Part Four: Aikido

I was eighteen when I started aikido, in my first year of university. I had wanted to learn a martial art for a long time before that, and the wanting had more than one root.

The first root was this. I was not good, then, at holding my own with people my own age. I could rarely defend an opinion or stand on an interest if someone pushed against it; I gave way. I came to the mat wanting, among other things, to become someone who could stand his ground. Keep that in mind through everything that follows: the thing I came to build began to take shape, and then was quietly taken back.

There were smaller roots too. I had begun reading about the philosophy that stood behind such arts, and I wanted to come closer to it than a book could take me. And university life, after the crowded years of school, had finally left me with the hours a regular practice needs. So I went looking, and a friend pointed me to a particular place. He had trained there about three years, and he spoke of the head of the dojo as a very good teacher. On his word I signed up.

From the first lessons I knew I had come to the right place. The beginners’ group was led by the head of the dojo himself. A lesson had a fixed shape. It opened with a warm-up. Then we practiced falling — how to roll through it instead of taking the force in the body. After that we walked the length of the mat on our knees — shikko. The art has its own way of moving even before it has thrown anyone. Then came the heart of it: the teacher would call one student out, take hold of him, and show a technique on his body, slowly, so we could see where the balance went; and then we broke into pairs and did what he had done, again and again, until he stopped us for the next technique.

At first each lesson handed me something I had never held, and the newness alone would have been enough to keep me coming.

But the newness was not the whole of the heat, and the rest of it is what mattered.

The teacher did not only show us moves. He would stop the lesson in the middle of a drill and put meaning into the thing we were doing. He would point at a mistake one of us had made and tell us what that mistake would cost in a real fight, where the wrist that was wrong by a few degrees got you struck or got you dropped. Through those small breaks in the lesson, the abstract thing my hands were learning connected, in front of me, to something that could actually happen to a body. The technique stopped being a shape and became a consequence.

I knelt down on that mat with the wanting still unspent.

Looking back, I understand that it was the teacher, and the meaning he kept pouring into the work, that lit my fire for the art.

The first teacher did something that is easy to walk past. If you walk past it here, then later, when it is gone, you will not see what is missing.

You could teach a physical art as pure mechanics. The grip goes here. The hip turns there. The wrist folds at this angle and the partner goes down. All of that is true, all of it is necessary, and a teacher who gave only that would be building you a real hand, the slow correct way, the only way it is done. There are teachers like that, and the students of such teachers learn to do the techniques.

What my first teacher added was the reason. Not decoration on top of the move — the thing that made the move worth burning for. When he stopped the lesson to say what a sloppy wrist cost in a real fight, he was not giving me more technique. He was giving me a reason the technique mattered, which is a different gift and a larger one. A move you have a reason to care about is a move your fire can enter. A move with no reason behind it is a shape you repeat.

There is one thing he said that I have kept word for word, because it did this so cleanly.

“Beware the feeling of genius,” he told us. “The moment it arrives, your learning has stopped. And in a real fight, that feeling can get you killed.”

Look at what that sentence does. It takes a thing that lives entirely inside you — a private flush of self-satisfaction, the warm sense that you have arrived — and ties it to your own body lying on the sidewalk. It makes an inner state into a matter of survival. After he said it, the warm feeling I might have had after a good throw was no longer just a pleasant feeling. It was a thing to watch, because the art had told me what it could cost. He had put something real at stake in the work, and in every mistake in it.

The largest thing a teacher gives a student is not technique. The technique you can, in principle, get from anyone who has it, or from a book, or in time from the art itself. The fire — the reason to care, the stakes that make the dull correct repetition worth doing ten thousand times — is different: a teacher can hand it across only if he carries it himself. My first teacher handed it across exactly like this: by stopping the lesson to tell us what the move meant. I did not have the word fire for it then. I only felt the heat come off the work where, the week before, there had been only a shape.

After a year, a new group of beginners came to the dojo. The head of the dojo took them on — that was his place, the beginning, the lighting of new fires — and he handed our group to one of his students. This man was himself an instructor at the club, and he held a high rank; he was no novice and no stand-in. By every outward measure he was qualified to teach us, and he was.

I felt the difference by the second lesson.

