Desperation

With the return of the self-conscious-self came an instant flood of concerns. I do not now know a single thing more about my situation than I knew the moment before. But now I am concerned, even panic-stricken about it. 

A new voice appeared with the specter. It is a voice that was absent these past three weeks.  I didn’t even know I was living without it. I had no self-awareness that I had not had my self-conscious-self talking to me. It just wasn’t there. Everything else was there, but not fear, anxiety, worry, concern, doubt…

A new tyranny overtakes me. I became obsessed with worry about my condition, about my situation.  When would it end: this inability to remember anything… this not knowing why I have walked into a room… this debilitating fatigue…

Suddenly, I am waiting for my brain… waiting for it to recover… waiting for it to return… waiting to be able to do something… anything.

It is not happening. Nothing is happening. I am not getting any better. Each day is exactly like the day before. No energy. No stamina. No ability to be on my feet for more than a few minutes. Each effort to do anything is followed by hours of collapse. Now it feels like a punishment.  I became desperate. 

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I have to do something. I do not have a brain to work with. But I still have hands. They still work. I will put them to work. I will rehabilitate myself by working with my hands. Maybe my brain will never come back to life, I mean, in a way that will let me use it for work, to make a living. Yes, working with my hands is a good idea. It might be all I have left.

I found an old Wooden Boat magazine.  I looked in the classified section in the back. I saw an ad for plans for a small row boat, a dinghy, made from plywood. The plans cost $25. I wrote a check. I put it in the mail.

The next day I went out to the mailbox. No plans. What? How can that be? I sent the money. I got the address right. Why were there no plans in my mailbox? I became very agitated. To hell with the plans! I don’t need plans! I used to design boats. I’ll design this one!

I call my sister. She lives down the street. I insist she come get me and take me to the lumber yard. She says no. I insist again, and again, until she gives up. She drove me in my truck to the lumber yard. I got two sheets of plywood. I don’t know how I did it. I am sure I did not load the truck. She drove it back to my house and backed it up the drive.

I don’t know how long the plywood sat on the back of my truck. It must have taken me a week to recover. Then I started to work. It is a ridiculous enterprise. I cannot work more than ten-minutes. I am wiped out for the rest of the day. But I keep doing it. Ten-minutes, each day, or each day that I can do it. There are many days that I can do nothing. I cannot get out of the hammock.

I often overdo it — if I work fifteen-minutes, instead of ten, I am done for two days. My bowels collapse. I am as weak as a kitten for hours, sometimes days. I am driven, I am manic. I am slow-motion-manic, if that makes any sense. I am desperate to recover and this project is my only way.

Finally, after weeks and weeks, I came to the point where I need to sand the joints of the hull. I sand every day. Five-minutes every day. That is all I can manage. Sanding is hard work. Pushing and pulling the sandpaper back and forth by hand. Pressing as hard as I can manage so the sandpaper grabs some wood. It is endless. It is exhausting. I keep at it.

Eventually, I finish the sanding. It must have taken three-weeks. The day I finish, I stand looking at the upside down hull, its rounded joints all made soft by my hard work.  Then, I notice something looking back at me from under my workbench. It is an electric sander. I look under the bench. I have not just one electric sander. I have five. All five sanders sat there all three weeks peeking out at me from under the bench. I laugh and I curse. I go in the house and collapse in the hammock. I am spent.

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Hope

It is three months since the brain injury. Memory is still only a memory. I am working with numbers, trying to see if I can remember two numbers at a time so I can make a phone call without having to use my fingers and the paper for every single number. It is a discipline. It wears me out.

It is short-term memory that is still missing. I call it functional memory. It is the memory which, when you don’t have it, makes it difficult or impossible to do things. You start out to do something, but you forget what it is. You stand in a room wondering why you have come there, or if you haven’t left the room you were in, you are wondering why you are standing up.

I finally learn to trust my feet. When I get up from the hammock and find myself walking into the kitchen with no idea why I am there, I stop stopping to try to figure it out. I learn to just kept moving. I learn to let my feet keep going. It seems to work. 

Eventually, I stop moving because the feet have taken me to a counter, or to the refrigerator. I stand and look at what is in front of me. I look at what is on the counter or what is in the refrigerator. It takes a while, but generally I will see something that makes me feel it is why I had come into the kitchen. Whether it actually is or not, I never know. But it makes me feel as if I have remembered.

Longer-term memory is not good either but it does not pose the same practical problems. One day I remember Nianzu. I don’t know why I remember him. But, I am glad that I do.  I had invited him to come to my class a couple of years before. 

I saw his name on a sign on a building in the middle of our small town. I walked up the stairs to his office. I went in. I waited for him to appear. I asked him to come to my class to talk about Chinese medicine. He says, in very few words, that his English is not good.

