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Cage's response to life at the turn of the twenty-first century was a positive one. Rather than regretting the present situation, with his perennial optimism, he rejoiced in it. In a recent radio interview, for example, he explained: I notice both in writing and in speaking that many people are gloomy about the present circumstances and it isn't my nature to be gloomy. . . I have been so long in reading and thinking of Finnegan's Wake "Here comes everybody" and I think our experiences more and more are populated with more and more people and more and more things that strike our perceptions. We live in a time I think not of mainstream but of many streams or even, if you insist on a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.[58] Just as he renounced compositional control in his music, Cage's utopian, or perhaps better said, "heteropian" vision rejected societal controls of every sort. This view is eloquently expressed in the following passages from "Overpopulation and Art," a mesostic poem that was written shortly before his death in 1992: John Cage transformed the modernist project taken up by philosophers during the Enlightenment more than two hundred years ago and redirected its concerns to problems facing us at the turn of the twenty-first century. He believed that anarchism should replace our present forms of government. Cage was an advocate for cultural pluralism and realized that the predominance of European culture had clearly reached its end. The avant-garde may have perished in the early twentieth century, but its aesthetics, hopes, and aspirations have taken on new forms.
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