To whom do you bow when there is no foe but yourself?
That very thin slice of time and space where you are between a rock and a hard place is Budo.
Where the jagged beer bottle of life arcs towards your neck and the ground shifts beneath your feet: the precise edge of kata.
Sanchin in a darkened room and the sound of an oscillating fan.
Way back in this blog I made reference to the fact that when I saw Seikichi Toguchi in person do the first basic kata of the Shoreikan syllabus (Tandoku or Fukyu) it seemed like another kata, all together different from the kata that I as a white belt was just learning to do. The ingredients of his kata were the same as mine, recognizable as a stick figure may be to a human form, and yet those same ingredients sieved through his body, mind and spirit tasted different to the eye.
The kata is a static mold, an ideal, a form, a map from here to there. Yet as it moves through one’s body and mind through time it jellies and wobbles, whips and pauses, morphs into the skin of your particular intent. Becomes yours. Becomes you, and you it.
My kata did not become Toguchi’s kata. Impossible.
No boxer fights like he/she spars, does the bag or skips rope. No karateca should fight as he/she does kata. Karate, as a “traditional” martial art, has a more profound purpose than just learning to fight, regardless of all the analytical mumbo-jumbo of the experts on its historical origins that attempt to scientifically package the ineffable.
Kata is the manifestation of the art of karate. It unfolds its meaning through time. Most of a kata remains untold, undecipherable at first glance, most times at the hundredth glance.
It is a ritual of epiphanies and within them the fleeting secrets lie.
Nothing like a spring cleaning where all kinds of memories are rescued from the most secluded reaches of the closet, dusted and viewed anew . This old photo of me dates back to 1973,taken as I was practicing karate with a friend in an old university-years apartment. A perfect place to practice since I had no furniture save a small round dining table , 2 director chairs, and throw cushions. That practice Gi cost me $15, the cheapest in the store.
I was a white belt. This was long before cell phones, Internet, and for that matter, even satellite broadcasts. Practicing a style of karate without knowing there were many other styles of karate, and many other styles of martial arts. All I knew I got from the dojo and it wasn’t much, just the first two katas of the syllabus (fukyu, gekisai ichi). It was all monkey see, monkey do. No Japanese or Okinawan terminology beyond the salutations. Just a mimeographed sheet with a short paragraph on the history of the style and a few others on dojo etiquette. I knew less than nothing and that little nothing I practiced every day and at every opportunity.
A white belt now knows more than I knew at brown belt, can see katas and forms of every style and all the martial arts, the legendary teachers at the click of the mouse, order martial arts books online, chat and comment on all the minutiae that his/her heart desires.
I would practice in that living room the little I knew. I had the space, I had the time, and I had my foolish youth to spend as I saw fit.
I’ve come full circle. I think I know a bit more. At least it is all a click away. Even got a blog, something truly inconceivable, unimaginable in that empty space of my youth in 1973. My living room now is more cluttered of all the things one may accumulate in a lifetime, and I must move more carefully between bookcases and furniture. I know a bit more but not that much more. I have just been practicing the little I know longer, years.
The invisible guy I was practicing with died nine years ago. My youngest son is much older than I was then.
The old guy in the sidebar smiles.
“ … but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.”
As I was walking down the street after work, in that final stretch of pavement to my house, I ran into an old dojo friend. I spied her from afar, in the midst of a group of people in front of a local political organization. As I neared the group she turned to go up a flight of stairs. I called out her name. She turned and swiftly ran down the stairs. We embraced in the joy of finding each other out of sheer happenstance. She had spied me too but could only comment to someone nearby that the manner of walking of that guy up the street reminded her of an old karate buddy. We laughed. We exchanged the usual karate courtesies and quickly asked about each other’s practice, the thread that binds.
She now practices with a few other “old” dojo mates in a public park close to the beach in a part of San Juan called Ocean Park.
She is an old Kimo Wall alumnus, getting her black belt in the Violeta Dojo in the ‘80’s. I had known her since my university years in the late sixties and early seventies, but just as a campus activist. Although we had friends in common, it wasn’t until we practiced together in the dojo that we became friends; the thread that binds.
Then we met again some fifteen years later in the Las Cumbres dojo where we finally got to know each other well. She was and is far my superior in technique, endurance, and commitment. We practiced often and practiced hard … the thread that binds.
It was surprising how without having talked about it we had reached the same lifestyle conclusions regarding the practice of karate. We have practically no knowledge of each other’s lives except for the surface details, and yet we feel a tie that supersedes these limitations and forges a unique bond: more than thirty years of practicing in the same style of karate. This has its particular glue and vision shared. We probably have more in common than we suspect.
This is not the only experience I’ve had of this nature, just the most recent. And it confirms a belief I have of the transcendence of practicing the martial arts. It is truly a lifestyle. It is truly a way of seeing the world that transcends the kata and yet resides at the very core of the kata.
I experience it in no other of my endeavors, except maybe for poetry.
It is the thread that binds.
