Discarding Yes and No

If you've ever been around teens or tweens, or were one yourself at some point, then you are familiar with 'discarding yes and no.'  It is a look they give you that tells you they aren't listening, don't really care to be listening, and many not even be aware that you exist at all. Or as we use to say in Australia, 'I just couldn't be bothered.'

So what do you think happens when I tell my adult students that I expect them to 'discard yes and no?'  That's right! they all look at me quizzically, bring their faces forward a bit, sometimes tilting a little to one side, and nod 'yes'  --Thereby demonstrating that they have no idea what I'm talking about.

If someone I know is walking alone in the distance and I call over to them to get their attention, as they turn they will look first, and then direct an 'I recognize you' face in my direction.  With normal vision one can recognize this face from 100 yards away.  And even if one has very poor vision, he or she will still display the 'I recognize you' face in return.

Comic Ellen Degeneres has a bit where she waves and shouts to get someone's attention and then realizes it isn't them.  It's funny because she reveals how much socially stimulated pain this causes.

The effort it takes to communicate with our faces is usually completely unconscious.  But I would suggest to my readers that normal social communication using the head and face requires enormous strength and torso tension.  That's why teens and tweens sometimes just drop it.  You never actually know if they are listening unless you quiz them afterwards, and even then they may decide not to participate.  And the same is actually true for adults, they may be nodding 'yes' without hearing a single thing you've said.  It could even happen with a loved one on Valentines day!

At about 6 months of age, babies can lift their head and they are capable of a lot of communicative facial expressions.  However, their heads are so big relative to the rest of their bodies that they have to move their chest underneath their head in order hold it up.  At some point they also learn to nod 'yes' and 'no,'  but if you hang out with 5 year olds you'll see that, although they will give a very attentive 'I'm listening face,' they are often reluctant to nod 'yes' and 'no.'  When they do stoop to this adult mode of communication they often exaggerate it with a whole body movement-- undulating with a slack jaw for 'yes,' and shaking horizontally for 'no.'

So.  What's the point?

In martial arts and qigong, the head must be included in whole body movement for it to actually be whole body movement.  If we are using our head for communication, it is very likely that we are exerting enormous torso tension in order to keep it in that state.  As adults, stress is our default position in social situations.

I want to make a distinction here between structural integrity and whole body liquid mass.  A person can be holding their head in an 'I'm ready to nod yes or no' position and still have structural integrity.  As people age, the quality of the structural integrity tends to diminish, but it may still be there.  However, it is not possible to have whole body liquid mass and hold ones head in such a stressful position at the same time.

I suspect that until a student figures out how to get their feet inside their dantian, inside their perception of space, this awareness of the head may be fleeting if it is possible to experience at all.  When the whole body is inside the spacial mind it automatically includes the feet and head.  It is by looking at the relationship between the torso and the head that, as a teacher, or a dude watching too many sub-standard 'masters' on Youtube, I can tell if a persons body is inside their mind--or not.

The head weighs a lot.  Holding it in positions of dominance or submission is a major source of tension.  Holding it in positions of dominance or submission is an obstacle to whole body power.

Outer Inner and Secret

One way to get at the cosmological organization of knowledge in Chinese arts is to think about Outer, Inner and Secret.

Outer is the stuff I can teach by showin' and tellin'.  It is by far the biggest category of knowledge in Chinese martial arts.  A given movement, action, posture or position is either correct or incorrect.

Inner is the stuff a student can learn from interacting with me in a dynamic push-pull/yes-no physical conversation.   It's all stuff that is hard to name.  Though not as big a category as Outer teachings, it is still huge.  Probably the most talked about Inner teachings are structure and root.  These two terms mean different things in different situations.  They can be pressure tested in numerous contexts and nobody really agrees exactly what they mean in words.  But two people fired up in the midst of practice can easily agree on what is what. We know it when we feel it.

