van het weblog:
The Edge of Grace:
Martial arts these days are practiced by many as a hobby.
Even the masters of the art, what do they use it for? Do they do anything with it other than teach students and compete among themselves? Most of them don’t. Their hand-to-hand combat skills aren’t relevant in war these days, or even in private self-defense. A punk with a gun could shoot a famous xingyi master. So martial arts tend to devolve into their traditions and competitions. Are these things what it’s all about?
Of course not. All martial arts exist in a context, a context that is a society that is more or less violent. It’s just that our methods of violence have moved beyond the realm where hand-to-hand combat was the norm. So we have amazing kung fu masters who might be able to take twelve attackers at one time, but what about a patrol of soldiers with machine guns?
Nonetheless, this what martial arts are for: real problems for their times. The problem of surviving in a violent world. The problem of negotiating a treacherous path through times of hardship and conflict, and emerging not only victorious, but without losing one’s soul in the process.
Learning to fight probably fit more seamlessly with other things in a person’s life when that life was more plainly surrounded by violence — when they lived in times when they regularly saw or heard about or experienced someone being a victim of violence. And we still do nowadays — which is why people buy handguns and take self-defense classes. But not learn tai chi or aikido, necessarily.
Rory Miller of the Chiron blog, in his new book Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence, writes,
[The idea of the police] was a new concept in the 18th century. The U.S. Marshals service was
founded in 1789. Scotland Yard was founded in 1829. Think about the implications: If you were
killed, unless your friends or family sought vengeance, there would be no investigation, no
search for justice. You would be forgotten. The killer would move on. Many of these killers
lived and worked in bands, sometimes gangs, but sometimes agents of authority. The press
gangs beat and kidnapped citizens to “recruit” for the British Navy. The soldiers of the Hundred
Years War, the Thirty Years War, and much of the Napoleonic era roamed the countryside
supplying themselves, which means robbing, raping, and killing for anything that they wanted
or needed. The largely unarmed citizenry had no recourse to any higher authority.
This is the environment and the context in which the older martial arts arose. It was an
answer to a primal understanding of violence, something we often miss without the experience
to understand and evaluate it.
Anything that is taught becomes tradition. Even a tradition of questioning traditions. Students
have a right to know which of their lessons are based on experience and which on reason. Do
you even know if the techniques you learn and teach have actually been used? If a martial arts
style goes through several generations of teachers without combat experience, will the guesses
of the many teachers come to wash away the hard-won experience of the few? Will the
rhinoceros become the unicorn?
Many of today’s martial arts lack context. I’ve trained briefly in karate, wing chun, tai chi, and Shaolin kung fu. They were all useful and beautiful in their own ways, but they were all missing a sense of flow into daily life. Oh, I don’t mean that there weren’t practical applications or benefits; I still go to kung fu class because it makes me feel healthier and it’s good exercise.
But something I couldn’t reconcile even when I decided that I would avoid the more violent applications and instead learn an art purely for health reasons is the fact that I was still practicing a martial art, going through the motions of training in its primary application in order to vaguely aim at its secondary goals. It felt thoroughly like self-delusion.
When I confront myself on the matter, I realize that that I’m drawn to martial arts because they promise to navigate a way through violence as well as provide better physical health. I’m afraid of violence and fascinated by it at the same time, and martial arts promises to instruct all about those matters. But actually, most of the time they do so without placing violence in the larger scheme of things. Training for violence without context implies a world full of random hypothetical attacks. Let’s say someone punches you high. Let’s say someone sweeps your leg. Let’s say someone attacks you with a knife. Who faces that stuff these days besides criminals and cops? What about the buildup? What about the why?
I’m not saying I want to live in a world where violence is more present and therefore I’d need to learn martial arts to save my life! I’m just saying that I’ve never been satisfied by the narrative I’ve been given to back up any martial art. Back in my wing chun days I used to hang around and ask some of the older students if they’d ever used their skills in a fight. Like, did you ever go to a bar and … ? That’s as far as the narrative gets. You learn the skills and the techniques, but without context, without a bigger story to fit into, martial arts is ultimately reactive, without greater initiative of its own.
The Shaolin kung fu class I occasionally train in nowadays I enjoy mainly due to its force training techniques, i.e. I’m pretty sure that if I trained really intensively I could eventually have a lot of power in my hands to hurt or heal. We hear lots of stories about the abilities of Sifu Wong and his teachers, including things such as dim mak, paralyzing an opponent with just a touch of the finger. But even this Shaolin master has, by his own admission, not used his powerful force on live opponents. So what’s the relevance of the narrative to my own life, if I don’t share the passion of learning a traditional art or learning how to break bricks with soft hands?
What I’m gravitating toward is: A method of negotiating and surviving conflict. That’s a very relevant skill. But that calls for specificity. There is no one thing called “conflict,” no one thing that is all that violence is.
