The Legacy of a Chess Game
Sean Bronzell                     

David Tudor once suggested to John Cage that he think of himself on his short visits to various colleges as a hit-and-run driver. John, in conversation with the pianist and composer of live electronic music, had been wondering what kind of affect, if any, he was having with these visits. Speaking as one of those college students, hit-and-run is pretty much what happened to me. You also might say that I took down his license plate number and eventually tracked him to New York, where we became friends and played chess.
	For me, John's 1983 hit-and-run lectures at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, opened all the doors. The last straw. The coup de gr‰ce. I was a junior active in theater, philosophy, art, and writing in Galesburg, a town in the midst of cornfields, prairie, railroads, and history. Carl Sandburg was born there; Dorothea Tanning grew up there and attended Knox; Ronald Reagan lived there as a boy. I studied Shakespeare and Heidegger in the building where Lincoln and Douglas had a debate. John, on the other hand, said he was glad to come to the college because he liked Sam Moon, our poetry professor.
At that time, Ann Suchomski and I were coeditors of Catch, the college literary magazine. After John read his "Composition in Retrospect" and "James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet" and made a hunt for mushrooms in the Green Oaks prairie, we interviewed him about technology and society, choosing these subjects because we didn't think we knew enough to interview him about his music. John later said that this interview was the best one he had ever given on those subjects.
Chess suited John. I loved just being there with him, sitting across from him at the board. The intense mixture of thought and action suited his temperament, and perhaps even his aesthetic. His games were as relentless as his work; he continued, proceeded, slaved away. Actually our games usually weren't hit-and-run; we rarely used the clock. We tended to spend our time pondering, studying, brewing plans, and laying traps. He liked that I was tenacious, that I wouldn't give up.
We played our first games the summer between my junior and senior years at Knox, when I came to New York with the artist Laura Olson to help her find a place to live and to go over John's interview with him.
Perhaps having chess grids on my mind, when I returned to college that fall, one of the first things I did was organize my room using chance operations. The dresser ended up backwards, close against the wall, facing it, though at enough of an angle so I could reach my clothes. I had used the floor's tiles to determine where each leg of furniture would go, and I lived that way for a month. That's just the kind of thing one did after playing chess with John Cage, wasn't it?
Our friendship really got going, when, shy and prodded by another friend, I took my poem, "A Reconstructed Index to de Kooning," to the backstage door at City Center after one of Merce Cunningham's dances. John called to tell me he liked it and to remind me came over for chess when I finally moved to New York.

Accessibility is a good thing.
affirmation of life

John liked that poem, which came from notes I took during a visit to the Whitney Museum's de Kooning exhibit, because it used mistakes made while typing on a computer, at the time just before we went from typewriters to computers and from mainframes to PCs. In those days, making corrections on a typewriter was a conscious chore, even with electric correction ribbons. As I typed my notes into the college mainframe, I realized I was correcting my errors even before I became fully conscious of making them.

To recognize, hoever, is to excl(ude all you haven't recognoized.
We are moving fast.
We cannot make things accessable.

I decided to explore this border between computers and typewriters, to live with my mistakes, and to keep retyping my notes, each version to be the new original, until I finally typed one complete version without making any corrections. It took awhile.

We try tp put oursewlves ikn a bozx all the time.$
We'll never know.
When they put somewthig likme this togethere they use every scrap, ecery 
scratch youu know from beginng to end.  
This is beyons cubism, is ovoidism.
Where are we goping from here?

