From and Emptiness in Art

One of the major obstacles to seeing martial arts as theater and religion is that North Asia and the West have different aesthetic dichotomies.  The West's dichotomies became international during the 20th century, so we often refer to those dichotomies as "modern," rather than Western.*  

The primary aesthetic dichotomy in the West is form and function; in North Asia it is form and emptiness.  The difference is visceral; one is a tool, the other is a cloud.  

Form and function is the notion that there is an organic reciprocal feedback loop between form and function.  Thus, the utility of an object determines its form.  And form changes as utility changes.  The need for an object to perform with variation creates variation in form.

But if we are looking at a "form" for which there are countless affordances, this dichotomy is not a good fit. 

For instance we can look at the use of self-mortification by Tangki in Taiwan and South East Asia. (YouTube Video by Fabian C. Graham)(pay-option by Margret Chen)  Why are they doing it? What is the purpose?  What is the meaning? If that question uses the form and function dichotomy, then we will want to know the function specifically and we will keep looking at the form expecting it to fill that function. But those explanations are often trivial or dismissive, or perhaps romantically reverent.  But that approach makes the Tangki's look crazy or stupid.  

If one asks the same question about purpose and meaning but framed by the aesthetic notion of form and emptiness, the results are quite different. The form is simply empty by default, we don't ask "what is its utility?" we ask, "what kind of meanings and purposes could it possibly fill?"  We look at the meanings all together. Physiology, warfare, entertainment, healing, magical trance---some of it is just labeling, some of it is a weak association which ties it to other cultural forms with stronger resonance, some of it is felt, some of it is fantasy, some of it is emotional, some of it is indeed rational functionality.  But it isn't utility that defines it.  It is defined by it's affordances, preferably infinite affordances, unbounded purposes. This is what the aesthetic of form and emptiness does to art and expression.

If we look at the work of Monet, we see his intentions; he wanted to accurately represent light and was willing to give up figurative accuracy to achieve a specific type of utility. It is utterly clear. It was made with form and function in mind, so it follows that logic.

If we look at his work with the form and emptiness dichotomy in mind, we see something different.  There is automatically religious resonance there--the light of god--nostalgia for farm life and all that implies politically, this water invokes water spirits (hidden nagas), as fengshui the watery image cools the room, and the light's reflections slice through psychic demons or conflicting emotions.

Try looking at form as just form, with no content.  Content can be infinite and utterly transcend form.

Now try thinking about martial arts this way.  

__________________________

Some credit goes to Sophie Volpp for getting me thinking along these lines.

Hat tip to Douglas Farrer, for the Margret Chan article linked above, and for his discussion of great martial arts movements taught with the wrong application: he calls it "captivation," being stuck in broken logic.  

And thanks to Fabian C. Graham, who has been shooting fantastic documentary footage of Chinese rituals (I met him at the Daoist Conference in Los Angeles in 2008, where he showed a film about how to open the eyes of a god.)

*Note: I'm making an argument about characteristics of culture, not the outer edges of what subgroups or individuals might be thinking.

Cardiff-Amsterdam

A week ago I arrived in Cardiff, Wales, UK, for the first Martial Arts Studies Conference.  I went straight from there to teaching a two day workshop in Amsterdam with Alex Boyd.  Over the next week I hope to have some time for reflection.  Until then, here are some undigested bits of excitement.

Paul Bowman deserves enormous credit for organizing the conference, and doing a wonderful job of it.  I admit, I worried beforehand that we might have disagreements, but Paul gets my highest praise:  He is the kind of guy one can disagree with and feel the bonds of sworn-brotherhood grow deeper.  His character, thus set the tone for the entire conference.  This is the first academic conference I have attended where everyone present had the ability to kick me in the head.

This is a dream network.

