Calvin Tomkins The Bride and the Bachelors, Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham. Penguin: NY, 1962, (1965) (1985) 306 pp.
[p. 122. John Cage]
[p. 122] Moving to the country, according to Cage, was "a complete change of experience, like moving from one color into another. I realized immediately that I'd had a profound need for nature. I had lived in cities mostly and always hated country weekends--for one thing, there we're all those biting insects, unlike any city bugs that are only interested in getting food. Suzuki once said that he couldn't conceive of anyone's living a Zen life in the city, and I had rejected this idea at that time, but now I began to see the point of it.
Cage lived and worked in an attic room that he shared with a colony of wasps, and almost immediately he began taking long, solitary walks in the woods. His eyes were caught right away by the mushrooms, which grow abundantly in the Rockland County, in all shapes, sizes, and brilliant colors. Fascinated, he started to collect books on the subject of mushrooms and to learn everything he could about them. Among the many reasons that can be given for Cage's passionate devotion to mushrooms may be the fact that mushroom hunting is a decidedly chancy, or in- determinate, pastime. No matter how much mycology one knows--and Cage has become one of the best amateur mycologists in the country, with perhaps the most extensive private library ever compiled on the subject--there remains always the possibility of a mistake in identification. Cage has had one or two brushes with disaster himself, once from eating poisonous hellebore that he took to be edible skunk cabbage, and once from downing Boletus piperatus, a raw mushroom that is labeled edible in some [p. 123] books, dangerous in others. "I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations I would die shortly," Cage has said. "So I decided that I would not approach them in this way." But he has continued to approach them, at every opportunity and wherever he has happened to be, to the point that he has frequently been reprimanded by highway patrolmen for leaving his car to pick attractive specimens he has seen growing near the parkways. For several months in 1960 he even supplied the Four Seasons restaurant in New York with regular shipments of wild mushrooms. With three fellow enthusiasts he founded the New York Mycological Society in 1962, and on pleasant spring and fall weekends, whenever possible, he is out in the woods on mushroom walks. It may be worth noting in this connection that Cage has never eaten any of the hallucinatory varieties of mushrooms. No mystic, he has a deep-seated aversion to trances, visions, and all the spookier aspects of Orientalism . . . Cage has also been delighted that the words mushroom and music are contiguous in most English dictionaries.
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