John Cage and Hypnosis

Through the course I am taking at the University of Maine on the History and Theory of Intermedia, I have encountered the ideas of John Cage.

I had always known that John Cage was an experimental musician and who has not heard of his performance in which the pianist walks on stage and sits quietly in front of the piano for 4 minutes and 23 seconds.  I had seen a performance by Merce Cunningham’s dance group for which Cage had provided the music, but as an audience member, I had had no idea that neither the dancers nor Cage had any clue what the other was going to do until the performance started.  It seemed flawlessly rehearsed to me, a member of the audience.  Having now encountered Cage, I assembled a group of friends for a discussion about his ideas in relation to medicine, psychotherapy, and hypnosis this past Saturday in New York City.  These were friends who had known John Cage in a variety of contexts.  All agreed that he was a pleasant unassuming man, unlike Dick Higgins, whom we have also studied and whom they also knew, but thought he was enigmatic.  I had just read Kostelanetz’s composite interview of John Cage from the Kenyon Review (Volume 9, Number 4, pp. 102-130, Autumn, 1987, at which time Cage was 75 years old). We also proceeded to by a MoMa tote bag on Sunday on which Cage is quoted as saying that he couldn’t understand people who were afraid of new ideas.  He was afraid of old ideas.  This was a nice entre to Cage and hypnosis for it is the old ideas that we hold sacred that get us into trouble.  Similar to Cage, Milton Erickson is credited for saying, “hypnosis is not getting someone into a trance.  It’s getting them out of the trance they’re already in.”  I think Cage and Erickson would have appreciated each other’s perspectives. 

For my creative response to this piece, I collected colleagues who had known John Cage in a room in Manhattan and advertised to everyone on my mailing list to come to a discussion of how John Cage related to hypnosis.  Additionally, we placed a sign at the entrance to the building inviting people to come upstairs for hypnosis or bacon, wondering if anyone would come and who they would be. This was also in the spirit, however weak, of the happenings of Fluxus, in which one cannot predict what will happen.

Here’s what I learned from our discussions and also from interviews I read with Cage:

Cage was more interested in a mediocre thing being made now, which is avant-garde, than in the performance of a great masterpiece from the past, which he said was a question of preservation.  Hypnosis is also about the present moment and not the past. Cage wanted to new things into being, which is the work of the hypnotherapist/psychotherapist.  Cage was devoted to being original saying that the more one knows, the harder it is to encounter the novel.  As an example, he cited cases in which the playing of new music by trained musicians required 75 rehearsals while young students coming from cornfields (I suppose he means anywhere that’s not a big city or perhaps Iowa specifically) who had listened to the music on the radio were able to play it with just two rehearsals.  This would be an example of a “beginner’s mind,” which works also in hypnosis. 

Cage believed that the music world had changed dramatically over the course of his life.  When he began to study composition, there were two possibilities – Schoenberg and Stravinsky.  Over time, everything became possible. Hypnosis is similar; more possibilities exist than can be described. Cage disagreed that music had lagged behind the other arts and acknowledged that he tried to make music which he didn’t understand, and which would be difficult for others to understand as well.  In the room, we agreed that some of our most effective hypnosis sessions were those that we couldn’t begin to understand. Cage likened art to the mysterious as is also true for hypnosis.  He wanted to use art to increase awareness because everyday life is more interesting when we become more aware of it.  Hypnosis has a similar motive. Cage’s goal was to become non-intentional, for then, everything is permitted.  He didn’t enjoy music that pushed him, and, famously, the Hallelujah Chorus was one example he cited of such music.  He spoke of the paradox of becoming free of memory at the same time that we take advantage of it, describing a dream he had once of composing a piece of music, all the notes of which were to be cooked and eaten. 

Cage considered the question of what is modern and decided that modern meant “not interrupted by the effects of the environment.”  For example, if shadows or spots fell on a painting and spoilt it, then it was not a modern painting.  If they were fluent with the painting, then it was.  He thought the way of deciding whether something is useful as art is to ask whether it is interrupted by the actions of others or whether it is fluent with the actions of others.  He spent his life denying the importance of relationships and introducing situations in which he could not have foreseen a relationship.  He gives as an example the Happening at Black Mountain at which many people were given the possibility of performing within compartments that he determined by chance operations.  If patterns did occur, they were patterns that had not been measured and weren’t emphasized.

Here is where we disagreed with Cage.  My friend, Peter, had been involved with Cage in his mycology hobby.  Cage was incredibly serious about mushrooms and bought books on these subjects. Perhaps mycology is a better metaphor than music; they are indifferent to human beings.  They go their own ways, cultivating their own survival.

Cage believed that this century saw an increasing gap between life and art.  He said that he was aiming toward a state of mind in which we don’t see things as ugly or beautiful but simply as they are – sans judgment. He said that the changes that have taken place in this century are such that art is not an escape from life but an introduction to it. He described eating lunch with de Kooning once who said a frame around the breadcrumbs on the table does not make it art, but Cage said it would.  When art is useful, it spills out of being beautiful and moves over into other aspects of art to influence our actions or our responses to the environment. We need help with the environment because it’s so crowded. We agreed that hypnosis is the kind of practical art in which we play with metaphors and images that are as evanescent as sand paintings disappearing after being used.  This attitude of not judging, eliminating the value judgments is also crucial to hypnosis, to accepting things as they are and not as we want them to be, and working from there toward where the client wants them to go.

