Limping to the moon - video clip

Here is the clip of my latest song - filmed at Mt Hawthorn by Ben Wilson last Saturday.



It is off my forthcoming album "Ways that won't mend".

I'm grateful to Jed for all his help in recording this song and the other songs on my album - cheers mate, you're a legend. Your creative genius and skill is beyond the ken of mere mortals.

Ben, what can I say... the video speaks for itself; pure art! Thanks for making my vision come true.

To the 2 drunks who heckled the shoot: this is what we were trying to do.

And to the one who said: "Listen mate, you should start singing about things that you actually know something about; I've been in the Sydney to Hobart race and I can tell you don't know shit about sailing," I have this to say: the song isn't about sailing, you moron.

Music and lyrics copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic.

The writing and recording of "Limping to the moon"

It occurs to me that there are probably relatively few instances of songwriting where there is a “trail” left behind, revealing exactly how the song came to be. My latest song “Limping to the moon” is one such rare instance.

I must preface my remarks by saying that I am, at best, a “reluctant songwriter”. In other words, I don’t really want to write songs; I have no special interest nor skill in music and poetry. Yet somehow I continue to write songs despite this (perhaps to the chagrin of my friends and family, I've written over 50 songs and recorded 22 of these). Why? Every now and again I get a song idea that seems too good to “let go”. And sometimes I think it might just be.

My song “Limping to the moon” is one of these. It’s safe to say that I don’t really care if I never write another song again. Nenad said to me the other night (while listening to it in the car) “this could well be the best thing you’ve ever done”. I think he was right.

Leaving aside the merits of the song, it is fortuitous that, in this information age, my songwriting process has left behind an electronic trail, however ephemeral. I thought I would preserve that trail before it vanished.

I’ll begin by saying that I initially came up with the line “limping to the moon” in around 2004, when I was writing and recording “He never left”. That song is based on a poem I wrote in around 1998 which I converted into a song based on some practice instrumentation of a piece written by Jed and Jeremy (the name of which escapes me). Jed’s and Jeremy’s atmospheric playing seemed to lend itself to those words.

I’ve always been drawn to the moon in my writing; just one example would be my references in “Miss you again” to “you came to my house by the light of the moon” and “when the moon has gone to ground” (not to mention the “wolf howls” at the end).

But, as things developed I never used the words “limping to the moon” in “He never left”. Instead I found (fortuitously) that the poem I’d written for my father dovetailed neatly into Jed’s and Jeremy’s playing, with some minor adjustments (enabling me to use their playing in the verses of the song and partly in the chorus - I thank them for that).

Apart from “He never left”, I’ve written songs for both my younger sisters (“Way back home” for Natalie in 1987/2004, “All aboard” for Belinda in 1991/2004) and for my own daughters (“Waiting for you” for Lara in 2002/2010 and “Blue heart of mine” for Maya in 2006/2010). And all these have been very well-received; they are regarded as some of my best work. But the glaring omission in all this is a song for wife Maureen. I suppose I’ve put it off because it nothing I ever thought of seemed “good enough”…

Coming back to “limping to the moon”…

I had always wanted to use that line in something. It seemed to me to convey so aptly one’s struggles to achieve the impossible. After all, just managing one’s daily affairs can seem insurmountable at times. The idea of aiming for an impossible goal (the moon) while under a handicap (limping) seemed to capture the essence of this sentiment. I even made it the title of this blog.

But I have always particularly wanted to apply it to my wife Maureen who has always been a “rock”, even in our darkest hours. Rather than write gushing lyrics, I wanted to celebrate this fact above all else. But the instrumentation that inspired this line was already “used up” by “He never left”…

In September 2009 I decided to bite bullet and write something for Maureen’s birthday. The result was a poem, titled “Limping to the moon”. It was written on the back of Jed’s and Jeremy’s original instrumentation but I had no idea of a melody. I thought that, as with “He never left”, something melodic might come to me one day.

But, 2 years later, it still hadn’t.

How are melodies composed anyway? Many mornings I wake up with a tune in my head. I usually hum it to myself over breakfast and if it survives that and still seems good (and original) enough, I record it on my phone (or, in days gone by, my dictaphone). [What can I say - I’m an “ideas man”, much like Michael Keaton’s character in the movie “Night Shift”!]

But dream inspiration is just one way this happens. Sometimes I get an idea walking through a shopping arcade, or on a bus or while watching television. It could be anywhere.

So where does an “original” tune come from?

First, let’s be clear on this: in terms of modern Western music there are only 7 major notes in a scale (ie. C, D, E, F, G, A, B) and 5 minor ones (C#/D♭, D#/E♭, F#/G♭, G#/A♭, A#/B♭). There are finite combinations of these. Accordingly I really don’t know whether it is true to say that any song is truly “original”. I always suspected that at some future point every single euphonic/useful combination of these notes will have been exhausted and perhaps even categorized.

Until then, what is actually happening when we hear something we regard as “original”? Mostly we are hearing a sufficiently “unique” recombination of the same sounds. It is my belief that this recombination principally results when the songwriter’s subconscious “scrambles” the constituent elements of some other song known to the songwriter. Like a dream, your subconscious will take a sound and “play with it”. Ultimately it can morph into something so radically different that it bears no resemblance at all to the original.

