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Why I Juggle

BY DUANE STARCHER

Is this picture familiar? A lone juggler is practicing in one corner of a gymnasium.

People play basketball, volleyball, some jog around the perimeter, a few watch at random. Players and observers wander by the juggler, hardly glancing at the movement. Once in a long while, someone will stop and watch for a few moments. Occasionally, but rarely, a person will make eye contact and perhaps smile shyly. A returned smile may encourage a question or two and, less often, an expression of interest in learning the three-ball cascade.

Invading a juggler's space seems formidable perhaps because contact must be made either through a moving pattern of intimidating props or during a stop in the action, most likely brought on by the juggler's failure. But once these impediments have been breached, one of the most common questions asked of a juggler, other than "How do you do that?" is some form of "Why? Why do you juggle?"

It is perfectly clear to me why I juggle. Juggling feels good. It is harder to explain that what "feels good" is not so much the throwing and catching of individual props, but the much longer process of gaining mastery through careful repetition. It is profoundly satisfying to feel your actions progress from shaky beginnings requiring your conscious attention, later to culminate in the nearly automatic operation of your muscles.

The fact that people raise the question of why we juggle at all has made me aware that most people, in most of their activities, don't really understand what it means to practice. Aerobics exercisers, runners and squash players have little experience with a disciplined approach to learning that is actually unnatural to many competencies. Even some musicians I have known rarely practice; they simply play a lot, as runners run often or squash players spend their court time in competition. They would not say they are practicing; they are playing. Practice and play are not quite the same activity.

Most people assume that, if you practice, a finished performance or entertainment must be your goal. Practice for its own sake seems a self-contradiction and confuses those who observe me "practicing" juggling. My activity appears to have no further purpose. Solitary activities with no outside reference border on several definitions of insanity. Practicing juggling appears to outsiders as the kinesthetic equivalent of talking to oneself.

I also like the fact that it is not really possible in juggling to cheat, even though it may be possible to deceive an audience about certain aspects of juggling, such as the number of objects actually being juggled. One can obstruct a juggler (and even raise obstruction to the level of a game in itself, as in Combat Juggling) but one cannot really cheat as a juggler. One either can or cannot do what is attempted, and no breaking of rules can revoke a juggling failure. One may direct an audience's attention away from failure with a clever drop line, but there is no way to cheat a juggling failure into success.

Juggling is self-contained and self-defined in a way that most other human activities are not. More like other forms of art than of sport, juggling excludes the outside world by creating its own reality, however long that reality can be maintained. In this sense, magic has always seemed to me to be the direct antithesis of juggling in that the of magic intent is to create and maintain not the reality, but the deceit. We expect to be deceived and any magician fails when reality intrudes upon that deception.

Why do I juggle? I still can't answer definitively, but I like the fact that no agency other than myself is available to blame for my failures or to take credit for my successes. I become my own referee, acting within narrow rules that are upheld or destroyed in an instant depending on a complex relationship of my skills with the relentlessness of gravity. Juggling presents the juggler, though not necessarily the viewer of juggling, with an either/or. It either works or it doesn't. The acquisition of the necessary skills is a satisfying end in itself.

Jugglers content only to practice need not bother much with aesthetics. A comparison of classical music with jazz is revealing. Classical music offers a standard to be attained rather than a ground on which to improvise. Andre Previn clarified this difference in a way that is directly applicable to juggling.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former "the music is always greater than its performance, whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played."

The biggest problem for the judges seated at the long table at the annual championships of the International Juggling Association is the judgment of the

"jazz" context in which the either / ors of juggling are presented. Mastery of technique being equal, what points are to be awarded for the jazz? Uproars about judging are essentially debates about classical and jazz criteria, which cross only in that performers happen to share the same instruments.

Finally, it has often been noted that the act of juggling also bears comparison with the contemplative practices of Zen. In Zen as in juggling, the goal is to exclude both past and future to allow total attention to an elusive present. The juggler progresses from present to present until the totality of that present literally collapses. Upon failure, temporal reality reasserts itself in an instant that can be denied by no one.

Juggling is a rejection of reality through the creation of an eternal present, whether the creation lasts for seconds, minutes or, for the fortunate few, hours.

Why do I juggle? Perhaps I should duplicate these musings on a very small card and offer it to the curious few who bother to ask why I am in the gym doing whatever it is they see me attempting to do. Or, perhaps not. As a listener was advised upon asking Fats Waller for a definition jazz, "If you gotta ask what jazz is, you'll never know."

Andre Previn quotation from: Bloomsbury Dictionary of Quotations. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Limited, 1987, p. 275.

Duane Starcher joined the ranks of the retired in the fall of 1994 and no longer has any believable excuses for not learning to juggle five clubs. He lives in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada.