The Force of Change With Art

This one goes out to Mr. Wilde—and it’s not for you, it’s for myself. Here’s to the mystery, irreducible neither to the visible nor the invisible.

Seeing, thinking, knowing, listening—these are all hopelessly muddled in critique. A critic is a perpetually cramped artist: who has time to do the ‘picking apart’ when they are in the midst of ‘putting together’?

I went to music school, trained in classical music performance. A classical musician in our age is the closest thing we have to the samurai, and the age of our samurai may well be dying out (they say). That is, making classical music is life or death, that is, literally, all the time, its true stake. If it isn’t taught as such, of course the art will die. Amidst such conditions, a single great artist (the ‘Musashi of x instrument’, say,) is liable to come along only to totally slaughter ‘an entire school’, thereby destroying a significant chunk of the cultural ecosystem which promotes, no, whose health is the longevity of the art itself. This sort of thing is also subject to disruption by developments in other fields—such as the technological, social, political developments of the early modern period that coincided with the development of classical music as we know it, which seems a positive development except in the light of the then-burgeoning ‘international’ being the coincident death of so many regional styles and their particularities.^[1]

These are the stakes of life, all the time: killing, and being killed. Sometimes we are killed by the sheer force of Wild Nature as manifested through sweeping waves of historical-material elaboration, like additions to the sphere of mass-production (such as the printing press) wiping out wholesale entire markets of buyer/seller groups—or, more likely, literally wiping out actual (meaning beyond the scope of mere humanity) ecosystems. Sometimes we are killed by the sheer force of Wild Nature as manifested through a single guy whose talent at killing you is a virtue of their natural ability to subsume their ‘self’, by dilating the psychophysical senses, to connect with the unity of things—making their sword one with heaven and earth. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes being killed and the guy killing you is a totally non-literal but still clearly-true-and-not-metaphorical experience at the hands of an artist and their art.

This is what I mean by ‘a critic is a perpetually cramped artist’—in the midst of contact between art, artist, and audience (whether that’s temporally asynchronous or not), all people involved have a sword. The sword is only an expression of force. The force of an audience, pushing back against an artist, can kill. You know this, I know this. I, as an artist, have been mortally wounded before, and survived from the brink of death. That’s really what a critic is: some asshole audience member who’s too busy studying the blade to see the ramifications of the cycle of death they participate in. Musashi (from Vagabond, of course,), a consummate artist, began to see the cycle of death he was participating in after encountering some asshole with a sickle-and-chain; everyone knows that a zoner is a defensive archetype. For Musashi, the only defense possible is a harder and harder commitment to the rushdown.

Musashi wins in the end, because an artist will always beat a critic (a critic has to truly become an artist in their own form to matter in the world and not be killed by their own shitty defense, or, their own shit opinions). This is expressed in the fighting game community as ‘zoners can’t/should NOT be top-tier’.^[2]

What is this ‘cycle of death’, anyways? It’s really obvious in the case of Musashi (Vagabond). He starts to wonder why these guys with weapons are all killing each other. There’s not always a clear political motive to these encounters, not even in the sense that a life-or-death encounter with a bandit is political: a bunch of these guys are literally just wandering swordsmen looking for fights with other wandering swordsmen. What’s the point? Some of it is ancestral, like that Musashi had a really shit childhood and took on the failed dreams of his abusive samurai dad; some of it is political, in the sense that the narratives which fuel wandering swordsmen (’being the strongest under the sun’, mostly) have origins in the masculine ideals promoted by states to turn men into effective tools of statecraft. This is inherent in the development of classical-music-performance (the mythological/cultural complex which was intentionally and somewhat unconsciously constructed during the early modern period)—the ‘international style’ is merely an arena in which it is really only possible for national constructions to participate, thus the composers establishing this style are really, in the functioning of their actions, directly participating in nation-construction with the virtues they promote and the circles they’re promoted by. The classical composer, for all the sensitivity and humanity of their artistry, in the end is still a swordsman whose ‘art of the sword’ ends up having the sole employment option of competing states.

