appears. Jabal is the first word in Genesis that has neither J nor E after the J. He is the first word after Jabal that does not have a J or an E before the E nor an E nor an H after it. Of course it has nothing after the E except the was which I chose to include.—Kathleen Burch et al. (1986)

[My computer] is a great liberation. I have a program now, so that if I have a text in the memory, in any language, I start it going and it makes mesostics on any text I wish. And then after the mesostic is made—it gives only the spine, so to speak—then I can compare that with what’s left over and make a poem, you see. I’m having a program made shortly so that I could every day, every hour or every minute make a new poem on the same subject, so that could kind of be as though poetry was put on the stove and was cooking, and you could taste it, and each time it would taste different. —Thomas Wulffen (1985)

At the moment, having, as I do, a computer, I’m able to work much more rapidly than formerly, so that I have a great deal of work that could be published. But I’m not publishing it as quickly as I could have formerly, because I think we’re almost at a point of change. The change, I think, will go from a book-publication as we know it to some form of electronic publication. And electronic publication would not be something with paper and binding but would be something that you would simply have access to, as you do to the voice of a friend on the telephone; so that you would be able to dial, so to speak, a book and receive it on a screen or on some erasable material that you would have beside the computer.—Birger Ollrogge (1985)

[Writing on a computer] does completely change your mind. When you write a text as I used to write with all the crossings out and everything, you have a picture of the past along with the present and you develop a maze. With the word processor you have only the present so that you’re really in a new mental land. I think what it also shows is the disappearance of the middle-man. There is going to be a great directness between making something and its being enjoyed.—Deborah Campana (1985)

Technology essentially is a way of getting more done with less effort. And it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing. Oh, pick up any text published by the musicians union and you’ll see that they don’t like electronic music. But, electronic music is definitely here to stay. The publishers, my music publisher, my book publisher—they know that Xerox is a real threat to their continuing; however, they continue. What must be done eventually is elimination not only of the publication but of the need for photocopying, and connect it with the telephone so that anyone can have anything he wishes at any time. And erase it—so that your copy of Homer, I mean, can become a copy of Shakespeare, by just quick erasure and quick printing.—Scan Bronzell and Ann Suchomski (1983)