Deborah Fisher

Aikido and the Limits of Empathy

One of my favorite aikido teachers also gives me the willies, for reasons that are worth exploring. She teaches great stuff that nobody else quite says in a way I understand, I like her style, and she is more willing to correct me than any other teacher. For this I am grateful and I learn a lot from her classes. But she's got a lot of that strong Serra empathy, and really throws herself into other people, assumes that she knows what you're thinking and feeling, and is often right. And I'm not into that.

I'm not into it because it hits me where I live and why I am on the mat in the first place. I am taking aikido classes because my default empathy setting is a lot like this teacher's, and that default setting limits me. I'm a good person who has fought too much, and I have fought because having someone else thinking your thoughts and feeling your feelings can be creepy, and many people rightly resent it. I am trading my knees and elbows for a workable set of boundaries between me and other people, and feel good about making this trade because I am stupidly literal, and need to learn in basic Newtonian terms. I will never get why I handled your grief poorly. I'll always think that I did it right because I really understood your feelings, and you'll never convince me that I camped out in your head. But it is starkly obvious that I am not the person I am throwing. This is physically true, and must remain true or I will get caught up in the energy and flow, and throw myself right on top of my partner. Practicing this for an hour or two on most days helps me not to throw myself onto or into anyone else out there in my life. It affirms that I can listen intently to you and understand where you're coming from. But I am not you.

But the best part is that this does not unfold in a vacuum, or between me and objects. Aikido is not merely social, it's surprisingly intimate. It's not sexy, but like sex it is a highly ritualized nonverbal conversation, and everyone's coming to it with a different agenda, and working that agenda out with a partner. I am relatively new at this, so my agenda is mostly to take responsibility for my perimeter. I am here to not fall on other people; to be a good mimic of the teacher; keep flailing to a minimum; ensure my partner's safety in a crowded dojo; protect myself when I am thrown; listen for more. But most people are working on something else, and most of that agenda is, to me, incredibly mysterious. One of the biggest pitfalls of having a strong sense of empathy is the way it makes you feel like you know everything already--are everything already! And so one of the most productive things I can do is just sit with the fact that everyone is learning something different here, and that I don't get what most people are learning yet. I don't need to purse my lips or furrow my brow. I've got no reason to assume that a master would be better than me at my own personal homework.

Tool Use and The Limits of Empathy

Richard Serra thinks of rigging as an extension of his own hand, and this understanding helped me when I became a rigger responsible for lifting her own work. Using a crane is not that different from driving a car or sweeping a floor--technological extensions of our own selves that we buy into completely every day. I don't know about you, but if I am paying attention, I can actually feel the dirt with the bristles, and feel the clean floor i am leaving behind, and I do this through the broom. My safety relies on the fact that I can feel the perimeter of my car, which is not me, but becomes part of me when I start driving.

Working at any kind of scale or distance is a matter of understanding tool use as this extension of self, and at the same time we have evolved to a point that we are constantly immersed in our tools all the time and it's hard to see what it even entails anymore. My husband's art is rooted in understanding the way we forget about extension into, or empathy for, our machines. And my life work has been consistently about understanding the extension, the way we enter tools, on its own terms.

I am not particularly gifted as a builder, and fell in love with making sculpture for emotional reasons. I felt powerless and loved how powerful learning how to use tools made me feel. When I was 19, this was about the simple act of conquering fear; dealing with how foreign and spastic I felt in the shop; learning how to play a tougher, more masculine role. But my life with tools became a powerful life in the same way Batman is a superhero because he surrounds himself with tools. Tool use gave me options. I could drive a much crappier car than you because I could fix it on the go. I could fix that old house, improvise solutions to physical problems. When the lights went out, I knew how to find the fuse box. Most of this empowerment was not about knowledge. It was mostly a function of empathy. I am not a great mechanic, but I could feel the difference between the starter failing (again) and a new problem with the alternator. I didn't just want to fix the house, I wanted to end its sadness and pain and atone for years of accumulated disrespect. In the same way some teenagers figure out in high school how to navigate the social scene and discover a rich and self-affirming world of meaning, I found myself in these things.

But now what? I still get a lot out of listening to those hand extensions I surround myself with every day. It helps me stay connected, and it gives Joel and I something to discuss deeply. But these days I work a lot more with people than I do with things. And while it's just as important to empathize with people as it is to empathize with tools, it goes without saying that when a person becomes a tool, that's a real problem, and I've been giving that serious thought.

One of the ways I've been thinking about balancing this sense of extension and empathy without letting other people become tools is with aikido. An aikido class is basically about two people taking turns throwing one another on the ground with a good amount of power, but ideally no force. Empathy and listening are part of this, but the fundamental idea is to use the force that the person you're throwing is giving you, and to keep that force separate from yourself. One of the teachers at my dojo puts this idea in terms of posture. He says, "See, I am the one throwing. I am standing up straight and my feet are on the ground. My partner is the one who's back is contorted and whose feet are moving all over the place."

This is a more loving distinction than it initially sounds. See, the way I learned to use tools is to enter them. You'll never walk in the wrong place around a crane if you've successfully inhabited the crane, and can see everything from its point of view. You will put the weld where you want it to go even after you flip down your welding mask and can't see where you're going if you are the weld. You can feel the bristles of the broom because you are in the broom. It's kind of like The Force.

