Expecting

FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN

I had seen many art studies come up the stairs from Josef Albers' design class at Black Mountain College, but nothing quite as startling as the procession of paper constructions that appeared at noon one day. 

This determined me to visit one of Albers' classes. 




The one I attended was taking up color. 

I remember Albers going to the window, and asking everyone to come and see the way the Craggy Mountains were looking. 

After a while he said, "You will notice the farther away the range, the darker the hue; and the nearer the range, the lighter." 



Everyone looked for a while, and then returned to their places to continue working. I remained at the window, looking at the mountains, because I was puzzled. 


I saw just the opposite phenomenon: the farther away the range, the lighter; and the nearer the range, the darker. 


After class, while we were walking to the dining hall for lunch, I expressed my bewilderment to Mary, one of Albers' students. She said, "Best to forget it; it's too complicated, and besides, that's Albers." 


The result of this was that I've kept on looking at mountains. 

~ Mervin Lane, Going To Town

Albers was interested in getting students to see--for themselves. For if there was one underlying, tacit, unannounced pedagogical philosophy at Black Mountain College, it involved an aesthetics of the unexpected . . . of the space of realization within the sudden thunder of exploration: astonishment, delight, awe, wonder, vision . . . 

Albers explains that when he came to this part of the world, some of the students asked him what he wanted to accomplish in teaching art. 

"To open eyes," he answered.  

He explained that one of the first experiences he brought into their minds was, in the beginning, drawing in air. 

In one of the first classes he told them to write their signature, what they write on their check, and then trace it in the air. 

And he wrote his own name in the air. 

But so that they could read it -- not for his own reading. 

He then did it backwards, and then they didn't know what he was doing, so he went to the blackboard and wrote it. 

"Who got it?" 

"Who didn't get it?" 

"Be honest." 

"Who got it now?" 

"Let's admit that we are visually underdeveloped." 

"Now write your name into the air." 

"Now try whether you can do it backwards. Ja?" 

And so he had them do it upside down, backwards . . . five different ways . . . of experiencing form . . . in space . . . 

~ paraphrased from Mervin Lane, Going To Town

JULY 1943

Albers stands on the dirt road, in crumpled white pants and white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, rake in hand. 

He is the road crew. 

Four girls are grading a section from the dining hall to the front gate. 

As though polishing a marble bust, Juppi's hands smooth the air as he explains the curve needed for good drainage.

We hoe and rake. Powdery white dust fills our nostrils. The heat is monstrous. 

From the Round House the sound of piano:

arpeggios, 

softly gliding up and down, 

stopping 

and starting again. 

One of the music students, probably Patsy Lynch, is practicing in the shade, behind the glass doors. 

Juppi's voice continues, steady, low-pitched, almost conspiratorial. 

Out of a collage of random English words, German sentence structure, verbs bent into nouns: images emerge as vivid and arresting as Albers' colors. 

There is nothing that is not commented on, questioned. 

The angle the rake is held, the mixture of stone and dirt, the slope towards the embankment. 

Had I ever seen a dirt road before? 

When we are finished, the piece of road is ours. 

~ A.G., in Mervin Lane, Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds, p. 123.

Although the impetus to experiment permeated everything that went on at Black Mountain, various creatives thought of experimentation differently. 

In the beginning years, when Black Mountain students learned under the able Bauhaus aegis of Josef Albers, experimentation was methodical, "embracing all means opposing disorder and accident." It represented a careful procedure of testing socially and historically constructed perceptual understandings in art against deceptive optical stimuli. . . . Albers proposed an ordered and disciplined testing of the various qualities and appearances of readily available materials such as construction paper and household paint samples. 

His approach emphasized the correlation between formal arrangement and underlying structure, and placed a high value on economy of labor and resources. 

But understanding the material and appearance of form was part of a broader project; to him, art was the experimental arm of culture, an investigation of the better forms that precondition advanced cultural production and progress. 

He encouraged a reflexive relation between art production and a better society; as he stated, "For me studying art is to be on an ethical basis." 

Albers' ethics of perception maintained that the arrangement of a work of art could mirror the way one organizes events outside what is traditionally called art, but only by testing received conventions with carefully controlled sets of visual and material experiments. . . . . Albers stressed the experience, rather than any definite outcomes, of a laboratory-like educational environment, and promoted forms of experimentation and learning in action that could dynamically change routine habits of seeing. 

As he insisted, "Art is not an object but an experience"--an experience in and of perception that facilitates complex understandings of the visual world. With his systematic exploration of subtle variations of form, he attempted to construct new techniques of pushing visual perception beyond habit. 

