I drove past a young man in a parking lot juggling what appeared to be crescent wrenches, three or four of them, I think. I regret not stopping but I had groceries melting on the back seat. He had attracted an audience of a dozen or so. Juggling is a metaphor for everything I’m unable to do, whatever requires grace and coordination – dancing, for instance, and writing poetry. I’ve never known athletic envy. I don’t admire the guy who can catch a ball but I often wished I was the the guy on Ed Sullivan who juggled plates, spinning one on the end of a stick. The graceless-looking W.C. Fields was a gifted juggler. Joseph Epstein, I’m told, juggles. William Hazlitt celebrated “The Indian Jugglers” while acknowledging his own sense of inadequacy:
“The hearing
a speech in Parliament, drawled or stammered out by the Honourable Member or
the Noble Lord, the ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one
could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good
opinion of myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed
of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this! Nothing. What
have I been doing all my life! Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for
all my labour and pains! Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water
into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to
prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark,
and not finding them?”
Richard
Wilbur closes “Juggler” (Ceremony and
Other Poems, 1950) with this stanza, a tribute to the purest form of art
for art’s sake:
“If the
juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust
again, if the table starts to drop
Through the
daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on
the table top,
For him we
batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world’s weight.”
1 comment:
In my 4th grade history curriculum we have a unit on the Gilded Age which talks briefly about vaudeville. I always use the opportunity to show my class the clip of Fields' juggling that you include here. Over the years, it's gotten harder to impress even ten year old kids, but after watching the Great Man balance a stick on his toe, flip it in the air, and catch the other end of the stick with his other foot, they're always suitably impressed.
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