Letters to Merce Cunningham | John Cage, New York, 1943-44

John Cage and Merce Cunningham, c 1945

I don’t know: this gravity elastic feeling to let go and fall together with you is one thing, but it is better to live exactly where you are with as many permanent emotions in you as you can muster. Talking to myself.
Your spirit is with me. Did you send it or do I just have it?

June 28, 1943

Rain finally came + it’s beautifully cool. Wonder how long it will last. It was marvelous because it started suddenly and then was alternately terrific and gentle.
I think of you all the time and therefor have little to say that would not embarrass you, for instance my first feeling about the rain was that it was like you.

June 29, 1943

I nearly left this earth a few minutes ago—ecstasy—word from you. Pretty soon I’ll write music for you.

July 2, 1943

Country was beautiful, and lying on the grass so that I could sometimes see the net a tree is against the sky or turning make a space for eyes between two trees and watch bird-movements across and in it.

—And I really need not be with you for me or for you, because there was facility in inventing your presence and knowing that just then you were merely not visible or not audible.

July 3, 1944

—I talk to you all day long but when I start to write I cannot—

—Your last letter is so beautiful I cannot answer it, only read it and lie on it.

July 12, 1944

As darkness comes, i lose mind with loneliness and must work or go to movie to bring about utter fatigue which protects… i hope you love it there and have some beauty to love… and I hope [your dance-play] is going well and that you are spirit-full… what need to wish?… you are strong… love you—

July 20, 1944

—Your words in my ears making me limp and taut by turns with delight. oh, I am sure we could use each other today.

—Pardon the intrusion: but when in september will you be back? I would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us.

July 22, 1944

Tonight I wd. love to write an essay about music—it seems to me I know some things tonight—but good God! For hours with pencil in hand + only one stupid sentence. Who tied my tongue + stopped the spirit for words?
Maybe I can tell you what vision I have: rhythm is like the air or water or the ether that the planets move in,—it is in fact like space, and the whole problem in writing notes or making movements, etc., is to not destroy it. It has not the slightest thing to do with anything that is put into it: an accent or a metre or what else; it only begs to be free to be.
Does that mean anything?

Please kiss whatever part of you you can reach for me.

August 17, 1944

I am beginning to think that the reason I “give so much” is that I am so poor in spirit, hoping through leaning on every little gesture, thought, word, and mood of other to get my empty spaces filled. so my giving is really demanding.

undated, 1944

John Cage, 1912-92, Selected Letters