I am very understanding. I tell him he doesn’t have to talk at all if he doesn’t want to. And, anyway, doesn’t he do some kind of movement thing? I wave my arms up and down. He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand. He is trying to politely excuse himself from my invitation. I wave my arms again. He touches his hands together in front of himself and says, “Taiji?”

“Yes, that’s it!” I say, as if he has just agreed to something. 

“You don’t have to talk at all,” I insist. “You can just demonstrate that Taiji business.”

I am the ugly American. He is the polite Chinese. It isn’t a fair fight. He says he really doesn’t think he can. I insist that surely he can, no problem. I will pick him up at his office. I will take him to the University. I will bring him back to his office. All he will have to do is demonstrate that movement stuff. He won’t have to say a word. He finally nods his head in surrender. I think he mostly wants me to go away.

I pick him up at his office as arranged. We drive to the University. I ask him questions on the way. He talks about how what we now call Traditional Chinese Medicine was literally put together in one conference in 1954. 

Practitioners of traditional medicines were brought together from all corners of China. They were all put in a hall together. What came out was the codified version of traditional Chinese medicine that has been taught and practiced all over China ever since then; and is now taught around the world.

He talks about how random was the moment in time that captured an entire culture of medicine with a history older than China, a scope as broad as Asia, and a diversity as rich and varied as all the languages and cultures of the ancient Asian world. It was essentially ridiculous and miraculous. 

We park the car and walk to Woods Hall. He is impressed at the sight of the great open expanse of the grassy quadrangle in the center of campus. He comments that you would never see such a thing as this in China. 

“Never see what? I ask. “Such a big open space?”

“No,” he says. “Such an empty open space.”  

In China, he explains, a park like this would be full of people: people exercising, practicing Taiji and Qigong.

The class is a course called “Medicine, Health and Culture.” We are at the transition in the course between four-weeks spent in intensive study of the San people of Southern Africa. We have a treasure of film archives of one particular group of the San people. They became the object of study of a Harvard team of ethnographers in the early 1950’s at a time when they were still free-roaming hunter-gatherers in the open bush country of what became modern-day Botswana and South Africa.

The San practice a tradition of healing trance and dance which the class has seen film footage of so often by now that it has lost its strangeness. I ask if there are any questions about the San people before we move on to the next section of the course; a section on the major global healing traditions, including Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. 

One student asks what is this ‘stuff’ of healing that the San call “ki” and how do they get it and how do they transmit it in their hands-on healing dances. I tell the class that it is, apparently, some sort of ‘energy,’ or so it has been described in the literature, though I have no idea what that means. Then I introduce Dr. Li.

Nianzu stands up in front of the class. He doesn’t say a word. He motions the rest of us to stand up as well. Nobody moves. I stand up. The class stands up. Nianzu brings his hands towards each other in front of his belly. He starts to slowly open his hands away from each other, then slowly brings them closer together. I mimic him. The class starts to follow along.

Nianzu continues. We continue. Hands slowly moving away from each other. Hands slowly moving towards each other. Not touching. Just approaching, then moving apart. Palms facing each other, always.  Wrists relaxed, hands waving a little with the movement as if it was being done under water.

Then I begin to notice. First one student then another starts looking down at their own hands while they are still following along. Then I feel something. I look down too. What is this? Nianzu is not paying any attention to our discoveries. He just keeps the movement going, slowly. 

There it is, in our own hands. The answer to the question: “What is the “ki” stuff?”

The Chinese call it “Qi,” pronounced, “chee;” also spelled, “Chi.” Strangely, the Japanese call it “ki” exactly as the San people. Nianzu has brought us in contact with our own ‘energy.’ It is not an ‘idea.’ It is something actual. It can be felt. It can be experienced. It exists.

I remember this moment. It dawns on me that this might be a way. Could this strange but real other path of knowing give me an alternative foundation to build a new life upon? One that doesn’t rely on the return of my cognitive brain? 

I had become despairing that I may never get my brain back. It hadn’t even begun to come back in three months. This new idea gave me hope.

Nianzu has a new office in the next town. He is teaching classes in his waiting room. I go there. I start taking his classes. 

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 Ambi-valence

I must have seemed a very odd student to Nianzu. I signed up for every class he offered from the time I started to study with him. At one point, he said to me,

“You do not have to learn every form.  It is good to just learn one and practice it.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. Then I signed up for his next course. And the one after that.

There is an effect of brain injury which I didn’t understand when I was in the middle of it. I became a little manic. I became a little obsessive.  Perhaps it was this tendency which really helped me to become established in Qigong practice. 

Actually, it took me a long time to become established in my practice. The truth is, I went to class obsessively. I often did not practice at all between classes. I forgot to, or I was too exhausted. But, because I took every class, I went to classes often. This, I am convinced, is the reason I ultimately succeed in learning Qigong and incorporating it into my life. Actually, at the time, I pretty much built my life around it.

