How martial should the T'ai Chi forms be?

At the gym today: twenty five minutes practicing the 24 posture T'ai Chi form and the 54 posture sword form: two or three times each. The Cheng Man-ch'ing versions.

Cheng Man-ch'ing demonstrating the sword form

The common image is of old men doing exercises in the park, very slowly. But I've always felt that the core of the discipline is its martial intent. You should know the bunkai (the combat intent) for each posture.

I also think that at least some of the time you should do the forms fast and lethally, as if you intend to dispose of an opponent. That's the story for karate kata - slow while you're learning and to hone technique - fast when perfected and with power and spirit. When I look at videos of Cheng Man-ch'ing and his student Ken van Sickle demonstrating the sword form (e.g. below) they are much faster than is currently convenient for me.

When practicing, I run through the forms slowly then faster with an opponent in mind.

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Ken van Sickle demonstrating the sword form

What I'm re-reading

An occasional review of my books on the go.

Amazon link

Dan Simmons rates the novels of John Fowles highly, perhaps not surprisingly as they are writers of a similar style, and has stated that he regularly returns to "Daniel Martin". A product of the mature Fowles, this elegiac novel is superior to "The Collector", "The Magus" and - IMHO - even "The French Lieutenant's Woman".

Amazon link

David Wallace says in his intro that this is accessible to anyone with a graduate level understanding of quantum mechanics. Well, that includes me but, of course, it's heavy going. The deep mystery is the relationship between the spacetime we appear to inhabit and the configuration space (high/infinite dimensional Hilbert space) which quantum-theoretic entities inhabit. I read on and wait for enlightenment.

Amazon link

Another deeply poignant work: the theory of endless recurrence from a Catholic point of view (space here perhaps for a little homage to the recently deceased Milan Kundera, a prominent member of my revered author list). Currently being read to Clare and we've just started part three: Fiat Voluntas Tua.

The T'ai Chi Sword Form

Part of the Cheng Man-ch'ing sword form

My last post was about stopping karate training. The chronic sciatica which prompted this is still with me, five weeks later, but I sense an improving trend.

The Cheng Man-ch'ing T'ai Chi form (empty handed, 24 postures) and the weapon form shown above are not a health problem however. The movements are slow, symmetrical and balanced without powerful impulsive strikes, turns and kicks. 

Puting the Daoist paradigm to one side, from a purely functional point of view T'ai Chi 'katas' are training balance, coordination, kinaesthetic sense, relaxation and, of course, a meditative psychological state. Such benefits come only when the sequences are as natural as driving, after many years of practice: I have been working on the sword form for six months.

Nine Months of Karate

After my yellow belt grading last month (May).

A short chronology

• First karate class: Saturday 3rd September 2022
• First grading: 9th kyu orange belt, Tuesday November 22nd 2022.
• Second grading: 8th kyu red belt, February 14th 2023.
• Third grading: 7th kyu yellow belt, May 20th 2023.
• Ceased training (sciatica): Tuesday June 13th 2023.

Despite my best hopes, my aging seventy-two year old body is incapable of supporting the endless repetitions of strikes, blocks and kicks of an unarmed combat art. There is a reason why the armed forces don't take guys my age.

I contemplate the deep pains in my left buttock, left leg and foot; the numbness and the tingling; the sharp jolts in the joints: and reluctantly leave my friends in the club to continue their long journey. By departing I affirm the very difficulty and exclusivity of the mission.

I continue to practice T'ai Chi and to exercise the T'ai Chi sword form.

A Better World, Where Are You?

 

"I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and simply follow the customs of my tribe. The church is part of my culture; I like the rituals and the music. If I had grown up in Iraq, I would go to a mosque… It seems to me that people who attack religion don’t really understand it. Science and religion can coexist peacefully — although I don’t think they have much to say to each other. What I would like best would be for scientists not even to use the word “God.” … Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality… I know that we don’t yet even understand the hydrogen atom — so how could I believe in dogmas? I’m a practicing Christian, but not a believing one."

My position is not quite the same as Martin Rees's.

To be esoteric for a moment, I am a deontic Catholic: not one who buys into the Confessional ontology (i.e. a literal, uncritical, ahistorical reading of the sacred texts). Though paradoxically, it's only when the vast majority of adherents and clergy cleave to a Confessional ontology that the institution persists through the endless millennia. 

Nevertheless historical, materialist deontology is the right paradigm (Roger Scruton is my go-to guy here on deontology).

