put their toes against the baseboard, hmm? And then, in that position, where they couldn’t see what they were doing, they were to draw what they had seen, what they had memorized. You can see that they were no longer capable of doing that. You can’t draw what you’re seeing when you can’t move your nose (laughs) and your toes! to see what you’re doing. Everyone became fascinated with what was drawn. They all became modern artists immediatelly! (laughter) Now that wasn’t a use of chance operations, but it was a putting of the body into a situation where it could not do what it intended to do. The intention of the mind was put out of operation. And that’s what chance operations do. (p. 126/127)

I like very much that work of Tobey that I have there. Because it doesn’t seem to me to show a mark that he made. And yet he clearly did something. What the nature of that action was with respect to what we look at is to me mysterious. I don’t know what happened.
     - You never asked him about it?
No. And now he’s not here. He can’t be asked. (pause) I’d like very much to be able to do that, to do something of that kind, in that spirit. (p. 133)

Whereas the Tobey is like something that goes on without interruption. (p. 134)

Each time we look at it we are encountering its complexity over again, hmm? And that’s true of - not an empty Tobey, like the one I have - but of one of the white writing ones. I remember having one in the house and every time I looked at it, it was different. It had done the moving, despite its always being there in one place. Or I had, I don’t know what to say - every time I encountered it, it seemed fresh. Isn’t there something of that in Ulysses, in the work of Joyce? You can’t find it fixed at any point. (p. 144)


Marion Boyars, For the Birds. John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles, Boston/London 1981

One day we were taking a walk together, from the Cornish School to the Japanese restaurant where we were going to dine together -