All I could do was chuckle, and throw my hands up in bewilderment at
these Tati-esque vacarmes de monsieur Houlou. Somehow, this reviewer saw
me praising Cage to the skies ("Godel, Escher, Cage"?) and managed to
read into my coy allusions to and minor borrowings from Zen an uncritical
acceptance thereof, which in fact is not at all my stance. As I declare at the
start of Chapter 9, I find Zen not only confusing and silly, but on a very deep
level utterly inimical to my core beliefs. However, I also find Zen's silliness
- especially when it gets really silly - quite amusing, even refreshing, and it
was simply fun for me to sprinkle a bit of Eastern spice into my basically very
Western casserole. However, my having sprinkled little traces of Zen here
and there does not mean that I am a Zen monk in sheep's clothing.
As for John Cage, for some odd reason I had felt very sure, up till
reading Houlou's weird about-face, that in my "Canon by Intervallic
Augmentation" and the chapter that follows it, I had unambiguously heaped
scorn on Cage's music, albeit in a somewhat respectful manner. But wait,
wait, wait - isn't "heaping respectful scorn" not a contradiction in terms,
indeed a patent impossibility? And doesn't such coy flirting with self-
contradiction and paradox demonstrate, exactly as Houlou claims, that I am,
deep down, both antiscientific and pro-Zen, after all? Well, so be it.
Even if I feel my book is as often misunderstood as understood, I
certainly can't complain about the size or the enthusiasm of its readership
around the world. The original English-language GEB was and continues to
be very popular, and its translated selves hit the bestseller lists in (at least)
France, Holland, and Japan. The German GEB, in fact, occupied the #1
rank on the nonfiction list for something like five months during 1985, the
300th birthyear of]. S. Bach. It seems a bit absurd to me. But who knows-
that anniversary, aided by the other Germanic names on the cover, may have
crucially sparked GEB's popularity there. GEB has also been lovingly
translated into Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, and Portuguese, and- perhaps unexpectedly - with great virtuosity into Chinese. There is also
a fine Russian version all ready, just waiting in the wings until it finds a
publisher. All of this far transcends anything I ever expected, even though I
can't deny that as I was writing it, especially in those heady Stanford days, I
had a growing inner feeling that GEB would make some sort of splash.
- perhaps unexpectedly - with great virtuosity into Chinese. There is also
My Subsequent Intellectual Path: Decade I
Since sending GEB off to the printers two decades ago, I've somehow
managed to keep myself pretty busy. Aside from striving, with a team of
excellent graduate students, to develop computer models of the mental
mechanisms that underlie analogy and creativity, I've also written several
further books, each of which I'll comment on here, though only very briefly.
The first of these, appearing in late 1981, was The Mind's I, an anthology
co-edited with a new friend, philosopher Daniel Dennett. Our purpose,
closely related to that of GEB, was to force our readers to confront, in the
most vivid and even jolting manner, the fundamental conundrum of humanP-18 Twentieth-anniversary Preface