_Refrain_, bottom of 311

"Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets
someone in, calls someone, or else goes out onself, launches forth.
One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos
press against it but in another region, one created by the circle
itself.  As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future,
as a function of the working forces it shelters.  This time, it is 
in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces.  
One launches forth, hazards an improvisation.  But to improvise is to
join with the World, or meld with it." 

Aesthetics, it seems to me, concerns itself precisely with this opening
onto the world -- with the launching forth from home into the cosmos; 
it is, as a friend of mine would put it, a theory of the Porous Equilibrium. 

And, I would say further, ditto for ethics.   

Cage was very wary of "home"; he thought that "home" always already carried
stagnation, and that improvisation was always threatened by a lapse into 
"home".  He thought that our need to shelter ourselves from the world
was so strong that extraodinary measures were required so as to
constantly block it.  Or, perhaps, that the cosmos was much more alien
a thing than what we were prepared to launch into.  In some sense, he
distrusted the notion that we are _of_ the cosmos.  To allow a work
to join the cosmos, he thought, one needed to take the most stringent
measures to remove oneself from it.  One needed to introduce a strict
discipline of chance operations, of following, with the strictest
attention, random external phenomena, etc. 

But not so in _Refrain_: it is "as though the circle tended _on its own_ 
to open unto a future".  "One ventures from home on the thread of a tune".
Etant donnees: (1) a "from home"; (2) an eagerness to venture.  



- malgosia 

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