2. Soundwaves of juggling

JUGGLING -book

Starting with an old metaphor: when a knight is knighted by the queen, nothing in the person being knighted changes in that moment. There is nothing knightly within that person, they are a knight only because we believe they are a knight. Just as there is nothing inherently queenly about the queen.

I claimed in the previous post that Juggling is a unique thing, that is, if we believe it is. I mean, juggling is a 'thing' overall only if we believe it is. Like anything else we do or have together, like money, law, football, it almost exclusively exists in our common understanding, in our beliefs. One way to put it would be to say there is no such thing as juggling, which would be equally true as my statement that juggling is unique.  

Knowledge of a thing is a belief; we have a belief that we know what that thing is. When we see a thing, we then recognise it as something we know. We believe there is a thing called football and then we know what football is when we see it. We believe there is a thing called music, we recognise it when we hear it. But sometimes we hear music where music was not intended to be, even in silence.  

Two separate actions for juggling are doing and seeing. What we get with these actions are:

1.       Knowingly doing juggling and knowingly seeing juggling

2.       Knowingly doing juggling and unknowingly seeing juggling

3.       Unknowingly doing juggling and knowingly seeing juggling

4.       Unknowingly doing juggling, unknowingly seeing juggling

The first one is the assumed basic set up; what is done as juggling and what we understand and commonly agree on being juggling. Any context; sports juggling, hobby, art. A juggler juggles and someone sees juggling.

The second scenario seems familiar as well; juggler might make a juggling piece, which includes multiple every-day objects, or no objects, the performer identifies themselves as a juggler and believes that their performance is juggling, but nevertheless, somebody seeing the performance might be left thinking they’ve seen something different, a performance art piece for example. In another scenario, someone might be exploring various objects and their qualities in a park for their own pleasure, again identifying themselves as a juggler, but people seeing them might not recognise them as jugglers or receive their actions as juggling.

Third; a scenario where juggling is not presented as juggling, but is seen as juggling, is also surprisingly common. A list of scenarios is of course subjective, but there are many common examples amongst jugglers; in a performance someone moving an object (chairs, cloths, ropes, dishes etc.) on stage could be perceived as juggling. Examples outside the performance context include rhythmic gymnasts doing feats with any object, hair plaiting (patterns), pin ball game, bar tending (flair), or even an otter playing with stones or a bear manoeuvring a stick, etc. The list is endless.

There is juggling thinking, a way of recognizing juggling, even where there is no deliberate juggling. So, outside the deliberate juggling that we do as jugglers, there are also non-juggling actions that are seen as juggling, because of the deliberate juggling we’ve done, or seeing it as juggling is enabled by the existing juggling. As juggling expands from its initial understanding, and begins a life in other contexts, it becomes possible to see juggling in new places too. Things that would not have been seen as juggling in the past, might now be common in juggling. Equally, things that might have fallen under the umbrella of juggling in the past, might now be seen as flow -art or something else. For a single action, there are many definitions, and multiple ways to see them, and they constantly evolve.

Back to the knight, although nothing in them changes in the moment of knighting, they have probably in the past behaved in a manner that we culturally might perceive as knightly. We have learnt to perceive certain actions as knightly, or knighthood worthy. The scope of those actions changes over time. What used to be regarded as knightly in the Middle Ages, might now be seen as purely sexist and barbaric. What might have been seen as a urinal in the past, might now be regarded (also) as high art (Duchamp 1919). Things are context and time related. Revolutionary thoughts are revolutionary only within the framework they're in.

This brings us of course to number 4, unknowingly doing juggling, unknowingly seeing it. Of all the action combinations, this is the most puzzling one, but a quite exciting one too. Could there also be juggling remote from the current cultural understanding of juggling? Or even further, something so inherently juggling-like, that it would be beyond the cultural beliefs, something like the 'metaphysics of juggling'. The age-old philosophical question is, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to listen, does it make a sound? If somebody juggles, but nobody, not the do-er or the see-er understands it as such, could it still be juggling? Depends how you define sound, depends how you define juggling. In my understanding, the tree certainly makes a sound, there are soundwaves in the air whether a human being is listening it or not. So, what are the soundwaves of juggling? I don’t know yet, but I think its worth trying to find out.  

ps: This post was written in a residency at Cirko - Centre for new circus in Helsinki. Thank you Cirko!