I spent most of the day thinking about martial arts and how I can apply how I learn it to other forms of art as well. I looked up a few videos online about how to improve my penmanship and began working on that quite intensely. I never thought I could be so focused on something I used to consider so basic, but once I put my mind to it suddenly I gained motivation. In the video, the author of the lesson talks about how when teaching yourself how to write better, the best way is through writing words that are meaningful to you so that you will not get bored or feel like what you are doing is work. Of course, me being the person that I am, I instantly took this as an opportunity to improve my Les Miserable addiction even more and began writing some of my favorite songs. While writing them, I realized even more things. I realized that how my brain works while writing is very similar to how it works while I train. Even though I have the songs from Les Miserables memorized word for word, when it came to writing them while I recited them, I soon was making many mistakes. The harder I thought about every single word, the more I seemed to struggle with producing the words. Even with the song playing on youtube, I found myself having to continuously loop parts of the song over and over again. So I had an idea. Rather than continuously repeat the music over and over again, I would just listen to one word at a time and then try to write as many words I knew after that. I feel this helped my retention go up quite substantially too. It is interesting to think about though and why I feel it applies to martial arts too. Think about it, I am fairly confident that I know every song word for word, but when I am listening to the music playing it is so much easier to recite then when there is nothing but me trying to produce the music in my head. This tells me that even though I have something memorized, certain indicators can prove beneficial to helping me recite it and perform it 100% accurately. Certain elements of timing, rhythm, focus, melody, helped my brain activate to the songs I knew it was accustomed to, but take them away and suddenly I am lost.
This can be applied to martial arts in a number of factors. I may know how to throw a punch perfectly, I have the form down, my body is physically at its highest possible peak for fighting (I wish), and I am conditioned by use of my heavy bag on how to correctly apply angles and timing and force to maximize my damage on the target. What would happen if the heavy bag was taken away? What if a smaller bag was placed in front of me? What if a tennis ball was tied from a tree branch on a rope instead? Would I still throw the perfect punch? Would I still feel powerful? This is what I mean by indicators and essentially why sparring becomes such an integral part of training for modern day fighters. In theory, I might be able to throw the perfect punch, have beautiful form and knockout power, but what happens when another person is standing in front of me. Suddenly, my instinct kicks in, my sympathetic nervous system takes over and my hands become a foreign object to me. All theory and practice is thrown out the window. All that timing and execution is thrown off, this object doesn't move like the bag I'm accustomed to, this object is intent on hurting me, attacking me, possibly killing me. You have to see an opponent as not an opponent, but as a part of the art. Without the concept of an opponent, there is no martial arts. Understanding their timing, their rhythm, size, style, balance, and using your training to overcome that, to find weaknesses, to set the rhythm, that's what fighting is all about. Just like I couldn't remember the lyrics to my favorite songs without music, I don't believe I would be able to recall my training on a target without the "music" it is a part of. I cannot possibly imagine punching an opponent without sparring. The more I think about it, the more I feel I need to add sparring into my training. The only question is, who will I find to spar with?
Alan Watts in one of his audio discussions or books talked about how music isn't beautiful to us because of the sound, it is beautiful because of the pauses in between the sound. We feel the beauty is in the sound, but in reality the beauty is in the spaces between the sounds and the change in rhythm and timing are what make music tolerable to us. Take any note and play it without pause and it would sound atrocious, the same I feel then must be applied to other art forms.
Is the power in the punch? the form? the timing? the rhythm? Well my friend, these are all important factors. But just like the beauty of music and speech comes from pauses, the beauty of fighting comes in its rhythmic changes as well. Anyone can walk up to a heavy bag and start punching it, we are all born with that innate ability, just like anyone can pick up a guitar and strum it or sit down in front of a piano and strike the keys, but is simply striking the keys or strumming a guitar with no knowledge or training really art? Without time and effort a musical instrument simply cannot be played effectively, the same thing applies to martial arts. To make a routine beautiful, one must think of marital arts in just the same way. When you are sitting in front of that bag, you aren't punching it, you are playing a song, writing poetry, painting a picture, but the pen is your fists, your legs, your very soul is going into it, that is what separates a martial artist from others. It's not brutal, it's beautiful. When I see choreographed fights, it takes away from that beauty for me. It takes away the spontaneity of it all. But I can't judge them anymore than a street performing violinist could judge an orchestra. It is simply the way that these people decided to focus their time and effort. For me though, being the street performer in this analogy, I see martial arts quite differently. It's a personal experience, something that is shown not through choreographed dance, but through practical application and technique. It's showing people that mastery of timing, rhythm, speed, tempo, power, can all be applied to everything I do in my life and the only real way to test that power is through actual competition. I could sit in my backyard and punch my heavy bag every single day for 20 years, but that doesn't mean I would have the ability to truly fight.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that if you are a pianist that you must go up against another pianist and try to outdo them in performance, that is impractical and foolish, I'm simply stating that for me, martial arts is the ultimate test, the ultimate expression. It is the ultimate expression of the human body because it applies all the same rules as all other forms of art, but to truly perfect it you have to put your life on the line, awaken the primal forces inside of you and dance with a real opponent.
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