Silat Stuff

A golok is an Indonesian knife akin to a machete. They come in various lengths, from keris-size to sword. ; generally they are sans guards, and are considered utility tools or weapons. Learn how to use a machete, you can use a similar-sized golok. The nicer ones are pamor steel, with patterns in the metal formed by nickel that shows up lighter against the iron. The black color is traditionally made with a mix of arsenic and lime juice and exposure to the sun.

The pamor in the short golok above is called buntel mayit. It's a "complicated" pattern, and is sometimes called "twisted tree bark" in polite company, though the literal translation as I understand it is "corpse bundle" more commonly called "the death shroud ..."

Such a pamor is considered very powerful magic in certain circles, but is also unstable. It is just as apt to bite the hand that holds it as that of an enemy -- if the owner is not sufficiently powerful enough to deal with it.

Last night, we had a make-up silat class -- Guru Plinck had to cancel an earlier one this week -- but because it was a short notice, most of the students couldn't make it. There were three of us who managed it, and because that gave us more room than usual (more on that later), we had enough space to begin learning a new weapon ...

I won't bore casual reader with the specifics of the training, save to say we used sticks in place of machetes or goloks, and that we started out very simple and stayed that way. But it was very interesting to see how the Sera we knew was used in the new training, and what we did differently because of the length of the weapon. It isn't kali, another blade art, but right out of the Javanese silat tradition.

There was another bonus for me:

Some time back, on one of the fairly rare occasions I missed a regular silat class, the group learned a new djuru. Last night, Guru decided I had suffered long enough and gave me another one. Something about learning a new djuru always revitalizes my practice, and I was most pleased. It doesn't really matter, but then again, it does ...

Now, to the comment about space.

Silat is a village art, and even today, taught more in backyards and garages to small groups than in commercial schools. Guru Plinck, when I started, was teaching a class in a multi-discipline school, the Straight Blast Gym, in Portland, Oregon, but after a few months, went back to teaching in his garage, in Vancouver, Washington. After a year or so, he and his family moved to Kelso, something of a commute, and we split the difference by having classes in Cotten Blackwell's garage, in Vancouver. Eventually, Guru opened a metal fabrication shop in Longview, and in the doing of that, didn't have time or energy to make the drive to Vancouver after a twelve-hour day starting his own business. He decided to take a lay-off from teaching silat.

Several of us managed to convince him to offer private lessons in the back of the shop after work. After a few months, a few of us -- Todd, Tiel, and I -- started showing up sequentially, and eventually overlapped into semi-private lessons, and then expanded back to a class. Private lessons are terrific, but group lessons expose you to different sizes and shapes of opponents, which is also good.

Last summer, we moved the classes to Guru's house, which has a nice yard and acres of pasture, but as the weather got wetter and colder, we moved into the garage. Come spring, we'll head back into the yard. Meanwhile, we've been concentrating on learning close-quarters material, and this is a good thing -- in a real fight, you might not always have a nice big empty ring, and you need to know how to get around in a room cluttered with stuff and other folks.

(I keep meaning to buy a space heater for Tiel, who likes the heat much better than the cold. What you get being raised in Hawaii by way of Africa, I suppose ...)

After more than eleven years, I still look forward to each class. Always a new revelation waiting around the corner. I love this stuff. I really do.