Trevor, it sounds to me like you've had a genuine religious experience
(tm) and are reaching out for language to describe it, just as any mystic
might do. The language of the 20th century is science, so gravity
provides a metaphor that fits the bill for your story, just as the
movement of qi might fit the bill for a Taoist scholar, or as the
movement of the Holy Spirit might fit the bill for a Christian mystic.
I find Eileen's comparison between your take on gravity and qi
particularly interesting because I've been studying tai qi for about 5
months now, and of course the power of qi is a big deal for this
particular martial art.
(From the reading around I've done over the years, I gather that people
who use the word qi don't always use it the same way: apparently it can
mean anything from ordinary breath to a kind of animist life-force, and
even people from the similar general backgrounds--two accomplished Chinese
martial artists, say--might disagree over how to define it.)
I enjoy the tai qi and think it's technically effective (sort of resembles
jujitsu in application), but I'm still not comfortable with the use of the
concept of qi. The way it's used, and the language that surrounds it,
doesn't fit into a properly scientific (i.e. reductionist) framework. But
I've decided it's not just mumbo-jumbo, either: it's an empirical term,
used to describe something that you feel when you do things just right,
and the feeling probably comes from a combination of the right kind of
breathing, muscular tension & relaxation, circulation, and so on. By
extension (and perhaps what would now be called technical sloppiness)
things that make you feel good in a qi-like way then end up being said to
be full of qi, like the bracing weather air after a good rainstorm, which
to me doesn't make a lot of sense, but where art is concerned the poetic
and the technical aren't easily divorced, I suppose.
Back to the gravity angle. In tai qi, posture is incredibly important,
and once you learn to pay attention you come to realize that your ability
to move well can depend on less than a centimeter's (happy Alberto?)
difference in how your head, shoulder, wrist, knee, etc. is set. Very
small physical differences make a huge difference in terms of how much
effort, muscular and emotional, is required to execute a technique or even
just to stand there. E.g., having your chin just slightly out of place
may mean that your head isn't quite balanced, which will place tension on
pretty much all the muscles from your neck to your tush, down the back and
across the shoulder blades; and if your tush is overly tensed, then your
thighs and calves have to compensate, and then your ankles, feet, and toes
have to compensate for that. When you're in the middle of a fast motion,
you don't notice it, but when you go slowly, everything suddenly jumps out
at you and it's a struggle, because as you practice you're learning how to
stand & walk all over again. The benefit is that once you get good, when
you need to push, punch, or spin, suddenly you can make a small motion do
a lot more work than you could previously simply because everything is
working together as a unit.
And this *feels* good. Standing correctly means that suddenly your body
is doing a lot less work to cope with gravity than it had to do when you
used a more typical posture. Part of that feeling of qi power and
well-being, I think, comes from proper posture and balance, which is
another way of saying that you're in tune with gravity and using it to
your advantage--or, at the very least, making sure it doesn't drag you
down. Maybe endorphins are involved too, who knows?
Of course, all that is fairly mundane compared with your experience, but
it doesn't take much to extend the term from an empirical one, denoting
a feeling that can be experienced by anybody who practices tai qi, to a
metaphysical one, representing a universal life force that needs to be
cultivated using the exercises of qi gong (of which tai qi is one--but we
don't use our penises to haul large vehicles, more's the pity, but I
guess there's not much martial application unless maybe you're caught in
the old Spielberg movie _The Duel_).
With religious experience, though, it seems like there's an intuition that
one feels on an almost physical level, in one's bones, as it were, so one
seeks to reify the experience by giving spiritual terms physical power (as
when we say we "feel" the Holy Ghost) or vice versa (as when we attribute
spiritual qualities to physical phenomena, like gravity or indeed qi, at
least qi as I understand it).
I think I've lost track of where I was going with this. Maybe it's just
that moments of enlightenment often come as a physical shock, or at least
we invoke metaphors of physical schock to describe the experience--a
feeling of weightlessness, say, or of lightning hitting, or for that
matter the sound of one hand clapping...a physical event that seems to
have no physical cause, so we look for a way to resolve the paradox with
metaphors until eventually we give up and just accept that what is, is.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