Sally Rooney hints that with the death of the Marxist-Leninist, communist ideal, Catholicism is one of the few remaining subversive forces insofar as - at its best - it counterposes and organises social solidarity based on high ethical principles against an alienated rootlessness taken to absurdity by a debilitating, progressive wokeness - from which elevated standpoint Catholicism is popularly ridiculed, or treated as absurd or incomprehensible.

(There are other countercultures which also deserve support: those arts which uplift, unify and empower ordinary people and exemplify unfashionable virtues: duty, honour, courage, competence, resilience.)

Sally Rooney's characters in "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" reflect on their ineffectual exposition of a fashionable, but sterile and impotent Marxism. They unwillingly experience the attraction of the granite, collective worldview of the eternal and universal Catholic Church: so often hijacked institutionally by bad people… so often bureaucratically underpinning reaction... but as John Dominic Crossan has so eloquently outlined, so revolutionary and omnipresent in its core doctrine.

A short Led Zeppelin playlist

Nigel's Led Zeppelin playlist

There wasn't quite room in the screengrab to show "Thank You" and "Dancing Days" - which complete my current list to eight tracks - a personal album's worth. 

One additional song I love is "Rock and Roll" which, IMHO, is best showcased by the contemporary Robert Plant - usually with glamorous assistance, as in the video below.

The original nineteen seventies Led Zeppelin performances now look hurried and throwaway; in the hands of a mature Robert Plant the song has deepened to become nostalgic and mischievous.

I will add it to my playlist.

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Robert Plant ft. Imelda May - Rock And Roll (Later with Jools Holland)

Here are the lyrics:

It's been a long time since I rock and rolled

It's been a long time since I did the stroll

Ooh let me get it back, let me get it back

Let me get it back, baby, where I come from

It's been a long time, been a long time

Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time

Yes, it has

It's been a long time since the book of love

I can't count the tears of a life with no love

Carry me back, carry me back

Carry me back, baby, where I come from, whoa-oh-oh

It's been a long time, been a long time

Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time

Oh seems so long since we walked in the moonlight

Making vows that just can't work right, oh yeah

Open your arms, opens your arms

Open your arms, baby, let love come running in, yeah

It's been a long time, been a long time

Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time

Yeah-hey, yeah-hey, yeah-hey, yeah-hey

Ooh yeah, ooh yeah

Ooh yeah, ooh yeah

It's been a long time, been a long time

Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.

I do like the impish look of glee on Robert Plant's face as he sings: "Open your arms...". 

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My previous Led Zeppelin post celebrated the massively underrated "The Rover".

Adam Carlton's writing notes in 2022

Humans and capitalism are a poor match

Humans are poorly adapted to a high-performance capitalist society. That's why as consumers (and as the owners of capital) we devoutly await the arrival of competent, ubiquitous robots. Ironic, really.

On being dominated by your primary psychological functions

All my life I have been seduced by ideas: libertarianism, marxism, the sacredness of scientific endeavour. Finally I am learning to be a whole person, with collegial relationships with others.

And you ask why I joined the Catholic church? That was my first confession! 

The one thing I took from T'ai Chi was the Taoist idea that we should be conscious of those drives which impel us to action or gratification  - which include of course intellectual curiosity, as well as staples such as fear or jealousy - and never be mastered by any one of them.

It has to be said, though, that the Taoist persona - calm and in control - does not lend itself to emotional colour or drama!  There's no market for a Taoist soap!

The illusion of intrinsic equality

Imagine teaching children at school that all (cognitive, psychometric) abilities are distributed normally and variantly - and that this explains many outcomes. And that we maintain a legal/social principle that all citizens are nevertheless to be considered equal.

Too sophisticated for the left side of the bell curve? Or too divisive? Is that why we lie?

Marx or Darwin?

In fact, to be absolutely precise about my view, I would say you can either have Marx's - rather vague and certainly utopian - concept of communism as a historical destination for humanity, or you can have a realistic evolutionary Darwinian theory of human nature.

You can't have both.

Marx is best understood, IMHO, as a sociologist who analysed the specificity of the capitalist mode  of production as contrasted with feudalism or slave societies. This completely undermines its utility to the revolutionary left, which is why they will defend to the death their dogma of the social-mutability and perfectibility of humanity. Wokeism is just one more, albeit theoretically-shallow, spin-off of this delusion.

Marx himself seemed rather ambivalent about the extent to which human nature was mutable. He was a fan of Darwin. But not enough, it turned out 😏... a triumph of wishful thinking on his part.

Liberalism is - in essence - decoupled from reality

Liberalism is a low-stakes politics. Liberalism believes in the autonomous power of ideas, detached from material contexts and more importantly vital interests.

