Merce Cunningham: It came to the last question, a complicated thing about identifying wild mushrooms.
Alice Aycock: I didn't want to talk about that.
Cunningham: It can open your spirit.
Aycock: Maybe. I'm not just open.
Cunningham: Not at the moment.
Aycock: The glass is there and not there.
Cunningham: Like a tree. I think it's poetic.
Aycock: Things get taken over, layer upon layer.
Cunningham: Usually, that has a great deal to do with practicality.
Aycock: I refer to it as transformational grammar. You know that.
Cunningham: Well, I don't know. It sounds superb.
Aycock: You are always being assailed by language, and memory.
Cunningham: It proved to have a stronger lure.
Aycock: It's nothing but dust. But they were all there, I saw people building stuff, big stuff, using big cranes, making bridges, all kinds of things, and that was just my environment.
Cunningham: Yes, yes. There was an awful lot of laughing.
Aycock: (laughs) When you are frustrated because you don’t have the money or the support system to build something, your imagination is still there: you can still think it up, you can still draw it.
Cunningham: And even if something comes up that is not quite possible, it shows you something else that you hadn’t thought of that is possible.
Aycock: You gasp. Or you step out into empty space. You need to know when to pull back.
Cunningham: At the moment, I am drawing little birds.