~ Eva Diaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, pp. 5 - 6

Anni Albers, Joesf's wife, was equally methodical in her weaving experiments.

In BMC, really at a time when the then-new buildings at Lake Eden were going up, I had to teach a class without any roof over my head, or looms--no looms were available. 

And we had to do something that could be done by just sitting down together, and we started by selecting grasses and seeds, and so on, and putting them together in specific orders, which are textile orders, and not orders of the sculptor or the metal man . . . 

~ Anni Albers, in Mervin Lane (Ed.), Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds, pp. 43 - 44.

The Fireplace

The fireplace at Black Mountain College became, for those speaking guests rumored to be epic bores, a major vortex of unexpectedness. 

John Andrew Rice, Founder, Rector, and Faculty from 1933 to 1940, explains how the fireplace became an unexpected force: beginning on an ominous, ani-authoritarian, even parricidal note:

"It was around this fireplace we sat one winter night and heard Sophocles tell the meaning of the death of Oedipus. When the last word was spoken, we sat and then, one by one, moved away, silent. 

. . . .  

"In the woods on the mountainside stood dead trees in plenty, and members of the College who liked to, cut and sawed and hauled and piled quarters around the fireplace: oak, and, for special occasions, chestnut. 

"For blight had traveled the length of the mountain chain and killed every chestnut tree. But with one exception, the burning of chestnut was not preferred." 

On the afternoon before a distinguished visitor would be speaking, John would ask, "Oak, or chestnut?" and the fire was laid accordingly. . . 

Then, that night, while the visitor was being introduced, someone would light the fire. 

"Well, usually a sentence or two were audible, until the fire got going about its business. The noise was sudden and loud, pop and crackle, splendid increasing noise, as if a small boy had been given an unlimited supply of fire-crackers. It was accounted a great evening when nobody could recall having heard a word that was said."

                                                         ~ John Andrew Rice, paraphrased, in Merv Lane (Ed.) Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds, pp. 22

~

Those chestnut trees were felled long before I was born. 

Those fires ignited. 

Those lecturers, droning on and on, drowned out . . . 


1963 or 1964 

As far as I was concerned, it was not until the early sixties that Black Mountain lightning struck. 

My high school Music teacher pulled me aside one day and insisted that I not miss John Cage's performance at UCSB. She knew that I was into Monk. 

"Who?" I asked. 


Campbell Hall auditorium at UCSB seats 800. As happened decades later, when Jacques Derrida lectured there, at first there was standing room only. 

John Cage had arranged a number of "prepared" pianos onstage, without really warning the audience for the evening happenings. 

Towards the end, the auditorium was almost empty. 

A couple of college kids were seated in front of my brother and I. 

Cage was bent over the bowels of a piano, with microphone and screwdriver, I think, and making horrible noises. 

One of the kids dared his buddy to run up on stage. 

Sitting front row, dead center, an enraptured beatnik looked on. 

Suddenly one of the frat brats bolted down the isle, leaped up onto the stage, and started banging on one of the pianos. 

Cage, absolutely unperturbed, continued torturing the particular instrument he happened to be engaged with.

The stage manager ran out and began chasing the kid through the maze of pianos. 

The kid leaped off the stage and raced out the side exit, stage manager in pursuit.

Some dozen minutes later John Cage walked up to the proscenium and took his bows. 

The beatnik delivered a solo standing ovation.

    

~

A couple of years after the concert, I walked into an English class at Santa Barbara City College. The professor looked out at the class, then went to the window and gazed out at the range of mountains paralleling the coast.  

"You know," he said, "from a distance, the mountains look green, but up close they appear blue."

                           ~                        

The professor was Mervin Lane. It was at his pad on Mountain Drive that, some years earlier, John Cage had stayed the night of the UCSB concert. 

As a youth, Merv had turned down a piano scholarship to instead run off to Paris and live a bohemian existence, eventually winding up at Black Mountain.

When I got to know Merv and mentioned to him that I had attended the Cage concert, he told me a story about Cage's visit. 

He said that he and his wife, June Christianson, had taken Cage out to dinner at a Mexican joint. John grabbed a bottle of pickled peppers, unscrewed the lid, and downed everything, vinegar and all. Then he turned red.

Merv explained that John was interested in zen and liked to experiment with the process of frustrating expectations. 

Merv then told me of an evening he had spent with Cage and his friend choreographer Merce Cunningham, a story he later published in Going to Town. 

