Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

I'm sorry, we had to discontinue the Newsletter. It was really a huge effort that put too much on our plate. It's a shame because it was enjoyable to do and was a cool way to share the news.

Some comments on Reddit on this post reveal that I was far too opaque about the idea that it is worthwhile to see Muay Thai as a language. I probably lost a lot of people who might find it interesting. Sometimes I'm far to oblique in my thoughts, and these forum posts are often just publicly published reading notes of areas I'm diving into in my reading, just in case others might one day also want to follow these lines of thought. But...in the course of my discussion there I was lead to explain further what I meant by "Muay Thai is like a language". I also got an awesome reply. Posting it here to keep it in context and to keep it from being lost on the Internet. My take on Muay Thai as a language and why I view it that way: My general thought about Thailand's Muay Thai and language is that it is an embedded art, which means its very difficult to extract the techniques in a bio-mechanical way (which is the dominant way it is exported to the West). Much of Thailand's Muay Thai is a product of the kaimuay subculture, the culture bound practices of the camps that raise the fighters, going well beyond simple techniques. These have to do with bodily disposition, relationships to authority, cultural attitudes towards aggression and discipline, and ideals of Thai masculinity. Which is to say that Thailand's Muay Thai is shaped by the Form of Life of the kaimuay, of which there are thousands and thousands in the country. The benefits of reading Thailand's Muay Thai as a language are that its an analogy that directs the idea towards things like a "grammar" (the way that strikes are put together, in relationship to bodily composure), and to the kinds of things we think about when we think about linguistic expression. In Thailand's Muay Thai a great deal can be read in the way that strikes are expressed, just like the tonation of words, and choice of words reflect a great deal in speech. At least in my opinion, there is an entire meaning universe in these kinds of things in Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, that in the muay of the very best become personal expression. This, in part, is why styles were so varied in the Golden Age. The grammars and vocabularies were being combined with great individuality...like a language. Dropping back down into the subject of the post, how Muay Thai strikes can be read as words, with "accents", at least by my experience of watching legends spar and move (for instance, I've spent maybe 50 hours closely watching Karuhat spar), as well as many contemporary Thais, Thailand's Muay Thai has a kind of acceleration towards the end of strikes that you don't really see in many Western kickboxing-like examples. It's a feeling of the word. It happens to coincide with the way that Thai language borrows English words and changes the pronunciation of them, putting the accent on the end. When you come to Thailand you have to learn that "com-PUT-ter" is actually "com-put-TER". It makes a nice cross-reference. This movement from relaxation to acceleration is - at least in my view - a really distinct aspect of the shape of Thai striking. Sorry that it isn't really a summation, it's not really how my brain works, but its an attempt to try to clear up some of the larger ideas behind the "Muay Thai is like a language" analogy. Ultimately, its not really about being right, but rather about trying to present a different way of thinking about strikes, something that departs from the usual bio-mechanical way of thinking about striking. There is plenty of that out there. This is just a new framework to change the perspective a bit. Something to add to the bio-mechanical story. Personally, I find it fascinating how Thailand's Muay Thai might resist exportation outside of the kaimuay subculture which generates it. It draws attention to all sorts of things that might just get silenced or minimized. Again and again in my mind I recall how Dieselnoi insisted that there was a very important way that you come off of pads. There is a way it needs to be done - in his opinion. There is a disposition of the body, a way of presenting yourself and shaking off exhaustion. This at first blush seems to have nothing to do with striking mechanics. But, it is an expression of the long-closed-down Hapalang Gym of the Golden Age. It's HOW he trained. It's part of the language of Muay Thai for him. And...if you look at his relentless, GOAT-like knee style, this way of coming off the pads actually is a huge part of his fighting style. I'm interested in all those things, the non-obvious parts of Muay Thai that are embedded (or were embedded) in the kaimuay which generated the muay of great fighters. If one grants this, then learning how to pronounce individual words, in this language, is an important place to start. The awesome reply, which is full of application eatmygorts TL; DR: Totally agree that muay is an embedded art that makes very little sense outside of its cultural context. I think your analogy with language is also spot on. I think an additional challenge for spreading the art, and this is something I haven't quite fleshed out in my own mind, is that Westerners (not all, but in general), culturally, have a very transactional and (edit) mystical mindset about this sport and the fighting arts in general. I have observed similar parallels with non-indigenous folks learning an indigenous language that is also deeply embedded in cultural context, so it's not just a issue in muay. Longer answer: Oh cool, thanks man! Normally I wouldn't ask for a summary of the source material, that's kinda lazy, but I just wasn't getting it, and neither were other people. I actually really like this analogy. Thinking about it this way makes it easier to understand why people have such a hard time learning Thai style muay, to a level of fluency that appears "native". The only people that I know personally that have cracked this are those that have emersed themselves in a Thai Gym for an extended period of time, speak at least some Thai, and understand intrinsically the fight scene in Thailand. I think this analogy also makes sense from your perspective, as people trying to preserve the old "language" and context that gave rise to that, as it evolves. This is a bit of a take, so hear me out. In my country, there is a lot of effort going into language revival of our indigenous language, that was effectively stamped out through colonisation. The language is utterly beautiful when spoken fluently - a confluence of past and present that is embedded in a strong oral tradition. It is simply much, much more than just a means to communicate to one another. I bring this up because I find that a lot of non-indigenous people, when looking to learn the language, do so to "acquire" the language and generally want to skip all the "cultural stuff". They see the language as merely a tool, nothing more, missing the bigger context and cultural relevance. It's generally well meaning, mostly, but still problematic. So I've often noticed that people in my country/the West (generally speaking) look at the Thais as quite alien and Thai muay as something (edit) mystical. Like, they see that the Thais are good, great even, but don't fundamentally understand what makes them good. They go about trying to acquire their techniques, without the context of where and how they are used, and not understanding the process that has led them to be so effective. Basically, acquiring the language without any context, picking up words here and there (emphasising different syllables, if you will), but developing no real understanding. They're missing the wood for the trees. Or, like my example above, maybe they do know there is more, but they don't see how it's relevant to them. They don't want to walk the path of countless Thai fighters before, even on a very basic level, like running. They don't think they need all that extra stuff, just learn a few techniques and some technical sparring to be "good", for a Westerner, because they have no actual aspirations to be like the Thais. This is reserved for some next level of "fluency" that they believe is unattainable for the average Westerner. Edit: Some stuff you can't replicate easily, if at all, because of those deep cultural roots that start at childhood. But even if people are given a blueprint of what it takes to be good - how to train, what it takes, where to go, who to train with - 9/10 they won't or can't do it, because they don't want to put in the work. They don't connect to the process at all, or it's importance, and want a simplified version of it. I did watch one of Sylvie's little videos a while back on the "hack" and I think this touches on aspects of this. Anyway, just some off-hand thoughts here. Edit: I guess one of the challenges that you and Sylvie have is that by producing the content you do, even if it is really good, interesting and contextual stuff, is that people are still going to see it as a collection of techniques to acquire, to be like the golden era, or what have you. You can't really control how people use your material, or how they approach the learning process, and that unfortunately has a big impact on the transference of Thai style muay abroad

