The Martin Duberman Reader (9 page)

Wallen sought to demonstrate that individual development in the arts and responsible group membership were complementary, not contradictory, goals. There's been a long history (the Swedish adventure playgrounds, for example)—and there would be many more examples in the sixties (Lama Foundation, Hog Farm, Woodstock)—of efforts to show that individuality and community can develop in tandem. That
any
such evidence exists in a Western culture that for centuries has stressed the supreme virtues of aggrandizement and competition can be considered remarkable. That the fugitives from middle-class life who made up the Black Mountain community could, more often than not, contribute their energies to a common enterprise, could regard their personal development as bound up with association, could try to negotiate (or at the least, ignore) the continual hostilities generated by the hothouse environment, is more astonishing than the fact that the community was sometimes characterized by those interpersonal antagonisms
central
to the social system from which it emerged—and from which it tried to separate.

Given the resistance within the college and the slow going he found in trying to implement change, Wallen increasingly turned
his attention to his second communal concern—the relationship of the college to the surrounding area. Some people thought he ought to “let sleeping dogs lie,” that since Black Mountain was a strange creature, establishing relations with the outside community could only lead to heightened antagonism (along with consuming valuable time and energy better put elsewhere). But Wallen preferred the observation of a friend of his that “treating a community as an oasis in the midst of a desert or wilderness is a rather futile endeavor. It becomes a refuge far more than a point of growth and development in the culture of the region.”

In trying to increase points of contact with the neighboring area, Wallen “had no support from the faculty—none,” one of his student admirers later insisted. Regardless, he continued to urge students to increase their experience of the surrounding world and to make concrete commitments to it. One student volunteered to serve as a companion two afternoons a week to a “schizophrenic” girl of about her own age who was a patient in a nearby mental hospital—and did so for a whole term, despite having to walk two miles each time to the bus stop. Other Wallen students got involved with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, took petitions around the region, and attempted to work on voter registration.

When Wallen would ask what kind of education Black Mountain stood for, he was usually told it didn't stand
for
anything—“They'd say, for instance, ‘We don't have grades,' ‘We don't have required courses,' etc., etc.” Wallen did continue to feel that relationships between students and teachers at Black Mountain were “much more human” than at most places—people tended to meet as people rather than as pieces in the ancient mandarin game called Classroom. All that was to the good—but not good enough. Wallen's expectations were high—an occupational hazard with utopians; and he measured success not against the failures of preceding educational or communal enterprises but against his hopes for ideal future ones.

Intimate living conditions can militate against closeness if one's background has conditioned one to be wary of “closeness,” to associate it with suffocation—a background common in a culture
where parents are so likely to put the label “love” on what in fact are gestures of control. Many have started the effort at living together burdened by emotional memories that link intimacy with constriction. Whether close living ends by heightening trust or distrust finally depends on the particular values and skills of the particular people involved.

Wallen stuck it out at Black Mountain for several years, but finally concluded that the European faculty members especially were unwilling to make the needed investment in building human relations, were much less willing than the Americans to explore and share feelings on a personal level. Though he resigned from Black Mountain, Wallen for the rest of his life would persist in believing that “it's possible to have a group who would live closely together and would develop a relationship that would be a virtuous circle instead of a vicious circle. . . .”

Of all the Zen texts John Cage had run across, the Huang Po seemed to him “the essential one.” When he decided to read it aloud at BMC, several of the twenty to thirty people who attended (out of a community swelled to about seventy for the summer session) assisted him, especially in acting out the dialogue section where the teacher insults the student (a section Cage has since imitated in part of a text, ‘‘Experimental Music: Doctrine,” printed in his collection
Silence
). Cage felt that the effect on those attending the reading was profound—especially for a Korean war vet “at his wits' end,” and for another student “at a puzzled point” in his life circumstance.

Implicit in the Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind is the postulate that the centricity within each event is not dependent on other events. That same postulate is critical in the work of Antonin Artaud, who Cage had recently discovered. In Cage's mind, Huang Po and Artaud (along with Marcel Duchamp's doctrine that the
work of art is completed by the observer) “all fused together into the possibility of making a theatrical event in which the things that took place were not causally related to one another—but in which there is a penetration, anything that happened after that happened in the observer himself.” The idea developed in conversation between Cage and David Tudor—“and our ideas were so electric at that time,” Cage told me, “that once the idea hit my head—and I would like to give David Tudor equal credit for it—I immediately then implemented it.” Taking into account the resources of talent in the community, he outlined various time brackets, totaling forty-five minutes, on a piece of paper and invited various people to fill them. (Cage persists to this day in referring to his outline and organization as having been done “by means of chance operations”—reminding me of David Weinrib's comment that the strange thing about listening to ten of Cage's musical compositions is that despite his insistence on their “indeterminate” origins, all ten pieces could
only
have come from John Cage.

