First week back; a target to meet

I’ve been out to practice twice this week, mostly focusing on the taijiquan.

On Wednesday evening, I tried to get through ten repetitions of the CMC-37 form, but only managed six. For the first time ever, someone I know from work walked past while I was practicing, and I stopped to talk for a while.

Later, I was approached by someone I think is a construction worker from the nearby building site, where they’re putting up a number of apartment blocks. He was Chinese, and I found his Manadarin difficult to follow (as in, even more difficult than I usually do!) but I think he was saying that he’d seen me practicing, he had hurt his neck, and could I help him with it? Wow. Of course, I had to apologize and tell him I wasn’t able to. Mark Salzman writes about something similar in Iron and Silk: the assumption that someone with skill in martial arts will also understand healing. One day perhaps, but not yet – I have a long way to go before I get there!

Even going through the CMC form six times was beneficial; I found myself making a lot of adjustments to posture and movement, and learned quite a bit from it.

Afterwards, I met up with Carlos, the English Wing Chun student I met back in April; we’ve been meaning to catch up for ages, but never got round to it. He’s got an interesting story – but you can blog about it yourself, Carlos! We went to the 24-hour coffee shop next to the Kong Chow Hui Goon Cantonese clan house, and had a good talk about life, work, and martial arts. He was surprised that I’m not exactly thin – hey, I’ve mentioned it often enough! But sorry, if anyone else out there was imagining your humble correspondent as tall, handsome, athletic, and with an ideal BMI…. nope. Short, fat, ugly, and not really worried about it. Carlos would add “being Welsh” to my list of crimes: guilty as charged, and unrepentant. Hehehe. Still, I really ought to lose a bit of weight, so I’ll make another of my famous public goal announcements: I’ll lose 8kg by February. I did OK last time, I should be able to do this as well.

Last night I resumed classes with Master Zhou. We went on to a new move, and lots of applications. He demonstrated the set we’re working on, but with the addition of a sword; very cool. He’s just got back from China himself, after attending his mother-in-law’s funeral. We talked a bit about China; as you all know, I’m a fan of Beijing, and he’s from Shanghai. I think he may have studied in Beijing: he agrees that people there are more open and less money-grasping than in Shanghai, but he despairs of the food in the north!

Nam Wah Pai have a new qigong course coming up soon, and Carlos and I are thinking of attending. I’ve done this course before, but back then I had absolutely no clue about qigong, or its relationship to IMA, and I’d like to go over the material again now that I’m a bit more expreienced, particularly as it’ll give me the chance to ask questions in English. Carlos mentioned during our conversation that, from reading my blog, I seem to jump around a lot in my studies, and that’s fair comment. As I mentioned before, I’m looking for the right fit for my build, my temperament, character – and language ability. I’m perfectly willing to accept that it could take ten years or more to really master a style; that being the case, it’s worth the investment of a year or two to find the right one. As I told Carlos, I want to study both taiijquan and baguazhang – each of them speaks to me in a different way, and I find that they reinforce each other. A lot of people here in Singapore are have been dismissive of NWP when it’s come up in discussion, but the martial arts scene is just as bitchy as any other, and at the end of the day I’m going with what works for me. With bagua, I’m still learning and researching. So anyway, Sim Pern Yiau of Nam Wah Pai will be giving a talk at the Central Library Library at Orchard on Sunday; I’ll probably be there if anyone else wants to turn up and say hi.

Alex Kozma moving to Singapore, early 2008

Well, a while ago, I was beginning to think that Alex had decided to go undercover, and stop public teaching… So, it’s a relief to hear from his “local representative” here in Singapore, aka Kevin, that Alex plans to move here next February to teach full-time. Given his reputation here, I think there’ll be no shortage of students!

Kevin says that Alex “intends to teach XingYiChuan, Baguazhang, and is also licensed to teach his friend’s Simon Das’ Kesateria Silat, which I think he intends to teach on a closed door basis”.

It’s all good news!

Memento mori

Another thing that I’d better blog while it’s on my mind: two deaths. One occurred while I was in Wales – a teacher from my old school, though he never taught me. He was a friend of my parents, and a pillar of the local community, especially through his work in researching local history, and the many books he published about it. Not long after he’d been walking in the Alps, he was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer of the liver, pancreas, and lungs, and died a few weeks later. I’m not sure of his age, but late 50s, early 60s would be about right.

The other death happened a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t heard until a friend told me last week. This was a young woman  I vaguely knew from the Welsh cultural scene, and the pub, in Aberystwyth. She was younger than me, a first-language Welsh speaker from North Wales. She was both beautiful and brilliant; one of those people who you just know is going to have a wonderful life. As I understand it, she just dropped dead one day from a brain hemorrhage, at 30 years old.  I simply couldn’t believe it.