Secret teachings take a lot of abuse.  Keeping secrets is widely denounced as a moral offense against modernity.  But the truth is, the real secrets keep themselves.  Secret teachings are concepts, revelations, and experiences which can not be taught.  I can talk about them.  I can show them.  I can write about them.  And to a certain extent, my actions might help transmit them.  But it is just as likely that I'm confusing people and sending them off in the wrong direction.  Secret teachings have to be discovered.  And for such a discovery to happen there has to be a particular openness, a certain milieu, a series of experiences, and a perceptiveness about where to look and what not to do when the secret is found.  The dark irony is that people are discovering these treasures all the time and then just burying them again, unaware.

But the purpose of this post is not to talk about Inner or Secret.  Outer teachings are actually the most neglected. The Outer teachings take loads of practice and hard work.  The Outer teachings store everything else.  They were made by people who lived the secret and inner teachings.  They are the container.  Outer teachings get discarded because people don't understand why they matter, they are easily misunderstood.  Laziness is a problem too.  As is the tendency to be overwhelmed.  Setting aside the time commitment for both student and teacher is so daunting in this day and age that even though the interest may be there, the Outer teachings almost always suffer.  And as my Kathak teacher often bemoaned, "A little learning is a dangerous thing!"

I don't know how to get around this.  Students want Inner, and teachers want to teach it.  But without the Outer container the Inner just spills away.

This fact of modern life leads many teachers to re-formulate their teachings, to create contexts which go directly to Inner teachings, the Aikido dojo is a great example.  Teachers sometimes create whole new simplified Outer teachings to get around this problem, think Jeet Kundo or simplified Tai Chi.  And many teachers just give up.

Ideally we ought to be capable of creating new milieus which will transmit the whole Outer teachings.  When I try to imagine this I see myself focused on a group of 20 year old students.  I suspect that to work in depth on a daily basis with people in their 20's I'd also have to teach economic literacy skills, cooking, simple living, and some kind of emotional release (theater/therapy?).

It makes me want to step back from the whole project of teaching and think about how I might create institutions which would produce students who were ready to learn.  A sort of "Drop out now, ask me how," kind of thing.

The Ming Dynasty

This is a big event about the Ming Dynasty happening around San Francisco.

http://www.humanitieswest.org/currentMing.html

Looks like the best stuff on Ming Dynasty theater is on Saturday February 11th, 2012.  Some stuff on Dreaming on February 8th too.  Check it out.

UPDATE:

Hey I went to this.  It kind of sucked.  A room full of scholars talking down to us.  Scholars who are long winded, and answer questions about subjects they don't know anything about.  Yuck.  One of those 21st century experiences where the audience is better informed than the presenters.

I did get a couple of things.  The cross hand movement in Chen Style Tai Chi that comes right at the beginning of 'Lazy about tying ones coat' is used in Kunqu theater to mean, 'waking from a dream!' Cool huh?  Also I learned that it is likely that the ambassador of Burundi who accompanied Zhenghe back to Beijing in the reign of Yongle (1402-1424), brought an entourage with him and that they stayed in China for 2 years.  So it is possible since Zhenghe and many of his sailors were Muslims, that Liuhe Xinyi is a mix of African martial dance and Chinese martial arts.  The mechanism is there.

Sheila Melvin presented entirely on the contemporary revival of kunqu which was interesting particularly because theater is still seen in an intensely political light in China, and also because the situation vis-a-vis the government is so fluid.

Is Gina Carano a Feminist?

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the fourth of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).



First order of business:  Is Gina Carano, the star of the new film Haywire, a feminist?  Gina has been a star of the MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) World for the past several years, she is hot, and she is now a Hollywood action star who is capable of doing her own stunts and fight choreography.  We'll get back to that.