To fill the time brackets, Cage invited Charles Olson and Mary Caroline Richards to read their poetry, Rauschenberg to show his paintings and also to play recordings of his choice, David Tudor to perform on the piano any compositions he wanted, and Merce Cunningham to dance. Each person was left free, within his precisely defined time slot, to do whatever he chose to do. Cage's aim, in his words, was “purposeless purposefulness: it was purposeful in that we knew what we were going to do, but it was purposeless in that we didn't know what was going to happen in the total.” In retrospect, he contrasts his procedure with those later “happenings” for which the 1952 event has been widely viewed as “prehistoric” pacesetter.

Yet by establishing rigid time brackets for each participant, and by scheduling the event for a particular time in a particular space (the dining hall), Cage had superimposed an intentional structure of considerable proportions, and to that extent had limited
some
of the possibilities for random development. And though he gave each individual absolute freedom to do what he or she wanted by way of composition or performance during their allotted time, each
participant in turn—and the extent varied with the individual—preplanned what he or she would do. Cage himself knew that he would read from a lecture he had earlier prepared that had long silences in it; what he couldn't know was what would happen during the silences, or how much of what he did say would be heard over the volume generated by piano, records and voices. So in the upshot, the event, even while allowing for a variety of chance occurrences, was also full of controls and intentions—more so than Cage wanted to believe, and to a degree that makes his contrast between the 1952 occasion and later “happenings” less dramatic than he would like.

Cage also contrived the space carefully. The audience's seats were placed in the center of the performing area, facing each other, and broken by diagonals into four sections. When people arrived, they found an empty white cup on each seat. As others filed in, they asked what the cups were for, but were given no answer (at the end of the performance, as Cage tells it, “girls came in from the kitchen with pots of coffee and filled the cups,” including those that had in the meantime been used as depositories for ashes and cigarette butts.)

Of the event itself, there are—one might even say, by design—varied accounts. Some of the variations must be ascribed to distortions of memory, rather than to differences in what was actually seen during the event itself. For example, one of my accounts has Cage reading from the top of a ladder, while another has him reading from a lectern—short of hallucination, or of a shift in position during the performance (neither of which I have evidence for), that kind of discrepancy must be due to the subsequent rearrangements and impositions of memory people have made during the intervening twenty years. Other descriptive variations, though, seem to have resulted from differences in perspective-sight lines, acoustical reception, etc. at the time of the event itself. One man, for example, recalls Cage reading lines from Meister Eckhart at some point; others deny such lines were read at any point.

Finally, though, there's no certain way of separating the memory distortions from the actual variations in perspectives—and
that probably would please Cage. As he and his Zen masters know, events are too full of multiple sensory inputs and momentary variables ever to be reproduced with descriptive exactness; it's an insight historians, more than most people perhaps, need to incorporate. Yet as a historian I hold (tenuously) to the rationalist hope that when all variables are discounted, there will remain a residue of
agreed-upon
evidence that can thereby appropriately be called a “true,” albeit partial, reconstruction of “what happened.”

Let's try it both ways: first, five descriptions, partly contradictory, by those who actually attended that “first happening”; then, my own “objective” attempt to synthesize, to resolve or discard the material that conflicts and to salvage a version that, however unsatisfyingly skeletal, at least consists of data which all parties affirm. “All,” of course, itself involves a major deception; it means, in fact, some eight to ten accounts. I have no list of everyone who attended the event, no way of getting one, no desire if I had such a list to spend another five years interviewing everyone on it, and no hope, even if I had the desire, of successfully contacting all those on the list who are still alive. And indeed, what should we do about those who have died?
Their
versions, were they but here to reveal them, might add exactly the material needed to confirm or deny critical elements in the composite picture presented by the living. I'm not being merely elfin, but trying to indicate why I believe historians should be more chary in their pretensions to objectivity. Most historians, of course, are fortunate in dealing with events long since past—events, that is, about which only limited evidence survives, and no live witnesses eager and willing to say “You've got it all wrong.”

The first account is from the diary of Francine du Plessix, written the same evening of the event:

Next, an account from Carroll Williams, now a filmmaker, at the time part-student, part-instructor in printing. This account was recorded sixteen years after the event: