Cage’s Mesostics and Saussure’s Paragrams as Love Letters

 
Abstract
 
John Cage’s poetry is often analyzed in relation to conceptual writing and constraint, making Cage seem particularly absent. This essay argues that the conceptual writing found in “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” is not devoid of emotion. Quite the contrary, the mesostics become the equivalent of a love letter. By employing Saussure’s paragram studies, Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, and chaos theory, the essay shows that there is something in language that renders it as either a constrained vehicle of love (in the Cagean mesostic), or as a nonlinear system that features disequilibria and chance emergences of meaning (in the Saussurean paragram).
 
John Cage’s “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” fashions text in relation to the chosen “spine-word,” or name, which is, in this case, either “Merce” or “Cunningham.” A “mesostic” is a form invented by Cage that writes through another text using the constraint of a spine-word or name. In mesostics, the spine-word or name moves down the middle of the poem, whereas an acrostic is left-justified. A “paragram” is a term invented by Saussure that denotes an embedded name or theme-word that proliferates within a text. The paragram shares features with a mesostic; however, the paragram is hidden whereas mesostics are typically announced. The paragram proliferates in a text, according to Saussure, in relation to its phonic features that simultaneously saturate the text while at the same time structurally organizing it. Much as Saussure originally defines langue in relation to space, Cage’s practice of naming exists within a space: “For Saussure these words exist at the same time, that is, synchronically, in a purely relational structure, a topological space Saussure called langue” (Saldanha 2085). This essay suggests that the mesostics emerge from a protosemantic field of language via Cage’s chance operations while simultaneously manifesting as a paragram (as an encoded name within language). I will also claim that the mesostics exist within a poetic or syntactic space that signifies the love shared between Cage and Cunningham, who “were lovers, life partners from 1942 until Cage’s death” (Weaver 19). “Love” is a fraught term that may seem rather non-academic; however, Cage’s poetry is often analyzed in relation to conceptual writing and constraint, making Cage seem particularly absent. I claim that the conceptual writing found in the Merce Cunningham mesostics is not devoid of emotion; quite the contrary, the mesostics become the equivalent of a love letter.
 
This created space of love (in both the mesostics and the paragrams) is heterotopic. A heterotopia defines a space as “other,” typically bridging definitive borders and creating a new space from already existent ones. The term is primarily geographical, but Foucault first defines “heterotopia” in The Order of Things in relation to language and naming:

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.

(xviii)

This essay emphasizes the definition of a heterotopia as a linguistic space that can “undermine language” and “tangle common names” by destroying syntax. Such a linguistic definition will be used throughout this essay in relation to Cage and Saussure. Peter Johnson avers that “‘heterotopia’, derived from the Greek heteros, ‘another,’ and topos, ‘place,’ is used within a broad typology to distinguish these emplacements from ‘utopia’,” and that “[h]eterotopias draw us out of ourselves in peculiar ways; they display and inaugurate a difference and challenge the space in which we may feel at home” (77, 84). It is difficult not to be tempted by a pun and claim that Cage’s writing also exists in a homotopia (to bring his craft into relation with his sexuality); however, whereas hetero means “other” and homo “same,” I think that this perceived binary of hetero/homo is under the sway of feedback whereby neither signifier holds dominance in the binary.¹ Wendy Pearson points out that “the adoption of the prefix ‘homo-‘ with its connotations of invariance, conformity and even normalcy flies in the face of a cultural logic of sex which precisely defines ‘homosexuality’ by its difference” (85). Situating Cage’s art in relation to his sexuality and the heterotopia does not have to be purely biographical. Instead, I find Foucault’s use of the prefix hetero telling in that he uses a prefix that is connoted with hegemonic sexuality (and its attendant institutions of power) to create an “other space” (a topos) that allows and/or welcomes alternative configurations of identity. Both heterotopia and homotopia suggest a space or geography that exists apart from a dominant norm: “homotopia as an at least potential and decidedly illegitimate queer utopia approaches closer and closer to the concept of heterotopia, and vice versa” (Pearson 93). Heterotopias and homotopias are “unthinkable spaces that reveal the limits of our language” (Johnson 85), allowing us to consider Cage’s writing as a welcoming topology of a future heterotopia which embraces syntactic breakdown. Cage defers authorship in favor of chance operations (a point that will be made clear in reference to the Saussurean paragram), opening into an alternative linguistic space where the hegemony of language (as syntax) is undermined by love. The Cunningham mesostics therefore take on the form of a love letter where Cage’s definition of love is one of parataxis and asyntactic play.

 
Cage claims, in conversation with Richard Kostelanetz, that “when people love one another, they don’t speak so much; or if they speak, they don’t make sense. They tend to make nonsense, when they love one another” (137, my emphasis). Despite the fact that love is typically something felt—an emotion or feeling about someone else – it is better thought of as something spoken. Love is given form in syntactic and linguistic statements that when delivered have the same power as performative utterances. Saying “I love you” to someone is a linguistic event requiring agency; however, love is also, as Cage asserts, almost dissimilar from nonsense. Recent research in neuroscience supports Cage’s claim: endocrine studies have shown that love is a little bit like being on drugs – oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin levels, as well as the dopamine reward center in the brain, are each affected when people are in love (De Boer 115-117). De Boer et. al. claim that “early stages of romantic love show similarities to OCD, including symptoms of anxiety, stress, and obtrusive thinking. It is therefore attractive to think of early love as a mild serotonin-depletion-related form of obsessive behavior” (117). Love makes people irrational and a little obsessive, suggesting that love is an experience closely related to avant-garde textual experimentation and nonsense (assuming that love is syntactically announced). If the experience of love is a little like being delusional, then it follows that the syntactic and linguistic experience of love must also be irrational: the mesostics embrace the visual depiction of the sort of nonsense that one sees in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet when, at the famous play’s end, both lovers, in a fit of frenzied passion, commit suicide because their all-consuming love means they cannot live without each other.
 
Unlike the mesostics written for Marcel Duchamp or James Joyce (which are all quite readable from a traditional literary critical approach), the Merce Cunningham mesostics challenge readerly temptations toward meaning. Cage’s choice to render the Cunningham mesostics in the form of asyntactic nonsense indicates the veiling of a private sphere or space of love between Cage and Cunningham: a private poetic communication between both, an homage to a devoted lover. Andy Weaver reads the mesostics through the lens of Lyotard’s theory of the differend and Cage’s closeted silence regarding his homosexuality: “Filled with nonce words, lacking punctuation and normative syntax, these silent poems … act as closets-in-view” (26). I agree with Weaver when he asserts: “I believe that ’62 Mesostics’ openly enacts Cage’s love for Cunningham” (30), but I would further insist that the mesostics not only enact a love, but rather encode a love within a particular textual practice that, through the heterogeneous dispersal of letters organized through a strict conceptual rule, erases the binary of homosexual or heterosexual in favor of the experience of love itself.
 
Weaver further claims that “the homosexual differend removes the problem of Cage’s silence. Since he can speak his homosexuality in the impossible idioms, Cage is not a victim. By escaping victimization, Cage undercuts the viability of the standard idioms, those idioms that do not allow homosexuality to be spoken” (34). However, why would Cage need to announce his sexual persuasion from the mountaintops in order to be understood? Why is Cage’s silence about his sexuality still a speaking? Jonathan Katz argues that “[i]n silence, there was instead a wholeness, a process of healing” (52), and Weaver suggests that Cage’s “homosexual silence provides him agency and strength” (25). Unlike both Katz and Weaver, I do not feel that Cage was obligated to announce his sexuality to anyone. Katz’s emphasis on silence’s providing Cage with wholeness and healing is problematic because it implies that homosexuality leads to splitting and illness. On similar assumptions, homosexuality was, until 1975, considered a diagnosable mental illness (Weaver 23). Obviously, Katz would never intend such a reading of his argument because his assertion depends upon a specific historical moment: in the 1950s and 1960s the outing of one’s homosexuality was an invitation to sociocultural, medical, and religious persecution.² However, my essay is less interested than both Katz and Weaver in Cage’s sexuality per se: if Cage had written the mesostics for a girl, a billboard, a lawn chair, or a parakeet, I would be as interested in the paratactic and asyntactic use of the mesostic as a tool for the formal encoding of names. That being said, I do not want to summarily ignore Cage’s sexuality; instead, I would point out that the Cunningham mesostics, while not blatant or obvious expressions of a homosexual love story, are, nonetheless, still written for a male lover and should be considered politically prescient and culturally important to queer studies. The mesostics therefore simultaneously operate as both love letters and also as closets-in-view that defiantly announce Cage and Cunningham’s queerness against the hegemonic norms of 1960s America. I support Weaver’s claim that “Cage not only calls into question the nature of expression (‘What is it to write?’ or ‘How does one express love?’), he also asks something much more provocative: ‘What is love?'” (34). This question “what is love?” is primarily linguistic and any answer must also take place within the topological space of langue. The linguistic space within which this love letter can be written is heterotopic—a space signified by the nonsense made when two people love one another.
 

Mesostics and Paragrams: From Saussure to Cage and Back Again

 
At first glance the paragram and the mesostic are essentially opposites: Saussure finds names/words hidden in texts, while Cage uses a name as a foundation to order a poem/text. I will argue against the obvious differences between them and claim that the mesostic and the paragram are flip sides of the same linguistic coin, so to speak, i.e., both indicate an uncanny agency within language and textuality.
 
Saussure’s interest in the paragram was a lifelong obsession with finding coded names and words hidden in Vedic hymns, Saturnian prose, and Latin verse. Both Cage and Saussure are concerned with what I call a nominative function: the act of naming. First, to clarify terms:
 
Saussure wrote 139 notebooks in which he uses several terms for the same idea: anagram, logogram, hypogram, and paragram. Each of these terms reflects various emphases on coded names and words: whether they are para (beside other words), hypo (underneath), logo (formed out of dispersed letters), or ana (the word written anew), each term used by Saussure implies a coded name within a verse line (Gronas 160). I will privilege paragram above the others because Steve McCaffery chooses paragram in his study on the protosemantic in Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics.
 
The downfall of Saussure’s paragram research is his search for authorial intention: he requires validation that the words and names are knowingly encoded by poets. He even goes so far as to write Giovanni Pascoli to confirm that the poet has encoded the names that Saussure has found (Gronas 162-163). When Pascoli does not respond to his query, Saussure abandons his research. Despite Saussure’s retreat, authorial intention draws the mesostic and the paragram together: Saussure discovers names in texts but wants to know that these names have been intentionally encoded by the authors/poets. Cage accomplishes this, intentionally encoding a selected name within a text. Furthermore, the paragram harnesses the protosemantic elements of language (language’s randomness as a chaotic structure). These forces are then used by Cage to form the mesostics via love and desire. The chance operation that permits the writing of a mesostic renders the mesostics an effect of protosemantic chaos momentarily ordered around a selected name.
 
The paragram indicates an underlying law within a closed system of language: initial conditions (say the constraint of a 26-letter alphabet) allow for a near-infinite array of combinations and permutations. I would suggest that the initial conditions give way to repeating patterns in relation to an underlying sociocultural and mythographic impulse: “Pertaining as paragrams do to hidden, nonlinear relations within texts, their disposition commits all writing to the status of a partly self-organizing system; they are thus unquestionably not only major agents of linguistic instability and change but also advance a protosemantic challenge” (McCaffery xvi). McCaffery is referencing the nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. This analogy can be extended to include one of the other founding fathers of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, who famously defines a dynamical system as one system featuring “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (8-9). In the model (or system) of the paragram, the initial condition is the choice of a name. Cage is aware of the aesthetic potential of initial conditions. In his musical theory, Cage sketches out the possibilities offered by three tones in his “Lecture on Nothing”:

The other day a pupil said, after trying to compose a melody using only three tones, “I felt limited .”

Had she con-cerned herself with the three tones – her materials – she would not have felt limited.

(Silence 114)

Cage understands that rather than promoting a constrained form of minimalism, the use of three tones in the production of a piece of music is akin to a potential maximalism that opens into the chaotic possibility of artistic production. In the example of the paragram, the selected name defines the parameters of a dynamical process within language. The use of procedural constraints allows Cage to negate authorial intention and create a work that is an accidental conglomeration or assemblage of text for which the author functions as bricoleur or catalyzer. However, the mesostics do not fully negate authorship. Rather, the initial selection of the name falls under the purview of Cage the poet. In the instance of the mesostics, the authorial function becomes a nominative function.

