Changing Paths - The Struggle Between Apollo and Dionysus

 

As soon as I graduated high school, my father suddenly expected me to go to college—a word he had never once mentioned before, nor had he ever shown interest in my grades. It wasn’t surprising that I had my own plan: I wanted to become a professional boxer. That dream lasted until the night I met Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta. I had fought in the New York Golden Gloves and had been fighting for the past three years. My whole life was fighting. However, spending just one evening with my boxing heroes was enough to show me that boxing would waste my potential. I admired what they had done for Italian Americans, but their words and outlook turned me off. They were tough, yes, but not high-thinking men. Still, I couldn’t help noting how LaMotta lived well into his 90s in excellent shape, body, and mind.

Realizing boxing wasn’t my path left me scrambling for direction. I was finishing high school with poor grades, working at a grocery store, and feeling like my options were shrinking. But as life often does, it opened unexpected doors. I started revisiting my hippie parents’ music—The Rolling Stones, The Doors—just as punk rock was exploding in my neighborhood. At the same time, I experimented with drugs that expanded my consciousness, and once I had rejected boxing, it was as if my mind suddenly became thirsty for everything I had missed as a poor student. I read voraciously, diving into literature, art, and philosophy.

When my friends started at community college, I tagged along. One visit to the art school there hit me like lightning: this was where I belonged. I applied immediately and was accepted the next semester. In art, I discovered the part of myself I had buried while busy fighting. It was my soul yearning for expression, and I dove in without hesitation.

The lesson I took away from this was the importance of courage. In America today, we glorify Special Forces as the ultimate symbol of courage. At the same time, we’ve systematically devalued artists—sometimes justly, given the excesses of the music industry, but often unfairly. Life is always a tug-of-war between two broad paths: Apollo, the god of order, structure, discipline, and Dionysus, the god of chaos, art, and intoxication. For years, the rock star—Dionysus—was the cultural ideal, until the decadence, drugs, and self-destruction of that image pushed society to swing back toward Apollo: military fitness, warrior order, discipline. That swing isn’t necessarily bad, but America has a habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

When times got rough in my own life, I, too, threw myself into Apollo’s camp, becoming a warrior. But eventually I realized that path was intellectually and creatively narrow. My soul kept calling me back to Dionysus. Like many people, I carry both within me—maybe too much of both—and reconciling them isn’t easy.

The punk rock movement was crucial for me. At a time when high school graduation forces you into choices, punk declared that all choices were meaningless, a liberating starting point. From there, I built a framework of meaning by looking to evolution and primitive cultures. What mattered to early humans—art, hunting, family, fighting—must be inherently human. That became my criteria for value. This perspective led me into woodcarving, tai chi, meditation, martial arts, cooking, and nutrition. These became the foundations of the life I’ve built—simple, rooted, and guided through the modern cacophony.

Society often seeks placeholders for meaning. For many, religion fills that role. In America, college has become another placeholder: a socially approved symbol that reassures others you are on the “right path.” Many people don’t want to wrestle with what’s truly valuable—they just want the security of what society values in the moment, and they project that onto you.

But ultimately, life is about balancing expectations: your own and those of others. To survive, you must demonstrate value to those who hold resources, whether in services or goods. Sometimes that’s noble, sometimes it bends toward vice. Either way, the challenge is to carve your own path between Apollo and Dionysus, between survival and expression, between order and chaos. That’s what I learned when I changed paths.

Getting lost in infinity

Practicing martial arts forms on the deepest level manifests your cosmic kung fu training teachers. They train you. They are the cosmic ancient masters and their accumulated experiences are held in two different places, one in suspended animation in your DNA and second in the specific martial patterns. Once these are linked, the secrets can be unlocked through a deep visceral training of the ancient forms. 

After I was done with fighting highschool bullies, I realized fighting is not healthy. I ran to the Yin side to pursue the arts. I had grown up in an artistic household and thought this path would offer me the most out of life. It seemed an exciting choice and coincidentally not much different than martial arts with its physicality of moving the brush, charcoal, or chisel.

