A cup of tea.

There are very few people out there that I specially want to meet. Talking to ordinary folk on the bus or the beach is enough. When I hear an interview with Professor X on the radio, or read a posting by Joe Bloggs, I am glad to know them that much, but only rarely think, I’d like to meet you.

I regret never having met John Cage. I have no idea what I would have said to him, but every report I have ever read suggests he was wonderfully easy to talk with, a man with no pretension or prejudice. His writings, films, and recordings are deeply inspiring and I regard him as an unintentionally significant figure in West Coast Buddhism—although Simon Wickham-Smith and I disagree over his ‘place’ in Zen.

Here are some available resources on the net:

Ubuweb’s Cage sections: film, sound, historical. Recently they have also put up a long film.

There is a mailing list for Cage studies, called Silence-L.

It’s also a good thing to celebrate a Cage Day in any year when it is possible. On this day, a group of people agree to use a toolkit for chance determinations that will guide their actions for that day – so, for example, one might use avispexy (assuming there were birds to be seen) to guide which direction one travelled, how far, and by what means; then again to decide what one did en route or on arrival (sing, dance, write, interview, sit quietly &c.).