The spaces in-between

The space that the martial arts create is a unique one. Those that enter to train have agreed to let certain things happen in that space that aren't allowed elsewhere, so the dojo is a liminal, that's to say an in-between space where "normality" is suspended. This space can be dangerous, not least because some teachers will use it to express their own control, power , fear or self-aggrandisement. A gentleman came to train with us recently whose art it seemed was that of martial compliance, thats's to say someone had trained him to die very politely at the application of the slightest force. I felt sorry for him. A teacher of my acquaintance admitted once that he had "run out of things to do" with his considerable crowd of students. This one particularly amazes me: what a gift to have a room full of people all willing to work together, all willing to drop some of the niceties of society in order to learn from blows and attacks!

So last night's training had a quiet edge to it. We zombied for well over half an hour, working on efficiency, flow and herding tactics. There's such a fine balance between letting them come, and pro-actively deterring the zombies. If you go in every time, you find yourself at their tactical mercy, as you have to keep turning in order to maintain awareness, and this is pretty disorientating. Sometimes it's better to let them sail past, using just a small evasion and cover, and hitting them as they go. Fists are fine, but open hand keeps forearms in play for smothering, chokes, locks and elbow-through-shoulder barges and hits. Our training in moving-step pushing has improved the use of lower body techniques, and I found that where top and bottom worked in co-ordination, the zombies balance and footing disappeared quickly and without warning...

There's not so much "teaching" going on. We can all, regardless of ability or experience, point out patterns or holes in people's movement (though experience improves this ability). If you've got a mob of keen people, and don't know what to teach, then don't teach: play, mess around, and thrash it out between you all. There's enough there to occupy several lifetimes. The lure of "the system" or "the art" gets them through the door, but what goes on once inside is much freer and vital than any system will ever be.

Tigers & Porcupines

 Tigers are beautiful and mysterious, powerful and deadly, and many martial artists wish to become like a tiger amongst the livestock of the human population. Many martial arts give the impression that they can turn out tigers through the process of their teaching. I am of the opinion that one is either a tiger or not, and, as in nature itself, there are fewer around than we think. There are lots of mynah birds who can do a good impression of a tiger call, or a few cats which, when viewed from a distance, look a little tigerish ( as happened in Essex, England recently.) but very few actual tigers and the first you'd probably know about them is when they knock your head off with one swipe. I have realised that my training, and the art in which I train, is not one that will magically imbue me with ferocity and the killer instinct. It is much more a case of being unappealing prey, much like a porcupine or a sea urchin. When and if someone chooses to attack me, I want them to very quickly get the impression that 1) it hurts to attack me, 2) that attacking me will not be a casual thing which they can end quickly in their favour and 3) there are much safer bets for preying on. The ego, of course, can raise real objections to all this, because really we want to be tigers and not porcupines. Perhaps there will be times when a pre-emptive strike is needed, and perhaps a porcupine won't be much good at that. But my life isn't so violent, and the likeihood for such an incident small, so I train according to my life.

Here be Dragons

There is a story about  a man who loved dragons: he had paintings and sculptures, tapestries and vases all depicting dragons. But when a real dragon, curious about the man's passion ,appeared at his window, the man dropped dead in fright.

 There are times in training when you realise it’s all for nothing. All the hours of training and teaching can add only the merest iota to what the cosmos already has going on. You could take this in one of two ways: you could become dejected and defeatist and give up your training. Or you could accept the fact that this feeling of “there’s nothing much to be done” or “I am not in control” should in fact form the backbone of training rather than being an occasional flash of inspiration.
In the martial arts it is very, very easy to become complacent about conflict, to think “I could handle that.” Some martial art teachers even boast of instilling confidence in their students.
We got stuck into some intense training the other night, in a way that we‘ve not done for ages. I was not as “good” as I thought I would be which shows how complacent I was becoming. Because thinking that you are “good” at this stuff is simply not the point.
What’s crucial to bear in mind is that we are not trying to improve our sparring proficiency. Our training partners are not fellow competitors but rather training aids for us. Our goal is not to defeat martial artists in some tournament: it is to try and open ourselves in readiness for when life comes along in the form of someone who wishes to cause us harm.
Intense and pressurised training is a reality check. In the midst of chaos, there is no style, no technique, no winning, no losing, no action and no reaction. This may not sit well with the image we have built up of what our training is about. It may even make us feel like giving up. An unexpected dose of reality or near-reality can be difficult for someone who isn’t absolutely, totally ready to lose. "Invest in loss" isn’t a pretty aphorism: it is an essential imperative.
There isn’t some Truth to be proved in martial arts, some gritty baseline that only certain grizzled fighters can lay claim to. There is only that which life throws in front of you. There isn’t a Truth in the martial arts; but there are lots of opportunities for self-deception.