 
The important question to ask about the Saussurean paragram (in relation to Lorenzian initial conditions) is the question of intentionality: were the names that Saussure was finding intrinsic to the compositional process, thus indicating an uncanny nominative function at work within language? Or were the names chance occurrences that contained no internal intentionality (which would still align with the analogy of language as a chaotic system)? I would suggest for the purposes of this essay that it does not matter whether the paragrams were intentional encodings or chance patterns because either option allows that language and semiotic processes are combinatory systems prone to patterns that emerge from chaotic potential.

On the other hand, what is fascinating about Saussure’s research is the implication of an encoded identity, of a dynamic opposite to the one McCaffery privileges when he writes, “the paragram does not derive necessarily from an intentionality and is an inevitable consequence of Western writing’s alphabetic combinatory nature” (197). Saussure’s original intent with the paragram is one of causality, intentionality, and ontology (literally a Being in language that is placed there according to a sort of intelligent design), but McCaffery repositions the paragram as a concept related to chaos and chance. Saussure is looking for God in language: “Two-thirds of the some ninety names which Saussure finds anagrammatized in the exercises thus far published are those of gods or heroes. They are, then, relatively ‘pure’ names, names liberated from material contingencies, names with universal social power” (Kinser 1119). The “purity” of the name implies the mythological slippage of narrative within a text. Saussure describes his own project in the following way:

One understands the superstitious idea which suggested that, in order for a prayer to be effective, it was necessary for the very syllables of the divine name to be indissolubly mixed in it: the god was, in a manner of speaking, rivetted [sic] to the text.

(qtd. in Kinser 1120)

Saussure’s structuralism can be seen in his preference for intentional design when he, almost like a paranoiac, searches through poetries for clues to this encoding. Instead of seeing chance, as Cage no doubt would have, Saussure sees pattern and intent: “Not only all actual literary texts, but also our very notion of literature might then be at once engendered and circumscribed by a triumphant, though largely unrecognized, ‘archi-anagramme'” (Shepheard 523). The archi-anagramme would be a deistic name, Saussure’s paranoia seems to suggest. This paranoia is geared towards the spoken, towards a conflict between parole and langue, the same conflict that Derrida later implodes with différance, a conflict that encodes either a spoken or written prayer. Saussure is interested in the prayer that echoes underneath the spoken or written word, the prayer that defers to a deity or an arche, a source of signification, sublimity, or religiosity.

 
Sylvère Lotringer suggests that in this prayer, “the phoné recovers its center, its preferred place, for in every name there is a certain coefficient of presence, a certain guarantee of identity” (5). Lotringer points out that it is the phoné or the spoken over the written that Saussure invokes because the Swiss linguist often finds his encoded names in syllabic diphones and triphones where only the sound conveys the encoded word. The presence (or presumed presence) of the gramme in the paragram is only discovered performatively through parole. Saussure thinks of the paragram as an “especially powerful organizing principle” in language itself (Shepheard 523). I claim that Saussure considers the paragram a law of language that provides an underlying structure or foundation, somewhat akin to the Newtonian laws of physics that structure the natural world.

Samuel Kinser finds ideological analyses in Saussure’s notebooks (but Kinser denies the same level of chance that McCaffery implies), where the paragram (or anagram) is used as a mnemonic device intended for the memorization of deistic names or phrases: “[a]nagrams repeat names, in order to induce memorization of names,” and “[r]itualization is remembering” (Kinser 1132, 1128). Lotringer maintains that, “[t]he Saussurian anagram constitutes, in other words, the imaginary dimension of all writing” (8). If Lotringer is correct (and his argument is similar to Kinser’s in this regard) then the imaginary dimension of writing tends towards nomination (the giving of a name) either intentionally (as Saussure would have believed) or by chance (as McCaffery implies or, as I would argue, Cage would have as well). Whether this nominative impulse is driven towards mnemonics, prayer, or homage makes little difference because the end effect is one of naming, of signing the name of the other (or another) in the form of a God, a hero, or a lover in a poetic verse or text that acts like an incantation of a memory, an homage, an ideological record, and a love letter.
 

