- If one punches with anger, his mind is dangerously sick. For this reason we must seek love in martial arts, love is fluid like smoke, it moves everywhere and in every direction. Only if love is the object of your mind your body becomes fluid. In anger, fear and in hatred body is rigid, hard. Love is energy, if you have love you have energy, an inexhaustible source of energy. After fifty years of age body needs elasticity and fluidity. Everyone love himself. Who does not love himself? Maybe a few...usually people love themselves, their ego. A martial artist must look inside and seek for love – The Master spoke.
The day I arrived in Vilnius my goal was to find a new martial art. The search for it took eleven months. Until I met The Master.
After moving to Vilnius I learned many things. A new reality. New people, new culture. New mentality. New colours , new flavours, new smells...a different world from the world I was coming from.
But, the most important thing I learned was one truth regarding I found out Vilnius in a book written by a Lithuanian author, Kristina Sabaliauskaitė.
In Lithuanian it sounded like this "Niekas šiame mieste nėra tai, kas gali pasirodyti iš pirmo žvilgsnio".
It is important to quote it in the original kalba, language. Because you maybe realize the strange and incomprehensible sound that stroke me when I read it. Because that truth, hidden and unknown up to that moment, smogė, hit me, in the face with the gravity of its brutality.
"Nothing in this city may be what it seems to be at first glance". Yes, this flat translation into a language that was known to me and which, however, was not my mother tongue let me understand the meaning of that displacing sentence. But it had no impact on me.
A sort of tromp-l'oeil sentence was that sentence, in the original tongue.
- Martial arts and love are inextricably linked - was another usual sentence of The Master.
I was not looking for love when I arrived, I had love. I was in love. I came to Vilnius for love. Yes, I had love, as an object in front of a subject. As I in front of Me. As Myself between I and Me.
Or at least I was not looking for that love.
The love The Master was talking was not that love.
It was one night I saw The Teacher in a forest exposed to moonlight. He danced. It seemed electric. Perhaps half a tiger, half a snake. He moved like a dervish dancer and had the flexibility of a cat.
In front of him a woman with two knives tried to hit and cut him. The Master moved his body like a wave, like a stream that recoiled before the blade of the weapon that arose from right, left, top and bottom.
But he flinched back not in fear, not in horror. Just a serene sneer was giving strength to his action. He was possessed by Love. It was evident.
- The main question is how to transform our daily living in happiness. Without thinking what is very effective in martial arts. Not techniques work but works the man you are (it doesn’t count you are a fighter or not).
A later response to my questioning. To my being confused before the exaggerated number of martial arts, to the promise of being each one more effective than the other. A lot of styles, masters, approaches…that it seemed to me like a jungle.
- They won’t bring any calmness in your hearth – he responded to my silence.
It was vivid the calmness with which he danced in front of the woman's knives that night. In my eyes it was like a movie I was watching and watching again...
One thing that I soon experienced after my arrival in Vilnius was the feeling of being surrounded by enemies.
In Vilnius in fact what was lacking was kindness. I daily saw beautiful girls without a smile walking in the streets, sitting in coffee shops, working anonymously behind cash registers....most of them looked sad and discontented.
I didn't feel welcome. I even felt spied. But by whom?
By a system, I should say. By a live and organic system.
Vilnius toks miestas - gyvenimo logika čia ne visuomet veikia [...] Vilniuje nutikdavo ir nutinka tikrų monų, that Vilnius was a strange city, it was also confirmed by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė. A city where the logic of life not always worked, she said, where unusual things have often happened and still happen.
For all these reasons I presumed that the Love The Master spoke of should had different hues, more proper hues and suitable to the logic of this city.
- You must be gentle. No hatred, but love. Leave hate, leave anger, rancor to these people who work in the city offices or ministries who do not know how to get to the end of their days. Perfect slaves of a system of human annihilation. Remember the wave. Remember the wave. It goes up and when it reaches the highest point seems to stop for a moment and then comes down instead and brings destruction. But it does not immediately fall down, it has a pause, an apparent pause, before unleashing its violence. But the wave itself has no violence, it follows its nature. Thus the body, it must follow the wave of love, the nature of love, and not the stiffening of hatred. Feel the wave from your heel till your punch, feel the wave through your body, through your leg, through your back, until your final punch bursts!
