Karate as Art

Sensei Lauri Cochran taught today, and during her teaching, she used the phrase "the language of martial arts." That phrase stuck in my head, because I recently was in a discussion about the language of digital media.

Art is a language in the sense it is a communication tool used by us, the humans (well, and some elephants, apes, and maybe other animals, too).

If martial arts are a language, what are we trying to say? In different contexts, we may be saying different things. In self-defense, we're saying "back off or I will hurt you (again)." In sparring and self-defense, we're actually having a conversation with give-and-take. In kata, and if we're good enough, we're reciting the poetry of the masters. If we're masters, we may even be writing new poetry.

Seeing martial arts as a language gives us an important metaphor for learning and expression. When we first start, we're learning the words: this is how you make a fist, a knife hand. Not much later, we're making phrases: combine the fist with a rotating forward movement to make a punch. Soon we're combining phrases into sentences: execute a rising block followed by a reverse punch. And then poems or, for most of us, paragraphs: do heian shodan.

We progress from one-side statements to conversations with our imaginary friends when we imagine an opponent during kata or drills. And finally, in sparring, we have conversations with each other. Like real conversations, there can be give and take, or a whole lot of shouting.

But where's the art? The art starts when When we move from being aware of our conversation to the pooint where we're in the conversation. When we're truly artful we deomstrate through the beauty of our expression what we feel: that's when a kata shifts from a paragraph to a poem.