Mesostics as Paragrammic Emergences

 
The unpublished Saussure notebooks have been excerpted and compiled by Jean Starobinski in Words upon Words. The theme word of the anagram becomes the spine of the mesostic. As Saussure himself writes: “[the] theme, chosen either by the poet or by the person who is paying for the inscription, is composed of only a few words, either entirely of proper names or of one or two words added to the inherent function of proper names” (Starobinski 11-12). It is not always the proper name that counts; instead, it is the nominative function associated with a name or taking its place. Saussure’s theory of the anagram (or paragram) suggests that: “To write lines incorporating an anagram is necessarily to write lines based on that anagram, and dominated by it” (17). In the case of the Cunningham mesostics, the poems are dominated by the name of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham is then the hero, the god, or the figure of homage in the mesostic. However, as will be shown, I would like to trouble this assumption by pointing out that Merce’s name is very often difficult to decipher. The varied spacing, size, and font-type of the Letraset³ choices encode and hide the spine-word or name in the presentation of the mesostic. For this reason, despite what Saussure may contend (by believing that the name or spine-word dominates the poem), Merce’s name does not dominate the mesostics, but rather exists tenuously and contingently within the experimental structure of the mesostics’ presentation on the page.
 
McCaffery argues that the paragram can be considered a dynamical structure that maps a space: “Paragrammic programs necessarily manufacture bifurcation points within semantic economies, engendering meanings but at the same time turning unitary meaning against itself” (197). A bifurcation point⁴ (a term borrowed from chaos theory) is a point in which a once-unified trajectory splits into two different trajectories. A bifurcation point implies a space or, at the very least, a dynamical model or map. Dynamical modeling⁵ (or the graph of a system that becomes chaotic over a period of time) creates shapes within the model (such as the famous butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor or the Mandelbrot set) in the same manner as the mesostics create the “shape” of Merce Cunningham.⁶ Let us consider the first of the 62 mesostics that use Cunningham as the spine (I have included Cage’s original along with a transcribed version in order to clarify the different shapes, sizes and fonts):
 
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denCe
sicdUctor
oNce
iN
premIse
oN
Gy
sHort
steAd
Mucon

(M 4)

The mesostic is a writing-through of the books in Merce’s library, including Merce’s own book on choreography, and the mesostic evokes the shape of Merce the dancer. Cage speaks about his compositional process:

The poem would then have a spine and resemble Cunningham himself, the dancer. Though this is not the case (these mesostics more resemble waterfalls or ideograms), this is how they came to be made. I used over seven hundred different type faces and sizes available in Letraset and, of course, subjected them to I Ching chance operations. No line has more than one word or syllable. Both syllables and words were obtained from Merce Cunningham’s Changes: Notes on Choreography and from thirty-two other books most used by Cunningham in relation to his work.

(M n.p.)

The mesostics are so subject to chance operation and Cagean constraint that the shape of the mesostic appears to mimic the shape of the paragrammic word: Merce Cunningham is physically depicted as in a portrait, sculpture, or etching. The words, taken from books in his library and re-permuted into asyntactic signifiers, take on the form of a private and personal homage that indicates a state of reverence and love.⁷ The movement (or dynamism) of the mesostic implies the dance of Cunningham, a point more strongly evinced by the second mesostic using Cunningham as the spine:

 
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danCe
lUs
eeN
(aNthe
whIch
calnitioN
Girl
rlencHr
cepAteygrel)
Mi

(6)

