Steven Barnes uses the Tai Chi concept of jin, rooted energy that flows from feet through the body, as a metaphor for creative work. He traces how The Keeper, a graphic novel he made with his wife Tananari about a grandmother who strikes a deal with a demon, grew from her memory of her great-grandmother on oxygen into a story with emotional impact.
Hi, Steve Barnes here wanted to read you a little segment from the Tai Chi classics. The jinn should be rooted in the feet, generated from the legs, controlled by the waist and expressed through the fingers. The jinn is the explosive energy, the whip power, that results when each segment of the body is accelerated in proper sequence. With a whip, this starts with the body conveying momentum to the handle of the whip, the wave accelerating down the length of the whip until the tip actually breaks the sound barrier crack. Same is true in martial arts, but different arts take different routes to generating it. The simplest being simply to aim at accelerating the entire body with more of a smash endpoint. Sophistication comes with understanding and time. That gin, then, is that pop? The same thing is true in every aspect of life in writing. I've noticed that Tananari, my writing partner and wife, talks about the Keeper, our new graphic novel available on Amazon. The story is about a grandmother who makes a deal with a demon to protect her granddaughter. It's rooted in a night Tanari spent with her great grandmother's bedroom. Great Grandma was dying of emphysema and on oxygen. The hissing sound haunted Tanamore with feelings of loss and fear. What would she do if Great Grandma stopped breathing? What did death mean? Was the aged woman on the bed just another version of Tenanire of herself? In years to come, if you can step back and look at that emotion, you'll see personal survival, family, love, the yearning for knowledge, and even a spiritual inquiry, all in that childish question, what's happening here? Can you see the different levels? If you can, you can really take advantage of what it is. I'm going to say when, many years later, Denon Re decided to write a script based on the event, we talked it through from originating emotional impulse to characters to the world, the specific events that had to occur to match a concept, even the nature of the creature itself. Then the question of meaning and thematics came in. From emotion to intellectual strategy, the structure had to hold the heat of the original notion. Then it was just do the work, chop wood, carry water. Tanamore had the original motion. We plotted and planned it together. She wrote the first draft. You can always tell who writes our first drafts by whose name comes first in the byline. And we polished and rewrote it together. But the originating emotion was the rooted in the feet aspect, the legs doing the heavy lifting. It's the transformation of primitive survival fear into artistic impulse. The waste that controls the mind. Controls is the mind. Trained by years of writing, reading and teaching, and the fingers that express is the capacity to create. The grace notes, the filigree, the skillful use of language, the poetic intertwining of events, characters, philosophies and themes that create a seamless experience for the reader. Jin in Tai Chi art in writing, successful art in the sense that the editor John Jennings felt the original impulse, felt the emotions, the craft that we used to create. It allowed him to submerge himself in the world and where we created and feel. Naneri felt decades ago. Feel, felt what she and I felt. We were planning and structuring all that work just to protect the emotions of the child that is still alive within the woman I love. The whip cracks, the gin pops. The art creates a shiver. If you can see how the physical can be a metaphor for the emotional intellectual, you're grasping the power of bringing these aspects together in one place and time. All else is illusion. There is no separate use of mind, body and heart. Always the three are together. But sometimes we're out of balance. We lose power because some link in the chain is weak or the accelerations aren't happening in proper sequence and timing. If the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service, then all education in life should be to increase our personal happiness and or to accelerate our ability to contribute to the world, our community, our family, the child within us, and the tender, beautiful heart within that child. Seek to move, think and feel in the moment, but with awareness of the overall path. Ask with every step and action. Who am I and what is true? These questions will never fail you. Namaste. If you'd like to join the Fire Dance Tai Chi group, Please go to www.firedancetaichi.com where you're going to be getting instruction every week on how to build a physical practice that impacts the entirety of your life. Take care.