"Women's Boxing and Related Activities: Introducing Images and Meanings," is an essay by Jennifer Hargreaves that delves into the cultural nuances of women and fighting.  She does a good job of covering all the cases, begining with an excellent history of women in the ring actually knocking each other bloody for money, all the way to the porno version of boxing done by strippers.  Is it masculine? Is it feminine?  Is it a special case?  Are they champions? are they exploited fools? are they happy subordinates?  are they victims or makers of their own fate?  Some female boxers in every case love it, some hate it.  Some are in it for dominance, some for money, some for excitement, some do because they crave risk, some seek health, some do it to look beautiful, some do it and find peace.  Self image?  It's all over the map too.  Hargreaves attempts to apply every post-colonial, feminist, cultural criticism she can find to the actual situation and history of women's boxing.  The result?  Not a single theory is consistent with reality.

I have read way too much theory in my life.  My fear is that even though Hargreaves (and many others, Richard Rorty comes to mind) have the honesty after years of studying post-colonialism, feminism, and critical theory to acknowledge it is faulty--people have invested so much time and university money in it, that it will live on as a ghost, haunting us to our graves.  I hope not.

My Great Grandmother was a prominent suffragette in New York.  As my Grandmother explained it to me, "If there was something that boys were good at, I wanted to prove that I could be good at it too."  I stand with my Grandmother on this one, it is wrong to put obstacles in the way of women trying to do whatever it is they want to do just because of their gender.  In the end, that is the only feminist idea that has any merit.

As for the film Haywire in theaters at the moment, it is a parody of b-movies which are vehicles for an action star.  If you go to the late show, sneak in a six-pack of beer and talk during the talking parts, you'll freakin' love it!

Martial Arts in the Modern World (Part 3)

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the third of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

____________

Yamada Shoji's, "The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery," is a hilarious romp.  The German guy, Eugen Herrigel, who wrote the book, Zen and The Art of Archery, was so enthusiastic about Zen that he projected Zen into his study of Archery.  In Japan, Zen wasn't associated with Archery until Herrigel's  book was translated into Japanese.  The confusion is also do to the fact that the particular Archery teacher Herrigel hooked up with (Kenzo Awa) was more than a little eccentric, he had gone through a personal mystical enlightenment experience while practicing alone at night in which his "self" exploded into tiny grains of dust.  But even so Shoji suggests that most likely the connection of Archery to Zen was the result of mis-translations, like one that happened when Awa accidental split one of his own arrows in the center of the target while shooting at night in the dark.  In Japan, splitting an arrow is very bad form because you are damaging your equipment.  Awa probably said something like, "Whoops, accidents happen," and Herrigel took that to mean something like, "Actions happen of their own accord, this is do to Buddha Nature."

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The next essay by Stanley E. Henning is titled, "The Martial Arts in Chinese Physical Culture, 1865-1965." It's a sort of journalistic survey of other works which is biased by a sort of 1970's Taiwanese Nationalism.  Here, "martial arts" gets reductively defined as utilitarian combat skills.  Not coincidentally, all he has to offer about martial arts prior to 1900 are accounts of sensational violence from what must have been a kind of tabloid entertainment rag (think: 'Baby Born With Three Heads!').  There is a parallel here between this approach and the approach of Daoist experts (1950-1990) who went around saying that Daoism is a philosophical way of life and not a religion, dismissing actual Daoists as superstitious and ill-informed villagers who perform silly rituals.  Henning's references to historical works about how Nationalists and Communists have influenced the development and perception of martial arts are excellent.  Anyone not already familiar with this material will certainly benefit from that aspect of this article. (Also see my review of Andrew D. Morris's Marrow of the Nation, of Qigong Fever, or here for a discussion of Lineages.)  But Henning's reductionist definition of martial arts can no longer be taken seriously.  To dismiss religious, ritual, and theatrical origins of martial arts as some form of failure, or deficiency, or superstition, or side track, or degradation from a past purity, is nothing less than cant.

