Trust, Emptiness

My job is evolving into something that more resembles a career. I am grateful for this, and I've been explaining my background to other people lately, distilling the two years of blind fumbling this blog represents into a comfortable elevator pitch about why I am not an artist anymore. And you know, the more I reduce the more I see that the fundamental answer to this question is irreducible.

I stopped making art because the freedom to do whatever I want makes me less creative, not more. I need to submit to something larger than myself. I chose to make sculpture because it was the kind of art that had all these external rules in the form of Newtonian physics that I simply could not ignore. The sculpture I made was organized around losing control over form and content--I was working as an artist to give the art back to the materials and process themselves. I wanted to stay out of it and watch. I wanted to enable the possibility that something creative would happen in front of me, but that was not of me. Screwing tires together just wound up being the hardest possible way to get what I am actually after.

This is going to sound like I am changing the subject, but I'm not, I swear. Yesterday I went to take Hal Lehrman Sensei's class, which I try to do every Friday at lunch because he's teaching emptiness. As a relative beginner, I positioned myself to train with a very senior student. This is critical when it comes to Hal's classes because, well, because Hal's teaching emptiness. But you know, aikido is a social experiment as much as it is anything else, and I wound up getting paired with someone who had been training less than a month.

This meant that I was in charge, and the subject of the lesson for that hour was emptiness. I was so screwed!

There were a lot of things going on in that hour that are only interesting if you do aikido. Hal is so good at what he's doing that it often looks like he's doing it wrong, and I am definitely not an expert, and the cool thing about Hal's classes is the way senior students flock to it because he's such a poet. Trying to bridge that gap as a novice was, on a strict Martial Arts Nerd level, exhausting. But you don't want to hear about it.

Two things happened in that hour though that I think translate outside the dojo. First, it became immediately clear the minute I stood with this beginner and had to explain why what he was doing wasn't working that I know much less about aikido than I thought I did. I've been training a lot, and thinking about aikido outside of class, and feeling like a bit of a hotshot. But all this knowledge I thought I possessed clearly lives in other people's bodies. They loan it to me on the mat so that I can generate just a little bit of my own to keep. I can't think of any time when it's not helpful to assume that this is the case.

The second lesson is weirder. See, it is not necessarily clear to a beginner that a dojo is a collaborative environment, and my partner was, I think, full of doubt about the way this all works, and might have also been coming in with a specific idea of what it's like to be martial. So he was rigid and testy, and didn't understand that I was trying really hard to work at his level, and that I had to do this because I didn't want to hurt him. He was refusing to get thrown.

You can't learn aikido without giving it the benefit of the doubt. One mentor who watched some of this hour and soothed me afterward put it this way:

You have to give your balance in order to learn how to take balance.

And I have never heard the word trust defined so usefully, or experienced a trust relationship unfolding in such a hamfistedly literal way. My partner didn't trust me, I am not sure he trusted Hal because a lot of what Hal does looks like magic, and for that matter I didn't exactly trust me either because I was wrapped up in lesson number one and trying to interpret Hal. This trustlessness proliferated, built on itself. At one point we were doing a technique that calls for taking someone's balance by, basically, striking their face. I'm not going to do that to a beginner. So I put my hand near his face.

On his face.

And then said, "Listen, ideally you don't want me to touch your face. Pretend I am hitting you right now and move your head back, OK?"

And he said in an agitated voice, "But you are not hitting me!"

And I thought about my options, and we went again, and I hit him in the face. His balance was taken and he narrowly avoided the smack, and he fell hard. The technique worked. But this did not increase his confidence or trust in me as much as it increased his fear. He doubled down on his initial strategy of martial-feeling rigidity, the hour slogged on, and the only tool I really had was explaining over and over again that he was putting himself into a bad position:

"It's true that you don't have to go onto the floor right now. But I have your arm and could break it if I wanted to. Getting on the floor signals to me that you don't want me to break your arm. "

There's got to be a more elegant way to say that. Don't you think?

Emptiness was nowhere to be found. By the end of class Hal was speaking the typical magic about not fighting, and were were focusing on basic interpretations of techniques instead, and we were fighting our way through them in this very basic and literal way that I cannot summarize, and need to hold onto and learn from.

Comments

[Ben Walmer]

Yup, we get behind the mule and plow and through that submission we are set free...to happily plow some more.

[kvinnor]

Good video. Thank you, it's been very interestingly.

[MBT Shoes]

It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.

[Jade jewelry for men]

Pretty cool post. I just came by your blog and wanted to say that I have really liked reading your blog posts, i must go as the replica watches time now

[wall art]

Thank you for your insight into this and it's struck a chord within me as well.