Yesterday, I braved the oxymoronic late March NYC chill (you would have to live here to understand that point fully) to go to a concert at Columbia University. The music on offer was not the usual fare: it was the 10th anniversary performance of a group that specializes in ancient Japanese music. The first half of the concert featured ancient music and the second half featured both modern pieces written for ancient instruments, and a modern piece inspired by ancient music (specifically, an abreviated version of John Cage's "Ryoanji"). The first half of the concert was definitely the less popular half, as evidenced by the restless audience. In the most annoying of New York fashion, people straggled in during the introductory talk; then left in the midst of the first, second or third pieces - not even waiting for the musicians to finish playing. Add in the simultaneous lighting of smartphone screens between every piece and the effect was positively maddening, especially among people who should know better.
To be sure, gagaku and hogaku - the two featured forms of Japanese ancient music - are acquired tastes. My appreciation of ancient Japanese music stems from going to a Shinto festival years ago. The festival featured almost 100 musicians playing the small, hand-held mouth organ, called a shoh, which produces a dreamy and unusual sound, sometimes rich, sometimes just a thin tone, and the hijiriki flute. The two instruments together sometimes create a disharmonized but somewhat hypnotic effect. The resulting performance was exactly what one might want for a Shinto ritual, but maybe not suitable for a cold spring afternoon on the Upper West Side.
So there I was, while everyone else was squirming, being carried back to Nara one very cold weekend in December when I enjoyed 3-1/2 days of just that type of music, only with a much larger and louder presence. I vividly remembered the ritual in the dark, when a group of chanting priests, accompanied by a large number of singers and musicians, carried a small, wooden box carrying the essence of the Shinto god from his home to a temporary shrine, there to be feted and fussed over before being lovingly returned to his usual abode, several days later. I felt both nostalgic and a little as though I was about to be drawn into a trance.
But the Columbia audience, in this case, though rude, was correct. Even my companion remarked that the second half of the concert was better than the first, and I had to agree. The context for the ancient music was all wrong. This small, but dedicated group of students, augmented by some Japanese professional musicians, did a competent, even surprisingly good, job, but the music was falling largely on uncomprehending ears. (People who don't live in NYC may wonder how something like a group formed for the appreciation of ancient Japanese music might even get off the ground, but this used to be a fairly common occurrence. I once met Isaac Asimov at a regular meeting of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. He was conducting the sing-along - from "Patience." I mean really - who knew?)
Context is important. When I teach budo, I try to throw in what I know of the era in which a given practice evolved. Most important to me is what people wore, and how they moved generally. We can know some of this from illustrations on scrolls; but Japan is a unique place. Just as gagaku and hogaku have been passed down through centuries, movement styles have been passed down via noh, kabuki and dance. I try to get people past chambara movies and anime, and into some more realistic historical sense of how people moved and behaved. Since I study Japanese dance, I am able to convey some of this sensibility, even if in a truncated fashion. I even brought my dance teacher in one time to teach suriashi footwork.
Do I succeed? Not always. And an argument can be made in regard to what a "realistic historical sense" is. After all, kabuki lives for exaggeration at least some of the time (but I'll bet you didn't know that there are some surprisingly realistic kabuki dramas out there) and noh has evolved over time to be more stately than it once was. And the dance both echoes and bounces off of these genres, along with others. But it's the best we have; and honestly, it's much better than nothing.
And I mean that. Some years ago, I was at a seminar for tanjo - a 19th century genre consisting of partner kata which pits a defender wielding a walking stick against an attacker with a sword. The kata are fairly vigorous for both attacker and defender. About halfway through the session, someone remarked that they just could not see how someone who used a cane could handle a swordsman in the way the kata required. He was completely oblivious to the fact that 19th century gentlemen (AND ladies), both in the West and in Japan, carried walking sticks as a proper accessory. Without knowing that, the kata meant nothing to this particular student. He could dismiss them out of hand, based on his ahistorical assumption about what people wore and how they moved. In his mind, there was no difference, historically or culturally, between the people of 150 years ago, and himself.
Modern budo is adaptive, and that's fine. It was created to fit in with the shifting contemporary world. But traditional budo is a different thing altogether. And one thing I know about context - if the teacher doesn't furnish it in some way, the students will come up with a way to fill in the knowledge gap on their own. We may think, as teachers, that we are teaching organized systems of attack and defense, but really that is only the start of what we are doing; or, at least, it should only be the start. The wonderful thing about our practice is the many layers of context that can be peeled back, and the richness that lies beneath.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
The Old Masters
Do you know an old master?
I'm not talking about someone who has trained for 30 years, or some 40-something TKD teacher who started when he was six. Hell, I've trained for almost 30 years (more if you count my western fencing training), and I know I'm not a master. Old, maybe, sorta, but a master? Nope.
