On Creativity

This post was originally published on the Exeter Creatives blog (https://exetercreatives.wordpress.com/). If you’re interested in creativity, writing, music, and finding ways to be a bit more than humdrum then give them a read, they’re interesting!

Due to all of us being rather busy with our own affairs in the lead up to Christmas, we haven’t actually be able to have a meet up and agree on a blog topic for a couple of weeks, but since I felt I’d like to continue writing, I’d like to write a little on creativity itself – fitting for a group calling ourselves ‘creatives’ don’t you think?

To begin then, how to define creativity? We’ll skip the rather grand way of interpreting: ‘the power to create’, since it is not my intention to discuss whether it is the part of Gods or humankind to ‘create’ or ‘bring things into being’. Instead we’ll take ‘originality, expressiveness, imaginativity’ as a starting point.

The problem of producing something original is well known to anyone who has ever tried to carry it out – in most any field (unless you’re fortunate enough for your field itself to be relatively new) it’s impossible to produce something which is entirely original. At least in literature (which I would say is the closest thing I have to a ‘field’) the themes that are written about haven’t changed since more or less forever. They’re so concrete in literature that there have been pretty solid genres in Euro-American writing since as long ago at least as the Greeks and Romans (let’s forget that there’s a fuzzy area between oral traditions and literature for now). The Tragedy and Comedy were populated by tropes and themes which commonly identified them just as today anyone can easily identify a novel’s (or film’s, or song’s, or painting’s) genre without much more than a glance at its legion of features which identify it. In today’s cynical language they’re generally called ‘clichés’;  the clumsy-yet-well-meaning-and-deep-inside-complex protagonist who leads the rom-com, the coming-of-age-but-desperately-struggling-with-the-melodramatic-weight-of-responsibility teenager who heads the young adult novel, the gruff-and-nasty-and-cold-and-gritty-yet-surprisingly-morally-firm-and-tenacious-and-occasionally-very-funny-ex-military-cop who sits in the main character chair of the crime noire. Tobacco (or galactic equivalent) chewing (space) cowboys, naive and straightforwardly bold (princes, princesses, hobbits, jedi) knights, mysteriously appearing sagely (wizards, fairy godmothers, goddesses, masters) elders, that one moody (love interest, exile, former spy, ninja, guitarist) girl/guy – these images are so set in stone that they could have conjured a hundred different stock settings and narratives in the reader’s imagination at this point and we’re barely scratching the surface (incidentally, cover art is so formulaic you almost really can judge a book by its cover), and this is for literature alone not to mention music or film. How to be creative in such a saturated environment?

Many try to set out and make something new by using new forms or new configurations of old forms. A rarer few attempt to write about new themes entirely or reimagine tried and tested themes in new variations. The use of new forms or variations on forms is constantly hampered by the prejudices, whether intended or otherwise, of audiences – the most overwhelming examples being in modern and digital art. The resounding cry ‘that’s not real art’, ‘my five year old could have done that’, ‘it’s all digital, where’s the engagement with the real world?’, ‘those things are trivial and facile and childish’, rises as if from the graves of generations of dogmatic conservatives to choke the use of new form. Contemporary forms from films, paintings and sculptures to hypertext art and videogames all face these criticisms which, in turn, lead those who do appreciate the new forms for their attempts at innovation to be branded as snooty elitists or worse, outright frauds who ‘just make it up’ – as if the interpretation of something ‘traditional’ like an impressionist landscape was any simpler than that of unpicking the textual nature of hundreds of lines of code of hypertext, or a novel any more intrinsically insightful than vast and painstaking installations. New attempts at themes run the even greater risk of being labelled as vulgar or elite or simply being boring on account of readers (listeners, watchers, perusers) simply not understanding how to engage with them. Can you imagine a book written not about love between two humans, but the relationship between an headphone jack and the auxiliary port on a laptop? Can you imagine a story about a noble slice of bread on a quest to become toast by any means necessary? A film about what it’s like to be a tongue? Maybe the bread’s toast quest is almost recognisable since it plays on such a strong theme (epic quest), but can you even imagine writing a hundred pages on the headphone jack? What would a feature-length about being a tongue even contain, and would you stay to watch all two hours and fifteen minutes plus commercials of it?

