tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33214022024-03-07T07:48:18.989-08:00Speaking Natalie<i>To Speak Natalie.</i> v.<br>
1. To speak another's idiosyncratic dialect of English.<br>
2. To understand//appreciate who that person is.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger275125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-11506085591429309872023-09-03T15:28:00.001-07:002023-09-03T15:28:10.733-07:00A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Brewery ...<p> So I've been in Orlando for about two months now, and I'm trying to rebuild my life. It's sort of a funny thing to say, that. One might think that, as I moved here for Meshparjai, I'd <i>have </i>a life here. But of course that's not really true, and it really oughtn't to <i>be </i>true; you can't make your kid your life. I mean, your kid needs you to <i>not </i>make them your life. But I don't really <i>have </i>a life down here.</p><p>One of the reasons that's true is that I don't have a church here. That is, itself, a funny thing to say. A funny thing for <i>me</i> to say, I mean, because I kind of ... really don't like church. Okay, that's not true. I like things <i>about </i>church. I like the rituals of church. Increasingly, I like <i>all </i>the rituals of church, from the ecstatic low church liturgy I grew up with to the stodgy high church liturgies that, in retrospect, have been slowly creeping into my faith life since middle school at Chaminade. I like Communion, which is a weird thing for a Foursquare boy to say, but there you have it. I like the exegesis of Scripture. I like closing my eyes and reaching for the Spirit and saying, <i>Hello. I missed having this time together.</i></p><p>Nevertheless, I don't like the way a lot of Christians expect church to be done, this early-century idea that the church is the hub of your social life. Most Christians I've met in church are just not my people, and while that still gives me a twinge of guilt to say, I'm more or less done apologizing for it. I miss Christians like Archimedes and Blue Rose and Antilles. And I miss Tenranova and being able to talk frankly about how bad so many people are at religion and what we want it to be. I miss talking to people about religion and being on the same wavelength, and it just kind of kills me how many Christians just <i>aren't that</i>.</p><p>Antilles has actually been on my mind a lot lately, as I think about church. I don't know about him, but for me, one of the things I valued so much about our freshman worship nights was how <i>different </i>they were from the standard campus Christian fellowships, and how much more intimate they felt. <i>There </i>was my church; <i>there </i>were my people--not at Campus Crusade for Christ, not at InterVarsity, not at Reformed University Fellowship. And I remember being both sort of shocked but also envious when Antilles told me he was, effectively, trying to do church without church--just some folks living in community. It didn't entirely work out, as I recall, but the <i>idea</i> of getting to do church with people you actually liked and respected was pretty powerful to me.</p><p>I guess that's the first time I've actually said that. I ... don't respect most Christians I've interacted with <i>qua </i>Christians, I suppose. Maybe that's a me problem.</p><p>Anyway ... one of the things on my parental To Do list now that I'm down here is to give Meshparjai access to her Christian heritage. And that's a complicated thing for me, for whom the closest thing I've ever felt to a real church home is The River, all those years ago. And I find, as I think about it, that that narrows the field of churches I'm interested in in a way that surprises me.</p><p>Here are the things that I would have said I was looking for in a church:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Sermons that aren't just self-help talks.</li><li>Musical worship that's mystic and alive.</li><li>Communion as an ordinary part of the liturgy.</li><li>A pastoral staff that lives and values the liberal arts and all that they entail.</li><li>A connection to and deep respect for Christian tradition.</li><li>The ability to commit to Christ without abandoning what we know academically about the Church, her history, and religion as a field of human endeavor.</li><li>A set of congregational values that wouldn't make me feel like I have to apologize for what happened at church to my own kid.</li></ol><div>I find it easy enough to find 1 and 2, but I find that they tend not to coexist with 3-7. And honestly, I find 3-7 increasingly important to me for my own sake, not to mention for the sake of raising someone in the modern church.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is how I found myself today at a place called the Hearth, an LGBTQ-friendly, woman-pastored Lutheran church that meets in a brewery. Because I have <i>no idea </i>how to search for things 3-7 on my list, but I figured that looking for a queer-friendly, female-ordination-friendly place would cut out a lot of the places that <i>weren't </i>3-7.</div><div><br /></div><div>#2 wasn't there, obviously, because apparently the only parts of Christendom who remember how to do ecstatic ritual are, for the most part, not my people either (he says with a nonzero amount of bitterness). But I ... well, I have a good feeling about this. The pastor reminds me of Tenranova a bit. The people remind me of the Episcopalians I've met, in a good way. I hung out for beer and lunch and talked with a bunch of them and I kind of get the impression there's a nonzero amount of "spiritual refugee" energy in this congregation, which ... at this point, honestly, maybe describes me too.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't go to church to affirm my support for the LGBTQ community. I don't go to church to affirm my support for female pastors. I don't go to church to fellowship with my coreligionists, which ... honestly, between you, me, and the blog, is a failing on my part. But I ... had a good <i>feeling </i>about this place. The way the pastor talked about giving. The way she talked about worship (musically, not my cup of tea, but theologically, yesyesyes). The way it was so clearly and unapologetically a Lutheran service, attended primarily by non-Lutherans.The way the sermon walked the line between meaningless exegesis and meaningless "applicability." The fact that they don't have a separate youth program (honestly, in my opinion, a big plus).</div><div><br /></div><div>The sense of tug on my heart last night, that said, "Go on. Give it a try."</div><div><br /></div><div>The sense of closing my eyes in the service today and reaching for the Spirit and saying, <i>Hello. I missed having this time together.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I'll be back next week.</div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-17540193621945820452020-04-18T22:25:00.006-07:002020-04-21T02:48:27.685-07:00Jungle CruisesI think I figured it out.<br />
<br />
Somewhere between today's three hundredth playthrough of Weird Al's "Skipper Dan," a much-needed dinner break reading my latest David Weber novel in which a young priest learns the truth about his fabricated church and wrestles with his faith, and explaining to Kara that I should never have become a securitization attorney in the first place, I think I figured it out. What's bothering me right now, I mean.<br />
<br />
Let me back up.<br />
<br />
The past few days I've been depressed again. I should be enjoying my spring break, reveling in the fact that I have a book coming out, lots of time to paint, a new roleplaying game I'm running (even if it is D&D, which <i>itself </i>is a sign of depression), lots of time to read, new shows to watch. Instead, I'm feeling like life doesn't mean very much.<br />
<br />
Oh, <i>part </i>of me is just mourning the loss of my trip to Disney. I was <i>supposed </i>to be spending a whole week on Batuu as Kalen Lowery, an expatriate from Arkanis fleeing the First Order and the loss of his copilot, flying jobs for Hondo Ohnaka all day and being recruited into the Resistance, trying to get passersby to play a game of dejarik or sabacc or just journaling under the Batuuan sun. I had a <i>plan</i>: for lodging and meals on a budget, for how to carry everything I needed on my person without a backpack in a way that still looked Star Warsy. And now that won't happen. Probably not until next year at the earliest. Maybe never.<br />
<br />
It's not about getting to Galaxy's Edge. <i>That</i> I'll be back to, maybe this year. It's about the <i>trip</i>. About having a whole five days in Galaxy's Edge (okay, maybe a day for other Disney stuff), without anybody wanting to do anything else, without anybody else there. About Kalen being stuck on Black Spire Outpost due to circumstances beyond his control and not being sure he wanted to leave. It was about me working out feelings of life being empty and pointless and deciding that it's not, about bringing joy to people's days with my interactions and remembering that magic still exists in the world if only we have the wit to see it. About really immersing myself in a place I wouldn't want to leave, and choosing to leave anyway. Kalen can't really get stuck on Batuu forever, you know. That can't be what the story is.<br />
<br />
But good luck finding another week I can afford to take to go to Orlando before my annual pass expires.<br />
<br />
Anyway ... as much as I hate having rituals taken away from me, my canceled spiritual retreat to Black Spire Outpost is not actually what's been bothering me.<br />
<br />
What's really bothering me is that I feel like my <i>job's </i>being taken away from me, and I don't know what to do about it.<br />
<br />
So let me back up and explain <i>that</i>.<br />
<br />
I was telling Kara the other day that I never should have become a transactional lawyer. What I <i>should </i>have been was a tax attorney. Transactional attorneys - the kinds of lawyers who actually make deals happen - are too much like diplomats for me to ever be a good one. As my last mentor told me before I quit the profession, in that job, you have to be okay with people being mad at you all the time. And I'm not. Not people I need to work with, anyway. I can dismiss people I can <i>forget </i>about just fine, but i don't have the trick of tuning out the emotional displeasure of people I have to interact with. But tax attorneys ... tax attorneys just wrestle with the law and make pronouncements to the transactional attorneys that Thus Saith the Tax Code. The kind of tax attorneys I always worked with, anyway. By the time I figured that out, it was too late. I'm not equipped to be a good transactional attorney, but I think I could've made a good tax attorney.<br />
<br />
Should've been a tax attorney.<br />
<br />
Or maybe not. Because then I probably never would've been a teacher. But that's kind of the point.<br />
<br />
Because here's what's really bothering me: maybe I'm trying to be the wrong kind of teacher.<br />
<br />
My current principal is threatening to put me in an "English language arts" class of newcomers, which is to say brand new immigrants to the US, most of whom will literally not speak English. I use the word threatening and the quotation marks advisedly. I feel <i>wildly </i>ill equipped to teach a class like that. I am, frankly, certain I will fail - or at least fail by the metrics that matter to my principal.<br />
<br />
<i>Some </i>of her motivations in making this move are benign; I recognize that. But only some of them. And regardless, it <i>feels </i>like she's taking away my kids and putting me in a situation in which I cannot possibly succeed. And the <i>reason </i>she's doing that is because I have, in her eyes, failed to establish control of my classroom in the way she wants to see it.<br />
<br />
Now, I <i>know </i>that is bullshit, in lots of ways. I <i>do </i>connect with my kids. I give a damn, and they know it. I <i>know </i>that matters in ways that isn't going to show up in my principal's precious metrics. But I <i>also </i>know that I <i>have </i>failed to convince my kids - most of them, anyway - that what we do in my class matters, and they should give a damn. Not about me. About <i>reading</i>.<br />
<br />
And I have to admit, it's got me thinking. Look, I know I'm a phenomenal teacher. Give me a student who wants to learn and I can find a way to make the light bulb go on about most things, for pretty much anybody. I'm <i>good </i>at that. Better than most people who hold instructional positions. I know that. I <i>am </i>a teacher, and I always will be.<br />
<br />
But am I trying to be the wrong <i>kind</i> of teacher?<br />
<br />
This is where "Skipper Dan" comes in, by the way. I've been bingeing it not because of the Disney connection (okay, there's a little bit of that), but because it's about a man who is a phenomenal actor and spent his life failing to become a breakout star, and landed as a tour guide on the Jungle Cruise ride ("Skipper Dan is the name ..."). The actual song is pretty bleak about this, but it's such an upbeat earworm that the unspoken message is that working on the Jungle Cruise ride is actually not such a terrible thing after all. There's a kind of wonderful beauty to it. It's just not how Dan saw his life going.<br />
<br />
You get it, I assume.<br />
<br />
I could have been a good lawyer ... but I spent ten years trying to be the <i>wrong kind</i> of lawyer.<br />
<br />
I <i>know </i>I'm a good teacher ... but am I trying to be the wrong <i>kind </i>of teacher?<br />
<br />
I truly hate the thought that there are students out there I might not be able to teach, but ... what if there are? What if there are types of teacher that I'm <i>not </i>suited to being, just like there were kinds of lawyer? I mean, if you put it that way, there are almost <i>certainly </i>types of teacher I'm not suited to being. What if I look back in <i>another </i>ten years and I'm paying the rent and I'm swallowing my pride and I'm working on the Jungle Cruise ride?<br />
<br />
Would that be okay? I mean ... maybe? I just don't know that I'd be any <i>good </i>at it.<br />
<br />