The old masters I'm thinking about have trained twice as long, at least - 60, 70, years. They're in their 80's or 90's, in varying states of health. They have more understanding of technique in their little fingers than the rest of us do in our whole bodies. Even better, they understand what they are doing, and why.
Some time ago, I looked at a very old video tape of one of my first demonstrations, which was held at a small dojo in New Jersey, in the 1980's. I remember we had a hell of a time finding the place (in the days before GPS) but I don't remember what the occasion was. In looking at myself on video (something I find uncomfortable even now) I noticed that I was trying very hard to do everything correctly as I had been taught, and, as a new student, I don't look too bad. At that time, I considered the sempai, who had about 3-4 years' seniority over me, as the "big kids." They certainly talked and acted like big kids, and, since I was new to this whole koryu budo thing, I believed them.
Only my teacher did his part in the demo with quiet grace and dignity. While the guys used to talk about him with great respect, none of them seemed to know him very well. It took some time for me to get to know him as more than the man who came in to okeiko, somewhat irregularly (his job kept him very busy), who told stories and sometimes made us repeat the same waza over and over again for a half hour or longer at a time. He never seemed happy with our progress, though he would let us stop after awhile, whether it was because he got tired of our relative mediocrity or decided we had hit our training wall for the night, I was never sure. I just knew I hated to disappoint him, so I kept trying.
When I did get to know him better, I was impressed by his humility. One time I came to see him on dojo business and before I could say anything he said, "Here, watch this. You've never seen anything like this before," and started the VCR. We watched an old, grainy film-to-video transfer of Nakayama Hakudo (a cleaned-up version is available on YouTube). In the film, Hakudo Sensei, clearly around 80 years old, both demonstrates and riffs (for lack of a better word) on Muso Shinden kata. I learned more about the meaning of practice in that one video than I had by studying for 10 years with my American sempai (and I realized later that it was not really their fault - 10 years is a literal drop in the bucket where koryu budo is concerned).
There were many other times like that. Once, when I visited him in the hospital, I noticed some books by his bedside. I asked him what he was reading. He said it was an account of the Ako Ogishi story (the story of the 47 Ronin). I knew the story in general, of course, but, thanks to sensei, I learned a great deal more after that. At his request, I went to Sengakuji, the temple in Tokyo where they are buried, to pay my respects. I still go there every time I go to Japan, and I have taken any number of hapless friends and students along with me. I go to honor him, and to try to give others a sense of what he taught me. And I go because I would still hate to disappoint him even now.
When he died, I spent over an hour on the phone with one of his daughters, whom I had met once or twice but did not know well. There we were, united by our grief, telling funny stories and laughing while we cried at the same time. She told family stories, I told training stories. Sensei didn't mix the dojo and his family life, so we were each hearing the stories for the first time. But we were clearly talking about the same guy - the stern family man with the goofy sense of humor and brilliant intellect.
My teacher, and others of his generation, began their budo training in the years before the Pacific War. Though the Edo period was a distant memory in Japan by the time they were born, the extraordinary changes in Japanese society after the mid 1940's created a clear separation in how people trained in koryu budo, and what it meant to them. More western influence and especially notions of competitive sport, along with a real and understandable concern for the survival of old art forms, has changed training. I'm not judging, I'm stating a fact. Good things may have been gained, but some good things have definitely been lost.
The problem with old masters, though, is they don't stay old masters for very long. They disappear. And a little piece of the world they were a part of disappears along with them.
So if you know an old master, whether of budo or something else, pay attention. Take him/her out for dinner, have coffee, sit and talk. Ask questions, and listen to the answers. You may realize how fortunate you are. Do it while there's still time.
I'm not talking about someone who has trained for 30 years, or some 40-something TKD teacher who started when he was six. Hell, I've trained for almost 30 years (more if you count my western fencing training), and I know I'm not a master. Old, maybe, sorta, but a master? Nope.
The old masters I'm thinking about have trained twice as long, at least - 60, 70, years. They're in their 80's or 90's, in varying states of health. They have more understanding of technique in their little fingers than the rest of us do in our whole bodies. Even better, they understand what they are doing, and why.
Some time ago, I looked at a very old video tape of one of my first demonstrations, which was held at a small dojo in New Jersey, in the 1980's. I remember we had a hell of a time finding the place (in the days before GPS) but I don't remember what the occasion was. In looking at myself on video (something I find uncomfortable even now) I noticed that I was trying very hard to do everything correctly as I had been taught, and, as a new student, I don't look too bad. At that time, I considered the sempai, who had about 3-4 years' seniority over me, as the "big kids." They certainly talked and acted like big kids, and, since I was new to this whole koryu budo thing, I believed them.
