Troubled Kids, Performance, and Society

I have a group of elementary school kids I have been teaching on Fridays after school. I turned down the job three times because I know from experience that kids lose their impulse control on Fridays after school and I didn't want to deal with that. But for some reason, I no longer remember, I said "yes" the fourth time they asked me.

Well, they are some of the most difficult kids to teach. They get in fights, which never happens in my classes. They mess with other peoples stuff. They whine too, about hunger and pain, it is like being stuck in a giant nest with 20 hungry crying baby pterradactyls.

But something happened that made me think.

The school asked me to do a performance; to have the kids perform at a parent night. I said, "sure," and I guess because the other acts were things like "kid poetry," they made my group the headliners. The kids were totally not into rehearsing and I really had almost nothing planned. The night of the performance I had no idea even which kids were going to show up.

But 12 kids did show up and they were really excited. I put them on the stage and just had them do stuff that I had tried to teach them over the last 10 weeks. To my complete surprise, it went well, the audience was cheering and kids were like a dream class: They had presence and focus and they were game for whatever I threw at them. One little girl found her way to the front when I was having them do forms and she did it perfectly with a smile and charisma, and all the other kids were following her like their lives depended on it!

My thought is this: How can we give people who are on the fringe, frustrated misfits, or underworld types ways to be at the center of attention.-- I'm thinking "star status," ranks, roles and positions which give them ritual potency. Rappers and hip-hop celebrities come to mind. This is not about good and bad, it is about establishing order.

Ritualized Violence (short)

All martial arts is ritualized violence.

I don't care whether you are invoking a deity, doing friendly push-hands in the park, or training solo for the UFC.

All competitions, matches, duels, and stagings are ritualized violence. All martial arts forms and improvisations are ritualized violence too.

Even standing still in a martial stance for an hour is ritualized violence.

We are the ones who make these rituals, and we are the ones giving these rituals meaning. They function in some way to make us who and what we are.

The Sound of Wen and Wu

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I've been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called "Martial Gods and Magic Swords," by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

"The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!" "PAAHK."

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

Spiraling Bones

All the bones in our bodies have a spiral. The direction of every bone's spiral is pretty much the same on everyone. These are set while we are still in the womb.

Ligaments give the spirals in each bone continuity across joints; from one bone to another. A given bone may spiral more than once while it is growing, but the second spiral will be in the same direction.

A good example of this is the clavicle (collar bone).  You can see that there is a spiral on the left side of the picture where it would attach to the scapula and the rest of the arm.  That spiral rotation is contiguous with the spiral further to the right where the bone would attach to the sternum.  Each of those spirals are actually the same spiral but the one on the arm side grew first, the one on the sternum side happened later.

So if you are trying to figure out how the spiral in you humerus (upper arm) continues through to your sternum, find the first part of the spiral rotating your arm forward/inward, then find the second part of the spiral by bringing your sternum up.

The spirals in our bones are there all the time.  If you know which way each bone spirals,  you can figure out which ways force will transfer through the body most easily.

Internal arts are all designed with these spirals in mind.

Here is a cool website which says something different about human structure, but interesting none-the-less.

Troops

It is not a great idea to let your muscles lead. When muscles get tired they are like vampires craving blood! Like hormone enhanced teenagers looking for trouble. Hungry muscles will take what ever they can get, they want slow-food, fast-food, sugar, even beer--anything that can be turned into blood.

Thus the metaphor used in Daoism and Chinese medicine is that the muscles are the troops, soldiers. They need to be well trained and well cared for.

If the muscles are making decisions, you will have mob rule. Alternately, the internal organs can function as a government, the heart/mind is the Emperor, the lungs are the chief ministers, the spleen is in charge of ordering, logistics, "ways & means", and the liver is the general, in charge of delivering blood to the troops and mustering them to action.

Well trained troops certainly can take some personal initiative. If it is truly in support of the larger cause, personal initiative can make or break a campaign, still the troops are rarely in a position to make good independent decisions so most of the time it is imperative that they simply follow orders.

For an army to function well, every stage of leadership must be clearly delegated and the chain of command exact.

Our body has things called proprioceptors which tell the brain where we are in space, where we are moving, and how fast. Most people's armies are in disarray because their proproceptors --scouts, spies, and communications networks-- are poorly trained. I don't know for sure, but my experience tells me that large numbers of proprioceptors live in the ligaments.

The muscles can move without consulting the ligaments but it is clumsy, the ligaments should lead--calling the troops, the muscles, to order. Once that mechanism is in place and scenarios have been set up and drilled, then the troops can be commanded.

My comments on other blogs and some reruns

I left a few comments on other blogs today.  Two are here on the subject of martial arts metaphors.  Another one (at the bottom) is on self-defense as a way of staying open.

In case you missed these back in August, I'm still rather fond of these four posts on eyes.
Eyes

More about Eyes

Eyes and Baguazhang

Eyes and Baguazhang (cont.)

Does intent matter?

Up until I was in my late twenties in San Francisco, there were many places where I could practice gongfu outside, even when it was raining. Sheltered areas in parks, tunnels, the overhangs of buildings, even thick tree canopies were available as public space. Now there are almost no public sheltered spaces because bums were using them for sleeping.

Our legal system is based on assessing a persons moral intent to do harm. A bum sleeping in the park is intending to sleep. They don't intend to make our quality of life worse, so we don't feel morally right punishing them for the destruction of public space.

Japanese society has no such problem because they don't care about moral intent. They treat crime as a problem of impulse control. This point is beautifully and brilliantly illustrated in the film Doing Time by Sai Yoichi. A guy goes to prison for the crime of wanting to feel the power of firing a pistol. He shoots into a bucket of water alone in a rural area but he gets caught anyway and sent to prison.