I don't know what to look for, and I don't even know <i>how</i> to look. If I stay at my Title I school, I get my classroom taken away from me (I might need to stop thinking about it that way, but ... that's where I am right now). It's more than halfway through April, and it doesn't exactly seem like I'm likely to get another classroom right now. Should I even be <i>looking </i>for another classroom? Could I, I don't know, be a full-time tutor? My coach said she'd like to see what I can do with a real honors class, and hell, so would I ... but how am I supposed to get one?<br />
<br />
By the time I figured out I should have been a tax attorney, it was too late to make myself one. It's only been two years of teaching, and I would hate to think I've already become unemployable because I did <i>this </i>career wrong, too. I <i>already </i>lost the last two years of my marriage to this career transition, and for all I know, my chance to raise Meshparjai, too.<br />
<br />
I'm pushing forty and, honestly, my working life feels like a failure. A lot of my <i>life </i>feels like a failure, really - that's why I was supposed to be going to Batuu, damn it - and I don't want my second career to be a failure, too.<br />
<br />
That's what's bothering me. At least I figured it out.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Now my hopes have all vanished and my dreams have all died</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><i>And I'll prob'ly work forever as a</i></i></div>
</div>
<i>
</i>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><i>Tour guide on the Jungle Cruise ride</i></i></div>
</div>
<i>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Skipper Dan is the name</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>And I'm doing thirty-four shows every day</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>And every time it's the same</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Look at those hippos! They're wigglin' their ears</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Somebody shoot me, 'cause I'm bored to tears</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Always said I'd be famous; I guess that I lied'</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Cause I'm working on the Jungle Cruise ride.</i></div>
</div>
</i><br />
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-35075793314770853082018-04-02T15:01:00.003-07:002020-04-18T22:29:11.140-07:00Resignation<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of an attorney and counselor at law to the best of my knowledge and ability.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of attorney and counselor-at-law, according to the best of my ability.</i></blockquote>
Today I mailed my transition to inactive status to the California State Bar and began the process of applying to resign as an attorney in New York (neither process technically the same as the other).<br />
<br />
I have, as the kids say, all the feels.<br />
<br />
I don't plan to be a practicing lawyer ever again, but it isn't very hard to become one after going inactive (CA) or resigning (NY). There isn't anything irrevocable about this decision. Practically speaking, its only effect is to save me the hassle of keeping up my continuing legal education requirements and the cost of those CLE programs and registration. The cost is the main driver; being an attorney in California and New York costs close to $1,000 annually. Still, I can't help but feel an immense sense of loss at this most practical and revocable of actions.<br />
<br />
Above are the words of the attorney's oaths as I took them (the California one has been updated a bit since). I thought about them a lot, as well as the "duties of an attorney and counselor at law" (to use the California phrasing) to which they refer, before I took them. There isn't an expiration date on these oaths. They aren't conditional upon my <i>being </i>an attorney and counselor at law. That status does affect some of them ... but not all. It remains my sworn duty, for instance, "never to reject, for any consideration personal to [myself], the cause of the defenseless or the oppressed" (from the California duties). I remain oathbound to support the constitutions of the United States and the States of California and New York - with all their faults, foibles, and injustices.<br />
<br />
I was proud to take these oaths. They mean a lot to me.<br />
<br />
As I said, I consider myself still bound by them. Yet I still feel like I'm losing something. Or maybe this is just a natural occasion for reflection upon the oaths by which I'm bound. I haven't made a lot of oaths. I can only think of ten, really.<br />
<br />
Or maybe what's really going on is I feel a need to understand how I'm going to uphold them when I'm <i>not</i> an attorney. I'm thinking a lot about that, too. One of the duties that weighs most heavily upon me is this excerpt from Paragraph 6 of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>As a member of a learned profession, a lawyer should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge in reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education. In addition, a lawyer should further the public's understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority.</i></blockquote>
The ABA has no actual authority over American attorneys, and the Model Rules are more like ... <i>guidelines</i> than actual Rules. The section quoted above isn't part of the duties of an attorney in California or New York ... but as far as I'm concerned, it's part of <i>my</i> oaths.<br />
<br />
I think about this as I try to become a teacher. I have a lot of strong feelings about how government and history ought to be taught, but more than that, I have strong feelings about <i>teaching </i>them. Because I swore an oath to further the public's understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system. I need to teach people these things - not just about what our system of governance <i>is</i>, but why I think people ought to <i>believe </i>in it. There are a lot of things about America I'm ashamed of, and many of those things are rooted in our constitutions. I really did consider, before I first swore, whether I could swear to support those constitutions for the rest of my life.<br />
<br />
And I realized that I could. That I'm proud of them. That it was worth it to add these oaths to the others on my ledger. I want to teach others to understand and be proud. I have to.<br />
<br />
I made a promise.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-84248892557635800352017-01-23T09:47:00.003-08:002017-01-23T09:47:40.560-08:00What Am I Doing Here? Church EditionThe subject of church is on my mind a lot lately. Swordwind is full of people from weird religious traditions, Meshparjai actually asked to go to church last week, and she and I had one of those powerful parent-child spiritual covering moments a few nights back. I'm thinking more about the mystical now these days just in general, in large part thanks to Tenranova (who makes me feel like a bad Christian, sometimes).<br />
<br />
The truth is, though, that I've always had something a fraught relationship with church. Maybe that's kind of surprising - I've always found it ironic for someone whom Princess once called "the most Christian person I know." I've pretty much always found church hugely problematic. I can recognize its <i>value</i> in my own life, but the more honest I am with myself about how problematic I find it, the harder I find it to commit to as a real spiritual discipline.<br />
<br />
This really bothers me, of course. To a pretty close approximation, Christianity <i>cannot be done</i> outside of a community. The same is true of most religions, I expect. And as Hebrews discusses, there is something fundamentally incompatible between the redemption of Christ and "forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some." But there it is.<br />
<br />
The problems I've had with church have varied over the years. When I was in school, my basic problem was that the fellow Christians I was supposed to be building spiritual community with were not my kinds of people - by which I think I meant some combination of "into the wrong hobbies," "too popular," and "too dumb."<br />
<br />
I have never dealt particularly well with dumb people. I like to think I've gotten better. But this was over twenty years ago. And, to be fair, it wasn't just the people. <i>Church</i> was often infuriatingly stupid. I used to say that I didn't really understand how you can give a worthwhile sermon in less than an hour. What I meant by that was that when I gather to hear the Word of God proclaimed, I really want to hear the Word of God <i>analyzed</i>. I want to understand the text better. I <i>don't</i> want some kind of "application" to my life. If understanding the text <i>happens to have</i> application to my life, then great. But the text - Scripture, the Word - <i>that</i> has to be the point. Not my own circumstances.<br />
<br />
As I got older, my problems with church tended to fall more into this category: that church is a place to meet with God, not a place to get moral or behavioral advice. And in this regard, I find myself caught - have been caught for about ten years, if I'm honest - between different approaches to church.<br />
<br />
I grew up with a very low church sort of liturgy, where the congregation enters the Presence principally through musical praise. This sort of rock concert worship service has become fairly widespread and especially characteristic of the non-denominational megachurch, though I think my home church was unusually thoughtful about what precisely we were doing. On the model I grew up with, musical worship is performative. It's instantiatory. It taps into the ancient roots within humanity that feel the need to create spiritual space where it <i>is</i> on earth as it is in heaven, whether we're recreating the throne room of Yahweh as revealed to John or recreating the hunting grounds of Ashur.<br />
<br />
Perhaps because of this, I find this sort of liturgy a more ... complete experience of the Presence. There is thunder and fire in it, and tenderness and heartbreak, that I don't find in the more staid liturgies of other Christian traditions. I don't think I could take seriously an experience of God that doesn't have thunder and fire and tenderness and heartbreak. Here my heart is open to God in a way that I crave. Maybe this makes me weaker, in theological terms, than those who can trust God without such direct experience.<br />
<br />
At the same time, this sort of liturgy is vulnerable to being ... well ... <i>stupid</i>. I don't mean pointless: I mean literally lacking in intellectual substance. It runs the risk of being hollow. There is thunder and fire and tenderness and heartbreak in it, but God is more than that, and you can't have Christianity without the text. You just can't.<br />
<br />
The Episcopal liturgy where I've made my home for the last few years (well, intermittently) doesn't have that problem so much. It may be staid, but as Archimedes once said to me, every word has been examined and re-examined. The prayers are <i>excellent</i>, carefully grounded in the text and with many layers of function. There is value in the sense of <i>wholeness</i> that comes from being part of a comparatively long-standing tradition. I find that there is actual, direct spiritual value in the Eucharist - a value that I think even Pastor Scott would have recognized. It is a staid liturgy, lacking in fire and thunder and tenderness and heartbreak. But there is strength in it.<br />
<br />
And as for the intellectual substance of the liturgy of the Word - something that, I find, <i>all</i> liturgies place more importance on than I appreciated when I was a kid being annoyed that Pastor Jack's hour-long sermon hadn't included <i>nearly</i> enough footnotes - well, as far as I can tell that's just not something you can control for by liturgy, or even by denomination. That comes down to the individual pastor.<br />
<br />
All three of these things are indispensable to my understanding of church - of what it means to just <i>be</i> in the Presence of God. There's only one church I've ever been in that combines all three (The River, back in San Jose). As a believer, I find that thought kind of ... discouraging. As a parent, I find it exhausting, and a little bit frightening, and a little bit sad. I <i>want</i> to worship with my family. I want to wallow in <i>all</i> the things that God has to offer. I don't want to have to pick and choose.<br />
<br />
And this doesn't even <i>touch</i> the community aspect of church.<br />
<br />
I have had the thought periodically over the past ten years that perhaps that is the missing part of the puzzle - or at least, the part that I'm supposed to grow in next. In truth, I've only ever really had one Christian community, which was Testimony - and even then, I was always the one arguing that we had to be an a cappella group first, and a fellowship second. I've never really <i>appreciated</i> community, is I guess what I'm saying.<br />
<br />
And I don't know how to build it. I don't know how to find a group of Christians who <i>just happen to</i> be the kinds of people I want to make clan - or how to have more than one clan, or how to make my clan big enough to have (say) a fencing community <i>and</i> a Christian community. I can sort of understand finding fellowship in the context of a larger community where our joint allegiance helps to paper over the fact that we aren't really <i>clan</i>. But what larger community is likely to have that sort of person, other than a church? And that brings me back to my problems with church.<br />
<br />
Which is why so often I've been in a spiritual headspace - whether it's praying with Meshparjai, sitting in the pews at St. Mark's, administering Communion to myself in the morning alone in the kitchen, or talking fencing with Tenranova - and asking myself, "What am I <i>doing</i> here?"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-3340332929216986382016-01-28T14:14:00.002-08:002016-01-28T14:14:25.163-08:00The Talhoffer Society, and On KillingI just finished <i><a href="http://www.michaeledelson.net/#/the-talhoffer-society/">The Talhoffer Society</a></i>. This will not be a review as such, although I will write one of those later (probably somewhere else, where it will be seen by more people, although I may do a more personal friends-and-family review here). I will say that it has been a good long while since I have read a book that is <i>excellent</i> (italicized for the Natalian).<br />
<br />
Anyway. As I said, this is not a review. It's going to be a post about force, and about killing, and why I think those are important topics.<br />
