The art of the human body in motion is sometimes confused with that of the martial arts. There’s no need to polarize either one since they serve the exact same purpose with few exceptions. Perhaps in tradition the entire survival of the arts of war have been developed rendering the older and more barbaric combat methods obsolete. Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, and the industriousness of one man’s beats the other man’s mediocrity, gun beats man, bomb beats gun, economy beats bomb.
When saying the art of human body in motion we are referring in part to an element of dance in which the universal meaning of it’s motion is a thing of beauty, a creation of the mind. Not one single man cultivated these art forms but all living things are embedded with virtue of them, quite in contrast to the violent twin of the two views as war. Not only does war have a place in art, everything in existence has a place in art also, since it’s continuity is by gift of the mind, trying to recreate nature by it’s own organs of thought.
The arts of war, the martial arts, only recently became obsolete and adapted a retirement in more literally a creative outlet, otherwise fights would be fought by the fist, however even the Holy Bible, the oldest book even written, may attest that Cain “Slew” Abel. Imaginatively enough, the weapon may very well have been a rock used in the murder, or just as well could’ve been a knife or a club of some kind, however the possibility that Cain, the gentler farmer overpowered his masculine brother the sheep herder unarmed is to be less. Martial arts itself evolves to overcome it’s foe more efficiently, the incorporation of weapons into martial arts follows the natural metamorphosis of war into the machine it has become today, spiraling upward from it’s core of weaponless combat into it’s more complex forms.
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