FootprintsintheWind.com

John Cage used chance operations to create his art. Often, we find ourselves using chance to carry forward our conversations. We know not where they will go. Even if we want them to go southeast, soon they are headed northeast and before we catch up southwest, and we never get to southeast. Sometimes we just abruptly stop. Other times we are complete. What’s going on?

:- Doug.

Reading the interview of John Cage in Musicage is difficult. Frustrating even. No single thought is carried for three pages. Little goes to depth. Why in conversation do we jump around so? This is a more profound question than it appears.

And then, over the course of several hundred pages a sense of the person and the person’s art emerges from the waves.

Eventually we know when the conversation is at an end. But how? Often we run out of steam. A few times we feel complete. To continue would undo.

Then another day we find ourselves renewed, picking up where we left off, carrying it deeper.

Is this pattern showing us how an individual mind works? It it revealing how two people act as one mind? Or three of us, or a whole people?

How deep goes the mystery?

I can’t take a lot of this transcript in one sitting. I need many breaks. At the same time it invigorates, dusts me with fresh directions of thinking to pollinate me for new ideas.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2121

Ya gots ta be curious.

Please pass it on.

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What if we re-“wrote” a conversation? Tried it all over, moved parts around, used new words, different ideas, fresh subjects for the conversation, unusual subtexts? Uncooked the potful?

:- Doug.