<br />
<i>TTS</i> is about a modern-day tournament fought using real swords, sponsored by the rich and powerful. This is, of course, a classic martial arts fantasy (cue <i>Mortal Kombat </i>theme), and for that reason I should mention not only that the central premise of the book was considerably more sophisticated than I had anticipated, but that all of the places in the beginning that struck me as sloppy plotting turned out to be satisfactorily addressed by the end.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>( For those who are curious, competitive fighting with real swords is not </i>entirely <i>fictional. I know of one group of people that fought on a semi-regular basis with no protection and real swords that were allegedly properly sharpened. I have no idea how good these people were, though I know that at least some of them had or went on to have actual killing experience (not of each other, thankfully). I am fairly certain I know other fencers, of whose skill I have more direct knowledge, who have done it, albeit not as a regular activity. I am not aware of any top-level organized live steel competition backed by what amounts to the Illuminati, but then, I wouldn't be, would I? )</i></blockquote>
In a story such as this, as you might expect, a lot of the characters' skull time is spent thinking about the relationship between martial arts, martial arts <i>practice</i>, and death. Or maybe you wouldn't expect that; I don't know. As for me, I was ... hoping for it. I am greatly edified by my hopes having been met (but now I'm getting review-y again).<br />
<br />
As regular readers know, I practice KDF in order to think about death. I vacillate between thinking this is utterly ordinary and probably uncommon. I've heard real people express the sentiment that most Americans probably don't understand that "self defense" involves killing people, or proclaim in ominous tones that guns are made For Just One Purpose, which is To Kill. This flabbergasts me, because ... well, duh? I'd like to think most people who own or practice with weapons understand quite well that before you can get into any nonsense about good guys and bad guys, you've got to be able to kill: to crush flesh and shatter bone; to cause limbs and trunk to part company; to turn a human being who is a parent or child and turn it into lifeless, pitiful meat; to send the spirit of another human being wailing down to hell and leave their body as a feast for dogs and birds. Murder, combat, attack, defense, justifiable use of force - these are all legal or moral <i>conclusions</i>, not acts. The act itself is simply killing.<br />
<br />
I'd like to believe that this is a commonplace understanding. Mostly this is because the converse is terrifying to me. Weapons can be fun, but they aren't <i>toys</i>, after all. But it's also because the converse is baffling to me. Why the hell (if I can continue in a Homeric vein) would you want to lay hands on a weapon if <i>not</i> to get in touch with the stark, singular, solitary reality of killing?<br />
<br />
Maybe this seems strange. I've tried before to explain why I think it is important. I have even said that I think killing is inextricably related to being a good person (not that I think being a good person is <i>particularly</i> important, but it's not nothing, either). I still think that. I don't know that I'm going to be able to do a better job of explaining now. But <i>TTS</i> offers its own meditation on the subject, and more directly than I can recall any other piece of fiction doing. It's inspired me, I suppose, to try again. So here I go.<br />
<br />
I have heard it said that humanity is divided into sheep and wolves, usually with the subtext that being a sheep is bad. I don't think this is true (though perhaps I am being Cicero here). Certainly I think it <i>is</i> true that most people have a natural aversion to killing, and some people have no particular aversion to it, and some people actively enjoy it. But I see no way in which this is of moral consequence. What I do think is of moral consequence is self-possession: to make one's will the master of one's actions (to determine upon good actions is another matter, of course, but self-possession is a necessary precursor). And the subject of killing, I think, tends to bring this into starker relief than do other topics. In part this is precisely <i>because</i> most people have a natural aversion to killing. But I think there's more to it than that. Killing seems to me like ... well, like a sort of moral nexus. Because it isn't <i>just</i> about the willful termination of biological life. To borrow Jesus' example (not that he was the only moral thinker to have posed this question), what really is the difference between killing someone and being angry enough <i>to</i> kill someone? Is it truly that the stark fact of biological existence is so all-fired important? I'm certainly willing to say that <i>death </i>is bad ... but am I prepared to say that <i>dealing </i>death is bad? I don't think so - and yet how can that be? And of course there are the more mundane questions that killing asks of us, such as under what circumstances we would be willing to do it. Would we really kill one life to preserve another? Why? Doesn't that imply that one life is more important than another? If not, on what basis are we willing to make the choice (and yet, sheep or not, I think almost all people share the instinct that <i>sometimes</i>, killing is the right thing to do)? Yet if so, doesn't that imply terrible things about the moral implications of sin and our own ability to forgive? Or put it another way: if you haven't settled for yourself when you would kill someone, how can you have settled when you would forgive someone? And if you aren't working to be <i>able</i> to kill someone, how can you be working to being able to forgive? Does it seem strange to link death and forgiveness so naturally? I am Christian, after all.<br />
<br />
I've begun to wax spiritual. And I'm not really apologetic about that, because I think people who eschew the spiritual are stupid. But I don't wish to get too ... <i>esoteric</i>, I suppose. Because these questions - death, forgiveness, self-possession - are of immediate, temporal urgency. I mean this generally. But I also mean it personally, in the sense that meditating on the how, why, and when of killing has helped me not to kill myself. I keep Ruusaan in my bedroom in significant part to remind myself that I choose <i>not </i>to die: that I choose to live, that I choose to be forgiven, and to forgive. There have even been times, late at night, when it has gotten so bad that I have to physically hold her in my hands, to see her edge glow in the moonlight, to feel the heft of her that wants to hew, that was made to part flesh from flesh - and to know that <i>I</i> hold <i>her</i>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-6468671675126740382015-11-16T10:26:00.000-08:002015-11-16T10:26:07.151-08:00Holding On and Letting Go<i>"Nu gar cuyi ner burc'ya.</i><br />
<i>Ni kar'tayli gar gai sa ner aru'e.</i><br />
<i>Enteyo kyr'amur gar.</i><br />
<i>Ni cuyi kyr'am."</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
You are not my friend. I know your name as my enemy. I must kill you. I am become death. After a morning of judging the open longsword competition at the Southeast Renaissance Fencing Open, the time has finally come for me to enter the ring and fight. I'm looking at my friend the Spider Monkey, murmuring this mantra under my breath.<br />
<br />
I'm in the invitational longsword tournament rather than the open, as I had expected to be in. It's a compliment to be in the invitational; it means the organizer trusts not only my skill in general but also trusts me to put on a display of technical, artful fencing whether I win or lose. And isn't that the point? A few days before the event I confide to Kebbura that I don't really feel worthy of the invitation, and she makes this very point to me. Maybe I can't win. But I'm not in it to win, right? I'm in it to fence well. Tournament success is not the pinnacle of good swordsmanship.<br />
<br />
And yet ... I <i>do </i>want to win. That's why I'm going, after all. Yes, I want to win with technical, artful fencing. A win without that wouldn't mean very much to me, because technical and artful are part of the fencer I want to be. But they're only part. I also want to be implacable and merciless. If I ever come at you with a sword, I want you to know right from the start that death is coming for you, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. I want to see Ailouros' predatory smile - the one she discovered at Longpoint - the next time we meet, lock eyes with her, and say, "Bring it, bitch."<br />
<br />
I'm not there yet. The art is coalescing in my head and my limbs and my hands; I can <i>feel </i>it. I'm stronger and faster, less easily winded. I can <i>see </i>better than I used to be able to, not only what happened and why but what is <i>going </i>to happen. But it isn't all synthesized yet, not the way I want it to be. I need to know that when it all comes down to <i>this moment</i>, I can bring all these pieces together and fuse them into a single whole. So yeah, I want to win.<br />
<br />
Most of this is mental. Part of it is aggression, something I've always had trouble with in fencing when it comes down to it. Most of it is singing, dancing. When I sing a patter song I'm not thinking about the lyrics; if I try, I'll trip myself up. When I dance, part of me is thinking ahead, but most of me is just in the moment, feeling what is and being immersed in it. I remember the Dance Master talking about this, the joy of <i>letting go</i> while still being hyper-attuned to the instant moment. Letting everything go, while holding on to my focus. I can do it when I dance. I can do it when I sing. I need to be able to do it when I fence.<br />
<br />
It's not a light switch yet. I have to sink into this mental state slowly and deliberately. Hence the mantra. <i>Nu gar cuyi ner burc'ya. Ni kar'tayli gar gai sa ner aru'e. Enteyo kyr'amur gar. Ni cuyi kyr'am. </i>You are not my friend. I know your name as my enemy. I must kill you now. I am become death. I repeat it to myself under my breath. Louder, once my helmet goes on. The bucket muffles sound going in and out, and I let myself sink further into my own world. My lips still, and my perceptions begin to change, like a filter lowering into place. My opponent's joints, limbs, and sword are no longer a threat. They tell me how I can take him apart. This is how I want to fence, how my art <i>tells </i>me to fence. I gaze levelly at my opponent, feel my body arranged beneath me, the fit of Ijaat's handle in my grip. <i>You can't beat me</i>.<br />
<br />
He can, and he does. Spider Monkey is still better than me in the ring. But I do much better than the judges' calls indicate, as even some of the spectators tell me afterwards and which my opponent himself is happy to acknowledge.<br />
<br />
The next two fights I win. They aren't shut-outs, but I never feel the fight slipping away from me, either. I don't know either of my opponents. It doesn't matter. I see them, and I hit the cracks that I see until they've been taken apart. We dance, and I lead.<br />
<br />
I make it out of the pool into the final sixteen, along with Spider Monkey. This is a huge accomplishment by itself. The only other time this has happened to me in a longsword event was at Iron Gate Exhibition 2014, which was due not so much to my fencing ability as to my superior game theory analysis of the rules. This advancement is mine. This one, I am proud of.<br />
<br />
I don't make it out of the final sixteen. My opponent is cagey, harder to trick into making mistakes. We end the match in a tie, and he beats me in sudden death when I get impatient. But it isn't the impatience that was the problem. I can see it now, what I should have done - how I could have pushed him harder, or in a different way, to take him apart. And I see what I <i>was </i>doing, treating him like my last two opponents. I was fighting the last war. Dancing without sensing my partner. I stopped <i>seeing</i> my opponent.<br />
<br />
That's okay. I will do better next time. I've proven to myself that I can do it. I am content.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-42763694847925539672015-07-26T20:50:00.004-07:002015-07-26T20:50:46.431-07:00Longpoint 2015When I met Zod for the first time, it was to teach a sparring workshop for the first time any of us had sparred with swords (at least in a HEMA fashion). One of the things he told us was that it was the responsibility of those of us who had a killer instinct already to help the others cultivate it. "You have it," he said, pointing to one of us. "You do, and so do you," he said, pointing to two others. And then he looked at me. He hesitated for a moment. "You sort of have it," he said.<br />
<br />
At the time, I was pretty okay with that. Half a killer instinct? Not bad for someone just starting out. But in the months since, others found theirs while I did not.<br />
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This bothers me. I want to acquire access to that part of myself that Zod termed the "killer instinct." I want to be able to turn it off and on <i>at will</i>, to find that part of myself and bring it within the ambit of my will. I want it even more (if only by a little) than acquiring actual skill with a sword. More than any other factor, this is <i>the</i> reason I started doing HEMA. When I talk about the connection between force and morality, or force and good character, this is the very essence of what I mean.<br />
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Aside from its moral implications, there are obvious competitive advantages to having one's killer instinct firmly in one's tool kit as well. Most of the best fencers, if not all, can switch from their normal selves to somebody <i>else</i> when they step into the ring, or before the cutting stand. That somebody <i>else</i> is a significant part of why they win.<br />
<br />
It was also a significant part of why I <i>lost</i> this weekend at Longpoint. I cut significantly worse than I know I can do, because I let myself approach the mat with less than single-minded intensity. I fought well enough in my longsword pool, but I didn't push, didn't take, as well as I know I can. Part of that is rust from not having sparring partners who are as good or better than me. But a significant part of it is also that I went into my pool in the same headspace I would occupy in any friendly (or even coaching) sparring match.<br />