Here the word “dance” contains the lettristic echo of the nonce-word “dence” and relates to Cunningham’s artistic talent. The various shapes and spacings of the letters make transcription difficult: for example, “calnition” looks, at first glance, to be “caution.” The “lni” appears to be a “U” because the dot of the “I” melds into the cross of the “T.” In the nonce-word “rlenchr,” the “L” is barely noticeable because it rests on top of the “E.” Why the variety of fonts, sizes and placements? Weaver points out that the physical layout of the poems feature letters that are “often phallic-shaped ‘I’s and ‘l’s” (31). This may be part of it, but why not write the mesostics in the same form as the Joyce⁸ or Duchamp⁹ mesostics? These other mesostics are more readable (even the Joyce ones which use words from Finnegans Wake) because there is more text surrounding the spine-word and the Letraset varieties of letters, fonts, and spacings are normalized to highlight the selected name. The Cunningham mesostics are frequently one-word lines. Cage points out that “language controls our thinking; and if we change our language, it is conceivable that our thinking would change” (qtd. in Kostelanetz 149). Cage’s mesostics can potentially change the way “our” thinking – or thinking as a normative model – is structured, making hegemonic thought more capacious and open to lived differences (semiotic, linguistic, sociocultural, gendered, etc.). The mesostics are coded – i.e. the name is occluded in the wide variety of letter sizes and font choices – in order to maintain the privacy of the relationship (to keep the love between Cage and Cunningham strategically hidden from view). Kinser reminds us that, regarding the Saussurean anagram, “the name thus hidden is the center of the passage, the meaning toward which it moves” (1115); in the same way, the non-meaning of the Cunningham mesostics moves towards the relationship between Cunningham and Cage. The first line from “Writing through the Cantos” is written in much the same manner as Saussure’s discovered paragrams (where the mesostic does not appear as a spine but as a horizontal encoding): “and thEn with bronZe lance heads beaRing yet Arms sheeP slain Of plUto stroNg praiseD (X 109). This example from Cage can be contrasted with one of the examples from Saussure’s notebooks where Saussure finds the name of Agamemnon in the following line from the Odyssey. Odysseus tells King Alcinous about the shade of Agamemnon in Hades: “Áasen argaléon anémon amégartos autmé” (qtd. in Kinser 1113). Without raising the question of intention again—the question of how Saussure knows that Agamemnon was the intended head-word—I would like to point out that this essay is interested in definitively known instances of nomination, which is why I focus on Cage’s mesostics. However, if this question is put aside—and, as Kinser points out, the diphones suggest that this Homeric example rules out the alternative names of “Alcinous,” “Odysseus,” and “Poseidon” (1114) – then I think a contrast should be drawn between the Homeric example and the Cage example from “Writing through the Cantos.” Cage’s choice to imbed Ezra Pound within a series of mesostics is certainly a form of homage to the great modernist craftsman; however, I would instead like to claim that the Cunningham mesostics are written in a similar vein as, say, Petrarch’s self-identified (by capitalization) anagram/paragram to Laura:

When I move my sighs to call you and the name that Love wrote on my heart, the sound of its first sweet accents is heard without its LAU-ds.
 
Your RE-gal state, which I meet next, redoubles my strength for the high enterprise; but “TA-lk no more!” cries the ending, “for to do her honor is a burden for other shoulders than yours.”

(qtd. in Gronas 190)¹⁰

Laureta is the diminutive of Laura and the love poem is an homage to Petrarch’s love for her and also a nomination of the object of his love. This Petrarchan example is an antecedent that more closely resembles Cage’s mesostics to Merce (in the form of a love poem). Cage explodes the syntax and hegemony of the heteronormative love poem by using asyntactic words to create a heterotopic/homotopic space for the expression of his love. As Cage himself notes: “I think we need to attack that question of syntax” (qtd. in Kostelanetz 149). Foucault claims that heterotopias “shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax'” (xviii); however, the coordinates of the homo-heterotopic space can be designated by a proper name. At least in the case of Cage, the nominative function is what destroys syntax in the Cunningham mesostics. Cage’s definition of love as signified through nonsense allows the mesostics to make a sort of intuitive and sublime sense as love poem and homage. Even though Kinser points out that “names enclose and control rather than stray from the path of discourse” (1107), Cage’s nominative function strays because Cunningham’s name is very difficult to decipher when looking at the mesostics. The name is obscured in the variety of capitalizations and spacings, thus fulfilling Foucault’s definition of heterotopia in that the name is tangled within the other nonce-words. The other nonce-words that have successfully destroyed syntax. Even though Cage claims that his mesostics can be understood in “the way you understand ‘No Parking'” (Kostelanetz 149), I would instead suggest that the Cunningham mesostics employ a far more complicated dynamic and, even though Cage would want them to seem as simple as “No Parking,” they encode a strong love written within a paragrammic heterotopia.

