there is a sliver of an anti-consumerism stance here. Again, very long Morley sentences, and his ideas just sprawl endlessly, in association.

For Cage forgetfulness became important, so that you would not always be trapped into only contemplating and consuming what you were told to think about and buy. You could break out of those patterns. You could find yourself, not the person that others, with ulterior motives, following your every move, were making you become. To forget was to avoid being completely taken over by what others decided you should be preoccupied with. Art, Cage decided, could help us forget, at least occasionally, so that we could resist being pummelled by the same things again and again. It could remind us that there were other worlds, sensations and objects to think about, not only what was placed in front of us for our comfort, which ultimately made us all addicts, pushed into a coma of apparent awareness. ‘If art today didn’t help us forget,’ he noted, ‘we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects.’ The forgetfulness was actually a remembering – of ideas and energies that were not being controlled on your behalf, by forces narrowing and emptying your actual options even as it seemed you had all the choice you needed. Once music had become so instant, so handy, some proposed that listening to music ceased to be an event, a special drama, and became simply another task, almost a duty, something to take for granted, not least because despite the amount of music just a touch or two away, it somehow didn’t take up any actual space in our lives.