This is an old link. Kru Thailand used to be at Santai, but he left to open up his own gym a couple of years ago now. I think also the Santai head trainer Kru Apple did as well.

You can find the gym's FB page here: https://web.facebook.com/Sit-Thailand-Muay-Thai-Gym-106840670828643 You can get a feel for it from the photos and videos posted. Also Sylvie has filmed with Kru Thailand 2x for the Muay Thai Library if you want to get a feeling for his teaching style: #83 Thailand Pinsinchai 2 - The Beauty of Clinch (57 min) watch it here In Kru Thailand's first session in the Library he taught all the principles of his femeu style, in this session, his second in the Library, he breaks down all the things necessary for his dominant clinch attack. Spend an hour learning the techniques that make clinch turns and damaging knees possible. All of it is balance and rhythm at close range. #16 Thailand Pinsinchai 1 - Attacking Shell (62 min) watch it here Former Lumpinee and Rajadamnern champion Thailand Pinsinchai teaches the beautiful framework for his attacking, elbowing style. Lots of minute corrections, small vital details that turn working techniques into dominance. You get the entire picture of a Muay Buek fighter out of the legendary Pinsinchai gym .

This is a fighter's capacity to impose regularity upon another fighter, making another fighter predictable. source: on Markov Blankets

Ah yes. I forgot to get a bit into another way in which fighters seek to overcome surprisal, which is neither the shrinking of the probability space, nor the complexified growth of predictive awareness. This is the use of memorized combination patterns of attack. This is often a bite-down approach to the probability space wherein one inures oneself to surprise itself. It does not matter if something unexpected happens. One just tunnel-visions and locks into a very rehearsed and trusted somatic pattern of attack, designed to (hopefully) produce favorable outcomes regardless of opponent/environment. This is locking oneself into a closed form. An interesting historical occasion of this in the history of Muay Thai was when Namkabuan at the end of his career fought Ramon Dekkers who founded much of his fighting style on memorized combination fighting, Namkabuan's commentary on the fight here. There are also more restricted versions of this kind of bite-down approach to surprisal, for instance the insensate use of some kinds of guards, in which surprisal is just weathered through.

Cliffnotes summation: Muay Khao fighting style: 1. Shrinks the probability space (closes physical distance, limits weapons). 2. Changes the dominant affect register (from visual to tactile/kinesthetic). 3. Through its ars technica increases the probability space (learned/discovered dynamics of movement & control).