Paul McCartney famously said that he woke up with the tune to “Yesterday” in his head, albeit with the lyrics “Ham and eggs, oh how I want some ham and eggs.” It is my belief that his subconscious had “scrambled” (pardon the pun) none other than Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concerto de Aranjuez”. Composed in 1939, this piece was covered in 1960 by jazz musician Miles Davis using a Gil Evans arrangement.

Five years later McCartney would have been well aware of this cover; he would have heard it regularly on the radio. The opening bars of the second movement (Adagio) are phrased identically to “Yesterday” and can be sung as “Ham and eggs, oh how I want some ham and eggs”. What differs is the melodic structure. Once you start to hum a harmony to “Concerto de Aranjuez”, then swap a few notes around, it morphs into “Yesterday”. That’s my best guess anyway - having woken up to find myself humming a hybrid to both pieces on more than one occasion. This is not to say that I think McCartney plagiarized “Concerto de Aranjuez”. Far from it. “Yesterday” is entirely “original”. It’s just that I think I can see the “trail” leading back to its origin in McCartney’s subconscious.

So what was I listening to when I composed the melody to my song “Limping to the moon”? I can tell you because the event is preserved on Facebook. It was 27 August 2011 and Ashley had posted this wonderful animation of a dance called "Thought of you" by Ryan Woodward.



The backing song to that animation, “World spins madly on”, was written by a band called The Weepies . As enthralled as I was with the animation, I was also taken by the song itself. It’s right up my alley - a poignant, wistful folk melody with a wonderful “hook” in the lyrics.

I watched it on that Saturday, 27 August (when I “shared” the video on my page), then again just before breakfast on Sunday 28 August 2011. I recall that as I was starting breakfast a melody had already come into my head. It is only through deduction and “back-tracking” that I can now see the link between this melody and “World spins madly on” - a vague trail akin to that between “Yesterday” and “Concerto de Aranjuez”.

By the end of my breakfast the song had already “morphed” into the form of the present “chorus” beginning “I limp to the moon” and ending with “We’re limping to the moon”. The constituent elements had been “scrambled” into something new.

Have I plagiarized “World spins madly on”? The answer is, emphatically, “No”. Anyway, you can be the judge. I think the differences are even more stark than those between “Concerto de Aranjuez” and “Yesterday”. They are so great that you might even wonder what link there is. Well, I can tell you it is this:

Ignoring the vocals, time signature and transposing the songs to the same key, The Weepies’ line:

“Woke up, wish that I was dead, with an aching in my head, I lay motionless in bed”

can (more or less) still be sung to my line:

“I limp to the moon, while you are busy planning things to do”

and vice versa. In other words, the underlying chord progression is largely the same in this line (and this line only).

But while the chord progression might be the same here, the melody and its phrasing are completely different; those elements have been “scrambled”.

My subconscious went on to take the melody into a completely different direction with the next 2 lines: “when we get there, there’s never any ‘if’ with you”. By the next 2 lines (“Take all my cares, and stow my baggage out of view, we’re limping to the moon”) any remnant link to “World spins madly on” is long-gone.

And, as I’ve alluded above, not only had my brain scrambled the melody, it had also morphed the time signature. It had gone from a standard rock/pop 4/4 to a 3/4 waltz.

Of course at that point I had no lyrics. The initial “sound” in my head was that of a neo-classical piece, played on a piano. But by lunchtime I had realized that this “piano sound” matched some of the words from Maureen’s poem, in particular “limping to the moon”. It seemed to me that I had, at last, found the key to a song for my dear wife. As my electronic “trail” tells me, I recorded this bit of melody to my phone some time on that day.

But, as I was to discover, this was only the beginning. One melody line that matches a few stray words does not a song make.

I know a chap who writes poetry. Unfortunately he often prevails upon me to read it. I can only hope that my music doesn’t impose as great a burden on others. What is notable about this fellow is that his standard refrain is “I don’t write poems - they just happen”. I often wonder if he is implying “Divine inspiration”. And truly, “inspiration” is evident in his writing; he has had some, and regurgitated it onto a page. But as well all know from Thomas Edison, creativity is only 1% inspiration - the remaining 99% is perspiration. What he has is the start of something (and, sadly, not something particularly good).

What I had here was the start of a song. But was it any good - and would it develop into a full song?

As the day wore on (and I occupied myself with chores like mowing the lawn) I started to play with the idea of a verse. As I’ve mentioned previously, verses are darned hard to write. You can’t just repeat the chorus. And as adept as your subconscious might be in “morphing” tunes, it just won’t do so in any kind of orderly fashion. Every initial attempt I made resulted in a mere rephrasing of the chorus.

But, but the end of the day, I had recorded 7 more sound bites to my phone, two of which seemed reasonable candidates for a verse to “Limping to the moon” (in particular the second).

I know from my phone that I gave the idea a rest until Tuesday 30 August 2011. On that day I re-listened to my sound bites and recorded another short sound bite (something that sounds now like a thought for backing instrumentation). On Sunday 4 September 2011 I can see that I recorded yet another sound bite - this time a more fully-formed version of my “second option verse”, indicating that it had firmed in my mind as the favourite.

Finally at lunchtime on Wednesday 7 September 2011 I had the melody of the song more or less in its final form. At lunchtime on that day I recall looking at Maureen’s poem from 2009 and trying to marry the lyrics to my new sound. I recall quitting in disgust. However much I had liked the poem, it wouldn’t “fit” my new song.

