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The ki to chi

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Any one with at least a passing acquaintance with martial arts knows about ki, or chi, depending on the country of origin.  Most can give you some kind of definition, along the lines of, “a mysterious force you can tap into.”  Higher ranks will get you more mystical rhetoric, but the gist is usually the same.  You can “have” more or less of it, depending on your skill level in the art.

This is contradictory, since the force is said to pervade everything, a kind of combination of ancient Egyptian ma’at and the “ether.”  As a member of the universe, then, one has as much of it as anyone else, if indeed such a protean force can be said to be had.  Shin Shin Toitsu (Ki Aikido) recognizes this contradiction, and no longer speaks of an individual extending his or her ki, but rather being mindful of its existence.  There is, however, still talk of blocking ki, as if a miniscule speck can stop a force of nature from acting.  Worse yet, this is usually said to be done inadvertently, as if it is a human’s nature to block another nature.

I have seen amazing things done in martial arts, both in person and on video, even the famous touchless throw.  But all of what I have seen is explainable in terms of skill and timing, and the ability to anticipate how one’s opponents actions will unfold.  So, do I believe there is such a thing as ki or chi?

Yes and no.  If I have to accept a mysterious force that is separate from gravity, momentum, and biomechanics, count me out.  There are ways of moving, however, in concert with those familiar forces that are far more likely to get the results we want.  You don’t have to find a martial arts master to see it in action.  It’s there in a laborer who’s been at the job for years, and has pared down the energy required to dig a hole to the maximum efficiency.  I recall when I was a young man working on construction jobs, coming home spent at the end of the day.  There was an old man, Leroy, who never seemed to break a sweat.  He never hurried, never cursed, and was cheerful no matter what the situation.  Some people said he was lazy.  The only thing was, when you looked to see what everyone had accomplished at the end of the day, Leroy was always way ahead, untired, and still cheerful.  Leroy “had ki.”

Had he tapped into some mysterious supernatural force?  No.  He had simply stopped wasting energy on actions that did not contribute to the task at hand.

I say simply, but I do not mean easily.  His cheerful demeanor was not unrelated to his skill; to do this you must relax everything that isn’t working towards your end.  That includes your mind.  I won’t go into the techniques that will get you there.  Suffice it to say that Leroy’s skill was the result of a lifetime of work.

More examples of this are everywhere.  Think of a skilled musician, a carpenter, a surgeon, an athlete.  Think of yourself walking through a crowd.  Do it.  Go to a crowded mall, walk, and try to think ahead of what to do next to avoid each oncoming person, each person passing, each physical obstacle.  Then just give it up, and walk.  Which was the more successful?

How did you do it?  It’s not obvious.  Watch a toddler try the same thing.  Chaos.  You managed because you and everyone else involved have been walking and avoiding people and things all your lives.  You’ve gotten good at it.  No mysterious force required.

Of course, if someone is trying to harm you, that complicates things considerably;  it’s as if someone in the crowd were deliberately trying to bump into you.  It’s a situation you’re not as familiar with.  But what if you trained to keep your body in a position to move in any direction in an instant?  What if you also trained to anticipate the intention and the momentum of someone coming towards you.  Those things require calmness and total relaxation.  Nervousness will distract you, and muscle tension will impede your movements, so what if you trained yourself in those arts as well?

You’d have ki, my friend, all from within yourself.

Exile’s Child

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I’ve just moved my poetry blog, Exile’s Child , to WordPress.  Please have a look!

Hats, dentists and story tellers

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Many years ago, when I was young and foolish enough to be perfectly safe doing the most dubious things, I toured Morocco on less than fifty bucks, US.  I took a boat to the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and walked across the border to Nador, a town no one had ever heard of, before or since.  My traveling companion, Stu,  was a friend from my Air Force days.  Nador turned out to be a bit of a hike from the border.  We must have been a sight for the local fisherman, all backpacks and guitars and covered with road grime;  I wore a fedora and had a large bowie knife strapped to my belt to complete the picture.  Singing cowboys for sure, they must have thought, but where are their horses?

I won’t tell you all of our adventures there; I have the right to remain silent.  Suffice it to say we grew wary and slightly uncomfortable.  Our solution was to get on a bus, all goats and chickens, and cross the Rif Mountains to the royal city of Fes.  The Rif had the distinction of not having been conquered, by anyone.  Ever.  Not the Romans who reduced Carthage to rubble and salted its fields, not the Arabs who swept across the Maghreb like a scythe in a wheatfield, and not the Spanish or French, despite claims to the contrary.  So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see Rif tribesmen, their eyes like iron gates slammed shut, climb aboard with ancient Remington rifles slung across their backs.  But it was.

Next to me sat a dapper young man who spoke English, and spent much of the journey telling me how alike we were, and how unlike the restless, glowering tribesmen.  Luckily, he got off the bus midway through the trip, before any of the other passengers, who I swore could understand at least some of what he was saying, swatted us like the annoying flies we must have seemed.