Before I relate that tale, however, let me tell you something of the space where all this took place. 

Merv and his wife, June, lived in bohemian art community in the foothills of Santa Barbara. The Mountain Drive tribe were known around town for their attention to the arts, for their home-built homes, for their celebrations, among countless others, of Robert Burns' birthday, and for their annual, nude, Bacchus-inspired grape stomps.  

Mountain Drive homes, built before building codes had been instituted in Montecito, were the product of whatever materials were available to express the needs and whims of the builders. 

Because June had been educated in dance at Black Mountain, where she'd met Merv and studied with Katherine Litz and Merce Cunningham, one entire floor of the Lane home was one vast empty space.  

It served as dance studio and an arena for Merv's interests in various zen-infused arts. 

Merv would retrieve from the rafters and carefully spread open various specimens of zen master Shunryu Suzuki's calligraphy. 

Traditionally so highly treasured is such art that one story tells of a conflagration hopelessly enveloping one temple, and of one monk, knowing he would perish, swallowing, sword-like, an entire scroll. 

Merv's collection, along with everything else he owned, was consumed one evening by a wind-driven wildfire racing through the hills of Santa Barbara.

After fleeing to safety and awaiting news, when told his home and neighborhood had been charred into a blackened heap, he remained silent. 

Then a grin spread across his features. 

"You know," he said, "it's a good time to be a Buddhist."

One day, several long decades before that "world-consuming" fire, I sat with Merv in the house's empty space. 

Merv had brought in a bamboo case. It held a quiver of yarrow sticks. Each about the length of a human foot. 

With all due solemnity he gingerly counted out each stick, returning one part of them to the dark hollow of the bamboo, laying aside a stalk, dividing the remainder into two equal bundles, retaining one in his left hand, and with the nimble piano-scholarship fingers of his right hand whisking away small clusters from the bundle. 

Next, counting these carefully, laying them aside until only a few stalks remained, cradling these between the two fingers of his left hand, then applying the same procedure to the other bundle . . .   

As Herman Hesse, in The Glass Bead Game, wrote of a Chinese monk performing the same procedure, "His fingers performed all this with economical motions and quiet agility; it looked like an occult game of skill governed by strict rules, practiced thousands of times and brought to a high degree of virtuoso dexterity. 

"After he had gone through the same process several times, three small bundles remained. 

"From the number of stalks in them he read an ideograph which he drew with a tapering brush on a small piece of paper. 

"Now the whole complicated procedure began anew; the sticks were divided again into two equal bundles, counted, laid aside, thrust between fingers, until in the end again three tiny bundles remained, which resulted in a second ideograph. 

"Moving about like dancers, making very soft, dry clicks, the stalks came together, changed places, formed bundles, were separated, were counted anew; shifting positions rhythmically, with a ghostly sureness. 

"At the end of each process an ideograph was written, until finally the positive and negative symbols stood in six lines one above the other. 

"The stalks were gathered up and carefully replaced in their container. The sage sat cross legged on the floor of reed matting, for a long time silently examining the result of the augury on the sheet of paper." 

I sat as still as a goldfish. 

It was not that I was unacquainted with the ancient Chinese oracle of the I Ching. 

I had consulted it continually. You see, many of my generation had to decide whether it was more ethical to travel overseas, all expenses paid, with stops in Asian pleasure ports, with the GI bill paying all educational expenses when we returned home, and with all that was required of us being that we try to butcher people who had been similarly brainwashed to butcher us. 

Or was it more ethical to do something else?

Such as -- Nothing. 

Such as sitting still as a goldfish -- or a mountain.

                                              ~

According to June, Merv's wife, at Black Mountain College whatever simple, unexpected movement emerged at the beginning of one of her teacher Katherine Litz's classes became the germ out of which an entire composition would emerge. 

A plié. 

Add an arm. 

A twist of the head. 

Shift direction. 

The other arm. 

Torso position. 

Change dynamics. 

Level. 

Tempo -- and at the end of any two-hour class, the dance students were performing a Katherine Litz composition. 

June sums it all up in the following words: 

"What Katie gave me in my search for what I expected of myself was infinite possibilities. 

"I learned, in time, how to allow myself the suspended space and moments needed to let my kinesthetic body explore the direction the dance, and life, were calling forth. . . . . It is much the same to move into a piece of music or a tree, a flower, or a rock. From this endless source of possibilities I have created my dance, as well as an understanding of myself." 

This "moving into" requires space. 