What follows is intersectional thought between an increasingly robust philosophical and scientific theory of living systems, and the art of fighting in combat sports. If you want to stay on top of the Free Energy Principle theory Maxwell Ramstead on Twitter is a great place to start. For me, personally, in the Free Energy Principle I find a lot of correspondence between itself and the philosophy of Spinoza, and it has always been my instinct that Spinoza has important things to say about some of our most concrete interactions as people. In some sense fighting is one of the most attenuated, physical yet social things that humans can do. This is about looking into the heart of what makes living systems tick, the possible dynamics which give all living things their values and their direction. And it is about thinking on the deeper metaphysical and scientific foundations of fight knowledge, the practical application of techniques and styles that have developed over the last century in Thailand. In bringing the Free Energy Principle to Muay Thai it is much more than a somewhat trite adage of: try to surprise your opponent! It is much more about thinking how surprise governs our choices of space, and the investments we make in maintaining those choices. And it is about recharacterizing the fundamental ways in which fight strategies and their tactics, create success. If organisms are at base in a struggle to control the entropy of information, increasing that entropy, taxing the resources of a fighters, is essential to long term fight success. I don't anticipate that this is for everyone or even most; this is just my passion where Philosophy and Fighting co-exist. As usual to my writing, this is not a finished article, but rather the sharing, mid-stream, the development of thought. The Free Energy Principle Theory Editing in the very best introduction to these ideas "An Introduction to Markov Blankets and Information Theory". Read this if you want to full, yet basic perspective. and from "Brain Entropy During Aging Through a Free Energy Principle Approach" (2021, below: This rumination will flow from the Free Energy Principle (FEP) which seeks to describe essential characteristics of living systems (being) and perhaps other phenomena as well. If you'd like a great 15 minute introduction to the principle you can check out this video explanation by Karl Friston. The Free Energy Principle generally argues that life forms, human beings included, benefit from reducing what in theory is called "surprisal" ("One can understand surprisal as a measure of how unlikely an observation would be by associating a system's sensory state with an observation or sensory sample"). Surprisal is here maybe best taken as just the surprise of events in the environment which are unpredicted...or unpredictable. This framework of reducing suprisal actually has very interesting broad brush insight into stylistic and skill-set developments in Muay Thai (and all other kinds of fighting arts). If we take as a principle in fighting the desire to reduce surprisal, there are two basic ways to do so that come at first blush. The first is the reduce the size of the probability space, which is to say limit the number of things that can possibly happen. By shrinking the probability space the number of possible unexpected events becomes reduced. At a very basic level, this is why octopi retreat into coral enclaves to sleep. The probability space becomes reduced (I'm using this term perhaps untechnically, it perhaps could be called the "event space"). This also is why people live lives in more rigidly defined circumstances, whether that involves habits of behavior or the habits of mind which condition them. Reducing the probability space can control surprisal. Reducing the probability space though has its drawbacks. You may not be able to control that space. This leads to the much more fruitful - though expensive - method of controlling surprisal, which is complexifying the prediction mechanism (the brain, nervous system, etc) so that it can predict events in larger probability spaces. More varied things can happen, and the mind (& body) is able through its development to read those patterns and become less able to be surprised. The richness of embodied knowledge over a probability space involves a mastery over it. And this process of complexification actually feeds on surprisal, because surprise causes it to grow in terms of complexification. The more unaccountable things it can account for, the greater its knowledge over a space. The Free Energy Principle, Surprisal and Fighting This leads to the tale of Sylvie's early year experiences of fighting in Thailand. She fought at an intense, never before documented, historic rate having over 33 fights a year for several years, but she was facing a serious disadvantage in these years. She was fighting more experienced opponents, with better eyes, who were much more familiar with the scoring aesthetics of Thailand. These Thai opponents had a very significant advantage in terms of surprisal in the fight space. Sylvie's stylistic solution to this was her discovery of the Muay Khao fight style tradition (a close-pressed, stalking fighting style that capitalized on clinch and knee fighting). She was aided in this in the discovery that there was in Thailand's history a traditional opposition between Muay Femeu (artistic, technical, often counter fighting) and Muay Khao fighting. This is where things become interesting. Muay Khao and Probability Faced with a disadvantage of fighting in a larger probability fight space, and not having the eyes and experience to read those probabilities visually, Muay Khao fighting tactics seek to shrink the probability space. In fighting close pressed, closing down angles, limiting distances the number of possibles to account for became more limited. It leveled the playing field more. But it is more than this. It also changed the dynamics of fighting and perception skills at play. In a more "padwork distance" fight space (fighters standing at basically the distance where training pad work is done) visual acuity reigns, but in more close range, clinch-oriented fighting tactile sensing can become paramount. By developing other sensory pathways (other than just eyes), and specific techniques to use them (locks, trips, turns, leverages) this new, (seemingly) smaller probability space then became expanded. Expanded in a different sense: what is possible in terms of historical skill development. The entire art of Muay Khao fighting actually is about expanding the possibilities of what can happen, at close range, exposing your opponent to increased surprisal. What began as a strategic shrinking of the probability space lead to the complexification of the art within that space, through both an inordinate number of fights (now well over 260), but also through the study of the art of Muay Khao fighting itself, and the richness of its specialized tactical knowledge. An example of a recent development of this tactical knowledge, anecdotally, is Sylvie's discovery and development of clinch throws from an outside position. Usually the preferred position in clinch is with an inside frame (Sylvie talks about the frame here). This where you are able to control the body of your opponent most directly, framing them. But through lots of sparring with larger partners Sylvie has spent a lot of time over the last few years in an outside (inferior) position. From this position, though technically inferior in important ways, one gains a dynamic advantage of some leveraged turns, trips and throws, introducing more centrifugal rotations to otherwise very erect, linear opponents (standing erect or stiffening can be a principle of strong clinch counter-control). Along with inside position locking and overhook tactics which have proven successful in countless fights, she now has an increased vocabulary of rotational force...which increases the surprisal for opponents. You can see a cut up of this dynamic here: It is a complexifcation of a reduced probability space, introducing an additional axis of dynamic movement, and its attendant vocabulary. There is of course quite a bit of complexity that is involved in the very act of shrinking probabilities spaces into fitness landscapes you've focused on understanding. These can involve hidden skills that require the control over space. Fighting is often a battle over space, and seeking to impose your probability space upon your opponent's preferred probability space. Getting from one space to another makes up a great deal of the art of fighting itself. But, one's growth as a fighter involves constant exposure to surprisal itself (hence the importance of live sparring & freestyle clinch training), so that your embodied prediction mechanisms will be stimulated to increase depth of knowledge over the fight environment, regardless of probability space in its variety. This ultimately involves increased visual acuity, and a soaked-in attendance to pattern recognition, what we've called "growing eyes". We've discussed it before, but the time we've spent with the legend Karuhat has uncovered the various ways in which he was able to read very large probabilities spaces through the detection of weight transfer, and body position alone. It has seemed to us that Karuhat, as he reads an open spaced opponent is often through a felt calculation of changes of probability that arise from how the opponent is standing, where their weight is distributed, and the shape of their bodily disposition (limb positions, head position, etc). He is able to reduce the complexity of what is probable, shrink "surprise", through a genius-level understanding of the fighting art. It comes off as mind-reading. Exposure to new and different probability spaces, controlled exposure to surprisal is that grows the complexity and knowledge of the fighter. If interested we sketch out a rudiment of Karuhat's spatial reading in this article: The Secrets of Karuhat’s Style – Four Internal Games From Southpaw as discovered in this study.