The new is reviled in its irruption, a problem the modernists confronted by embracing the ‘elitist’ label and creating works built for only the highest of high culture moguls (generally speaking of course). Novels too were hated when they first appeared (the ‘one true literature’ was poetry back then) and only overcame the prejudices of time by, well, time. Now, novels are celebrated (at least commercially) for the vulgarity that they were originally hated for (can you honestly tell me you’ve never read an airplane paperback or can doubt their widespread popularity?). Film, when it first appeared wasn’t considered art or artistic, and now it’s a massive global industry. Videogames still mostly aren’t considered artistic and that industry rakes in more than film per annum (not that money is an indicator of art, just that the medium’s growth and widespread popularity is undeniable)! And let’s not even talk about hip-hop, rap, EDM, or Metal as artistic. Whenever the new appears, historically it has been denied the status of art, and thus the potential for being creative, for being ‘original’ and making the ‘genuinely new’ is stifled by the very audience the creator tries to reach. True, if something truly drives itself into the imagination, it’ll survive the test of time and become the norm in 100, maybe 200 years. If you’re willing to wait for your creativity to be acknowledged until long after your death then I guess you’d best start bucking trends and hope for the best. It’s true that life expectancies are increasing I suppose so maybe one day that’ll be fine, but even then, by the time you’re acknowledged for your work, your style will have become dogma, will have become the boring cliché that everyone else is copying – and you’re denied the right to ‘originality’ again. The techniques that were once experimental and radical and hated by everyone turn into commonplace markers of the form (free-indirect-discourse was new when Joyce did it and now it’s everywhere – heck, the first novels didn’t have chapters or paragraphs, imagine how chuffed the person to invent those must have been, and how uncreative (s)he’d seem now!).

Is it possible to be creative in one’s own lifetime? Is it possible to be groundbreaking in your own age and also hailed as ‘original’, ‘expressive’, and ‘imaginative’ in ages to come? I know some would simply recoil at the idea of using this example, but due to its universality, if for no other reason, let’s talk about Shakespeare. Even those who turn their nose up at the archaic language, hated it in school, or simply don’t like theatre, there isn’t anyone who’s taken an English Literature class who doesn’t know who William Shakespeare is to some degree and who hasn’t at least heard of Romeo and Juliet (sweeping statements alert [as if I haven’t made enough already]). Imagine that, almost 400 years after your death being considered ‘the greatest poet in the English language’, theatre groups and students still squeezing relevant, dramatic, and ‘original’, ‘expressive’, and ‘imaginative’ richness from your work. Imagine being considered so ‘creative’ that 400 years later many still consider you foundational in (read: the creator of) massive swathes of a whole culture’s literary tradition. Not to mention you tended to pack out the theatres in your own lifetime, the biggest show in town, appealing to everyone from royalty to the lowliest street urchins who could afford to chuck your theatre a coin. Now, true, not everyone can be The Bard, but if we, who consider ourselves creative could ask him how in the world he did what he did (Elizabethan English notwithstanding), would any of us pass up the chance?

Here lies the crux of the discussion. What we cannot do, is find out from the man himself what his ‘creative process’ was. What we do know is that he was considered not only pathbreaking and revolutionary but also masterful and enormously skilful within the ‘traditional’ disciplines of the time. The sonnet form of poetry pre-existed Shakespeare by many centuries. Tragedy, Comedy, and indeed, even Tragicomedy had been around since Aristotle in 300 BC. Shakespeare didn’t just come out with new things by endlessly mixing and remixing these media which had been around for hundreds of years – in some ways he wasn’t very creative at all, he just produced, in a very traditional way, some of the best material there had ever been in a certain form while adhering to its conventions.