A lot of other amazing and interesting things happened on that journey; maybe I’ll tell you about them another time.  This story is really about Fes, at which we arrived about midnight, exhausted.

Fes is one of the great ancient cities of Morocco, and one of four with a royal palace, each from a different period.  Like all North African cities of any size, it bears the imprint of European colonialism, in that part of it is indistinguishable from any city in Europe, and the other part, called the medina, is like stepping into the twelfth century.  Medina in Arabic simply means city, as in Madinat Al-Nabi, the full name of Medina in Arabia, the “city of the prophet”, Muhammad.  That’s a long story itself, but can be easily recovered from Wikipedia, so I won’t go into it.  In the Maghreb,  these “cities” are the remnants of pre-colonial cities where they were large enough to survive modernization.  There are two adjacent medinas in Fes, Fes al Bali and Fes Jdid.  Al Bali is the older, and is particularly enthralling, its ancient walls still standing, pierced by some twenty gates, ranging from the magnificent to the humdrum.

Stu and I had landed at one of the least imposing of the gates, Bab Ftouh, the entrance to the potters quarter, in a darkness as black as our demeanor at seeing a small square filled with dark doorways and the occasional  hooded figure.  The bus had disgorged its cargo, and all but the two of us had quickly melted into the shadows.  How we passed that night has utterly vanished from my memory, probably just as well, because the next day was washed with sunlight, and we decided to make our way to Bab Bou Jeloud.  A brilliant decision, as it took us through almost the entire medina, passing through the main souk, and by dusk, we found a small pension near our destination.  It was a dark and damp room with no water.  Outside the door was a large basin with cold running water, and nearby was a squatter for less social activities.  But it was cheap, about twenty cents US a day, and it was home.  Since it was just inside Bab Bou Jeloud, the main entrance to the medina, it was also near the amenities of the modern city, which included public showers for a dirham or two.  Across the street was a small restaurant where one could get a gigantic bowl of nutritious soup and all the khubz one could eat for a few pennies.  I often saw beggars get fed for free there.  I never saw one turned away.

So many stories could go on from this point, but instead I will get to the point, which is, dentists and story tellers.  On our trek to our new home, we had seen marvels in the souk, but one had stuck in my imagination: a small table covered with a white cloth, with dozens of teeth arrayed on it.  I had to know what that was all about.  And so, one fine morning I set off to find out.  Forty-odd years ago, when this took place, one walked through early morning Fes al Bali in the middle of the narrow, twisting streets, to avoid getting hit by the contents of chamber pots emptied through second floor windows.  Being a cautious sort, I bought a hat from a vendor in the street.  He had attached himself as I passed, and was trying to sell me a djellaba sized for a midget.  I settled on the only thing he had that would fit me: the hat on his head.  Deal!

Within the boundaries if this particular souk was an open square, and that was where I found my destination.  This time there were three tables of teeth, not just one.  Some friendly competition!  On closer examination, most of the teeth were whole, and next to them on the tables were dental extractors, i. e., pliers.  These were dentists, and the one with the most unbroken teeth on display was the best.  My current dentist says this is actually a pretty good measure of dental skill, since it is difficult to pull diseased teeth without breaking them off.

I learned this through a combination of gesture, and a mixture of French, Spanish, and English, none of them properly deployed, no doubt, but nevertheless adequate to the purpose.  Next to Dental Row, against a wall, a man had been regaling an audience the whole time I was bantering with the dentists;  it turned out he was a story teller, a common fixture in many parts of the world with few electronics.   For tips, he would tell long, often dramatic stories; for larger tips, he would include your name in a custom made story of your own.  I was looking at a direct cultural descendant of Homer.

He had heard the clatter of languages at the dental tables, and saw me approach.  More gesturing; I told him my name, and he launched into a lengthy monologue punctuated by alternating groans and gales of laughter from the growing audience.  The performance lasted about fifteen minutes; all I could understand was the periodic occurrence of my name, but I could see from the reaction of the crowd that it was a splendidly wrought tale with twists both dramatic and humorous.  He got a very nice tip from me, and more from the rest of the listeners.

I would love to know what the story was.  Or maybe not.  At any rate, I left the souk that day with my teeth intact, an incomprehensible story ringing in my ears, and this marvelous hat.

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Humility and the scientific method

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In the Fall of 1990, on a whim of the gods, I was in Tunisia, touring the ruins of ancient Roman colonies with some Italian students.  Saddam Hussein had just decided to reclaim Kuwait (believe it or not, he had some historical precedent) and the long litany of dares and double-dares had begun.  Most of the Arab speaking world backed Saddam in this, albeit halfheartedly, because they thought of Kuwaitis as selfish and spoiled.  Poor people rarely like rich people.

In any event, Americans, such as myself, were viewed warily, especially unusual ones.  First of all, I stood literally head and shoulders above most of the population.  Secondly, I was traveling with Italians, and it was clear that I spoke Italian.  Everyone knows Americans don’t speak Italian unless they’re up to no good.  It was obvious to discerning Tunisians that I was a CIA operative, in Tunisia during the Gulf crisis to – what?  The fact that no one could imagine what such a person might be up to there only confirmed their suspicions.  Lucky for me, they are, for the most part, a gentle and amicable people, but it did take awhile to get accustomed to knowing smiles and the occasional glare.

