Jayne Holsinger sent me the following essay as I was beginning to organize this symposium. This is what she wrote to me:
I've attached here a lovely essay I found by Hugh that he wrote for his promotion from 3rd to 4th degree black belt in Seido Karate. I found it while gathering the papers in his office for his archives.
Since Hugh so rarely wrote prose, I found it to be moving and a rare glimpse, almost a summation of what he had written again and again in the poetry itself.
Jayne, of course, is absolutely right, and I am delighted to include the essay here.
SENSEI Essay — Spring 2016 — Challenge & Opportunity
Imperturbable Mind
It took me 50 years to learn the basics of Kendo using my body.
After I turned 50 I started the real discipline.
I wanted to perform Kendo using my mind and spirit.
When you reach 60 your lower body weakens.
I used my mind to try and reverse the drawbacks.
When you are 70 your whole body weakens.
That’s when I trained my mind to be imperturbable.
With a still mind the mirror inside you reflects the opponent’s mind.
—Moriji Mochida — 10th Dan (1885-1974)
…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2)
I started Seido at the age of 57 in March 1998. I trained as a white belt for five months before going up for blue belt. And on that first Seido day, after my first class, I happened to ask the guy next to me in the locker room how long he had been training. “Twenty years,” he told me. I have no recollection of who he was, and I don’t think he is still here—as so many who were once here have gone—but now here I am, at the age of 75, fast approaching the 20-year mark myself.
One might say I was in a low period when I started. I trained three times a week at mid-day with Sei Shihan Walter, and it meant a lot to me to have a place to go at a particular time each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. (The balm of structure and order.)
I had come to Seido in the first place because my new therapist had said—or at least I thought that was what he had said—that he would not see me unless I studied karate. (He later disputed the “would not.”) And so, for whatever other reason and because I had always had a fascination with the martial arts (what little boy does not want to be powerful?), I went for it, though I could be quite stubbornly resistant to many other things. I had consulted the now bygone Yellow Pages of that time and went for the styles nearest to my apartment with the biggest ads. It was either Seido on 23rd of the Oyama dojo further downtown on 6th Avenue near the old Waverly Theatre. I checked out both places and decided on Seido. (I had hurt my footing in an earlier karate involvement when I was in my thirties, and to my novice eyes Seido looked less scary.)
. . .
When I think of it now, it is interesting that I made such a quick decision about Seido, when normally I tend to mull things over, sometimes for quite a while, and there has always been a part of my soul that “does not want to.” Thus, as I type now, for example, a part of me rebels against having to spend the time and the energy to write four irrelevant pages on the question/problem of “challenges and opportunities.” And why should I bare myself before an audience of strangers? (Even though I have trained beside many of these same “strangers” for years.) Throughout my life it has been easy enough to often “ confess” the most intimate details of experience within a poem, but here—here in this essay written for the ears of Seido—a different order attempts to impose itself.
Must I say, for example, that after I was born in 1940—the only child of a long-sought conception—my mother was seriously emotionally ill at a time when such illness was little understood and mostly crudely treated? Must I explain or invoke my own lifelong challenges of “anger” and “despair”? My father told me that when I was six months, my mother walked off and left me alone in my carriage on the street. Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), recently perfected at the time in Italy in 1938, was applied to her as a last resort and snapped her out of her postpartum psychosis, though she relapsed again when I was eight and when I was seventeen. At eight I was sent to summer camp so that I would not see her, but at seventeen I did see her one night when she came home with my father and raved that men would kill her. A heavy burden for a son and a mother, to say nothing of my poor father who had been advised by some to commit her.
And then in her final years Alzheimer’s struck her, but when she stopped eating my father would not “pull the plug.” Ironically, she outlived him, with a feeding tube in her stomach, until she died of pneumonia in an eight-bed ward in the grim Coney Island hospital.
. . .
Near the end of a relatively recent poem I wrote:
No reason for the poem but the absence of Mother.
No refuge from the absence of Mother but the poem.
Thus, it is staggering to suddenly experience—at absolute emotional purity—the shadow that “absence of Mother” still casts over my life. I wept, I cried out: “I did not deserve to suffer.” But still I suffered.
. . .
It is impossible to avoid the condition into which one is born. I could not help my mother, but can the son escape her fate? “Yes,” says a voice, “But one must want to.” But how can I reset the clock? How can I erase that of which I have no memory—except in the body—of what caused me to be as I am. And at some point the crisis merges with life and death. The days pass and the son knows that it may be that indeed he is his mother’s son, that indeed he may die as he has lived.
