the timboucher experience

It might sound stupid, but juggling has made me understand all art. Either that or I just happened to be juggling at that point in my life when my understanding of the arts and how they all fit together and what they are all for really began to coalesce. Let me try to explain.

I began juggling in my basement bedroom in Seattle, stoned and drunk with my girlfriend at the time – the one who soon would run away to California to re-join her hippy circus friend, and whom I would but a few months later foolishly rush after into my own personal Hell-mouth. Picasso had his Blue Period. That old guy playing guitar, then his Rose Period with paintings of something called saltimbanques, I remember vaguely from art history classes before I dropped out of school. Tumblers, acrobats, jugglers, those who wore the motley. Fools, that is. Professional ones. Quasi-professional ones.

I suppose I come from a long line of fools, or so I’d like to imagine. As a young child, my mother would do clowning with us, puppetry, painting. My dad played music, worked for the church and we never had enough money. Kids have no concepts of grand traditions of anything, no understanding of broad aesthetic or spiritual trends which carry across time and all cultures. Growing into manhood, I’ve set my sites on actively reclaiming those traditions and understanding them from the inside out.

Juggling stoned is easier, for some reason. I think its because you don’t care as much if you drop balls or clubs or whatever you’re working with. You’re more relaxed, and you’re in a more imprintable state. I don’t necessarily advise marijuana use across the board and have definitely seen firsthand certain negative psychological consequences of it, but that’s how I learned to juggle. High out of my mind. And that’s how I spent my “lost month” in California, day in and day out. Struggling as what I would years later find out is called a “first of May.” A newbie in a circus troupe. Because the first of May is when tenting season formally begins, when troupes dormant or confined to one venue during the winter months venture forth in their covered wagons on tour. Okay, they don’t always have covered wagons. But I did move down there on the first of May, and I was treated as a complete and total outsider during my stint with the three hippy circuses which called my home their headquarters.

My girl – she was never “my girl” - told me matter-of-factly after a few miserable weeks down there, “Look, you’re going to have to learn some kind of special circus skill if you’re going to live here.” My juggling was never good enough back then. Three balls, that was it. I started learning clubs. I thought at the time that my regular purchasing of food and beer which was consumed by the entire household with no compensation should have counted as my special skill…

It never did, though one time a beautiful Spanish girl traveling in a bus with one of the troupes said something to my girl (she was never mine), “Are you guys together?” My girl made some kind of defeated gesture as response, hanging me out to dry in front of everybody, infuriating me.

“Because,” the beautiful Spanish girl (an acrobat maybe? I’m not sure…) continued, “You guys always have beer and that costs money.” I liked where she was going, but she trailed off leaving the implication hanging in the air. I should have gone for her instead.

I left California, but I kept juggling. From juggling I began to catch glimpses of the possible integration of the body and mind into what might be described as a harmonious programmable continuum. My first set of three balls were made by that girl in California and sent to me in the mail before I went down to join her, the Fool’s Path. They were filled with bird seed and are with me still in a bag or drawer somewhere. When I left town, I took with me her nicer set of three balls as well as kind of a final “fuck you.” I was going to take her book about different prescription pills and their effects too, but knew she would be really genuinely pissed about that. I gained my first set of clubs as a gift from an old-time Baltimore radical who ran briefly a juggling club out of the Hampden Rec Center in Roosevelt Park. I borrowed a set of clubs from him enough times that one day he offered to let me keep an older more beat up set if I agreed to fix them where they were broken and re-wrap them which I did. Those clubs I still have and carry with me when I leave town for any length of time. I had, for a while, the letters U, S, and A written in electrical tape, one on each.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes something to the effect of, “Art is the revelation of the Godhead in the works of man.” Juggling, I’ve always thought, is a form of praising God. If you just look at it from the posture, the physical actions: you stand there – outside usually in the sunlight – with your arms uplifted, often a smile on your face (if you’re not dropping them constantly) and sometimes stoned out of your mind. Praising God, creating and reveling in a state of wonder, the works of a man’s body functioning in harmony with natural physical forces to make something amazing happen – even if only for a second.

Juggling consists of patterns and cycles of motion, precision and poetry. Equipoise, deftness, dexterity, mastery of not just one’s physical body, but of the physical body’s interaction with objects. Little kids have come up to me while juggling in the park, “Could you juggle rattlesnakes?” they ask me. “Could you juggle tarantulas?” I answer yes to most of the items on their list, though with the stipulation usually that it would be “really hard” or “really dangerous” to juggle baby crocodiles and things of that nature. Even dogs like juggling. I used to perform for them at the doggie daycare places I’ve worked at. It’s something about the way the eye works, the way animal perceptual systems work. Our brains are designed to seek motion. Motion has meaning. Motion carries danger, changes in the herd, available food supplies, reproductive possibilities. Objects glinting in the sunlight catch the eye, automatically hypnotizing if the patterns and timing are right, holding the eyes and minds of the beholder in a state of aesthetic arrest until the first ball or club or tarantula is dropped.

Juggling has made me a better painter, more aware of the physicality of my brush-strokes, the certainty of mark-making broken down in comparison to the heft one must produce to get a quick low circus-style double spin out of a fat club. Juggling has made me a better musician, able to count out time in broad physical strokes, spins that take a certain amount of time because of the height of their arc, starts and stops coordinated with other actors, partner juggling. In the old days, I’ve read, jongleurs – a French term for something in between a juggler and a minstrel – would create visible music. Small troupes would perform in the marketplace, mixed jugglers and accompanists, troubadours, buskers, epic poets. Troubadour, from the French “to find;” busker, from the French, “to seek.” What were they trying to find? What were they looking for? Donations from passersby? Some poetic ideal of Love and Beauty? The secret to all arts… it’s there somewhere, hidden, waiting to be revealed. But the Tao that can be put into words is not the true Tao. And so around and around we go.

• Partner Juggling, Notes
• Academic Painting
• An Internet for Smart Objects
• Hand-Stands In The Park
• Living forces of creative intelligence