Miscellany, Jan 24

Jiu-jitsu, mediated existence, reading, kindness

Jiu-jitsu this week gave me a useful opportunity to reflect on defense.

The first instinct when someone’s on top of you, aiming for a choke hold or a submission, is to get that guy t.f. off. You want out of here. The adrenaline hits; you buck, you roll, you twist and kick. Full-on animal spirits.

The trouble is, you spend a lot of energy thrashing about. And, if you aren’t much stronger than the other grappler—who, remember, has gravity on their side—you’re not likely to get anywhere, if your opponent has the faintest clue what they’re doing. Even if you are stronger in general, one or two failed maximum-strength attempts to break free will wear you out. A common first step is to establish frames: defenses that work by structure rather than strength. If you get your arm inside a choke hold that works by isolating your neck, the other guy will have a hard time. The structure of your arm, the bone fact of it, protects you. You can save your strength to seize a later chance.¹

Once you have a frame or two protecting you from immediate danger, you look to act. What can you use? How can you move? What resources can you recruit or establish or support? Can you get another frame in? Where have they committed their weight? Can you bridge them off you? Can you isolate their arm? Control their hips? Can you just… stand up?

Recognize the adrenaline. Resist the urge to thrash. Find your frames. Organize your efforts against the weaknesses of their position. Go for it.

I’d strongly recommend reading Michael Walzer’s Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics. I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Democracy for Busy People, a more recent publication—its title appeals to me, a busy person. If you’ve read something that feels useful, I’d love to hear about it.

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“Silence has meaning when it contains more than can be expressed. When we feel more than we know how to express, then silence is pressurized. But when we try to force silence for effect without understanding the material and spiritual conditions that give rise to that silence, what we have is a mediated idea of an experience. An abstraction of an abstraction.”

(Brandon Taylor substack post, against casting-tape fiction)

Taylor’s writing about first person narration, but his caution against abstraction-of-abstraction here reminded me of a great little Dumbing of Age strip that has a lot to say about writing in general and genre writing in particular. The strip’s title is “turkeys” but I remember it as the strip about “someone else’s memory of a face.”

Genre writing has more than a trace of the old commedia del’arte: there are stock characters and phrases, general and familiar plot-shapes. Someone wants to “destroy” or “rule” the world, someone else is a faerie prince, someone is a dwarf, someone has a gray beard and a pipe and a staff. Even general concepts like “villain” and “hero” come with a range of midi keyboard pre-sets to be remixed as needed. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Everything does not need to be radically new all the time. People like the grocery store to be in the same place when they go looking for it, for example. But while these days whole industries are built on the idea that the walk to the grocery store is a pure time-cost to be eliminated or passed on to a gig worker, in fact even the walk to the grocery store presents opportunities for newness, surprise, human presence: to see and be seen by the sky, to notice birds, to trade hellos with a neighbor, to pass along the good news that it’s National Cookie Day. All that “farting around” for which Kurt Vonnegut says we were put on this planet. (And upon which, forgive me, rest the foundations of communal life.)

Set forms and stock characters are a sort of cultural memory of a face: they are core-wood left by past living art, upon and around which the present living art grows. One job a living artist can choose, is to be that bark. If we are no more yielding, responsive, alive, sap-rich than the wood beneath us, we do not nourish, not even ourselves, and the tree dies. If we are awake and alive and feel the sap in ourselves, the old forms add to the work’s vitality and power. Try to tell a common fairy tale or a ghost story to a child you love, changing as little as possible, and, listen: a present, vital voice emerges. Still there lives the dearest freshness deep down things!

Of course there’s nothing wrong with wanting your work to be wildly, intoxicatingly new, an adventure into unknown territory. Shine on you crazy diamond! But since genre means “kind”—in the sense of ‘type’, not in the sense of kindness, though one sometimes wishes it were otherwise—it’s a rare piece of genre writing that wants, as genre writing, to be utterly different in kind from all that preceded it. Many great works of genre writing which at first glance seem utterly different from anything that’s out there, are in fact quite similar to an older form that’s out of fashion in the current market. They stand on shoulders of giants—but the giants may be invisible to most.

Another bit from Taylor’s post:

“The watcher watches until the screen goes dark, but the novelist is native to that darkness. It is their greatest virtue and gift. They do not need a screen to see.”

Screenwriters, though watchers themselves, do inhabit the darkness after, and the darkness before. I’ve been told while screenwriting to leave the characters’ interiority to the actor to interpret—you want actors to feel that they have something to do, so they get excited and sign on. But the audience’s interiority must be considered, because the audience’s interiority is the ultimate intended effect. The screenplay talks about what “we” see and feel—you run into phrases like (forgive my bad example): “the demon queen rises from the black pool, sexy, terrifying”—who’s aroused and terrified? The audience! The screenplay cues cinematographers, lighting, makeup, directors, etc etc, to shape the camera’s gaze and prime the dreamworld. In late 20th-early 21st century prose, we’re more reluctant to trespass on the reader’s inner life in this way. (Though that’s changing—more second person narratives and epistolary narratives around these days.) Experienced screenwriters coming to the prose page sometimes have to work their way out of the darkness of the reader’s mind, and into the darkness of the character’s. Experienced prose writers coming to the screen may have to make the opposite journey.

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“I do not fully understand people who say, “I read a book that was so much better than I could ever write, and now I’m soooo depressed!” I get depressed when I read a BAD book, because How in god’s name did something like that get published, in which case why am I even bothering to create something beautiful? But that’s just me. No judgement.” - Ellen Kushner’s Read for your Life

Samesies. Well, almost. A good book, a great book, is a challenge, a mountain, a message that demands response. Reading one, I get that shounen anime fighter’s grin: let’s go! I hit the draft the next day with ten times the energy. But the bad book, the widely acclaimed and profoundly mid book: “Am I just wrong about my most foundational aesthetic judgments?” (No, though aesthetics are neither universal nor uniform, the same person may dig Krzysztof Penderecki and Carly Rae Jepsen, ask me how I know—still, this is a mind-screw and a half, one of the all-time great writer-brain pit traps, since 70% of job is aesthetic judgment and the rest is typing. Eighty percent?) “What’s the point of all this work?” (The secret of any great magic trick: put in 10x as much work and time as anyone could possibly imagine the effect is worth. Then put in another 10x.)

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An observation, speaking, as we were for a second up there, about kindness.

Among the great affective errors in American story culture and civic practice, is the sense that kindness is easy. (And, by a basic transitivity error, weak: easy things can be done by weak folks, so doing easy things is a mark of weakness.) True, lived kindness is hard. To see someone else as a person like you, to find what they need (not what you think they should need), to help, especially in moments when you have good reason to feel aggrieved, even furious—you have to be strong, you have to keep your footing rather than be drawn into the vortex. You have to be sensitive to the other without collapsing. You have to know yourself and the other person and the situation. You have to act with care, attention, and control, at the speed of human life, which always runs a step too fast. We tell so many kindness-stories and friendship-stories in children’s media because kindness is so often not the first instinct, because children start to learn these techniques early, to practice them and fail at them. They’ll be trying to get better at this stuff for their entire lives. Or else they’ll stumble through the wreckage of their own relationships, not knowing why. No pressure, parents!

I think we often talk about kindness as if it were easy out of a desire to manifest it as easy, like hyping up a weightlifter prepping for a personal best. You’ve got this! But like any hype-talk this can work out poorly: we’re told this thing should be easy, but in practice it sure can suck. Who are you going to believe, the hype man or your lying heart? Cue anger, resentment. Imagine Fred Rogers as a sort of all-time gym master of kindness. I recently watched an old video of Lou Ferrigno talking about weightlifting technique. He wasn’t saying much that seemed new or surprising: you lift with control through the full range of motion, you challenge your body in new ways, you put in the work. What’s persuasive is the evidence of result, the inarguable magnitude and power of his frame. The challenge of course with kindness is that it’s not visible. Inner strength is like a Dragonball Z power level: you only know who has it when some schmuck steps up and realigns your world.

1. (The sort of frame you’re looking for depends on what the other guy’s trying to do. In sport grappling, you (often) want to create breathing room; if the other guy is trying to hit you, you may want to reduce space in a controlled way, so they have less room to build striking power, and their attempts to do so create opportunities for you.)