1. For the Birds. These words may not be precisely John Cage's at all. They are taken from his conversations with Daniel Charles, which have, as text, an odd history. For the Birds is an English translation of a French transcription of interviews taped in English. The tapes were lost before they could be transcribed directly into English, and Cage himself said he didn't recognize much of the voice labeled "J.C." at the end of all that. So the puzzling over these words is not so much trying to get at what was originally said, which is clearly irrecoverable, as trying to make useful meaning of words that have the attraction of initiating a process of active "not-knowing," opening an edge in the mind, beyond which lie things not thought of before. This is an exhilarating notion, even if self-delusory. It has to do with the structure of the reading experience, the structure of language itself. [BACK]

2. Tosu is quoted in Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 37. John Cage, Empty Words: Writings'73–'78 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 11. [BACK]

3. From manuscripts for "Mushrooms et Variationes," NYC–Tulsa, Okla.–Mountain Lake, Va., September–October 1983. [BACK]

4. John Cage, Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else, in MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words, Art, and Music, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), from part 2. [BACK]

5. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 523. [BACK]

6. CageFest, Strathmore, Rockville, Maryland, 1989. [BACK]

7. Jasper Johns quoted in Cage and Retallack, MUSICAGE, 4. [BACK]

8. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–45. [BACK]

9. See "The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I & II" in this volume for a more detailed treatment of this work. [BACK]

10. C.S. Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 107. [BACK]

11. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 92–93. [BACK]