Almost all Japanese convictions come with a confession. (Historically in China, all convictions required a confession.) Prison in Japan is not a place to punish, it is an isolated environment where people with weak impulse control get an opportunity to develop it.

If I ever teach high school students again, I think I'll make this film required viewing.

This is important in the realm of martial arts because the pivotal term here, the operative word, is intent or yi in Chinese. Many internal and external martial artists claim that intent is the most important part of practice.



You can have a really clear and strong intent and still not get the results you want. Our good intentions do not necessarily produce good results. Intent can actually be a type of aggression that stops us from experiencing subtlety. Highly focused intent can even make us blind to what is right in front our our faces.

In our legal system we also make a distinction between pre-meditated intent and spontaneous intent.

I'm honestly not sure how to explain the difference between the Chinese term yi and the English term intent, but I thought this little discussion about impulse control might generate some insights.

Note: Yoyogi park, in central Tokyo, has a designated area for people to permanantly camp-out. It is clean and safe, and kind of edgy weird experimental.

Bones

There is a Chinese expression that goes, "You know it so well it is written on your bones." First I should explain where this expression comes from.

In Daoism the quest for immortality is extremely varied and so quite difficult to define; however, a significant factor in immortality is that other people recognize you have become an immortal at the time of your death or sometime after your death. The so called "highest" way to demonstrate becoming an immortal at the moment of death is to "Rise up in broad daylight with your dogs and chicken." Zhang Daoling (the founder of Religious Daoism) did this, as did his wife, his 3 sons and their wives.

Dao Hongjing and Ge Hong, the two most famous alchemists, became immortals simply by hiring a carriage (you know, a taxi) taking a trip out into the wilderness and then "Sending the Carriage Back Empty." There are hundreds of unique (loosely) documented ways of demonstrating the transition to being an immortal. Often when Chinese people died they were put into big ceramic jars in a squatting position. Then, after their skin and organs had fully decomposed their bones were transfered to a smaller jar. It turns out that some immortals were recognized during this transfer of bones because Daoist sacred texts (like the Daodejing for instance) were written on their bones!

You can tell an enormous amount about how someone lived by studying their bones. The shape, density, places of wear, and chemical composition of a persons bones tell a real story. This is the premise of the wonderful Fox T.V. show Bones where a forensic anthropologist and an FBI agent team up to solve crimes by looking at bones. Since my sister is an Archaeologist I sometimes call her up after watching the show to find out if what they did on the show could really happen. Often it can! My sister says she can often tell what kinds of work a person did, or what kind of weapons a person used by looking at their bones.

This got me thinking. It must be possible to tell what kind of martial arts a person was doing by looking at their bones. I want to know if there are people with Taijiquan type bones or Shaolin type bones a thousand years ago. This could be done, and eventually it could be done so well that we could see the entire history of martial arts by region over 3 thousand years!!!

So little is known about our physiology. It is hard to put a percentage on, but if we know more than 10% of what there is to know about physiology I would be surprised. Here is some very cool new research about bones, here too.

...(N)ew research shows that bones release a protein called osteocalcin involved in controlling sugar and fat absorption, thus acting like a hormone....

"Because osteocalcin is secreted by one organ and acts on others, it fits the definition of a hormone, making bones part of the endocrine system..."

What do you have written on your bones?

Master Cat

A long time ago Tiger was awkward and clumsy. Lacking skill he found a great gongfu master and begged him to accept him as a student. This is how he came to study with Master Cat.

Tiger studied and practiced Master Cat's lessons with great diligence until one day, after many years, he believed he was more powerful and more skillful than Master Cat.

Tiger said to Master Cat, "Thank you Shifu, you have taught me all your greatest secrets and now my gongfu is superior to yours, now I'm going to eat you!"

In the time it took Tiger to say these words, Master Cat had scaled a tree and walked out on a branch, "Oh," said Master Cat, "There was one thing I forgot to teach you."

--------------------

I like this story for its cuteness and because it plays on what we think we know about natural ability. Did the tiger really learn all his gongfu from a cat? It makes sense to me.

But the story also takes for granted the paranoid old master. I have felt that fear of giving away gongfu secrets lurking there in even the most open and generous masters.

Even as we can feel Daoist inspiration surging through the internal martial arts, nudging us to let go of fear as a driving force in our quest for power--the lingering mythic fear of the Mongols, the Qing Dynasty, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, WWII, the Purges, the Great Leap, the Re-education camps....haunts our movements and our practice.

Self Defense (Not)!

Of course, self-defense is not a traditional Chinese idea, village defense perhaps, crop defense probably, and family defense sure thing-- but the idea that I might need to learn self-defense to dispatch bullies or muggers, not so likely.

After all, when I was ten years old I knew what every Chinese merchant also knew; if you want to deal with bandits you're better off having a large number of armed guards, or even better, getting the government or an army to protect the roads or even hunt the bandits down with overwhelming force of numbers.

I knew that bullies who resist trickery, slight of hand, and psychic intimidation, can be dealt with by enlisting the overwhelming force of a bigger friend, a tougher friend, a group of friends, or just adults who wield punishments more severe and longer lasting than fisticuffs.

I did not begin studying martial arts because I wanted to be able to defend myself, quite to the contrary. I took up the arts because I had a huge amount of natural aggression. I'm talking about explosive aggression that by ten I had already learned I needed to tame. At ten I knew that to be accepted by the adult world I needed to suppress my own spontaneous desire to smash and bash!

No, I started studying martial arts so that I would have a place to explode, a place where it was safe to be aggressive because I would be in the company of people who could defend themselves from ME!

Hat tip: This came up because I was ranting over at formosaneijia

Link: Scientific American:  This kind of research is pure evil because if there is a genetic cause for my aggression and they find it, there will be a push to make sure people like me are not born in the first place!