Kru Thailand Pinsinchai is pretty old school. A top fighter in his day, technically strong. Has his own gym in Chiang Mai.

Slowing them down before impact. As in this analogy: "When fighters pull strikes very, very commonly what they are doing is radically altering the pronunciation of the strike...they are softening the final syllable."

Informal Intro: I've been reading Agamben's The Highest Poverty, an incredibly dry but also quite fruitful study of Early Christian monastic orders used to gain insight into how cultures - and perhaps more importantly sub-cultures - organize and express themselves. He's examining Wittgenstein's prescriptions regarding rule-following and Forms of Life when thinking about Language and problems of philosophy, but tracing these concepts down to their historical exemplification in monasteries in say the 12th century. It's pointedly obscure, but these details open up into flowers of realization, like seeds, especially as I draw them into the sub-culture of Thailand's Muay Thai, and more properly kaimuay (camp) Muay Thai. I've written along this grain on the Forms of Life, using Bourdieu's concept of habitus in Thailand's kaimuay Muay Thai in "Trans-Freedoms Through Authentic Muay Thai Training in Thailand Understood Through Bourdieu's Habitus, Doxa and Hexis", where the hidden, or at least non-obvious, forms of doing something carry secret formative principles which are expressed in the techniques of fighting. But here, below, I want to bring out a very small thought, that aligns with the concept of rule-following and shaped communal ways of doing. Do not pull your strikes. Sorry for the sprawly introduction. Sometimes I feel like I have to really sketch out where I'm coming from because I sense that my frames of reference are potentially quite alien to the topics I'm putting my thoughts to. In any case, do not pull your strikes when sparring. This is why. Strikes Are Like Words Body of Thought: We've probably spoken about this in our lengthy Muay Thai Bones podcasts, but there are many analogies to the Muay Thai of Thailand and language. You seek a certain fluency and ultimately an expression of a grammar and vocabulary that is not your own. There are many points which map in an illuminating way from one to the other, and I think this analogy sheds light onto areas of learning (and performance) that are lost in more mechanistic views of Thailand's strike armory. In some respects this seems ridiculous. "Of course I should pull my strikes, this is sparring! Do you want an all out war!" But, this is the point. A strike in Thailand's Muay Thai is like a word with syllables. It unfolds in time, like a word. And in pronouncing a word which syllable you place the accent on, the stress, is quite important. BE-gone is a mispronunciation of be-GONE. EN-gin-eer is a mispronunciation of en-gi-NEER. When fighters pull strikes very, very commonly what they are doing is radically altering the pronunciation of the strike...they are softening the final syllable. They are pulling it back. This distorts the entire energy dynamic of how a strike is supposed to follow, which involves the communication of mechanical energy through the body parts into the final syllable, which ultimately comes about through a feeling about that strike, in the very same way you would have a feeling about a word, and how it is supposed to be pronounced. What happens is that you feel that in actual fighting you'll just put the emphasis on the final syllable, after habitually placing it much further up the word. Your strikes will have been trained/pronounced with accents often on the FIRST syllable, coming out fast, and then abruptly slowed down and softened. What will happen is that you very well might SAY your strikes louder, even shouting them in fights, but the actual pronunciation of them will be first syllable. You'll be shouting EN-gin-neer!!! Instead of en-gin-NEER. This is because the flow dynamics of how strikes unfold contain a feeling in time, and of emphasis. And sparring is the closest affective training you can have of actual fight circumstances. Sylvie and I have talked about this in the discussion of the Golden Kick: The Golden Kick – How To Improve Your Thai Kick which compares the shape of the Westernized "round" kick, with the more traditional kick of Thailand's Golden Age. Patterns of acceleration become embedded into the very shape of strikes, just as words become pronounced differently: You can take a deeper dive into these patterns of acceleration if you examine Karuhat's particular chest-rising Golden Kick, which is absolutely unique on it is own, but comprises these final-syllable principles to a great degree: #111 The Karuhat Rosetta Stone 7 - The Secrets of the Matador (83 min) watch it here The idea is that in sparring you say your words softly, but when the emphasis on the end...on the final syllable. They come out relaxed and slowly, and have a bite at the end. This actually folds into very high level striking that you'll find in legendary fighters like Karuhat or Namkabuan, who will begin a strike and as it unfold decide if a different strike is in order, mid-strike...because they are looking with their eyes. Elite fighters have matrix-like perceptions of the time unfolding as a strike a delivered, and I think that some of this comes from the feeling that the emphasis, in terms of feeling, but also bio-mechanically, comes at the end. Ultimately you want the affective shape of a strike, and its reality, to express a confluence of body parts all the way up from the ground, through the torso, into the ends of where the strike makes contact. This is a practiced release of energy. The energy does not have to be "hard". It can be quite soft, just as you can whisper a word with emphasis on the end, almost inaudibly. There is something Sylvie's experienced many times when training with legends of the past. Men in their 60s, even 70s. You can feel how hard they are. Some of this is just their "bones", hardened from so much training and fighting as well, but some of it comes through the dynamics of how power flows through their strikes. Sylvie's commented about this for instance with Sagat or General Tunwakom, both in the Library. Even at very slow motion demonstrations of a technique there is a tremendous, or at least unexpected transfer of energy, at the final syllable. It's not that it hurts, it just has a certain kind of weight. This is because they are pronoucing the "word" properly, even in slow motion. The energy is not stalling, or getting suppressed. It's just that very little energy is being sent through the line in the first place. It still has a zing, because these are the shapes of the words. You do not want to lose the shape of words. Especially the old words. If you've been pulling your strikes, and pronouncing them with emphasis on the first syllables it might very hard to change that pronunciation. It could lead to sparring too hard for a while, or unpredictably. Key would be learning to say your words more softly, with lower energy on the first syllable, and learning to feel how they can accelerate at the end. This would collaborate with what you are or can do on the bag or on pads. You want to feel that ascension in sparring, and the control over just how much electricity you are sending down the line. Another Note about the Shapes of Words and Muay Thai in Thailand This comes to a larger concept about the proper techniques one might learn in Thailand. Just because techniques are being communicated in Thai gyms does not necessarily make them purely "Thai", or connected to lineages that are the most effective. This is because the shapes of techniques are like words, and words are effected by the innumerable practices that make up a gym's social space. A kru very well might be teaching the form of a strike as he learned it as a boy and teen in a kaimuay very different than the one he is in at a kru (the social space, the behaviors of fighters and authorities, etc), but the gym itself is a sponge of Forms of Life, and as we, as Westerners (and others) enter these spaces we are also communicating our Forms of Life. How we through punches on the pads can change the way punches are thrown in the gym, how those words are pronounced. How we come OFF the pads and hold our dispositions, how we recover, might very well change the shape of how Thai fighters recover and express themselves. If definitely seen Western-friendly gyms absorb many unscripted but powerful Forms of Life from the non-Thai fighters they train. It becomes a cross-pollination. This is not necessarily even a dilution. There can be benefits of cross-pollination. But insofar as we come to Thailand to find how words - and even sentences, or full paragraphs - are pronounced in their language, in the language of their efficacy, there are many ways in which we can be communicating and impacting against what we are looking for. We come to Thailand and we find what we already are, because others like us have already been carving rivulets into the rock, changing the habitus. This is one of the reasons behind the Muay Thai Library project. We are filming the techniques and affective expression of Forms of Life one cannot really find any longer, because the kaimuay and the promotional muay that produced them largely no longer exist. It's the way words were pronounced, and a great deal of that is a mixture of technical proficiency, the feeling of a transfer of energy, and end of syllable emphasis that holds it own character, a character of a time and place. When Dieselnoi teaches how to knee, he is teaching a feeling of kneeing, as well as a technical unfolding of parts. These feelings are embedded in a realm of Muay Thai that is no-longer. At best what we can do is reach for these feelings, as we scribe the bio-mechanical guidance of what they are.

