Done Bleeding (No Relation)
My blue belt is the excuse I’ve always wanted toquote Bruce Lee.
As of eleven hours ago, I’m a blue belt in Brazilian jiujitsu. My first instinct is to rib myself over my second-lowest rank in a trendy martial art. I won’t. Self-seriousness is the mall ninja trademark, but this is the first time in my life I’ve put two years of effort into a qualified achievement. Yeah, I’m proud.
Jiujitsu is largely decentralized, meaning each school has different standards for a given belt. Not only that, but within a given belt grade, some will be better fighters. That’s where I have to focus on the art part of martial, because I haven’t managed to kill the braincop that wants those full marks I missed in high school chemistry. I’m not a blue belt because I aced my way through a test of forms that have become quite undemanding after 24 months of training, nor am I less of one because I can’t handily outgrapple every one of my juniors. I’m a blue belt because time and effort conspired me towards a vague yet comprehensive personal standard. Bruce Lee said martial arts are about “expressing yourself honestly”. In that sense, they are much like the fine arts. Even further: if there’s a formula for art, it’s intent to express plus sheer work. It’s my blue belt, and it took me two years to make, and it’s not the best belt I’ll ever make, it might not even be the best belt I make in two years, but it’s mine, it took two years, and I won’t disrespect it with comparison.
So why do I disrespect the rest of my art?
The acceptation of fine art as having no practical value is nuclearly damaging. If literature has no real use, it stands that the process behind it was of equal uselessness. There could have been no work involved. And if work didn’t happen, the piece must’ve been torn out of the glimmer-hearted author. Therein authenticity. A piece created with patience of labor can’t be said to exist, that’s not a thing artists do.
This is how the cult to the tortured artist is sustained. I’ve suffered through eight months of psychosis during which I produced twice as many paintings, a medium which I’d never approached before. The paintings were amazing. The process was unsustainable. It would have killed me if I hadn’t stopped it with every neuron capable of rationale. But this is the quickest path to stardom. Especially if it kills you, because what’s less work than being dead? Van Gogh with the ear off, Mayhem bootleg with Dead’s brains all over the cover.
I wasn’t training then. Neither when I published HELL, a necromancy on the worst of my misanthropy. It took a full year after my mental break to start jiujitsu. My grandmother died of cancer, my father soon after. That led to PURGATORIUM, which was mostly de-archival, and a lot of missing training to cry. By the time my other grandmother died, all I could manage was one article.
One of these days I’ll get the names that protagonize this story, I remember them being pretty famous actors, but anyway one of them’s American and the other one’s a Knight Bachelor, and the American shows up looking like shit, he’s a method actor. And they have a conversation like:
SIR: What’s wrong?
AMERICAN: I’m playing a starving man, so I haven’t eaten all day.
SIR: My dear, have you tried acting?
I don’t expect the American held to his regime for more than the shoot’s worth. Yet so many obscure artists are tangled up with this need for legitimacy that we keep it up for our entire career. We’re not just paid less to suffer more, though economy is a deciding factor in burnout. We’re also, on the level we do control, paying ourselves less to suffer more. We reject the little pleasure of pride, starving our heart as though it were not enough to be deprived in body.
The mechanics tested in my blue belt exam aren’t rote, I worked to make them rote. Hearing from a world champion that I demonstrated the best technique out of my little group of ex-white belts made me, in that bubble, uncomplicatedly happy. It didn’t relieve me of my pursuit for validation, but neither did I fight it, because I knew what I’d cultivated. If we can’t, as social animals, ex nihilo pride points as efficient as those handed to us by our audience, we at least have to believe our audience.
Technically skilled art isn’t better than amateur productions, only differently good. But a portion of that good must come from the technique, and that technique springs from the disconnect between your effort’s limits, and that of the other. If I’d spent this much time drawing instead of writing, I might be able to freehand the stunning characters my friends design on a dime. If I studied dance rather than grappling, I might have my wife’s 180 split. If you’re an artist, you, too, are surrounded by people that want you because you are, or will be, capable of things they aren’t. If you don’t have this community, finding it is the only way your creativity will survive.
Bear with the arrogance of comparing my craft to one that’s been honed for fifty years. Glennray Tutor’s photorealism eludes traditional meaning much more than the gestural abstraction often derided as senseless. Looking at Sprite, all I can tell is that it is the summation of decades of concerted effort. And if I can extend that awe towards other artists, and I have no choice, because high-caliber art introduces you to wonder as swift as a good throw does to the floor, I can turn it inwards as pride.
If you’re a marginalized artist, it’s a duty to the self to find such pride (lowercase p) in your work. Because the market wants your heart instead. See how many bestsellers are marketed to a tune like “a triumph of vulnerability”. Random House doesn’t want my work so much as it wants my Identity and the way that Identity has touched my Grief and Loss and other such pains. But I’ve spent time enough in the crash site. It’s not that we must close ourselves from expressing what it’s like to live in hostility, only that we cannot do so out of artless sincerity forever.
Fighting and writing are misunderstood to come from nature: I tend to hear from men that they’d win any fight, and from women, that they could never write. They’re both wrong, in that they both underestimate the simplicity of distance required to succeed at either. Having a strong chin is good; not getting punched* is better. To “express yourself honestly” without vivisection, that’s no essential gift, that’s the product of work. Common wisdom in Brazilian jiujitsu goes that most people quit at blue belt. After class, the visiting judge teased me not to fall prey to this curse. No sir, I said, I intend to do this all my life.
*Strikes are illegal in Brazilian jiujitsu.
