Love Letter: John Cage to Merce Cunningham

Dear Merce,
I’m unsentimental but I’m sitting at one of our tables and looking in a mirror where you often were.
I’m looking forward to seeing you again rather than backward to having seen you recently.
That’s a happy way to be.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.

Rain finally came and 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. I Love you.
I get terribly lonesome for you. Please be lonesome enough to come back in not too distant time.
I love you and often think of fancy reasons why: spirit is very close to me and mine, I sent it, close to you.

Your letters i just plain love: they bring you so close that at any moment i expect
the door will open and you will see me camouflaged in enigmatic home, built on shoes you made.
The 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.
Beautiful daisies and a jungle of tiger lilies. Multitudinous lakes and canoes.
I could tell how distinctly happy you would be.
I am often in deep pain; I am afraid I am not a human being.
I talk to you all day long but when I start to write i cannot, dreaming of you and enigma
and how we are together today: your words in my ears making me limp and taut by turns with delight.
Oh, I am sure we could use each other today.

I like to believe that you are writing my music now: God knows i’m not doing it, because it simply seems to happen.
The pretissimo is incredible the way you are and is perhaps a description and song about you.
Please don’t let intellectual art discussions intimidate you.
They are only talking about art or loving it or God knows what, but you are it.
You’re a visitation and any one who has a chance to be near you is damned fortunate.

Going to sea and sun will be marvelous.
I couldn’t help thinking how magic it would be to meet you some place on cliff or sand,
but problems of communication and my own allergy to summer-nature mock romanticism.
My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.
Please kiss whatever part of you you can reach for me.

I would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us.