. . .
When my boyhood friend Ed was first struck with metastatic melanoma, I rode the IRT to Columbia Presbyterian on 168th Street. Three tumors had been surgically removed from his brain and three had been attacked with the “gamma knife.” And still Ed yearned to go back to work, to live his life.
Afterwards I went downstairs to the coffee shop and sat with his wife Renee. I had introduced Ed to Renee and the two of them had had six happily married years. And there and then I thought how stupid it was to be depressed. How lucky I was to be alive. I must have been out of my mind to despair. And for the first time in a long time my melancholy broke. For three weeks I seemed free, eager to embrace whatever came along, to live my life for the future. But it did not hold. The feeling wore off and I was back in the pit. And in six months Ed was dead, just as the Web had predicted that he would pass, given his Stage 4 condition.
. . .
Sometimes when I tell people that I do karate, they express envy at my discipline. Of course for myself I do not see it as a discipline but rather as a way of being the world in a way that suits my temperament. It is not a cure for despair, but when the endorphins rise, melancholy recedes, at least for a while and if I may paraphrase for example what Jun Shihan David said in last week’s kata class, it is not necessary to find a meaning in training; it is enough just to train. That is, as we know, Seido is the school from which one never graduates.
But when I was born and brought from the hospital, my father had hired a woman to help my struggling mother. And when I cried and cried, so my father said, this surrogate mother, this hired woman had said let him cry—as it was thought then that babies shouldn’t be coddled. (A quick Google search, for instance, reveals the following nuts advice from a 1940’s new mother’s manual: Though he cries, don’t pick up your baby if he is well. A good lusty cry is excellent exercise.) And thus I cried until there was nothing left in the world but rage, sorrow, and silence. (My father said I did not talk until I was three.) No doubt other children have passed through such experience less scathed.
. . .
Coda
I might have called this little essay The Tiger in the Room. That is, as long as one feeds and believes in the beast, it lives. How Mochida made his mind “imperturbable”: I do not know—perhaps through long hours of meditation. To experience things as one might experience the clouds that pass in the sky. My mother is long dead and there is no way to reach her. How shall I teach myself that? At last.
I've attached here a lovely essay I found by Hugh that he wrote for his promotion from 3rd to 4th degree black belt in Seido Karate. I found it while gathering the papers in his office for his archives.
Since Hugh so rarely wrote prose, I found it to be moving and a rare glimpse, almost a summation of what he had written again and again in the poetry itself.
Jayne, of course, is absolutely right, and I am delighted to include the essay here.
—NF
SENSEI Essay — Spring 2016 — Challenge & Opportunity
Imperturbable Mind
It took me 50 years to learn the basics of Kendo using my body.
After I turned 50 I started the real discipline.
I wanted to perform Kendo using my mind and spirit.
When you reach 60 your lower body weakens.
I used my mind to try and reverse the drawbacks.
When you are 70 your whole body weakens.
That’s when I trained my mind to be imperturbable.
With a still mind the mirror inside you reflects the opponent’s mind.
—Moriji Mochida — 10th Dan (1885-1974)
…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2)
I started Seido at the age of 57 in March 1998. I trained as a white belt for five months before going up for blue belt. And on that first Seido day, after my first class, I happened to ask the guy next to me in the locker room how long he had been training. “Twenty years,” he told me. I have no recollection of who he was, and I don’t think he is still here—as so many who were once here have gone—but now here I am, at the age of 75, fast approaching the 20-year mark myself.
One might say I was in a low period when I started. I trained three times a week at mid-day with Sei Shihan Walter, and it meant a lot to me to have a place to go at a particular time each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. (The balm of structure and order.)
I had come to Seido in the first place because my new therapist had said—or at least I thought that was what he had said—that he would not see me unless I studied karate. (He later disputed the “would not.”) And so, for whatever other reason and because I had always had a fascination with the martial arts (what little boy does not want to be powerful?), I went for it, though I could be quite stubbornly resistant to many other things. I had consulted the now bygone Yellow Pages of that time and went for the styles nearest to my apartment with the biggest ads. It was either Seido on 23rd of the Oyama dojo further downtown on 6th Avenue near the old Waverly Theatre. I checked out both places and decided on Seido. (I had hurt my footing in an earlier karate involvement when I was in my thirties, and to my novice eyes Seido looked less scary.)