All things considered, I was left a bit dubious of the critical thinking skills of the hoi polloi.  And so it happened that, on a break from run-down Roman baths and fora. we visited Douz, once the fabled trailhead for Timbuktu and points beyond, nowadays a hive of hucksters and tourists longing for a one or two hour Lawrence of Arabia experience.  Typically, one wanders out into the Sahara on a camel led by a guide on foot, has lunch, and returns for an extended photo op.  I thought the camel ride seemed pointless, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the friendly clash of cultures.

Suddenly, my pondering was interrupted by the loud and repeated braying of a camel.  Camels, of course, are among the rudest animals humans associate themselves with, but this outburst had an unusual urgency about it.  I looked over and saw that four or five men had wrestled a camel to the ground, and were holding it down.  Nearby, a wood fire burned, with a long iron rod reddening in the heat.  I walked over and asked one of the camel drivers standing nearby what on earth was going on.

“Ah,” he said, “this camel refuses to eat.  He will die soon, unless something is done.”

As he said this, a man pulled the iron, now white hot, out of the fire, walked over to the prostrate beast, and began searing three parallel lines on the animal’s throat.

“This will make him hungry, and he will eat, and all will be well,” my new friend cheerfully informed me.

Poor benighted bastards, I thought.  If only they had access to modern veterinary practice, instead of relying on this absurd medieval ritual!  I wondered what they would do when they realized this wasn’t working, maybe exorcise demons?  The men concluded their torture and let the camel stand on its own.

Whereupon it immediately walked over to a clump of grass, and began enthusiastically devouring it.

Life, knowing, and history

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In my rather odd life, I have most recently been a professor, of what, I won’t say; it could be part of a conspiracy.  I have, however, taught history, a subject I never studied beyond high school.  You think that’s strange?  I think it’s typical of Academe.  There is a pervasive but deeply buried assumption among the professorate that anyone smart enough to earn a doctorate can teach any subject.  Believe me, it is entirely unwarranted, and bespeaks only the remanent arrogance of a life once restricted to the aristocracy.  If I ever begin to succumb to this delusion, I need only to look in the mirror.  All the same, I think that in time, I became an adequate teacher of history, although there doubtless remain some perfectly competent individuals out there who believe the most preposterous things on my account.

What is history, anyway?  That’s a question that has sent alternating waves of apprehension and boredom through countless classrooms.  Little did my students suspect that, initially, at least, I asked it partly in hopes of finding out, myself.  Too bad for me.  Mostly I heard it was a narrative of the important things that have happened in the past, and that our version of it was objective, while theirs was biased, or vice-versa, for budding politicos.

Objectivity, of course, is impossible, if only because it implies a thoroughness that would take longer to describe by several orders of magnitude than the events themselves took to occur.  Write an objective account, if you can, of everything that has happened in your neighborhood while you were reading this blog.  Just your neighborhood.  Don’t leave anything out because you think it’s unimportant; that would be bias, and be careful to hide your opinion of it.  Don’t forget the pigeons, either, or the cockroaches.  Even if you intend to write only the history of humans in your neighborhood, they might well have a bearing on that.  Then there are all those minute occurrences of which you are utterly unaware.  Fall a bit short, did you?  Try for the entire world since the dawn of agriculture some 12,000 years ago.

Just that fact alone, that you can’t write all of it, dooms any semblance of real objectivity.  What to leave out?

So why do people keep on about it?  What do they mean when they say something is “objective?”  Non-historians generally mean it’s agreeable to them, it fits their world view.  Historians tend to avoid the subject, but what passes for objectivity among them is consensus.  Don’t let them tell you otherwise; all that citation and vetting of primary sources is nothing more than an attempt to arrive at what the consensus was at the time of the occurrence they happen to be writing about.  Occasionally, someone does stray from the pack.  Maybe a new source is uncovered, or a discredited one is taken at face value.  In that case a process begins to either expel or integrate the upstart view, so as to preserve the appearance of objectivity.  Rarely does it occur to anyone that seemingly contradictory accounts may. in fact, be legitimate from differing points of view.  We, historians and otherwise, are obsessed with what really happened, as if everyone involve had the same stake in the outcome.

Please don’t confuse this with the increasingly common view that any opinion is as good as the next!  This is another difficult point for some people: an opinion can be dead wrong, even ridiculous.  I often hear that all opinions have the right to be heard.  Opinions have no rights, friends.

So, what do these opposite approaches have in common?  Both seem to make life easier.  In neither case is it necessary to think too much.  Consensus is no guarantee of accuracy, and relativism just despairs of it.  They each in their own way avoid the disturbing conclusion that history is a subjective review of the past, that may be plausible, true, false, or all of the above, depending on where you stand.  Know where you stand, but also where others stand, and you may find history endlessly fascinating.  Perhaps even useful.