Aikido mythology at Aikido Journal

 

My comment:

 

Thanks again for your faithful ongoing work in clarifying where literal history intersects with the interpretation of ideas associated with aikido. In my experience, there are often very different expectations when professional martial artists and professional scholars end up in the same conversation (or even in the same personality).

 

I sometimes see martial artists presupposing that truth can only be found in simplicity of expression (perhaps “either he said these words or he didn’t - which is it?”), whereas those accustomed to treating language critically have been trained to assume that any use of language is a complex of meanings (literal, figurative, factual, imaginal) which second hand transmission and translation make even more problematic.

 

It has been my delight to discover in many martial artists one particular virtue that applies here, and from which scholars certainly benefit. That is the assumption that, while helpful ideas may come from many sources, there is only one place to receive communication with certain provenance, and that is the mouth of the person claiming the ideas involved. Even so, any speaker, no matter how precise, makes mythology: an imaginative way of cultivating understanding and building systems through language with enough room for the full range of both fact and fiction.