I came in still expecting what I had been given for a year: the technique, and then the meaning poured in over the top of it. What I got was the technique, and a few brief words about my mistakes. The lesson had the same shape it had always had — the warm-up, the falls, the knee-walking, the demonstration, the pairs, the repetition. Nothing in the form had changed. The man running it was thorough, and he showed us what he knew. He gave corrections, and they were useful corrections; when he told you your elbow was wrong, your elbow was wrong. There is no bad word to say about the care he brought to it. He did the job in front of him properly.

What I am about to describe is an absence, and an absence is very easy to turn into an accusation against a real person. So let me say up front what I am not claiming.

I do not know what was or was not in that man. Whether he loved teaching or merely did it, whether a fire burned in him that simply did not cross the gap to us, or whether something was missing — I cannot see into him, and guessing would be a lie dressed as insight. What I can tell you is not about him. It is about what reached the mat. And what reached the mat was the move without the reason in it. The lesson was complete and correct, and the thing that had lit me the year before — the meaning that made a shape into a consequence — did not come through it.

The lesson had become a perfect glove with no hand in it: the moves all in place, and the person who had been inside them gone. The year before, the hand had been there. Now there was the glove.

And the method he taught by was not his invention, any more than the jugs were my drawing teachers’ invention. There is an old and honorable way to build a hand in this art: you repeat the techniques, thousands of times, year on year, until they are clean, and in due course you are ready to test for the next rank, and you go on. It has produced real masters. He had come through it himself, as a student, and he passed it on in good faith, the way people pass on the method they were taught by, trusting it because they came through it. I am not telling you the repetition was wrong. I am telling you what it was like to stand inside it when no one was putting any reason into it.

Very soon the lessons became repetition and little else, and I knew the feeling of it the way you know a face you have seen before.

I had walked this loop already, in another building, at an easel, a few years earlier. I knew its particular texture — the road that has quietly become a circle while you were still driving it, the same bend coming around again, no one having told you the journey was over. I had learned, at the easel, not to look directly at that feeling. Now here it was on the mat, wearing a beginner’s sweat instead of gouache.

The wrong lesson is that repetition put the fire out. It did not. This art is repetition almost all the way down; so was the first year, the one I loved. Under the first teacher I had done the very same drills, the same falls, the same techniques over and over, and the fire had only grown. The dull repeated work is what digs the riverbed, in any art. The question is never whether the work repeats. The question is whether the repetition is going anywhere — whether, lesson by lesson, the dry pieces are connecting to something, or whether they are looping back on themselves and reaching nothing. Under the first teacher the repetition connected; the meaning he poured in was the thing it connected to. Under the second, the same repetition looped. The drill was identical. What had gone was the thing that made it lead somewhere.

And here is what I most want you to see, because it is the strangest and the saddest.

By the third year, my fire still strong, I had started — on my own, with no one asking me to — to find the system inside the art. I sorted out most of the grips and the movements; I began to see how they fit together, which things were versions of which other things. And at some point I saw something further: I could feel how a new throw might be built out of elements I already knew, a throw that was not in the syllabus, that no one had shown me, that would be mine. I wanted to try it. I wanted to experiment with the thing I was beginning to understand.

That impulse — the copied hand starting to do what the student means, the fire finding that the channel is finally deep enough to carry something of its own — was the release, beginning. It had begun in me. The years of drill had built up my hand, and my fire was reaching for the opening.

And the room had no opening to give it. The teacher and the dojo offered no space to experiment; we went on repeating the techniques I knew to the point of pain. So the release that had started inside me had nowhere to land. I asked a friend, once or twice, to stay after the lesson and let me test a technique. But I was too shy to push it — to experiment freely, in the open, in front of people, which is exactly the standing-up-for-myself I had come to the mat to learn and had not yet learned. And so I drew the conclusion that stopped it. I decided that if the teacher was not giving us the space to do this, then I was not ready for it.

I was not ready. That was the verdict. Read it beside the other verdict I once signed — I have no talent — and you will see they are the same coin. Both take a real fact and read into it the one meaning that condemns you and lets you stop. The fact was true: the room gave me no space. But the fact did not prove the meaning I read into it. The room’s silence about my own throw was not the art speaking: it told me neither that I was not ready nor that I was. It was the method we were being taught by, and that method had no place in it for a student’s own anything.

