Tools, or training with a sharp katana
July the first
Mid afternoon finds me sharpening my cooking knifes. Doing so I smile at my son, who is not here. He is likely to be sharpening his own knifes in the restaurant that he works. I cook for my beloved Ch, his mother, and he cooks for his clients. I smile at all that, but not only. One of the first things I bought for myself were my cooking knifes, some 30 years ago in Switzerland. The first decade or so I kept them sharp, to the little sharp and little awkward smiles of my guests. “Do they have to be that sharp”, they asked. I answered yes, of course, and smiled myself back. The time has passed, though, and a day came that my son, then studying for becoming a cook, made a grimace at my knifes. “they are blunt, dad” he said. I might have tried one or another lame explanation, but they were blunt, and that was that. Ayden bought the same german steel that I bought before, but his new ones could slice anything with a soft turn of the wrist. Not mine, not anymore. I let them go blunt. So I bought a wetting stone, on top of the well used sharpening steel I had, and slowly I learned to restore the edge of my tools.
About nine years ago I grabbed my first bokken, the wooden sword used to learning japanese fencing, iaido. Eight years ago I bought an iaito, a reasonably balanced but blunt aluminium alloy piece in the form of a katana, and I have used it since, day in and day out. Time has passed, indeed. Since a couple of weeks I own a shinken -or alive sword- a true steel katana forged and sharpened in Japan. This is the one tool that I will never have to sharpen myself. Its cutting edge will remain sharper than a shaving knife for the coming decades. Instead of teaching me sharpening, this katana is teaching me to cut. I had been told that the change from an iaito to a shinken will give me focus, which is true. A meter of sharpened steel moving at speed is perfectly capable of cutting any finger or limb that happens to be in the wrong position. Knowing this, my iaido is indeed becoming more focused.
But that is not even half of it.
Tools gave us the capability of shaping the world to our needs and follies. Not everybody I know happens to like the film 2001, but neither anybody finds that jaw-axe turning into a space ship farfetched. We know in our bones that commanding our tools is commanding our world. So we know that learning to make a cutting weapon precluded our cutting the world. It is only recently that we have begun to question our endless appetite for nature’s destruction. Perhaps our tools destroy more than what they build? Perhaps we should not shape all of our world into our follies? Perhaps our tools have taken a life of their own and we don’t command them anymore. Perhaps they have commanded us all along?
I take my shinken then, and go through the katas we practice, sequences of an imagined combat situation. I cut nothing but air, and yet the build of this, my new sword, is changing my movements and my thinking already. I came to iaido with a long list of frustrations and anger. Some of it found a way in my style, which was coarse and rough. I like to believe that along the years I have made peace with some of my own anger, and then my iaido has become less coarse and perhaps more gentle.
But this new shinken does not allow me to move coarsely. One could not use an scalpel to chop a tree, neither an axe is capable of cleaning a wound. If I move my new sword with the strength that I used in my blunt iaito, this sharp blade resists me. But if I hear it and feel it, if I squeeze my fingers when I know the blade and myself are ready, then and only then will this sword slice the air as only a shinken can, and I will know that those years of trying have not been in vane, and I will know that this shinken is only beginning to show me the road ahead.
This is a tool that is shaping me, indeed. I like to believe that the lethality of this sword will help me to become gentler. If only we would have the time to understand our tools better.
If only.