But it's rude and destabilizing to inhabit people all the way like that. You really do turn someone you enter like that into a tool. It's aggressive, and that aggression creates all the extra energy you need for a backlash.

Right now I am watching someone act like Richard Serra, but with people, not steel. And I am not surprised to find a good deal of empathy in this aggression, and feel lucky to have this opportunity to learn about my own relationship to power and people and work. You use what you've got, and my empathy bone is enormous, and I know I've tooled someone by entering them too completely myself. I know from that experience that empathy is not equivalent to love, that it can also be a rather raw way to own something.

A lot of my own decisions about not making sculpture anymore are about the way sculpture became a limitation. This reliance on a specific kind of empathy is one of those limitations. I don't do myself any favors to forget that for years I've been casting my lot with the old white guys, modernist men whose sole drive was to defy gravity, to phallically rise up out of the earth again and again in expressions of their own power made weight and height and equipment and fuss. That kind of sculpture happens as a function of entering and owning the earth the sculpture sits upon, the materials, the welder, the cherry picker and the crane and the bolts. In my own creative life, I have tended to look out onto the landscape so that I can own it with my eyes and my heart. The more things I knew about how the world works, the more of the world I could aggressively enter.

Every single event in my life is conspiring to tell me that there are better, more loving ways to take on the world, and I am not certain what they are yet but I promise to keep looking.

Like A Phoenix, Baby, Rising Out Of Flames!

So last year I went ahead and told my art career to fuck off. I decided that it wasn't worth doing anymore, that it made me angry and poor and felt masochistic. Even though I approached the problem from a position of exhaustion, retiring from art has worked out well so far. I feel lighter than I did when I spent my days screwing tires together, and much more generous. I have been learning a lot about what I am actually good at and the limitations I was putting on myself. Sculpture is a drag and a real estate struggle, and is about a very specific definition of power that depends on an increasingly arcane definition of masculinity for meaning. The guys I worked with at Socrates, bless their hearts, are so caught up in the Heavy Equipment Opera and the way all that diesel and weight proves their masculine power that they don't tend to have very good ideas.

It was important for me to figure out that you don't need a penis to fall into this trap, take a long look at myself and realize that I had surrounded myself with piles of dusty inventory and experiments in a studio I could not afford. I had a lifestyle that was dependent on needing too much space and too much time, which would be okay except that I tended to waste all that pricey time and space on the most repetitive of tasks that did not honestly feed me.

Sculpture is special because it concretizes both the process and product of your intangible thoughts, but I wasn't doing that. I was screwing garbage together, and while i did that the rest of my life was kind of falling apart around me. My financial situation was starting to really suck. My dayjob was becoming an ordeal, in part because I was acting like an artist and trying to protect myself from it instead of care. I kept up steady progress with getting my work out there, but every one of these achievements cost me money I didn't have, and made me feel more like a sucker than a success.

Abandoning this trajectory took more effort than I can describe, and was sadder and more fraught than I thought it would be. I did not understand how much identity and self-worth I had riding on my perpetually dirty hands; how proud I was that I had no idea how to dress for a white collar job; how lost I would feel at parties when I was asked what I do; how much time I would spend fantasizing about getting certified as a union rigger, or becoming an arborist. When I started opening myself up to new experiences, I found that I am actually much better at getting other people to do work than I am at doing it myself, and this realization shattered the old me, the me that used Labor Creates All Wealth as the tagline for her blog. The me that proudly spent the winter of 2006-7 screwing tires together alone in the cold, with three pairs of socks and a heat-exchanging balaclava.

I also found out that while I am a consistently serviceable welder, I am a fantastic, if unschooled, presenter of ideas. And that I am good at troubleshooting structural problems, but truly great at navigating people problems. I can pour a concrete pad, or figure out how to lift a really heavy thing. But honestly, I find this work arduous. What comes easily and gives me real flow is writing a diplomatic email that helps a tense situation. I became a sculptor because I distrust the way words can mean so many things and have such slippery power. And yet, all my power resides in my consistent ability to listen acutely, and say exactly what I mean.

In other words, I organized my whole life around fearing what I am best at, and that made me feel, temporarily, like a total retard. I fell apart just a little bit, and am putting myself back together a little differently now. Writing will help that process, and it's time to start letting sculpture back in. I am not a sculptor in the object-making sense of the word, but it's true that the best intellectual work I have ever done is in service of understanding what sculpture is and what it's for. And as I reintegrate and move forward with whatever it is I am supposed to do, that work can't help but provide a solid foundation.

I don't know what I or this blog will resurrect into. I've been doing a lot of aikido, starting a nonprofit, thinking about writing more art criticism and embracing my dayjob in ways that are interesting, but that I am not allowed to write about directly. It's not soup yet, and for now, that's a good thing. This is the most interesting moment i have ever experienced in my life. If you want to find out what sculpture and farming and art criticism and martial arts and heavily fictionalized office politics and learning some leadership skills make when you jumble them all together, keep reading. Something interesting seems certain to unfold.