Just goes to show: you never know when your time will come – are you ready for it?

Back to make decisions.

Well, I’m back.

Wow.

After three and a half years without returning  to Wales, it was a remarkable experience to go back to where I grew up. It was so totally different to my day-to-day life here in Asia that I hardly know where to begin… The most incredible thing was that for the first few days I thought I’d gone deaf: the utter silence of the countryside left my ears ringing, trying to compensate for the constant low-level noise that I’d become accustomed to here.  Oh, and stars beyond number: I really had forgotten what it’s like to live without light pollution (well, it was still there, but vastly lower than what I’m used to!).

So anyway, I’m back in Singapore, with a heavy head cold, headaches and a chest cough, all due to the changes in climate. Boo. I can’t write just now about the reasons, but the time has come to make a lot of hard decision about  how I spend my time and money. A lot of things are going to have to be cut, in order to make way for new priorities; I’m not sure yet whether this will affect the things I write about on this blog, but it might… Watch this space!

Surfing midnight with the ghosts

Last night was the final night of the Hungry Ghost Festival. The area where I live was aglow with the flare of joss sticks jammed into cracks in the pavement, or in the borders of gardens. Anywhere with some kind of significance had people burning big piles of Hell Money on the street, and in the housing estates the old oil drums had been brought out to act as furnaces.

I  met my friends from Chin Woo, and watched as they burned Hell Money as offerings to the spirits. As I’m not a member, I didn’t take part, but that didn’t stop a certain person from being rude. Well, it didn’t matter, and like I say, the overwhelming majority of Chin Woo people are really cool Quite a few people took photos, and I also took some shots at one fire where only my friends were present. One thing people like to do is to study the pictures to see whether the flames form observable shapes; quite a few seemed to show lions, dragons, and the like, as well as some human shapes. I got one shot  that seemed to show “snakes” (as one friend put it) looping around the bystanders…

Anyway, tonight I’m off to Wales. I was saying to one of my friends last night, it’s a good thing I’m not superstitious… the ghosts were out in force last night, and – let’s face it – today is a pretty ghost-ridden date to be flying. I take off late at night, and arrive in Europe early in the morning, so my flight is going to be close to the date line all the way… surfing midnight with the ghosts, yay!

More on mud-stepping

I had class with Master Zhou again last night, and I’m beginning to hurt again. We went over a couple of new moves in the form, some san shou and a lot of applications. When he attacks, he uses my shoulder as a substitute for my face, ie a blow that would in practice be an attack to the face is redirected to land on my shoulder. Given the way my shoulder is aching this morning, ow, I would not like to be subject to these applications for real. Oh no, not at all. Of course, my being able to remember these is a whole other matter…

I was sent flying once and landed flat on my back, but no damage hehehe. My ribs are now pretty much healed, which is good because they took a few punches. I managed to uproot him a few times, which was pretty satisfactory. Several times, he demonstrated the relentless nature of bagua attacks, with one strike turning into another: every time, it forced me into a crouch to protect my face… which just left my back exposed, and game over. One time, I did manage to deflect him by using white crane spreads wings from the taiji form, but probably only because he didn’t expect me to be dumb enough to try it (The second time I tried it, I got a knee to the chest!)

He’s still criticizing my stepping, and rightly so: I need to go back to basics, and spend some solo practice sessions solely working on the stepping, like I did last year. Kenny asked what mud-stepping is, so here’s a demo from Earle Montaigue:

Master Zhou really emphasizes the bagua principle of “Every step a kick”, ie that right up until the sole of the foot touches down, your weight is on your back foot, and the front foot is available to launch into a kick. A little bit more from Earle Montaigue about this:

As I’ve mentioned before, the form Master Zhou is teaching me uses short stepping; the forms I’ve studied with Madam Ge and Master Zhang use long stepping. I was reminded about that by something Master Zhou said last night: “We practice long, but we apply short” (or words to that effect). He was talking about one of the form moves (a chop and elbow strike) rather than stepping, but I think the principle must be the same – doing long mud stepping is tough, if you do it properly (which is why I’m rubbish at it!).

We had a chat after class; it turns out his family are still back in Shanghai. He has a small daughter; after I get back, I’m going to help him set up Skype for videoconferencing so they can see each other.

Oh yes, I haven’t mentioned, have I – next week, I’m going on holiday for two weeks, back to Wales. I haven’t been back to the UK for 3 1/2 years, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s changed!

