The sharp smile of the Cheshire Cat is known to hang in the air—like perfume or less pleasant alternatives—after its owner vanishes. The smile of the Mona Lisa, in cahoots with the eyes, is said to persecute hapless viewers wherever they move in the room, should they find any space to move through the permanent throng surrounding the Lady. The so-called archaic smile adorns countless human faces sculpted in the sixth century B.C.E., continuing to flash through the glass and the velvet of museums, continuing to say, exquisitely, nothing.
I could of course expand the list by invoking devilish smiles in a good way, devilish ones in a very bad way (think Jack Torrance of The Shining), those of a loving dog (which would be so hard to capture in painting), those that once won my idiot heart, and those that are a meager offering to unpredictable, blood-drawing yet bountiful Argentine demiurges. If, however, I am to speak strictly of mysterious smiles, there is a new one I’d like to add to the above.
The aikido smile.
This specimen is often found fluttering upon the lips of both those black-or-blue-skirted masters performing bone-crushing techniques with the relaxed displacement and repositioning of their bodies, and their light-footed students who demonstrate the extent of their learning by the sheer miracle of surviving what is done to them, gracefully springing back up after every brutal pass. Certainly, the technique is not the real aikido, and its flawless performance is only a drill for the reprogramming of the connections between the mind, the body, and the spirit. (Equally certainly, the real attack and the real fight wouldn’t look at all like the spectacle of these feline rolls and flips, but I deliberately opened this can of worms right here, just so it could attract the fervent opponents of aikido, all those who will spend a juicy hour pontificating on the history, theory and practice of aikido not working, without ever questioning what it means for a martial art to work, often without having ever tried it themselves, and sometimes believing that they finished learning it). The can is left open there, so the rest of us could move on and get to the smile in peace.
Technically, it’s no mystery that such a smile exists. Anyone who practices at a dojo for a few months will see it break through a dull, listless evening practice, when most people are still dwelling in the mire of their minds and whatever they had to endure at work, this ray of warm light crinkling the corners of some trickster’s eyes as a tower of muscle suddenly topples, or a face crashes into the mats ejecting a silvery web of spittle. Anyone following aikido communities around the world will catch fleeting glimpses of this odd smile in videos and photos, regardless of the age, the nationality and the level of expertise of the practitioners—Shirakawa Ryuji in an international seminar, smiling as he folds like laundry an uke twice his size; Christian Tissier on the beach, smiling at a horizontally airborne Bruno Gonzalez, who is smiling back at him.... Most importantly, anyone who has been practicing for a few years will find themselves smiling and being smiled at just like this, once or twice at least. The mystery rather lies in the meaning of the smile and I, based on my still very green understanding, can interpret it in two distinct ways.
The first, simpler, explanation is that aikido is just like an iceberg, with only a small portion jutting out into the surface world, lending itself to open sight and articulation. The rest of the massive knowledge consists of sensations, shifts and modulations of such subtlety that can neither be seen by the keenest eye nor put into intelligible words for teaching. When practitioners smile, it is because they feel such a sensation electrifying their bodies, or because they know they are inducing the elusive sensation in the bodies of their partners. They smile because, after years of sweat and doubt in an art that unnerves by the slowness of the progress it permits (that eliminates the impatient the way nature eliminates the sickly), they finally feel aikido happening. Smiles, grins, giggles, shrill squeals of joy and wonder—all are welcome at that point.
Then again, there could be a deeper meaning to the aikido smile.
In a video interview, the aforementioned Tissier Shihan, who holds the rank of 8th Dan in Aikikai, defines aikido as “the search for the ideal of purity through gesture.”* He then repeats the definition to let it sink in.
When I heard him speak the words, his mention of a “search for purity” instantly resonated with me despite the limitations of my knowledge in aikido, because I had been haunted for years—I still am—by another master talking about his wholly other art in a strangely similar way. That master is none other than Kafka, who one day scribbled in his diary words to the effect of, “When I write a simple sentence, such as, ‘She opened the window,’ it is already perfect.”
The example he gives is not representative of his vertiginous, bottomless parables, or even of his more mundane, biting vignettes. Given that he is far too intelligent to boast without reason, one cannot help asking what he might mean when he says that such a seemingly boring sentence is already perfect. If there is no context for philosophical or psychological depth, no evidence of wit, or of an elegant turn of phrase, where could the perfection lie?
Of course, that question is misleading in itself since it implies perfection as a static object, a trait lying somewhere and waiting to be observed. Whereas Kafka, I believe, talks about the perfection of the gesture of writing. The purity of the moment—the purity of him being in the moment--when he sits at his desk, leans on the paper and writes the words, ‘She opened the window.’ This gesture cannot be observed from the outside and cannot be taught. It can only be experienced directly, if and when one acts with the same kind of purity. When it happens, people tend to smile.
Indeed, I suspect that the concept of purity that Tissier Shihan invokes in the definition of his art is of the same order as Kafka’s understanding of perfection in his writing. Whether the way is literary or martial, in its highest ether it becomes one and the same thing. And this is where I meet my limit; I cannot tell you what that “thing” is. I cannot articulate any better what I only intuit.
I can, however, smile like they do.
London, December 2021
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* The interview was recorded on August 8, 2018. It is available on YouTube in seven parts, and the definition I mention appears in Part 5 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecsO01UH4Ro&t=589s