books, page 113 of 138

Writing about Robert K Elder’s The Film That Changed My Life recently made me think about books that have changed mine (in that wordlessly changing way I wrote about), and the one that came most immediately to mind was Moving Zen by C W Nicol. Because I’ve never had much in the way of storage space, my personal library has seen a lot of books come and go, but Moving Zen (given to me as a Christmas present by my brother Garen back in about 1985) is one of the few that have stayed with me. Of course, I first read it because I was heavily into Karate at the time, but it’s the one Karate book I’ve kept, in part because it tells a story that isn’t just about Karate, but something far more universal.

First published in 1975, Moving Zen is C W Nicol’s memoir of the time he went to Japan (in the early sixties) to learn Karate. “I wanted it to be the simple story of a journey from white to black belt”, he says (in an excellent two-part interview which can be found online here (part 1, part 2), and which makes a wonderful afterword to reading Moving Zen), but really it’s about a young man finding a place (both inwardly and outwardly) where he truly feels at home.

The start of his first Karate lesson at the Japan Karate Association’s dojo in Yotsuya is the perfect illustration of this. A Westerner with only a smattering of Japanese, he at first finds the very atmosphere makes an outsider of him:

“Silence. I tried to draw myself into it, but it excluded me, and I held my breath lest I should make a noise, and hovered, uncertain, on the edge of it, for I did not know, and would not know for some time, exactly what we were doing.” — p. 9

And outside the dojo:

“Crowded Tokyo magnified my loneliness. In language and life-style, I lived apart from the people. I had not yet truly found a place to belong. Coming off an Arctic expedition, with its close and isolated companionship, did not equip me emotionally for dealing with huge, alien crowds, or for the many people I had to know, greet, and be friendly with.” — p. 18

As well as learning a martial art, and coming to understand a new culture, Moving Zen‘s subtitle, “Karate as a Way to Gentleness”, points to another conflict Nicol faces, this time with something alien inside himself, a raging temper he was prey to, which had led to him being involved in street-fights as a youngster, and he deals with the paradox of using a martial art as a means of learning to control these urges to violence, eloquently.

In fact, one of the joys of this book is just how well-written it is. Always clear and simple in style, it evokes the Japan that Nicol comes to know in a very Japanese way, using brief, accurate but expressive strokes to describe small incidents, sights and experiences:

“Outside, in the yard of a nearby farmhouse, a little grey-haired old lady bent over a broom, busily sweeping the fallen leaves of a gnarled and ancient persimmon tree. Dark clouds scudded by, over the curves of the eaves. And then came a gust of wind, and a thousand leaves clung to the wet roof, and tears came to my eyes, and my scalp tightened, and the wet leaves and the roof suddenly brought an understanding to me of something that was pure Zen, and therefore wordless, and Sonako and I went home for supper.” — p. 90

It’s these passages that provide some of the most moving episodes in the book, particularly in the final chapters where Nicol looks back on the many experiences he’s had in this once-alien country and realises how far he’s come, not just in terms of learning Karate (and earning his black belt), but in terms of ridding himself of his “foreign-bachelor isolation” and finding a way to truly belong:

“I was part of a family now… Each day was an object lesson in living, and I had so much to learn.” — p. 68

“It was as if the surface were calmer now, and I could begin to see beneath it, coming face to face with the warrior philosophies of Japan… I knew now that I had not come to Japan on a wild goose chase. It was all here.” — p. 100

Is a knowledge of Karate necessary to enjoy the book? I don’t think so, as Nicol was writing at a time when few Westerners would have known much about the subject, and he takes time to introduce the various concepts as he comes across them — mostly those relating to the spirit of Karate, the paradoxical heart of Bushido that turns a fighting method into a discipline, an art, a means of “perfecting one’s character”, rather than becoming some sort of killing machine. But this is certainly not an instructional manual, and the passages that explain aspects of the people and culture of Japan are as frequent as those about the martial arts. For me, there’s something about the very way this book is written, a calmness and clarity in its language, a simplicity in its insight into the many paradoxes of Japanese culture, and Karate in particular, that reveals how deeply Nicol was changed by the experiences he describes.

Doing a web-search, I was surprised to learn that C W Nicol is quite a celebrity in Japan, and has written more than a hundred books, not to mention plays and scripts for TV. He continues to practise Karate, and to follow his other passion, for the environment. His official website’s here, but alas (for me), it’s in Japanese. Amazon lists a couple of other English language books by him, though, so I may well be checking those out in the near future.