Beyond here lies speculation.

I believe that, broadly speaking there are two main ‘types’ of creativity. One is inspiration, the other is mastery. Inspiration is the blissful visitation of the muse, the descent of the gods from Olympus to bless the mortal pen with divine and eternal beauty – it’s the flash, the ‘Eureka’, that one evening where you sit down and for no reason you can think of, just keep writing until the sun comes up and have something remarkable. Mastery is slow and bottomless process of study, it is searching each hay stack in the barn for a needle, it is slapping the camel’s back with straw hoping it will break (not that we wish harm on camels), it is playing those scales and arpeggios one more time, it’s doing that last push up and going out for that drizzly Sunday morning run again. It’s that training montage that doesn’t happen for only as long as Eye Of The Tiger lasts but carries on until you’re heavyweight champion of the world, and far beyond.

Of course, it’s absurd to think of these two as separate, I don’t think anyone does either in isolation, but I do think these can be heavily polarised. Some writers will be familiar with the notorious fickleness of inspiration, of how standoffish the muses can be. One day, the divine is before you, blinding, and you’ve never written better in your life – the next three months your pen might be drier than a Triassic creek, your picking fingers fat and clumsier than horse trotters, your cinematic eye and panoramic imagination more stale than a month-old baguette. That’s not to say that those devoted to mastery do any better though. Another day slogging through another exercise, another day forcing myself to study and learn and scrutinise and practice in ways which don’t let me express, which don’t let me be free, which might even be (dare I say it?) lethally boring (seriously though, scales and arpeggios…). I do believe that there is a difference though. One who reaches mastery, who does break the camel’s back with straw, who finds a needle in every haystack and keeps on searching, their mastery will never leave them, it will never forsake them like the erstwhile muse. One the other hand, the inspired artist may create in a day, a month, a year, what the student dedicated to mastery never accomplishes in fifty years.

I can’t say for certain whether Shakespeare leant towards one or the other – maybe he was blessed with both? I do favour the idea that he was of the type who leant towards mastery, however. He was beloved in his own generation for being a brilliant poet of all the most traditional styles (Shakespeare did not, contrary to the naming sense, invent the Shakespearean Sonnet). He did not, as far as I believe, begin his career with outlandish or experimental work, or by attempting to break with the theatrical traditions of the era. He was, to all intents and purposes, what one might analogously call, a ‘pop playwright’. True enough, the academic elite playwrights  of the time are believed to have criticised and decried his early work – sound familiar? I believe that Shakespeare’s (and most all creative) genius is ultimately not just the product of miraculous awakenings and flashes of brilliance, but rather, a rigorous and developed, studied, and learnt quality which is enriched and refined through investment in forms and traditions, through deliberate limitation of creativity.

Anyone who is vaguely familiar with my beliefs on martial arts practice will know that one of my favourite martial arts sayings comes from one of the great Aikido masters of this generation; Master Seishiro Endo. It goes like this:

There is no such thing as freedom just like that. It is an aim to become free. Freedom is often referred to as being free of something, but that kind of freedom, to be free, for example, of a duty, or a person, is not real freedom. So what is? – That is an important question. It certainly is nothing you get just like that. There is no easy-going freedom.  I think, in order to become free, you have to restrict yourself at first to a very unfree form. By practising within that form, you will learn to be free – step by step. You practice within a restriction, but in the course of the repetitions within that restriction – it may happen that the restriction rids you of itself. And then the whole practice suddenly, becomes egoless, light – and free. Practising a form thoroughly will, at some point rid you of the form. To reach that stage in a practice means to have acquired freedom. –But within a form.