You may find that if you look into the traditional side of Thailand's Muay Thai (how it is scored, and also in many ways fought), there will be some correspondence to the "inner" or "internal" forms of slower martial arts like Yiquan. We've discussed in the Muay Thai Bones podcast where Buddhistic principles such a "Ning" or "Samadi" are drawn on for Thailand's Muay Thai. Here's a link to the whole playlist. Sorry I don't recall which ones, unfortunately they are very long podcasts.

I began writing about this here, where the photo series is found: The Inner Grace - The Esoteric of Muay Thai Style This is a continuation. There is an incredible play of doubling in Luce Irigaray and Carolyn Burke's "When Our Lips Speak Together" which slides between the doubling of the Self and Other (a woman an her lover), and the Inner private Self, and our Outward public Self, which is brought together in the analogy of lips touching...and separating to speak a word. That impossible-eqse word is unknown. Perhaps it is "love" or "equals", but it's about the joining of the two. When the separate touch, as one, and then separate out to speak. Some relevant excerpts: And There are some really beautiful things said about exteriority, and also about the internal experience of lips touching lips, the recursivity of the same, the joining together. These passages feel like to me that have taken the abstractions of a Philosophy and pressed them down into experiential physicality, all the while riding on a rich metaphor. I feel like this self-touching of creation is something that the camera can bring to fight photography - well, all photography of course, but the subject here is fight photography. Fights are so externalized, in an apparent sense. Seen as events of clashing. And fight styles signatured by mechanics of force and outward display. The temptation is always to grasp hold of the external and record it as a physicality. But, in photographing Kru Pern, for instance, I uncovered a different layer, one that I described (above) as esoteric. The inner techniques of self-touching and self-relation. I was pretty shocked to see it in the files. I felt something of it compositionally when framing shots, but on crop and edit the internal REAL leapt out. I feel like photography, fight photography in particular, can capture that intimate script, that quiet language, which lays like code and word beneath the outward form, which Irigaray and Burke says is "assuming one model after another, one master after another..."

Photography makes a prime example of N-1 rule conditioned inscription, not only how it is framed, but the entire edit of the world, and the edit of the file, not to mention the rote, rule-governed paths of producing photographs. These photographs from today of a calf and a mother are differing N-1 inscriptions.

