You face your opponent, your companion. You hold your sword, which more or less is your defense and your attack. She holds hers. Yours points to her heart, as yours points to hers. Both of you look at each other, not at the blades. Both of you see each other. The sword, both swords are but irrelevant bamboo or wood or steel between us. You will approach her, increasing that tension between the two of you, that tension that happens when your sword, and so hers, get’s close to a distance from which you, or her, can strike. She is seeing you, and so you know that there is no space for attacking her. So you retreat, perhaps. The tension is still there, and both of you are seeing each other. The tension will come and go, she will get closer and go back again, and so will you. Both of you wait for that moment, that moment when the other isn’t able to bear it anymore, when the tension has to escape, has to flow away! and an attack has to happen. If you have been seeing her, whenever she starts her move, you will have already hit her. To attack is to open yourself. The one that is more at peace is the one that will see the point of no return, the pressure that can’t be hold anymore. So he, or she, will strike first, and all will be over.
So you talk and talk and talk. She draws, and talks, and draws again. Her sketches are good, but they are not quite what you mean. Both of you fall silent, and remember a clip in youtube, and look at it. Closer, closer. Both of you remember, almost at the same time, that angle of that camera in a film of Fellini, that’s it!... both no, that isn’t. You are getting closer, but also you are getting far away. So you both talk again, and again. You write two sentences that almost almost are there, and then again, they aren’t. Both of you are working hard getting closer to formulate, to articulate that idea that both of you are chasing. You know that you can’t do this on your own, neither she. You need each other, you can’t without the other. It is the other that pushes you, the one to which you do not want to yield, the one from which you want to be first. It is maddening, since you are so close, so close! but not yet, not quite yet there... so you keep circling each other ideas, you keep trying to hear what the other really tries to say. It will happen, both of you know that. It will happen.
I do practice kendo, and I have heard that what I wrote above might describe what an encounter should be. I still don’t really know, because I am not at peace with myself, because I am still so unbelievable clumsy with my sword, because it is so difficult to see, to really see, the other. I write, and I think and I have discovered couple of ideas once upon a time, and I will discover one or two more in the time that has been given to me. I know that I have never done that on my own, I do remember the increasing tension, the needed peace, the needed capacity of seeing, really seeing what is it what we are telling to each other. I wil go on talking, and writing, and doing my equations again and again, searching, chasing.
For as long as somebody faces me, I will raise my sword and point at his or her heart; at the heart of my opponent, my companion.