Words Sabine Hrechdakian

The print edition (No 17) did not attribute three quotes by John Cage. The correction has been made in the online version.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation.

At the end of a dirt road near Woodstock, NY, in a clearing in the woods, sits The Maverick Concert Hall. Built in 1916 by members of the nearby utopian Maverick Art Colony known for their bacchanalian outdoor carnivals (considered the precursor to the Woodstock Music Festival), the rough barn-like structure, like most hand-built affairs, is full of charmingly peculiar details like rows of windows set at odd angles and walls made of wide planks unevenly nailed to tree trunks. The wooden building, known for its sublime acoustics, is the site of the country's oldest summer chamber music festival.

This is where, on a rainy day in 1952, John Cage, one of the most influential avant-garde composers and music theorists of the last century, debuted his revolutionary composition titled 4’33” (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds). It consisted of the player sitting at the piano without playing a single note. His only action was the use of a stopwatch to time the opening and closing of the piano lid three times, marking each movement. In this quietude, the increasingly perplexed audience could hear the rustling of leaves, the dribble of raindrops falling on the shingled roof, and the sound of their restless bodies, all of which unwittingly became part of the performance. Considered one of Cage’s seminal compositions on silence, it was less about absence and more about getting us to tune into the symphony happening all around us.

 A devoted practitioner of Zen Buddhism who embraced its principles of emptiness, chance, and communion with nature, Cage was not interested in the confessional aspects of music. He wanted to suppress his ego and instead strive for the phenomenological state of being he experienced in nature, where he spent most of his time foraging for mushrooms. In the woods, preoccupied with finding and identifying varieties, his mind was free to drift.

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium.

One imagines him walking in the sun-dappled forest, his eyes cast downward, far from the din and distractions of the city, a rural flâneur, whose daily walks among sylvan cathedrals were as much of a rebuke to post-war capitalism’s fixation with productivity as Baudelaire’s metropolitan wanderer was to 19th-century Paris. Both were modernists who questioned classical conceptions of art and encouraged idleness, now recognized as essential to creativity. “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation,” Cage once said. But the comparison diverges when one considers that the mushroom hunter and botanical forager who mistakenly identifies a variety could pay the ultimate price, as Cage nearly did after eating poisonous hellebore that sent him to the hospital.

 Like most alluring, mysterious, and slightly dangerous things, those who fall under the mushroom’s spell become consumed, obsessed even. “I compose music but mostly I’m a mushroom identifier,” he was once overheard saying at a party. The future co-founder of the New York Mycological Society’s first encounter began when he foraged for mushrooms out of necessity on California’s Monterey Peninsula during the great depression. It was the beginning of what would become a life-long passion, particularly with edible varieties, which only deepened when he moved to Stony Point, NY, in 1954, a hamlet near the Hudson River about 50 miles from New York City. His intention was to build a music studio and establish a summer theater but, with acres of nearby woodlands, his attention was hijacked by the fruiting bodies of an as-yet-unknown kingdom.

Rockland County, where Stony Point is located, abounds in mushrooms of all varieties. The more you know them, the less sure you feel about identifying them. Each one is itself. Each mushroom is what it is — its own centre. It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms. They escape your erudition.

Cage intuitively understood that these kindred lifeforms defied categorization at a time when they were so poorly understood that scientists thought fungi were a minor subset of plants. Neither plant nor animal, but now classified in a kingdom all their own, these diverse organisms are found in every type of habitat on Earth and even in outer space. As agents of decay and putrefaction known by endearing synonyms like mold, mildew, fungus, and rot, fungi have historically gotten a bad rap. Yet without these mighty decomposers and nutrient recyclers, not only would there be no soil for plants to sprout or humans to grow food, but the earth itself would be smothered by a towering mass of corpses. They call it the cycle of life for a reason. Death and dissolution are what allow successive generations (and ideas) to take root.

Ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking. Instead of having them come at you clearly, they come to you as things hidden, like an Easter egg.

In Atelier Editions’ two volume John Cage: A Mycological Foray, a remarkable first-ever compendium of Cage’s mushroom-inspired musings, photographs, writings, and compositions, the reader stumbles upon all kinds of Easter eggs. Littered among the text in Volume I are Cage’s whimsical postcards of people as mushrooms in domestic settings, his field book collages, and a transcript of his 1983 performance, Mushrooms et Variationes. Meant to be read aloud, it appears here as a mesostic poem, with a column of words running vertically down the middle of the page intersected with sentences veering left then right. Volume II reproduces, in its entirety, Cage’s 1972 Mushroom Book, made in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long whose beguiling drawings are interspersed with more of Cage’s poems. This time, with words superimposed into smudged tangles.

Scattered throughout are black and white images of Cage in worn jeans and a rumpled shirt, crouched on the ground rooting through leaf litter or walking with a woven basket around his arm filled with the day’s discoveries. First clean-shaven and sporting a flat top, as time progresses, his hair becomes more unruly, a white beard covering his grinning face, and a ubiquitous cigarette holder fixed in his mouth.

Born in 1921, Cage’s life spanned nearly the entire 20th century. Although he was not immune to the larger forces that defined that era, like many visionaries, he instinctively pushed boundaries, asking questions, and making connections others had never even considered. His radical experiments in the worlds of dance, theater, poetry, and visual art ignored borders. He created relational webs between disciplines, not unlike mycelium, the underground network of fine filaments recently discovered to link tree roots in what has been dubbed the “Wood Wide Web.”

Mycophiles, as those who love fungi are called, often speak of meeting rather than finding mushrooms, of being chosen instead of called to advocate and educate on their behalf. It might explain how Cage, a Methodist who never took psychedelics or drugs of any kind, nonetheless figured out decades ago what most of us are only discovering now. That categories and identity are a construct. That everything is connected. That the present is now.

 Correction: The print edition (issue 17) did not attribute three quotes by John Cage. The correction has been made in the online version.

John Cage: A Mycological Foray is published by atelier-editions.com.

Sabine Hrechdakian writes about art, culture, travel and food for UD, Afar and Vice. She is working on a memoir about love, loss and belonging. sabinehrechdakian.com