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I think I figured it out about halfway through the event, coaching first Ailouros and then Kebbura in the women's longsword pools. I said something to Kebbura when she was facing Panthera and holding back (as usual) that stuck in my mind. I pointed across the ring at her and said, "That is not your friend right now. I want you to get in there and <i>hit her</i>."<br />
<br />
I coached Ailouros through her pool in the women's longsword and into the elimination brackets. I felt like we developed a good rapport, and I enjoyed analyzing the weaknesses of her opponents and helping her to exploit them (and more, perhaps, on the coaching side of things later). But I also just tried to get her amped up for the fight, because most of the women she faced had significant exploitable weaknesses and I just <i>knew</i> she could take advantage of them - if she went in with the right attitude.<br />
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The night that she got into the elimination brackets - the night after she beat the woman who would eventually take fourth place - she posted something to Facebook that really rattled me. "<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I found my inner bitch today," she said. "</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">And not just the one I fight health insurance companies with.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">The one I fight with."</span><br />
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Both of these ladies started training a few "generations" of students after I did (which is a matter of months, mind you; we acquired generations pretty quickly in Manhattan). Because I like teaching and I wanted the school to succeed, I made an effort to mentor them, and I feel a certain amount of investment in their success as their senpai. I was, of course, very proud of Ailouros' fighting and I could <i>see</i>, even in the pools, when she made the jump from fencer to fighting bitch. But I was also kind of shaken.<br />
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<i>Son of a bitch</i>, I thought. <i>My kohai has found her killer instinct before me.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
This was the moment that I realized I had been fighting without it all this time. But it was also the moment that I realized I didn't know what it <i>was</i>, and that bothered me a lot more. <i>What is my inner bitch?</i> I wondered. <i>What does she look like?</i><br />
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I tried to think back to the times I <i>had</i> felt my killer instinct in a fight, even if briefly and non-deliberately. The best I could think of was the dagger competition at IGX (my best competitive showing to date, perhaps not coincidentally). It felt ... almost cold, to be honest. Certain. And focused, ever so focused, on the defeat of the person in front of me.<br />
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If I ever kill someone, that is how I want it to be. Cold. Emotionless. Certain. Implacable. That is how death <i>should</i> be dealt out, so far as I understand the morality of killing. It's the kind of swordsman I want to be.<br />
<br />
Maybe these thoughts are naive. Almost certainly they are in at least some respect. But it was something to start from.<br />
<br />
So I meditated on that through the night. I meditated on it all through Ailouros' fights in the brackets. I tried to keep her in that state as well. I meditated on it in several otherwise friendly sparring matches I had. And I meditated on it during today's cutting class, during which I hoped to be able to show, before my friend and teacher and a bunch of people who <i>knew</i> that I was the student of one of the best longsword cutters in the world, that I really <i>can</i> cut. As I did so, I felt that calm, cold, unfeeling certainty return. I was interrupted by people saying good bye, and I was able to return to that state. And when it was finally my turn to cut, I stared down the mat and cut the way I <i>should</i> have cut during the qualifiers, and afterwards people who had felt pretty good about their improvement during the class asked me how I made it look so <i>lazy</i>.<br />
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Of course, a good headspace for cutting is not <i>necessarily </i>the same as a good headspace for fighting. But we shall see. We shall see.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-80082846647454217552015-06-08T00:00:00.000-07:002015-06-08T00:00:01.983-07:00Fencing Retrospective, Two YearsTwo years ago today I had my first KdF class. Two years have passed in my own timeline since I first began to practice in Prospect Park, in the mornings atop the knoll in the ring of trees.<br />
<br />
A lot has happened since then. I've moved to Charlotte. I have students of my own. I own a sharp sword - the first weapon I have ever owned - and I own it on <i>my</i> terms. I've practiced with the langes messer and dagger, two weapons that I would never have thought I would be attracted to, and discovered that I really like one of them (the dagger) and really hate the other (the messer). I've started learning the use of the sidesword, a weapon I've wanted to learn for as long as I've wanted to learn longsword, which is the first time I've tried to learn a weapon without the benefit of in-person instruction.<br />
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I've attended two major tournaments and two minor ones. At one of the major ones I made it to the finals in the dagger tournament, I actually won a medal in a rapier tournament, and I made it to the eliminations in longsword.<br />
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Am I any good?<br />
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I don't really feel like it, to be honest. There are others from AHS who have been practicing for as long as I have, or very shortly longer, who are better than I am - better in technique, better in cutting, better in sparring. I suppose it is natural to compare myself to those of my peers whom I know to be the best. As for my students, I am not as far ahead of them as I would like.<br />
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Am I <i>better</i>?<br />
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Absolutely.<br />
<br />
I have now executed cuts that I couldn't execute a year ago. The progress hasn't been entirely forward, but it <i>has</i> been forward in the aggregate. I understand the art better than I did a year ago. Whereas a year ago I could more or less explain pretty much all of the <i>hauptstücke</i>, I can now just <i>explain </i>all but a few of them, at least in a much deeper way than I could a year ago. And I understand the foundational concepts of the art better now too. I no longer think in terms of <i>tempi</i>, the Italian concept that forms the basis of so much modern fencing theory, and instead think in terms of <i>vor </i>and <i>nach</i>, the Liechtenauerian concept that serves the same purpose. I can exert pressure ... not well, perhaps, but much better than I could a year ago. And I can <i>feel</i> pressure better than I could, which is just as important.<br />
<br />
The reasons I fence have changed somewhat. I started fencing as a thing for me - a corner of New York to make my own. I needed that, to keep me from succumbing to depression. I needed a tribe, and fencing gave me one. I needed a reason to exercise, and fencing gave me one.<br />
<br />
I still fence for those reasons. The thing that keeps me eating well (well ... better than I otherwise would) and exercising is the need to do honor to my weapon. Here in Charlotte most of my tribe are students. And there are certainly times, even here with Thayet and Meshparjai, when I feel the weight crushing me down like one of Rodin's caryatids and I just need to feel Ruusaan's grip in my hands.<br />
<br />
I also fence to teach. I'm still a lawyer, but I can teach through my fencing. It isn't really the same teaching peers as I think it would be teaching those younger, but it's still teaching. It gives me a chance to work on curriculum and lesson design, as well as my presentation skills and pacing. And this, as much as holding the sword in hand and hammering body and will to the demands of the art, helps to center me.<br />
<br />
I am thirty-four now. The five years will be up when I am thirty-seven - too old, in all likelihood, to ever be a truly top-tier fencer in the competitive world. But I find that I remain determined to be a swordsman. It has morphed from an exploration of force into its own thing - I must fence because I must. I <i>will</i> be a swordsman. I am a swordsman - I'm just not a good one.<br />
<br />
Three years to go.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-78663063572356792942015-01-03T11:37:00.000-08:002015-01-03T11:37:25.459-08:00An Tion Jate?<h1 class="quoteText" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">
<i>"The very formula, '</i>Naus <i>means ship' is wrong. </i>Naus <i>and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind </i>naus<i>, as behind </i>navis <i>or </i>naca<i>, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.” - C.S. Lewis</i></h1>
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<i>An tion jate? </i>This is a question I ask myself a lot lately. I in Mandalorian because it makes me think about them in a different way than if I ask in English. I ask it because it means, "Is everything okay?" And I am not okay. I am sick. The anxiety and depression, the "impaired executive function" - it's all back (I'm back on medication, but these things take a month or so to really kick in). Everything is not okay.</div>
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I ask it because, without additional context, it also means, "Was everything okay?" And I begin to wonder if perhaps it has not been okay for a long, long time. I am better prepared this time, more aware of when parts of my mind shut down and better able to re-route around the dark sectors or at least tread water until the lights come back on. One of the things I have learned that helps is to sing - to <i>roar</i>, the kind of singing that feels like a core workout, songs that are choked full of emotion, to thunder into the void. And I remember ... this is not the first time I have felt that way. I have always loved to <i>roar</i> (as my sophomore year dormmates can attest), but it has not always been out of desperation. But it was out of desperation in New York, when I started attending Hillsong NYC because I needed that space to roar in, a cathedral of light and smoke and sound and spirit. It was out of desperation in the worst times in California, when the smothering blanket of depression was so thick that I <i>couldn't </i>sing, even when I wanted to. It was out of desperation as far back as law school, when I first created a playlist of Disney songs that I could thunder because it was the only way I could feel something - anything at all. </div>
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And you know what? It wasn't out of desperation any further back than that, that I can recall.</div>
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So I ask it because it also means, "Is everything good?" And I wonder. Maybe this profession is not good for me. Certainly the sector of it in which I have worked almost my entire working life is not. I need to face up to the fact that I am sick, and this kind of job is not good for someone with my condition. I am not certainly it is good for <i>anyone</i>, to be honest, but perhaps I am being overly judgmental - or overly naive, which is sometimes just as good.</div>
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And I ask because when Meshparjai is sad, truly sad, I cradle her in my arms and stroke her hair and whisper, "<i>An jate</i>." And asking this question makes me remember that it <i>will</i> be okay. I think, "<i>How long have I been sick like this?</i>" and, armed with greater experience of my illness, I suspect that the answer is <i>a good deal longer than you thought.</i> But there was a time when I was not sick, and there have been times when I was at least asymptomatic. It <i>can</i> be okay again. <i>I</i> can be okay again.</div>
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I ask because as much as the answer is no - <i>nayc, an nu jate</i> - the answer is also a faithful, defiant <i>elek</i>. Yes.</div>
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No, everything is not good. My sickness is not good. But God is good, and God is above everything, and it <i>will</i> be okay.</div>
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A postscript digression: One of the things I have learned helps me keep it together when the lights go dim is fencing. This is, of course, why I have bothered to emblazon my gear with the phoenix earth; it's a way of reminding me that this is one of my anchors, not just a hobby. When I was making my sword pillows, Thayet jokingly reminded me not to forget to include embroidering a cheesy saying on them. So I did, and it <i>is</i> cheesy, but it's also quite serious. I embroidered them: <i>Gotal'u an kebise evaar'la</i>, from Revelations 21:5: "I make all things new." But thanks to Mandalorian conjugation, without specifying the subject, it also means: "He makes all things new." And he will.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-33840581303828218712014-12-24T22:10:00.002-08:002014-12-24T22:12:05.099-08:00Gotal'u An Kebise Evaar'la<i>Now</i> it is Christmas.<br />
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This is the first Christmas in a long time that I have spent away from my immediate family. Certainly it is the first without Thayet or Meshparjai. I did not go to Dickens Fair. My house is empty and undecorated. There are no presents here. I may not be able to stay in Charlotte. There has been little about this Advent that has seemed Christmas-y.</div>
