Things aren't always what they seem

The other day I decided to take a break and head out for a hike up Mt. Tom. I had spent most of the week ripping up the old mat in the dojo and laying down a new wood floor. The canvas cover I  scrounged from an Aikido school years ago was old when I got it, but we needed something to cover the old wrestling mat that looked more like a patchwork quilt made of duct tape than anything else. Patching up the canvas cover had taken a few more rolls of duct tape the past few years, so it just seemed like the time to move back to a wood floor. I had gotten to the point where we had finished cutting and laying down the wood floor, so it seemed like a good time to take a break.

The woods were damp from the recent rains and the first yellow leaves were beginning to fall. A few trees had come down in the last storm, their roots not deep enough as they stretched out over the outcropping of rocks along the path. I was coming down the mountain on a path that wound its way around a small, rocky crag when I noticed a dog coming up the other way. He paused for a moment just in front of me, sniffing the ground, and as I stopped to pet him I looked ahead to see his owner leap wildly to the side of the path, jumping from one foot to the other, waving his arms frantically as if he were trying to escape a giant spider's web. After a moment he stopped and continued up the mountain. When he looked up, he must have noticed the quizzical look on my face. "Snake," he said. "I hate snakes." And then we both continued on the trail; he going up and me going down, but both of us, I'm sure, on the look out for more snakes hiding on the bare rock, hard to pick out amongst the meandering tree roots.

It reminded me of that sketch on Saturday Night Live with Bill Murray and Steve Martin. They stare

Opening technique of Seiunchin.

straight into the camera and just keep repeating, "What the hell is that!?" Maybe we just don't expect things or maybe things just aren't always what they seem to be. Kata is a lot like that. We see a move in kata and assume that it's one thing because it looks like that's what it ought to be. We think, well, it looks like a down block, so it must be a down block. It looks like a double punch so it must be a double punch.

What we're often missing, I think, is the Tristram Shandy effect, for lack of a better term. Tristram, the title character in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, an 18th century novel by Laurence Sterne, attributes all of his troubles to what happened the moment he was conceived. Just at the crucial point, his mother interrupts his father to ask if he has remembered to wind the hall clock. If I'm remembering it correctly--it's been many years since I last encountered it--the rest of the 500 or so pages of the story and it's hilarious sequence of events can all be attributed to this critical moment, this momentus interruptus, if you will.

Palm up technique from Seiunchin.

Fiction, certainly, but there are connections that are important. Kata is composed of sequences that constitute self defense scenarios. And each sequence is composed of entry techniques (uke), bridging techniques, and finishing techniques. Too often teachers and students trying to find bunkai ignore the sequences, as if the techniques are disconnected and unrelated. I think this is why we don't see the right applications sometimes, why we judge things strictly on appearance rather than a technique's function within a given self defense sequence.

Beginning of the end mawashi
from Saifa.

For example: we might look at the opening technique of Seiunchin and imagine that it must be a release from a two-handed grab or choke hold because both hands look the same--if they look the same, they must be doing the same thing. And the folks that interpret the opening of Seiunchin this way, imagine that the next technique--when the right palm is raised up and the left hand is brought up into chamber--is meant to block and grab the opponent's next punch. This is the disconnect between these two techniques of the sequence. Somehow the opponent must have pulled away from the previous technique in order to punch. But this interpretation works only in contradiction of the age-old martial principle of ikken hissatsu (one punch kill) or is it ippon kumite (one point fighting)? Perhaps it's all the same concept; that is, one should move in such a way as to allow your opponent only the one, initial attack--the one punch being your opponent's, not yours. (They get the initial attack, of course, because "there's no first attack in karate.") Or we might look at the opening technique of Sanseiru (after the three "punches") and imagine that it must be blocking and grabbing a kick because we're reaching down, knee level. Or we look at the end mawashi technique of Saifa and imagine that it's a ridge-hand strike, as many would say, simply because we don't see how it's connected to the previous sequence of moves.

At Mt. Tom looking across
the reservoir. 

It always makes me think of that old admonition about missing the forest for the trees. I suppose it's natural but it's also good to remember that things aren't always what they seem. (And no, it's not common knowledge, nor is it how everyone else looks at kata, no matter how much lip service we pay the old aphorisms we here in the dojo.)

