LE PARKOUR: DAVID BELLE

Leave it to the French to take something ordinary, like "street climbing" and turn it into haute couture. If you've never heard of "Le Parkour," as a sport or pop culture phenomenon, then you're in for a treat. Translated, "le parkour" is the art of displacement, when one runs through a series of obstacles. As a French discipline, it sits somewhere between military urban warfare training and martial arts. Le Parkour is a component of French military training that emphasizes negotiating urban terrain to gain both position and advantage. What's interesting to me, is the how often Le Parkour requires mastery of what naturalist and sport climbers would term "dyno" moves.

Of course, I doubt Americans will be surprised to learn that the true origin of le Parkour rests in flight (a.k.a. retreat), a discipline that encourages students to make the most of all surfaces in order to protect oneself. Within French urban culture, however, Le Parkour is a mixture of its history and contemporary street culture. Like skateboarding, the sport draws the younger crowd who gather to compete and share trade moves.

The most notable expert in Le Parkour is David Belle. He is, by most accounts, the Bruce Lee of Le Parkour. And he's amazing:



Reading the Wikipedia entry describing Le Parkour (click here), it seems to me that this is a sport similar to climbing. Both require critical thinking and discipline, a sense of inner play and possibility. Both sports, too, require the sort of people who aren't afraid to take risks in order to gain self-confidence. In a BBC article (click BBC), Belle asserts that his mission is "to make people understand what it is to move." Watching his videos on You Tube, I can attest to my own blossoming understanding of how his work in Le Parkour could and will influence my work as a climber.

What's more interesting to me, however, is the ways in which Belle asserts that his version of street climbing is a philosophical act visible through practice. This reminds me of all the climbing videos I have watched since my injury, and the many ways in which one's personality or worldview is made visible through rock climbing. Though Belle was first claimed by gymnastic folk and runners - le parkour was once termed "free running" in the U.S. - it seems to me that the sport's epicenter on grip and forearm strength, mental discipline, and overall agility could make it a French kissing cousin of both rock and sport climbing.



For Belle, Le Parkour is a sport of "you against you" - and this is something climbing presents too. And the more I watch Belle, his training videos and performances, the more I understand what he means about "movement." Facing the rock or the urban landscape, one does confront obstacles. In that confrontation one learns more about personal freedom and self-respect than anywhere else. In my scholarly pursuits, I term this confrontation "displacement" and "process" - so it shouldn't be too surprising that I'm fond of climbing and le Parkour because it turns the cerebral into the physical. This is why I encourage my students to join me at the climbing wall, too.

Though most would have us separate the philosophical from "the real," I fail to see that separation as natural. To me, this breaking between mind and body is a byproduct of WWII mechanisms, ones that brought the university together with the military in order to gain advantage (and ultimately nuclear power). In the 1940s and 50s, America loved its scientists. Only after the bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima did the average joe get a view of what nerds were capable of and I think it scared them.

Scientists have been suspect since, throughout the "space race" and the Cold War, science was at the heart of espionage. So it seems the division between the "smart science people" and the "regular people" had everything to do with the circles in which they moved. Culture compartmentalized, and the "regular" people cast suspicious eyes at those in their ivory tower labs and libraries. It hasn't been cool to be a nerd since.

Even James Bond had to deal with science as villain in Goldfinger, and popular culture since often posits science as dangerous.



Technology presented, too, the "confrontation of one's humanity" like the Stanley Kubrick film, "2001: A Space Odyssey":



In the 1973 film, Westworld, Yul Brynner portrays a rogue robot. I saw the movie when I was a kid, maybe five or so, and had many nightmares featuring Mr. Brynner until I saw him in The King and I. The film was based on the premise as technology as vacation - with better actors and twists than the later Total Recall with Alnold Governator of Californie.



Anyway, my point is this: as typical plot themes go, technology rarely gets to be a hero. And the compartmentalization of people and knowledge, the ways in which theory was separated from praxis (though the two are braided together even when we can't name the theories at play), limited movement. This limited freedom and movement eventually became, as most social constraint mechanisms do, a collective preference. In our case, the exact opposite of movement is stability - a term government officials and politicos, financial "experts" and commentators throw around with unfortunate regularity.