The defining characteristic of liberal thought is the setting of ungrounded normative models. Fukuyama is more sophisticated than most in that he has read widely and situates his thinking historically. Yet his attachment to the ungrounded concept of "democracy" abstracts from the actual dynamics of history. Marx called Hegel out on this (and Fukuyama has regressed to Hegel). We need to move in the other direction, that of sociobiology. 

Example: Fukuyama was stranded by the military coup in Egypt which overthrew the Morsi Islamist government. That marks the outer limit of his insight. 

AI Cars

Current architecture AI cars attempt to prove the zombie hypothesis: the hypothesis that all driving can in principle be achieved unconsciously. 

Why can't we tell the cars things? Would that be the road to automotive consciousness?

Biology first, then sociology, then political economy

You have to think of the animal. The animal, if smart enough, can support various social protocols. Co-evolution obviously, at the margins. But it's the animal supporting the protocols, not the protocols creating the animal. 

AI systems today are task models, not agents per se (in a naturalistic sense). We'll make scientific progress when we know how to engineer artificial animals or humans. And that's when AI Risk becomes real.

Hitting your cognitive limits

Subjectively how it feels: self-deception. No-one really believes in their own cognitive limits - people prefer to believe that the IQ tests 'suddenly become arbitrary'.

J. S. Bach's psychological type was ISTJ

 I suppose I had always thought of Bach as an INTJ. Had to be pretty conceptual with all that transcendent hyper-complex polyphony, right?

Turns out I was wrong.

Paul Boboc writes compellingly: 

"In typing the greatest musician in history we must let go of biases and look carefully at the information. As a Bach devotee, I've read a few biographies of him: Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician and Schweitzer's Bach: The Poet-Musician. 

Having read these books and listened to hundreds of his works many times over the years (I think I've listened to the Passacaglia and Fugue alone at least a thousand times), I can confidently say that Bach was an ISTJ. It was his powerful Si that allowed him to create works so tremendously powerful in detail, while his tertiary Fi imbued his intricate structures with intense pathos. Bach lacked the INTJ's penchant for theoretical thought; we know he found it hard to express abstract ideas and at one point had a professor from the University of Leipzig, a personal friend, write a letter defending his compositional technique because he had a hard time doing it himself. 

If you read his letters, especially his letter to his friend Georg Erdmann from 1730 and a letter about some wasted wine to a government official, you notice the extreme attention to detail that characterizes him in general and which probably made him an unlikeable character in Leipzig. (The unlikeable persona also has to do with his very weak Fe). His personal writings are very characteristic of S-types, with their strong grasp of specifics and their transparent earthiness.

Bach never seriously questioned the orthodox Lutheran creeds and had little interest in the theoretical underpinnings of the Enlightenment. His library consisted mostly of theology, no philosophy or literature; an INTJ would have had a more diverse library, certainly one containing more abstract material. His keyboard playing astonished everyone and clearly gives evidence of his Si, as do the physical aspects of his life; he was by all accounts a man who indulged in physical pleasures, whereas IN**s, who are temperamentally more puritanical than other types, tend to shy away from those and to prefer mental activities instead. Imagine an INTJ writing the Coffee cantata, or spending years obsessive-compulsively re-writing his works down to the smallest details, or having 20 children (!). It's hard.

In his own life, Bach was more famous as a performer and teacher than as a composer. His organ playing was universally recognized as some of the best in Europe. The famous story of Marchand being invited to compete with Bach in an organ contest, only to hear him play from an adjoining room and leave in awe and shock without even bothering to compete with him, speaks volumes about the cantor's imposing physical gifts. Physical prowess comes more easily to ISTJs than INTJs, who are more comfortable inhabiting mental rather than physical spaces.

Then there's the music. It's inconceivable to me that anyone but a sensor could have written the Art of Fugue or the Musical Offering. Compare Beethoven (INXX) with Bach (ISTJ) to see the obvious difference between an N type musician and an S type musician. N type musicians (Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Beethoven) can be sloppy, even careless, because the full effect matters more to them than the details through which that effect is achieved. S types - Bach and Mozart being the most notable examples of this type in classical music - have a miraculous ability of making every detail matter, and of getting straight to the point without any superfluity. Their economy of style is amazing, soul-shattering. Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler lacked it. Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Schubert also lacked it. Bach and Mozart had it in abundance.

PS. If you're interested in more along this line of reasoning, here's a great and persuasive article on what makes Bach (probably) an ISTJ."