What Endo says of freedom is, to my mind, true of creativity. If creativity is originality, expressiveness, and imaginativity, then I believe it should follow the same structure as the freedom outlined above. Plenty of people are wildly imaginative – they can picture a scene or a story, an object or a sentence or a concept which others would be awestruck by and which would be uniquely their own. But to realise that imagination, to transform it into expression, will not happen without mastery, or rather, submission to form. By submission to form, I mean learning. I mean becoming so immersed in learning poetry that you end up breathing verse, being to invested in music that you dream in lyric and melody, being so captivated by and dedicated to painting that you see the sky like your own version of van Gogh’s Starry Night, and yes, being so extensively drilled in martial techniques that even the cadence of your step is as intimately martial as your most flamboyant throw. Then your work becomes ‘original’. There is no creativity ‘just like that’: I can’t just turn my idea for a wonderful novel into a book. My imagination is constrained by my technical limitations. In mastering, or rather, being mastered by a form, in ridding myself of ego, I gain expressiveness – my native mode of expression becomes form, I can transform my inner imagination directly into expression. This is ‘originality’, this is creativity. Whether I’m remixing and sampling a sick beat for a brand new experimental mixtape or asking my violin to show my audience how I feel about the Dvořák violin Sonatina – this is true creativity. It’s what happens when you can say someone who might be doing something ages old ‘makes it their own’ – not in the way Simon Cowell idly applauds his stagelings on X-Factor, but in the way everything from Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet to Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker gives you chills. In the way that both Eminem’s Lose Yourself and Nicola Benedetti shredding a Shostakovich solo take your breath away, and in the way both T.S. Eliot’s Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and the 1982 cartoon The Snowman accompanied by We’re Walking In The Air are both profoundly moving experiences. Even the way water droplets play across the floor of Teshima Art Museum or Amazon’s drop-down menus elegantly and smoothly opening and closing when moused over have this character.

In this way, creativity has little to do with ‘the new’ in the sense of breaking away from things that are dogmatic or ‘traditional’, but rather has to do with sincerity. The sincerity of expressing an aspect or character of something (of yourself, of your medium, of a specific form, of a moment, of an object) which is thoroughly native to that thing is creative – it makes something new happen, even if that’s not in the sense of being genre defining or groundbreaking in the sense that might be more commonly accepted. Creativity is self-expression of the most appropriate order. That which is creative expresses its inner ‘selfness’, its ‘vision’, its ‘imagination’, if you like, through the form of something else. Indeed, it isn’t non-newness which is really the s(c)eptic that rots pop culture – it’s insincerity, the deepset feeling that the ‘artists’ in the big industries aren’t really committing anything sincere to their work at all. It’s not a matter of there being ‘nothing new’, but a matter of there being ‘nothing true’. To begin with creativity relies on there being something non-new there to be expressed through. To reiterate: creativity is expression through form. The violinist expresses themselves through their instrument, the conductor expresses herself through the orchestra, the composer expresses herself through the orchestra, and the conductor, and the paper she wrote the notes on, and the contemporary musician expresses herself too, through all of the above, by sampling and recombining their work. Just because any one of these artists use methods and media that they did not invent (how to play the violin, a conventional orchestra, the conventions of a sonata, someone else’s sonata) does not make them less creative. It is the imagining of one thing through the profile of another thing which is creative and which, in the end, is what makes the whole of aesthetics churn like a geyser from the muses’ fountain into fiery life.

If you have managed to read this far and still not be convinced – I dare you to not at the very least marvel at the technical skill, the artistry if you will, and the inspiration, vision, and expressiveness of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA

Thankyou very much for reading. I hope this has proven an interesting and compelling read! Some of you may have noticed two rather odd tags on this post: OOO and Object-Oriented-Ontology. I haven’t actually written on OOO (the acronym of choice for Object-Oriented-Ontology) here, or anywhere else on the blog properly, but I would be lying if I said that these ideas were not heavily influenced by the thought of particularly Timothy Morton and Graham Harman on causality. If you care for philosophy, I certainly recommend them, especially Morton’s Realist Magic and Harman’s The Quadruple Object. They’re fascinating. They also have their own blogs at: https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/ and http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.co.uk/. They’re actually very regular updaters and very entertaining bloggers. Given that they’re dedicated to bringing philosophy out of the dry and prohibitively elite/complex dogma it’s been stuck in (amongst other projects), it’s not really that surprising, I suppose! Once again, thanks for reading!