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But Christmas is not about family, nor love, nor togetherness, nor cheer. It is not about goodwill towards men. Those are all good things, and worthy trappings <i>for</i> Christmas. But what Christmas is - what the <i>Black Pearl</i> really is - is praise.</div>
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This is not a plea to keep the Christ in Christmas. Even in its most traditionally religious incarnation, Christmas is already an abstract memorial of events and ideas that the Church finds significant. If other people want to turn it into an abstract memorial of other events or ideas that they find significant, I shan't object; it doesn't diminish the sanctity of my own memorial. But for me, what Christmas memorializes is the invasion, the return of the king ... the promise that <i>I make all things new.</i></div>
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And while I love spending time at the holidays with my <i>aliit</i> (moreso, truth be told, than with my <i>family </i>in the traditional sense), and I love spreading Christmas cheer at Dickens, and I love spreading a sense of <i>magic</i> with decorations and presents, the one thing that Christmas really <i>needs</i> for me is a memorial of that epic moment, when the trap was laid for the great enemy and the powers of heaven rolled forward upon the territory of the prince of the air with all the thunder of the angels of the one whose thunder and trumpet terrified the people at Sinai, spearheaded all by the cry of a newborn.</div>
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I need the sense of remembering with others who are remembering the same thing, and are similarly moved. It used to happen with Xenophon over Christmas carols at my parents' house. Then I moved away, and some years it never happened. Tonight it happened at St. Mark's Episcopal, filling that old church with carols and invoking the weight of generations past. And at home after midnight, in this empty house with the lights off, thundering songs of praise.</div>
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I may, as it happens, be trading in my accustomed low church tradition for something somewhat more liturgical. But I think that my cathedrals will always be made of thunder and smoke, light and shadow: full-throated worship roared to the heavens, a vocal salute. Tonight I build one of those in this empty house, and the home is full.</div>
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And now it is Christmas.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-8423036966392031142014-11-25T17:55:00.002-08:002014-11-25T17:55:31.574-08:00Things I Find Troubling About the Brown ShootingThe St. Louis County prosecutor <a href="http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1370766-interview-po-darren-wilson.html">released an interview with Darren Wilson</a> recently, in which Officer Wilson recounts his version of his encounter with Michael Brown. As I expect anybody reading this knows, the grand jury returned no indictment of the man, and naturally, I accept that as a matter of state law that's the end of it. But I nevertheless find myself troubled by the story recounted. There are, of course, questions of systemic justice that the case raises or at least has made people think about, but this is not a post about those. Even among those who see this as an exemplar of systemic injustice, I expect that many people who are fascinated by this sort of thing are at least in part fascinated by the question of what they would have done had they been in the defendant's position, and I admit that a goodly portion of my own fascination is inspired by just that line of thinking. In short: what do I think about Wilson's story, and how does that better help me understand myself?<br />
<br />
According to Wilson, here is what happened:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Wilson encountered Brown and his friend walking down the middle of the street, heading towards his car. He drew up to them in his patrol car and asked, "Hey guys, why don't you walk on the sidewalk?" One of the two demurred. Wilson repeated his request, and the second told him, "Fuck what you have to say," and the two continued to walk past Wilson's vehicle. Wilson backed up, I suppose to keep pace with them, began to open his door, and said, "Hey, come here." One of the two (Brown, the interview seems to imply), said, "What the fuck are you gonna do?" and shut the door on Wilson before he could even get his leg out of the vehicle. Wilson tried to push Brown back with his door, Brown said something that Wilson doesn't recall, and then began punching Wilson through the window, pressing the door shut with his body.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Brown bent down to enter the vehicle with his upper body while continuing to do something with his arms ("tryin' to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbin' me and everything else," in Wilson's words). Brown paused his attack to hand his companion a pack of stolen cigarillos with his left hand, saying, "Here, take these," which afforded Wilson the opportunity to grab hold of Brown's right arm. Brown then rounded on Wilson with a full punch from his left hand. Wilson continued to hold Brown's arm with his left hand while attempting to use his right to draw something to defend himself with. He didn't have a taser, couldn't reach his mace on his utility belt (and didn't want to use it at such close proximity anyway for fear that it would incapacitate him too), couldn't reach his flashlight in the bag on the passenger seat without leaning away from Brown and rooting through the bag, and so decided on his gun. He drew his firearm, pointed it at Brown, and ordered him to stop or be shot. Brown informed Wilson that he was "too much of a fuckin' pussy to shoot me," grabbed it over the top with one or two hands (Wilson doesn't recall), and twisted it around to point at Wilson's pelvic area, with his hand around Wilson's trigger finger, which was inside the trigger guard.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Wilson let go of Brown's arm with his left hand and used it to lever the gun back around towards Brown. He tried to fire twice, but the gun didn't fire, presumably because Brown's hand was still on the slide. He tried to fire again and the weapon discharged through the door, sending glass from his rolled-down window flying along with blood. Brown rocked back and then forced his upper body into the car again, swinging and grabbing wildly at Wilson. Wilson defended himself with his left hand and tried to fire through the door again. The weapon clicked, so Wilson racked the slide and as he did so the weapon "just came up and shot again." Brown fled, and Wilson exited the vehicle and shouted at him to stop and get on the ground.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Brown stopped, and with "the most intense aggressive face I've ever seen on a person" charged Wilson at the run, putting his hand under his shirt into his waistband. Wilson ordered him to stop and get on the ground again, but Brown kept running towards him. Wilson began to backpedal, fired "multiple" shots and repeated the order, and Brown continued to run, "hands" still in his waistband. Wilson fired multiple shots again, at least one of which hit Brown in the face and caused him to pitch forward onto the ground a few feet from Wilson. Brown had "made contact" with Wilson "multiple" times, and landed "at least two" "solid blows," resulting in a swollen right cheek and jaw and scratches on his back, neck, and shoulders.</blockquote>
Now, I have to admit that this story does not strike me as especially credible. But let's suppose that everything happened exactly as described. What are we to make of this?<br />
<br />
My ethics of violence boil down to two aphorisms:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. To he who strikes you on the [side of the] jaw, offer to him also the other (Jesus); <i>and</i></li>
<li>Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back (Malcolm Reynolds).</li>
</ol>
The difference in verbs is important to me, and dictates what I believe to be the morally appropriate response. The first (socking you on the jaw) is, in Natalian parlance, merely <i>violence</i>. The second (trying to kill you) is a <i>threat</i>.<br />
<br />
To unpack that a bit - as a Christian, I think that killing is bad. This is not to say that it is always the wrong thing to do; I think that killing can be the right thing to do, despite being a bad thing to occur - and I think it <i>remains </i>a bad thing, even when it is the right thing to do. Because killing is always bad (even when it is the right thing to do), it seems to me that the onus is on the prospective killer to decide whether it is warranted.<br />
<br />
Christians have of course struggled with when it is appropriate to kill someone since almost before there were Christians. My personal resolution of the dilemma is bound up in the distinction between <i>violence</i> and a <i>threat</i>. I do not believe that Jesus intended for us to suffer <i>every</i> attack without resistance, and God seems to be perfectly okay with killing human beings under many circumstances. The moral question for me boils down to what is actually being threatened. Mere injury, or loss of honor or authority, does not warrant resistance. If something more important is threatened, such as a life or a psyche, then resistance is warranted.<br />
<br />
I don't believe in threats, and I don't believe in going into any kind of fight that you aren't prepared to finish by any means necessary. So if resistance is warranted, death is on the table. If it isn't worth killing over (if the altercation should escalate to that level), it isn't worth punching over.<br />
<br />
How does all this apply to the Brown shooting? I find myself troubled by the fact that Wilson drew his gun. At the moment he made that decision, he had suffered back-talk, a punch to the face, and attempted grabs. This is certainly offensive, but does it warrant killing? I hesitate to say that being punched and grabbed on the street rises to the level of a <i>threat</i>, let alone when the attacker is awkwardly wedged through a car window. I cannot help but notice that in Wilson's account, Brown only went for the gun <i>after</i> Wilson drew it - and then did so in a way that one normally associates with <i>preventing</i> an automatic from firing, and in fact <i>did</i> prevent it from firing twice, even after Wilson had regained some control over his weapon. Is that a threat? To be honest, I find it ambiguous.<br />
<br />
I find it less ambiguous - somewhat, I admit, but significantly less - as to whether a large, wounded, apparently berserk teenager charging one is a threat. I do not believe in reciprocal force. Once an actual threat has been offered, I believe in ending it as decisively as possible. I can buy classifying as a threat being charged by a kid with murder in his eyes, even if he does have to hold up his pants while charging. <br />
<br />
But how did it get to that moment in the first place? It is difficult for me to escape the conclusion that the escalation to lethal force came from Officer Wilson, after being offered no more provocation than being punched and unsuccessfully grabbed - in short, after being <i>attacked</i>, but not <i>threatened</i>.<br />
<br />
It would be disrespectful to say that I would have done differently. If that is what happened, though, it is difficult for me to say that it was right.<br />
<br />
I do understand that what I am classifying as the <i>morally</i> correct way to deploy force is not the <i>tactically</i> correct way to deploy force. If a person is close enough to strike you, after all, they are in all probability close enough to kill you before you can effectively resist. Not only that, but your chances of being <i>able</i> to effectively resist are significantly diminished if you have first been struck, even by blows that are in themselves not actually threatening. At the end of the day, I think that following Jesus sometimes requires one to do the tactically unsound thing in order to do the morally sound thing.<br />
<br />
It's worth observing, though, that <i>civilized society</i> requires the same. Imagine a society in which you can be justifiably killed for punching someone in a bar. We all know instinctively that being punched in a bar is highly unlikely to be a prelude to homicide. It's almost certainly about establishing dominance, not about rending body from soul. But of course that's an assumption, and after all, one <i>has</i> been attacked by a person at a very dangerous range. It would be safer to incapacitate them than to ignore it, or walk away. And there have been and are times and places when society was much closer to that norm. It was not, I feel confident in saying, an improvement.<br />
<br />
I should emphasize that it is not the escalation <i>per se</i> that troubles me. As I said, I don't believe in reciprocal force. In fact, I affirmatively believe in <i>un</i>reciprocal force, which is why it does not particularly bother me that Brown was, at the time of his death, unarmed. What troubles me is <i>why</i> Wilson, according to his own account, chose to escalate. His account does not make it sound like Brown intended to kill him, or indeed was in any reasonable danger of doing so inadvertently, and yet Wilson threatened to kill him. <i>That</i> is what troubles me.<br />
<br />
I have heard from various parties variations of the sentiment that Brown deserved what he got, because he assaulted a police officer. To this I feel it should be sufficient reply to ask why, if assaulting a police officer is sufficient cause to warrant death without a trial, no legislature or court has seen fit to articulate that doctrine. We will search the law in vain to find the proposition that a police officer may lawfully kill another prior to receiving an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury that an objectively reasonable person would interpret as such, even the laws of self-defense. And we know, of course, that not all assaults <i>do</i> constitute, to an objectively reasonable person, imminent threat of death or serious physical injury. In this case, Brown was allegedly attempting to punch and grab Wilson through the window of a patrol car. It is difficult for me to see how he could have caused Wilson's death or serious physical injury in that position, and if he could not have done so or done so only through a very improbable series of events, then he could not present Wilson with an imminent threat. So again ... what was it, other than Wilson's subjective fear, that justified his drawing his weapon?<br />