Happy New Year

Martial Arts in the Modern World (Part Two)

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the second of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

__________

Svinth and Green's "The Circle and the Octagon:  Maeda's Judo and Gracie's Jiu-Jitsu," traces the interaction between Judo players and Wrestling in the early 20th Century.  Maeda Misuyo made the leap from Judo to competitive wrestling, starting in America, and then in England, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and finally Brazil.  But competitive wrestling has the problem that it is either over in a few seconds, or it lasts for hours with little action.  So most of the wrestling involved slap stick and elaborate back stories and costumes.  He was a huge star, especially in Mexico and Cuba.  In Brazil he was part of a circus show, where he met the Gracie brothers who were also in the circus.  He taught them Judo and the rest is history.  In summary, neener, neener, neener, MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) comes from the circus and is a kissing cousin of WWE.

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Graham Noble's "The Lion of the Punjab:  Gama in England, 1910," tells the story of an extraordinary South Asian Wrestler named Gama who traveled with two other top wrestlers to the heart of the British Empire to claim the title of the world's greatest wrestler.  Do to the fact that most of the pro-wrestlers were performance artists with superb slap-stick skills, he had a terrible time getting anyone to allow themselves to be smacked down for real. As an American reading the story I was cheering for him to humiliate a few of the old Colonials.  But the expression 'chicken' is too good for them.  Finally a sympathetic American was recruited from New York to fight him and was soundly defeated.  They found a guy from Poland to fight him too.  Gama and his crew, after 6 months of waiting, returned home having had only a handful of fights.  The account of his rise in India, his insane workouts, and his drive to succeed, are inspirational.  A timeless tale of human achievement, stuck in a strange moment in time.

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Thomas A. Green has two essays on African martial arts, "Surviving the Middle Passage: Traditional African Martial Arts in the Americas," and, "Freeing the Afrikan Mind: The Role of Martial Arts in Contemporary African American Cultural Nationalism."  Green must get credit for publishing first on these extremely interesting topics.  Unfortunately I already devoured TJ DESCH-OBI's, Fighting for Honor (2008), which I loved and reviewed here.  Obi's notion of honor makes these essays somewhat out of date and goes a long way toward explaining the unique forms of African Nationalist martial arts Green describes in Freeing the Afrikan Mind.

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James Halpin's "The Little Dragon:  Bruce Lee (1940-1973)," is the best succinct history of Bruce Lee I've ever read.  His father was a comic opera star, which is really where he got his chops.  He was a rich kid that wanted street cred, so he trained at the Wing-tsun school and got involved in illegal competitive roof top fights.  He got busted and in court his mom asked the judge if she could send him out of the country instead of to jail, and that's how he ended up in the United States.   His ex-girlfriend said he had the maturity of a 12 year old.  He gave amazing lecture demos, published a book on the philosophy of martial arts, and wrote the original screenplay for the Kung Fu television series.  Lee was an awesome egomaniac who transfixed a generation and propelled the martial performing arts of China into an international sensation.  He died from an allergic reaction to a large Aspirin.  The essay covers a lot of territory, and draws on many sources.

___________

to be continued....

Martial Arts in the Modern World

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the first of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

_____________

In "Sense and Nonsense:  The Role of Folk History in the Martial Arts," Thomas A. Green notes that most lineage histories and biographies appear to be false, yet they serve important social functions which should be explored.  He also points out that many stories from different schools concerning different teachers are essentially the same story.  I like his take on the problem.  But I would add this; unless and until we achieve widespread acknowledgement of the theatrical roots of these arts we will be forced to physically flip-flop between telling our lineage histories as social glue, as educational flux and as inspirational catalyst on the front end, and transmitting our knowledge of history and how the world actually works on the back end.  The reason we as martial artists tend to be contorted over lineage histories stems from a failure to adequately place those histories within social and intellectual movements.

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Joseph R. Svinth's "Professor Yamashita Goes to Washington," is a superb history of the first people to teach Judo in the United States.  The highlight of this account is that Theodore Roosevelt studied Judo at the White House! Over the years the President demonstrated his throwing and flipping skills on many a hearty visitor to the Oval Office Dojo.  While Roosevelt felt that after a period of months he had at least managed to throw Professor Yamashita convincingly, the Professor gave a slightly different account,  "According to a journalist named Joseph Clarke, Yamashita said that while Roosevelt was his best pupil, he was also 'very heavy and very impetuous, and it had cost the poor professor many bruising, much worry and infinite pains during Theodore's rushes, to avoid laming the President of the United States.'"  It's a brilliant and fun read.

