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In the opening pages of Snow Crash, Stephenson notes that every man, until he is about twenty-five, occassionally believes that, if only he takes a few years off and studies in a Shaolin temple in China somewhere, he could be the biggest badass in the world. This is a generalized case of “green belt’s disease”, where newly minted green belts walk around and look at people, nodding and thinking, “yeah, I can take him.”

The brown belts in our school, I think, know better: the occassional class where you get repeatedly “cut” by the training knife when uke does something unexpected or even expected; the everyday where your technique gets blown and the switchup doesn’t quite work, but uke goes along with it in order to avoid injury for everyone; the times when you’re uke and tori can’t get the technique and you’re not quite sure how your own stuff is working. People who are willing to do harm to you tend to better armed, or are more committed to doing harm than you are, or are simply bigger than you. And random chance, accidents and slips happen in real fights, not always to your advantage. Brown belt tests are hard our school, I think in part to demonstrate how things go catastrophically wrong.

So, what use is all this? Sensei Coleman, in the post-class talk last night, started off with an Ursula K. Le Guin story about a bricklayer shipwrecked on an island who tried to build a bridge across the ocean to get off the island. Such a hopeless, ridiculous task was only marginally less hopeless and ridiculous than trying to build a brick boat to escape, but it was all he had. Eventually, his bridge goes some way off the island by the time he runs out of bricks, but at the end of the unfinished structure, he sees a sail off in the distance, jumps off and starts to swim towards it. While building the bridge, he learned how to swim.

The hope with these jujitsu classes is that all the techniques we learn and practice are the bricks from the story. They’re specific answers to specific questions in specific circumstances, and are as inadequate to the problem of personal violence as a bridge across an ocean. But, maybe, we’ll understand enough about the patterns of footwork, the ways of unbalancing and the techniques of escape to be able to swim when we need to; swimming for the distant sail is a better chance than not being able to swim at all. We, however, just have to realize that we should start swimming and stop laying bricks.

This basically sums up who I’ve tended to think about the basic techniques, and how a lot of our techniques and exercises might be derided as useless in a fight. Yes, certainly I can get sankyo if you hold your arm in a particular way, but you may not cooperate. But the repetitive exercises for doing sankyo are more for imprinting footwork and hinting at how you can gain some control over uke’s body by taking all the slack out of his arm, than for the technique itself. So, you swim: sankyo didn’t work, but you wind up in a good spot and can unbalance the attacker by going in a different way. Then you can switch up or, perhaps better, run.

Posted on Monday, February 16th, 2004 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Martial Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.