Under this idea, the practice of Ruup, Ning, etc, as aesthetics would be N-1 inscriptions, because they are decomplexifications of the world which are rule-conditioned and trained/then-presented in a bound way, but the effect of them would be to involve N+1 truths or invocations I think.

If you are new to N+1, N-1 Flatland is an easy entry point. A point that starts as a dot, grows into a circle, and then shrinks into a dot and disappears can be read as a sphere passing through a plane of N-1 dimensions.

More on N+1 and N-1 from Duchamp and Panes of Immanence TIME AND AGAIN, DUCHAMP INSISTED that the Large Glass (fig. 1) was also (perhaps even in the first place) a consideration on perspective. When Pierre Cabanne asked him how he had arrived at the idea, he replied, “Perspective was very important. The Large Glass is actually a rehabilitation of perspective, which had been completely neglected and decried. With me, perspective became absolutely scientific . . . It was scientific mathematical perspective . . . based on calculations and measurements.”1 To Richard Hamilton he likewise admitted: “The projection [of each part of the Glass] in perspective [on the Glass] is a perfect example of classical perspective, I mean that I imagined the various elements of the bachelor machine first of all as arranged behind the Glass, on the ground, rather than as distributed over a surface in two dimensions.”2 We know that Duchamp drew up several perspective diagrams in this way, to situate the various pieces of his Bachelor Apparatus—now on a reduced scale, now life-size—before they were outlined on the surface of the Glass. from Duchamp and the Classical Perspectivists

This is going to be very sketchy. It will be jumping between associations and thought network hubs, building out a vision I had upon waking this morning. Sometimes in the half-dream things come to you, that are worth unpeeling. I've been slowly working my way through Agamben's The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life which is a study of Medieval monastic rule-guided life (in quite fine detail), with a view towards Wittgenstein's elementary solve for questions of Philosophy, among so many other things. Wittgenstein's powerful tool was to examine just what rule-following is (whether this be following mathematical processes or playing various language games), and ostensibly point out that generally there is "no rule for how to follow a rule". There is no way outside of rule-governed behavior and Life. Instead, we are all in Forms of Life. It's probably not a very good summation, as it's been many years since I engaged Wittgenstein, but that's my immediate stake. Agamben takes up Wittgenstein's rule-following examination and applies it to a period in Western Civilization where lives became quite starkly defined and governed by rules. It writes about the nature of rules, and how they differ from Laws. I've already taken a deep dive foray into Bourdieu's concept of Habitus and how it exemplifies itself in the Thai kaimuay, if you want to hypertext swerve from my point here you can. It's about how rule-following and custom conditions and communicates the subject in Thailand's traditional kaimuay: What struck me this morning was actually the way in which monastic life, which was rule-governed almost to the minute of waking life, with times and kinds prayers, meditations and rituals that mark out the hours (he writes about how monks were turned into living clocks), with great rigor. The window that is opened is the way in which all of our lives are rule-governed in important, hidden ways, and that we ourselves are becoming living clocks as well. But this is not the point of where I am going, just setting ground. What occurred to me was the way in which the simplification of monastic life, it's bounded sense of living rules is very much like a host of human actions which might be characterized as (n-1) inscriptions. N is the dimension we live in, so to speak (and I think we are using it analogically at this point, we can also call it an order of complexity, and (n-1) is rule following actions/creations which drop down in an order of complexity, and importantly inscribe these actions on a medium, a bordered medium. Medieval monks are inscribing the complexity of the world (their otherwise lived worlds beyond monastery walls), in an (n-1) dimensional way, through rule following. For some reason, upon waking, I pictured the way in which we now all interact and express ourselves through screens. Screens that act like panes. There is a (n-1) dimensional reduction of the complexity of our lives, and all these interactions are rule-following on several levels of description. In a certain sense these panes are little different than the inscriptions of a monastic life, or the way in which an icon painter would paint on treated wood: They are bounded, rule-following inscriptions on a medium, (n-1) dimensional reductions. Much has been made about Plato's (n+1) dimensional picture of the world. We live in this world of shadows (n), the shadows are cast by a dimension of a higher order than our own (n+1), and the purpose of Philosophy (and religion) is to connect up this world N, with N+1. Platonism runs through all of Western Culture, and in schools of critical philosophy transcendence (the mark of Platonism, trying to get from N to N+1) is scorned. It's thought to be the great mis-step, principally because it devalues this world, for another more imaginary one, one that has often been in the hands of dogma for the purposes of social control. What is missing from this picture of Platonisms, hidden and outright, are the ways in which we actually perform or construct transcendence through (n-1) operations. This is the quintessence of Art, which also is often in the service of Platonism. Here, within the bounds of this rule-governed, or rule-conditioned inscription (let's say an icon painting) an N-1 simplification casts our eyes to an N+1 reality. What is operative here though is the very experience of how N-1 releases itself, and calls up "N" in an expression or experience of transcendence in an everyday way. If we look at a hand written letter by our mother who has passed, every jot, every gap in words, every word-choice, every piece of it calls up a world far more complex and rich than what is "contained" in that letter. The inscription holds transcendence, and does so in everyday ways. Scrolling through Twitter on an iphone, a bounded, rule-governed or rule-conditioned inscription in a medium (n-1), is an transcendent experience to our world of N. These are pane of immanence. There is wordplay here, as the Philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed a metaphysical plane of immanence, the wikipedia summation of which is below. Hopefully you can see the difference between joining a plane of immanence, and constructing a pane of immanence. We leave aside some of the vitalist and semi-transcendent operations of Deleuze's project when plane become pane. The idea here though is just to focus on operations of N-1 dimensional reductions, in rule-governed, rule-conditioned ways, so was to leverage the dimensional shift between N-1 and N. And I do believe these go well beyond the human. They can be anything from RNA inscriptions of life forms to a new diet regime to lose weight. The phrase occurs sometimes, that of "playing God", but really anytime we are de-dimensionalizing Life, moving from N to N-1, we are spring loading a transcendent effect...and effect which is immanent. It could very well be that Platonism (and we know this does not all flow from Plato himself, he just codified it, brought N to N-1, in a particular powerful and historically lasting way) was simply a formulation of N-1 inscription which makes up all of Life itself, and is carried forward through rule-governed, rule-conditioned ways. We all are constructing Panes of Immanence everyday, through all our rule-following actions of inscription. How we walk into an office we work at. How we compose an email. How watch movies from our couch. How we eat. The ways we have turned our lives into clocks (that's a slightly different story). For me it comes to learning to see all these flattenings as panes. Which is to say, a dimensional reduction of complexity, that in a rule-governed/conditioned way interacts with and encodes its medium. These inscriptions are meant to be released. N-1 is meant to be unfolded into N. And this is immanence. Because my writings here almost always have to do with traditional Muay Thai and fighting, this brings up back to what exactly a fight is. (We'll leave aside the whole of training which makes up a great deal of a fighter's life, and that sum of inscriptions.) A fight is an N-1 inscription of the complexity of the world. It's rule-governed, rule-conditioned nature is directed to a material medium, composed of the ring and its opponent, and in a certain sense the fighter (like any artist) must join the medium in order to inscribe within it. The judges, the audience, the gamblers, they too make up aspects of the medium when the fighter is more aware. And in a certain, Old World way, it is an N-1 inscription which invokes an N+1 real, in the way that sparks, embers and lineations sketch out fire and form that lies beyond us.