 
How does one understand “No Parking”? On the one hand, it is quite literally a sign; perhaps “No Parking” is one of the examples par excellence of semiotics. “No Parking” is a sign on a sign and it contains text that with or without context (i.e., driving on a street or approaching a parking spot) or interpretant requires very little analysis to comprehend. “No Parking” is a directive speech act that implicitly signals a punishment if a driver does not obey the sign’s command (in this case, “No Parking” becomes contingently related to legal discourse, whereby a fine can be issued). Cage’s point is that the directive and its placement within a larger discourse is understood almost immediately. The immediacy of the meaning of “No Parking” can be compared to the immediacy with which one understands the mesostics. However, this is obviously not the case because the mesostics are written with nonce-words and resist linguistic meaning. I would therefore suggest that “No Parking” should be considered a visual composition and not only a textual one. “No Parking” is a sign that drivers hardly need to read to understand: the shape of the sign and the words are familiar because the sign is already neurocognitively primed in a driver’s memory. The mesostics should not, in this sense, be read, but rather, they should be seen or experienced. Despite the procedural techniques Cage uses, the mesostics deny meaning and point to a metaphysic of language. Much as Saussure believes that something uncanny functions structurally within language to order texts and discourses with names, Cage’s mesostics point to a meaning that is protosemantic and beyond language, but still significant. There is still, because of the procedure, some ineffable aspect of Merce Cunningham captured in the mesostics through Cage’s use of Merce’s own library and book on choreography, suggesting that the mesostics cannot be limited to the textual level (because they resist reading) and should also be understood at a protosemantic and visual level.
 
Mesostic 2, the second mesostic using Cunningham as the spine, ends with the nonce-word “Mi,” a word that echoes the first mesostic using Merce as the spine (Mesostic 3):
 
Fig. 3.  If you are a Project MUSE subscriber click for view of image.
 

Mir
thE
pRe
Crown
wE

(9)

I do not want to imply a progression between any of the mesostics. However, I am interested in phonemic, graphematic, and lettristic echoes in the mesostics. Many of the chance occurrences found in the mesostics indicate an uncanny aspect to the randomized ordering of language: such randomness is protosemantic and paragrammic. For example, many words appear in various forms—I would argue that these words appear as themes to the whole piece—”dance” can be found as “dence” (4), “dance” (6), “danc” (62), “dance” (108), “dances” (97), “dancer” and “danc” (130), “dance” (191), and Mesostic 44 ends with the words: “dance / men” (155). Body parts repeatedly appear throughout the mesostics, supporting Cage’s assertion that the mesostics evoke Cunningham the dancer: “legs” (39), “hands” (130), “heads, / arm” (203), and “knees” (193); the movements of dance recur in the words “jump” (62) and “movement” (112) (“movement” reappears in Mesostic 4 [11]). Mesostic 55 self-referentially describes the ways in which the mesostics were composed by highlighting the word “chance” (191) in the top line. The “Mi” (6) from Mesostic 2 sonically suggests “Me” (or a place of singularity) that ends with the word “We” in Mesostic 3. Is the “we” Cage and Cunningham? Paragrammic uncertainty organizes the mesostics via chance, affording the emergence of a particular configuration of letters. Mesostic 28 seems self-referentially aware of the protosemantic and uncanny conglomeration of the chance experiment:

 
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danCe.
thoUgh,
ruN
oN
nIr
Num
rhiGuage
Huge
hAs
lanzoMe

(108)

Despite claims to a mesostic’s randomness (assuming it is constructed according to a chance operation), I would like to highlight the last four lines of Mesostic 28: “rhiGuage / Huge / hAs / lanzoMe.” If the prefixes of the nonce-words “rhiguage” and “lanzome” are exchanged then the lines read: “language / huge / has / rhizome.” Ignoring authorial intention—and ignoring whether or not Cage ever read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus—I would like to point out that a rhizomatic model of language welcomes a paragrammic reading because a rhizome is a chaotic system¹¹ that promotes chance occurrences and semiotic emergences. Cage’s chance experiment almost desires meaning whereby a rhizome of language peers out from a randomly ordered mesostic that coins “rhiguage” and “lanzome.” Furthermore, I would argue that the nonce-words “rhiguage” and “lanzome” simultaneously signify “language” and “rhizome” alongside their more meaningless iterations, thereby contextualizing the mesostic itself as a paragram of chance and an evocation of Cunningham: a rhizome is circular, spiraling, and involuted much like a dance.

