Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Sylvie uses a wonderful term to describe the Westernization of Thailand's Muay Thai, through its Entertainment commodification. She says the West is terraforming Thai Muay Thai, and then taking glory for beating Thais in the new, terraformed world. It's a powerful analogy.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Beautiful by Cixous on Paris of her youth, could be the same on the simulcrum of social media.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

If...

you are not your thoughts

a fighter is not their strikes.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

like an orchard in a battlefield. 

 

cixous

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Watched Melville 's Second Breath the other night, on the big screen, was very moved. What is it that makes him so incomparable? The light, the classic masculine, the pace. A synthesis of structure and Life.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

Sometimes I muse that Muay Thai, Thailand's Muay Thai is like the elephant. One time integrated within the society, at the village shore at the forest for instance in Surin (a folding of the human & the elephant culture), and then become the tank of the military empire, then the diesel truck of the lumber and other industry, now almost entirely existing within the country for the tourist, a bend of fate I do not want for Muay Thai...but today, visiting this one who lives near our house, I feel the depression, the majestic depression of her. Today I feel her. A short film study I made.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Just to hold, when held down.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Caring for Arjan Gimyu

Sylvie did a very good deed today. Arjan Gimyu in his 80s, 2x Coach of the Year, kru of Kaensak and so many other champions, has been somewhat confined to his room because of the air quality and his asthma. He lives a very spar life on a government check, just really a room and a radio and a fan. He usually drives over to Rambaa's gym in the afternoons so he can be in a kaimuay, the real form of the sport where kids are developing, pads and bags popping everywhere, but he's had to stay home lately. Sylvie bought a good Hepa airfilter he can run at night to clean the rooms air, dropping it off, plugging it in and showing him how to use it. She texts with him regularly when he can't make it to the gym, talking about how fighters did and such, keeping in contact. Just knowing that someone cares just a little bit more than expected goes a very long way.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Arjan Gimyu in his CoTY days.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Watching yet another very skilled Japanese Muay Thai fighter on Phetyindee the other day, I remain convinced - very broadly - that though Japanese fighters definitely hold the Thais, in fact Thailand's Muay Thai, in allure, they principally train in the aesthetic of Anime. This is to say, they are guided by a visual aesthetic that almost entirely forgets the art of Time, which is where almost all the art of Muay Thai is. They honestly, at some very deep level, "doing" Anime, which isn't Muay Thai at all.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

People think its the padman's job (in Thailand) to make you tired. No...its your job to make your padman tired, especially if you are a dern fighter. But this does NOT mean go harder.

 

It may mean that, but it does not principally that.

Understand, you are learning when you do padwork, and if what you are learning is "This guy makes me tired", that is one of the last things you want to learn. Instead, use padwork to find the inner-patterns of rest, both physically and psychologically, the quiet ways experienced padmen work to recover, breathe, pace, control the tempo. And learn to take these, quietly, away. If you can do it to your experienced padman, you can do it to your opponent.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Found the old footage of Sylvie's 2nd fight (Fight 12) vs Angela Hill, accidentally, waking up my very old YouTube account the other day. We thought the video of both those fights were lost, taken down by their team to keep opponents from scouting her, as it was, back in the amateur NY days. Sylvie tells the story on her blog, taking the fight vs the best female fighter on the East coast on 24 hrs notice (wrecked on fertility hormones because she was donating her eggs very soon to afford to come back to Thailand. Not training, giving up big weight, out of shape driving straight from work to the fight), it was quite a thing. Perhaps her most "raw" fight, never to win such a fight in a 100 years. Angela all crisp in her technique, she was a bit of a situational weight-bully back in the day as that was the ethic you took every advantage you could get, and she was properly feared as big, aggressive, skilled fighter, sometimes finding herself fighting the proper 100-102 lb girls who didn't even have a weight class at 105 lb; not a criticism, nothing unfairly done as there were so few girls, but few wanted to face her in that small scene where fighters really valued victories. She had big dreams as a fighter and later ended up having to fight up a ton in the big girls of the UFC, something that probably deprived her of the dominance that would have made her a big star, giving up all that weight in the ring. If she had been fighting down in the UFC it would have likely played out quite differently. In fighting if you fight enough it goes and comes around, you go through every permutation. Cool stuff.

