I had a Bagua lesson today, and I was telling my teacher how much I loved Everything Everywhere All At Once. She loved it, too, and she said the martial arts were solid. We laughed about the butt plug scene, but I can’t get over how great it was. Not just how it was exectuted, but the idea of it in the first place.
We also talked about how great Jamie Lee Curtis is and how she is gloriously her age. In an industry that focuses on youth (especially in women), it’s activism to just exist in an obviously older woman’s body. Plus, she allowed herself to look frumpy and dowdy in EEAAO, which most older female actors would not have done, either.
Michelle Yeoh also looks frazzled and worn-out in the movie, but not quite her age. Her daughter is supposed to be a college dropout, which would make her fifty or so as a mother. She is 61 now. So she wasn’t that far off from the age of ther character. She didn’t look that old in the movie, though. Let’s see. She ran away from her family fairly young. Probably twenty-two or three. Came to America and got married. Had a kid. Probably by age twenty-four or five? And if Joy dropped out of college, maybe at age nineteen? So Evelyn is mid-forties or so. At any rate, she looks frazzled in the movie. She is not a glam woman–at least not in our universe.
It’s funny how they had to soft-lens the cameras when they were shooting the younger Evelyn and Waymond, but not by much. Asian people look younger than they are until seventy or so and then everything falls apart. But by then, it doesn’t matter. This was decades ago, too, so we might be able to push that back to eighty or more.
Bagua gets my blood pumping. If I’m going to be honest, I want to punch someone in the face while doing Bagua. When I first started walking the circle, my teacher told me to imagine that there was an opponent in the middle of the circle. I was a self-proclaimed pacifist at the time so that made me uneasy. Then, one day, I had a flash of, “If it’s you or me, it’s going to be you”–meaning that they were going to die, not me.
That was a seismic shift in my thinking. Before that, I had it drummed into my head that my life didn’t matter. Everyone else was more important than me, and I had no right to expect anything different. I used to say that if someone wanted to kill me, I would let them. So that moment of saying my life mattered, even if it was just in my head, was a big deal.
Taiji is all about reactions and not making the first move. It’s about preserving your energy and doing as little as possible. I love it for being the lazy person’s internal martial art. It’s beautiful and elegant, and it’s also known as the scholar’s martial art.
Bagua, on the other hand, is none of that. I mean, it’s beautiful to me, but it’s not elegant or lazy or reactive. It’s fast and aggressive, and it makes me want to pound my chest as I do it. It’s still an internal martial art so there is a mental aspect to it, but it’s much more muscular than Taiji.
I absolutely love it. It’s my new favorite, and I want to cuddle with it. I can’t help that I explain my relationship to different martial arts and weapon forms in terms of romantic relationships. That’s how I feel about them, so there.
I still love Taiji. A lot. Especially the weapons. I love that it’s so gentel and yet, so brutal. It’s efficient and does what needs to be done. The weapons are incredible and are a part of me. I love them and want to marry th–no. I don’t want to marry them. But I want them in my life forever.
I really love the DeerHorn Knives. Those are Bagua weapons. And my teacher gave her practice pair to me many years ago when I had trouble with flashbacks and could not meditate. From the minute I wrapped my hands around them, I fell in love. I still have them and use them to practice walking the circle.
The reason I asked my teacher to teach me the Swimming Dragon Form is because I want to do it with the DeerHorn Knives. She said that I needed to learn it by hand first. Which I was more than fine to do. It’s the basis for everything else in Bagua. Well, walking the circle is, but this is the only form in the whole discipline. Apparently, ocne you learn it, you can do whatever you want with it. Which appeals to the chaos goblin in me.
I am getting serious about Bagua. I want to learn the whole form right now. That is how I am with these kinds of things. If I like it, then I want it all at once. That’s what happened when I first started learning the Sword Form in Taiji. I nagged my teacher to teach it to me almost every time I saw her. I was obsessed with it, and I colud not get enough. Then, once she taught it to me, I started teaching myself the left side. That’s how it works. The teacher teaches you the right side, then you teach yourself the left. It’s a way to re-learn and to make sure you know the form well. I had no problem teaching myself the left side except for one movement–the easiest movement in the whole form. I found that funny, but it was probably beacuse I hadn’t given it enough respect when I learned the right side.
I hated Fist Under Elbow from the Solo Long Form when I was learning the right side. I just could not wrap my mind around it. Apparently, I called it the W (as in George W. Bush) of postures, which is pretty funny, but apt. Funnily enough, I know it really well now because I had to really focus on it to learn it. I taught it to a classmate of mine, and he said I did a really good job teaching it to him.
The one posture I had difficulty teaching myself in the Sword From was a simple drop of the tip of the sword (Fishing Posture), but I just could not do it for a half hour. That was an important lesson for me to learn.
I have no idea where I’m going with this if anywhere. I’ll wrap it up for now and maybe get on point tomorrow.