Occlumency and aiki-waza (LONG!)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 126908


This is an admittedly personal, RL experience-based attempt to 
explain something in the books.  It makes use of an extended analogy 
between the martial art of aikido and the practice of Occlumency, as 
Occlumency is presented as having skills at base that are strongly 
parallel.  It has at least one huge hole, but there are some nice 
problems to consider when complaining about said hole.

If you are profoundly allergic to RL analogies, don't read this.

To put the big contention up front here: effective resistance 
requires relaxation (clear your mind), but not limpness.  The most 
effective way to push back is not to struggle.  Here we go.

Occlumency.  What does it actually take?  First the canon (page 
numbers from US HB):

p. 534, before the beginning of the first attempt, Snape speaks: "You 
have already shown aptitude at resisting the Imperius Curse...you 
will find that similar powers are need for this...Brace yourself, 
now..."

p. 535:  "You must remain focused.  Repel me with your brain and you 
will not need to resort to your wand."

"I'm trying," said Harry angrily, "but you're not telling me how!"

[We'll come back to this complaint later.]

p. 536: "You are not trying, you are making no effort, you are 
allowing me access to memories, you are handing me weapons!" 

 p. 538: "You are to rid your mind of all emotion every night before 
you sleep -- empty it, make it blank and calm, you understand?"

[We'll come back to this, too]

Aikido as model:

I am an avid student of aikido, one of the modern Japanese martial 
arts. One of the major long-range projects some formulations of it 
focus on is mind-body unification (which is complicated, to say the 
least).  As you practice, you learn how to truly relax both your mind 
and your body together, with the result that the two work hand in 
hand instead of obstructing each other. 

What I mean here by 'relaxation' is not what casual use of the word 
denotes.  It is not limpness of the muscles, and it is not a state 
with diminished awareness of what is going on around you.   
Relaxation is the state where the muscles lack tension, but are in 
the state where they can be used at any moment.  Think about watching 
a cat jump, and how amazingly strong that cat is pound-for-pound.  
The cat generally does not have stress or muscle tension, and can 
thus utilize all of its power.  A sleeping cat is amazingly heavy and 
solid, because the cat is completely relaxed.

There are two extremes, one of complete stiffness (which makes it 
impossible to resist effectively, since stiff things are easily 
broken), and complete limpness (where the person is not taking 
control of themself and is easily manipulated). True relaxation is 
the midpoint, where the person is alive and has feeling and power and 
control, but is not tight.  It is the most desirable condition to be 
in as it is when anyone is most fully functional.

One of the great paradoxes of martial arts is that relaxation is 
actually the route to stronger resistance.  There is a little trick 
we do called 'Unbendable Arm'.  The arm is easily bent when the 
muscles are either tight or limp, but not when the muscles are truly 
relaxed.

The essence of my foundational argument is that resistance takes 
relaxation of this particular kind.  Tense muscles are weaker than 
relaxed ones (as you learn quickly when punching things), and tense 
minds have more trouble doing complex tasks (like the state you need 
to be in to play a complex piano fugue--you aren't thinking about 
each note; do that, and you trip and fall, Beethoven wins.) The full-
power actualization of willpower takes this kind of relaxed state. 
It's actually much harder to resist when tight and nervous.  It's 
also difficult to learn what you need to be able to functionally 
resist when you're getting whacked hard from the get-go.

What I know is so counter-intuitive about this is that we tend to 
think about these things as being opposed, relaxation vs. 
resistance.  But relaxation, true relaxation, is the route to strong 
resistance.

Relaxation allows individual muscles to work together as a unit, 
becoming considerably stronger.  Some schools of martial arts, 
including aikido, use a number of things that could be considered 
mystical, such as an emphasis on ki and energy manipulation.  I 
consider mysticism and visualizations as one way to try to get 
muscles to do specific things; if you envision, for example, light 
steaming from your fingertips (a very a common visualization), the 
muscles in your arm that you cannot consciously control individually 
tend to line up and extend, and there are all kinds of neat results 
from this that can be physically felt.

Interestingly for the analogy here, the feeling that you get when you 
try to hit (or grab, which is more common in aikido practice) someone 
who is both relaxed and extended is that you literally bounce off of 
them, like hitting a ...shield.  It's amazingly fun.  I want to 
practice with the people who make me bounce, because I don't feel any 
force coming from them...or rather, what I am feeling is my own 
expenditure of force/energy being fed back into myself. I end up on 
the floor and I don't know why, and I say "Can you do that again?"

