Flit Lit

From the arts-sports [like ice-dance] I took heart [about my possible triviality]. They proved that creativity is indivisible. The skaters, the divers and the gymnasts reminded me that what I read in books, saw in pictures and heard in music had all started in a fundamental human compulsion to give dynamism shape. […] There are moments in Shakespeare when he sets three or four ideas all travelling at once through each other’s trajectories. He couldn’t have been thinking of Bach, who wasn’t born yet. But he might well have been thinking of a juggler he stopped to watch on the way to work. — from “Souls on Ice: Torvill and Dean”, Postscript (ii), in Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James, Picador 2001.

Jonglietzsche


Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

“Jonglietzsche” is a portmanteau of German Jongleur / jonglieren, “juggler, juggling”, and the surname of core counter-cultural philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Jongleur is pronounced something like “zhawngloer”, as in French.

Jug is the Drug

In “The Gems of Rebbuqqa”, I interrogated notions around the concept of priestesses who permanently juggle three giant eye-like gems, a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald, atop a sandstone altar. In “The Schismatarch” (forthcoming), I will interrogate notions around the concept of a Himalayan sect that believes this universe is one of three juggled by a god called Nganāma. Each of these universes contains a smaller Nganāma who juggles three dwarf universes; et sic ad infinitum. Moreover, the Nganāma juggling our universe sits in a larger universe, one of three juggled by a giant Nganāma in a larger universe still, which is one of three on a higher plane; et sic ad infinitum. The cosmology of the Nganāma-sect is fractal: ut supra, sic infra: as above, so below. Here are some animated gifs inspired by these two stories and based on juggled eye-gem fractals.

A fractal of three juggled blue eyes

 A fractal comprising three juggled eyes

A fractal of three sets of three juggled eyes

A fractal comprising three sets of three sets (sic) of three juggled eyes

A fractal based on juggled eyeballs

A fractal of three juggled eyes, in front of each of which three more eyes are juggled

A fractal of 27 juggled eyes