威豪

Guts, Konjo, Spirit

The idea of ‘fighting spirit’ is common to much more than martial arts. In most sports there’s an idea of ‘grit’ or perseverance. I’ve heard it said that military basic training is designed to push the body and mind beyond its limits, to produce toughness and resolve. If you’ve seen the Simon Pegg movie Run Fat Boy, Run (or actually run marathons) then you are familiar with the idea that long distance runners hit what’s called “the wall” at some point, and must push through the physical and mental exhaustion with force of will. Aside from these more physical exercises, there are plenty of other disciplines which require a high degree of commitment, precision and dedication in order to become proficient. I reckon it’s just as rigorous an exercise to write a good novel as it is to complete any of the above mentioned challenges. So, because it’s a cool and wide ranging thing, I’ll write a little about having guts and resolve, or as those in Japanese martial arts might say Spirit or Konjo (which I believe translates more or less directly as “guts” in the “gutsy” sense [not the viscera sense, I think]).

At Exeter Aikido we have an exercise known as taninzu-dori or just ‘taninzu’ is what we usually refer to it as. I don’t know the kanji so I can’t actually tell you what it translates as, but the form is basically a multi-man attack with the catch that the tori, the one who is being attacked is limited in the techniques they can use. Or rather, they can use almost no techniques whatsoever and effectively cannot use their hands to parry, block, or halt the motion of an attacker. The point is that the Aikido practitioner has to learn to move amongst three, four, or five attackers who will increase the speed and ferocity of their attacks proportional to the practitioner’s ability. Once basic movement between attackers is ok, then the practitioner should begin to move to positions where he or she can use attackers to block each others’ lines of movement and from there continue to use attackers as shields against each other. Ideally, the Aikido practitioner can continue to move indefinitely without getting struck, but usually, if you can make it three or four (quite slow) attacks without getting hit, then you’re doing pretty well. When you get hit in the chest three or four times in a row (and usually because your attackers are choosing not to hit you in the face) then it gets immensely frustrating. The exercise refuses to allow the practitioner time to recuperate. After being hit, there is no “stop, wait, let me focus”. You are constantly under the cosh and if you can’t weather being hit without breaking your composure then you will be hit again, and again, and again. For the first year or so of trying this thing, taninzu just made me mad because I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t sense any improvement, and I couldn’t figure out what I was learning from it. Of course, what I was really learning from my leaden attempts to lunge out of the way of attacks and having fists plough into my ribs was Konjo and the kind of focus that comes with the resolve to continue moving no matter what. Quite honestly, despite knowing it was good for me, this lesson was an absolutely unpleasant experience.

To those who know me as a gamer, it is common knowledge that I am a fan of the videogame Dark Souls. If nothing else, this game is about guts and perseverance. Like taninzu-dori, the game is designed to deal unrelenting punishment to the player who makes mistakes. If the player refuses to learn the game mechanics through observing enemy movements and correcting mistakes, it is very likely that they will never complete the game. There were plenty of moments when I played through the game first time when I felt that I would never be able to beat a boss, clear an area, or escape a trap. If I may be somewhat melodramatic, I think I felt as close to despair as is possible in a videogame. The game demands and trains the player to persevere. Through the infuriating and indeed, sometimes tedious grind of running through a part of the game for hours on end, just to progress to a boss you cannot yet beat, with equipment which you do not know is adequate or not, the game teaches commitment, dedication, and discipline through the very simple method that if the player has none of these traits, they will never advance. Sure, it might be ‘just a game’, but that makes it no less trivial a pursuit if you intend to pursue it fully. And if you do, I think you learn just as much about mental strength as anywhere else.