 Again, I heard those ancient voices but there were also voices of temptation like Lorelei whispering to travellers in the woods. I was soon coaxed into territories deeper than I could fathom, listening to the whisperings of lost souls whose threads were not connected to the ancient voices, my tether was cut and I was free floating in infinite space.

Floating in limitless space you brush up against those who are also untethered and there you can experience extreme connection but it is only temporary. Everything seems to fall apart and nothing lasts. Although this is true for much of the things found in life, there are however, some things that are rock solid and indestructible. Religions speak of such structures but, words can only be of little help. 

In martial forms, we walk with the ancient masters without form and our souls touch their footsteps. Those footsteps lead us to the energetic cathedral which forms the structure of the universe. This is indestructible and always changing.This is the place to reside. 

Chris Aloia, July 21, 2020

A New Art

When I graduated high school in 1983, there was this sudden pressure to do something. One either had to get a job or go to school or something. I got a job at a grocery and thought for a while about what would be the best position in society for me.

Being 18, I wanted the "job" with the most freedom. My parents had a friend who was a struggling artist and he had this really open-minded perspective on life. So I chose to become an artist. My parents were not too happy with this decision but they knew I wasn’t going to change my mind that easily.

I started drawing everything I could. I eventually went to a college for art. I was as passionate about art as anyone had ever seen. I specialized in painting and sculpting. I had even carved totem poles for a motel in Taos, NM.

As I explored art, I was continually amazed at the artist’s calling for pushing limits of what art is. One of my artist role models is Joseph Beuys, a German performance artist who really broke new ground. He was an artist in the academy before WWII doing representational themes in paintings, drawings and sculptures. Then he was called to serve in Hitler’s army as an fighter pilot. He was shot down a few times. The last brought him closest to death. He was shot down and was found by a tribe of people who saved his life by putting him into a felt cocoon surrounded by fat. When the war was over he knew standard academy painting would never be able to externalize his past experiences. He began doing elaborate performances, which set his career off and changed the art world.

After 12 solid years in the art world, I had a profound experience during a martial arts class. We were asked to make 100 Japanese sword cuts with a wooden Katana called a Bokken. I can’t remember what number I was on but I got myself into a state. Then all of a sudden a black passageway opened up and I felt hyper-aware. That experience of an altered reality changed my perception of the world. Art itself seemed pale and utterly cheap from that moment on. I tried to paint that experience for the next few years with some feelings reminiscent of that first experience but it wasn’t until I started doing T’ai Chi and Qi Gong that I was able to get back to that place.

Once this new method of altering my consciousness began my art production slowed to a trickle. I found that Qi Gong and T’ai Chi could replace and surpass any internal feelings that my art was able to do.

My next step was to share that feeling with others. After becoming relatively proficient in some Tai Chi and Qi Gong forms, I felt comfortable enough to teach other people. But I seemed to keep bumping into some obstacles. Many people in society viewed these forms as either, stale and static or just for old people.

So my next challenge was how to change the way society viewed these activities. I went back to school and completed my bachelor's degree in psychology. Studying social psychology it becomes abundantly clear that people have many preconceived notions that are informed not from direct sensory experience but from socio-cultural norms they learn. Many people in society relegate art to a painting or a sculpture that is executed by “artists.”

T’ai Chi and Qi Gong are really not considered as anything more than an exercise for older adults who are in need of assistance. Even martial artists have been patronized by being Asian-philes who break boards and shout like cavemen. Our society has these narrow perceptions of what all these things are. Our whole society is compartmentalized so much that you would think nature is as well. Compartmentalization is a major flaw in our highly industrialized society. The problem is those of us in the West have to name everything, which seems harmless but limits the object once it is named.

Even fellow artists often ask if I still paint or make art. There is no possibility in their minds that the act of performing Tai Chi is the creation of art. Art to me has now become that amazing feeling when my body seems to open up and glide on the earth's crust weightless and painless and ready!