John Cage on attention and boredom

 John Cage — he was such a polymath I hesitate to call him a composer — said this:

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Cage is known for 4’33,” a musical composition that takes four minutes and 33 seconds to perform. All the notes are silent.

A musician told me that 4’33’’ usually is performed on piano but that the score leaves room for other instruments. Whether it’s a piano composition might be a philosophical question. Whether it’s a performancemight another.

I’m not sure what to make of Cage, but I like his remark about boredom.

If I am bored with the cosmos, I’m not paying attention. Or I’m paying attention to the wrong thing.

If I’m bored, something is wrong with me, not with the cosmos.

If you’re wondering what this observation has to do with anything else in this collection of notes, please consider that Cage, the polymath, liked to walk in the woods. 

In her delightful essay on Cage, Mary Mann says that he lived “on the edge of poverty until age 42, when an Italian game show awarded him $8,000 for being able to name ‘the twenty-four kinds of white-spore mushrooms listed in Atkinson.’”

Cage was an expert. Mann says he taught a class on mushrooms at the new school and founded the New York Mycological Society.

She quotes him about paying attention on his tramps:

 “Often I go in the woods thinking after all these years I ought finally to be bored with fungi,” Cage writes. “But coming upon just any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again.”

She also quotes Cage putting the same idea another way:

What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods? 

For some people, walking in the woods is some kind of practice, something done to pay attention to something wonderful outside themselves. Cage searched for mushrooms. Guy Davenport searched for arrowheads. I search the Piedmont.

• Sources: The first quote is from Cage’s collection of essays, Silence; 1961. The others are from his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). All are quoted in Mary Mann, “John Cage’s Endless Project,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2015. It’s here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/john-cages-endless-project/

For Guy Davenport’s view, see his essay “Finding” in The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. My note on it is here as “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.