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To be continued...

Is Humanity Blind?

Is humanity blind?  In asking the question I'm not referring to the limitations of our eyes, I'm speaking metaphorically.  But since I brought up the limitations of the eyes, here is a quick review.  1) Peripheral vision mis-perceives distance, I first discovered this while doing outside crescent kicks in a row with a person on either side and my eyes cast straight ahead.  If I don't make students look to the sides before kicking, chaos ensues.  2)  Motion and color are learned functions of the imagination.  This is so hard to conceptualize because we learn to see color and motion so early, but when children are born blind and gain sight through a surgical opperation after the age of 3, they don't see color and they don't see motion.  In place of color they see complex patterns of reflected light.  In place of motion they see something akin to stop-motion- objects get larger and closer but aren't 'seen moving.'  Weird huh?  3)  Tunnel vision is in focus, everything else that we think we see in focus is imagined.  You can test this by staring at one word in the middle of the page and attempting to read with your peripheral vision.  4) I'm betting readers can contribute many other examples of human sight inadequacy.

A reason for all the spinning and head turning in Baguazhang is to train the eyes to see without focusing.  Welcoming the blur, as it were.  Thus reducing the effort and time normally wasted convincing ourselves that we are not blind.

And on that note I have a few items from the News for my dear readers.

First off, Why Placebos Work Wonders from the Wall Street Journal.  Before you get your hopes up, the article does not convincingly answer the question and it says noting about Nocebos.  Depending on where you happen to be standing in the 'what is medicine' debate you may be shocked to learn that sham acupuncture out performed real acupuncture in one of those double blind thingamajiggies.  Just hearing about it is enough to give me a hot flash!  Also, a study suggests that the more indulgent we think we are, the less we will eat.  If I were juggling just now I would have drop my balls.  After reading this article you may drift beyond the  question of whether humanity is blind, and might find yourself wondering whether we exist at all.

And off to a good start, why not ask; is humanity deaf? Can anyone actually hear the difference between a modern violin and a Stradivarius?  I got a good laugh when the maestro compared the double blinded musicians to people trying to distinguish a Ford from a Ferrari in a Walmart parking lot.  Umm dude, them Walmart parking lots is pretty big, and I think I could tell a Ferrari from a Ford upside down in a ditch, with earplugs, a blindfold, a shot of whisky, and in my pajamas. (Perhaps the NIH will fund the study?  If not then surely the NEA.)

Meanwhile, Tai Chi folk have known for some time that our stomach is a brain.  This science-blog is choca-block with links pointing to the notion that Your Gut Has a Mind of It's Own.  I should be heartened by this news since it suggests a host of new angles with which to approach the idea that Tai Chi is medicine.  I guess my serotonin levels are flagging.  Perhaps I should be doing Tai Chi before dinner?  As an aside, it occurs to me that the movement of (from?) one person's dantian could sync up with the movement of another person's dantian to create mood and other outlook changes.   There are many studies looking at how we coordinate movement and breathing (sic) unconsciously, it's not so far fetched.

Perhaps you still believe that despite the fact that we are blind, deaf, and emotional robots, we still might have that old saw free will?  Turns out what we have is free won't.  Here is another study showing that violent crime is linked to brain injury.  It's a bit off topic but this summary of the debate about the drop in violent crime is a good starting place to throwing up your hands and declaring with fervent lusty abandon, "I just don't know!"

Why I Hate Breathing

I have contributed a guest post to the venerable blog Dark Wing Chun. I commend it to my readers. I also wish you all a Happy New Year!

To entice you to click through I offer this little appetizer:

I was driving in my car the other day and a woman comes on the radio and starts telling me how important breathing is!  Not like there was any actual content there, it was just a disjointed emotional rant scientifically calculated to sell HMO Medical Insurance.  That’s when I realized, I hate breathing.