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(With due apologies on the title to Angus Young and Jerry Lee Lewis, respectively)
I am a firm believer in the Eastern approach of encapsulating complex observations into concrete images. But i also value the Western approach of analysis of concrete observations to find generalized principles of behavior. I believe they work far better in concert than does either one alone. Too few try to draw out the connections more rigorously and imaginatively. Both are required, I find.
This discussion, with props to Mr. Campbell, below, flows from this diagram I prepared and now christen as
Big Balls O' Aiki Water & Fire:
I have for some time used (here) a typical mechanics textbook illustration of torsional shear, shown on a cylinder, with those right-angle spirals of opposite stress. Then I realized that the issue of discontinuities in the body, their creation and resolution, controlled a great deal of the concerns on this issue. Then I recalled the "spherical" language used by both M. Ueshiba and K. Ueshiba. I also recalled that M. Ueshiba used the images of fire (upward flow or extension ) and water (downward flow or compression). So, I drew my own spherical model of the same stresses to see what it might reveal. It has revealed a more coherent dynamic that I did not suspect before I thought about this model.