On the afternoon of Saturday 10 September 2011 I decided to sit down and thrash it out once and for all.

I ended up abandoning the 2009 poem almost entirely. The chorus still used the words “limping to the moon” but the only other concept surviving from the poem was the line that goes “stow my baggage out of view” (which contrasts with the poem lines: “check my baggage in, so I can have it out of sight, and mind).

For the verse I started from scratch. I’ve always found that the sound of words are more important to a song than their meaning. I’ve also found that the sounds often lead to a story in themselves. So by simply listening to the “sounds” of my humming and scatting I slowly began to compose the lyrical structure. In this case I realized that all my humming and scatting was leading me to: “I’m climbing… I’m sailing… I’m drowning… I’m burning…” The rest fell into place quite quickly and by the end of the day I had the first 2 verses as well as a chorus and bridge finished (the bridge being “But when, all my water has dried, hope seems to have died, I see you by my side”).

I had already determined that the song should have a traditional structure comprising 2 verses and 2 choruses with a bridge between each. But a quick run-through told me the song was too short at just over 2 minutes. This was “solved” by adding the humming (the bit that goes “da, da dum”) - something I had initially conceived as an instrumental along the lines of that in Sting's "Fields of Gold" (which just happens to follow the first 3 notes of "World spins madly on"). I also repeated the last line of the chorus (ie. “Take all my cares, and stow my baggage out of view, we’re limping to the moon”) for a third time at the end.

However on the following day (11 September 2011) I wrote a third verse as I still felt the song would be too short and just under 3 minutes. (The third verse is the one that begins “And I’m grieving…” - which seemed apt as I was watching the repeats of 9/11 footage).

It was on this day that I determined that the song should be in a 3/4 time signature at 130 bmp.

I also worked out the key (A) and the chord structure (which was surprisingly easy). What wasn’t so easy was practising my playing to a metronome which I did for the rest of the day and the following evening.

On the night of 13 September 2011 I went to Jed’s and Bel’s house to record the song. After some 4 hours we managed to put down a decent take of my guitar playing, however the vocal takes were a complete write-off. I have discovered that singing a newly minted song is, in itself, a voyage in discovery; working out the appropriate phrasing is as much a part of the act of songwriting as composing a melody and writing lyrics. Jed also opined that the song was overly long; it also seemed to repeat too much.

The following day I had an epiphany: the first 2 verses should run straight into one another (culling the first chorus but keeping the first bridge). This would avoid most of the repetition and also bring to the fore the song’s strongest element, which I now believe to be the verse (both in melodic and lyrical composition). That evening I also recorded 6 different sound bites of backing vocal concepts (ie. harmonies).

The verse harmony (lower than the lead vocals) was settled from the very beginning, as I could distinctly hear it in the “mix” in my mind. The chorus harmony was a little harder to discern. I could tell that I wanted a higher harmony sung as a kind of counter-melody, but it took some time to get a “fix” on it.

I met with Jed for another recording session on Monday 19 September 2011. We spent most of that evening surgically excising the first chorus using Cubase, however we did manage to lay down my lead vocals.

The following night we recorded the backing vocals. This proved a far more difficult task than I had imagined. Here’s another lesson for “young players”: the newer the song, the harder it is to sing the harmony while listening to the lead vocal. I finally cottoned-on to singing with the lead vocal muted, timing my singing to the wave form on the computer screen. Of course, now that I am familiar with the song I can sing the harmonies without resorting to such tactics, but at the time this was the only thing we could do.

Rather than track a guitar solo on the “da da dums”, Jed had me re-sing them and kept them as is (which I quite like now).

At close to midnight I finally found myself driving home and listening to the “finished product”. Once again, I was struck by the realization that a sound that once existed only in my head had made its way into a recording. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Jed for this.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. After listening to the song critically over and I over on different stereo systems (a habit I developed in sound engineering school) I became sick and tired of a few errors in pitch that were more manifest than others. So on 24 September 2011 I opened the file in Soundforge and did a “cut and paste” to fix them. These include a sharp opening bridge, a flat first “da da dum” and a sharp last “Take all my cares”. I was pleased to see that my skills in editing sound waves earned in sound engineering school all those years ago hadn’t been lost. Jed and I subsequently met to make some more adjustments and apply some mastering compression.

The result is this song song. I hope you like it.

Copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic

Limping to the moon: a song for Maureen

I’m climbing, over the hills
that turn to sheer cliffs in my mind
And I’m sailing, over the seas
made up of tears that I’ve cried

But when all my water has dried
hope seems to have died
I see you by my side

And I’m drowning, deep in a well
dug out of my own despair
And I’m burning, in fires from hell
but nobody else is aware

But when all my water has dried
hope seems to have died
I see you by my side

I limp to the moon
while you are busy planning things to do
when we get there
There’s never any “if” with you

Take all my cares
and stow my baggage out of view
We’re limping to the moon

And I’m grieving, my past’s in an urn
heart’s broke in ways that won’t mend
And I’m dying, nowhere to turn
waiting for my time to end

But when all my water has dried
hope seems to have died
I see you by my side

I limp to the moon
while you are busy planning things to do
when we get there
You always say “we’ll be there soon”

Take all my cares
and stow my baggage out of view
We’re limping to the moon

Take all my cares
and stow my baggage out of view
We’re limping to the moon

You can hear a recording of the song here.

Copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic

The writing and recording of "Miss You Again"

I was walking along the deathly quiet streets of Lancefield, Victoria in early hours of the morning, unable to sleep. I remember feeling totally engulfed by the darkness - street lamps and car headlights flickering like candles in the distance, the moonless sky showering me with the milky way, the chill, still air cramping my lungs, the gravel cracking underfoot like someone's knuckles.

It was September 2007 and I was staying in a local motel near James' place. Except it wasn't a motel. It was the town's former hospital, converted into an eerie "B 'n B". I remembered how, the previous morning, I'd sat having breakfast at the former nurses' station with a bemused Hege and Lucia (who were sharing a room down the corridor), our spoons clinking against the chipped porcelain bowls on a mottled-green vinyl bench top, the musty smell still hinting at sterility, old people, dying people, isolation. No amount of jarring '50s decor, fake pot plants and billiard room lampshades could disguise the fact that this had once been a place where people came not because they wanted to, but because they had to. And that often, they didn't get to leave.

And so, late that night, when I couldn't couldn't stand another moment of staring at the old red "panic button" above my bed, I took a walk (as I often do in such cases). I rugged up, tiptoed down the corridor over the rose-patterned carpet (surely laid straight over "follow the green line" hospital lineoleum), past the garish chandeliers and funeral-parlour floral arrangements and out into the inky darkness.

I headed over to the petrol station and bottle store, both of which were still open, but reconsidered buying anything. Walking away from those lights felt like I was stepping into an abyss - my little torch cast a pathetic, narrow, yellow circle onto the gravel in front, but otherwise I was groping my way through oblivion.

Then this tune came into my mind; a waltz-like rhythm with a gentle sway; wistful, happy and sad at the same time; poignant. It was a folk/roots/country tune. Some words came with it, inspired by my surrounds: "When that old town falls asleep, when the moon has gone to ground, when the quiet of this place fades the smile from my face..."

By the time I got back to my room, I had the full chorus. The words didn't mean anything - they were random products of my subconscious. Yet they seemed so very appropriate. I pulled out my trusty old dictaphone and recorded it. Then I put it back into my suitcase, had one last, uneasy look at the panic button, then switched off the light.

Two years later I'm walking into the house after work and I hear a song being played in the lounge. As I enter, I see it's coming from my dictaphone and the kids are dancing around it. It is the song I wrote in Lancefield. I sit down immediately and start to compose a verse and bridge. Then I write the lyrics. All in under an hour. I write about an old farmer, sitting on his porch reminiscing about a girl who left his home town many years before - and how life might have been had he gone with her. Needless to say, the story is not autobiographical. But I'm happy to say that the response so far is that the theme is universal and manages to touch a nerve with most folks. As my doctor is fond of saying, when older people look back on their lives, they don't tend to regret things they did, so much as things they didn't do. I'd like to think that I've captured the essence of that sentiment, and "bottled it" in this song.

I record another vocal demo of the full song using my new mobile phone, and forget about it.

A year later I'm sitting in Bill's truck and he's playing me his last album of country music. He's about to head off to Tamworth and is recording new material for his new album. I ask whether he would like to hear my own country song, and I play him the demo on my mobile phone. He loves it and asks me to do a full demo.

And now, another year later, I have finally done just that.

After a few false starts (wrong tempo, wrong chord progression, me revealing my "hidden ambition" to have - shock horror - a key change at the end), we finished the song just before midnight. The product comprises the final takes of Jed's guitar and my vocals (sans, I'm glad to say, any auto-tuning).

If I could re-record it, I would redo my attack on the "wolf howls", correct one or 2 stray notes, and I'd breathe a little easier on the refrain. But that's academic. Jed again revealed his unique ability to "hear inside my head", replicating the "train track" stifled strumming pattern and the grand open chords and picking on the chorus. He also added a perfectly atmospheric reverb to my "wolf howls".

As I listen to the song now, it strikes me as simply astounding that the song I first heard in my head on that cold night in Lancefield has finally been brought to life - in exactly the form I had envisaged. I am profoundly greatful to Jed for making this happen.

So, here it is.

I've previously posted the lyrics here.

Copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic

Miss you again

A song I wrote in Lancefield, Victoria in 2007

So many years have passed us by,
here I am wondering why:
maybe instead of the road to the left,
I should have gone down to the right.

Mostly I keep all these feelings at bay,
so they'll never get into my head -

But when that old town falls asleep,
when the moon has gone to ground,
when the quiet of this place fades the smile from my face,
I think of you, and miss you again.

We walked through the fields
I was holding your hand,
it feels like it was yesterday:
you came to my house by the light of the moon
to say you were going away.

Mostly I try to keep out of my mind
all the things I should have done or said -

But when that old town falls asleep,
when the moon has gone to ground,
when the quiet of this place fades the smile from my face,
I think of you and miss you again.

Maybe instead of the road to the left,
I should have gone down to the right;
now all that's left is the road in my mind
that goes down, down, down, down, down...

Sitting on the porch in the late afternoon,
watching the young children run:
it's been a good life in so many ways,
but why do we only get one?