<br />
I find myself troubled.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-20162138690745405772014-08-30T21:30:00.002-07:002014-08-30T21:30:46.395-07:00Fencing Retrospective, A Year and Three MonthsWhen I <a href="http://dmeroit.blogspot.com/2013/06/impressions.html">first came to New York</a>, I gave myself five years to get any good at fencing. It has now been fifteen months, and I am headed to my second competition at the end of the month. I've decided to participate in four tournaments at Iron Gate Exhibition: dagger, longsword, "mixed weapons" (really a series of competitions all involving one-handed swords), and basic cutting. This will be the first time I've competed in a dagger or one-handed tournament, the first time I've competed with a steel longsword, and the first time I've competed with a sharp sword. I am, in other words, jumping in with both feet, and we'll see how I do (perhaps later I can share my thoughts on why). But this seems like a good time to ask: how is it going? Am I getting any good?<br />
<br />
Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself able to answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative. Liechtenauer divides his unarmored longsword art into seventeen <i>hauptstücke</i>, high-level concepts that group together several individual plays or techniques. I've now at least <i>seen</i> all seventeen, can explain them all at least superficially, and I am starting to be able to apply them when analyzing other people's fights and in my own fighting. Occasionally I can even make some of them work. Five of the <i>hauptstücke</i> are special cuts, and I can execute about half of them with a sharp sword against a resistive target almost all the time. In fact, there are thirteen cuts on my "to do" list (there are others that one can do with a longsword, but these thirteen will do for now), and I can reliably cut about eight of them (eight and a half, if that's a thing). My fundamentals are definitely better than they were a year ago. And I find, as I contemplate my first steel tournament, that I am willing to fight anybody. I don't necessarily expect to win, but ... I'm confident that I won't completely embarrass myself. In cutting, I am by no means capable of fancy or complex feats, but I feel that what I am capable of is solid. The gap between my sparring and my cutting is narrower than it was, and I feel like the one informs the other.<br />
<br />
I'm not really <i>good</i> yet, by any means. When it comes to dancing, there are a few dance forms in which I feel like I can dance with a partner of any skill level and any training background - anybody from anywhere - and make the experience uplifting. And as for other dance forms, while I may find them <i>scary</i>, I am confident that I have the skills to pick things up quickly enough that I can at least make it workable in short order.<br />
<br />
That's pretty much what <i>good </i>means to me in fencing: I want to be able to fight anybody from anywhere, at least with my chosen weapon(s), and make the experience uplifting. I don't necessarily have to win (in fact - post for another time as well, I suppose - the more I learn, the more complex I find is the line between the martial and the non-martial), but I want my opponent to come away from the fight feeling like <i>my</i> fencing really brought out the best in them. And I want to be able to pick up any weapon and be able to at least make it workable in short order.<br />
<br />
And ... while I'm not there yet, you know what? I think I <i>am</i> getting there. And hey, there's another forty-five months to go.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-3728492762364850762014-06-21T17:25:00.001-07:002014-06-21T17:25:19.411-07:00You Keep Using That Word... I do not think it means what you think it means.<div>
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<div>
This is one of those topics that has bothered me for a long time. To be perfectly honest, it's one of those topics on which I feel like the church lied to me, and that made me pretty mad. I am speaking of the issue of <i>lust</i>, that bugaboo of American Protestant Christendom about which we harangue our young people from puberty until about the age of 30.</div>
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I think America in general cares far too much about morality, and American Christendom is certainly not immune to this peculiar cultural defect. And I suppose, if one is going to focus on morality, one might as well focus on sexual morality - since, for better or worse, we as a species seem to be obsessed with it (Christianity hardly being the only religion, and America hardly being the only people, who have made veritable fortresses of rules to protect our sexuality from ourselves). But that doesn't stop me from feeling like the church lied to me about it.</div>
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Specifically, I feel like the church lied to me about lust. I don't think anybody did it intentionally. They just ... left out a really important piece of information.</div>
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<div>
APC teachings on lust generally begin with Matthew 5:27-28, with the better sort ending at verse 29 instead. My favorite commercial translation (the NKJV) renders it thus:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[27] You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not commit adultery." [28] But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. [29] If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.</blockquote>
I say that "the better sort" include verse 29 because I think that makes it pretty clear (if the preceding verses were not clear enough) that there is ample Biblical support for the notion that the problem is with the luster, not the lustee. That by itself gets lost often enough. It doesn't get lost in the teaching, precisely. Frankly, you have to be a fairly incompetent teacher not to get that point. Everybody I know teaches that it's my responsibility not to lust. But it gets lost in the overall messaging mix, because everybody I know is <i>also</i> deeply concerned to let people know how they can <i>help</i> me not lust. And the next thing you know well-meaning older women are teaching younger women in their women's groups (no men involved!) about what to wear and not to wear, to "help" their brothers, and girls are getting sent home from proms because their dresses aroused lustful thoughts in the chaperones, and even I am deeply, <i>genuinely</i> upset over what a girl is wearing who is trying to convince me to date her.<br />
<br />
I don't think that the APC obsession with lust is to blame for all of America's sexual dysfunction. But I think it drives - granted, oftentimes from many removes - a lot of it.<br />
<br />
And there really is no problem with the desire to help me avoid what is, quite clearly, something Jesus thinks I should avoid. "It's your problem, not mine" <i>can</i> (and should) live hand in hand with, "How can I help?"<br />
<br />
But. Before we get there ... what exactly <i>is</i> the problem?<br />
<br />
Matthew 5:28 starts off simply enough. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Egô de legô humin</i><i>, </i>Jesus says: "But I say to you all."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: 'New Athena Unicode', Gentium, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Lucida Grande', Galilee, 'Arial Unicode MS', sans-serif;"><i>hoti pas ho blep</i></span><span style="font-family: New Athena Unicode, Gentium, Palatino Linotype, Lucida Grande, Galilee, Arial Unicode MS, sans-serif;"><i>ôn gunaika</i></span>, "that everyone who is looking at a woman." Still pretty straightforward.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>pros to epithumêsai </i>... </blockquote>
... and here is where I think insufficient attention is focused, in APC practice. <i>Pros </i>is a preposition that, like most prepositions, can have a variety of meanings - but they all have to do with the idea of directionality. <i>Epithumêsai</i> is an infinitive (specifically an aorist infinitive, I know, but I don't think that's relevant to my present argument), here being coupled with the accusitive article <i>to</i>, to make it clear that <i>pros </i>(whose meaning, like most Greek prepositions, is shaded by the case of its object) is being used in the sense of motion or direction <i>towards </i>the object - in this case, the infinitive <i>epithumêsai</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Epithumêsai</i> is conventionally translated as "to lust," but I think we have a tendency to forget what that word means - and since it is the thing Jesus is exhorting us to avoid, I feel like that is a significant oversight. Ancient Greek is a language that is in love with compounds, and this is one such. There is a danger in getting too reductionist with foreign compounds, since sometimes they don't literally mean what their compound would suggest (idiom is a thing!), but in this case, I think the lexicon is on the side of a reductionist reading. So what is this word?<br />
<br />
<i>Epi </i>is another preposition, also with an overall idea of directionality, but in a much more pointed way than <i>pros</i>. If I walk <i>pros </i>to you, I am walking in your direction. If I walk <i>epi</i> to you, I am headed in your direction with a more distinct purpose. <i>Thumos</i> is the "soul," if you want to put it that way (but English-speakers tend to be used to thinking of <i>psyche</i> as the soul); it's the part of you that houses your strongest passions and feelings. <i>Epithumêsai</i>, therefore, is to "set one's heart upon," to drive your desire towards something (in this case, the aforesaid woman) with great purpose. So lust is ... not a bad translation. "Covet" is equally good.<br />
<br />
No matter how familiar one is with grammar, it should be clear by now that there is a lot of directionality in this prepositional phrase. In fact, as much as I like the NKJV generally, this is one area where I feel like it drops the ball. "To lust" is an adequate translation of <i>epithumêsai</i>, by itself - both are infinitives. But it does nothing to render <i>pros to</i> - we are not just lusting here, we are looking <i>pros </i>to lust. We are looking <i>in order to </i>lust (or, if you aren't particular about translating the infinitive literally, <i>for the purpose</i> of lusting).<br />
<br />
There are two small points that just got made, both of which have what I believe are outsized significance for real-world morality.<br />
<br />
Point the first: Jesus is <i>not</i> talking about lust in general. He's talking about <i>looking</i>, for a specific purpose. Why is this significant? Because all too many young people in American Christendom (myself included, and I feel like I generally had a higher-caliber of theological teaching than most) are worried about the fact that they just lusted after someone. We twist ourselves into real knots about this, as a community. We have gender-segregated groups to talk about "struggling with lust." We form awkward partnerships for "accountability." We wring our hands about pornography because of it (depending on the pornography in question, there might be <i>other </i>valid reasons to wring our hands about it, but in my experience, those are never the actual reasons hands are wrung). In a million and one ways, we feel ... guilty. Dare I say it, we feel <i>condemned</i>. And that is not something we should ever feel.<br />
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And all over ... well, what? Because we had some sexual thoughts about a person, or our sexual response cycle started. I'm going to avoid the secular cop-out of saying that there's nothing wrong with that; there <i>can</i> be. But let's start with the text: did you look (even if we're defining "look" pretty broadly, for instance to include imagination) <i>for the purpose </i>of lusting? Or was it something that happened? It makes me almost want to giggle uncomfortably just typing that, as if lust is something that can happen by accident, but ... well, look, that's what the text says. We are not talking about lust. We are talking about <i>looking for the purpose of</i> lusting.<br />
<br />
Universities, high schools, and youth groups are filled with young people wringing their hands about lust, and the nation is filled with adults who never really stopped, but how many of them - how many of us - actually do that? How often do you really take a mental step back, and <i>deliberately</i> cast your gaze upon someone to lust after them? I won't say it never happens; it does. But it happens a <i>lot</i> less frequently than one might infer from the amount of play this issue gets with our young people.<br />
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Point the second: what <i>is</i> lust, anyway? I can't recall a single sermon, or discussion, of this point that has bothered to ask that question, let alone answer it. But I can say that, even in my generally high-quality theological environment, the never-actually-discussed, de facto, <i>assumed </i>answer is that lust is sexual arousal.<br />
<br />
This is a lie.<br />
<br />
<i>Epithumêsai</i> is not describing getting aroused, or finding someone sexually appealing, or having an orgasm. There is a reason that the Septuagint uses it in the ninth commandment ("Thou shalt not covet"). It is describing a state of mind in which you have an object in mind and, like Sauron, all your thought is bent on it.<br />
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Now, this <i>can</i> be sexual, yes. But it is a very particular <i>part </i>of a person's sexual life. A person can find someone attractive, initiate a sexual encounter, and have sex, all without <i>lusting </i>after his or her partner in this way. <i>Most</i> of a person's sexual life, I daresay (most of mine, anyway), occurs outside of this focused, laser-like, I-must-have-it-and-it-will-be-mine state of mind.<br />
<br />
How often do we bother to explain this to the generations of people who have grown up wringing their hearts into knots about lust? How often do we actually ask, "Have you ever felt that way?" I have, but not often - and when I first started hearing sermons about this passage, I <i>definitely </i>had not experienced what it is actually talking about.<br />