I taught in Amsterdam at a converted shipyard with a vegetarian restaurant and artist studios, will post a video.  The students taking the workshop practice Lishi, a Chinese Daoist collection of martial movement and ideas--I'll post more on it later.  It is very worth researching.  It is connected to Daoist thunder rituals and was brought to the UK in the 1920's, so it is a window into the past as well.  Some excellent training, and orthodox Daoyin.  They were very open to what I have to share, it is a good fit.  (And Alex Boyd is a great teacher.)

Snibits:

Martial Arts Studies--will it become a discipline or not, how about an "indiscipline?"  I think the point here is that martial arts stretches the boundaries of many categories, and at the moment is in need of some working definitions.

Considerations of authenticity must be included in the definition of martial arts.

There is much support for the notion that dance and acting were closely related to western martial traditions. Dueling was expected to up hold standards of beauty.

Do we need a theory of history?  How do we know what questions to investigate?  Is it enough to follow what is intreging?  Probably not, we need to consider metaphors, and make lists of differing views, perspectives and conditions.  Yes, theory is dangerous, it can obscure or become an obsession.  Theory is powerful, we need to be able to put it down, it should not become part of our arm.  Sometimes great questions seem to come from nowhere.  

There are Japanese Kata, that tell stories.  I didn't know that before, a new subject to investigate.

We need more people from the "outer edge," (that's the sharpest bit of the sword).  So much of the work on Martial Arts Studies up until now has been outside of academia, those people need to be included and rewarded.  I suspect this field is going to explode now because there are people out there who have been sitting on research for more than 30 years.  Up until now, it has been career suicide for academics to seriously take up the study of Martial Arts.  The commercial world in film, religion, and sports is a huge potential source of funding and interest.  

Open minded enthusiasts can accomplish a lot.

Project:  Understanding what sovereignty is by looking at differences in notions of individual self-defense.  

Shiva, lord of the dance, is the destroyer of illusion.  In the South Asian world view, dance is closely related to destructive power (perhaps).  

"One should avoid making sweeping generalization."--a view held by people who don't seem to notice that they are in the habit of making sweeping generalizations.  Better, in my view, to do it, and know you are doing it.  It makes it easier to take it back later.  

Bruce Lee was defiantly killed by talismanic magic.

Plate steal armor was easy to move in, do flips and rolls, hop fences, climb, swing, and wrestle in.  It just requires wearing it a lot--some wise men tested this out.  I hope this means that we stop seeing people move like stiff robots when they wear armor in the movies.  And I hope we see more people wearing plate steal armor to the movies, driving google-cars and drinking coffee at Starbucks.

Zhang Sanfeng texted me several times during the conference to clarify his positions.

Anthropology has changed from representing (peoples, events, milieus) to making.  This was obvious when I was in college, and partially accounts for me dropping out.  

Martial arts is a very potent tool for identity transformation.  This position was promoted particularly by women at the conference, but I think there is a consensus

The desexualization of confined spaces.

One can not teach self-defense/counter-assault scenarios without acting, and the better the acting is--the better the training will be. 

Theory

Experience and theory talk to each other.  New experience (hopefully) causes theory to be either re-worked or thrown out and replaced by new theory, which prompts experiments which in turn lead to new experiences.  

However, language is not very good at communicating experience.  There are may places where language can fail us.  I have the sense that my body-mind-experience has real limits, but where they are is often unknown. Those limits are sometimes presumed based on what I can remember, or think I can remember, of my own experience, they may even be based on what I've heard about my potential.  So I have limits but I don't know what they are.

Language can be burdensome.  

So there is experience (mixed with uncertainty), and there is a portion of that experience which can be felt as a kind of knowing.  And that knowing can be translated into language as some sort of metaphor, often metaphors on top of metaphors.  Some of those metaphors are unconscious.  Some are just useful because they point to some pivotal aspect of experience, but may otherwise be misleading. And these metaphors are put together into theories we then use to formulate experiments to test and replicate our experiences, and to share with others.  