And there was nothing to show whether the verdict was right. This is where this art parts from the craft I told you about before. At the keyboard, when you invent your own solution, the program runs, and the running is a receipt — there is no arguing with a machine that gives the right answers; the release happened, and there is the proof. On the mat there is no program and no receipt. Whether a throw you have built yourself works, there is nothing to check it against: the partner goes down when the throw works, and he goes down when he is only doing what is expected of him. Nothing in any book confirms it for you. So when the room seemed to say keep repeating, you are not ready, there was no equation that would come out and show whether it was so. The absence of an answer at the end of this art is exactly what let the verdict stand.

My passion for the art was still alive, even then. And since I could not freely practice the way I wanted in my own group, I did a thing that I thought was clever and that I now see was an attempt to get back to the fire: I went back down to the beginners.

The first-year group was still led by the head of the dojo, the man who had lit me. If I could not have the open mat, I could at least go and stand again in the meaning he put into the work — the philosophy, the reasons, the stakes. So I started turning up to the beginners’ lessons.

He knew me at once, on the first day. For some weeks he said nothing about it. Then, after perhaps a month, he came to me after a lesson and asked why I was training with the beginners.

The question undid me, because I could not answer it honestly.

The honest answer was that I was unhappy with his student — that the senior group under the man he had handed us to had gone cold, that I had come down here to get back the thing that group no longer gave. But I could not say that. In our dojo the authority of one’s seniors was not open to question: that was part of the training, and the head of the dojo taught it to us himself. A student of my level had no place criticizing an instructor of high rank, least of all to his own teacher, and I could not make my mouth do it. So I made something up. I said this lesson time simply suited me better.

He did not accept it. He told me I would get nowhere this way, that I belonged back with students of my own level, and that I should return to my group. I could not argue with him. I went back.

I want you to see the trap closed in that exchange, because it is made of something good.

The respect he had taught me was a real gift. It is part of how a person learns to carry himself among others, and I do not regret carrying it; I carry it still. But that same respect was what the trap was made of. A true sentence — the senior group has gone cold, and my fire is going out in it — would most likely not have changed the room: a student’s word against an instructor counted for almost nothing there. But it would have made visible the choice actually in front of me: to stay in a room gone cold, or to leave — for another dojo, or out of aikido altogether. Respect kept me from saying it. I went back to my group as if there were no other way. The man who lit my fire handed me, in the same years, the very virtue that kept me from seeing that I could take that fire to another dojo.

I will not guess what he understood of the group he sent me back to. Perhaps he thought the senior group’s way was simply the correct way — repeat, and repeat, and in time present yourself for the next rank — and that a serious student belonged in it and not among novices. A teacher may well believe that; it is the path he had likely walked himself. What he saw of what that path had become for me, I do not know. I only know that I obeyed him, and went back up, and said nothing.

Early in this book I told you there are two ways for a finished work to fail, and I described the second one — hand without fire — in a painting. The painter in the tourist square who renders the famous tower flawlessly, every proportion correct, every shadow placed, and the painting is dead, and ordinary people walk past it feeling the deadness without a word for it. Perfect technique, and no one home. I showed it to you as an object — a painting people walk past.

What I have just shown you is the same defect, and this time it was not an object. It was standing at the front of a room, teaching.

A correct lesson, every technique sound, every correction true — and the thing that makes it live not in it. The competent dead painting and the competent dead lesson are one defect wearing two costumes. One produces an object with no fire in it. The other produces a lesson that starves a student’s fire. They are the same absence, met at two different points in the life of an art: once in the thing the artist makes, once in the way the art is passed on. I held them apart until now on purpose, so that you would meet each one cleanly before you saw they were the same. They are the same.

To name the defect is not to convict the man. I cannot see what was in him, and the method he taught by was old and honorable and not his to answer for. The failure I am describing is structural — a way of teaching that carries technique faithfully and carries no fire. That is a description of a method and its effect on a student. It is not a verdict on a heart.

But the description holds, and it hands you something.

In the two schools of my childhood, the subject being taught was different. At one there was an easel and at the other a keyboard, and a careful reader could always wonder whether the difference was really the teaching at all, or just that drawing was not for me and machines were. The doubt was fair. I could not fully close it.

