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I vaguely remembered having heard “I Happen to Like New York,” by Cole Porter, in a Woody Allen film, and loving it, and had no idea which film, for many years, until the other night, when I happened to watch Manhattan Murder Mystery, and there it was, at the top of the film.

What a beautiful song! The last strain, its gorgeous cry of life:

And when I have to give the world a last farewell,
And the undertaker starts to ring my funeral bell,
I don't want to go to heaven, don't want to go to hell.
I happen to like New York. I happen to like New York.

Granted, we die for good.
Life, then, is largely a thing
Of happens to like, not should.

And that, too, granted, why
Do I happen to like red bush,
Gray grass and green-gray sky?

What else remains? But red,
Gray, green, why those of all?
That is not what I said:

Not those of all. But those.
One likes what one happens to like.
One likes the way red grows.

It cannot matter at all.
Happens to like is one
Of the ways things happen to fall.

detail from a collage poem, 1983.

TO: JAY
FROM: MIKE

LOVE . . . LOVE WILL
KEEP US TOGETHER!

In Slate magazine, Jack Shafer is pissed off that people loved the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who died recently: “The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today's newspapers prove that you're more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section.”

The same day in Slate, Jim Lewis waxed luscious about Rauschenberg’s fabulousness.

I have mentioned Rauschenberg many times hereabouts, at greatest length in October 2005. I wasn’t going to write about him now because he became such a Brand Name by the end that I didn’t know what to say -- the Seattle Symphony paid him something like a Million Dollars to do a collage for their new symphony hall a few years ago, and the influence of his style is so ubiquitous now that it just looks like a nice painting.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that the influence of his style captures only part what’s unique about him, which neither the tributes nor the diatribes I’ve seen have done justice to.

Rauschenberg began as a fascinating conceptualist and ended as a massively influential stylist. I can’t think of a parallel figure. His friend John Cage was hugely influential as a conceptualist, but, while many people, including me, love a lot of his music, he’s not famous for an influential style. The kicker is, Rauschenberg was more of an influence on Cage than the other way around.

In 1952 Cage composed his silent piece, 4’33”, the fame of which has gone far and wide. But in the year before then, Rauschenberg had painted completely white paintings, inspiring Cage to his make his silent piece. Cage admitted the influence, saying, “The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”

Rauschenberg and Cage were jointly germinal in the development of Happenings in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rauschenberg presaged such beautiful works as Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os -- in which Johnson erased large chunks of Milton’s Paradise Lost, leaving behind radiant word clusters -- with his 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing, which is just what its title says.

More famous than his conceptual works, though, are Rauschenberg’s collages, often gorgeous and elegant constructions in which he aspired to an aesthetic of “multiplicity, variety, and inclusion.” It’s hard to imagine now, but works on which he painted on untraditional surfaces, such as 1955’s Bed, scandalized patrons. Now it just looks cheerful and friendly -- -- like Rauschenberg’s demeanor (Slate’s disputing Rauschenberg commentators, both of whom met the artist, agree on this point), and, surprisingly, like the mainstream myth of the Eisenhower ‘50s.

Rauschenberg had a greater impact on me, as a musician and aspiring poet, than Cage did, because I thought his collages were beautiful. Cage challenged my mind, and I found and find many of his non-collage music lovely, but I didn’t find his sound collages -- the ones that I heard, anyway -- beautiful. Cage’s principal of non-selection did not seem like an honest way for me to proceed. Rauschenberg’s “multiplicity, variety, and inclusion” inspired me much more -- it included aesthetic judgment. Not to exclude the ugly, but to contextualize it. And -- Rauschenberg’s collages are beautiful.

I don’t know with certainty, but it’s my hunch that his collages were hugely influential in book design. Martin Williams’s beautiful book The Jazz Tradition came out in 1971, seven years after Rauschenberg’s Kennedy homage, Retroactive I. I can’t help but feel that the book designer found inspiration in Rauschenberg. Ain’t it a lovely cover?

I bought that book 10 or 11 years after it came out, when I was a teenager. It blew my mind as much as Rauschenberg did. I still find inspiration in something Williams says in his introduction, extolling jazz’s drive to individuality. This is one of the few quotes I’d like to have on a coffee cup (and I’ve quoted it before):

The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and co-operation required in a jazz ensemble, carry with them philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a co-operative social structure, can actually enhance society.

I still find political as well as aesthetic inspiration in this Williams quote.

If Rauschenberg maintained his conceptual fertility after his 15 year explosion from the early ‘50s through the mid to late ‘60s, I wasn’t aware of it. He continued to make nice looking works, an avatar of Williams’s individuality, and he became very wealthy -- far wealthier than Cage or than any of the musicians Martin Williams championed, even Miles Davis.

By becoming an ubiquitous influence and a wealthy brand name, Rauschenberg became irrelevant as a possible model. I know an artist who follows Rauschenberg’s lead in painting on fabrics, but her work differs from his in many ways, most immediately in being intensely socially engaged -- like classic jazz, and unlike most Cage and Rauschenberg. Social engagement is not a requirement for lively or beautiful art, and if Rauschenberg’s later work lost its liveliness and even some of its beauty, he had liveliness and beauty in spades for a long time.

As I write this, I struggle with an ambivalence. I am grateful for Rauschenberg’s work, but I resent him. And it’s taken me this many paragraphs to remember why. In 1985 Rauschenberg designed a limited edition pressing of Speaking in Tongues.

Many a long dispute among Divines may be thus abridged, It is so: It is not so; It is so: It is not so.

The paradox of memory -- that we remember so intensely, that an unexpected smell can bring back a long-gone milieu, whole and complete; and yet our memories are so faulty. It is foolish to trust one’s memory in the details. I do it all the time.

* * *

At the college reunion last October, at the poetry reading in honor of two creative writing teachers who have been there for more than 25 years, I recited Leigh Hunt’s poem “Abou Ben Adhem.” I had memorized it in honor of my grandpa, who had had to memorize it to join the DKE fraternity in the 1920s. My freshman year Grandpa had phoned the Dekes and told them that his grandson was at the university. A representative of the frat invited me for a chat. I was a hippie-punk bohemian, and the Dekes appeared to be one of the more buttoned-up frats. The frat rep knew that I had no interest in joining, and I knew he had no interest in me, but we went through the interview in honor of my grandpa, this friendly young guy

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold: -
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?" -The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.