When I gave John that poem backstage, I had just seen Merce dance for the first time. John and Merce didn't tie the music to the dance. The dancers didn't dance to the music. Each existed independently, each did its own work. But together-in time and space. Naturally, of course, I got the idea that the same was true for the audience. I brought a dictionary to the dance to work on poetry, and later started doing drawings of the dance, on paper and computers, aiming for work that came from the dance but wasn't about the dance.
John, of course, had talked about work that produces ideas but isn't about ideas. When one of my favorite college professors, Jonathan Lee, a philosopher, wrote some texts he called "Philosophical Overdrafts," based on this principle, John liked them a lot, and encouraged Jonathan to keep doing whatever he could in that direction, to do one thing and then another, to start and to keep going. John played chess with the same kind of determination.
John liked to treat each aspect of life on its own terms, with its own flavor. His was a discriminating playfulness-exemplified by his use of Indian philosophy, where the basic aspects of life are described as artha (success and failure), kama (pleasure), dharma (moral decisions, strict rules of improvement), and moksha (liberation).
John did chance operations. I favored contingency.
John proceeded from principles. He asked once what a book I was reading said about chess openings. I told him it talked about principles, how to control the center, etc. He got very excited-"I can do that!" He had studied the scenarios, the gambits, mentioned them by name once in a while, and had plenty of practice, but my sense was he didn't know them as religiously, say, as he did mushrooms. Principles were John's thing, and he was an extremely principled man. The beauty is how he made principles so playful.
For instance, chess is about winning. John took it as being part of the artha-side of life, and he liked to balance his use of chance with activities where success and failure were important, where chance wasn't useful, giving each aspect of life its due. I find it intriguing that the two main activities he chose to practice artha (chess, hunting mushrooms) demand such adamant attention, not just to succeed, but even just to continue. One moment of inattention and "game over."
In the morning, water the plants. Evening, chess. He often would start cooking dinner during a game. Sometimes we cooked together. He liked to make a daily soup, a continuing soup, adding today's vegetables to yesterday's leftovers.
We both often made mistakes while playing chess. Sometimes we let each other take back a move, but usually not. Now and again, we'd replay part of a game to see how it would turn out if we made different decisions. The dynamics of our games often turned on some slip or mistake. One of us would be clearly ahead, good position, good balance of pieces, and then voilˆ, so much for that.
John liked to say, or rather laugh while saying, that he was a wood pusher, that, playing chess, he just pushed wood. That was us, the wood pushers' league-the regulars being John, me, and the artists Bill Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw (Dove, only on occasion). Though Bill played with John most days and I played with him a few times a week, some days it was just John and me. Sometimes, when the three of us were there together, we would play round robins.  One or the other of us would just watch, or John would go off and make dinner or answer the phone or do paperwork while Bill and I played. Sometimes Dove joined in the round robins, with the four of us playing at the same time, two against two, and then switching. Dove seemed to like setting traps. One of the returning champions in our league was the pianist Grete Sultan, who I still play with occasionally and who in many ways was and is the sharpest and most clear-headed of us. Bill and I have played once, maybe twice, since those days. I always love playing with him; his energy is tremendous. You never give him an inch. And you better be aggressive. Bill, appropriately enough, was the biggest advocate for speed chess. 
When John went to play with Jack Collins, the chess teacher who taught Bobby Fischer and many other greats, John lost quickly; he said the game was over before it even began.
Chess was a hub. Practicality. Simplicity and complexity. Theater. John thought of Rauschenberg's white paintings as an airport for shadows and dust, and 4'33" for sounds. Chess also was an airport, for friends and attention. It certainly was one of the hubs in our relationship. I was just glad to spend time with him.
John was big on devotion, being devoted. That's chess, of course-you need devotion. He became devoted to music through Schoenberg, and he told us, as a boy, he saw a sign for piano lessons and that's what started it all. What started it all for me was when Vitas Briedis and I were on the high school cross-country team. Our coach called us over to tell us, "You are the two most devoted runners on the team. You're also the worst." He suggested the school newspaper.
When John talked to me about devotion, he told me to be devoted to one thing. He acknowledged he did lots of things (writing and art included), but he still was devoted, in his way, he pointed out, to one thing, music. Of course, 4'33" is the one piece of music by which he lived and created, all the time. I suggested three things to which I could devote myself. He insisted, "You can't die for three things." I proposed "compassion." "What's that?" he demanded. "That could be anything." He called me a poet.
He found out I also studied theater. He thought one of my college theater pieces was the best of those works that were like his "Alphabet," a ghost story of sorts spelling out John's life by way of those artists he loved. Walking together out of the subway, he commented that he just didn't like my title, Influences. I didn't like it either, but didn't have the courage to say I chose it for that reason-despite John's own creative use of what he disliked. Trying to find a way to come to terms with his droning refrigerator, for instance, John composed 103, for 103 instruments.
I was exploring what influences are, playing with that word's fluency, and I learned anew from John's example how being fluent in and playing with the work of others, and being devoted to one's own work, lead to original action-as John would say, to the work that needs doing now. I find it refreshing, energizing to look back on these first steps I made after meeting John, where I was exploring what influences are. I learned anew from John's example. When the poet Mark Strand advised me that he thought art was separate from life, that this gave it an advantage, a vantage point, it was too late for me. I was already in love with John's work, which made no difference between the two. After all, centuries of artists have pushed for directness, immediacy, reality. What could be more direct?
I finished growing up playing chess with John.