One of the semi-principles of traditional Muay Khao style is a tendency to square up, I believe, because clinch is a squared-up technique set (mostly). To me this involves principles like keeping your opponent in front of you (not overturning on strike follow throughs), and advancing on the end of strikes (like stepping down after a knee in space, etc). This means often sacrificing power of any single strike, because strikes lead to other strikes, within a kind of squaring tendency. You can see this in Yodkhupon's footwork and pressure attacks, for instance. The Muay Khao fighter is "persistence hunting", setting up for a kill later in the fight. This means that even non-switching Muay Khao fighters of the past were adept at striking fairly square, and sometimes in the opposite stance by situation, and provides a natural connection point to close pressed western boxing. In the Library an interesting footwork centered recent session is this one on Boran balance, working towards a sense of flow. #117 Kru Kin Por Promin - Muay Boran Precision, Balance & Flow (93 min) watch it here A beautiful session under the instruction of Kru Kin teaching the foundations of Muay Boran, revealing the underlying basics of Thailand's ring Muay Thai. Balance, precision and flow. These are the principles that are the bones of Muay Thai, keys to footwork and transition and effective fighting.

Thanks for studying the Library and supporting it! That's a good question. There are general reasons why southpaws have advantages over orthodox fighters, and this reasons are even bigger in Thailand because Thailand scores openside strikes higher than closed side strikes. The southpaw fighter has an open power alley to that open side, with the rear kick, a spearing knee and the left straight all "open". Of course the orthodox fighter in mixed stances ALSO has his/her power weapons "open" to attack the open side, but the supposed advantage is that there are many more orthodox fighters than southpaw fighters so southpaw are more comfortable in this faceoff of power side weapons, have spent much more time evolving their game to take advantage of it. For instance a lot of Thai southpaws traditionally developed very big left kicks (Yodsanklai is a perfect example, but there are many). In Sylvie's case though, it was for a different reason. As a caveat, lots of traditional Muay Thai training and older forms of Muay Thai were taught ambidextrously. There was much less of a single stance emphasis. This has really changed in contemporary Muay Thai. In the Samart Payakaroon session you can see this, Samart tells us he doesn't even know which stance he is, southpaw or orthodox. There are several sessions in the Library which show this ambidextrous quality from the older school. So switching is part of the heritage of Muay Thai. In Sylvie's case the move to Southpaw was recommended by the legend Karuhat who had cornered for her quite a bit, and trained her many times, as a solution to a problem she was having in orthodox. Sylvie is a Muay Khao fighter with lots of emphasis on clinch. From orthodox she had a problem with her primary grab with her lead arm. She would overturn. Which is to say the arm would wrap around too deeply, with the elbow behind the neck, and she would find herself somewhat bladed, with her lead foot between her opponent's feet. This is a very disadvantageous opening position for clinch. She would work her way back to positive positions most of the time, but against a few adept clinch fighters it would result in bad rounds or losses, because she started with a disadvantage. Karuhat moved her to southpaw to basically short circuit this clinch grab and overturn, and make her more squared up in initial clinch positions. Also, he reasoned, putting her power side up front (her right handed power) would give her more confidence in space, make her more offensively potent. Karuhat himself was a beautiful switching fighter, so in a way it wasn't really to become southpaw, more so as to build it that side of the attack and defense, so that one could switch. But first Sylvie had to commit to just Southpaw. I think she did so for two years. If you don't commit to it you just back out of it once you get stressed or uncomfortable. You have to learn how to solve problems from the left side. It takes time. A few things were pretty apparent. The first is that it did seem to correct the clinch overturn grab, and make her more square. Also, offensively she was more willing to fight in the pocket, and her left kick seemed to come out more easily, without some of the bad habits her right kick had developed. She beat several world champion level fighters as a southpaw. One of the challenges of moving to southpaw though, was that while offense seemed to get an automatic boost, defensively instincts suffered. This pretty common. You just are not used to seeing strikes from that orientation, you are through The Looking Glass. In Thailand this can be an issue because your openside will be exposed to big scores. As a Southpaw you have to be able to close your openside. Karuhat helped solve this to some degree with the Forward Check, as a kind of defensive cheat, which squares you up some, and also threatens attack (or switching), but mostly this defensive weakness of a new stance was lessened by simply being a pressure fighter. If you are newly as a southpaw and laying back in space, you can be picked off quite easily, but as a pressure fighter the time you spend at risk is decreased. This is the session in the Library where Sylvie actually makes the switch, you can watch it in real time over a few days, and she talks about the reasons for it: #20 Karuhat Sor Supawan 3 - Switching To Southpaw (144 min) watch it here 2x Lumpinee Champion Karuhat Sor. Supawan in this epic video posts installs a limited Southpaw core which leads to developing high level ideas found in his switching style: tracking and attacking the open side, watching for and dictating weight transfer. This is the blueprint of a legend's acclaimed fighting style. After about 2 years of really devoting herself to southpaw, I believe, Sylvie went back to orthodox, because at that point in her development she felt that the most important next step was learning how to bring more relaxation into her muay, and southpaw still had elements of stress and discomfort in it. What two years did though was to open up the possibility of switching as the occasion called for, more like how Karuhat fought. It built out an alternate side grammar. I hope that helps!

