When Mike’s hand came down, there was no bone-on-bone shock, no meeting of force at all. The sensei stepped out of the way, an easy turn at the hip and glide back and out, and laid the side of his right hand on the uke’s right wrist, the left hand behind his right elbow, then was behind the uke, guiding him, helpless in a stiff arm bar, along his original path, facedown to the mat, where he was pinned. It was like watching a leaf get sucked into a whirlpool.
A young man made a late entrance and hurried through his bow and rushed into the men’s changing room.
“Shomenuchi ude osae,” the sensei said, describing the technique, and Mike slapped the mat twice, and the sensei let him up. He demonstrated twice more, slowly, and then once at full speed. The final time, Mike slapped the mat in earnest, and when he stood, he was sweating.
The newcomer came out to the mat, still tying his belt, but instead of kneeling he waited for me to move down a space. When in Rome.
Sensei gestured us to our feet. The others paired off instantly, which left me with New Boy. He bowed at me sulkily, and assumed hanmi, waiting. I dutifully stepped into shomenuchi.
He was rushed, and clumsy, and if I’d been a beginner he might have sprained my shoulder, but he was uncertain enough that my arm was not fully extended, and he moved stiffly, using muscle rather than technique, and I could control him without appearing to and go down without injury. He frowned. He knew something wasn’t exactly right, but had no idea what.
Part of the noncompetitive ethos of aikido is to help and guide each other: the uke helps the nage with the technique; the nage ensures that the uke goes down without injury. The greater the disparity in skill, the greater the responsibility. A ninth dan should be able to take down a rank beginner with speed, grace, and precision, without anyone getting a bruise. He should be able to help the beginner do the same to him.
The woman who had taught me aikido in Atlanta, Bonnie, had talked about sensing ki, and blending energies. She showed me an exercise called the unbending arm. We faced each other, and she asked me to hold my right arm out straight and make a fist. Then she turned it palm up and laid my right forearm on her shoulder. “Don’t let me bend it,” she said, and interlaced her hands, and began to press down at the elbow. I gritted my teeth and locked my arm. “You’re strong,” she said, but after three or four seconds, my arm bent. She smiled cheerfully. “Want to see if you can make me bend my arm?” So we exchanged positions, and I pulled on her elbow, and nothing happened. She looked bored, even pretended to yawn while I grunted and exerted more and more pressure. “You look like you’re going to burst something,” she said. So I asked her what the trick was. “Trick? It’s not a trick. Here, put your arm back up.” I did. “Now bend it a little. And spread your fingers wide. Relax, relax your shoulders and neck and back. Root your feet to the earth.” The earth was covered in concrete foundation, steel I-beam construction and bamboo flooring, but I didn’t comment. “Now feel the energy coming up from the earth and through you and down your arm. Stay relaxed, keep your fingers open. Channel your ki through your fingers. It’s pouring out of you in a stream of light.” And my arm didn’t bend, and it took absolutely no effort. And I didn’t understand it at all.
“Are you really trying?” I said, and she said she was. Later that day, I found Frank King, my first APD partner, six-feet-three and two hundred thirty pounds, and put my arm on his shoulder and said, “Bend it,” and he couldn’t.
I didn’t believe in ki, or the energy from the earth, or light shooting out of my fingertips, but the fact was, when I relaxed and thought about energy flowing smooth and liquid through my arms, my arm didn’t bend.
I wrestled with the idea for a week, and I told Bonnie the idea of ki was nonsense, and she shrugged and said, “What does it matter?” and after a while, it didn’t. I could feel when I got into the zone and became fluid and unbendable. And then one night Frank and I were called to a fire. The firefighters were already there, herding people back, unspooling their hose, locking down the connection, but just as the water began to stiffen and bulge through the flattened canvas, a chunk of burning roof pinwheeled in orange flame onto the lead hose man, and he’d gone down. The hose whipped and snapped like a dying moray eel and snaked itself ten yards across the pavement, leaping and spraying the crowd before I got to the hydrant and cut the water supply. When another firefighter took the nozzle and shouted, “I’m good!” I opened the hydrant again, and watched the hose turn into a live thing, and something I couldn’t articulate clicked in my brain.
In one of those strange coincidences, when I got home, too wired to sleep, I turned on the Discovery Channel and saw a program about crocodiles. “This twenty-two-foot croc can run more than twenty miles an hour,” the narrator said in an Australian accent, “but when you take a look at its spinal structure, that doesn’t seem possible. Researchers at the University of Melbourne tell us that the key to this incredible strength and flexibility is hydraulics.” And they showed two geeky-looking academics draping an empty hose over two saw horses fifteen feet apart, turning on the water, and watching the hose transform from a limp tube to an arcing, stiff sausage. They hung weights from it; it didn’t bend.
Hydraulics. It wasn’t the bone and ligaments and tendons that made an arm strong, it was the blood pumping through the vascular system, the plasma in the cells of sclera and muscle.
New Boy didn’t yet know this. Directing him, from my position as an uke, was a little like trying to direct a high-pressure hose from the hydrant end instead of the nozzle.
Then it was my turn as nage. It would have been very easy to breathe in two long gushes and take him down in a perfect moving spiral, pin him helpless to the mat, nod unemotionally when he slapped, let him up, do it all again. But he wouldn’t learn anything, and neither would I. And so the first time, I took control very gently, like sliding my palm under a tap runoff and tilting it so it was almost, but not quite, perpendicular and the water landed an inch to the right of the drain. For a moment, he tried to fight. He tried to draw his wrist up, but my palm on his elbow was firm and I guided him kindly to the mat.
He slapped, and leapt up, rubbing his shoulder, and then looked confused when it didn’t hurt. But the sensei had seen it, and came over.
“Everything okay here? Jim?”
Jim looked at me, then nodded slowly.
“Continue,” the sensei said, and watched while I assumed hanmi, and Jim came at me, and I took him down, just as before. The sensei nodded, and gestured for us to swap roles, and I attacked Jim. I used my body to guide his hands and he took me down with the same puzzled look as before.
The sensei motioned Jim away, said, “Watch,” assumed hanmi, and nodded for me to attack.
We barely touched each other, but we felt each other’s strength clearly, and it was the difference between the exuberant rushing together of two mountain streams and the vast movement of ocean currents—the Kuroshio gliding past the North Atlantic Drift, separated by the continent of North America. I went down, and slapped, and stood.
He bowed with a thoughtful look.