But, Sylvie didn't get knocked out, which was a big aim, and got to just be raw in there one more time. That's what it was about that time, that's what coming to Thailand was about then, just to find opportunities to fight...at all. Sylvie took every fight possible because you might not fight again. Each fight chance felt like it might be the last, and you just could not grow without fighting, a principle she would embody in the many years to come. In some ways its my favorite fight of Sylvie's, its not even close...but close to the beating heart of it all. After the fight Angela was on the mic before the crowd, this was about when she herself was running out of opportunities in Muay Thai, and she announced to the crowd something like "I bet Sylvie will fight again", like...this isn't Sylvie's last fight, even though I whopped her...two-hundred-and-74 fights ago. That was the beating heart then. I love this fight. You see the raw, the "what was about to happen" that's beneath all those hundreds of fights to come...if you have eyes for it, and all the documentation of the sport and its art, all the expertise she would seek and learn, because she had none of it then.

In some ways, its proper for this fight to be private (and we'll keep it so). Because its the hidden crucible, just before we came to Thailand. Sylvie almost died on the donation table (at least I thought she was going to die as doctors came rushing in), so at least her heart probably stopped, they never told us. And we were landing in a plane in Thailand to actually LEARN Muay Thai properly and fight it properly 2 months later. She was in the ring a month after that. 2012. Fight 13.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

You can't train yourself, anymore than you can tickle yourself.

 

Yet, on the other hand...you are always training yourself.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

We've been watching a lot of David Lynch since he passed. Rewatches of Lost Highways, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire...and now working through Twin Peaks. I talk about it a lot.

 

One of the things coming through is the way that he works with melodrama, and in Twin Peaks the soap opera tv form of it. It allows archetypal (in fact at times wooden) characters who are moving through scripts they repeat, stories that are told about these kinds of characters. As the actors say in Inland Empire (paraphrased), "I thought we were doing an original script, I wouldn't agree to do a remake". IN this sense Lynch is saying we are all doing "remakes" as we repeat the scripts we have inherited. But the characters are experiencing very real, intense emotions in these scenes, just like we do in our "real" lives. We are acting in scripts, doing "remakes", but living with tremendous pathos within them. Lynch, I imagine, is making two points about our pathos. There are two doors. The first is akin to Buddhistic (un)attachment. The only reason we are suffering (or enjoying) intensely is because we are attached to these wooden characters, the "remake" we are making. If we saw that these are just recycled characters the grip of our emotions would lessen. But, there is within his films & show another door. Sometimes characters suffer or intensify their experiences so thoroughly they transcend it, they are transformed, in a passion-of-Christ (archetype) type intensification, often it is female characters who pass through this door, with a sort of glowing, mixed divinity.

As such with the Muay Thai fighter who is a woman, in a certain way. Female fighters especially are putting on the "clothes" of the fighter, because the fighter is a model of hypermasculinity in many cultural traditions.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The Muay Thai Library is so incredible. Today I was realizing how many men we have filmed with who have passed. This is a generational greatness, and it is an honor to have met these men, and in some cases to have come to have known them. Taking a moment to think of them and feel them. Each of these men a universe of a muay within them, of which we have touched just a teaspoon.

Andy Thompson

Morakot Sor. Tammarangsi

Sangtiennoi Sor Rungroj

Namkabuan Nongkipahuyut

Sirimonkol Looksiripat

Kaisuwit Sungila Nongki

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

23 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

Caring for Arjan Gimyu

Sylvie did a very good deed today. Arjan Gimyu in his 80s, 2x Coach of the Year, kru of Kaensak and so many other champions, has been somewhat confined to his room because of the air quality and his asthma. He lives a very spar life on a government check, just really a room and a radio and a fan. He usually drives over to Rambaa's gym in the afternoons so he can be in a kaimuay, the real form of the sport where kids are developing, pads and bags popping everywhere, but he's had to stay home lately. Sylvie bought a good Hepa airfilter he can run at night to clean the rooms air, dropping it off, plugging it in and showing him how to use it. She texts with him regularly when he can't make it to the gym, talking about how fighters did and such, keeping in contact. Just knowing that someone cares just a little bit more than expected goes a very long way.