Mostly I don't let my thoughts further stray
as I go to get into my bed -

But when that old town falls asleep,
when the moon goes to ground,
when the quiet of this place fades the smile from my face,
I think of you and miss you again.

The song can be downloaded here.

Copyright © 2007-9 Dejan Djurdjevic

Memories of Taiwan: Third eye blind

The sun has set behind the Kaohsiung skyline as our bus rattles along in the congested rush-hour traffic. I lie back against the head-rest, feeling the vibration on my scalp through the velour, and try to doze. Every now and again a jolt throws me back into the real world and I see flashes: flashes of the faux wood-panelled interior of our vehicle, the slumped, silent silhouettes of my fellow Chen Pan Ling practitioners, chaos passing in every direction, the smoky-red stain on the horizon and the neon glow of the pea-soup sky.

We’re travelling from the Fo Guang Shan monastery into the city centre for our respective appointments with blind masseurs/masseuses. “Go on!” James had said to me in 2009. “Do it. You’ll feel like a new man.” But for whatever reason I declined – a decision I’d come to regret deeply. In fact, the moment I saw them arriving at the Kingship Hotel (each on the back of a scooter) and being escorted in through the foyer to the elevator (aided by the directions of my good friend "Little John" Scott) I knew I'd made a mistake.

So this time when the call came for massage bookings my hand was the first to go up. “Try everything once except folk-dancing and incest,” Sir Thomas Beecham famously said.

I could hardly go back to the West without experiencing the particularly Oriental cultural phenomenon of the blind masseur/masseuse (the Western world of today seems less likely to "assign" such an occupation to people with impaired sight). In fact, I simply had to have this experience, especially given my frequent references to the Hagakure story of the Ten blind masseuses - a story that has become my favourite metaphor for how confronting your fears is often less stressful than avoiding them.

The gnawing pain in my lower back reminds me that there is a more urgent reason than this to call on the services of a therapeutic masseur/masseuse - blind or sighted. I don't know it, but little can help the bulging disc pressing on the nerves in my spinal canal. But at this point I remain hopeful of some relief. So I lie back, cocooned against the hum-drum world, and try once more to clear my mind of the million thoughts.

Try as I might, this is a task I cannot accomplish. Despite decades of chipping away at my mental indiscipline, I remain unable to bring my mind to heel. Finally, I give up. I allow it to wander freely over the tumultuous year that was 2010:

I recall the year of training and teaching martial arts: the many students, some leaving some joining; the endless frustrations of dealing with a recalcitrant body succumbing to arthritis.

I think of the hundred thousand words of this blog (and 2 others), often written in the dead of the night and the associated hours of research, photo/video shoots and editing, and animated gif construction.

I think of my fortnightly radio show "The Combat Sports Hour" on 91.3 SportFM - the many true masters and fascinating characters I interviewed.

I recall the hundreds of pages of legislation I drafted each month in my "day job" combined with late nights in Parliament. I think of the many challenges of raising a young family.

I think of the months of sustained amateur detective work to uncover, once and for all, the whereabouts of my mother, missing for over a decade; of the hair-pulling frustration of dealing with the glacial South African bureaucracy and how I finally discovered that she had passed away somewhere in Cape Town in July 2008 from unknown causes and in unknown circumstances.

I also remember the many "obsessive" projects, completed at break-neck speed: The gargantuan revision of the Wu-Wei Dao syallbus, now accessible (to members of our Academy) on the web with images and video to illustrate each technique for each grade requirement (from white belt through to the "end"). The web design alone accounted for many hundreds of hours. I recall how I more or less completed my book "Essential Jo" in the 10 or so days preceding my trip to Taiwan. And I remember my crazy two week bid to solve Fermat's Last Theorem using only algebra and trigonometry.

It's at this point that I realise I've been thinking in my "out-loud" voice - something I rarely do, but I'm tired and less inclined to act rationally. My travelling companion is looking at me quizzically, saying: "You lost me when you started talking about quadratics".

Our bus pulls into the kerb at a jostling, sardine-crammed night market. We are dislodged onto the sidewalk, my back sharply protesting at abrupt the need for movement. Out in the open I'm greeted by the familiar mix of Kaohsiung smells: the sickly sweet sewer, chemical solvents and foul, fermenting tofu.

A million voices drown James' as he attempts to give directions to those who have chosen to visit the night market instead of having a massage. They depart and the rest of us follow Master Chen through narrow, darkened alleyways to the "parlour", scooters squeezing between us, mangy dogs running underfoot. Finally we stop outside an ancient grey building and file through its narrow doors.

In the foyer we are promptly greeted by smiling hosts who herd us up the rickety wooden staircase. As I get up to the first landing I'm reminded of some old Western - Rio Bravo specifically. It looks like the accommodation one might find above a saloon, with tarnished brass-handled doors to tiny rooms on both sides of the corridor. I expect Angie Dickinson and John Wayne to appear at any moment.

Once I'm settled into my own room, I gently lower myself onto the bed, wondering what clothing, if any, I need to remove. Moments later there is a knock, and the door opens. The blind masseuse enters, led at the elbow by one of the hosts. "You lie down on bed," the host says to me, beckoning and smiling. "Okay, okay?".
"Xie xie ni," I answer, nodding. Then the host is gone. I take off my shirt and trousers and lie down on the bed, face first. The masseuse, a middle-aged woman, feels her way to the edge of the bed, finds my upper back and starts to knead. "Okay?"
"Hen hao," I reply. My face burrows into the mothball-smelling sheets as her fingers start digging into my trapezius. My mind wanders back to Fermat.

