Secrets of the Art: the Real Facts

Traditional Roach

One of us wrote to that one guy whose sausage web site had all the incredible recipes, complimented his site, thanked him, and of course pestered him with questions. He wrote back, and answered all the questions, but also sent the following: "I wanted to share what I know about salami in particular...you know how the old-timers are they always leave out 1 or 2 key ingredients so no one can make it right."

Tinker: Traditional cooks? And salami?

Neo-traditional: Sure. After all his patron, Guan Gong, is the patron of martial artists, warriors, and chefs.

Practical: And the salami is good, like grandma used to make.

<SMACK>

Troll: Sorry, Troll hit New Age just in case.

Practical: Seriously, that sausage site is the, IMHO, one of the finest homepages we have ever seen put

forward from an enthusiast on any topic, with an incredible collection of excellent recipes and tips. This is

the type of site that people way back 10 years ago were saying would be lost to the commercialization

 of the internet. It's good to see they were wrong. The coolest place to buy sausage and home

butchery supplies, although the price on some hardware is not the best price--spices, casings, cures

 etc. in addition to actual fermentation start cultures, can't be beat: www.butcher-packer.com

Sadly that is so very true. A lot of cooks drop things out and sometimes die before they ever get around to telling anyone. This guy's recipes, however, are so spot on that its all there. However, I've been trying to put together some recipes for years and it can be very aggravating - I never did get them right. We found it funny though because it is, both in appearance and many other ways, similar to both the teaching of  and frequent complaints surrounding Traditional Martial Arts.  

It comes down to this:  without the requisite background in sausage making, it would be difficult to realize what sets his recipes apart from others, and without recognizing the necessary attention to details, one might not follow the directions. Since he isn't writing for beginners, that problem still exists with these recipes. Check out the recipe for hot dogs. It looks fantastic and workable. So some young innocent decides to try to make them. Caveat Botulor.  Making hot dogs in the home is not easy. If you use too large batches, if you use ice water, if you don't hold at precise temperatures (and that is assuming you were able to stuff them into those small lamb skins without them prematurely bursting out), then you risk things "smearing" where the fat melts and everything runs together and you get meat sticks that have the texture (and almost the taste) of those big giant pink erasers. So now you are stuck: you are compelled to eat them because you just spent hours making the damned expensive things, yet your final product is just plain crap. You certainly can't sell it to anyone with taste buds and you can't share it with your friends if you want them to stay friends. In fact, you will probably spend countless hours DEFENDING them because at least they are "home-made".

Practical: So homemade crap is good?

Tinker: Well, if you believe the Luddites...

Here is our analogy is best - even with the details, but lacking the the background or training to understand why those details are important , you can still end up with crap. This is especially if you skip parts because you think you understand and let things run together.  Something many just don't get with Traditional Martial Arts training. We are talking here of an intact living tradition that knows why it exist. Not the the guys that jump around in white pjs who call themselves "traditionalists" without understanding the why and wherefore:  those people are ritualists, or more precisely empty ritualists. In the case of the charcutiers and their traditional ilk, there is good reason to protect the secrets of their oeuvre and leak out things with small details missing. It was your client base. Even in the old days of the guilds moving into the unions, you needed to maintain this knowledge so that people would need you. People would make their own stuff, but they will come back to you, if only for special occasions, when your stuff is simply better. This was the idea of guild secrets: having carried down the collective experience of the line of sausage-makers the tricks that help you make a better or more consistent product.

Now in the old days, this approach was similarly applied to a lot of stuff. although with different motivations depending on the culture and the art. You could either be holding back from the smelly peasants in case you had to further suppress them, or you could be hiding from the "effete" upper class in case you needed to have an uprising--which may not, and did not, ever come, but it gave you some motivation. You could be keeping secret techniques that keep your stylists alive

Practical: Ah, yes, hatchling, we call it gun

Troll:  you call traditional "hatchling?"  You drinking Troll:  you call Traditional "hatchling?"  You drinking RAID last night?.

Practical: Relax,  its a just a expression,

Troll: called suicide?

So there was motivation for closed door practices, just not directly for survival or profit, but, driven either by a desire to change or maintain the status quo. 

Scholaristic: Ranting in generalizations and simplifying here, nevertheless, these are two

of the bigger fish in terms of ideological MA thumping, but sadly not the only fish.  It

of course begs many questions, one of the biggest being what exactly is a "martial art"

 and bypasses Draeger's caste specific and hoplologically based assertions.

Neo-Traditional Roach:  That's because those guys haven't figured out the difference between a "role," and an "identity." 

In some cultures, your fighters were playing a role, in others an identity... in some, both. 

But you can't reduce it too far, without stifling innovation.  Quality innovation, that is...

crap innovation will stifle itself within a generation or two.

Another reason, terribly under-rated, was the knowledge base. Certain techniques and approaches may not have even the terms to describe them in the common vocabulary. This is reason scientific jargon developed, although Snow's misbegotten followers do not understand it. You can not define tensor behavior using normal terms: you either redefine terms (curl is my favorite) or create new ones from odd words (think quark).

