Message from the Director, Dr. John Glavin: "It Shoots"

I want to start my part in this blog by recalling an incident from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (German 1948; English 1956). In 1921, Herrigel began to study Japanese archery under a renowned master, Awa Kenzo. Herrigel had come to Japan to understand more about the practice of Zen. Once there he concluded his best route would involve training in a specific discipline.  A serious athlete, he then decided that discipline should be archery.

There’s one particularly memorable scene in this remarkable book that may carry a transformative message for Carroll Fellows.

In this sequence, Herrigel is complaining that Awa regularly criticizes his pupil’s performance but never demonstrates his own putatively superior skill.  In response, Awa orders Herrigel to turn out all the lights in the shooting gallery, and then to set a target up at the opposite end; finally, he tells Herrigel to position a candle directly in front of Awa’s face so that he is in effect blinded, unable to see past the light.  Awa, then, releases two arrows into the dark space.  When the lights come up, Herrigel sees that the first arrow has hit the bull’s eye, and the second arrow has split the first in half. Awestruck, Herrigel asks the Master how he did that.  Awa answers by refusing to take credit. Instead, he insists: “It Shoots.”

I don’t want to enter into the lively controversy over what Awa actually said in Japanese, and how Herrigel may have misunderstood and mistranslated him. What interests me here –and what I want to talk about in these posts over the next few weeks-- is how we might adapt It Shoots to our own lives.

American mass culture everywhere insists as its fundamental, enabling claim that each person is, can, or should be the master of his or her own fate – a fantasy clearly designed to mask the predatory power of privilege while fueling in every class the engines of consumption. But what if we resist that fantasy, and reverse its argument? What if –instead of seeing life coming from us--we see it coming toward us, and through us? In other words, what if for Awa’s “It” we read “Life”? How would you be living differently, what would your life feel like, what choices would you make, and avoid, if you started from this radically altered point of view?

This may seem an impossible prescription in The Age and Culture of Apps, which encourage each individual to believe he or she should be able to summon without effort and instantly everything he or she desires, from Uber to entry into the upper middle class. Nevertheless, I urge you to explore our version of “It Shoots;” it contains, I think, an extraordinarily liberating and life-enhancing potential.

It will take several weeks for me to try convincingly to explore that potential. So let me conclude this first week’s installment by asking you in the days ahead to try a short exercise.  List all the things in your life that can be considered to have come to you or through you but not from you –good and bad. Add to the list over the course of the week. Where in your life have you found It Shoots? Where in your life has your life found you?

JG