Untimely Contributions and Uncanny Meditations on the Philosophy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

“Such a one is the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal.” ―Gilles Deleuze

“There is more philosophy in jiu-jitsu mats than in any Ivy League school in America.” ― Renzo Gracie

“Dixie Time” is undifferentiated by steel and stopgaps. Our Southern chronometrics fail to measure the “persistence of timekeeping,” the days and nights a long and lost horizon (always warm, like Shangri-La), the “days of thunder” viscous as Valvoline, fluid as Superflo motor oil, molasses in the mornin’ (and it can be mornin’ all day long), honey in the afternoon, Waffle House always open (much tastier than IHOP slop), the day – like every other day – pouring like syrup into the pore of a hive. The coffee is strong – too strong – but I ain’t in no rush! All of eternity (eternity is always “all of eternity”) lay before me like white gravy flowing over tan biscuits. The sky yellow as a pineapple chunk, orange as O.J. (the drink), auburn as a twice-burned griddle, a hazy home. Florida is my new home.

Time comes to an end “up North,” New Jersey, where I used to live. Not here.

What shall I do with time everlasting, or time passing? I am 43 years old, healthier than ever, but almost “halfway there” (in the words of Jersey son Jon Bon Jovi.) Does time slow somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, or am I just happy to have a new home, far from the Monmouth County (NJ) madding crowd?

But “time” (slow or fast) seems trite. I am (or want to be) Untimely. Whatever that means, but let’s hold that word: Untimely.

Untimely within the world of trends, I took up the study of the trendiest sport of all, second only to pickleball: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (pickleball is for men my age and older who need Viagra.)

I entered the MMA academy, not sure what to expect and a bit intimidated, truth be told (I was never quite an alpha male, but a sigma or an intriguing alpha-beta mix, sensitive but ready to rumble.) Did I belong there or would I be taken as a snooty Northern liberal? (Not a lib at all, thank you); a New York City aesthete (years of living in New York taught me Picasso from Picabia); reclaiming martial arts – gentrifying them – from “Das Man” (a Gen-Zer philosopher told me it was our job to take sexual relations back from “Das Man” – and I agree) and imposing the grace and delicacy of an ineffective martial art like tai chi on the bone-crunching gristle-mill of a grappling mat, educating and bettering those I thought might be motorin’ motorheads (douchebags with names like “Meathead” or “Beef-tits”), dumb lugs and lummoxes! I would hector them to read Proust on their own time, the grubby lot of them not just devouring the devourment of madeleines, but digesting pages upon pages of flowers, gardens, ponds, lily-pads, coquettes, and courtesans. “You teach me how to kill people with my own hands, Beef-tits, and I’ll teach you how to read Proust! Proust has to do with time and shit! What are your thoughts on the Untimely, by the way? The Untimely is neither temporal nor eternal.”

But if the public library is “Autistic Las Vegas” (despite the threat of misbehavior on the part of sheltering vagrants, some of whom are idiot-savants), the “training hall” is “Autistic Valhalla.”

Many of my classmates are semi-bright to intelligent and many of them are autistic or semi-autistic “idiots” (like me, a self-proclaimed “King of Idiots”), “idiot” meaning “private person,” “idiot” as in Marshall McLuhan’s re-salvaging of a sunken Greek word: private person. Only idiots are fun (and refreshing) to be around, only idiots are untimely.

In the words of Deleuze: “At the risk of playing the idiot, do so in the Russian manner: that of an underground man who recognizes himself no more in the subjective presuppositions of a natural capacity for thought than in the objective presuppositions of a culture of the times, and lacks the compass with which to make a circle. Such a one is Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal.”

The “training hall” (as it is called by famous philosopher/jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher) is a “safe space” for Untimely Idiots. Sure, most of us started because we wanted to become “living weapons,” confident streetfighters more than capable of defending ourselves from drunken loudmouths and other public troublemakers, but as each one of us increases in knowledge and skill, we find that we are, in many senses, laughing at ourselves and others, laughing at the time we waste, our time-wasting a mockery of time. We spend our “time” in an Untimely purgatory of pain (especially pain, the warm-up alone is enough to “stroke out” many men over 40.) In the words of Ozzy Osbourne, “we find our Heaven spewing from the mouth of Hell.” Like the foot-cramping Zen “sitting” of Zazen (at its best), it is about showing up, bracing for bruised legs, “just doing it” (the words of Shunryu Suzuki), and thinking about concrete “means” to intangible and perhaps unreachable “ends” (what do “ends” matter when engulfed by the greasy slick of post-workout Epsom salts?)

