James,

In your writing you have addressed ancestral memory on more than one occasion.  I'm curious as to your thoughts on whether or not any of that memory/skill translates into the arena of boxing or stick fighting.  You've made note of various physical ailments that have plagued you of late...Yet when stick fighting, you have mentioned that these ailments somewhat fall by the wayside and you are able to stand toe to toe with younger more mobile fighters.  Do you think that there is anything imprinted in your DNA that affects this?

Be safe out there.

-Nero the Pict

Oh, King of Pictdom,

I would like to believe that your hypothesis is true, that when I find myself teetering and alone and faced with an aggressive young primate, I am somehow infused with the spirit of the proto-human who picked up the first bone or stone and clobbered his rival. Hell, I'd be satisfied to discover that that wretched LaFond digging a ditch in Frankdom, that gave issue to my line, planted that pickaxe in some knight's kidney, but he probably just got trampled while the knight was riding off with little Miss LaFond over his saddle...

The argument against it is that the thousands of hours of training—often against my instincts—that it took to enable me to mindlessly fight with effect while having great difficulty getting in and out of cars and on and off of wenches, even willing ones! especially willing ones!!—have enabled me to fight with seeming instinct encoded through the mimicry of training.

An argument against training and for blood memory would be that my training is merely undoing the sissy cultural encoding that Mom, Dad, Teacher, Principal, Cop, Boss and Politician have been charged with ingraining into my being.

I can tell you one thing, that holding a stick or other weapon does enable me to connect more directly with my will than boxing, which requires heavy emersion in training, to become more tantricaly involved in the combat.

Taken to a more basic level, I think—no, I feel—that my person only opens to the unknown powers that surround us stupid apes when I am in combat. For me, combat has been a search for the truth, and when involved in fighting and hypnotic levels of training I have felt energy pour into me, not out of.

That was a long way to go for an "I hope so, Bro'" so let's take a long look at our universal uncle of an era gone by.