When I first came to New York, I lived in heaven with Laura and three of our college friends in a brownstone across the street from Fort Green Park in Brooklyn. We even had a backyard for Moneypenny, my black cat. I arranged the backyard's many rocks and stones, of all sizes, stimulated by John's own collection in his and Merce's apartment, and then I invited John to come over and take his pick. Bill and Dove brought John in their car, to help carry the larger, heavier stones.
A beginning, a moment of interpenetration, where "water goes to water," where we found ourselves gathering like water in John's company. A moment in time.
And then time changed, and I moved by myself into a single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel on 95th Street in Manhattan. That was hell. Bill thought it was great, just like Dostoevsky. I really didn't want to be Dostoevsky. To make it worse, I couldn't keep Moneypenny in the manner to which she had become accustomed. John and Merce, fortunately, took her in. Merce renamed her Skookum, or Skookums, after the river Skookumchuk, a Native American word, which he knew from growing up in the Northwest. John thought she walked like a queen (she had an elegant sway), and he gave her the run of the loft, even having Andrew Culver, his assistant, cut a hole in the skylight so she could go in and out as she pleased. She survived many adventures until one day someone took her off the roof and put her on the street. When John later posted signs on the corner, a man approached him to tell him that he knew the cat, that in fact he had put her out on the street, even though he thought she belonged to someone. Our only consolation was that we felt certain that, given her elegance, she immediately found a new home. John asked if there were any more black cats like her in the family, but there were no more, and so John and Merce found another that Merce named Losa, after a cat he had had years ago.
In the meantime, while Skookums was having her adventures in the loft, John invited me to cat sit and water the plants when he and Merce were traveling. Sometimes I stayed for a few days, or even a week, after John returned. I loved looking out the window south on Sixth Avenue to the Twin Towers. At a time when I was doing some computer work for John, I spent most of a day just looking out that window. I told him how many hours I had worked that day. "That's all?" he asked. I needed a break from my Dostoevsky-like room, to have some sanity for a while. I was extremely grateful to him for that, and for letting me use his computer to write poetry. Both John and Merce provided me with a deep, abiding sense of equilibrium.
John liked what I did with poetry and computers. In I-VI, the transcript of his Harvard Norton lectures, he answered a question about the indeterminacy of computer problems by noting, "i met a young man...he made some very interesting works of a poetic nature that made use of things that happened with the computer that would have put most people off but which delighted him which he incorporated into the work i haven't done that yet but if i take the path that seems to lie ahead of me that might happen if i were doing all the work."
On the other hand, I also wrote a very simple poem (words five and seven letters long, haiku by letter) by simply sitting, looking around John's and Merce's apartment, looking out the windows, listening:

