Recently I went on a cruise. It was my first time so I paid special attention to the safety video (unlike on a plane, where I’m already immersed in a book when the emergency procedures are demonstrated).
Since this was a cruise along the coast of Norway there were detailed explanations on how to put on the hypothermia suit. The characters doing the demonstrating were CGI cartoon, moving in quite a human way, but there was something wrong about them; and since the video was shown every time the ship docked, which it did four or five times a day, I got an opportunity to study it closely.
What I realised at last was that they moved too well, too smoothly
Amazingly, the Japanese have an expression for this coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori: Bukimi no Tani Genshō, which is usually rendered into English as Uncanny Valley from the 1978 book “Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction” by Jasia Reichardt.
Mori’s theory states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human a point is reached beyond which the observer’s response becomes one of strong revulsion. It accounts for the flop of the Tom Hanks film “Polar Express”. And yet, as the New York Times review said, “ … none of the humans have the countless discrete fluctuations, the pulsing, swirling, twitching aliveness that can make the actor such a pleasure to watch on screen.”
Because human’s don’t move that way. Our humanity is represented in our frailties. Anyone watching me at the beginning of an aikido class would have no doubt of my humanity: I groan when I get up, have to used my hand to help push off the tatami, and then wait until the circulation comes back to my legs. After that I limp into the exercises.
What makes us human are our aches and pains, our failures and all our little quirks and foibles. We do not move smoothly through life. We stumble. We “suffer the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune … the Heartache and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to.”
And then, because I couldn’t be distracted enough by Norwegian fjords, the Arctic Circle and the Northern Lights, I started to think about how all that applied to aikido.
Obviously, I started with myself. I have written before on the problem of teaching “old man’s aikido.” I’m sixty-one now and I physically can’t do some of the things I could thirty years ago. The knees don’t bend as well or as far as they used to (or rather, they certainly bend the same, but they don’t get up as well once they’re down!), and I definitely don’t have the same physical power or speed.
I acknowledge that since my teens, my hearing has got worse, by my forties I needed glasses for reading, and in my fifties my hair was gone and when I reached my fifties, my hair was vanishing and what was left was turning grey and my wrinkled skin had lost its snap. Arthritis means that I find shikko, hanmi handachi and sieza waza and kokyu dosa difficult to perform. In short, I’m slowly falling to bits.
But I like to think I replaced the things I have lost in my aikido with improved technical ability and greater sensitivity. It is a lesson learned from a man I used to practise with who had suffered a brain aneurism which had resulted in partial paralysis of his right side. It meant he could not easily tenkan on techniques like kotegaeshi. He had adapted this “weakness” and drew uke round his body and into the technique – you literally ran onto the wrist lock with all your impetus and body weight. Naturally, it was a variation of kotegaeshi which I have included in my own arsenal.
So my techniques are my own unique flavour, which favour my weaknesses, and it’s only when I see photos and videos of myself singularly failing to “maintain the vertical” when it is something I am constantly telling my students to do that I cringe.
Nevertheless, I should not deliberately pass on my little cheats to my students, unless I do it in a very conscious way, explaining what I’ve done and why.
And the same applies to them. I see young ones who want to rush around and slam-bang everywhere. Ones who have started at an older age tend to be more cautious, and then there are those who carry some specific injury or condition. They all have their own style and my job is to help them do the best possible technique they can within those boundaries.
Since I’ve made one Shakespeare reference already, I suppose it’s fair to say that most of us come to aikido in the fourth age of his Seven Ages of Man:
Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And it’s that recklessness which gives us the wisdom of experience which makes us such a know-all in the fifth age, before our assertiveness becomes a joke in the sixth age and we end up in the seventh age:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Shakespeare was probably being a little harsh, but we’re none of us perfect – in fact just the opposite. We are an agglomeration of imperfections, by and large, doing our best.
To return to “Uncanny Valley” and my original point for a moment, CGI characters in films like “Polar Express” and “TinTin” do not make eye contact with each other, they do not relate to each, they do not make a connection. They are what one reviewer called “soul dead”.
We, on the other hand, perceive and accept the imperfections in each other and accepting them is one of the things that makes us human, which makes us “soul alive”.
We should revel in our imperfections and build on our weaknesses. After all, we want to be human, not computer-generated perfections.