This time The Master gave me a better definition of what he meant by "love". Love was nature, was energie, was not a personalized love but a natural love. A pure pervasive bodily energy.
I was surprised when I found a similar concept of love in Ričardas Gavelis, probably the most important Lithuanian writer.
Mano ūmi meilė buvo beribė, jos bruožai pernelyg kilnūs, pernelyg neapčiuopiami, kad būtų galima juos aprašyti. Tuo metu [...] toji meilė buvo mano rankos ir kojos, kūnas ir kraujas, mintys ir sapnai. Aš visas buvau išvien meilė. It was the same idea, an impetuous, acute, love - a pervasive, bodily love, completely spread throughout the body - hard to define what it was.
Once I met a photographer who took pictures of plants and flowers very closely. I asked her why. She answered me that in this way the real life changes could be grasped, not the surface changes that are simple adaptations and no real life change is implicated, because they are only modalities, modalities of adaptations.
She didn’t know anything about Tai Chi, but she had realized what was Tai Chi nature.
Gyvenimas bėga lėtai. Medis auga neskubėdamas. Taiči yra tarsi viso gyvenimo tėkmė ir tas, kas susilieja su ja, tobulėja be pastangų. Visi greiti metodai yra trumpalaikiai ir dirbtiniai.
When The Master said those words, his face was elongated, his pale lips narrow, had slightly hollowed cheeks and his eyes seemed tormented. In pain. But why?
In Vilnius every day of mine began with a question. I don’t remember where I had read that sentence but somewhere I had read it. I was sure about that.
Who is then the secret Demiurge of my mind?
It was like every single day was selected by something that resonates in the silence of night and when I opened my eyes it pierced the still sleeping brain.
I thought (I hoped) that it would have disappeared but it was not so. It would have colored my entire day instead.
Maybe those blue eyes had the same sufferance of mine? The knowledge to involuntarily obey to a memory of the night?
What was that memory?
Honestly, I did not have a clue. But...
My first instinct was to think “Fear”. He had a fear, I was sure that he feared something. But why he had a fear? He was a Master. Masters shouldn’t fear anything. That was my logic.
I was blind. I was stupid. I had never considered that in martial arts as in life, fear are the roots of motivation, of energy. Without fear there is no real change. Without fear there is no progress, no result.
Fear is a subterranean work, sometimes deceitful, like a malarial fever.
But in the end fesr is just a stepping stone for love. Fear and love are connected. Entangled. There is no love without fear. There is an underhand continuity between the two. Like dark and daylight.
It was early December. It had snowed between 3:00 and 5:00pm. At 3:30pm it was already dark and cold, very cold. Quite common in Vilnius when the days are grey and snowy.
I checked the time. At 7:00pm I had an appointment with The Master.
In Vilnius there was a place called Art Café. The meeting was scheduled in there.
I felt quite lazy that afternoon and I hoped The Master had changed his mind and called me to cancell the meeting. But he didn't.
I felt unquiet, anxious.
Was I being had by a massive fear? In my nature, not seeing light made me feel scared. Hugely scared.
I felt tapped.
I went to the appointment.
- Do you know why we need love? – said me The Master – Do you know what’s the difference between “fear” and “love”?
- No – I replied.
- “Fear” causes loss of control, “love” generates control. When I fully possess love I fully possess control.
My eyes narrowed with pleasure at seeing the way he spoke.
- Have you been watched?
- What do you mean?
- Have you been followed, trailed?
- By whom?
- Did you have the feeling that you are spied on?
- Why do you ask?
He watched me. He didn’t answer directly.
- I found a similitude between breeding and martial arts.
- What?
- My technique is coumponded by breeding several pieces of different martial arts in one combination. Which is not different from… - he paused. A too long pause for me.
- Which is not different from…- I insisted.
- …from the way they used to create our race – it came out from his pale lips.
- They?
- The Jie.
- Who the hell are the Jie?
- We have to go through a door to know it. To answer this question. Those creatures are trying to make themselves understood and they're trying to do it through me. I am the door.
- And this makes you scared?
- Yes, it does. That’s why I need control. That’s whay my technique is completely different from any other technique. Do you understand now?
- Perhaps.
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