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This reminds me of the sensei at my karate club who is similarly ISTJ:  intensely skilled in technique and a stickler for formal and methodical progression by the book. 

I pass my first karate grading

After the grading: orange belt - 9th kyu

Two and a half months after starting Traditional Shotokan Karate, I passed my first grading last night and now have my orange belt. I am absurdly pleased!

Paul, a brown belt, said to me afterwards with a wry smile: "Welcome to the ladder of hell!"

The Sensei was extremely helpful in this first grading (I got most things right) and confided that he had hated all his gradings: "Except one time, when I was taking my second dan back in 1995. I suddenly realised half way through I was enjoying it."

I was of course nervous beforehand, even though it's really hard to fail your first grading. You really want to display all the skills you think you have, and not be flustered.

The next phase of training focuses on the first of the Heian katas, Heian Shodan.

Heian Shodan

On restarting karate at age 71 (Saturday Sept 3rd 2022)

Gedan Barai (low block)

 "So before I went I was thinking about the last time I went to a karate class where I had to sit on the floor and spread my legs very wide and bend towards each foot, and it was very painful; also do ferocious push-ups on a hard wooden floor. 

That quite exhausted me but this was actually not at all such a bad experience. The guy who runs it, I'd say he's ISTJ (we're talking Myers-Briggs here) with a big extraverted presence though - plenty of charisma. According to his website he’s a spiritual kind of person - into Daoism - but very different from my T'ai Chi teacher, who's really free and easy. This guy is quite imperious; he called people out: ‘You look at me when I'm talking. Karate, it's serious stuff. If you're here, you do it right.’

So they all came in their gear, their white gis. The first thing that struck me: they were driving here from wherever they lived, parking their cars in the car park. I walked in and followed them: the dojo is actually the gymnasium at the back of the building facing the sports field. 

It's a hard polished, wooden floor. There were about, I would say, 20-25 people there: some brown and black belts, some orange belts; quite experienced people and a few white belts showing absolute beginners.  The age range was enormous. I was obviously the oldest person there at 71, there were some people below the age of 11: a little girl of seven or eight, a little boy. And then some kids around 11 or 12 and some young men. 

I was placed at the left side of the line as a newbie with the higher grades towards the right. We started by getting down on our knees and sitting on our heels. So, he says, you'll find this posture quite uncomfortable (a euphemism for painful) but this is what we do. 

It certainly is quite uncomfortable, kneeling on a hard, wooden floor sitting on your heels. So, we did that for a minute or two. I was thinking, this is the first test: if you can handle the pain you've already passed. Then we did warm-ups, the kind that we do before the Shibashi QiGong. 

Then we practiced kihon, basic techniques: some standard punches, punching and advancing, that kind of thing, getting the postures right.  And then towards the end some forward kicks, balancing on one leg, flicking the other leg out like a whip, out and back again, then stepping forward and turning. And it all looked more dynamic than T'ai Chi ever does because things were being done fast and with aggression. 

The Sensei was working with one of the orange belts as his opponent to show exactly how to do the punches, how to do the ward-off deflects and so forth. So that was good and I didn't find it too tiring. It's a bit of a workout but not a super-hard one. Not to the point of sweating or physical exhaustion or anything. I know that when you do things like sparring - kumite - where you're moving very fast, and extended kata sequences, you'll be working much harder. 

The padded boards he promised would arrive soon: then you'd definitely be doing more work than just learning the moves, which is what we were doing today. We finished on the hour and that was it. The cost was six pounds  and the next session is on Tuesday evening half past six. 

I spoke to the Sensei afterwards and said, thank you very much, and he seemed a perfectly friendly kind of guy, so that was my day." 

"And what are your thoughts on going?" 

"Well, I think it's, I think it's good. I mean, I got to see the people who know what they're doing. They were performing well in my opinion, linking up moves and doing extended sequences, looking very crisp and balanced - so fast! 

There are three things you're doing in karate. One is that you learn kihon, the basics of the moves themselves: how to do a punch, a block, how to do a kick. 

The  second thing is, you learn kata, a kata is an extended sequence like the T'ai Chi form where you're doing a succession of punches, blocks, spin turns and kicks, joining everything up. And the third is called kumite, which is choreographed sparring, at least initially. 

Later, in competitive kumite, you have an opponent and you could be doing freeform sparring with them. I don't know how he does it. I don't know whether he pads people up and has them, you know, hitting with a sort of muffled force. 

He was a bit short-handed today because his other black belts who normally assist him were all away on holiday . So I didn't see anything like that and we just did the basics today.“