BLAUGUSTINE / BACK TO ARCHIVE

April 28, 2006

DID SOMEONE SAY THIS WAS EASY?

Anyway it was wonderful and I'm going back next week. Imagine a huge wooden-floored room under the high arched ceiling of a converted church, coloured balls and other objects flying in dazzling patterns up into the air and down into the hands of a motley crew of people at various stages of juggling expertise and among them yours truly at stage precisely zero. Never mind, I will practice and next time may even be able to visualise a figure eight lying on its side. Can you do it? Visualise an 8 lying on its side. Now throw two balls in that shape. You couldn't do it, right? Neither could I for the simple reason that I was visualising a 3-dimensional eight when it was meant to be 2-dimensional. Well, that and other mistakes. But everyone was so helpful and I discovered that there is a whole world I was unaware of - jugglers world, not unlike bloggers world, where ordinary people do extraordinary things simply and effortlessly and are extremely friendly. The concentration is absolute and yet easy-going. What a fantastic way to get the brain to by-pass reasoning and go into Zen-mode. I never noticed time passing or the ache in my back from picking up and dropping balls a zillion times and suddenly it was eleven-thirty PM.

Today I went to the Oddballs shop in Camden Lock (another mini-universe, frequented by unicyclists and skateboarders and fire-eaters, as well as a novice juggler) and bought three squashy balls, a red, a blue and a gold.

Juggling figure 8

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April 27, 2006

BLOGIVERSARY DAY

Three years since I started this blog. Let the tributes pour in. I am going to my first juggling class tonight.

Augustine the juggler.

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April 16, 2006

A GOOD DAY FOR JUGGLING

A happy Easter and/or Springtime to you. May golden slumbers fill your eyes and smiles awake you when you rise. I was so inspired by that video of Chris Bliss juggling to Abbey Road that I have decided to take juggling lessons. Yes really. I've been practicing with a couple of apples and they're a bit bruised but I will improve enough to suit my limited ambition in this field. All I want is to be able to juggle 3 balls to music, for my own pleasure. I can't explain why I find it so thrilling - it's like freeing the mind from the body and the body from the mind by the simple process of paying attention to airborne balls.

(I've pasted removed the video from here so as not to overcrowd the page).

Chris Bliss

I'd never heard of Chris Bliss so I did some Googling and found that not only is he a fine juggler, comedian and writer but also a man of praiseworthy goals: listen to this interview in which he describes his excellent project regarding the Bill of Rights (all you Yanks out there, please take note).  What an interesting discovery, all because I followed the trail of some bouncing balls. Hey, Chris Bliss, if you ever happen to follow links that will lead you here, hello! I was in Egypt too in a previous life. But I'm quite normal in this one. ( See Luxor Journal).

I hear that at least one visitor hasn't been able to leave comments here since I changed computers - can you let me know by email if that's also the case for you and if so, what browser are you using?

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April 14, 2006

A GOOD FRIDAY FOR MEDITATING

I'd like you to join me in a bit of philosophical wandering off the beaten track, temporarily suspending habitual styles of belief or disbelief. Consider the following paragraphs slowly, and naively, if possible:

1. Man is a suffering creature. At all stages and ages of his short existence he suffers calvaries - inwardly or outwardly, innocent or guilty - he is tormented, humiliated, used, abused, crucified. Physically, mentally, spiritually - literally or metaphorically, we are afflicted in at least one of those categories many times during our lives and the lives of those near to us.

2. Around 2006 years ago a man named Yeshua, said to be God's son, is condemned to undergo a calvary ( condensed version of the sufferings of humankind ?) each step of which is remembered and re-enacted by some as the Stations of the Cross.

Jesus of Nazareth3. Why would God, said to have created Man in his own image, make creatures so vulnerable to suffering? Why would he do that? Those endless crosses lined up ad infinitum, our names written on them, why would he permit such a wasteland of desolation? And if he ordered his son to undergo the same suffering as all humankind, as a lesson to us, what was that lesson exactly?

(Please refrain from quoting or thinking doctrinally/theologically. We are  trying to meditate theo-illogically)

4. Evil is an absence, an absence of good. Something missing. Suffering attempts to chase good away. If I make someone (or myself) suffer, I am threatening good. To cause suffering is to try and destroy the ability of good to regenerate itself. The more I attack you or myself, the harder I am yanking at the roots of good in us.

5. So was Yeshua being tested as the guinea pig for the rest of us, to see if suffering could empty him of good or if he would rise up, Phoenix, out of the fire?