Between ronin—the game played among artists and critics—there really isn’t ‘proper employment’. It’s a strange middle zone between engagements being ‘casual-enough’ to minimize risk, and life-or-death to maximize reward. The latter is the real crucible of development, which also creates a cycle. You kill one guy, who inevitably has connections to some other guy or group of guys (whether that’s temporally immediate or asynchronous). The group of guys has two reasons to come after you, the killer: either for revenge or to test your mettle. In some cases, the motivation is ‘nothing personal’, because the guy you killed was an important function within a state-complex. If you kill a group of guys, you develop a reputation. Now, anyone who kills you gets a pretty big boost to their own reputation; it’s all in the name of ‘becoming strongest under the sun’, which is really a reputation thing that says nothing of the reality of skill. It happens to be that ‘strongest under the sun’ is a ‘small condition’, because past a certain threshold of skill (represented by the old masters Musashi encounters—the heads of their respective schools) there’s no question of being ‘totally your own’, ‘with no equal’—in other words, ‘strongest under the sun’ doesn’t really make sense when a bunch of guys can hold that title at the same time.

So what’s really going on here?

Listen: it’s possible for the intellectual faculties to organize reality into a linear ranking of ‘weakest’ to ‘strongest’. The game played between wandering, master-less artists, of mettle and reputation, is basically just power-scaling done for the sake of holding on to the idea of one’s place in the world. This is also the weakest use of the intellectual faculties for organizing. Musashi, when encountering the old masters, keeps bringing up his aspirations and ideals and being met with paradox (sometimes verbal, sometimes ‘of the body-and-sword’) and apparently-meaningless^[3] statements.

This is essentially what a critic does. It’s a defensive posture, holding onto one’s place in the world, and not even the reality of one’s place but the idea of it, the potential of having a place. That’s also why zoners tend to dominate sincere-but-new players of fighting games (or, why a teacher-as-critic can crush a student-hopeful’s dreams, or, why a ruthless sickle-and-chain user can effortlessly cut down some ‘dreamer with a sword, in over their head’).

It’s not the true art. The old master, head of their own school, an artist unsurpassed under the sun, totally their own, can appear as a critic amidst the sheer force of their knowing being conveyed. That is, a harsh word expressing truth can sound a lot like ‘a critique’ to someone on their way. Actually, the line between critique and art is hazy, such as is the line between defense and offense. The distinction is useful to a point because it describes a real difference in approach that matters in the game played between ronin, wherein use of self is a determining factor of development. If use of self does not reorganize to a certain point—that is, if organization of self (and thus of others) continues to be led by intellect rather than to become distributed among the whole self—then the young artist is essentially killed as their own ego, by a critic, or as a critic, by their own ego.

When I sit at the instrument, it’s near-inevitable that I face my mind; I face projections. Thoughts will appear: how should this sound? What does that sound do? Who likes it, who doesn’t? (In this mode, if I ask if I like it, I’m not really asking myself if I like it—in this mode, asking this question, I really tend to be asking ‘who besides me will this please?) What is this phrase? What do I want it to do? What is its role in the music?
Questions upon thoughts upon questions. When they appear, for me, I get frustrated. That is, these thoughts gain an emotional charge, which is the contact between them and accompanying sensations of the body. Rather than freeing me, these questions and thoughts constrain, are both cause and result of tension-rather-than-freedom; the only freedom in this condition of tension is a collapse, and I either collapse after the fight or in it, upon my being killed.
The instrument, like the sword, like the fight, like the opponent, is only a mirror. It’s only showing me what is about my self. Asking and answering the aforementioned questions is an ego-game, predicated on eventually ‘placing myself’ in ‘good ranking’. It appears as if I am concerned about my sound, about my artistic integrity, and so on, but the reality is a fundamental fear of having no place in the world. There’s no point theorizing about this: it is clear and obvious when simply observing what occurs while playing, which is the arising of a complex of interrelated thoughts, emotion, and sensation. It is as if I’ve conjured some sort of spirit—because what else could such an interrelated, complex body of intangible forms be?—some distant specter of the past or future come forth to kill me where I stand, before the fight has even begun.

