44-4,p21

Need one spell out the details? I could tell you, in very concrete terms, the advances I've made, and I could expound on my enlarged attitude toward juggling. But figure it out for yourself! I, for one, have benefited remarkably in two short weeks, though at the time of the workshop my juggling was extensively humbled. One doesn't attend such an affair in order to show off! Nevertheless, to be, even for a brief interval, gosling to such a golden goose, is no small exposure! It's like having an invisible hand, present and functioning, throughout all of one's subsequent practice. .

So it is, perhaps, the flight of my own imagination. But I have imbibed from this experience something a little more profound than the whigmaleerie of a Mills' Mess. Though you know, I did figure out Mills' Mess two days after the workshop: what satisfaction! It sketches a whole new order of spatio-temporality! A true pons asinorum, and this donkey got over it! But you see that I am juggling words again, and with a certain enthusiasm. I owe that enthusiasm, and its heightened sense of possibility, to my experience at Kit Summers' workshop.

And it is difficult to predict just what might come up to confirm the virtue of that experience. The day after the workshop, I was trying this move where you take a dropped ball between your heels and kick it up from behind over your shoulder. This was attempted in the somewhat limited space of my bedroom, and my first go at it sent the ball to a high shelf, where there reposed a glass vase of some sentimental profundity for my wife. It had dry stalks of eucalyptus austerely arranged in it. Well, I needn't tell you...

But the amazing thing was that my hand, without haste or contortion, simply caught it in the fall. It was like being clutched out of Hades by some invisible savior! This somewhat confirmed that I had been having fun over the weekend - though I hadn't been entirely sure of it at the time. It was sweaty hell and daunting humiliation at certain moments, but I appear to have survived the better for it.

Actually, it was a most salutary airing of my solipsistic closet, and a very undisappointing exposure to other people who juggle. Jugglers are extremely generous with their knowledge, very non-judgmental toward those of us whose struggle bespeaks a less than genius-level talent, and quite lacking in that sort of zero-sum competitiveness which one finds in many other disciplines.

If there is one point of complaint, it's probably that Summers, who demanded that we each give a little performance at the end of the three days, chose the time right after we'd been sitting for 90 minutes listening to his discourse on how to extract the lucre from an admiring world. The gym was quite hot that day, and many of us were juggled out. Even our seven-ball titan Rick Burhans had a kind of slack showing under the circumstances. The most charming to perform, I'd like to say, was a teenager by the name of Joanne Swain, whose touch of strabismus combined with the crisp virtuosity of her juggling to heighten its effect, making her gaze appear to be summoned elsewhere.

When it came my turn, however, I fear the juggling abandoned me. But I fetched up from my poetic soul a number of truly cunning drop-lines. It didn't seem to matter to anybody that I wreathed myself in pedantic obscurity. Though I may have juggled abominably, I was still appreciated for the eloquence with which I covered my blunders. In one case, for example, I paraphrased the line from Shakespeare's Richard II, "Down, down it falls, like glistering Phaeton, wanting the manage of unruly jades." One has to admit that this is a cut above "Oops!"

I have rambled somewhat, undoubtably. But chalk it up to enthusiasm. If any of you deskbound souls who are reading this should seek wider energies through the experience of juggling, I recommend to you the Orpheus of that discipline, Kit Summers. You can see how he's churned up the curds in this vat!

Postscript: In the preceding paragraphs I have spoken somewhat deprecatingly about my own juggling, especially with regard to my performance at the end of the workshop. As time passes that attitude is undergoing a rapid change. I have since juggled quite effectively in front of people, and not one of my juggling balls has landed in the dip! Now certain invisible wheels of cunning have also begun to spin within me, which have been set in motion by Summers' invaluable advice, notably as to moneymaking angles. I hope to be able to give you some fuller report of these developments, perhaps from some cruise ship, at a later time. Until then, may their flight be secure and their numbers increasing - better

juggling to all!