RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.
John Cage Ten Rules for Students and Teachers
originates not from John Cage,
but artist and teacher Corita Kent
who created the list as part of a project
for a class she taught in 1967-1968
at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
I spent most of my life pretending I knew what the hell I was doing. And then one day, somewhere along the line, I stumbled across these rules, technically Corita Kent’s, not Cage’s, but whatever, and realized I’d been doing this backwards the whole goddamn time.
“Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.” That’s the one that gets me. Because trust is the hardest thing, isn’t it? We’re all so busy performing, so terrified of looking stupid, that we never actually commit to anything long enough to let it work on us. We’re tourists in our own lives.
The rule about pulling everything out of your teachers and fellow students, that’s about hunger. Real hunger. Not the polite kind where you raise your hand and ask permission. You take what you need. You steal techniques, ideas, the way someone holds their body when they’re thinking. That’s not plagiarism; that’s survival.
And “nothing is a mistake”? Jesus, if I’d understood that at twenty-five, even thirty-five instead of forty-five, imagine the neuroses I could’ve avoided. I’ve spent so much energy constructing elaborate narratives about my failures when I should just be making the next thing.
But Rule Seven, that’s the one that matters. Work. Just fucking work. Not when I feel inspired or when the moment is right. Work when I’m tired. Work when I’m hungover. Work when I think everything I’m making is garbage. Because the people who show up every day, who do the tedious, unglamorous labor of their craft, those are the ones who eventually make something worth a damn.
The last rule, though, breaking all the rules, leaving room for chaos, that’s where life happens. In the X quantities. In the spaces between what you planned and what actually occurred. That’s where you find something true, something that might outlive you. Everything else is just static.