Indeterminacy 121

David Tudor and I took a taxi down town. He
was going to Macy’s; I was going on to West
Broadway and Prince where I get my hair cut.
After David Tudor got out, I began
talking with the driver about the weather.
The relative merits of the Old Farmers’ Almanac
and the newspapers came up. The driver said
they were developing rockets that would raise the
weather man’s predictions from 50 to 55 per cent
accuracy. I said I thought the Almanac
starting from a consideration of planets and
their movements, rather than from winds and
theirs, got a better start since the
X-quantities involved were not so physically close
to the results being predicted. The
driver said he’d had an operation some years
before and that while his flesh was dead and
numb, before the wound healed,
he was able to predict weather changes by
the pain he felt in the scar, that
when the flesh lost its numbness and was,
so to speak, back to normal,
he could no longer know in advance
anything about changes in weather.

- John Cage