I've not heard much about Sitmonchai in the last two years, but if there is one gym that is strongly associated with a fighting style, and produces that style in a competent way, that would be Sitmonchai. I'd be pretty surprised if you came to them looking to develop punch and lowkick styles and didn't get a LOT of support and nurture in that. The only other gym I could think of that might be like that, would be very, very different than Sitmonchai, would be Arjan Metprik's gym in Khorat, which has for decades taught a hard Muay Maat and lowkick style in a traditional way. But it is not a gym that really looks like it has had farang much, and seems mostly full of local kids long past its glory days in the early 2000s. But you can see Arjan's style in this Muay Thai Library session. #103 Metprik Silachai - Lost Techniques of Old School Muay Maat Lowkick Pressure (81 min) watch it here Wow what a session. Arjan Metprik was not only a great fighter of the Silver Age of Muay Thai, he created the relentless fighting style of 2001 Fighter of the Year Thongchai Tor. Silachai. It's just an amazing lowkick, knee and Muay Maat style full of pressure and toughness. See how he trains his fighters in this Old School Khorat gym: https://www.patreon.com/posts/48810277 Another option if you are into hands is Kem's Muay Thai gym below Khorat. He is largely credited with turning Muay Khao legend Yodwicha into a hands heavy international fighter, and works on hands and proper spacing and footwork a lot. It's a beautiful gym up on a mountain, and he's a very technical focused trainer. He won't be doing any punch-kick combos over and over, but his emphasis on hands in the constellation of all the Muay Thai weapons is really great. There are a few sessions with him in the Library, here is one: #53 Kem Sitsonpeenong 2 - Mastering Everything In Between (80 min) watch it here With one of the great technique krus of Thailand, Kem Kem Muaythai Gym, in his gym in the mountains just below Khorat. A special session that details how to work on all the things in-between strikes. So much to learn in this 80 minutes. He's a special teacher.

Another small piece of evidence added to the mix, in 1922 Siamese Kard Chuek rules are described by Australian News report as prohibiting "clinching" (unsure of its meaning then), but allowing throws:

Adding to this thread after some time. Above I reasoned that the exclusion of Japanese/Judo techniques from Muay Thai likely stemmed from the Japanese World War 2 occupation of Thailand, which bred resentment, and that may indeed be true to some degree. Unwritten rules, fight aesthetics may have shunned Judo-like techniques without them being illegal, as they are today. But the timing was just conjecture. I noticed though this Judo-like throw in 1959 British newsreel footage of what is described as a Thai championship fight. The ref does not react to the throw as if it is unusual: As my tweet suggests, the more austere shunning of Japanese techniques may have actually developed later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when perhaps Japanese Kickboxing was seen to have somewhat have appropriated Thailand's Muay Thai, with perhaps layers of other counter-Japanese cultural developments mixed in. At some point Thailand's Muay Thai developed distinct non-Judo aesthetics and rules.

@Nightshade Here is also a podcast portion we did on Clinch Transitions:

One of the more difficult things to learn in Thai clinch is relaxation. Getting to leverage positions and controlling those positions with selective tension. It just comes with time. Just as when a surfer new to the board will be tense all over when up on a wave, and an experienced surfer only tense in very particular areas. But clinching someone that much larger to start out with is going to intensify any tension, and exhaust you. Maybe just note how much you are holding your breath, and the areas of your body you are tensing in. Also, maybe best is not to concentrate on throws or trips, just because these require greater feeling and already a firm knowledge of anchor positions, and trying to trip much larger opponents is advanced and can lead to frustration. Instead think about controlling positions from the inside, and breaking posture a bit, and scoring with knees repeatedly, turning your opponent, etc. Once you are able to control posture, breathe, and manipulate their position more, trips will become more accessible to you.