Mosaic Cage

Words are sounds, but are sounds words? Some are, the onomatopoeia ones – word making. Sitting this morning, laptop at the ready, still wondering mid January what to do new with the blog this year, thinking of letting it go, go silent, from minimalist to nothing at all. John Cage can be an inspiration at such moments:

                    There is no
such thing as silence. Something is al-
ways happening that makes a sound.
No one can have an idea
once he really starts listening.

John Cage, 45' For A Speaker, Silence, 191

Wondering too what John Cage might have made of a blog. Surely he would have created and maintained one. Others have taken up the call, of putting or imitating Cage online, , for example, his app utilizing Cage’s “Indeterminacy“.

While a mosaic can take disparate parts that from a distance can be appreciated for a new whole, the parts might at the same time be in conflict, interests that compete for one’s attention, time, one distracting from another, broken links. Post no posts on this post.

Here at the Toads our primary interests remain the essay (literature), music (guitar), painting (including cartoons hand drawn on paper or screen), yet the blogs we often enjoy most have to do with original photography, gardening and cooking, ocean and landscape, construction of all kinds but particularly those focused on the trades (carpentry, plumbing) and arts and crafts.

WordPress works well as a blogging platform. Their idea of the paragraph being “the basic building block of all narrative” and the “Block” developed from that idea facilitates relatively easy start up and go. But there’s also a cage created by the block form, or format, the screen, that one needs coding expertise to escape from, and one may not want to spend the time understanding or mastering the writing of computer code. One wants to write, not program.

And isn’t the basic building block actually the syllable? A sound. A note. In any case, what you see is not necessarily what you get, what you see being dependent on the type of device being used: phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, television cast. So that for the blogger who spends time formatting columns and rows, grids, tables, a matrix – formats can change unexpectedly and automatically. So what?

Indeterminacy.

Cage orchestrated and choreographed his writings for “Silence.” The formatting in part approximates performance. The written text is like the written text for music, sheet music, a musical score. A representation. “Silence” is a mosaic.
Whatever Cage you’re in, as Cage said, get out of it.

Pizza is a mosaic.