But it’s more than suffering in vain; it is a card or board game in vain, one that hurts, crippling cribbage, chest-crushing chess. My friend and classmate Kyle, a retired Army infantryman, also joined for the enhancement of a capacity for violence, but he is now a pacifist “glass bead game” player, compounding complexity for the sake of complexity, fitting his body to another’s like a jagged jigsaw piece, not thinking much – if anything – of using his skills to silence a bar-brawling braggart. Kyle, soldier and chess player, but maybe – maybe still – someone who is a chess master in a garden and not a gardener in a chess tournament (a garden table Glass Bead Game is more fun – more fun! – than kicking someone’s ass.)

We take to the mat, a small patch of cushion but large as a mothership for the alien arts practiced there. BJJ is, above all, an extraterrestrial combat sport, an art of xenolinguistics, and we are “on the way to language” (whatever that means, my dear Heidegger! I suppose we are “on the way” – en route – just by asking what “on the way to language” “means.” Not that we will ever reach a lingual destination.) So we perform brute acrobatics, our feet touching the sky like the appendages of a super-intelligent praying mantis: “Let us give you a ride to outer space!” We are trans – transterrestrials that is – and I identify as an intellectual insect. Is our Untimely-ness a praying mantis Untimely-ness? Either way, we are at least on the destination-less way to philosophy, BJJ fighter and right-wing junior philosopher Renzo Gracie (black belt and all) along with us (in spirit) for the ride to nowhere and no-time.

Untimely-ness, for its merits, also has a taste or tincture of the “uncanny.” The mat is uncannily white, cut from the metallic sheen of a Star Wars Storm Trooper uniform. Moby Dick white. Melville, an Untimely (and outside the timestream) writer, found paleness unpalatable (as Will Self said, what is the difference between a black void and a white void?) Black – the blackest night – is more void-ish-ly comforting (nothing like some good ol’-fashioned Void Worship) than white. The black, ’tis where we originate, ’tis where we return? Black is a night terror, but white is a nightmare, the uniformly white, ghostly gowns, ectoplasm pulled from the gullet of a 19th Century spiritualist, texture of the wedding dress of a widower’s wife, white, the “deadlights” (as the hack Stephen King wrote about in “It”), where we want to go/not-go, whiteness or blackness as, perhaps, one of the eternal double binds to which all Dasein (and other sentients) are subject. Blood drips from my mouth, onto the “Moby Dick Mat.” I used to be an actor. In New York City, but that’s subsumed in white, In love with Samantha (my Robert Graves-ian White Goddess), my High School crush (not-so-Halcyon Days.) The entirety of the past is now “unheimlich” and haunted (hauntological), a haunting white spectre, and all that is “real” (in the prosaic sense of the word) is my blood on an uncannily white mat. This is my home now! Let me un-uncanny it!

We splatter our blood all over the mats, but only so much blood-sport can cure or un-cure a 43-year-old. Anyone “over 40” is “Hauntologized” to some extent, dreams of a midlife coming and going. I roll, I tumble, and I dream back to the apolitical year 2000, hanging out with my acting school friends, sipping margaritas at some Mexican restaurant on 6th Avenue, down in the Vill, “hot time, summer in the city” pre-9/11 by a year or two, thinking of nothing – innocent young guy that I was – than becoming a famous actor and winning the hand of my High School crush, Samantha, a Springsteen-esque “Jersey Girl” if ever there was one. A different me, a different life, a different Samantha (back then, only Brazilians did jiu-jitsu.) Accretions of years piling on and making me “timely, all too timely” and “Dasein, all too Dasein.” So much for the Untimely.

Any 43-year-old’s life feels “uncanny, all too uncanny” (especially mine, because I was an actor in New York City) and looms over me, the gray Horatia Alger-an streets of NYC, the McMansions and beach bum bungalows of New Jersey, the sun-splashed shores of Florida.

Jiu-jitsu, for the 4-plus hours a week I practice it, is a stab at “canny” (opposite of uncanny) Untimeliness, an improvised scene (like the ones I did back in acting school!), a Pollock-esque splattering on a padded canvas. Heimlich versus Unheimlich: who will win the day, tonight? Feeling young again, maybe even younger than when I was young (feeling young again, may I hold on to visceral non-jadedness.)

The “training hall” brings me to a reckoning and calls forth thought.

Heidegger wrote: “When in the darkness of a winter night, a snow storm surrounds the shelter (die Hutte) and covers everything, then the great moment of philosophy has arrived.”

But my great moment arrives adjacent to the sands of Florida because I am, like Nietzsche, sensitive to the cold.