I think the metaphor I want to construct should be clear now: 
occlumency's internal focus and resistance to an outside force can be 
conceptualized as like what the aikidoka does to be able to deal with 
attackers.  The successful Occlumens prevents the Legilimens from 
obtaining access to his mind; the successful aikidoka is not 
overwhelmed by an attacker but sends him merrily upon his way.  
Neither art is aggressive, but is a response to an 
attack/engagement.  The connection of resistance and clearing one's 
mind is common to both, and sets up the extended analogy—which is by 
no means complete.

How To Learn:

Learning to truly relax and have it hold up under testing, with 
variable amounts of pressure, is very hard and takes an experienced 
and skilled teacher and a lot of time. The best way not to teach 
someone is to take a beginner, tell him "Relax!", and then hit him to 
see if he does. If you repeat it enough, he might get one time where 
he successfully absorbs/deflects the attack. It's a fluke. He hasn't 
really learned how to do it systematically.  That is the category I 
put Harry's one notable success in, given the later problems and the 
lack of repetition.

Even when I was an absolute beginner, I managed to drop a senior 
student very solidly.  As he had almost a foot on me, it was very 
gratifying.  Of course, the next time... The hallmark of learning is 
consistency, and Harry is not consistent.  This is in part because 
Snape's teaching was not producing good foundations (the ability to 
clear one's mind, for instance) for the actual practice of the skill 
itself.

In my experiences, teaching relaxation requires a truly co-operative 
model, where the amount of force starts very small, and is an agent 
of feedback to both the teacher and student.  Student learns what 
force feels like in small amounts that can be dealt with at first, 
and it then increases over time so that the student is always 
challenged.  It is possible to learn just from being hit, but it 
takes a lot longer. I was talking with my sensei, and said I wished I 
could be as good as he is in 10 years (as he's got 10 years on me). 
He looked at me and said in all seriousness that I could easily be 
better, since he's teaching me.  I don't have to struggle with being 
taught by being beaten on repeatedly, like he was. To learn in this 
rough way takes a lot longer and requires some deep self-exploration 
to develop the ideas that a good teacher would be nurturing from the 
beginning.  You will never teach someone to relax and thus to resist 
by the 'sink or swim' method unless you have the time to indulge in 
an infinite number of sinkings, compared to swimmings.

Things That Are Like Occlumency:

Since the Patronus Charm and resistance to the Imperius Curse occur 
frequently in discussion about Occlumency, they should be addressed 
together.

Casting a Patronus takes something with a somewhat different 
orientation than Occlumency; it seems rather externalized rather than 
an internal property.   A Patronus requires summoning up one's happy 
memories and using them to create an external form, sending them out 
to conquer the dementor.  As well, it consists of an actual charm, a 
defined thing that one can do, so that Lupin sets Harry to practice 
the charm itself before releasing the Dementor!Boggart on him.  
Occlumency has no concrete manifestation like a charm, but is 
internal, the defense of one's own mind.  Summoning a Patronus can be 
accomplished under stress, as we see Harry summon Prongs when he 
absolutely must.  Occlumency does not seem to function under stress; 
it cannot be practiced by kicking out in a panic. All evidence points 
to Occlumency requiring getting down with your own mind, and I 
respectfully submit that that's hard. 

I read Harry's resistance to the Imperius curse as a 
successful 'centering' operation. He hears the inner voice of 
resistance that questions Moody's commands and reaches a state 
wherein he and that voice are unified in purpose.  This allows him to 
breaks the hold of the curse.  This kind of resistance and Occlumency 
both seem to involve getting together with yourself, getting 
everything in line focused on one purpose, being balanced and not 
distracted by strong emotions which interfere. Stubbornness and a 
desire for things not to be seen helps, but Harry would have had to 
really get himself together to do that consistently.  Consistency is 
what he does not show.

Failure Is Not An Option:

Why does Harry fail?  One area where Snape is absolutely correct (but 
raises some very interesting questions about Snape himself, to be 
addressed below) is that Harry's anger is undoing him.  Anger clouds 
the mind, and prevents one from relaxing or resisting effectively.  
That seems at least some support for my reading.