Merv Lane: 

One evening when Merce's dance company were performing in Santa Barbara, they stopped overnight at our house, in which, after the performance, there was a buffet, at which everyone became relaxed.

John told a few stories, so did M. C. There were some recent company anecdotes told by a few of the dancers. 

Then in that suspended space, Nick and John decided to perform a skit. 

John and Nick left the room. 

Nick returned with a sheet, which he spread out in the center of the floor, and around which everyone gathered. 

Kneeling, Nick kept straightening out the sheet until it was perfectly spread. 

He rose, sent to the kitchen and brought back a huge assortment of utensils, condiments, beverages and liquids from the refrigerator and cupboards. 

He then took great pains in arranging all the materials in various patterns all over the sheet. 

When it began to look like a design-construction, there was a vocable rise among the onlookers, and Nick was spurred on. 

He changed some things, rearranged others, squatting and scooting around the perimeters. 

He moved the grater, put three spoons in a line, or leaned the garlic crusher against a glass. 

He brought two eggs out of his pockets.

Finally John made a flurry at the door. 

Nick went to open it and began bowing. 

John reciprocated bowing. 

They both alternately kept bowing. 

We all began laughing. 

They kept bowing. 

We kept laughing. 

This went on too long. 

When everyone was exhausted, Nick beckoned John to sit down. 

Nick went to the opposite side from John, and very formally knelt and began to squeeze, pour, sprinkle, shake, break, grate, and place various ingredients in a large bowl in an order that made them appear incongruous if not also nauseating. 

Milk, pickle juice, sieved flour, catsup, honey, pepper, oil, Worcestershire sauce, pineapple juice, milk, garlic, Tabasco, a slosh of tequila, beer, a dollop of brandy, the two eggs beaten with a whisk, and finally some grated nutmeg over the top--all this was mixed vigorously in a large bowl, and then contemplated with due solemnity.

John observed all this with a cherubic smile, broken occasionally by a grin or a breathy chuckle at some more awful ingredient just added, or in response to the more extreme reactions of the onlookers. 

Nick then ceremoniously ladled out a large soup bowl's worth of the strange looking gruel, and with much prostration offered it to John, who took it, and forthwith grinningly swallowed the whole bowl down, amidst our cries of revulsion, disbelief, hilarity, pain, approbation.

Nick and John rose, and with much repeated bowing and guttural exchanges, began parting, John giving he impression that he wished to leave at once, backing to and out the door, Nick following, bowing, nodding, ooh-ing and aah-ing after him. 

Exit. 

Cheers and clapping. 

Later, in talking with one of the dancers, I found out that the company had seen this skit numerous times, so I was surprised at how responsive they were to all that had been going on, as if they were seeing John and Nick perform for the very first time. 

But of course, they were. The uncertainty of the occasion, time, location, materials, and available ingredients made for always unique improvisations, and thus, for the company, fresh delight in a new version of the tea ceremony.

                           ~ from Going to Town

 *

1945  Black Mountain

Alfred Kazin sits by himself on the top steps to the Round House. It's after lunch, a sunny peaceful interlude of emptiness before classes or the work program begins. 

He is playing the Act II Finale of Mozart's Nozze de Figaro from the record collection.

The sound of mingling voices drifts softly over the still lake. 

He does not notice me, who has slipped into the Round House from the backside, as I have each of these past days. 

Each day he plays the finale, with eyes closed, his face tipped up to the spring sun, his concentration complete. 

At first noncomprehending, then amazed by this single-minded attention, and curious, I begin to listen too. 

Slowly the sextet becomes understandable to me, becomes beautiful, because the first piece of music that I've ever truly heard. 

Kazin leaves quietly, unaware; the Round House falls silent. 

I am left with the discovery of Mozart. 

                                                                                       ~ A.G., in Mervin Lane, Black Mountain College, Sprouted Seeds, p. 123 

~

John Cage was an admirer not only of tea ceremony, but of a Japanese form of collaborative, performative verse known as renga (連歌). 


Renga is also known as "linked verse," for reasons that will become obvious. 

During the 13th through 16th centuries, the Land of the Rising Sun's medieval period, renga was the most popular literary genre.

Like other performance arts in medieval Japan, such as noh drama and tea ceremony, renga was spontaneous: an emptiness within which the unexpected was expected to emerge.

Had John Cage been a renga master during those centuries, he probably would have thought of renga sessions in terms of a word he coined: as happenings. . . 

It did not matter if the moon on a spring evening was illumining the Imperial Palace or a rustic tea house  . . . a renga master . . . 

to be continued . . .