glass 
cracked
stone

watch
stutter
stick

notes 
duchamp
rusts

chess
gutters
cross

smoke
twig tea
tower

	In neighborly fashion, John sent me and my poetry to Jackson Mac Low, for whom I also started cat sitting. Jackson himself has just died, and knowing both him and John has made me a better man. For years, whenever I entered a bookstore, I first checked to see if it had Jackson's poetry. That way, I quickly could tell whether or not it was a good bookstore. Spell-checking his name, I found: metalaw madly meadow.
	Both John and Jackson recommended me for a Guggenheim grant, but more directly, John asked me one day, mischievous as ever, "Have you received anything in the mail?" Yes, it turned out, a grant from Jasper Johns's Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the first of two. John sometimes could be sneaky like that, always ready to surprise you.
	His generosity was incredible.
When I set off to travel around the world ("Go west, young man, go west"... and keep on going all the way around), John didn't think I had enough money. He insisted I take a check that he signed over to me, which he had just received for doing a lecture. It was all the money he had at the moment; could I use it? He insisted that if I needed more I should call, which I didn't do, and he suggested I visit Gita Sarabhai in India, from whom he had learned about music's role in making the mind susceptible to divine influences, which I did.
When, in 1991, I noticed something peculiar about Duchamp's ƒtant donnŽs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John suggested I write Anne d'Harnoncourt, the director of the museum. I had discovered a third hole in the door, located between the other two, recessed slightly in the overlap where the two doors meet, angled so that what you see (with one eye) is the area of the waterfall and lamp (the title, framed by this third hole). I found the inherent Renaissance perspective opened up by this third hole intriguing, as the whole innovation of "vanishing point" perspective involves looking with just one eye. John didn't know anything about this third hole, but was amused.
In the meantime, we played chess. Once, we even had four draws in a row.
Anne d'Harnoncourt wrote back that "the hole is actually the result over time of visitors' scratching away at the door in curiosity and was not part of Duchamp's original intention-it has grown gradually visible over the years" and that everything they know about the tableau convinces her that he intended to provide only the two holes. Though I took this information in stride, I couldn't help thinking of Duchamp's assertion that it is spectator who finishes the creative act.
Meanwhile, Bill had made his own discovery. By his reading, Duchamp (and Joyce) used Alfred Jarry as a secret template for all their work. After Bill told me this news, I went to the library and read Le Surm‰le. The next day I wrote him a letter conveying my sense that he had found something which, at the very least, meant I would no longer be able to think of the Large Glass or ƒtant donnŽs without conjuring up Jarry's book. Bill felt John didn't want to accept the idea, as John didn't want to read the book. John demurred that he didn't read novels. Though John was disturbed by the notion, at first he primarily voiced concern about how it would affect Teeny, and as such he didn't want Bill to publish his research.
In my letter to Bill, I wrote "think of Shakespeare," how Shakespeare took the plots of his plays from elsewhere, or how art history is full of this kind of gamesmanship. Amusingly, as if on cue, Jasper Johns at the time assured everyone that the source of a certain shape in one of his works would never be found.
I was, and always will be, a big fan of Bill, and I soon found myself helping him with his writings on Jarry, including his 1991 article in Artforum. I became his ad hoc editor and someone with whom to debate regularly the scope of the implications (though Bill did talk about it with practically everyone, as well).
I showed John a copy of my letter and talked it over with him, suggesting how, whatever the extent of the truth, Duchamp still had made profoundly original work, that one can't look at Jarry and find Duchamp contained inside, that whatever the source, Duchamp changed the form of what is possible. John didn't like Jarry. I understood and shared the feeling, given Jarry's scatological approach. John, however, did like my analogy to Shakespeare and, not surprisingly, given his own work, the notion of taking a source and making it new.
Afterwards, and increasingly, John became more relaxed on the subject, more accepting, even amused by the possibility of a new aspect and meaning to Duchamp's secretiveness.