6.  "In the Beginning was the Word..." In what language?  What word in what language did God speak in the Beginning? I think it was a language of notes, musical sounds. God sang those notes and they were instantly translated into numbers and patterns: whoosh! Look at it in speeded up motion and it makes perfect sense - the galaxies, the atoms, the molecules, the this and the that, coming together and evolving into life as we currently perceive it, all formed out of those original divine musical sounds.

7. At some point in the process the Creator decides that Man will be "made in his image". So there has to be some sort of cosmic mirror for God to look into. Very interesting: God can't make a duplicate of himself so he uses a mirror image. An alias. Like those aliases on our computers (on the Mac anyway). The Alias is not the original but it stands for the original. Yeshua is an Alias for God. We are aliases for Yeshua?

8. Wait a minute: a mirror image is the reversed reflection of the original. So if we are "the likeness of God" we must be back-to-front, facing the wrong way? This is tricky. Got to illustrate it. If we're living inside a mirror, then everything we see is only virtual reality. The Real World isn't here, it's on that other side which is looking at us. "My kingdom is not of this world"? This is beginning, but only beginning, to make theo-illogical sense.

Just chanced upon this most wonderfully fitting conclusion. The link comes from Wandering Willow . You need 4 minutes and 27 seconds to watch this extraordinary video and you'll want to replay it. This is how I imagine the universe came into being. Thank you thank you, Chris Bliss.

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April 13, 2006

IN WITH THE INTEL-IGENTSIA

I'm out of the woods, I've conquered the beast. The transfer from Bad Mac Intel to Good Mac Intel was accomplished almost painlessly. However, the secure wiping of my personal files from the memory of Bad Mac was an operation which required approximately twelve hours of intense nightwatchfulness. All done now. Let them come and take away malfunctioning amnesiac Bad Mac, the sooner the better.

For a rewarding break I went to hear The Wasteland read by Roger Lloyd Pack at the literary café around the corner, a wonderful book-lined place where I often happily avoid doing whatever I should be doing instead. I've never heard T.S. Eliot's tour de force spoken aloud before and it was a revelation to follow its nuances and cadences and accents interpreted by this very fine actor. The burnished words swirled around the tightly packed room while my pen raced across the paper, trying to capture their light and darkness in the speaker's face. Not having researched Eliot's multi-faceted sources or fully understanding his meaning didn't detract one bit from my communion with the poem. Sometimes I wonder if the need to know, to figure out, to get information, isn't a barrier to some other kind of understanding: that which surpasseth all.

Roger Lloyd Pack reading "The Wasteland".

I'll be back with the autobiography continuation shortly. By the way, I've added a little animation to the header of the graphic novel page. Another thing I'm waaaay behind with. Where can I get an injection of that thing which drives some people to feats of self-discipline and self-denial worthy of Olympic athletes and nuns/monks?

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April 7, 2006

APPLE INTEL SORRY SAGA UPDATE

The replacement iMac has just been delivered. Should I celebrate or wait until the Bad has changed into Good? I have five days (hopefully not including the weekend) to perform the alchemical transformation. Then they'll come to take away the baddie, cleared of all my good stuff. Wouldn't it be nice if reality was like that? Transform yourself and the whole planet in five days from bad to good, from malfunctioning to olympic, from all the things you're not to all the things you wanna be? Risky, obviously.

from Bad to Good

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April 5, 2006

RETURNING

Even a slowed-down, limping, erratic Dreamweaver is a piece of cake compared to the fiendish shenanigans involved with entering a simple post on Blogger. Maybe it's just me and whatever's going on in my cosmic starsoup but I just cannot cope with it. How does everybody do it? My post looks more or less okay on the preview page then everything goes haywire once it's published. None of my paragraph spaces appear, it's all squeezed together, I have to toggle back and forth endlesly betwen Edit, Draft, Preview, Upload Pictures, Publish, Re-publish, then start all over again umpteen times when it inevitably goes wrong. No no no! I'm not getting into html, no way. Forget all I said about starting up a Blogger blog. I'm staying home, right here. 

April 2, 2006

tiny Mickey NEW MICKEY MOUSE BLOG

Disregard this post.

Well I've signed up with Blogger.com for posting the continuation of The Burial of Mickey Mouse. It is here and the Feed address, if you're interested, looks like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBurialOfMickeyMouse

Now if for some unforeseen or foreseen technical reason your familiar Blaugustine should vanish from cyberspace again, there's always that Blogger space to run to. Right at this moment there's naught but an introduction over there but it's a start. I have to get used to a completely different way of doing things.

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April 1, 2006

NOBODY'S FOOL

April Fool's day is supposed to be cheerful and jokey so, just for today, I'll stop moaning about computer nightmares and offer a little light entertainment in comic strip form. The speech bubbles arose spontaneously from letting one word suggest another and the images are taken from an earlier series posted here .

Free Associating

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