After class, I went down to the other part of the park where I do my solo practice, but I didn’t stay long. The Hungry Ghost Festival is still going on, and someone had been burning a big pile of Hell Money. It was still smouldering, and giving off thick, acrid white smoke; when the wind blew it in my direction, it was pretty choking. More importantly, when I did one spinning move from Zhang Sheng Li’s form, I suddenly felt way too much friction under my toes: yes, my the sole on my right shoe had worn completely through from all the toe-gripping! The left shoe was close to going as well, so I gave up that point and went to chill with my Chin Woo friends. I need to buy a new pair of shoes before tonight’s class with Madam Ge…

Sic transit gloria mundi

Via Boing Boing, I found this page about a life in pictures… In many ways, I find this a very melancholy story: a woman’s whole life, from infancy to old age, recorded in photographs. Stored together in a box, they were found for sale in a flea market. Who was she? We don’t know – there’s no name on any of the photos… so, troping the title of an old Avengers novel, I think of her as Gloria Monday.

It does make me feel sad, looking over these pictures. I’m certainly guessing here, but I kind of get the feeling that a light goes out in her teens… afterwards, it seems, she seeks approval through her clothes… “Look at me, I am pretty, I am“…. Never anyone else in the pictures, just her… getting older, sadder maybe, defiantly dressing up in yesterday’s finery to keep age at bay? Was she alone? If there was a family, would they have thrown out all of her life’s pictures? Surely not…. she must have been alone.

Is this a sad story? Ask yourself what response you have to this, and what are the reasons you feel that way…. For me, I’m reminded that it’s futile to define ourselves through our looks, through other people’s opinion of us… There’s no point looking backwards, at how youthful, and good-looking we once were. No point fretting about the future – will I look better, or be more popular, if I wear this, or that… We get older, weaker, frailer, uglier… we can’t fight time any more than Canute could resist the tide. So stop worrying about it! Will we die alone? Will we be remembered? We should not consider such things important.

I remember Maya Deren writing in Divine Horsemen about the relationship between the living and the loa, the voudun spirits. As I recall, it was like this: we live, then die. Our friends and children remember us as we were, simplifying us into stories of our lives. Our personalities fade from memory; our attributes are simplified -we were happy, sad, angry, covetous, generous… Our grandchildren may remember us from our lifetime; more likely, they just know the stories they were told about us, which change, are moving into myth, the way we were is stripped down to fit our culture’s archetypes. Our great-grandchildren don’t remember us at all; our stories just form a few small strands of the rope connecting the living with the forgotten dead of our culture. The loa, in Deren’s telling, represent the personality archetypes of Haitian culture. My point being: we won’t be remembered, not really, not as who we really were. So stop worrying about it. Being single, being attached… same thing.

Reading about Gloria Monday, how many archetypes, or stories of your culture, did you try to fit her into? We shouldn’t try, really. We can accept what we know of her, feel compassion for her, but we shouldn’t judge her, or try to fit her into what we think she should have been.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: yes, Buddha was right. True happiness doesn’t come from fighting age, from the approval of others, from having lots of friends and family. That’s not to say that these are bad! Readers of my other blog know that I’m totally into a better life through biotechnology (hehehe, another one of my formative film experiences was hearing Roy Batty shout out “I want more life, fucker!“); and who doesn’t like having lots of friends? Staying fit and healthy is good! Having money put away against a rainy day is good! But these things should not define our view of ourselves, or be regarded as the purpose of our life.

True happiness, though, comes from living right here, right now, in the present, not chasing after things that we can’t control. Just deal with what we can control, and become a better person… become a better person, clear out your bad karma without creating more, and the world becomes a better place. Much more satisfying than shopping or fashion

Qi sensitivity?

I know that this is the kind of thing that can ignite flame wars, but anyway…. Also, I am completely out of my depth, and have no expertise in any of these issues… which really, is why I would really like sensible feedback from anyone who does have more insight into physiology, qi awareness, etc…

Anyway: in my day job, I have to do reading up about computer games, and I just came across an article in Wired referring to another article in New Scientist: ‘Skin signals betray a gamer’s moves‘. Basically, changes in skin conductivity give up to two seconds’ warning that a gamer is about to make a move.

Are humans sensitive to (changes in) each others’ skin conductivity? If so, is this an awareness that can be trained?

Is qi connected to skin conductivity? A quick google shows that some researchers think so.

Does this tie in at all to medical and combat uses of qi? Not something that you would learn overnight, but over years of practice…

Don’t know: does this have any relevance to taijiquan and qigong? It seems like this kind of sensitivity would fit the descriptions of advanced qi practitioners… I’d like to hear what more advanced taiji practioners might have to say about this….