Creation Myths

It's the done thing these days to imagine a "prologue" to the main events: witness the recent film "Prometheus" as one of the very worst examples of this to be found in popular culture...
People like to do prologues to tai chi chuan as well, to explain the "backstory" as it were. Many of them, in fact most of these are very unconvincing. Particularly the ones that edit out the martial content. Tai chi chuan has always seemed to me like the art that was designed to be done after having trained in some "hard" style. It is, in my opinion, more of an approach to martial situations than a formal style of movement. It has now become a style, of course, out of necessity: it's very difficult to market a concept, particularly when one is surrounded by schools who are very sure of their lineage, the effectiveness of their art, and the skills of their founders. I'm not just talking about nowadays: I imagine it was the same in China two-hundred years ago. When someone says "demonstrate your art" what do you do if you don't have a "form"? Is is possible that the tai chi form arose out of a desire to have something concrete to demonstrate to prospective students? Obviously the Handform has benefits in and of itself, but I wonder...
It used to de rigeur ten or so years ago to talk about tai chi chuan as having sprung out of the combination of Xing-Yi and Ba-gua, which makes total sense to me on a physical level. Seven Stars looks like pure Xing-Yi and when I did Nine Palace Stepping recently in front of some Shaolin guys, they asked if I  had ever trained in Ba-gua. These two arts are rarely mentioned in connection with tai chi chuan's genesis today, presumably to give weight to tai chi chuan's miraculous virgin birth several thousand years ago, as some would have it. Others would point out that tai chi chuan became what is recognisable to us today right about the time George IV was illegally marrying Catholics and burning his way through the country's finances in the pursuit of various architectural follies.
I like to imagine tai chi chuan being cooked up by a bunch of worldly-wise and weary old salts who simply no longer possessed the vim required for extreme conditioning, or  acrobatic high-kicks, but whom were essentially still damned kick-arse. Using their pooled years of youthful high-jinks and encounters, and perhaps mixing in some basic Taoistic wisdom which favours the less frenetic approach to life, they came up with something none too fancy but which worked even if you were a bit overweight or had a dodgy knee or whatever.  Whoever they were, and however it came about, I salute and thank them for their cleverness, and their bloody-minded lazy-arsed effectiveness.

Immersion!

Whether it's with weapons, or empty-handed, the thing is this: we can't hang back. We can't be purely defensive. If it takes too long for us to catch the turning tide of their attack, to spot an opening, we will simply be overwhelmed. Tai chi is certainly counterattacking, but it isn't and can't be purely defensive. If our technique is good, perhaps we can cut down on the lag-time between attack and defense: ideally they are simultaneous. The weakness with many Pushing Hands drills is that they subconsciously train us to allow five, ten or twenty attacks to go without a decisive response. Repetition is key to making the movement a habit, but we don't want to make  a blind habit where something is applied in an inappropriate manner. The point of Five Element Arm, for example, is not to be able to deal with five punches, but to deal with changing and varied punches. But really, we don't want anyone to land two shots on us, or even a single one if possible. This doesn't mean however that in training we don't ever let anyone land anything on us...It's tricky stuff this. We need to train the swift response, and the seeking out of the gaps, and general non-compliancy. We also need to feel what it's like (to a certain degree) to take a bit of a pasting. But it's important to know which we are training, and to realise that neither has the monopoly on "realistic".