It wasn’t a smooth road, though. There is another aspect of brain injury that effected me almost every day. I became extremely ambivalent. Not only the ‘indifferent’ variety of ambivalence I mentioned already. Also, the bi-valent kind of ambi-valence. I was often both for and against things in equal measure, simultaneously — sometimes to a ridiculous degree.

I remember driving my truck to go to class. My hands are on the wheel. My feet are on the pedals. My head is out the window (literally) yelling, trying to turn me around. My mind is hurling scorn and ridicule at where I am going and what I am doing, even as I am driving to class. I hear my mind talking out loud, sometimes shouting out loud. It is saying:

“What do you think you are doing?”  

“Who do you think you are?”  

“Why are you going to this class?”  

“This guy in black pajamas: Who is he? Why are you following him?”

“You are being ridiculous!”  

“You are an idiot!” 

“You are being stupid!” 

“You are not Chinese!”

This voice went on and on, day after day, week after week. The body drove to class. The mind harassed and harangued the whole way there. My routine for the first year was to go after class to a pub down the street, drink a couple of beers and smoke a few cigarettes. 

The mind has its revenge. Yet, somehow, I kept going. 

The courses with Nianzu begin to blend into each other. In the early years, he conducts himself exactly as he did in my university class when I first saw him teach. The large waiting room of his clinic has a mirrored wall. We wait in the cleared waiting area for him to appear from the clinic rooms in the back.

Nianzu walks in. He is dressed in black silk Taiji tunic and trousers. He acknowledges us, then he turns his back to us and faces the mirror wall. Then he begins to move. We watch him from behind. We watch his front in the mirror. The mind moves back and forth between him and his image in the mirror. He moves. We follow. There is no talking.

Every once in a while a student asks a question. Nianzu folds his hands in front of his chest and gives a simple answer in halting English. He apologizes for his English. He turns around and goes back to moving. We go back to following him.

One student asks him how we should be breathing. When do we breathe in, when do we breathe out. Nianzu listens, then he says, “Just natural breathe…”  

“Don’t think about …” “Just breathe natural…”

The student isn’t satisfied. He says he read in a book that you have to breathe in just such a way and that it is very important to do it correctly.  The next week he brought the book to class. It is the book that made Tai Chi famous in the U.S., written by the man who brought the practice from Taiwan to the States 25 years before. He shows the book to Nianzu. He points to the diagram showing the ‘correct’ breathing. Nianzu stands in front of us looking at the illustration. He studies it for a long moment. Then he says, “Ah…. Editor make mistake…”

He closes the book and gives it back to the student. He turns around to face the mirror. He pauses. Then he starts to move. I follow him, letting my breathing be what it is, as it is, in a way that I think he means by “just breathe naturally.”

Nianzu taught many classes. He taught many forms. He taught the very popular forms, like Soaring Crane Qigong. He taught an esoteric Taoist form, Lang Ya Qigong, a previously secret form which he had been taught by his teacher, Dr. Yangzhong Shang. Traditionally, secret forms were passed from one teacher in one generation to one student of the next generation. This is how the forms survived the centuries as they were originally practiced. 

Dr. Shang instructed Nianzu to teach the Lang Ya form publicly for the first time in its history. I am among the lucky heirs to this teaching. I practice it virtually every day and have since I learned it nearly thirty years ago. 

One Spring, Nianzu offers a class he calls Taiji Circles. I sign up. He comes into the room as he always does. He faces the mirror wall and starts to move. We follow. Or, we try to follow. After a few weeks, something is apparently not going the way Nianzu thought it should. He says we have to keep practicing. We will work with this movement until we get it right, then, maybe, we will go to the next.

We come to class each week. We stand behind Nianzu. We make a gentle circle with one arm, the right arm, going in one direction, clockwise, scribing an arc through the air, returning to standing, then striking a second identical arc in the air, and a third, and a fourth…

We go on like this for a full hour, each week, week after week. Early on, someone asks him what is the name of the movement we are practicing. Nianzu doesn’t stop moving. He keeps making circles. Then he says, “Taipei.”

We went on like this for six full weeks. One movement. Taipei movement. One full hour each time. I wonder what will be the next movement. What will be its name? Will it be another famous city in China, “Beijing,“ or “Guanzhou?” Then we did it again the seventh week. 

On the eighth week Nianzu stood before us and announced that now he will teach us the second movement. Somebody asks what will be the name of the new movement. Nianzu turns to face the mirror wall. He pauses. He begins to move. This time his left arm scribes a gentle arc in the air, exactly like the arc the right arm had been scribing for 7-weeks, but now with the left arm and in the opposite direction, counterclockwise. Then he says, “Type B.”

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