Miller, citing the story of the three blind men feeling an elephant, writes,
Violence is a big animal and many people who have seen only a part of it are more than willing
to sell you their expertise. Does someone who has been in a few bar brawls really know any
more about violence than the guy who grabbed the elephant’s ear knows about elephants? Bar
brawling experience is real and it is exactly what it is, but it won’t help you or even provide
much insight into military operations or rape survival.
… Officers on patrol avoid hand-to-hand encounters. Fights are dangerous. Even when you win,
there is a possibility of injury, exposure to blood-borne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, or
a lawsuit. Within that context, there are two distinctive hand-to-hand skills that an officer
needs. In the ugly, surprise situation, taking damage and unprepared, the officer needs brutal
close-quarter survival skills. Putting handcuffs on an unruly drunk who doesn’t want to go to
jail but doesn’t really want to hurt you requires different skills, different techniques, and a
different mindset.
Sometimes there are more. A SWAT sniper needs a crystal clear though process and the ability
to deal with hours of boredom and discomfort. The point man on an entry team doesn’t need or
use the same techniques or mindset as the sniper, isn’t interested in semi-compliant
handcuffing and damn well better not be surprised if he works for me. He is the “surprisor.”
In just one profession, four different skill sets for dealing with physical conflict. Not one of them
is line dueling, sparring, or waging a war.
… Very, very different things get lumped under the general heading of “violence.” Two boxers
in a contest of strategy, strength, skill, and will. A drunken husband beating his wife. Two
highschoolers punching it out in the parking lot. A health professional trying to hold down a
schizophrenic so that a sedative can be administered. An officer walking into a robbery in
progress finds himself in a shoot-out. Soldiers entering a building in hostile territory. A rapist
pushing in the partially open door of an apartment. An entry team preparing to serve a search
warrant on a drug house with armed suspects. A Victorian era duel wtih small swords.
Because they involve people in conflict and people get hurt, we lump them together as
violence, but they aren’t the same and the skills and mindset from one situation don’t carry
over automatically to the other.
So then the question is, what narrative fits best for me? What violence do I face, or expect to face, so that I can gear my training towards that?
I really have no idea.
Let’s step back even more. At base, in this world I’m interested in self-defense and survival. But what does that even mean? Surviving is more than staying alive through a fight. It means making enough money to live. It means having good relationships with others in the community. It means choosing a place to live where water shortages aren’t virtually assured. On a global scale, self-defense means making peace with life without oil, and taking care of your human and nonhuman neighbors.
This is getting really broad. But this is how I think, this is the narrative in which a way to relate to conflict has to fit. Going to a class where I learn to punch and kick without meaning does not sit well with me. And yet, at the same time, it still fascinates me because there are situations in which it is absolutely called for to punch and kick. But really, it would be nice to get filled in on the stuff in between pie-in-the-sky and punch-in-the-face.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except that there seems to be more narratives available for navigating the murky depths of a hostile and sometimes violent world than just knowing how to counter a punch. Without any current, genuine experience or fear of violence, it’s up to me to discover what narrative seems most likely and most relevant, or will fit with the most sense in my life, in the present or future.
And, it seems like there are many, many ways to go wrong, even with the right intentions.
Further, what Miller hints at in his broad-ranging analysis of human violence is itself only the tip of the iceberg. In a deep sense, we all live on the deaths of others. Life and death are part of the great cycle; each day we eat dead things so that we may live. It cannot be otherwise.
These are difficult depths to navigate.
I’ll end with this quote from Aryeh Kaplan’s introduction to Kabbalah, Inner Space.
We have seen that the Kabbalists speak of five comprehensive levels of universe. These
constitute a descending order of revelation that culminates in the near total concealment of
God’s light in the physical universe.
It is this concealment that allows for the possibility of a finite continuum of distinct and
separate worlds to exist. In this sense, all the universes were created as vehicles through
which we may draw close to God. They act as filters, allowing us to draw near and still not be
obliterated by His Infinite Light.
… The universes are said to act as ‘garments” for God’s light. Describing the act of creation,
the Psalmist thus says, “You have dressed Yourself in majesty and splendor; You have covered
Yourself with light like a garment” (Psalms 104:3-4). A garment serves two purposes, to
conceal and to reveal. With respect to God, the concept of “garment” conceals His true
essence, while at the same time, attenuating it so that it can be revealed.
Kabbalah says that the world we live in is permeated by God, but at the same time this is so distorted and damped down so we are able to experience God’s light just barely. This is so that we can learn from our own egregious errors.
This, ultimately, is the environment we live in! A world filled with God but so dark as to seem forgotten by the Divine Spark. How do we get through? Pure prayer, passively waiting for deus ex machina? Or lots and lots of fighting? Think you can be all spiritual and vegan? What if you get stranded and cut off and all you can eat to survive is rats? Or, think you can be the bad-ass and dominate the world by fighting? What if you come down with heart disease from your own bad-ass-ness, that can really only be cured by learning compassion?
No one system, no one way. Many paths, many dead ends. So many stories to get lost in. Who can know the real way? All we can do is blunder in and out of darkness, and keep trying, and keep trying