Only my teacher did his part in the demo with quiet grace and dignity. While the guys used to talk about him with great respect, none of them seemed to know him very well. It took some time for me to get to know him as more than the man who came in to okeiko, somewhat irregularly (his job kept him very busy), who told stories and sometimes made us repeat the same waza over and over again for a half hour or longer at a time. He never seemed happy with our progress, though he would let us stop after awhile, whether it was because he got tired of our relative mediocrity or decided we had hit our training wall for the night, I was never sure. I just knew I hated to disappoint him, so I kept trying.
When I did get to know him better, I was impressed by his humility. One time I came to see him on dojo business and before I could say anything he said, "Here, watch this. You've never seen anything like this before," and started the VCR. We watched an old, grainy film-to-video transfer of Nakayama Hakudo (a cleaned-up version is available on YouTube). In the film, Hakudo Sensei, clearly around 80 years old, both demonstrates and riffs (for lack of a better word) on Muso Shinden kata. I learned more about the meaning of practice in that one video than I had by studying for 10 years with my American sempai (and I realized later that it was not really their fault - 10 years is a literal drop in the bucket where koryu budo is concerned).
There were many other times like that. Once, when I visited him in the hospital, I noticed some books by his bedside. I asked him what he was reading. He said it was an account of the Ako Ogishi story (the story of the 47 Ronin). I knew the story in general, of course, but, thanks to sensei, I learned a great deal more after that. At his request, I went to Sengakuji, the temple in Tokyo where they are buried, to pay my respects. I still go there every time I go to Japan, and I have taken any number of hapless friends and students along with me. I go to honor him, and to try to give others a sense of what he taught me. And I go because I would still hate to disappoint him even now.
When he died, I spent over an hour on the phone with one of his daughters, whom I had met once or twice but did not know well. There we were, united by our grief, telling funny stories and laughing while we cried at the same time. She told family stories, I told training stories. Sensei didn't mix the dojo and his family life, so we were each hearing the stories for the first time. But we were clearly talking about the same guy - the stern family man with the goofy sense of humor and brilliant intellect.
My teacher, and others of his generation, began their budo training in the years before the Pacific War. Though the Edo period was a distant memory in Japan by the time they were born, the extraordinary changes in Japanese society after the mid 1940's created a clear separation in how people trained in koryu budo, and what it meant to them. More western influence and especially notions of competitive sport, along with a real and understandable concern for the survival of old art forms, has changed training. I'm not judging, I'm stating a fact. Good things may have been gained, but some good things have definitely been lost.
The problem with old masters, though, is they don't stay old masters for very long. They disappear. And a little piece of the world they were a part of disappears along with them.
So if you know an old master, whether of budo or something else, pay attention. Take him/her out for dinner, have coffee, sit and talk. Ask questions, and listen to the answers. You may realize how fortunate you are. Do it while there's still time.
Friday, March 6, 2015
The shutdown
A couple of days ago, I put up something slightly unusual on Facebook - a rather personal rant on the state of some U.S. policy. One of my erstwhile colleagues, whom I have not even shared comments with in a long time, responded to my rhetorical query "What's wrong with us?" (meaning the country) by saying that the answer to the question was in my query; i.e., there was something wrong with me. So I attempted to clarify a little, suggesting that U.S. voters often vote against their own interests (when they vote at all). My interlocutor once again persisted that my first rhetorical question suggested again that something was wrong with me.
Okay - so I was a little clumsy in my post (it's Facebook, not a dissertation - duh). The guy is an established writer with a correspondingly large ego, so his criticism was technically apt, though his spirit was decidedly - well - grumpy. The other responders actually took my post in the spirit in which it was rendered and variously gave their opinions on the subject. Since I could not break the syntax police blockade, I told the Writer that I accepted his rhetorical point.
But what has given me pause was what happened next; or rather, what didn't happen. I did not contribute anything else to the discussion - a discussion which I started myself. I was concerned that *anything* I might have said subsequently on the thread would have been subjected to the same type of shutdown my initial post had incited. So I said nothing.
The meaning of my post was clear to everyone else; in fact, it was also clear to my critic. I could have jumped in and added more to my commentary in response to the others who joined in, but I did not. Meanwhile, the Writer went back to the lurker shadows he had come from (actually, I believe it's a coffee shop somewhere in Canada). Mission accomplished. By sidestepping the content of my post and instead attacking the way in which I stated it, he had publicly shut me down.
I'm not interested in motive here. I have not seen this person for about 10 years. He puts essays up on FB for (mostly fanboy) comment. His budo world is slightly different from mine, so I don't often read his expositions; and when I do I don't offer much comment one way or the other. Most of the comments he does get are from his students, with content like you might expect. I have a lot of respect for the guy as a writer and a teacher, and considered us colleagues, if not friends. So his comments surprised me. I was not posting on some vital aspect of our respective practices; I was not even talking about military policy; I was talking about access to healthcare, fergodssake.
