4 MODERN MYSTICISM IN ACTION: Music & Literature
MYSTICISM IN MUSIC— LEONARD BERNSTEIN AND JOHN CAGE
Leonard Bernstein’s Third Symphony, which he has recorded with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, gives an example of the same kind of mysticism in music. It is called the Kaddish Symphony (1963). The Kaddish is a Jewish form of music, a Hebrew paean to God. This form Bernstein (1918-1990) has absorbed into his modern unbelief. Now in contrast to the original Kaddish, this one indicates that we can know nothing of what is there but can only listen to the musician, for he will make something of god for us. In this modern Kaddish the concert hall is “the sacred house,” and in it the artist will “continue to create you, Father, and you, me.” Art is seen as the one surviving miracle god has left.
The reviewer Leonard Marcus, in an early 1965 issue of High Fidelity Magazine, rightly concludes his review in this way: “Theologians have always had artists to bridge the gap to their flock. Now, for better or worse, the antitheologian has a powerful, artistic statement.” Marcus correctly brings together the new secular mysticism and the new theology. There is no certainty that a god is there, but the poet, musician, or art as art is the prophet where there is no certainty about anything.
We should love good art. But art as art does not have the right to speak ex cathedra regardless of content.
There was a very interesting profile of John Cage (1912-1992) in the New Yorker, part of which we shall quote in considering his music. The profile says: “[What] he is proposing is, essentially, the complete overthrow of the most basic assumptions of Western art since the Renaissance.” We have already seen that the young person caught in the modern generation is 400 years away from the previous generation. So Cage is seeking to overthrow a total concept stretching right back at least through those 400 years to the Renaissance. The article goes on to say what it is he is smashing:
The power of art to communicate ideas and emotions, to organize life into meaningful patterns, and to realize universal truths through the self-expressed individuality of the artist are only three of the assumptions that Cage challenges. In place of a self-expressive art created by the imagination, tastes, and desires of the artist, Cage proposes art born of chance and indeterminacy.
If God exists and we are made in his image, we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us. If this is taken away, we are left only with man and his finite self-expression. At this point all one has is the expression of the individual man. But Cage quite logically sees that this will not do, and so he carries man’s dilemma further, smashes self-expression and leaves chance speaking. This is the basis of his music. The article continues:
A number of painters, writers, and composers in various countries have been moving in roughly the same direction in recent years, and many of them have used chance methods as a means to that end.
It names the Frenchman Pierre Boulez and the American Jackson Pollock. In the last stage of his painting Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) put his canvases horizontally on the floor and dripped paint on them by chance. After doing this for some time he felt he had exhausted the chance method. This left him no way to go on further, so he committed suicide. The article continues:
Painters like the late Jackson Pollock in America and Georges Mathieu, in France, whose goal was and is certainly not anonymity, have nevertheless sought in the accidents of throwing or dripping paint a key to creation beyond the reach of the artist’s conscious mind and will.
In other words, this is not merely self-expression; it is in the same direction as Paul Klee’s art—the hope that through the art form the impersonal universe will somehow speak as the artist works. The New Yorker profile continued:
Then just as he was beginning to feel ready to stop what he called “window-shopping” among the world’s philosophies and religions, he discovered Zen-Buddhism. Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki, the first important spokesman for Zen in the West, had recently come to America and was giving weekly lectures at Columbia University that were attended by psychoanalysts, scientists, painters, sculptors, and philosophy students. They were also attended by Cage. . . . By a rare coincidence, Cage found this Oriental idea perfectly summed up in the words of seventeenth-century English music commentator Thomas Mace, who once wrote that the function of music was “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”
However, it is important to note that when Mace wrote this in the seventeenth century, he had the idea not only that music would quieten the mind but that afterwards the personal God could speak to it. God was really speaking. Cage, on the other hand, had come to the point where there is nobody there to speak to him. This is the fundamental distinction. Notice how clearly this comes across in a later section of the article:
One day, young Wolff brought a copy of an ancient Chinese book—the “I Ching” or “Book of Changes,” which Pantheon had just published in an English translation. “The moment I opened the book and saw the charts and the hexagrams that were used for obtaining oracles according to the tossing of coins or yarrow sticks, I saw a connection with the charts I had been using,” Cage says. “It was immediately apparent to me that I could derive a means of composing from these operations, and right then and there I sketched out the whole procedure for my ‘Music of Changes,’ which took its title from the book. I ran over to show the plan to Morty Feldman, who had rented a studio in the same building, and I can still remember him saying, ‘You’ve hit it.’”
