Blog on the Lillypad
Monday, September 27, 2004
 | On the Death of a Martial Artist
The rain is falling hard today. Early this morning a younger black belt veteran from Hong's taekwon do school told me that one of the school's early founders has died. In the 1980's, when I was young, this man was approaching 50, a man who had studied judo in Japan during military service there, gotten a black belt at the Kodokan, and then met Billy Hong in the late 1960's in Greenville SC. Billy Hong's amazing spirit and devastating kicks won him over, and he dedicated his tiny, hand-built training hall on Paris Mountain to tae kwon do. In those days, when Mr. Hong was still alive, Mr. Hong ran his students barefoot over Paris Mountain. Life for anybody in a Billy Hong school was measured in sweat and the smell of raw pine boards slowly drying and seasoning. |
I was a relative late comer. I started my training in the school on Laurens Road. But I remember the men who had been the first students. I remember doing pushups from a handstand while somebody held me by the ankles. I remember jumpovers---30 - 40 at a time, sideways, over a kneeling person. Life at Hong's was always sweat, suffering, hazy vision, bruised feet, bruised shins, but powerful, powerful youth. It was life. Your body would go down to nothing---sheer exhaustion, and then you felt your life force still bursting through you.
The man who hand built the first school was not a Christian man, not at all. Budo was his way. But I respected him. As it turns out, he recently developed cancer, and rather than face a lingering end and the loss of his dignity, he put a shotgun against his chest and pulled the trigger.
I don't know what to think. That's the way of Budo, to prefer to drop from the branch in full bloom like the cherry blossom, without regret, without tears, without clinging to another day.
And yet, true honesty would dictate that to know our estate, to truly comprehend what man is, what even the mightiest warrior is, we would have to undergo the loss of our strength and glory. Because it's true that no human being stays in full flower. He was wrong to take his life. It was a gesture of despair, no matter how bravely he did it, a refusal to see and know the truths that only mortal suffering and slow death give us. There is a truth in the way death comes, reminding each of us of our estate. To say, "No I am strong," when the weakness is growing, and then to pull a trigger to insist upon a thing that is not, is not the way of gazing unflinchingly at one's fate.
Yet there is in me a respect for him, my lost and fallen friend. He was brave when I knew him, and he had a generosity in him when he was strong. Our lives were not marked by sweat and the smell of pine and bruised feet. But when we thought that was what life was, he tried to stay true to it, and I admired him.
My memoirs of training in martial arts for most of my life are posted here.