If we could simply and effectively demonstrate and describe the experiments for replicating an experience we could, theoretically, by pass the need for theory.  But experience is uncertain, metaphors are imperfect, and experiments have artificial boundaries, so nature has stuck us with a never ending conversation between theory and practice.

So always approach theory with doubt.  There probably is another way to solve the problem, whatever it happens to be, no matter how insistant your teacher is about a particular method or your lineage is about a particular way of stating things.

Which seems like a good enough intro to this video which attempts to answer the question, why do we have a brain?  There is a funny joke about 2 minutes in.   

Update on 2012-12-05 00:42 by Scott Park Phillips

I wrote this a week ago, and at that time I was adding and editing a fragment I had written a month ago.  It's pretty abstract, no?  But it shows how deep into it I am.  I'm going to add an example of what I'm talking about but the reason I didn't put an example in the heart of the article is that there are countless examples, the conversation between theory and praxis is my food and drink.  This is the difference between gongfu and true art.

Example:  Slowly lift your arm, emptying what is inside the finger tips (fluid?) into the next part of the finger, and then the next, and then into the palm and then past the wrist into the forearm, elbow, shoulder, chest (take a couple of minutes to do this)...Now repeat the exercise with an object in your hand (use a soft grip), use a sword perhaps, or a golf ball.  Ok, now you have an experience.  What is happening?  Do you have a test for your explanation?  Why does the sword behave like fluid?  Is it because we are or aren't dealing with fluid in the first place?  Or is it that our mind reorganizes periperceptual space by imagining fluid density outside of our bodies?  Because we started in water perhaps?  If you can do it with a sword can you do it with a person?  Can you do fast?  Can you do it unconsciously?  Automatically?  How is that possible?  Why is this different than the way I normally pick up a book or push my friend out of line at Starbucks?  How?

Yin Yang

I wouldn't be a martial artist at all if I didn't love the "doi!" moments where I hit my self-on the forehead because I've just realized how wrongly I've been practicing for x number of years.  That's because those moments are transitions to new freedoms.  

Yinyang theory is among the most basic aspects of North Asian cosmology so I'm not going t go into it here because most of my readers already know it.

What got me excited is that I suddenly came to understand the yin and yang meridians in a way I never had before.  Or rather, I put together a bunch of discrete experiences into a coherent whole.  So I'll just make a list.

Zhang Xuexin taught that qi rises up the meridians on the insides and back of the legs, then moves to the yang meridians coming up the the back over the head and out along the tan side of the arms, and then comes from the palms inward along the yin meridians of the arms and down the face and then down the front of the body and then, moves down the yang meridians of legs which are on the outside edges and along the front.  Kumar Frantzis taught the same thing.  And generally this is part of any heaven-earth qigong series.  

Liu Ming expained that meridian flow, like the flow of qi in meditation, happens by itself, of its own accord, effort only inhibits it.

Markus Brinkman, on his roof in Taiwan, explained and demonstrated channel theory as it applies to martial arts using a finger counting system.  He was astonished at how fast I picked it up.  I puzzled on it for awhile and did a bunch of experiments.  The idea is that force is generated, defused/transformed and transmitted along specific groups of meridians in sequence.  The theory is in this book: Applied Channel Theory in Chinese Medicine Wang Ju-Yi's Lectures on Channel Therapeutics. 

I figured out through my own experiments that the yang meridians are better for defense and yin meridians are better for attacking.  In the language of tai chi, pengjin takes force on the yang meridians, jijin issues force via the yin meridians.  A corollary for this is that yin is gathered when our structure is organized towards the inside edge of the feet, yang is gathered when our structure is organized towards the outside edge of the feet.  

In an attempt to reduce all structural power (jin/jing) in my body I figured out that I could put my foot down during baguazhang walking as if it were a vacuum cleaner, allowing qi to draw inward as my foot takes weight. 

George Xu said to me sometime in the last year, "The yin and yang meridians have different jobs."

