Cage-Minji Kim

John Cage says in his essay called “silence” that wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. People are living in the world where silence, noise and sound are jumbled together and they coexist. Relationship between these components can be easily figured out if we look this relationship superficially. Especially relationships among silence, noise, and sound the relationship between silence and noise seems most simple. If we just think about the definition of silence and noise, their meaning is completely opposite; therefore, their relationship can be explained by one word: antithesis. However, after I examine silence and noise more carefully I figured out that the relationship between them is more than a simple antithetic relationship. I think the relationship between silence and noise is similar to the relationship between sense and non-sense. As the concept of “non-sense” cannot exist with out “sense”, silence is an essential source for noise to exist. One might not be aware of non-sense if sense never exists since non-sense is derived from the absence of sense.  Like wise, noise cannot exist without the appreciation of silence since people, without comparing the noise to the silence, cannot understand how disturbing the noise can be. Even though silence and noise have opposite meaning they ultimately need each other to be defined.

Through the essay called “Lecture on Nothing” by John Cage, he indirectly and visually explores the relationship between noise and sound using chance operation and enspacement. Enspacement is a special writing technique that invented and utilized by Mallarme who is one of the most influential modernist. Mallarme uses enspacement to show the chance operation and how it can be applied as a literature form. The way Cage employs chance operation and enspacement provides readers simlar feelings that the readers might feel when they hear noise: very disturbing and annoying. The disturbing feelings can be from the random white blank spaces that separate sentences or words without any orders. For example,

“ I am here            ,         and there is nothing to say         .

      If among you are

Those who wish to get      somewhere ,       let them leave at

any moment       . What we re-quire”

Not only sentences, phrases, and words are randomly separated, but punctuations are also put in the middle of the white space. When I read through “Lecture on Nothing” it was not easy read and understand what Cage wants to say this section because I had to pause several times due to the random enspacement. The disturbing and annoying feeling that I had when I read his piece is similar to those feelings that I had when I listen very noise sounds. Therefore, I believe that the white space represents the silence and any other components on the white space including punctuations, words, uncompleted phrases and sentences can be seen as noise. If people refer disturbing and annoying sounds as a noise, then the words, phrases, and even punctuations can be visual noise. Therefore, noise and silence can be thought as auditory components but they are also expressed by visual components, which can generate similar disturbing feeling compared to auditory noise.