. . .
When I think of it now, it is interesting that I made such a quick decision about Seido, when normally I tend to mull things over, sometimes for quite a while, and there has always been a part of my soul that “does not want to.” Thus, as I type now, for example, a part of me rebels against having to spend the time and the energy to write four irrelevant pages on the question/problem of “challenges and opportunities.” And why should I bare myself before an audience of strangers? (Even though I have trained beside many of these same “strangers” for years.) Throughout my life it has been easy enough to often “ confess” the most intimate details of experience within a poem, but here—here in this essay written for the ears of Seido—a different order attempts to impose itself.
Must I say, for example, that after I was born in 1940—the only child of a long-sought conception—my mother was seriously emotionally ill at a time when such illness was little understood and mostly crudely treated? Must I explain or invoke my own lifelong challenges of “anger” and “despair”? My father told me that when I was six months, my mother walked off and left me alone in my carriage on the street. Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), recently perfected at the time in Italy in 1938, was applied to her as a last resort and snapped her out of her postpartum psychosis, though she relapsed again when I was eight and when I was seventeen. At eight I was sent to summer camp so that I would not see her, but at seventeen I did see her one night when she came home with my father and raved that men would kill her. A heavy burden for a son and a mother, to say nothing of my poor father who had been advised by some to commit her.
And then in her final years Alzheimer’s struck her, but when she stopped eating my father would not “pull the plug.” Ironically, she outlived him, with a feeding tube in her stomach, until she died of pneumonia in an eight-bed ward in the grim Coney Island hospital.
. . .
Near the end of a relatively recent poem I wrote:
No reason for the poem but the absence of Mother.
No refuge from the absence of Mother but the poem.
Thus, it is staggering to suddenly experience—at absolute emotional purity—the shadow that “absence of Mother” still casts over my life. I wept, I cried out: “I did not deserve to suffer.” But still I suffered.
. . .
It is impossible to avoid the condition into which one is born. I could not help my mother, but can the son escape her fate? “Yes,” says a voice, “But one must want to.” But how can I reset the clock? How can I erase that of which I have no memory—except in the body—of what caused me to be as I am. And at some point the crisis merges with life and death. The days pass and the son knows that it may be that indeed he is his mother’s son, that indeed he may die as he has lived.
. . .
When my boyhood friend Ed was first struck with metastatic melanoma, I rode the IRT to Columbia Presbyterian on 168th Street. Three tumors had been surgically removed from his brain and three had been attacked with the “gamma knife.” And still Ed yearned to go back to work, to live his life.
Afterwards I went downstairs to the coffee shop and sat with his wife Renee. I had introduced Ed to Renee and the two of them had had six happily married years. And there and then I thought how stupid it was to be depressed. How lucky I was to be alive. I must have been out of my mind to despair. And for the first time in a long time my melancholy broke. For three weeks I seemed free, eager to embrace whatever came along, to live my life for the future. But it did not hold. The feeling wore off and I was back in the pit. And in six months Ed was dead, just as the Web had predicted that he would pass, given his Stage 4 condition.
. . .
Sometimes when I tell people that I do karate, they express envy at my discipline. Of course for myself I do not see it as a discipline but rather as a way of being the world in a way that suits my temperament. It is not a cure for despair, but when the endorphins rise, melancholy recedes, at least for a while and if I may paraphrase for example what Jun Shihan David said in last week’s kata class, it is not necessary to find a meaning in training; it is enough just to train. That is, as we know, Seido is the school from which one never graduates.
But when I was born and brought from the hospital, my father had hired a woman to help my struggling mother. And when I cried and cried, so my father said, this surrogate mother, this hired woman had said let him cry—as it was thought then that babies shouldn’t be coddled. (A quick Google search, for instance, reveals the following nuts advice from a 1940’s new mother’s manual: Though he cries, don’t pick up your baby if he is well. A good lusty cry is excellent exercise.) And thus I cried until there was nothing left in the world but rage, sorrow, and silence. (My father said I did not talk until I was three.) No doubt other children have passed through such experience less scathed.
. . .
Coda
I might have called this little essay The Tiger in the Room. That is, as long as one feeds and believes in the beast, it lives. How Mochida made his mind “imperturbable”: I do not know—perhaps through long hours of meditation. To experience things as one might experience the clouds that pass in the sky. My mother is long dead and there is no way to reach her. How shall I teach myself that? At last.