 

Sylvie tells me that Arjan Gimyu called her to say that last night was the first time in the last month that he was able to sleep at night, because he could breathe.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Defense

Even the best intentioned don't train actual Muay Thai, the Muay Thai of Thailand. The foreigner, even quite knowing ones, train 90%-95% offense, when in fact Muay Thai is probably about 70% defense. There is a reason why in Thailand when you have the lead you defend the lead. This is the position of the superior. Every fighter who gains the lead learns how to defend it. This is what distinguishes it - in skill, in spirit.

The foreigner only SEES offense. Trains its words and vocabulary, missing the entire thing.

 

Even the high-so Thai, quite-Americanized, sought to take out as much defense as possible, every drop and drip of it, because even Thais can be very far from the root and tree of their sport, separated by class and commerce.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Coming back to mind the pejorative of young kids fighting in Thailand called "child abuse" recently by a redditor in a discussion I was having not long ago. I suspect this issue is about as complex and profound as any in West vs Thai relations and the ways Muay Thai is translated/transmitted to the West. But...this small piece of video goes into the complexifying folder of those arguments. Kids cheering as intensely as at any Little League game for their mate. This doesn't "solve" the ethical question, but it does push it further away from polarizing, simplifying pictures. It touches such a raw nerve along the faultlines of culture I do find the conversation almost impossible to have with some otherwise fairly reasonable people. It just is very hard to see the assumptions behind the very fabric of our culture, assumptions which likely distort and even motivate the appeal of Muay Thai itself to the West.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Concepts of Predation

I'm reading a fascinating book right now, Cannibal Metaphysics (by de Castro), which is providing a powerful re-dimensioning of my already somewhat sketched out Girardian perspective on the deeper meanings of Thai Muay Thai ringsport, and its likely cultural antecedents. Cannibal Metaphysics argued for an anthropological ethical equal footing of other cultures in a way that does not reduce itself to a multiculturalism, and it does so by conceptualizing various animistic practices and beliefs AS Philosophy. It's long been my sense that the animisms of South East Asia actually help us see the animistic underpinnings of our own beliefs, many of them forced into the shadows to make room for our Clean Room of dissective griddings, underpinnings that still are operating throughout the West, in a kind of Unconscious...which is not to say "less developed". These methods of relation operate side-by-side within and thorough the more hegemonic manners of discourse. 

I've just begun the book, I look forward to what more I can see in it, but already the very concept of a ubiquity of predation (and prey), variously managed, sidelined, ignored, and sometimes ritualized and symbolized in hierarchies, goes right to the root of the meaning of fighting as art and sport. How we organize and meaningfully interpret violence, personhood, and imagined violence within the inner circle of culture, kind and family.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Muay Thay Beyond the Logic of Girard, an Alchemy of Violence

Girard creates a kind of electro-static concept of the Rite of Sacrifice, the analogy that violence as some kind of energy builds up within the group, which unless symbolically though still quite affectively discharged, by rite, will otherwise surface as real violence between members of said group.

Not adjusting or correcting this - though Girard's vision does have something of late 19th century electro-magnetism science mysticism to it - de Castro points out that Amerindian peoples live in a world of predation, and personhood is awarded within (and between) groups where markedly predation is excluded. This is its defining characteristic, the outer edge where predation (which rules the universe otherwise) ends.