I've previously mentioned how martial arts analysis needs to factor all the relevant dimensions - not only the three dimensions of space, but also the fourth dimension, time. Somewhat synchronously, it is time and its very nature that preoccupies me now.

Most of us are equipped with two functioning eyes. This allows us to see in three dimensions. If we have only one functioning eye, we see in only 2 dimensions. But what if we had three eyes? Would we see in four dimensions - ie. could we "see time"? Lester del Rey proposed just this in his 1977 science fiction short story "Natural Advantage". His alien race, the Ruum, had a third eye that was used for "time depth perception."

I suspect that an added eye would not be sufficient. We would remain four-dimensional beings who can accurately perceive only three of these. Yes, we experience time, but we don't perceive it correctly or fully. As Albert Einstein famously wrote:

"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

"How can this be? Carl Sagan provided an entertaining explanation by way of analogy in his television series "Cosmos". In the segment below he describes how a race of "flatlanders" (who can only perceive 2 dimensions) would react when confronted with a three-dimensional creature. The flatlanders can experience something three dimensional coming into their flat world, but they remain incapable of pointing to that third dimension. They simply don't understand "up".


Carl Sagan discusses the fourth dimension

Similarly, we humans can experience time - but we can't point to it. We can't perceive it for what it truly is - a dimension. We use our two eyes to accurately perceive three dimensions. While we experience the fourth - time - as a linear progression, it is in all likelihood anything but that.

My mind is brought back to the present when the masseuse's sharp knuckles are thrust into the base of my skull just above my cervical vertebrae. The pain is excruciating, so I shout "Ow!" as I've been instructed. She continues regardless. It is only when she starts kneading my other trapezius that I am free to drift back to my thoughts.

It occurs to me that even these thoughts have a physical existence in time and space, however emphemeral. Every thought you've ever had (and ever will have) is an electrochemical process in your brain. For a brief moment the thought has an independent "physicality". It is "something" that can be described in terms of atoms and molecules. It exists in time and space, then vanishes.

The masseuse pressing into my knotted muscles reminds me that I too have a physical existence. And, not unlike my thoughts, the existence of my body is also emphemeral; not as emphemeral as a thought, but emphemeral enough in universal terms (when compared to planet, a star a galaxy or the universe itself)!

We get used to thinking of our bodies as a piece of fixed matter - like a rock or other inanimate object. And yes, like a rock we are subject to physical change in the form of wear and tear over time. But we like to imagine that our "matter" is otherwise substantially fixed. This is clearly false.

While we are living, we are rather more like a river than a rock. Our bodies are in a constant state of flux. I'm sure you've all heard that every single cell in your body is replaced after 7 years or so. In this respect each of us is rather like the mythical "Kelly's axe":
"Yes, this axe really did belong the famous Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly. It's just that the head has been replaced 7 times and the stock more than twice that..."

So if we are not defined merely by our physical matter, then how shall we be defined? Clearly we comprise a physical entity; we are matter. But we are much more than that. Our identity as living beings is dependent precisely on how our matter changes over time. It the very nature of this change that permits our consciousness to persist as a continuum, despite the fact that our bodies (and the electro-chemistry of our thoughts) are, in essence, emphemeral and constantly being changed.

Perhaps that is why when we see a lifeless body we no longer regard it as "human". The life has gone. What is left is stagnant matter; matter that will no longer renew. All that remains is for that matter to degrade and erode. It is no longer capable of change except in the sense of entropy - much like a rock or a dead piece of wood.

So how, if at all, does this dimensionality relate to martial arts? It seems to me that in order to understand ourselves and our complex interactions (of which physical confrontation is but one), we need to understand the nature of change. And I think it is no suprise that the internal arts (particularly baguazhang) relate to this concept. What do I mean?


Su Dong Chen illustrating "indirect fist"

I have previously noted that martial arts are not focussed on fixed postures, but on movement; the transition from posture to posture. However the internal arts go further than this. They don't just focus on techniques (which comprise a series of movements). Rather they examine how those techniques change or morph, depending on the circumstances. Consider the video above of Su Dong Chen, one of Hong Yi Xiang's students, demonstrating the "indirect fist".

You will note that a punch can be diverted or deflected. What most martial arts then seek to do is to follow up with another strike. This seems logical enough: the first one has failed, after all. Yet the internal arts of taijiquan, baguazhang and xingyiquan all approach such a scenario differently. They focus on what happens to the deflected punch - just as much as they focus on any follow-up movement. In Su Dong Chen's example, the deflected punch doesn't just stop after it has been deflected. Like a flowing river encountering a rock, it flows around. It doesn't stop. It continues. It morphs into something else.

I have previously discussed the importance of understanding what to do when your technique fails (see my article "Really USING your kata"). The techniques of the internal arts do more than focus on "conversion upon failure". They recognise that your techniques are constantly morphing - whether they fail or succeed. For example, there is no point in the taijiquan "long form" where one technique is finished and another begins. The techniques flow one into another, seamlessly converting and changing. This is the very nature of taijiquan; to move like a cloud, endlessly forming and unforming. When forward energy/momentum is exhausted, there is a withdrawal; when a withdrawal is complete there is a forward or sideways or backward lunge. The body weight is constantly shifting, the movement evolving, changing. Like life itself.