Watching kata

Training kobudo in Okinawa
with Matayoshi sensei and
students from UMass.

When I first started training Goju with Kimo Wall sensei, we trained in a fairly large room at the Univer -sity of Mass -achusetts Amherst. The room was probably 20 or 25 feet deep and 30 or 40 feet long, plenty of space, though there were often 50 or 60 of us lined up for training. The space was fine for warm ups and basics—we would generally line up one arm’s length apart, side to side, and a little more than the distance of a front kick, front to back—but it was a little tight if we were doing kata, particularly classical subjects. So we often took turns training. For example, black belts would divide into two groups; half the group would do a kata while the other half sat on the side and watched, and then the other half would do the same kata while the first group watched. 

This was often the way people trained in Okinawa, Kimo sensei explained, because the dojos were generally much smaller than they are in America. But the real point, he said, was so that each person could watch and learn, not just from one’s seniors but also from one’s juniors. The idea was to have an opportunity to check oneself. If one saw a mistake in someone’s kata—perhaps the elbow hadn’t been kept down or the shoulders were raised or tense—one was supposed to use that opportunity to check one’s own technique. It was the teacher’s job to correct the student, but it was each student’s job to correct him or her self. This was, in fact, the way Kimo sensei taught; I never heard him correct an individual student’s mistakes in front of the class. He would always comment to the whole class. “Check your feet.” “Don’t forget to breathe.” “Elbows down,” he would say, even if he had noticed only one person making the mistake. And I would always check myself to see if he was talking about me, and thought everyone else did as well. 

Doing Sanchin in Gibo sensei's
dojo in the '80s.

When we sat and observed kata, Sensei said, “first watch the feet, then the eyes, and then the hands.” Well, I thought, that’s pretty clear, but what am I watching for? Are we only watching for mistakes? If we already know the kata, what can we learn from watching someone else do it, aside from making sure that we didn’t make the same mistakes ourselves when it was our turn? I suppose in some cases, nothing. If all we’re looking for is mistakes, and we don’t see any, then there’s nothing to learn here. But perhaps it’s not really the movements themselves as much as the movement, how someone moves. 

There’s a video I used to watch a lot of a guy doing T’ai Chi saber form on YouTube. His movement was so incredibly natural and fluid that it was hard to tell where one technique finished and the next one began. You couldn’t really see his intent or the moment when the muscles required for one movement gave way to the muscles required for the next movement. In some way it reminded me of something Picasso had reportedly said about painting, something to the effect of, “It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to draw like a child.” 

Practicing sanchin dachi
and stepping with the log.

And yet natural movement, for lack of a better term, often seems to fly in the face of what we are led to believe is “good kata” from videos of winning tournament performances. What we usually see is kata performed with exaggeratedly large arm movements, techniques done with excessive dynamic tension, movements that are so fast that the use of the whole body is sacrificed, movements that are so slow that the functionality of the technique has disappeared entirely, and positions that are held (and seemingly admired) for so long that whatever practical use they may have had—particularly in relationship to the techniques that precede them and the ones that follow them—is forgotten. In fact, we seem to be forgetting the whole purpose of kata; that is, to preserve and practice self defense techniques.

I can remember when I first started to train Goju. I would go home and practice walking in sanchin dachi, focusing on balance and grounding and using a crescent step. It felt so unnatural but I was committed to practicing it until it felt good. Nowadays I try to make all of my movement natural, but it doesn’t look very much like the demonstration kata I see at tournaments. There’s very little locked down movement, labored breathing, rigid holding of postures. Some would no doubt say my kata is “sloppy.” Where are the punctuated, staccato movements? the dynamic tension? the deep stances? the loud breathing? the scowling look intended to intimidate the meek? But kata, it seems to me, is not a performance piece, and we’re not role playing. If anything—and if it’s even possible—we’re trying to demonstrate our understanding of kata applications, or bunkai, every time we do kata. That’s hard enough. Oh, and then trying to move naturally. You see, there it is again, Nature. It's always at the heart of things.