In the dojo-kun or training-hall code of Shotokan Karate, there is a verse which reads “doryoku no seishin wo yashinau koto”, which I believe roughly translates as “to foster the spirit of hard work” [or sometimes the more fancy but perhaps a little less accurate; to foster the spirit of endeavour]. This part of the code captures one of the key tenets of karate practice as I knew it, and that is the ultimately dull practice of the same kata or forms over and over and over and over and over again. Certainly Karate as I experienced it was composed primarily of the repetition of movements without any instruction whatsoever except the count: ichi, ni, san, shi! It was left up to the practitioner to extract meaning, to extract learning from the movements, which is a stretch that perhaps does translate better as “endeavour”, rather than “hard work”. The value in this training style is that it forces the student to learn their own body through rigorously examining their movements by repetition before any of the techniques can be at all effective. In this way, Shotokan Karate teases out the spirit of Konjo through, of all things, boredom avoidance. It never forces you to persevere or push through with guts. You can happily just do the movements lazily, or if you’re bored, quit. But in order to gain from the training, however, the discipline that one must learn is the discipline to simply do terribly repetitive and at times esoteric to the point of inexplicable exercises which is certainly a good skill and a good piece of spirit to learn I think.

I used to play chess in school. I believe when I was fourteen or fifteen, I played one of my friends a lot. He and I were roughly even in terms of matches won and matches lost, but I think that overall he was (and probably still is) the superior chess player. Towards the end of that school year, he and I happened to be drawn to play a match to effectively decide the rankings for our school year. Towards the end of the game, he was ahead by a couple of pieces and I felt that based on our skill levels alone, I would not be able to outplay him unless he made some sort of grave error. So instead of taking him on head on, I played an exceptionally boring and defensive game. The resolve or ‘guts’ I think I had to use there were not the kind of guts which let you push through something physically or stretch my stamina to its limit, but rather I had to be resolved that in a contest of pure skill, I would be at a complete disadvantage and therefore have the discipline to null any sense of pride I had in my style of play and shamelessly try to bore him out of the match. In the end I stalled him long enough that the match timed out and the judge decided that our match would be called a draw which would, according to the points system in this particular tournament, place me higher in the rankings than him and make me officially the ‘best’ chess player in my school year, a title I was somewhat proud of at the time. I’m sure he resented me robbing him of the small accolade which I thoroughly didn’t deserve.

Once, I tried to write a novel. For three or four weeks, I think it was, I wrote a thousand or so words every day. The story was an imagining of what divinity may have been like before the war in heaven. There are plenty of well known texts about what happens after that (Paradise Lost, all of the bible, etc.) but I thought it’d be cool to imagine how it was before Lucifer led the army of traitor angels against God, was defeated and cast out of heaven. I very much enjoyed writing it, but damn, writing every day was harder than I had ever anticipated. Plenty of times I just didn’t want to. Major props to people who manage to write a whole novel at any point because it takes more resolve than I reckon I ever managed to muster. I never finished the story. In the end, I had three or four characters who I thought were really interesting, but not a very well written story to link them together. Besides that, the other characters were kinda drab and I just petered out eventually. That’s more a story about a failure of guts than anything else.

In a class while we were practising a technique known as katate-dori iriminage, or the entering throw from same-side wrist grasp, the head of our school at Exeter Aikido came over to my partner and I and invited us to attack him. He threw us both two or three times each and I recall being struck in the mouth (it is a common thing, I find, when taking sincere and non-preemptive ukemi against sincere and committed atemi). I expected his demonstration to end there, but he invited us to attack again; “keep going, I’m enjoying this”. He continued to throw us for a number of minutes. The physical challenge of continuing to get up and attack while exhausted took a fair degree of guts, but even moreso was overcoming the fear factor. Certainly for the first year and a half or so of training at Exeter I was afraid to take falls for our head. Not because I did not trust his technique or his conscience, but because I did not trust myself to keep up with and respond to his various unbalancing strikes and checks. I still find taking ukemi for him intimidating because I have to commit to my attack wholly to have a chance of responding to his movements without premeditating my fall, but at the same time committing puts my safety entirely in his hands. That kind of resolve is the resolve to trust another person with what is effectively the potential to severely injure or kill you and also to trust your own judgement and your own abilities. It takes a good deal of guts, I reckon, to overcome the sweaty-palm fear that makes you want to hesitate or keep lying on the ground after being thrown and get up and throw your safety to the wind and attack again.