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But let us finish Jesus' thought. <i>Êdê emoikheusen autên en têi kardia autou</i>, he finishes: everyone who is looking at a woman in order to covet her <i>already committed adultery with her in his heart</i>.<br />
<br />
I mention this final phrase because I think it nuances what Jesus is talking about in a way that I think is incorrect misunderstood to the sorrow of whole generations of Christians. I think the most common understanding of this verse is that looking at a woman in order to lust after her is <i>morally equivalent</i> to having sex with her.<br />
<br />
If we understand <i>pros to epithumêsai </i>in what I believe is the vernacular way, we might translate the verse like this: "Everyone who is looking at a woman and finds her arousing has already had sex with her in his heart." And this would indeed be a terrible challenge, one so difficult to meet that it could well justify all the effort and, frankly, broken spirits that the American church has sacrificed to meet it.<br />
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But that's <i>not </i>what it says. The looking must be with purpose. And the object of that purpose is not mere arousal, but hyper-focused desire. Again, <i>to covet</i> is a perfectly good translation here, and one that I think is helpful. What I understand Jesus to be saying is this: If the only thing stopping you from having sex with someone is that you have not, in fact, had sex yet, then in your heart, you have had sex.<br />
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And this <i>does</i> happen. But again: how often do we ask our youth groups, in all of our earnest discussions, "How many times has this happened to you?" In my experience, this verse is taught (with due solemnity by our elders, who presumably know what it's like to be a young person) as something that every young person struggles with, pretty much all the time. That is certainly how it was taught to me, and I left a lot of sweat on the ground struggling against what everyone assured me as a daily struggle.<br />
<br />
And ... well, I feel like the church lied to me. <i>Sexual arousal</i> is a daily occurrence. <i>Looking at a [person] for the purpose of lusting after [him or] her</i>, quite frankly, is <i>not</i> a daily occurrence.<br />
<br />
When I in college, I met a girl. She was amazing. She was ... well, I haven't discussed this with her, so I won't give any more details than that. But she was intoxicating. From pretty much the instant I saw her, I wanted to jump her bones and do things I didn't even have names for with her. The attraction, we quickly discovered, was mutual. We flirted not just outrageously, but <i>intensely. </i>When she was anywhere near me, I could barely keep my hands off her, let alone think straight. We weren't dating, but the sexual tension between us was so thick that a knife would barely have made a dent. We planned a date in my room to watch a movie we both thought was sexy and had no plans to watch the movie, except maybe as foreplay. Leading up to that day, we both texted and IM'd each other to drive each other even crazier (this was before that was cool).<br />
<br />
<i>That</i> is looking at a woman for the purpose of lusting after her. It's intentional, it's consuming, it's directed. Sex is a part of it, but its defining features are not actually sexual at all. The critical thing - the thing that left me with such an indelible impression that now, for the first time, I had really seen what Jesus was <i>actually</i> talking about - was that I wanted <i>her</i> (and she wanted <i>me</i>) in a way I had never wanted anyone before, and we both took deliberate steps to encourage that desire in ourselves and each other. We both came to our senses before "anything happened" (if you'll forgive me the use of such a mealy-mouthed phrase), but for a few weeks, the only way in which we hadn't had sex was ... well, we hadn't gotten around to having sex.<br />
<br />
Contrast this with a more typical scenario. I am walking down the street. I see a woman wearing pants. Like many women's pants do, these pants show off her legs to advantage. I find this sexually appealing. I maybe even get the start of an erection. We go our separate ways.<br />
<br />
In that second scenario, while there is certainly a bit of attraction, I think it is plain that the intensely directed experience of <i>coveting</i> is missing. I don't actually want that woman at all, and if she offered to have sex with me right then and there I'd not only say no, but be kind of repulsed - <i>despite </i>the fact that I find her attractive. And while I did look at her, I certainly didn't do it <i>for the purpose</i> of coveting her (which I didn't do, in any case).<br />
<br />
This leads me to suspect that one of the greatest lust bogeymen of the American church is actually a paper tiger. I speak, of course, of pornography. The principal use of pornography, in my experience, is to arouse. It may have many ancillary uses (comfort, relaxation, a sense of safety, stimulation of the sexual imagination, whatever), but I think one use is almost always missing: desire to be in the scenario depicted. People don't use porn because they want to have sex with a particular actor or a particular character. In my experience, there is almost never any <i>wanting </i>involved at all.<br />
<br />
Now, there are many reasons why we could wring our moral hands about porn. It may be professionally exploitative (but it doesn't have to be). It may be morally destructive for the actors involved (but I'm not sure it always is, and there aren't always actors involved to begin with). It may just be an artistic travesty (which, let's be honest, most of it is). But is it looking at a [person] in order to covet [him or her]? I see no way to make that argument with a straight face.<br />
<br />
I don't think that what Jesus is talking about never happens (nor, I should probably state for the record, is it always <i>bad</i>). It happened to me in the story above (and it's happened to me since). But it's a lot rarer, and a lot more <i>recognizable</i>, than I think it is generally given credit for. I don't think this verse should <i>never </i>be taught, but neither do I think we should teach our young people - by our words and by how much time we spend dealing with "lust issues" - to be constantly looking over their shoulders to make sure they haven't lusted after someone.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-5320621702904944352014-06-02T19:34:00.002-07:002014-06-02T19:38:28.539-07:00Phoenix EarthThis weekend at Fechtschule New York somebody asked me, again, what my phoenix earth patches are about. I've been asked this a bunch of times since adding them to my HEMA gear, and I always chicken out. Yeah, I guess part of it is that I don't really know how to explain, but mostly ... I chicken out. Usually I say that the phoenix earth stands for me, or that it's been my coat of arms since I was fifteen or so (when my sister first designed it). And those things are true ... sort of. But that isn't what my patches are about.<br />
<br />
My phoenix earth patches are representations of my arms as they have existed in my mind since some time in late undergrad: <i>On a circular shield gules, a diminished bordure, a phoenix earth Or. </i>The circular shield recalls a hoplite aspis, and symbolizes faith (a shield) that benefits others (in the hoplite form). The red field is for strength and magnanimity, and for honoring a father (or, if you will, the Father). The gold is for faith, obedience, gentility ... and for vengeance.<br />
<br />
Which ties into the phoenix earth itself. The phoenix earth represents Earth <i>after</i> the end times, the New Jerusalem. It is the new beginning after the resurrection of the dead, after whatever tribulations the end times may bring, after the reign of a thousand years (if there is such a thing), after the last rebellion of the adversary, after Judgment Day and the second death, after earth, after heaven ... when all that is over and done with and life begins. <i>I saw a new heaven and a new earth</i>, says Revelation 21, <i>for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span class="text Rev-21-3" id="en-NKJV-31057">And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. </span><span class="text Rev-21-4" id="en-NKJV-31058">And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”</span></i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
<span class="text Rev-21-5" id="en-NKJV-31059"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”</i></span></span></blockquote>
When I look forward to an "afterlife," this is what resonates with me: when there is no more heaven and no more hell, when the brokenness of the human condition and the glories it can produce in adversity are replaced by a better human condition, one utterly free of the brokenness that haunts every corner of our existence and yet produces better glories, in ways we, who have come to depend upon darkness to let us distinguish and appreciate the light, can hardly imagine. When we get our bodies back, recognizably flesh and bone and yet transcendently better than before, and live in a physical world that is recognizably our own and yet so much <i>better</i> that it may as well be an alien planet, when the source of all joy and satisfaction is closer, and more present, than any human being has ever experienced. When all things - <i>all</i> things, everything that makes life the bittersweet mixture of joy and sorrow that it is - are made new.<br />
<br />
This is, as I said, the afterlife that resonates with me. I do not care for heaven. In heaven, I am still dead. Not obliterated, perhaps, but my body and soul are sundered, and that is just fundamentally <i>wrong</i>. The Biblical descriptions of heaven, if that's what they are, sound either dreadfully dull or eye-wateringly intense yet dreadfully one-dimensional. Give me a body, give me an earth ... give me the promise of the wild, unfettered and <i>alive</i> life that my [probably metaphorical] ancestors experienced.<br />
<br />
But it is not really the afterlife itself that motivates me. It is what this new life - this New Jerusalem, this phoenix earth - represents in the here and now. For me, the [Biblical] phoenix earth is the ultimate expression of the promise that <i>God makes things better</i>. That he is not the god of consolation prizes, nor the god of jury-rigged solutions held together with duct tape and a prayer, nor a god for whom some things are simply broken beyond repair. If the earth - the human condition, <i>life itself - </i>can be fixed in Christ, then <i>anything</i> can be fixed in Christ. And not only fixed, but made <i>better</i> than it was before. No matter how bad a marriage is, it can be <i>better </i>than it was before. No matter how broken a friendship, how sundered a family ... it <i>can </i>be made better. It may involve a phenomenal amount of effort, soul-breaking vulnerability and hard work. But in Christ it can be done. Whatever it takes to get there, it's not impossible. Knowing that makes all the difference to me.<br />
<br />
So what do my patches say? They say, <i>I believe in a God who not only can, but wants to, make all things new. I believe he will come in indomitable strength to have his vengeance upon evil itself, not only to fix what is broken but to make </i>everything <i>better than any human being has ever experienced it. I believe in creating that kind of world through self-mastering forgiveness and unconquerable gentleness wherever I go. And I will hold this trust in the face of the slings and arrows of life, for my sake and for yours.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
That's what my phoenix earth patches are about.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-44014829190455998882014-06-02T09:52:00.002-07:002014-06-03T11:29:28.897-07:00Fechtschule New York 2014This past weekend was Fechtschule New York 2014, which was my first "formal" tournament since beginning KdF almost exactly one year ago. By "formal" tournament I mean one in which every match in the tournament was judged and refereed according to rules that had been prescribed beforehand. I had competed in one tournament before this, at an event called Shortpoint 2014, but that was a very informal gathering of fencers and the "tournament" was simply the result of every match that a fencer happened to have during the course of the day, be it a friendly sparring session or "in the ring."<br />
<br />
At FNY, I was competing in both the paired forms competition (in which teams of competitors performed specified techniques from a particular fencing treatise, each team competing to present the technique as cleanly and "ideally" as possible), and the beginner's longsword tournament.<br />
<br />
I didn't advance beyond the first round of either tournament, but I feel very differently about them. My partner for the paired forms tournament got her left little finger broken earlier during the event, so I competed only sort of by accident, at the last minute - another fencer from my school also found out he needed a partner at the last minute, so the two of us practiced ten techniques for about an hour and then threw ourselves into the competition. That's about six minutes per technique, which isn't exactly a lot of time to polish things even if we did know most of them already. Given that, I am proud of what we were able to present to the judges, even if we didn't make it past the first round. And the people who did go far really did deserve it; their fencing was clean, exacting, and accurate.<br />
<br />
The beginner's longsword tournament was a different matter. Competitors were divided into three pools of five fencers each (I think one of the pools might have had six), and each fencer fought every other fencer in his or her pool. The two best fencers from each pool went on to a bracket system for the semi-finals and finals. The rules for the tournament, and the judging procedure, had been refined at Shortpoint and in my opinion were excellent. Not only did matches run very quickly, but judging felt very accurate (i.e., few instances where the fencers thought one thing had happened, but the judges thought another), and the incentives for the rules felt very good. In a nutshell, they discouraged people from taking shots to easy targets (such as the forearms) unless they could also defend themselves while doing so, and encouraged people to make technically strong hits to the head and torso, preferably while simultaneously controlling their opponent's blade (and, thus, defending oneself). While no tournament rules are ever going to be perfect, and no tournament will ever be a very good simulation of a real fight - even a real duel - I have nothing but good things to say about these particular tournament rules.<br />