It may sound a bit like a Self-Help book, particularly with a subtitle like “The classic work on how to achieve happiness”, but Flow takes a rather more scientific approach than your general “Yeah! Go for it!” self-improvement type of book. (I love what Sarah Millican said on the recent My Life in Books series, that if you read a Self-Help book all the way to the end, it hasn’t done its job. The whole point is to kick-start you with its enthusiasm. But Flow isn’t about that.) In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sets about trying to see what characteristics are common to all the things people do which they find the most rewarding, and which lead to an experience he calls “Flow” — that state of being “in the zone” when you’re really absorbed in what you’re doing. He comes up with eight:

“When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.”— Flow, p. 49

One of the major differences between Flow and the type of Self-Help book that teaches you how to achieve your business goals is that this isn’t a book about achieving success, but about enjoying what you do, whether it’s for yourself or others, for no money or for millions. The activity I thought about most while reading Flow was, well, reading.

I know that I enjoy some books more than others. Usually the ones I really enjoy keep me reading for a good chunk of time, and make the real world disappear for however long it is I’m reading. That, to me sounds like flow. So, how do Csikszentmihalyi’s eight points relate to reading a good story?

1. “A task we have a chance of completing.” Unless we’re talking about Borges’s Book of Sand (which has pages so infinitesimally thin, it packs as many between its covers as there are grains of sand in a desert, so you’re not likely to get to the end of it), reading a book is a task you have a chance of completing. Simple enough.

2. “We must be able to concentrate on what we’re doing.” The obvious part of this is you must be able to concentrate on the act of reading, and if you don’t, it’s hardly the book’s fault. But there are things a book can do to hurt the flow in this sense. There could be, for instance, typos or spellos of various kinds, or the awful formatting you get in so many free ebook versions of classic novels, or it could just be bad writing — anything which bursts the story-bubble is a sin against the second ingredient of flow.

3. “Clear goals”. A book has a clear goal in that you’re reading from the start to the finish. But a story has a different sort of goal. I recently finished reading a novel where every chapter was a pretty much separate piece of fiction, linked only by the fact that it was told by the same narrator. It was pleasant enough to read, whilst I was reading it, but when I put it down, nothing called me back to continue reading it. Why? Because story is what calls me back to reading — the desire to find out what happens next. You can only have that desire if you have a sense of large-scale movement behind the immediate, little movements of the scenes and episodes that make up the forefront activity of a piece of fiction. In the case of this novel I was reading, the story had no shape, no clear goal, it was just a series of fiction-flavoured slices of a loaf-shaped novel that ended because it hit the crust at the end. I like a story to have a well-defined shape. That doesn’t mean I like to know what’s going to happen, but I do like to know the sort of direction it’s heading in. I don’t have to, for instance, know if the hero’s going to live or die at the end, but I do want to know if this is a will-the-hero-live-or-die type of story, or if it’s something quite different. Otherwise, it’s just so much sliced loaf.

4. “Immediate feedback”. A well-shaped story creates expectations in the reader (“Is the hero going to live or die?”). It may do so only to play with those expectations, but at least there are expectations there to be played with, the reader is engaged. And the great thing is, you win whether you’re right or wrong. If you think things are going to go one way, and they do, you feel rewarded by the intrinsic rightness of it; if, on the other hand, you think things are going to go one way and they go the other, you’re rewarded with a sense of surprise.

5. “A deep but effortless involvement”. For me, this is the same as point 2. Nice writing helps.

6. “A sense of control over their actions.” Your “action” as a reader is your engagement with the story. Those expectations again! But also it’s the way you feel free to let your imagination roam about the edges of the writer’s words or the artist’s illustrations, the way you can add your own value to a story. I love it when I find myself thinking, “What would I do in the hero/heroine’s situation?” In that way, you get two stories for the price of one!

7. “Concern for the self disappears”. This, really, is Tolkien’s “Recovery” — the sense you get, from immersing yourself in a well-told story, that when you emerge you are seeing reality (both of the outer world and the inner you) that much clearer.

8. “The sense of the duration of time is altered.” Well, we all know what time does when you’re having fun. But the great thing about a good story is it seems to pack a real punch of timelessness into however long it takes to read it. A life is a story, but so is a five minute encounter, and both can have the same weight.

Flow applies its ideas to a wide range of activities. Of course, you don’t have to know about flow to experience it, but I find it has clarified my ideas on what makes for a good read, and so what makes for a better reading experience, which can only be for the good.

Very excited to find I’m going to be in the British Fantasy Society’s 40th anniversary book, Full Fathom Forty. (In the year I celebrate my own personal fortieth anniversary, too!) And I’m really thrilled to find I’m in the company of some of my favourite authors. The full list of contributors is up at the BFS website, complete with ordering details. The book comes out in September.