Back in the Chinese culture long ago, the Chinese had worked out a system of tossing coins or yarrow sticks by means of which the spirits would speak. The complicated method which they developed made sure that the person doing the tossing could not allow his own personality to intervene. Self-expression was eliminated so that the spirits could speak.
Cage picks up this same system and uses it. He too seeks to get rid of any individual expression in his music. But there is a very great difference. As far as Cage is concerned, there is nobody there to speak. There is only an impersonal universe speaking through blind chance.
Cage began to compose his music through the tossing of coins. It is said that for some of his pieces, lasting only twenty minutes, he tossed the coin thousands of times. This is pure chance, but apparently not pure enough; he wanted still more chance. So he devised a mechanical conductor. It was a machine working on cams, the motion of which could not be determined ahead of time, and the musicians followed that. Or as an alternative to this, sometimes he employed two conductors who could not see each other, both conducting simultaneously—anything, in fact, to produce pure chance. But in Cage’s universe nothing comes through in the music except noise and confusion or total silence. All this is below the line of anthropology. Above the line there is nothing personal, only the philosophic other, or the impersonal everything.
There is a story that once, after the musicians had played Cage’s total chance music, as he was bowing to acknowledge the applause, there was a noise behind him. He thought it sounded like steam escaping from somewhere, but then to his dismay realized it was the musicians behind him who were hissing. Often his works have been booed. However, when the audience boo at him they are, if they are modern men, in reality booing the logical conclusion of their own position as it strikes their ears in music.
Cage himself, however, is another example of a man who cannot live with his own conclusions. He says that the truth about the universe is a totally chance situation. You must just live with it and listen to it; cry if you must, swear if you must, but listen and go on listening.
Towards the end of the New Yorker profile we read this:
In 1954 . . . the sculptor David Weinrib and his wife moved into an old farmhouse on a tract of land in Stony Point, Rockland County, forty miles from New York, which the Williamses had bought. Cage lived and worked in an attic room that he shared with a colony of wasps, and often took long, solitary walks in the woods. His eye was caught right away by the mushrooms that grew so abundantly in Rockland County, in all shapes, and sizes and brilliant colors. He started to collect books on mushrooms and to learn everything he could about them, and he has been doing so ever since. After all, mushroom hunting is a decidedly chancy, or indeterminate pastime.
No matter how much mycology one knows—and Cage is now one of the best amateur mycologists in the country, with one of the most extensive private libraries ever compiled on the subject—there is always the possibility of a mistake in identification. “I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations, I would die shortly,” Cage said not long ago. “So I decided that I would not approach them in this way!”
In other words, here is a man who is trying to teach the world what the universe intrinsically is and what the real philosophy of life is, and yet he cannot even apply it to picking mushrooms. If he were to go out into the woods and begin picking mushrooms by chance, within a couple of days there would be no Cage!
We have said before that the ideas of modern people are destroying what “man” is in himself. But not only that, their views cut right across what the existence of the form and structure of the external universe indicates as well. As we see in the dilemma of Cage and his mushrooms, they cannot live on the basis of a consistent application of their views in regard to the universe, any more than they can in regard to man.
However, while Cage is forced into a hopeless dichotomy with his mushrooms, with his music he has continued to live consistently with his position, even though his music is nothing more than noise or silence. He has resisted the pressure to dress up impersonal Being in connotation words or sounds. Most modern men have not had this much courage.
MYSTICISM IN LITERATURE—HENRY MILLER
In the writing of his earlier books, Miller (1891-1980) had not just set forth something which is dirty in a trivial sense, but he had succeeded in murdering everything which is meaningful, including sexual things. In these books he expressed his antilaw position, in every sense. However, Miller is another man who could not stand by his own position. Many others have been destroyed in their inner lives by his books, but he was not able to be so tough-fibered. So he joins the growing list of modern men who have accepted the new mysticism. In his later life Miller held to a pantheistic view of the world.
His later views are very cogently and consistently expressed in the preface which he wrote to the French edition of Elie Favre’s History of Art. He calls his preface “A Sense of Wonder.” This is an important title, for it implies that he is going to contrast the “sense of wonder” with the intellect. And this in fact is what he does. For example he says, “Above all, he [Elie Favre] was a devout worshipper of the creative spirit in man. His approach, like our own Walt Whitman’s, was nothing less than cosmic.” This already has a pantheistic ring about it. Later on he continues, “What impact his work may have today, particularly on the young who are almost immune to wonder and mystery because of all the knowledge which has been crammed into their heads, I do not know.” This is a significant sentence because he has set the intellect and knowledge against the sense of wonder. One’s intellect would lead one only to the lower story of rationality and logic where there is no meaning in life, only machines. But in contrast to this one has a sense of wonder which bypasses the rational, and this sense is very much related to the use of the word awe that is so much in vogue today. The intellect is divorced and rejected.