When I was 15, I was in the Leicestershire Under 15 county cricket squad. In our winter training sessions, we occasionally were made to run the bleep test. For those unfamiliar, a bleep test is basically a very long set of short runs of increasing speed. You have a set distance, I believe roughly 20 metres, which you have to run before the cassette tape makes its next ‘bleep’, hence the name of the test. I seem to recall that there are ten runs at each bleep interval before the interval shortens, at which point you’ll be told you’re at “level 2” or “level 3” or whatever. The point is to make it to as high a level as you can. Of course, the only way you can get yourself any rest is to beat the bleep, but then you run the risk of getting a stitch from changing your pace too rapidly, so it’s meant to be better to try to match the bleep as closely as possible, if you can consider non-stop running of constantly increasing speed “better” than anything. Anyway, in this particular session, we were running the bleep test, but for whatever reason, everyone was just on poor form. Maybe it was because it was a particularly cold day and our muscles were seizing up, or perhaps we’d all just had a lazy off season and were unfit. Whatever the reason, most people were out before level 9, which is pretty poor, considering that you need to run a 13 to make the academy squad which all of us with professional aspirations were aiming at. I remember touching down behind the 20 metre mark at 10.3 and turning to go for the next sprint and thinking that my lungs would give out and that I should just give up. It’d be nothing to me to just sit down and take it easy like most of the rest of the squad were doing. I’d already outdone most of them anyway. But then I saw out to my left my friend Tom Wells, a lovely chap well liked for his pleasant manner and well respected for his all around fitness and strength and not inconsiderable technical skills. When I saw him begin to pull away from me, I can’t explain why, but I absolutely did not want to lose to him. I believe I was told afterwards that I looked somewhat possessed on the last two turns of that bleep test and I remember very clearly raising my fist and striking myself at least twice in the stomach to give myself an extra burst of adrenalin. I did indeed manage to beat Tom on that occasion, I think I made it to 10.6 after he pulled up at 10.5 then promptly packed it in from exhaustion. I’m not sure if this really counts as guts, spirit, and resolve so much as manic competitive spirit and a mildly psychotic desire to prove myself to the selection panel and coaching staff at the time, but either way, I thought it was a decent story to drop in there.

Once, I tried to tell a girl I had feelings for her. On the monday of that week I chickened out. The day after I had an even better chance to speak to her alone and I chickened out again. On the wednesday evening I managed to go ahead and say what was on my mind, but holy crap that shit’s terrifying. Ain’t no volume of physical and/or psychological training that’s ever gonna make that easy. Or maybe I just don’t talk to girls enough? Either way, she didn’t in the end say whether she requited my feelings or not (which I assumed meant she didn’t, because I was pretty sure she didn’t beforehand anyway) but she did say words to the effect that she thought well of me for telling her straight up to her face even though I knew it was a bit of a lost cause. If by some chance she ever reads this then I hope she doesn’t mind my paraphrasing her. So much for guts eh?

So the moral of the story is, there are a ton of things which require resolve, discipline, commitment and perseverance, which I have broadly put under the term “guts”. I think it is good to do all of these things. If it takes guts, I think it’s probably a worthwhile pursuit for that reason alone. And much as people in the martial arts and people of an academic bent like to harp on about technical precision and beautiful form and the minimalistic elegance of Aikido like good poetic imagecrafting, there’s a lot to be said for straightforward fighting spirit.

Anyway, thanks for reading~

Geebs.