Anyway, all this fit together for me recently.  All these things have to happen at once --simultaneously and continuously.  Without this piece, we can not achieve an 'I know you, you don't know me,' situation.  Without the crystal clear differentiation of the roles of the yin and yang meridians, the dantian can not do its job of meeting our opponent before our mass does.  

It wasn't that hard to say, and no doubt, I believed many times over the years that I understood it intellectually and physically.  But until it was happening in my body under the pressure of testing and resistance, it was just words.  

There are so many ways to be wrong, it feels good to get a few more of them out of the way.

• For more background read this article on making a sandwich.  Or for tai chi structure theory read this. For the concept and rationale of reducing jing/jin read here.

What the Heck Does Relax Mean?

One of the things I love about teaching beginners is that they ask the most basic and obvious questions, and I get stumped.

What does relaxation mean? It's being touted from here to Peoria as the end all and be all-- the key to awesomeness in every endeavor under the sun or moon.  But does anyone know what it means?  My sister, who teaches maximum high speed swimming says, "The more relaxed, the better."  I talked to an Olympic weightlifter who says that when he lifts he imagines that there is a video camera framing only his face and neck.  As he is lifting an enormous weight he tries not to show any evidence of it on the video.

This raises another question, "How do we test for relaxation?"  By the way, if I was to teach Olympic weightlifting I would have people lift weights while standing up in a small boat on the ocean--any moment of stiffness and over you go...

So, to be an internal martial artist you have to test, a lot.  I suppose progress in martial arts could be measured by the types of testing one does.  First structure tests, then liveliness tests, then emptiness tests.  Is your structure good in every direction and in every posture?  Okay, then is your intention correct in every movement?  Okay then, have you completely discarded all evidence of structure and made all intent outside the body?

Yeah, I know I lost a few of you there but you'll get this next part.  If I were forced to define relaxation I would say it is an order of phenomena:  Body mass completely quiet, mind wild and aware-- no second thoughts, no contradictions, no social inhibitions, no identity to cling too, only clouds, rocks and water!

Lately my ideas about internal martial arts have become so simple.  I shrink, I expand, I turn off all my impulses, and glory in my original nature.  I am clumsy, vulnerable, weak, and fat.  The layers and lumps of tension float off of me and on to the ocean waves where they join the dolphins and seals in their savage hunt.

Perhaps I only write this blog for myself, like an insurance policy so I won't forget, so I won't endlessly loop.  What I am about to say is so obvious you probably shouldn't read it.

Relaxation is easy to define, it is the absence of stress or tension.   Probably the greatest source of tension, day to day, minute to minute, is social.  I just think about being in a meeting at my old job, or what the school board thinks about martial arts, and zap, the tension bites me.  It grabs, it pulls, it twists, it concentrates, numbs, grinds, and it tries to find a home under my skin! Walk into a room with people in it and zap, the tension is there, instantly.

During every injury I've ever had, my mind was stuck on some social drama.

And thus I have a theory.

Inside each of us there is an animal, I suppose Freud would have called it the Id.  It always moves from the center.  It is un-self-conscious, spontaneous, and asocial.  It is older than old, and younger than young, an ancient seed.  It has no regard for itself, no self-image.  It feels but it doesn't possess.  It knows but it doesn't hold on.

When this ancient seed (Laozi = old seed) finds itself in a social situation it wants to act, it wants to shrink and pounce, to bite, and wiggle, but our social mind overpowers it.  We smile and nod, we speak and gesture, and yet we are hiding what is happening on the inside.  The animal is pushing and pulling.  Because we won't let it out, it bites us from the inside and we call that tension.  We call that stress.

Tension happens when our spontaneous animal mind is out of harmony with our social human mind.  We become the battle ground.  I don't mean to imply that animals don't have social stress, but come on, when the coyote finally catches roadrunner and then starts his own blog we can have that discussion.