By Bob Gauagher - Photos by Mark Garvin

 

A creature of the word, I have sought from juggling the balance of my partial mind, as well as some modicum of finesse in the universe of physical objects. So having toiled out, in two or three years, the shambling in­fant of a five-ball cascade, I deemed myself ready for a workshop with the incomparable Kit Summers.

 

And thus, for a long weekend last summer it was three seven-hour sessions of intensive juggling in the gym of a converted boathouse called Plaisted Hall at the foot of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

 

Intensive is the word for it! With Summers, as many know, it's all of his wisdom or none of it: a didactic barrage! Before even thought can intervene, it's "O.K. Next trick," and the expectant mind is confused into that receptive state which resembles extinction. Meanwhile, one is regaled with his many apothegms of positive thinking, which even a border-line nihilist like me will start to think true. Is it possible that even I, the fallen one, the self-conscious mourner at the demise of his own ego, this sniffer of decay, this fin-de-siecle type, might think "success with finesse" a locution worthy of his entertainment? The rubric over my soul has heretofore been more like Samuel Beckett's "Fail as no other dare fail."

 

But juggling is the happiest of vacations from all of that, and not irreconcilable with it, either. Juggling enjoys the gentle emphasis of pointlessness, like poetry or dance. What did Paul Valery say about the dance? It had something to do with the fact that when one dances, one is not going any­where, the action is not in subservience to anything extraneous.

 

It is true that to make a value of such a thing is to depart somewhat from the puritanical work-ethic. And Summers was voluble as to the many ways of skirting the latter. It takes hard and patient work to juggle, to be sure, but not bosses and alarm clocks. Juggling Masters can be helpful, of course. But we seek these Juggling Masters in our affection for them, and we are in no way arbitrarily indentured. To be less euphemistic, we jugglers crave some alternative to a "job."

Summers sought to guide us to realize this fact. He reminded us, for example, to tell a gathered crowd to fold their money before dropping it into the hat, thus diminishing the contemptible clink of mere beggary. Our work is our juggling - or some other, more metaphorical application of the term.  I feel that I am juggling right now.

 

And certainly, when Summers was struck down by a truck one rainy night, he was confronted in the mysterious eclipse of the coma, with a mammoth opportunity to convert juggling into an all-pervasive metaphor.  My personal observation tells me that the has succeeded in doing this in  a marvelous way.  He has given the phrase "Sucess with Finesse" a meaning well above the realm of chops and showers. He has shown that the worst is interchangeable with the best, if only one's mind can achieve the juggling finesse to so see it. If one sees it so, it is so. The rest is rumor.

 

But I'd like to talk more specifically about the actual benefits of this workshop, which after two weeks of reflection, I find to be considerable. Don't be daunted if you should choose to submit to this intensive, total-immersion, slightly chaotic experience. Summers is an expert at sowing the unconscious field. It took me at least two weeks to begin to grasp the dragon-teeth he'd planted within me!