We have lately heard stuff about a backlash against women's autonomy, from Gamergate to male celebs and politicians pawing women in public. A few electronic reams have been laid out about the frozen smiles from the women being pawed, and what the pawing means. With all of the hand-wringing over this boorish behavior, not one has suggested a way to make it stop. I have a way, and I have used it when some guy tries to put his hands on me: any convenient variation on the taiji roll-back-and-press technique. It works, not least because the pawer in no way expects it. And subtle it's not.
Additionally, there has been a rise in people (not all men, either) referring to grown women, once again, as "girls." This was something I had hoped had gone the way of the dodo in the '80s (thirty years ago!). But here it is again. I generally offer a firm but polite remark: "I am not a girl. Please don't refer to me as one." The response to my reply has been shock, shock, I tell you. "I didn't mean it as an insult," is the most common response, and if I say the response is common, it's because it comes up often enough. Seriously, how can it not be an insult? No one refers to a grown man as a "boy," unless it's definitely an insult. No one has yet adequately explained to me why I should consider being referred to as a child to be a compliment (which is the second-most common response).
But now here's the literary shutdown from the Writer, a you-can't-express-yourself-properly-according-to-me-so-your-opinion-has-no-value remark. I am embarrassed to say I was so surprised I didn't have an adequate comeback. And just like those smiling, pawed-on women, I affected the FB equivalent of the glassy stare and gave in, in order to make it stop. To their credit, everyone else involved ignored him, and no one missed him when he bowed out, having "won" his point. But, obviously, I am still thinking about this. And, sooner or later (I hope sooner), I will come up with an unsubtle, written, roll-back-and-press response to this too.
Okay - so I was a little clumsy in my post (it's Facebook, not a dissertation - duh). The guy is an established writer with a correspondingly large ego, so his criticism was technically apt, though his spirit was decidedly - well - grumpy. The other responders actually took my post in the spirit in which it was rendered and variously gave their opinions on the subject. Since I could not break the syntax police blockade, I told the Writer that I accepted his rhetorical point.
But what has given me pause was what happened next; or rather, what didn't happen. I did not contribute anything else to the discussion - a discussion which I started myself. I was concerned that *anything* I might have said subsequently on the thread would have been subjected to the same type of shutdown my initial post had incited. So I said nothing.
The meaning of my post was clear to everyone else; in fact, it was also clear to my critic. I could have jumped in and added more to my commentary in response to the others who joined in, but I did not. Meanwhile, the Writer went back to the lurker shadows he had come from (actually, I believe it's a coffee shop somewhere in Canada). Mission accomplished. By sidestepping the content of my post and instead attacking the way in which I stated it, he had publicly shut me down.
I'm not interested in motive here. I have not seen this person for about 10 years. He puts essays up on FB for (mostly fanboy) comment. His budo world is slightly different from mine, so I don't often read his expositions; and when I do I don't offer much comment one way or the other. Most of the comments he does get are from his students, with content like you might expect. I have a lot of respect for the guy as a writer and a teacher, and considered us colleagues, if not friends. So his comments surprised me. I was not posting on some vital aspect of our respective practices; I was not even talking about military policy; I was talking about access to healthcare, fergodssake.
We have lately heard stuff about a backlash against women's autonomy, from Gamergate to male celebs and politicians pawing women in public. A few electronic reams have been laid out about the frozen smiles from the women being pawed, and what the pawing means. With all of the hand-wringing over this boorish behavior, not one has suggested a way to make it stop. I have a way, and I have used it when some guy tries to put his hands on me: any convenient variation on the taiji roll-back-and-press technique. It works, not least because the pawer in no way expects it. And subtle it's not.
Additionally, there has been a rise in people (not all men, either) referring to grown women, once again, as "girls." This was something I had hoped had gone the way of the dodo in the '80s (thirty years ago!). But here it is again. I generally offer a firm but polite remark: "I am not a girl. Please don't refer to me as one." The response to my reply has been shock, shock, I tell you. "I didn't mean it as an insult," is the most common response, and if I say the response is common, it's because it comes up often enough. Seriously, how can it not be an insult? No one refers to a grown man as a "boy," unless it's definitely an insult. No one has yet adequately explained to me why I should consider being referred to as a child to be a compliment (which is the second-most common response).
But now here's the literary shutdown from the Writer, a you-can't-express-yourself-properly-according-to-me-so-your-opinion-has-no-value remark. I am embarrassed to say I was so surprised I didn't have an adequate comeback. And just like those smiling, pawed-on women, I affected the FB equivalent of the glassy stare and gave in, in order to make it stop. To their credit, everyone else involved ignored him, and no one missed him when he bowed out, having "won" his point. But, obviously, I am still thinking about this. And, sooner or later (I hope sooner), I will come up with an unsubtle, written, roll-back-and-press response to this too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)