I demonstrate the third section of the Chen Pan Ling taijiquan long form

To analyse taijiquan, one needs to start with the appreciation of what it is designed to teach. A friend of mine is fond of saying "I don't teach techniques - I teach principles." This is very much the case with taiji, bagua and xingyi. What do they teach? The principles of change: when you should change, how you should change, the different ways of changing. Changing what? Your movement, your momentum, your technique. An exhausted punch becomes a deflection, a deflection becomes a lock, a lock feeds into a throw, a throw feeds into a strike, a strike becomes a deflection... and so it goes.

Pragmatic sports fighters are inclined to look to an art like taijiquan and see "old people's dancing". It is nothing of the sort. It is an exploration of change. Correctly understood, it can be analysed and applied in a very pragmatic way.

After enduring another excruciating round of knuckle burrowing into the base of my skull, I feel a quick double-slap on my back. The massage is over. I rise (relaxed but still aching in my lower back) and dress. After that I gingerly descend the rickety staircase, back into the hum-drum world below.

I have changed. My waiting colleagues have changed. James was right. I do feel like a "new man" - and in some respects, I am.

The past, the present - these are both illusions. All that exists is the present. Live it.

Copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic

Memories of Taiwan: Synchronicity

It’s almost midnight and I’m limping in the blue shadows of the monastery grounds finally deserted by the maelstrom of day-time activity. I'm limping because I’m alone and no longer inclined to hide the pain in my lower back – pain that stabs like a thick syringe-needle with every step and the slightest knee lift. It is an injury I sustained in my very first training, and which scans will later reveal to be a prolapsed disc in the lumbar spine. Here’s a tip: don’t travel for almost 36 hours, then attempt long xing (dragon form of xingyi) without a sufficient warm-up.

What am I doing? Oddly enough, I am searching. I’ve arranged with my photographer friend Lucia to take photos at the following dawn for the cover of my book “Essential Jo”. I’ve carted my gi and hakama all the way from Australia for just this purpose. I have come completely prepared – except that I have no jo (4 foot staff). You’d think that a Buddhist monastery built on a bamboo-forested mountain would have such a stick – somewhere. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Half an hour before, I’d given up on sleep: the bed that had initially promised so much comfort (but turned out to be not much softer than a kitchen stool) had effectively tossed out my bruised body. And if the bed hadn't done it sooner, my troubled mind, egged on by stabbing pain, would have done it later.

At first I tried to read the magazines I’d purchased at the airport – an unlikely mix of Rolling Stone and New Scientist (“A bit of yin and yang,” I explain to James when I'm passing them on to him later). But half way through the last recorded interview with John Lennon (and a minute into an article about why our white sun can appear “gold”) I gave up, exasperated by the absence of my foolishly-forgotten reading glasses, and turned out the light.

I went to the window to gaze out at the myriad speckled lights that decorated the temple grounds. Something about this glittering star-scape felt irresistibly inviting, drawing me down. And so, only moments later, I found myself dressed and heading out into the fresh night air – away from the stifling confines of four walls and the million thoughts echoing in my head. If I could find a suitable stick, I reasoned, at least one of those thoughts would be silenced.

As I walk, I’m realising the hopelessness of my task. It isn’t just my failure to find a stick. I’m finding it impossible to outrun my other thoughts; they keep pace, dogging me at every turn. The four walls that trap them are not those of my room. Of course, thoughts have no geographic boundary. They limp with me along the temple grounds as surely as they have followed me across the globe.

“People think we meditate for happiness,” said our monk-guide Hue Shou. “What nonsense! Who cares about the happiness of monks? We meditate for only two reasons; to learn concentration and to gain insight.” He’d said this the night before as we sat cross-legged in one of the monastery’s many wood-panelled meditation rooms, each in our own alcove propped up against a rolled-up towel. Speaking, somewhat incongruously, via a microphone in the muffled stillness of the chamber, he told us to meditate for no more than 20 minutes as it would then be his bed-time. I lasted about two minutes into the Buddhist breath counting (something I’d first practised on a training camp in Africa 20 years before) until my aching back and growling stomach forced me to tip-toe quietly out of the chamber.

I observe that for someone who doesn’t care about happiness, Hue Shou appears to be remarkably happy. Like the guide from our previous visit, it would not be an exaggeration to say that he (figuratively anyway) radiates happiness. There is something indefinably contented about his person and manner – at the very least something tells me he is not trying to outrun a million thoughts.

I’m passing the monastery’s gymnasium where I know James had kept a whole bunch of rattan sticks. From memory these were all either too long (6 foot) or too short (baton or walking cane), but they are worth checking once again. I recall grabbing one from the pile at our first training and thinking it would do, if only it weren’t so long. Maybe I’ll find a shorter one.

As I approach the gymnasium I catch the unexpected sound of karaoke wafting in the breeze. At first I think the singing is in Chinese, then I realise that it is in fact in English. Through the gymnasium's double doors I can see the remains of some sort of private function. The karaoke performer is standing on the stage in front of a microphone, her face wringing out as much passion as her voice. It takes a moment longer before I realise that she’s singing a track from Sting’s album “Nothing like the sun”. Somewhat synchronously I look up at the starless sky and catch sight of the three-quarter moon just above the tiled rooftops.