Here there is no such doubt, because here the art held still. Same mat. Same body. Same student, with the same fire carried in. The only thing that changed, from the year that lit me to the years that followed, was the man standing at the front. One teacher poured meaning into the identical drills and my fire grew through them; another ran the identical drills with no meaning in them and my fire was starved behind them. When you hold everything else still and change only the teacher, and the fire follows the teacher, you are looking at proof of a thing the earlier stories could only point at: that what becomes of a student’s fire can turn on the teacher alone — not on the art, not on the student’s talent, not on the drill, which was the same drill in both years. The teacher is not a small variable in this. Sometimes the teacher is the whole of the difference.

About half a year after I went back up, I was injured. It was my neck — for a while it looked as though it might be serious.

Let me say how it happened, because it would be easy to lay it at the teacher’s door, and it does not belong there. I think I hurt myself: when the lesson has stopped holding you, your attention drifts, and a body whose attention has drifted falls badly. I fell badly. The fault, as far as I can tell, was mine.

I healed. And when I had healed, there was a real choice in front of me. I could have gone back. The injury did not forbid it. There was a risk in returning, as there always is in that art, but it was the ordinary one a person takes by stepping onto the mat at all, and I could have taken it.

Here is what I knew about myself, standing at that fork. If it had been the first teacher’s room waiting for me, I would have gone back. For that room — the one that put meaning into the work, the one that lit me — I would have taken the risk without much weighing it. But it was not that room. It was the loop. And I found, weighing it honestly, that I would not take even an ordinary risk to return to the loop.

So the injury did not end my aikido. It only handed me a scale, and made me set my aikido training on it. And notice what decided the weighing: not the art, not my fire, not the danger — the same danger sat on both sides of the choice. What tipped it was the teacher. The fire I had carried in was still willing to take a real risk for a room that fed it. It simply would not take one for a room that had gone cold.

The two stories before this one each came out differently, and I want you to feel how this ending sits between them. The easel ended with me staying on out of habit in a place that had stopped teaching me, and feeling, when it finally finished, only relief. The keyboard did not end at all — the fire found its channel, and the channel is still carrying it. This one ended in the middle. The fire was real, it was strong, it had even begun to reach for its own throw — and then it met a room with no door, and a respect I could not break, and a verdict I signed against myself, and at last an injury that handed me the scale on which I weighed my aikido training and found it wanting. Not a fire that simply went out. Not a fire that found its channel. A fire that would have taken the risk for the right room, quietly declining it for the wrong one — and grateful, in the end, for a respectable way to stop.

There is one more thing I owe you before I close this story, and it is what kept my own verdict in place the longest. Not everyone left that room. Some stayed, and some of them reached the black belt. Three of the students I started beside wear one now. One holds a high rank and teaches students of his own.

For years that fact sat on me like a proof. If the room was what I have described, how did they come through it? And the answer I gave myself was a familiar one: their fire was greater than mine. They had it and I did not, and that is why they wear the belt and I do not.

One of them I remember in particular. He had taken a serious injury, the kind the doctors tell you to stop for, and they told him to stop. He did not stop. He came to the mat with a surgical pin still set in his hand, on a break that had not yet healed, when a single bad fall could have snapped the pin and cost him the hand. I knew this because he told me, and I looked at him while he told me, and I thought: there is a fire that puts mine to shame. I do not have that. That is the thing I am missing.

That conclusion was the same coin: a real fact, and the one meaning that condemned me.

The man who taught us had, in fact, told me the truth about that room himself, once, without knowing it. He stopped a lesson and said we were not trying hard enough. “When the dojo began,” he said, “there was only the founder, and under him many of us reached the black belt in two or three years. Now hardly anyone does, and the ones who do take five or six.” The founder he spoke of was the head of the dojo — my first teacher, the man who had lit me, still lighting beginners on the same mat, at other hours. He meant it as a reproach to us. But hear what is actually inside it: the same dojo, the same rank, running twice as fast under one teacher as under another. He had measured the two rooms for me, in plain numbers, and laid the result at the students’ feet — reading a fact about the teaching as a fact about our worth, exactly as I had read the newcomer’s few months at the easel as proof about mine.

