Leaving the Path at Any Moment


John Cage and collaborator/partner Merce Cunningham

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson has been my mainstay for the last several weeks. Every page has now been marked and annotated, leafed through many times. This is an unforgettable, inspiring, deeply moving book about a towering and yet famously accessible figure. Larson weaves this story through written words by John Cage himself and the historical evidence of the network of extraordinary people that Cage knew, learned from, influenced and collaborated with. For anyone interested in 20th century culture, art, dance, music, cultural history, Buddhism, Eastern thought or the varieties of spiritual experience, put this on your list.

Larson is an art historian (longtime denizens of Boston may remember her writing for The Real Paper before moving on to Artnews and New York magazine) who changed the trajectory of her life by entering into Zen practice at Zen Mountain Monastery in 1994. From her unique dual perspective of seasoned art observer and practicing Zen Buddhist, Larson is the perfect chronicler of John Cage’s richly lived life and inspirational work.

Larson describes her undertaking of this project :

This book has been a fifteen-year journey into the world of John Cage, who was teacher to so many, and who taught me, too. As real Zen teachers do, he modeled a way of life for me. This kind of teaching doesn’t need physical proximity. It is best displayed within the life of the person who teaches. What choices did he make? Why did he make them? What questions did he ask? Cage modeled a life that lives on in the daily moments of those who knew, loved, and were taught by him.

There are so many ways to slice into this complex, multi-layered biography, and perhaps over the next few weeks I will write a few more posts that explore some of the many themes that weave their way through this book. But for now I start with Larson’s account of Cage’s existential dilemma while he was still a relatively young artist. In his words:

So what is beautiful? So what’s art? So why do we write music? All these questions began to be of great importance to me, to such a great importance that I decided not to continue unless I could find suitable answers…

I had been taught in the schools that art was a question of communication. I observed that all of the composers were writing differently. If art was communication, we were using different languages.

The answer came through an Indian friend, Gita Sarabhai. Steeped in the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Gita answered Cage’s question with this: The function of art is to “sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”

From Cage’s journal:

I was tremendously struck by this. And then something really extraordinary happened. Lou Harrison, who had been doing research in early English music, came across a statement by the seventeenth-century English composer Thomas Mace expressing the same idea in almost exactly the same words. I decided then and there that this was the proper purpose of music. In time, I also came to see that all art before the Renaissance, both Oriental and Western, had shared this same basis, that Oriental art had continued to do so right along, and that the Renaissance idea of self expressive art was therefore heretical.

Cage becomes particularly compelled by Indian aesthetic theory and an art that measured itself by its reflection of the immeasurable. And to that end Cage wrote:

I felt that an artist had an ethical responsibility to society to keep alive to the contemporary spiritual needs. I felt that if he did this, admittedly vague as it is a thing to do, his work would automatically carry with it a usefulness to others.

And this deeply moving quote from Cage on the last page of the book:

We were artisans; now we’re the observers of miracles. All you have to do is go straight on, leaving the path at any moment, and to the right or to the left, coming back or never, coming in, of course, out of the rain.

Cage’s evolution as an artist, particularly his merging of wisdom traditions with creativity, is a personal and inspiring narrative. But in addition to a biography of Cage, this book is also a profound contemplation of the spiritual dimensions that can characterize an artist’s life. Larson delivers on the title of her book by all counts.

10 Replies to “Leaving the Path at Any Moment”

  1. Love that last quote!

    Cage remains so fascinating; he touched so many others’ lives and lived his own to a fullness most of us can only imagine.

    One of my favorite fun facts about him is that he was a mushroom expert.

  2. Thanks for sharing this book — I hadn’t heard of it before. It’s now on my wishlist!

  3. Maureen, it’s true, he was an expert mycologist!
    And Diane, I just thanked you on Facebook for posting Ben Ratliff’s review in the NYTimes. Glad you are interested too–this is a tour de force in combining creativity and spirituality.

  4. This sounds like a beautiful book. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

  5. Deborah – Thank you for introducing me to this gem of a book. It’s on the top of my wishlist – I can’t think of a better match with my mind-space – off to the library I go!

  6. I’ve come across this book at least three times this week. A few days ago I put a hold on it at the library. I am seventh in line. After reading your excellent post this morning, I said to myself: “That’s it.” I biked down to my local bookstore in the rain and bought a copy.

    Thank you, Deborah.

    1. Luke, I think you made the right decision. It is a book that needs to be marked up. Let me know what you think.

  7. I didn’t know about Larson’s practice at Zen Mountain Monastery. I was there in 1993.

    This book sounds fascinating. It’ll go on my to-read list.

    1. I think this is one you will adore. Let me know OK?

  8. […] and then a a day or two later, Deborah Barlow’s (who writes at Slow Muse) inspiring review “Leaving the Path At Any Moment” showed up in my blog feed. It seemed an unlikely coincidence. That was it for me. I promptly […]

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