It was French language theorist and philosopher Jacques Derrida that introduced us to the nature of binaries and controls through language, and his response to stability - he argued this stability was about hierarchal structures - was play. Derrida provoked play every chance he got, as a way of moving through language and through thought. So I'm not surprised David Belle focuses on movement and philosophy, nor am I surprised to see the organizations supporting play as an engagement with imagination such as the Norfolk Council's "National Play Day" co-sponsored by Le Parkour Alliance:



My interest in movement, of course, stems from the fact that my own physical movement is limited by my injury. And as I process my emotive responses to my physical limitations, I return again and again to the connection between personal freedom and physicality. Mental and physical are visible to me in wholly new ways. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the charges that climbing, Le Parkour, and other nonconformist sports are "reckless" and "dangerous" are made because the sports put into physical movement, in tangible ways that are witnessed, the need and right to think for oneself.

Both climbing and le Parkour require critical engagement with surrounding spaces - the spatial theorist in my finds this fascinating. Both require a willingness to push back common tropes or meanings surrounding what is safe. Both require one to be physically and mentally present at the same time. And it seems both attract intelligent people who seem to be living out their personal theories in the real world. When I'm climbing, I'm processing my own physicality, my lived realities, and my body as miraculous machine. It's the movement up the wall that brings me in tune with my mind.

So I think I'll be adding some of the training moves/exercises from Belle's le Parkour to my workout schedule as soon as I can. I think training should be about play, about building strength and self-respect. I won't be back-flipping or anything, but I will be concentrating on grip and forearm strength, mobility and balance. I'll also be thinking more about urban landscapes and movement, about freedom and place. But I'm a nerd. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

I don't know if it's America's "rugged individualism" philosophy, or our culture's shortsightedness when it comes to history that makes it so easy for each generation to think they're doing something new. While walking home on a crisp afternoon, at the glorious hour just before the sun slips away for the night and washes everything gold, I wondered about my present tensions and the past.

As a new climber, someone just working her way up an indoor wall, there's a lot to take in, absorb. There's much about the indoor version of climbing life that's sanitized, symmetrical, and manufactured. That isn't to say indoor climbing is less than outdoor ascension, it's just different. The routes themselves are art in my opinion, crafted by those who have a sense of rock, the way it pushes you, teases, and beckons. In that sense, an indoor route is about simulation, perhaps even what philosopher Jean Beaudrillard would term, "simulacra," when the artificial takes the place of the real within one's consciousness.

The holds are casts; designed to train you for a multitude of challenges indoors and out. Their bolts are screwed in and tight, maintained, and in a sense, predictable. When you're trying so hard to master UP, when you're challenged in the same spot each time, it's easy to question both the hold design and your aptitude, and this inquiry is not within nature. It's an urban interpretation of the outdoor challenge, and because it's a human interpretation, it becomes both a representation and a real thing. The philosopher in me, the one married to academic life and scholarly pursuits, finds this dynamic intriguing.

On the synthetic wall, as I work to gain confidence and a sense of my own physicality, I'm also projecting these experiences onto the eventual, real rock I hope to climb ... someday. So while I contemplate my moves and try to tame my monkey mind, as I try to praise myself and trust my instincts, as I smell the varnished boards of the rec center floor beneath the wall and all that padding, I'm conjuring pine and thinner mountain air. I'm projecting myself from one place to another, and this too is of philosophical importance.

I've been told several times that climbing outdoors is "easier" in the sense that you choose your way, based on your self-inventory of both expertise and strength. In this sense, climbing becomes an interpretative dance, a reflexive exchange between the climber and the environment. Some have written about how a rock face will make you or break you, that either way your soul must battle to make peace with the work and the hope that you will be enough to reach the top. Therein lies the real grace, some claim. Therein lies the art.

But it's easy, when embarking on a new task, to overlook the history, the testaments of those who have gone before. It's not often that one, while trying a new sport, becomes fascinated by its history. For many, taking on new physical pursuits means getting a sense of literacy for the immediate breakthroughs, the equipment as it is today, hanging at the local store. It's only when that sport or activity seeps into the soul and the voices of the past begin to whisper, inviting you back, pulling you near, that you explore histories.