The three I started beside did come through. But that does not prove the room worked and I was the lesser man. By our teacher’s own count, the founder’s room brought ordinary strong fires to the rank in good time — ordinary ones, not only the rare — because there was air in it for a fire to breathe. The room I trained in brought hardly anyone through at all, and the few it did took twice as long. A room like that weeds people out more than it brings them to the rank: an ordinary fire, real and strong, can hardly get through it. And among those who did come through was a man who would train on a broken bone against his doctors.

And here the first teacher comes back, because he had already taught me how to see this, and I had lost sight of it. He kept putting one question to us: what a body might pay for our mistake or our feeling. The man who trained with a pin in a broken hand was not the height of fire I should reach for. He was a fire overriding the body it lived in, which was the very thing the first teacher had named as the danger. I had taken him for the standard and found myself wanting beside him. He was not a standard I should have been measuring against at all.

So if you ever walk out of a room that went quiet on you without coming through it, and you look around at the few left standing, do not do what I did. Do not conclude that they carried the fire and you lacked it. Sometimes a bad room demands far more of a student than a room where a fire has air to breathe. Now and then a fire that will override a body gets through it, and many other fires starve in it. The people still on their feet are not evidence that yours was too small. They are evidence of what that particular room demanded in order to pass. Your fire can be real, and strong, and entirely enough — and still not get through a room that demands that much.

I am the one who walked into that room and did not make it out the far side. So what follows is three warnings.

The first is the one the three stories together taught me, and it took all three. If a room goes cold on your fire, do not be quick to decide the art is not yours, or that you were never made for it. Before you sign that, look at who is standing at the front of the room. In the same art, one teacher can light the fire in a student and the next can starve it; I watched it happen on one mat, with one me, when nothing changed but the man teaching. I once took a cold room for a fact about myself. Sometimes it is simpler than that. Sometimes the other room is the same room with a different person in it.

The second is about your own throw — whatever, in your art, the thing that is yours would be. If you feel it beginning — if you start to see how the pieces fit, and to want to make something no one showed you — and the room around you gives that wanting nowhere to go, do not read the room’s silence as the verdict that you are not ready. That is the reading I made here — the same coin as the one I made at the easel — and it was wrong both times. Teachers who only loop cannot hand you the release, because they never open the door it comes through; their silence about your own work is a fact about their method, not a measurement of you. I am asking you not to hear not yet in that silence. I heard it for years. It cost me.

The third is the hardest, because it is made of a good thing turned against me. You will, I hope, be taught respect — for your teachers, for those ahead of you, for the people who carry the art. Carry what is given: it is worth carrying. But know that respect is not a vow of silence while your own fire goes out. Criticizing your seniors in a room where their authority is not open to question is most likely useless, and I do not advise it. But you can tell the truth about yourself without breaking respect: my fire is going out in this group. That sentence may not change the room, but it will show you the choice the room really holds: to stay, or to look for another room. I did not say it. I went back to my group and stayed in it until the injury handed me a scale and made me set my aikido training on it. The not-saying cost me the thing I had come for. Respect that requires you to watch your fire die in silence has been put to a job it was never meant to do.

And there is a bitter joke underneath this whole story. I came to that mat to learn to stand my ground — to become a person who could hold it, who could say the hard thing and not give way. That was what I carried in. And the room went quiet on exactly that. It talked me out of the very thing I had come there to build, and I thanked it for the exit. The faculty I came to grow was the one casualty I did not notice I had taken.

I do not tell you this so that you will distrust every teacher who repeats a drill, or break every code of respect you are given. The people who could not help me were passing on what had been passed to them; the drill is not the enemy; the respect was a gift. I tell you only so that, if you are ever standing in a room that has gone quiet, with something of your own beginning to press against the inside of you and nowhere to put it, you will have a name for what is happening, and you will not do what I did, which was to go silent, and stay in that room, and finally be glad of an injury.

Here, at least, there was a room to point at — a method, a closed door, a code that bound me. There was something outside myself that I can show you and say: that is where the fire met its wall.

The next story takes even that away. There is no teacher whose method let the room go cold in it, and no loop — nothing to point at. The door was open. The teaching was not the problem. And still the step did not come — because sometimes the thing that refuses the release is not in the room. It is in you. That is the hardest one to see, and it is the one I have to tell next.