Musashi only truly develops before, during, and after those duels which he may truly well die within. Before fighting the spear-prodigy son of the old master, retired, of the regional spear-fighting school, knowing he basically has no chance and is going to die, Musashi sits, carves wooden Buddhas, and sees his death. In his mind^[4], he sees himself and the spear-prodigy, feels the speed and terror of a mid-dispenser, hears the gurgle of his last breath and then the wind of the rushing spear, and so on; I am positing, here, that this psychic, sensual experience is also physical, played out also among (if not by) tensions of the physical body. This experience in meditation culminates in his accepting his death—which is also connecting with the unity of Wild Nature, that he experiences when seeing the immensity of the sky, a beetle, and the smallness of his life, which is really the smallness of his ego, his ‘separated’ self—which is also the release of bodily tensions that perpetuate the somatic experience of ‘small, separate self’, the somatic reality of constrainment also creating the thought-complexes which are the manifested ego, and which also accompanies if not engenders the narrowed attention and awareness (the constricted senses) that prevent connection with the unity of Wild Nature, unity of all things, unity and wholeness of self. In other words, Musashi passes through the psychophysical reality of fear in order to accept his obviously imminent death; the paradox of it is that this movement of self, both unintended and intended, is what propels him to victory.

That movement of self is a psychophysical expansion. It’s psychic in the sense that ‘sense of self’ drops away even though sense and self remain (more paradox). It’s physical in the sense that literally the body will seem to ‘grow’ because it expands as the whole-body tensional net of prior constriction literally also ‘shrank’ the body. It is as if one feels they need to take up less space as a precondition to ‘arriving‘ at ‘the place where it is possible to take up space‘—of course, that place is within the realm of egoic ranking-of-things, part of the game of power-scaling played among ronin, the place of ‘strongest under the sun’. Eventually, Musashi learns that this place is an illusion, ‘strongest under the sun’ is a fiction, and that as a fiction it was only supportive to a point: the point of developing toward the realization that this place does not exist ‘somewhere else’, but rather was always present in his person. The realization is somewhat like understanding that one has a place in the world by virtue of existing, which does not need to be justified, and the strength of this knowing is, paradoxically, the strength which justifies it upon attack. It is ‘the invincibility of a sword that is one with heaven and earth.’

Listen, there must be something I’m not getting yet. Or, I get it, but it’s like I have understood the sword before my body has understood the sword. Or, it’s like I’m explaining the sword rather than using it. Clearly, throughout this whole piece I have been utilizing a defensive form.

What do I stand for? What is this for? Who is it for? I wrote ‘for myself’. Like other pieces of writing with my name on them, apparitions have appeared during compositions. Memories, voices, images, and so on. Tensions in the body. I can involve my whole self in writing by dilating the senses, I can introduce my feet into it, right now I’m writing with my feet, the fingers are contacting the keyboard but the feet are the ones doing it, the feet are utilizing the connections among the body to use the hands.
And now my hands are really warm.

Listen: I’m a cramped artist. I’m relatively practiced in dilating the physical sides of the senses. I seem to be less developed in relaxing the psychic sides. The psychic is what’s employed in art, the physical expression is just a means of drawing out the inner objects of psychic experience. That’s why when I play my instrument, I face apparitions, I hear voices, memories come up. It’s not so literal, I don’t hallucinate, rather the conditions of artmaking are such that my ‘headspace’ is suddenly populated where before it was relatively quiet, not that it was really and truly quiet.

I got some blunt critique a year ago, on my writing, wherein I was told to bring more sensory experience in for the reader—so the reader has something to hold on to. I hated to receive that advice, on the one hand because I didn’t feel the reader had bothered to read slowly and carefully enough to get through the thoughts to their emotional charge; how could they have done the same, how could they have thus seen me, through something so inane as my choices of physical scene-setting? I still somewhat think that. Description doesn’t in itself connect a reader to the content that really matters in a piece, and description is what putting down my physical sensory experience on the page would have consisted of at the time. In face, sensory experience does not exclude the psychic realm of emotion and abstraction that I was working within; it’s just an apportionment of sensory experience, the reality of presence coexisting paradoxically with the reality of dissociation. The abstraction, the thoughts, the charged narratives in my head, these were how I experienced what I was writing about. Of course, nothing put on the page is put as what it was; if I put down apparent memories of the physical experience I would have been lying, but I was essentially lying in the same way by putting down what I was thinking and feeling. To me, it mattered what I was thinking and feeling. That it mattered was an exercise in contacting these ghosts, these ghosts which are physical tensions in the body, and by slowly contacting more and more of the ghost in the psychic realm, it had the consequent effect of working out more and more of the physical tension beyond the scope of writing. Yes, it’s diary-writing, it’s inane, it’s poor storytelling—but it’s magicworking, it’s personally meaningful, it’s a functional art. It’s art. It’s art. Was that critique truth? In a sense.