 
This essay has argued that the Merce Cunningham mesostics signify as a love letter between two lovers that highlights the protosemantic and paragrammic aspects of language and textuality. Following Weaver’s assertion that Cage “removes the presuppositions surrounding love and leaves the mesostics with only the bare elements of love” (34), I claim, after Weaver, that this love is paratactic, experimental, textual and based on paragrammic chance. Even though I focused on some of the more formal features of the Cagean mesostic, love cannot be ignored when discussing the mesostics written for Merce Cunningham. However, this chance (of love and language), when it coheres into a linguistic rhizome, is understood immediately as both a textual and visual sign that the viewer apprehends as quickly as a sign that reads “No Parking.” Both “No Parking” and the mesostics for Merce Cunningham become aesthetic signs that are comprehended as totalities. Despite the fact that the mesostics are paratactic and fractured, with letters dispersed at random around the spine-word or name, the paragrammic aspects of the mesostics become an invisible self-organizing force, an uncanny energy operating within language as a chance operation (much as Saussure imagines) that makes the aesthetic totality of the mesostics cohere into their finished products. A rhizome of language manifests as both territorialization (radicle or root) and as totality or territory (rhizome) in the same way that the mesostics cohere into a final rhizomatic totality (a “No Parking” sign) that contains within it paragrammic roots, permitting the emergence of the overall mesostic.
 
Much like the nonce-words that Cage conjures from I Ching chance operations (a process of composition in which he asks the I Ching which page in a book he should focus on, and then which word on that page, based on coin flips), love itself is a chance operation that often emerges randomly from events, societies, environments, and geographies. Cage recognizes the asemic, nonlinear and aperiodic signification of love, its inability to be easily reified, predicted, or categorized, and the singular poetry created by two lovers who “tend to make nonsense, when they love one another” (qtd. in Kostelanetz 137).

Sean Braune is a Ph.D. student at York University and holds a Masters from the University of Toronto. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, and Poetry is Dead. He wrote the play Leer that was performed at Ryerson University in April 2010 and directed the short film An Encounter (2005), which won the award for excellence in cinematography at the Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival ’09. He has published in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, and Journal of Modern Literature.

Footnotes

• Cage, John. M: Writings ’67-’72. New England: Wesleyan UP, 1972. Print.
• ———. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Print.
• ———. X: Writings ’79-’82. New England: Wesleyan UP, 1983. Print.
• De Boer, A., E.M. Van Buel, and G.J. Ter Horst. “Love is More Than Just a Kiss: A Neurobiological Perspective on Love and Affection.” Neuroscience 201 (2012): 114-124. Print.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print.
• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
• Gronas, Mikhail. “Just What Word Did Mandel’shtam Forget? A Mnemopoetic Solution to the Problem of Saussure’s Anagrams.” Poetics Today 30.2 (2009): 155-205. Print.
• Johnson, Peter. “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces’.” History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (2006): 75-90. Print.
• Katz, Jonathan D. “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse.” Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print.
• Kinser, Samuel. “Saussure’s Anagrams: Ideological Work” MLN 94.5 (1979): 1105-1138. Print.
• Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York: Limelight, 1988. Print.
• Lorenz, Edward N. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995. Print.
• Lotringer, Sylvère. “The Game of the Name.” Diacritics 3.2 (1973): 2-9. Print.
• McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2001. Print.
• Pearson, Wendy. “Homotopia? Or What’s Behind a Prefix?” Extrapolation 44.1 (2003): 83-96. Print.
• Saldanha, Arun. “Heterotopia and structuralism.” Environment and Planning A 40.9 (2008): 2080-2096. Print.
• Shepheard, David. “Saussure’s Vedic Anagrams.” The Modern Language Review 77.3 (1982): 513-523. Print.
• Starobinski, Jean. Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure. Trans. Olivia Emmet. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print.
• Weaver, Andy. “Writing through Merce: John Cage’s Silence, Differends, and Avant-Garde Idioms.” Mosaic 45.2 (2012): 19-37. Print.
• Yeats, W.B. W.B. Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Print.