Revising History

John Cage, in Silence:

While Meister Eckhart was alive, several attempts were made to excommunicate him… None of the trials against him was successful, for on each occasion he defended himself brilliantly. However, after his death, the attack was continued. Mute, Meister Eckhart was excommunicated. (p. 193)

In Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 1981), medievalist scholar Edmund Colledge gives quite a different picture. Noting that one of Eckhart’s “heresies” was a direct echo of St. Thomas Aquinas that the inquisitors should have recognized as such, he brings upÂ

the problem of why Eckhart himself did not put up a better defense… The years… of paradox-spinning for the scandalized delight of larger but less critical and instructed audiences do not seem to have sharpened his wits… [W]e can perhaps detect signs of the apathetic fatigue experienced by an aging man, aware that he has not fulfilled his early promise and has exhausted his powers in his efforts to woo popular acclaim.Â (p. 14.)

Now I’m trying to figure out when Cage visited the anechoic chamber. Most people (including Cage) say 1951, but his own narrative also seems to imply that he left Black Mountain College (where he was in summer of 1952, not ’51, and must have been until August 16, 1952, for a performance of Sonatas and Interludes), went to Rhode Island, thence to Cambridge for the Harvard anechoic chamber visit – and then wrote 4’33” for an August 29 performance! This is William Brooks’s position, and it looks irrefutable.

I’m at the point at which every day I finish half of what’s left of this book, but the final tiny pieces get harder and harder.