A swift glance at Miller’s introduction might lead the reader to think that he had suddenly become a Christian. He uses words and phrases which sound so correct. Thus, “In investing himself (man) with the powers of a god, man has divorced himself from God—and from the universe as well. That which was his inheritance, his gift and salvation, he has vitiated through pride and arrogance of intellect. He has not only turned his back on the source, he is no longer aware that there is a source, the source from which, as the Good Book says, all blessings flow.”
It sounds most credible, and there is more to come: “The spirit which first breathed upon the waters will create anew . . . . There is no last word, unless it be the Word itself: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’” We are forced on the basis of this to ask, “Is Henry Miller one of us?” But the answer, which is negative, can be gleaned from a full reading of what he has said in this preface.
He says, “It forces me, the knowledge of this truth, to observe as I have again and again that behind all creation, whether human or divine, lies an impenetrable mystery. All those epoch-making names which he [Favre] reels off in his works, devastating forces when one thinks on it, because forces for good and evil simultaneously, all bear witness to the inexhaustible energy which invests even the tiniest particle of matter and demonstrate in miraculous everyday fashion that what is called matter or substance is but the adumbration of a luminous reality too powerful for our feeble senses to apprehend.” There is a strong connection here with what Salvador Dali says concerning the dematerializing of the universe.
A little further on he writes, “It is only embryonic man to be sure who is staging this drama of annihilation.” (The preceding context shows that what he is speaking of is the dropping of the atomic bomb.) “The true self is indestructible.” You may think that he is referring to the individual soul here, but it is not so. He continues, “Art more than religion offers us the clue to life,” and at the beginning of the preface, “Did he [Walt Whitman] not say somewhere that religions are born from art and not vice-versa?” We can link this statement with what Heidegger says about the poet: just listen to the poet. Miller tells us to look at art and not to worry about the content; art as art is the new prophet. “Art more than religion offers us the clue to life, but only to those who practice it, those who dedicate themselves, and who come ultimately to realize that they are but the humble instruments whose privilege it is to unveil the glory and the splendor of life.” Rationality brings one to the content of Miller’s books, The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn and the rest. Therefore the intellect and knowledge must be put aside and a leap made into contentless mysticism and awe.
But the man who has arrived at this point does not really matter anyway. “What matters, in the ultimate, if for a few aeons of time this creature called man remains in abeyance, absent from the scene?” In other words, go ahead and drop the bomb, what does it matter?
The usual way of thinking, as exhibited by the shock shown following the publication of Nevil Shute’s book On the Beach would be: if everybody is going to be annihilated tomorrow, what is the use of writing a poem or making a painting today? But Henry Miller and his new pantheistic mysticism would claim that it would not matter if tomorrow the oceans were calm and there were no man on the shore. Individual man does not matter.
However, he goes on to say, “This is an end, one of many—not the end. What man is in essence can never be destroyed. The spirit which first breathed upon the waters will create anew.” He is not speaking of a personal God. He is using these connotation words to speak of pantheistic cycles. Everything, including human history, is being viewed as a series of cycles. What happens to the individuals does not matter, the cycles roll on! This is a thoroughgoing pantheistic idea. The man who can never be destroyed is not individual man, but just Man springing from the universe of what is. “Man, this embryonic form of a being which has neither beginning nor end, will give way to man again. Present-day man, the man of history, need not and will not be the last word. There is no last word, unless it is the Word itself: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’”
To Miller the world can be conceived of only in pantheistic terms, in endless cycles which repeat themselves. But in order to give it a personal sound, he uses biblical terms and phrases. In this way he utilizes the connotation attached to these forms, which comes out of the history of our race, to heighten the feeling of the semantic mysticism he has accepted.
The preface is concluded with these words: “Let us therefore, in reviewing this vast panorama of human achievement, think less of what was accomplished by the giants who parade throughout these volumes and more of the imperishable energy of which they were the fiery sparks. All may be lost, all forgotten, if only we remember that nothing is lost, nothing ever forgotten. ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.’” And with this devastating blow at the individual, who counts as nothing except as a part of the energy of the universe to which he is united as a spark to the fire, Miller finishes his preface.
It must be plain that the later Henry Miller cannot in any sense be called a Christian. He is doing the same as Salvador Dali and the new theologians are doing—namely, using Christian symbols to give an illusion of meaning to an impersonal world which has no real place for man.
This is Henry Miller, the writer of The Tropics, who in this preface takes up basically the same position as the new theologians. We have ample warning not to accept the “god words” of many modern theologians without being certain that they, like Henry Miller, are not using these words to give an illusion of meaning.