“Sister moon, will be my guide.
In your blue, blue shadows, I will hide.
All good people asleep tonight,
I’m all by myself in your silver light…”

I don’t bother to look for the sticks; I remember now that they have been moved to a storeroom in a building further up the hill (the same place we conducted the bai shi ceremony a few days before). So I leave the lights of the gymnasium doors and plunge once more into the shadows hoping to find the storeroom and hoping it will be unlocked…

As I limp up the hill the singing voice fades and my mind wanders from Sting, to the moon and then to synchronicity. Synchronicity is, of course, a term coined by Swiss Freudian psychiatrist Carl Jung to describe (apparently) meaningful coincidences; disparate events that are not causally linked but are somehow correlated. This theory is closely related to Jung’s other theory of the “collective unconscious” and the broader notion that all living things connected at some “cosmic” level.

My late father was a firm believer in spiritus mundi. It was in this context that he and my mother would often read the Chinese classic called the I Ching / Yi Jing (Book of Changes). The I Ching is a Neo-Confucian philosophical treatise, however it was/is used by many (including my parents) as a means of divination - a way of tapping into synchronicity via the collective unconscious.

To ask a question of the I Ching, all you have to do is throw 3 coins, 8 times. How the coins land is said to reflect your thoughts – and hence the universe with which your thoughts are inextricably linked – at that exact moment. A particular (traditional) matrix provides a means of decoding that coin sequence. Once decoded, you go to the relevant chapter which will synchronously pertain to your question, or at least the thoughts that occupied your mind at that moment.

The truth of the matter is that, much like other Chinese classics, eg. the Tao Te Ching / Dao De Jing, the I Ching can probably be opened at any page to reveal a truism. And a truism will serve as good advice for (and appear entirely applicable to) any particular situation.

I’m struggling up the final, steepest, part of the hill to the storeroom, simultaneously recalling the events of the previous days. In particular I’m thinking of our practice of baguazhang (which is said by some to be the physical embodiment of the I Ching). I also remember how, earlier that day, my good friend Tony Nguyen took me inside the base of the giant Buddha where I had a “reading” from a monk. We walked into a little chamber, paid our respects, then took a random scroll from a bin. A monk then read out and interpreted the scroll. From what I could tell, the idea wasn’t to tell your fortune; rather it was akin to the I Ching – the scroll would reflect the moment and contain advice synchronously pertinent to your situation.

The advice I received was just this: “That which you seek, you have already found.”

Last year I had the good fortune to interview prominent BJJ instructor John Will on the Combat Sports Show on 91.3 SportFM [I hope to have the full text of this interview transcribed for this blog in the future as it was highly informative and entertaining.] John noted how receptive you become to certain information once it assumes relevance – where otherwise that same information might be filtered out by your mind. So does that pile of free bricks on a verge “suddenly materialise” when you’re looking to build a barbecue – or is its synchronous appearance attributable entirely to your heightened awareness of the need for building materials?

Either way, I’m looking for both a stick and a certain peace of mind, and I'm not having much luck finding either.

In the darkness I grope for the handle of the storeroom only to find it locked.

On the way back to my room I search amongst stray groves of bamboo, along promising fence lines and in strangely-placed closets in rabbit-warren buildings – but ultimately to no avail.

Finally I’m standing in the chill breeze outside the main eating hall that is only metres from our accommodation, considering one of the many cartoonish paper monks. This one has a staff braced across his shoulders, 2 pails dangling from either end. It seems strange that I never noticed it before: the staff is exactly the right size and diameter. For a brief minute I toy with the idea of “borrowing” the staff; it is connected to the pails very loosely, after all. Then the absurdity of the situation hits home.

Is my troubled mind really burdened by a missing stick, a too-hard bed, forgotten reading glasses, an injured back and the other health issues and challenges I face? Are life’s frustrations the result of such external factors – or are they attributable to how one thinks of them? Is synchronicity working against me in as much as my mind is not filtering out information it otherwise could - and should?

For a moment I recall the story of the Ten Blind Masseuses. Then I realise that somewhere between the locked storeroom and the cartoonish paper monk whose staff I was thinking of "borrowing", I had actually started to enjoy myself. Walking out in the fresh early morning air had gone from a dispirited search to a pleasant experience. Happiness, it seems, is found not in the presence of “happy thoughts”. Rather it is found in the absence of unhappy ones. Feeling a greater sense of peace than I have in many months, I wander back to my room and into bed.

The next day’s photo shoot does not go on as scheduled. But it does go ahead later that day. The stick I end up using is, ironically, the very same one I picked up on my first training in the gymnasium. Yes, it is manifestly too long. But it can be - and is - miraculously shortened using Photoshop. That which I sought, I had already found.

Footnotes:

The night photos and the photo of the "paper monk" are courtesy of my new Chen Pan Ling brother, Rob Himes. The photo of the moon was taken by my brother Nenad almost exactly 28 days after the events described in this blog post. The photo of me with the jo is a composite of 3 photos taken by Lucia for the cover of my forthcoming book “Essential Jo”.

Copyright © 2011 Dejan Djurdjevic