Tinker: You can give other examples: the use of the term "upsetting" in blacksmithing

Neo-traditional: or the tones in Eastern music. It doesn't mean what you'd think.

Of course, at some point,  you get the Jimmy Hoffas of the world and various teamster and waterfront figures and their international ilk. What was a guild system except  the knowledge that was so closely guarded isn't the issue -anyone can learn the requisite knowledge to be a mason, an electrician, a plumber - but the access to the work is controlled. The point is the information and knowledge has been disseminated. The basics of most of this information can be readily learned. So it isn't the information that is guarded anymore, it is simply the position and the ability to practice your skills for money that is protected, and not in a family sense, but in a "family" sense. Endorsed franchised rights, that came from a real control of skills degenerates into a political racket. It is easy enough to hire a group who are not members and who actually may do better work, but you will need to put up with the giant inflatable rats, picket lines etc.

Ok, so the point of stewing all this cassoulet...

Tinker:  Hmmmm  Cassoulet...I remember living in that fancy restaurant...

Practical: You mean the bean stew? with all the meats? Hmmmmm.

 I think the part about needing the requisite background is obvious in terms of the analogy to TMA.  If it isn't, well then your particular weltanschauung is most likely informed by either a "modernist" or a sport fighter mentality.  However, it goes deeper than that because martial arts requires a hands-on guidance in relation to others. It's not just being able to taste on your own and say "needs more cayenne". Some guys often rail against "traditional" teaching and "secrets" because they assume, and the assumption is valid for some ritualists, that it is sort of a modern development out of the guilds. They thinks it is a sort of union that while you may have the same knowledge, it isn't accepted because you still need the membership card. In fact I saw one discussion where persons were talking about "closed" traditions being "stupid" because, with the internet and cameras, everyone knows how to do everything  anyway.  On the other hand, you have the combatives crowd pointing out that all you need to survive are shitty tasting, rubbery hot dogs. Most of whom refuse or fail to realize that the sausage meister can stuff his casings to the tastes of different audiences, but see the black jelly bean discussion elsewhere.

Tinker: Funny how the two groups that hate each other so much take the same position re: the traditionalists.

So we have the case of even with the sausage recipes, even with the hot dog recipes, most of them are going to produce erasers. Can you eat erasers? Sure. Can you "survive" off erasers? For the most part. But like a famous psychologist once remarked in a different discussion:  "cavemen may have survived in spite of their diet, not because of it."  Try eating the erasers when your constitution changes and your bowels age. Just another facet of survival: or you could go with the mass produced things that are called hot dogs or those oh so processed "Italian" salamis in some supermarkets that are nutrition-less, tasteless, and probably pointless - but what is the long term consequence.  Often it is the "family" part that matters beyond any other consideration. Not necessarily a family in as father to son, but the formation of a social unit in which the transmission of the knowledge is valued specifically for the transmission itself, for the value of learning from the past and carrying over to the future. It is a family/guild system in many ways without the driving profit base, and in terms of contemporary American society, a secret society without even the considerations of keeping the peasants down, or toppling the rich.

 What some don't realize either is that it isn't simply a matter of putting up a recipe that is "correct," hell, even that has been done to death. It is a matter of time invested in learning all the things that make the hot dogs delectable. Some people complain about keeping "secrets" for no reason.  If it were just a matter of handing over the recipes and counting on an already existing background, then they might be right. However, it is also a matter of investing time in *each other*. It is the transmission itself that is important, and it is not something that can be handed over, but something  that takes long and painstaking practice on the part ALL parties.

In the end I think I now understand more fully the traditional Chinese response to the question: "Would you teach me what you know?" "Why should I waste my time?" Try saying that to an American young buck who wants you to teach him. Many get so heartily offended by that response that they don't seem to realize that it is *not* rhetorical, all you have to do is answer the question...correctly. Value, where you apply it is your choice, makes all the difference in "traditional" enterprises.

Tinker:  The kicker being, to echo Cheng Man-ch'ing, "there are no secrets". It's all there, all the time,

but it comes in stages over time. It's attitude and assumptions, the lack of time in that water things down

---which sadly is the state of the greater majority of things calling themselves TMA today--watered down

, nonsensical, empty ritual. Highly reminiscent of one of the old lawyer jokes: "Its 99%of lawyers that ruin it

 for the rest of them." No wonder a young hatchling, eyes idealistically filled with visions of UFC and

Pride should stand up and say "thank God I am no traditionalist, but an MMA.

Troll: Hatchling not very smart? Nest get hit with Raid like New Age?

Neo-Traditional:  No, Troll, that's the irony of the situation.  In the end, even these guys

develop a traditional stance.  Not the same traditions, mind you, but traditions nonetheless,

based on the context of  what's dripping into their kitchen sink.  Either what they're

doing dies stillborn, or it becomes the very thing against which they rail...