Cage said that a mind that is interested in changing is interested in extremes.  The extremes give us a perspective from which to visualize the center. The logical mind is offended when it is confronted with things outside the range of its imagination whereas the accepting mind is delighted. In hypnosis, we strive to be delighted by whatever happens. Cage responded Zen answers the question of why compose by saying why bathe, why do anything.  Maybe because we enjoy doing it. I suspect we do hypnosis because we enjoy making word poem performances that may or not move the other person and that sometimes we are actually surprised when they work. Cage believed his feelings belonged to him and should stay out of his music.  We decided our emotions should always enter into our work for thoughts that cannot exist without emotion.  This perspective is perhaps different from the Zen Buddhist ideas embraced by Cage. He said that emotion didn’t fit into his work regardless of how many he had. We thought emotions were signals that were crucial to our artistic work in performing hypnosis. Cage said we must free ourselves of our likes and dislikes.  We concluded that we must become aware of our likes and dislikes and use them artistically which is the same as using them therapeutically. Cage said, if one gives up on the pleasures of one’s likes, then one’s pleasure will be more universal – more constant and more spacious. We thought the goal was to have pleasure without attachment.

In discussing abstract expressionism, Cage says that these painters wanted to put across their own images (identities), which he found disgusting.  We disagreed.  We found people’s identities fascinating and worthy of study and exploration. Cage believed that our ego and our likes and dislikes need to be removed from our compositions.  We believed that these were important aspects of the hypnotic, artistic performance. Cage said he’d changed his sense of responsibility from making choices to asking questions.  We agreed with that. By continually asking better and better questions, we elucidate the world of the client and learn how to function within that world instead of trying to make choices for people or even for how we should proceed.  Let the dialogue determine where the questions will go. Cage said that experimental music was experimental on his part, not someone else’s.  We thought that experimental hypnosis was an interactive dialogue of all involved.

Cage told how he stopped writing music until he found a better reason than “self-expression” for doing it.  The purpose of music, he said, was to sober and quiet the mind, thus making us accessible to divine influences.  He wanted to abandon the conventional idea that art is a means of self-alteration and say that what it alters is mind, and that mind is in the world and is a social fact.  This resonated also with our conception of hypnosis.

Cage described speaking in 1949 at the Artists School about sand painting.  He was promoting the idea of impermanence in art.  He denied that this related to Jackson Pollock whose work had permanence and who was concerned with the fact of gesture and painting on a surface which was on the floor.  His discussion of sand paintings related to their being discarded as quickly as they were finished.  The performances that we call hypnosis sessions are like this. Rarely are they recorded; rarely are they preserved.  Each one is constructed just for that moment, for that client, for that situation under consideration, and then it is gone – forever.

Cage used the word experimental to refer to actions for which the outcome is not known.  His goal in writing music was to make sounds that were free of his intentions.  By eliminating purpose, awareness increases.  Therefore, his purpose is to remove purpose. For us, hypnosis is different even though we now see it as art. Our purpose is to accomplish the purpose of the client added by sometimes our own perceptions of what would constitute greater health. Whatever we do with the client, the outcome is completely unknown.  Therefore, our work is experimental.

Cage distinguished three ways of composing music for these times: (1) writing music as he did; (2) performing music electronically rather than writing it; and (3) building the music layer by layer on recording devices in studios. He remarked that the directions in which we go are actually the ones to which we’re prepared to go, whether in music or any other aspect of life. Silence, his first book, contains an essay that he wrote when he was 12 years old called “Other People Think.” He proposed that we, in the United States, stop and listen in silence to what people in other countries think and to realize that they don’t think about us in the ways that we think about us. This is part of a more global goal of keeping his curiosity and his awareness open and trying to arrange his composing so as to have no knowledge of what might happen. This offered powerful parallels to doing hypnosis in which we must listen closely to the “other” so as to use his or her metaphors to accomplish the goal that he or she establishes. We must step aside from our own beliefs, interpretations, and judgments so that we can enter into the world of the client more effectively.

Cage said that the highest discipline was that of chance operations since they have no relationship to one’s likes and dislikes (I would disagree with him, having been using random number generators to pick what I eat in restaurants and what machine I use at the gym for many years, and having discovered that they are not random.  They do respond to what I like and don’t like.). We agreed that we use chance in our practice of hypnosis. We randomly select poems and stories that we might use before even meeting a person, and, more often than not, they are effective.  Is this chance or serendipity?

Cage talked about beginning his explorations of chance with the musical values of the twentieth century. He began using the I Ching as a kind of random number generator to select a sound or a note at random. Only those who are superstitious, he said, would consider this use of the book improper. Then he remarked that he had realized that Marcel Duchamp was working with chance 50 years before him. He said that Duchamp carefully chose the simplest method for his work. Cage said he enjoyed details and preferred to be more complicated. Cage further remarked that doing “just anything” in an unstructured way leads us to do what we remember or what we like which is quite different from what we would do as a result of chance. The audience can immediately tell when someone is doing something in a disciplined way or in an improvised way.  Cage criticized composers who combined mostly conventional methods of composition with a modicum of chance, saying that they were merely being careless about what they were doing.  He discussed having certain aspects of the composition controlled and others, uncontrolled. He believed we are in an urgent situation in which it is imperative to change our minds fundamentally. Hypnosis aims to help people change their minds fundamentally in the directions that lead them to less suffering and more happiness, for suffering is largely in our minds as Cage noted.