In my classical training, I was expected to ask of myself the kinds of questions I put down above. Who am I playing for? What is the effect of this sound? What am I trying to convey? The critique of my writing was essentially the same thing: a command to think about what you’re doing, and why. This command is also, by virtue of how thinking tends to work, an injunction to stop. Above, I am arguing, essentially, that it is possible to stop while moving, and that this isn’t really thinking in an analytical sense anymore; creating an analysis by asking questions actually prevents the kind of ‘thinking in activity’ that I’m arguing for. I’m arguing that not-losing-oneself while putting something together constitutes egoic artmaking, cramped art. I’m also arguing that losing-oneself, in itself, isn’t enough—for the making to pierce through, to connect with the unity of all things, it must be necessary for an expansion to occur, for the senses to dilate. Which senses? If just the psychic senses dilate, and not the physical senses, am I connected with unity? Or am I just being killed?

No—a dichotomy can hardly be set up here, because the physical body is never disconnected from the psychic body. It may well be that I’m being killed, by ghosts, and that physical tensions do not dissipate within the session I’m working in. However, it is the case that psychophysical unity is, and expansion within every session is not necessary in itself, and it is the case that a certain amount of losing fights, mortal wounds, must be sustained before death can be accepted and expansion can occur. This is especially true if this, my written work, is a means and not my end—the writing has a specific function of carrying out a psychic component that my somatic work thus far lacks.

I’m cramped, by which I mean, how do I dilate the psychic senses? Knowing ‘how to’ dilate the physical senses, what is the psychic equivalent? It must be simple, it must be, since for the physical it’s pretty simple: allow peripheral vision to come in, which feels like ‘letting sight come to you’ rather than ‘going out to see things‘. This one motion is the same ‘motion’ as dilating all the other physical senses; with this motion, I can feel my body as a whole, not by ‘going looking’ with feeling but by allowing what feeling exists among the body to appear in my expanded awareness. I trained this motion in school, learning to hear the context of sound, the totality of sound, and to learn to hear both parts and totality as coexistent, rather than by looking for certain sounds to the exclusion of others. The same can be done with my awareness of space (meaning, my body in space as well as the relation of objects in space, of space as a unified field and objects as a unity of interrelations). I imagine the same can be done with smell and with taste, even though I’ve not specifically practiced with these senses before.
Thus it must be the same with the psychic senses—seeing, hearing, touching and feeling, relating among space, smelling, tasting—and just what is being sensed? Psychic objects, the that which constitutes thoughts and mental content, just as that constitutes sensations and somatic content. That being form, form being ‘the psychophysical’, forms being the parts together with the whole. All form being ‘the visible’, all formless being ‘the invisible’, the invisible unity in, among, and from whence all visible forms appear, the basis and reality of the unity of all things as well as of their life and death.

Really, it is that the artist becomes uncramped by feeling in movement, by going past mere thought and question, beyond analysis, to feel their response in the moment to the creation. Moreover, to feel their creating in the moment as it creates response.

So, when I play, becoming uncramped means feeling more, seeing more, knowing more. The ghosts fall away. It becomes just myself looking in the mirror, the playing, the instrument, and my body all the mirror—and the reflection—and seeing this is sensing the unity of how I’m making and what I’m making, and sensing that is being able to change both of those with the feedback provided by both between each other.

This clarity is the ability to see others, to become a mirror in which an opponent can only fight themselves. That is, in the mirror of playing, there being only myself, the question is whether I can stop fighting and allow, be with, help, support. In being the mirror, there can hardly be said to be a ‘fighting another’—rather it seems as if they destroy themselves with their own foolishness, of which I am only there to witness, and by witnessing ensure its passing.

That is how it can be said that art is life and death, which is to say that the force of change, violent and healing, is present in art as it is in all things; and the force of change is eternal and infinite, incomparable to the view at the top of the mountain beheld by the strongest under the sun.

1. This isn’t to say that regional particularities cease to matter, but more to say that regionality becomes more national in character—a development in line with the character of the technological, social, and political developments.↩︎

2. The best resource for understanding these fighting game references is a streamer/youtuber called Sajam. Sajam will direct you to the Fighting Game Glossary.↩︎

3. Hmmmm.... perhaps apparent meaninglessness is just another expression of paradox? Something to ponder, but later,↩︎

4. In Vagabond.↩︎