Like Duchamp, John enjoyed floating questions in conversation. "What do you think about this word 'postmodern'? What is that? Is it just another label? What's it about?" Duchamp now is often considered the first postmodern artist, given his refusal to take positions. When John similarly floated a question about conceptual art, Bill answered that John was the first conceptual artist, given 4'33".
Harmony was the core of another question John floated. He disliked harmony, wondered aloud why someone like Mozart, daring as he was, didn't go further. But after hearing a performance in Florida of a work by the composer James Tenney, John rhapsodized, "If that is harmony, I'm all for it!"
We also hobnobbed about diet. After John's visit to my college, I had ordered every single book in the United States about macrobiotics, even those that discussed how to raise your children that way.  At the time, I was nonplussed by the philosophical side, but John described the diet in practical terms-beans, rice, and vegetables. I later became a vegetarian after a dinner where John served chicken that did not sit well with me, at which moment I decided, "that's that." John worried he had poisoned me, but I took it in stride, philosophically.
Perhaps returning the favor, I surprised John when he came home from a trip to find a brown paper bag in the refrigerator. He held it at a distance, by his thumb and forefinger, remonstrating, "Is this yours?" It was butter. "Yes." I had been reading a book about the favorable aspects of whole butter. After a moment, I took the bag and dropped it in the garbage, answering, "You're right."
When we first met in Illinois, I mentioned to John that I was planning to move to New York to become a starving artist. "Oh don't worry about that," he reassured me. "There's plenty of food in New York." 
	We also went together to all kinds of performances, films, concerts, and dances. One time, mistakenly arriving an hour early for a concert at Phil Niblock's loft, Bill, Dove, John, and I decided to use the time before the concert for chess. Phil, however, had had a fire in his loft, and he only had half of what we needed. I think we made at least one chessboard out of a sheet of paper, but also seem to remember improvising for pieces, as well. Given (1) the board (2) the pieces. I recall John's translation of Basho's haiku: "What mushroom? What leaf?"
	I can't imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't met John. What if I hadn't experienced Merce's ability to move, his merciless directness and humor? So many others I have met by way of John, and have come to know, to my advantage as a human being.
	I met Teeny Duchamp and her daughter, Jackie Matisse Monnier, at dinner with John. Teeny and I tested each other over the chessboard, and she thought I was a strong player. After attending and making drawings from Merce's 1994 Ocean premiere in Brussels, I slipped over to France to visit Jackie and Teeny. I spent a day with Teeny, watching tennis, chatting, and deliberating over each other's chess moves. "Oh, you're leaving the country?" she remarked, as I got ready to depart at the end of the day. "If I had known, we would have played more chess, instead of watching all that tennis." 
When Teeny was in the hospital, she loved hearing from Jackie my short story, "A Male Female Email Story," which ends: "This much was sure. She could walk through him like a field, and he could hold her like wind in a tree."
Overlapping ages. Is our age marked by the tension between Duchamp's indifference and Cage's zeal? Perhaps for me. The only answer I have is poetry. As Hšlderlin wrote, poetically, we dwell upon this earth.
In this vein, John spent his life "doing something else." Walking on Sixth Avenue after a dinner party, John emphasized that, while he may not have been the smartest man, he was one man. I didn't say it then, but I thought to myself, "That is intelligence. To be one man." I felt he wanted to impress upon me an ethic of synergy, and also, again, a singular passion akin to what Duchamp observed in chess players, "madmen of a certain quality." As we continued walking, a homeless man asked if I was John's son. John bandied, "No, grandson." I gave that man my last dollar, and then later had to borrow one from John to get home.
Every day, quiet, work, and play. Emptiness. Togetherness. Chess. Once, after only one game of chess, I said I was exhausted, and John said that's what dancers call just getting warmed up. When I won our last game a few days before he died, John said, "He who wins last...," and I replied, "...loses next time."

(NICOLAS PLEASE TRANSLATE INTO FRENCH)
New York-based poet Sean Bronzell first met John Cage in the early 1980s, when he was in college. The two shared a close friendship, one often passed over the chessboard playing the game. In this memoir, Bronzell offers personal stories and observations of the extraordinary and touching impact that Cage the composer-and Cage the chess player-had on his life and his writing.
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