Lurchcraft

Witness the birth of a new martial art based on necromantic principles, suitable for undead creatures of all kinds!

History and Derivation

At the tail end of 2015 it became clear to me that I needed a hobby, get out of the house more, see other human beings. I also needed (seriously needed) some exercise. So I decided to find a martial arts program to join.

The first art I studied, in the mid-eighties, in my earliest college days, was hapkido. I later discovered that this had been at one time the favored combat art of the CIA operations division. It was brutal. Extremely violent.

I was about the same height as the instructor, so I became one of his favorite test dummies for teaching techniques. I logged more time in the air than some commercial airline pilots.

It started to mess with my head. You know the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Hapkido was a hammer I couldn’t put down, even though I wasn’t great at it. I managed to put it down eventually.

So in 2016, I didn’t look for another hapkido class. I was more interested in pursuing fitness than ass-kicking, so I decided to find a softer art. One classified as internal, more concerned with body posture and musculoskeletal structure and flexibility and core strength, as opposed to external arts, which are more about strikes and kicks and throws. Ba gua seemed to be one of the softer soft arts, a cousin to tai chi and qi gong. But less trendy.

Once again, I wasn’t a great student. But I lost weight, rediscovered my sense of balance, and straightened out my incipient back issues from decades of office work.

If none of your back issues are too serious, ba gua will fix any of your vertebrae that have become misthreaded over the years, and strengthen all of the muscles that keep them straight. Tightens up your abdominal muscles too, so you’ll look like you’ve lost more weight than you have. That could be a draw to many folks.

None of this is to say that ba gua isn’t absolutely bad ass as a combat art. There’s a basic exercise of ten minutes, half an hour, maybe a whole hour, where every minute is spent taking a single agonizingly slow step, paying careful attention to posture and a balance of tension and relaxation. The end result of this, and many other exercises like this, is…. Um. Let me try to explain it.

You know how you’ve gone drinking with the crew now and then, and sometimes there’s this one guy who drinks too much and needs help to get home. Under ordinary circumstances he weighs maybe as much as 140 pounds, but somehow, drunk off his legs and passed out, he seems to weigh somewhere on the wrong side of eight hundred pounds. It takes four of you, sweating and straining, to get him into the backseat of a car, and once you get him home, you all leave him on the floor of the living room because his bedroom is upstairs, and fuck that.

Ba gua lets you be like that all the time, even in motion, fast or slow. Combatants roll off of you like water or bounce off of you like they ran into a tree. Meanwhile you’re circling and twisting around and tangling an opponent up in your limbs like twirling spaghetti onto a fork, then flinging them away. It’s like you’re the only flesh-and-blood person in a room full of plastic mannequins.

It’s kind of jaw-dropping to watch ba gua employed in a fight by someone who knows what they’re doing. Just watching the exercises, you’d never expect it.

Anyway, after a year and a half of attending classes religiously twice a week, I got downsized out of my job and had to drop out. Then I moved to a place where classes weren’t available—and also there was no room where I lived, indoors or outdoors, to practice. So there’s been a seven-and-a-half year hiatus before I tried to pick it back up. Or, rather, to start practicing the parts I remember.

I remember some of it. I’ve forgotten way more than I remember. The nearest master teaching classes is a little too far away for me to resume classes—or, more likely, start over again from the beginning to make sure I pick up everything I’ve lost. So it’s kind of an insult to the art to keep referring to what I’m doing now as ba gua.

So here. I’m officially doing my own thing, maybe somewhat derivative in principles, but not so you’d notice by looking.

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Ars Titubandi: In Theory

The art has many names: ars titubandi in the formal Latin, something like slegneh in the old pre-Sumerian-era language of the Scythian steppes, or, in a more colloquial English, lurchcraft.

Of course it’s not that old. But no one respects an art without the appearance of age and tradition. Not to say there isn’t a tradition to follow here, but in this case it’s a more New-Agey tradition of making a newly invented thing seem to have an unearned historic gravitas so that people will take it seriously. But, in this case at least, as a joke.

In the typical terms for describing martial arts, lurchcraft is an internal, open-handed art emphasizing utter relaxation of every muscle and element not involved in maintaining posture and motion, with poses and movements demonstrating unexpected flexibility and range of motion, often seeming unbalanced but preserving a moving “root.” The practitioner typically exhibits a lack of concern or even awareness, perhaps as if being puppeted like a marionette.

The organizing principles are (you should have guessed) necromantic in nature:

DEAD INSIDE

It’s popular for internal arts to concentrate on an inner source of strength, perhaps from the breath or the center of mass, and to occupy itself with visualizations of filling the body with this strength and moving it around to bolster motion, strikes, and defense. In contrast, ars titubandi prefers to acknowledge an inner void, or an unfillable stillness, into which incoming momentum is dissipated or directed to the underworld through contact with the floor or ground. The feeling of the void fills the body until it seems weightless and responsive to the lightest twitch of the controlling volition.

Motivating force is seen as coming from outside the body, either from redirected energy from an opponent as you pivot from an off-center strike or pull, or from externally initiated motion imagined as strong pulls from ropes connected to the limbs vanishing off into the distance, or gentle guidance from strings from above, as from a puppeteer.

Do not concern yourself with your breath. If you need air, your body’s motions will alternately compress and expand your ribcage and abdomen in due course. Your diaphragm is a key muscle in your core, and it will have better things to do.

DEAD EYES

Vision is your least important sense in a conflict. It centers you inside your head, which should instead be empty. Be aware of your surroundings as if you have vacated your body and have filled the entire space. Be aware of your opponent’s intentions and momentum through light contact with a limb, through vibrations of the floor or ground, through sounds and rustling and air currents, even through smell. A clever opponent will think you rely on vision and will try to fool you.

Through all of your other senses you can divine immediately when your opponent is overbalanced or committed to motion in such a way that you can absorb or direct it.

You should be able to fight in the dark as effectively as in broad daylight.

DEAD WEIGHT

Any unnecessary tension in the body is a tool for your opponent to use against you, so let it drain away into the ground. The only parts of your body that should carry tension are the ones that provide structure to connect a limb used to strike or guide your opponent through your hollow, empty core to the limbs that brace against the ground, either still or in motion, and the tension should be the smallest amount necessary for the task. If someone strikes you or shoves you, you should absorb the force like a sack filled with water. If you shove or strike or guide an opponent, it should carry the force of the spinning earth, transmitted through the minimally reinforced structure of your skeleton and musculature.

In Practice

Here’s the perfect place to list a bunch of exercises tailored to the art, possibly with diagrams, all with arcane-sounding names in Latin, except I haven’t exactly worked out anything beyond a joking suggestion to make a form or kata out of the choreography to Michael Jackson’s famous “Thriller” video.

At some point I should test and describe a set of postures that suitably provide the necessary structure and mix of mild tension and utter relaxation to be useful for training a practitioner to be aware of these dynamics at all times, plus transitions from posture to posture that present a combination of unexpected motion, continuous grounding, and practical strikes, blocks, escapes, and guide-alongs, all of which suit the aesthetics appropriate to a Hong Kong action-cinema zombie movie.

I’ve already (literally) stumbled across a number of these poses and transitions, sort of like a hybrid between ba gua and drunken boxing in appearance, that can be refined and formalized. But as for doing all of this intentionally? I don’t expect to be great at it.

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