Just as a sketch, it seems that my Girard-inspired concept of ring Muay Thai as an extension of the logics of the Rite of Sacrifice (the production of the loser, ie, the holy-profinated victim) is further clarified if we imagine that the group logic described by de Castro involved also the ritualization of predation, at the group's edge, folding in the outer logic within the circumfrance of the group. And, this rite of symbolized predation, when risen to an art and practice, can work both with Girardian expiative properties, but also with the logic of boundary predation, reinforcing the exclusion of absolute predation (the law of the Universe).

 

This is about affectively alchemizing violence (and its real-world corollary, predation), into practices of civilization and personhood making. In a certain sense digesting it, breaking it down, so as to not practicing it. This is one of the great violations of the West in aggro-molding Thailand's Muay Thai so as to feed its own needs to consume violence in the simulcrum of entertainments. One is undo-ing the very cultural alchemy and turning Gold back into Lead, so to speak.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This is quite important, even at the personal psychological level, as Sylvie's recent Jungian readings of the Tale of Bluebeard (Women Who Run With Wolves) point out, if the exclusion of predation is the foundation of community (ontological grounding of the "person"), we each can have a predator within our psyches, a predator who preys not upon others (outside of us), but upon the persons within us, emanations of innocence, youth and dreams. The boundary of predation, as it can be symbolically and ritualistically defined, may be key to our own mental health and liberty...otherwise we ourselves predate ourselves.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Without imparting a colonialist lean, one might argue that Muay Thai (in its rite form, and then apex to its art) is Christological. In this one sense (at least). It is taking predation (the violence of Death, the display of power over another) at the very heart of the communal, at the heart of personhood. As Girard argues, the Christological lifts up the practice of the sacrifice to a universal. I do not adhere to his Catholicism, but it is good to trace this vein of ethics, along the line of predation itself. If we read the expiative force of the fighting ring in the preformative of an excluded predation, then the Christological "death hath no dominion over him" pronoucement is "predation has no dominion over us"...it does not belong here...through the rite practice of alchemizing it, inviting it in on our terms. Exclusion through inclusion.

The point of this redescription isn't to Westernize Thailand's Muay Thai so much as to resposition what is going on in Thailand's Muay Thai in terms that sit within some of Western ethical, liberatory frameworks.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Key to decoding Muay Thai in terms of the excluded predation is that "domination" (often symbolized aesthetically in the conventions of the sport and art, but always suffused with physicality) = Predation, inscribing it within the (ritualized) social sphere.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

15 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

so much as to resposition what is going on in Thailand's Muay Thai in terms that sit within some of Western ethical, liberatory frameworks.

...this puts the ethical characterization of youth fighting in Thailand in a contradiction, varying with its framework. Typically the notion of "child labor" is seen as children (innocents) engaging in the onerous, fallen-state of labor, the least free thing an adult can do...in particular, a violent, dangerous sort of labor, the worst kind. In this world picture in which labor is seen as onerous servitude, and fighting as labor, it makes deep sense to see this as ethically wrong. But...if fighting within the culture contains an expiative meaning, and the training in fighting, traditionally, as the maturation and bulwark of culture against violence (predation), we would be quite far from fighting-is-labor frameworks. We are reaching toward an understanding of the pedagogy of personhood, one that is Buddhistic, in that young males help form the prophylactic fabric of the culture. The problem is that both of these frameworks can apply, or, by circumstance one may apply much more than the other...especially as Muay Thai is being commodified for a violence-hungry global entertainment economy.

*This is leaving out any thorough disentangling of the very concept of "labor" from the West's industrial age (along with its coterminous Cult of the Child), and also from Marxist & other ideals of measured units of equity.

To say this is to allow traditional Muay Thai to investigate us, rather than us investigate traditional Muay Thai. How is it that we organize ourselves toward violence (and its corollary, predation)?

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This written about Jean-Pierre Melville's best films, regarded by some as slow, can equally give insight into apex Golden Age Muay Thai, which holds something of the cinematic in its control over time and rhythm:

"There's a rhythm in each of Melville's mature films that rivals that of the best of John Ford and Yasujiro Ozu. The movies are not "slow," but rather, they move at a deliberate and calculated pace wherein not a single shot or second is wasted."