View Single Post
Old 10-24-2013, 02:49 PM   #92
Erick Mead
 
Erick Mead's Avatar
Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,619
United_States
Offline
Re: "IP/IT/IS" vs technique?

Quote:
Jon Reading wrote: View Post
For me, technique is a small thing, a building block of interaction. .... You put together an interaction of tactical movements and you get a kata.
Kata is to the art as snapshots are to a hike in the mountains. They cannot show you the way ... for that you need a guide -- or perhaps a map -- if you can read the map. Maps, of course, require no effort to traverse, and in addition provide a perspective that is unnatural and difficult to interpret from the actual level of practice.

But the snapshots are neverthless valuable references, with or without a map. They help you recognize certain key features of the landscape that help orient you -- and that someone unfamiliar and untrained would almost never just come upon or recognize merely by accidental wandering around the terrain.

In class I sometime analogize waza as (not quite) arbitrary cross-sections of a sausage -- the sausage is pretty much the same throughout its length, and the same type of sausage actually varies a lot between individual examples -- but somehow they are all very similar as well., Understanding its internal structure is hard to do without taking one to bits piece by piece. Then you have to learn make your own sausage -- which of course no one like to watch.... .

More technically speaking, a sausage slice is a 2D representation along only one plane of the 3d object. If you have ever seen the sketch of a hypercube -- you have seen a 2D representation of a 4D object.

Waza are 4D representations of a 7D continuum -- not just the continuum of action (5D) that it immediately represents from but one perspective -- but also of a contingent continuum of action (6D) of which its representation is but one branch or element in the whole.

The real thing lies is in finally grasping, intuitively, physically, and to greater or lesser degree, the underlying patterns -- the 7D stuff that creates the forms, and rhythms and dynamics of the resulting contingent continuum of action -- or in other words, the takemusu aiki.

Last edited by Erick Mead : 10-24-2013 at 02:53 PM.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
  Reply With Quote