This brings me to something that I've been thinking about. The benefit of some random, non-compliant, free-response training is boundless, simply because of the non-linear nature of the martial arts. A picture being worth a thousand words, anything that approaches a "whole" or "total" situation will encourage learning in a way that broken-down, linear-organised drilling simply won't. The danger in the first case is that it's easy to confuse with "reality". Now, five of your training partners coming at you in an intense and unpredictable way is a good training tool, and nearer to the "total" picture than is, for example, Seven Stars Stepping drill. But it isn't "total". "Total" can only happen in those nasty real-life happenings outside (hopefully!) the dojo. No-one is going to confuse Seven Stars with a "real" situation.
When you throw new people (or even more experienced sorts) into the "free" situation (and there are still plenty of rules and provisos for sure...) they can flounder and panic. This is where the more limited drills come in: they give the person the courage to enter fully into the "free" situation. They may even enhance their skills when they are in there. But what they also do is to give a kind of "spotter's guide" as to what's happening there amidst the hurly-burly, so they can identify and learn. It's like giving someone on safari some binoculars and a book which identifies the relevant beasts, but the obvious wonder of the safari is in its immersive quality and not for example, in the exact total number of wildebeest spotted. We want to get people to the point where they can spot for themselves, because then the real learning appears rather than the copying, mimicking or following.

Something else entirely

It has occurred to us in the last few weeks of training that many of the elements of tai chi chuan come into play after the fact. What I mean is that, in a "real" situation, and even in sparring or competitions, you have to set up your Pushing Hands, or your  particular application with something else. It is this "something else" which forms the bridge between your approaching or closing down the opponent, and either escaping or taking him down. Here are some things that are difficult to do without the something else:

1) Going round the opponent with something like a Nine Palace Step. Unlike in flawed application training, an attacker will not pick one vector and stay on it. He or she will swivel quite naturally to find and hit you wherever you may go, unless you really are extremely fleet of foot. If they are at the centre, they only have to turn a few degrees, whilst you have to travel a couple of feet.

2) Any kind of throw. You see this in competitions, where people shoot in for the Double Hand Takes Legs, or they jump and swivel in for a White Crane Flaps Its Wings. Normally they expend energy and give away position for very little effect.

3) Effective striking, by which I mean striking from a position where it's hard for the opponent to strike back. If you are just standing centre line to centre line, exchanging punches, you are not using your tai chi chuan to its best advantage.

4) Sweeping to take their balance. Again, in competitions particularly one sees major shin-kicking contests where the opponents try to apply sweeps and trips with little effect (though a good kick to the shin can have its very own special effect...)

5) Locking  an arm, or controlling the motion of the opponent.

There are probably more, but these are the most obvious to me.
Lots of the syllabus in tai chi chuan, and I imagine, in other martial arts, is based on a kind of end result: techniques applied once you have already done a certain amount of work on the opponent. I'm not sure if I want to specify exactly what this might be at this time, mainly because I can't think of  a way of explaining it that isn't misleading. So I'll ruminate a while longer, and get back to you.

Shaolin and Wudang

Recently, In the spirit of martial camaraderie I accepted an invitation to train with some Shaolin chaps for an evening. I had gone along, mouthguard in bag, expecting some sparring, but we kept it quite mild-mannered and focused on some martial drills instead. The key to these seemed to be stances, mainly based on quite a wide and deep step which is somewhat different to my usual ambivalent stance. These stances were used to generate extra power, something which we don't pay too much mind to in our approach, beyond using the right mechanics  for the job (and perhaps conditioning). The long stance did indeed feel powerful, but also slightly immobile and ripe for sweeping. There were similarities also, with both Seven Stars and Nine Palace Stepping being part of the Shaolin repertoire, albeit under different names. The drills were lively and energetic, and utilised a range of punches from angles different to those I am used to, but my "kickboxing"(!) approach to them seemed to serve me well enough.
The martial approach of these fellows seems to be "quickly in, quickly out", a kind of sniping approach if you will. Sifu Tim was able to demonstrate some great combos and evasions. By contrast, our Tai Chi way is more akin to throwing a weighted net over someone, or like a cloud of bees that you just can't get away from.
It was interesting to me that the teacher referred to my movements variously as "kickboxing", "boxing", "bagua" but never "tai chi". In fact he was of the opinion that, of all the things they teach in their particular Shaolin syllabus, the Tai Chi would be the one I'd most benefit from, which only goes to say that our ideas about what Tai Chi is are rather different.
The main difference really is in the approach: these Shaolin soldiers were training for the ring, whereas in our Tai Chi, we are inspired by the notion of usage in  "real" martial situations.

Thanks to Tim, Jon and Rich for a great evening, huzzah for the Shaolin style!