Harry is also left without any explicit method for what he is doing—
hence his complaint above, "You're not telling me how!".  Of course, 
a lot of these things cannot be encapsulated in neat little 
instruction booklets that a simple read of will provide the path to 
enlightenment.  As mentioned above, there are a number of methods to 
help someone figure out how to do these things, none of which are 
provided by Snape.  I remember thinking, when reading these 
passages, "He's never going to learn how to really relax and do this 
if you go about it like that--he's just going to learn to hit back."  
It's hard to do this sort of thing reliably without someone helping 
you learn how to do it, and it's really hard to learn it when you're 
in pain, frustrated and angry and not understanding what's going on.  
When Harry does try to clear his mind in the chapter "Seen and 
Unforseen", he fails because of his anger.

Trust plays an important role as well.  From my own experiences, you 
are learning to do things where at almost any point, the person who 
is throwing you could hurt you very, very severely--and it becomes 
aikido practice in part because they have the ability to choose not 
to. Any beginner has to put their body into the hands of someone else 
and trust the senior partner to not hurt them, to keep the beginner 
from hurting himself, and teach with good faith. You have to trust 
your teacher, and trust and fear are mutually exclusive.

Occlumency doesn't involve bodily harm, but for Harry it does involve 
pain, the worsening of his scar.  It is also a deeply personal thing 
to have one's memories exposed to anyone.  And while Harry knows that 
he should trust Snape (because Dumbledore does), he has no reason to 
trust Snape personally.  Harry has no actual knowledge about Snape's 
allegiances and motivations, and Snape's past (and present) behavior 
towards him places another obstacle in his path.  The reluctance to 
explain anything to Harry takes a severe toll here, as well.

And Now, The Problems:

There's a big gaping hole in this entire account, and I'd be remiss 
if I didn't point it out myself.  How did Snape learn Occlumency and 
how does he do it, given that he seems to conflict so overtly with a 
number of the foundational ideas I've laid out here?  He is presented 
as an angry man, frequently annoyed and disaffected, holding on 
tightly to grudges and injuries from the past.  This is not even to 
mention that knowing how to do something and being able to teach it 
are not the same thing.  My options are as:

1.  My model is completely flawed and Snape's own intense emotions 
have no effect on his Occlumency skills.  Very possible, but I was 
able to reasonably support my model from the text.  We'll come back 
to this one.

2.  Snape is an excellent actor and his apparent losses of temper and 
lack of self-control are simply that—apparent.  I'm not terribly fond 
of this characterization of Snape for a number of reasons.  It made 
more sense pre-OotP (trying to address the PoA blowup) than after.  
It's a possibility, but needs some confirmation to justify reading 
strongly against canonical events.  (MAGIC DISHWASHER crew, I'm 
looking your direction.)

3.  There are a number of different ways to practice Occlumency, and 
Snape's success at it is based on different foundations than this 
potential projected one derived from a teaching scenario for the very 
specific case of Harry.  [One reader of a draft of this proposed that 
Snape, who would be dead if Voldemort knew that he was resisting—
assuming that Snape is back dealing with Voldemort personally in the 
first place—must be doing something different than Harry, whose 
struggles are tangible.  I don't think that's necessary, as the 
discrepancies are explainable by the contrast of an expert and an 
amateur.]  That leads back into number one like this:

The easiest solution, and one we have a distinct probability of 
getting in a few months, is the authorial fiat: a direct statement 
of "This is how Occlumency actually works and this explains the 
discrepancies, everyone".  However, aren't authorial fiats the thing 
that frequently raises the ire of the discussion community here?  
I've seen any number of general complaints about the method of 
communicating information being telling us rather than showing, 
leaving any number of holes open.

We may simply be left with the statement "Snape knows Occlumency 
well, but he was unable to teach it effectively to Harry".  This 
would not be surprising, as not every excellent practitioner is an 
excellent teacher, and Snape's pedagogical skills are not his high 
point.  As Dumbledore practically says "Mistake on my part to ask 
Snape to teach you", this gains some support.  (Lupin seems 
introduced as a character precisely in order to contrast with Snape 
on teaching style and effectiveness, if you want to get meta).  Where 
Snape learned Occlumency, how he got good at it--your guess is as 
good as mine.

At the present state of knowledge, keeping my explanation internal 
while applying a useful framework from outside explains a lot of 
things, but it leaves a number of holes.  I finish with the hope that 
some of this will survive next book, and it will become clearer.

-Nora notes that if she didn't have that pull in the right hamstring, 
she'd be on the mat tonight