Erick Mead

I think "rococo" is a deep insight on Ellis's part, though I think he means that the complexity tends to negate something more simple. I see his point, but he has only one side of it.

If he were to take hold of the affirming part of his observation, however, he might ask whether or not the great complexity is in fact the product of something extremely simple. I think he might actually agree with that statement.

If we pursue what that affirmation actually means, then "rococo" gives us a possibly different way to look at this issue. I'll come back to that in a minute but accept for argument, at least, that while the underlying process is actually very simple, it is nevertheless enormously difficult to grasp it concretely from its essential simplicity alone.

which then begs questions in any system, not just Aikido
"What are the didactic "techniques?
"Why do they develop?"
"What do they actually represent?"
"What are they intended to accomplish?"

In the context of "rococo" the swirls and flourishes are suggested as pointless ornamentation, where as they may in fact be an inherent expression of the underlying simplicity. Let me show you: This is a rococo design:[spoiler][/spoiler]

This is a mathematically generated fractal attractor (or rather one perspective of it) called the "Julia Set": [spoiler][/spoiler]

THIS is the rule that generates the Julia Set: -- where C is a complex number.

If you have dealt with complex number geometry you will have some idea of the difficulty of concretely grasping ( i.e. creating a mental image) of what is actually, mathematically, computationally fairly simple. It turns out that the only useful mental image is in fact this "rococo" complexity -- and it is not reducible in its expression -- in fact it is infinitely and intricately expandable as you can begin to see from a very large image of the Julia Set you can zoom in on. But it is a very simply stated operation to generate it.

If you put a phosphor on the hands of two people doing good jiyuwaza in aikido, turned down the lights and recorded the video and preserved all the phosphor traces in one image, what do think it would look like? Hint -- eerily like the rococo image and the Julia set. And a lot like these:
[spoiler][/spoiler] For more on why that one is important-- look here:

I quite agree.

I agree with the first statement and could not disagree more with the second. Why does it take so long? That is the question. Sagawa thought there was no other way than time spent on the order of ten year to "see it" and twenty to "do it" -- and he was death on waza as training method.

The reason seems straight forward to me. Most kids take to walking by two, and are fully capable in ordinary body mechanics by six, at which point they generally are learning the more "odd mechanics" like bicycling and things like ball and stick handling/tracking/hitting or something more whole-body oriented like gymnastics or swimming. Other than swimming, these types of mechanics largely have to be suppressed before the other mechanics of aiki can be learned. (Swimming, when learned at high efficiency, I think is deeply related to aiki mechanics. Iit is however not trivial to relate that to action on two legs).

Since this is not a cerebral learning task, but a cerebellar one, acquired knowledge does not speed up progress at a later age.as with other learning tasks. So calculate six years to back out of the basics that it took six years to learn, plus time in intellectual fighting with that unlearning process, and we are up to about ten years to perceive something of the basics of what is occurring, but another ten years (the intellectual resistance continues to be a tolerably capable in applying them in a challenged mode. Kids learn faster because they don't think they understand anything to begin with, and have less baggage to haul along before they finally drop it along the away.