It could be that because I'm a nerd, a "binoclard aux premiere classe" (a first class nerd as they'd say in France), I'm drawn to histories. It could be too that I find this sport so baffling, so contrary in experience to all the stories of "recklessness" and "rebellion" passed down to me by a larger culture, that I am compelled to explore its past for myself. Then again, it could just be that I'm excited to find a whole other section of a library or bookstore worthy of my attention. I am, after all, a bibliophile.

I found this video advertisement from Stonemaster Press captivating. As I watched the video created with current digital technology, I thought about the photographic technology of the 1970s. While looking at the images, it's easy to take them for granted - most of us today won't know the frustration of having to wait until your film's developed to know if you "got the shot." Our contemporary use of digital cameras doesn't require much patience or even photographic knowledge. We don't have to deal with F-stops and exposures because most good cameras can do it all automatically. When I think of how easy we have it now, how simple it is to take a video and put it into the world, and how simplistic and straightforward digital camerawork can be, the photos in the above video presentation seem all the more remarkable. Not only did the Stonemasters change the sport, they set the example of recording the journey.

And I think that was both prophetic, a promise of what was to come, and foundational, a keeping of what has gone before.

I tend to get contemplative as summer surrenders to fall. And now that I'm walkin' like Jesus everywhere I go as a commitment to a larger goal, I've got more time to think. For just this month, I'm going to walk instead of bike. I'm going to take the time with myself in the morning on the way to campus and in the early evenings on the way home. But it's not a walk of destinations. It's what Thich Nhat Hanh posits as meditative:

Walking meditation is really to enjoy the walking - walking not in order to arrive, just for walking. The purpose is to be in the present moment and enjoy each step you make. Therefore you have to shake off all worries and anxieties, not thinking of the future, not thinking of the past, just enjoying the present moment (33).

My neighborhood is torn into sections now by road and university improvement projects. A giant crane interrupts the view, looming as it reaches a long arm across the sky. There is the constant churn of tires, earth movers, the banging of metal against metal, and the shouting of men. If I leave my apartment windows open all day as I like to do this time of year, a fine silt of their work, all that dust they've cast to the wind in the name of progress, settles on everything. In a very real way, I can feel the grit of their determination, trace my finger through it, or wipe it away with a dusting cloth.

The noise used to bother me, all the traffic and the "beep, beep, beep" of dirt loaders and dump trucks once set my teeth on edge. But trying to take walking for walking's sake, learning to keep my mind focused on the limb and then the foot, has helped me to hear these noises in a different way. And the flowers, those daring things at sidewalk's edge, seem all the more miraculous to me. If they can grow here, in the mess of improvement and displacement, surely I can, too. What was noise is now an urban beat, some sort of crazy symphony, I listen to while marveling the musicians with hard hats and crazy instruments.

Where the natural and the unnatural meet, I think, is where our thinking should begin. And I think that, too, is something climbing - even just researching climbing - can help one to appreciate. I'm beginning to wonder if climbing is meditation, a transcendental and Romantic lyric on a good day, or a lament on a bad one, but poetry all the same. One can only go hold by hold, line by line, present moment by present moment - and that in itself, according to Eastern traditions, is meditative. The entire meaning of your interior world can be condensed into one move, just as poetry is nothing more than a story rendered into just one line. I find this encouraging, particularly because all of the experienced climbers I know tell me "half of climbing is in the head" or "most of the hard work isn't physical at all - it's mental."

So maybe those who have gone before shaped the sport with their legacy: The work of those who shape the polymer holds, cast and mounted, bolted to the interpretation of a rock's eventual story and the poetry it waits to share someday, when you meet face to face.

And perhaps that journey begins in the horizontal plane, when one walks for the sake of walking. As Hanh notes, such contemplative joy in the present moment causes blossoms of peace, of focus, to bloom beneath every step. Perhaps this thinking will help me to see the route, those holds and the challenges, as flora that blooms with each move I make. I like this idea, not so much because it's got flowers in it - and chicks dig flowers - but because it allows me to think of my success in a single moment and the collection of these moments as a garden I tended.

Then again, maybe this line of thinking just helps me to forget that my elbows ache and my ass feels like it's made of lead.