<br />
I do have very critical things to say about my own fencing. It was timid, overly intellectual, and restricted itself to a smaller range of techniques than I know. At Shortpoint I felt like I fought about as well as I knew how, win or lose. At FNY I did not feel like I fought as well as I know how. I found myself discomfited by the incentive to go for the vitals, but did a poor job of defending myself when going for my preferred strikes against exposed hands and forearms. I let myself believe that my opponents were better than they were, and as a result forgot to fight with basic good technique, which foreshortened my range and made it even harder to fight at a good distance from my opponent. That belief also restrained myself from doing what I knew was the right thing in many situations. "I'm not especially good at what I know I should do in this situation," I might think. "My opponent will probably counter it." But that is no way to fight. Everything can be countered, but counters are generally harder to pull off successfully than the things they are counters to. And in any case, if one isn't willing to attack, one might as well throw in the towel. Attempting to substitute techniques that I knew I was better at, but also knew were sub-optimal for the situation, did not go well.<br />
<br />
This is why I am not pleased with my fencing in the longsword tournament. I certainly would have liked to win more matches, but mostly, I feel like I did not fight with my all. I have been brooding over this for the past couple of days; it's taken me that long to break down what exactly I did wrong in terms that are specific enough that I can work on them but broad enough that I can draw generalizable conclusions from them.<br />
<br />
I've decided that I need to own this failure. On the one hand, this weekend was not the best fencing I have ever done, or even the best fencing I know how to do. But it is the fencing I actually <i>did</i>, and that makes it part of me as a fencer. It's something I need to face if I'm going to get better.<br />
<br />
It's also, despite the pain of giving a poor showing, a reminder for me of what kind of fencer I want to be. It might be nice to say that I lost because tournament fighting is not real fighting. But in fact, the opposite is true. The event as a whole demonstrated that the best way to become an excellent tournament fighter is to learn real, martially applicable skill. And you know what? While I'm perfectly happy to hew into somebody's forearm to win a fight, I don't want to be someone who can't attack and defend. The elegance of the longsword that I find so appealing is precisely in using it both to attack and defend. And I don't <i>want</i> to be the kind of fencer who wins fights by nickel-and-diming my opponent to death in the legs and arms. I want to annihilate them. I want those head shots - one of the most oft-repeated phrases in the treatises we study is "stab him in the face." Yes, it's scary to close that extra few inches to be able to hew or stab the skull, or the collar area. I want to face that fear and conquer it.<br />
<br />
Because that's what fencing is about to me. Force without is force within, and vice versa. I'm not interested in killing because I have any particular desire to kill people. I'm interested in it because it's a form of authentic force, and I believe that authentic force is what is necessary for real self control or self possession. And that - to hold oneself in the grip of one's own will - is something I prize very highly. So I will get better at fencing the way I want to fence, and I will get better at being me, and I will remember that most of all, this is something to <i>learn</i>. More than twenty years later, Alanna still calls to me to <i>work</i>, even at the things you aren't good at, to bend myself to my will through sheer bloody-mindedness:<br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #fafbfb; line-height: 15.359999656677246px;"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$4:0">“</span></span></span></span></i><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0" style="background-color: #fafbfb; line-height: 15.359999656677246px;"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">Sacherell was well enough.” Coram yawned. “He’s a bit of a natural. Ye’re just not a natural with a sword, Master Alan. Some are born to it, like me. I never knew aught else, and I never wanted to. Now, some—some never learn the sword at all, and the</span></span><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #fafbfb; line-height: 15.359999656677246px;"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">y don’t survive their first real fight. And then there’s some—”</span><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$1:0" /><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$3:0" /><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$4:0">“Yes?” Alanna asked, grasping at this straw. She was obviously not born to the sword, and she had no plans for dying in her first fight.</span><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$5:0" /><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$7:0" /><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0">“Some learn the sword. They work all the extra minutes they have. They don’t let a piece of metal—or Aram Sklaw—beat them.”</span><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$9:0" /><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$11:0" /><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$12:0">Alanna stared at the forest and thought this over. “It’s possible to learn to be natural?”</span><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$13:0" /><br data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$15:0" /><span data-reactid=".4e.1:3:1:$comment10101097703849483_10101101872819833:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$16:0">“It’s just as possible as it is for a lass t’ learn t’ beat a lad, and the lad bigger and older than she is, and in a fair fight."</span></span></span></span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-30676443811748719072014-04-26T12:42:00.001-07:002014-04-26T12:45:33.477-07:00Loathe EntirelyWhen I talk to people about New York, I try not to focus on the negative. It's unhealthy and unworthy to do so on a regular basis, and also quite possibly rude, since odds are good I'll be talking to a New Yorker. Instead I try to focus on the positive, such as the fact that I have a job (and a pretty decent job, taken on its own merits), AHS, or my church. This may give the impression that really, I don't think New York is that bad, or that I only don't like it because Thayet and Meshparjai are not here. This is untrue.<br />
<br />
I <i>hate</i> this town. I hate it with an incandescent fury. I hate it with such passion that its very existence offends me. I hate its understocked little stores. I hate its endless, green-less stretches of concrete. I hate its weather. I hate its smoke-shrouded sidewalks. I hate its wretchedly cramped apartments, and the fact that even nice neighborhoods can't be counted on to have basic amenities like free laundry facilities, or level floors. But most of all, I hate the subway.<br />
<br />
I am writing this instead of sparring right now because I just spent two and three quarters hours <i>not</i> getting to fencing, due to subway delays and reroutes caused by construction. I suppose I could have called a cab, but this infuriatingly self-absorbed town is expensive enough as it is. Eventually, I gave up and turned around, never having gotten more than a third of the way to my destination. You might think it's kind of ironic that I didn't make it to fencing when I could clearly stand to hit something right now, but fencing isn't really good for expressing anger, so I guess that's something.<br />
<br />
I understand that the New York subway system is an attempt to make a public service out of what was originally a collection of for-profit proprietary networks. I understand that it runs 24/7. I understand that it is over one hundred years old and desperately needs renovation. I understand that it is still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy. I understand that I hate public transit in general, because you can't sing on it and it runs on the opposite of lawyer hours. And I freely admit that, miserable as it is, the New York subway is far superior to BART. Nevertheless, the New York subway system has got to be the least reliable system of transportation I have ever experienced.<br />
<br />
And it is the backbone of New York transportation. There is no comparable method of transportation available out here. I cannot simply <i>go </i>places in New York; I must subject myself to the vicissitudes of a public transportation system that is as reliable as it is pleasant. There is something deeply, personally offensive to me about a city that tries so very hard to prevent me from going wheresoever I please, but if it <i>must</i>, it could at least make its precious little miniature Niles run reliably.<br />
<br />
So yes, there are good things to be found even in this swamp of human misery - even things that, individually, I will miss when I finally shake off the dust of this terrible cesspit. And I try to focus on the good things, because for now - <i>for now - </i>the alternative is a breach of duty, and that is unacceptable. But let there be no doubt that I hate, <i>hate hate hate hate</i>, this waterlogged trash-compacted smoke-impregnated <i>railroad-dependent </i>wretched excuse for a town.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-50435401101002286072014-01-24T00:05:00.000-08:002014-01-24T00:27:54.011-08:00I Noticed Something About "Submission"<div class="MsoNormal">
I think a lot of people learn ancient Greek in order to read
the New Testament for themselves. That
wasn’t my primary motivation, but it was certainly on my mind. For the most part, I haven’t found any great
insights into Scripture by reading it in the original. I suppose that’s to the credit of our
translations. The other day, though, I
did notice something that I found rather interesting.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ephesians 5:22, as we all know, says, “Wives, submit yourselves
to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
That’s the New International Version.
The New Revised Standard Version says, “Wives, be subject to your
husbands as you are to the Lord.” Both the
English Standard Version and the New King James say, “Wives, submit to your own
husbands, as to the Lord.” Translation
after translation carries the imperative: submit, submit, submit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s the sort of thing that we often find embarrassing, and
many a sermon has been preached on just what Biblical “submission” means, and
how it really isn’t that bad. The
exegete might grab onto the phrase “as to the Lord” to differentiate <i>this</i> submission from
abject subjugation. Or the sermon might
focus on the later verses, about how husbands are called to “give themselves up”
for their wives. I’ve grown up with
these sorts of sermons all my life, and while I think they are morally sound as
far as they go and on firm textual footing, there’s something I noticed just
recently that I don’t think I’ve ever quite heard before.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t say, “Submit.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t mean that in the original, “submit” isn’t in the
imperative. I mean that the word “submit”
isn’t in the verse <i>at
all</i>. In point of fact,
Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t even have a verb.
What it actually says is, “the wives to their own husbands as to the
Lord.” This is not a sentence in Greek any
more than it is in English. This should
give the reader pause, and perhaps put him in mind that Ephesians 5:22 is not
an appropriate place to begin a citation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So where <i>is</i> an appropriate place to begin the citation?
I don’t actually think that’s very clear. This may be surprising, and lest we think
poorly of our translators, I think a short digression is in order.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The issue of how to break up sentences is not quite so
trivial as it might first appear.
Ephesians was written prior to the adoption of punctuation, so we must
infer punctuation from content.
Oftentimes this is reasonably straightforward, but there are times when
it isn’t. Ancient Greek is also fairly
fond of embedded clauses and phrases and the like. For
instance, you might encounter a sentence with a structure like this: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Hesitating on the front stoop, holding each option in his
mind and considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house.”</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even without the punctuation, this is fairly obviously a
sentence. If you know enough English,
you can identify that by the presence of the verb (“entered”), and you can
infer that the preceding clauses and phrases relate to the main clause. But suppose you had a sentence like the
following:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“hesitating on the front stoop holding each option in his
mind and considering whether to knock or to leave he entered the house with
trepeditation looking this way and that trying to make as little noise as
possible he crept through the empty rooms”</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>Is that one sentence?
Is it two? Is it two, with a
fragment of a third? There are multiple
ways that you could punctuate the passage above that are equally correct, even
if the actual meaning of the passage is quite clear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now imagine that what I have written is not actually English
but another language, one in which my stringing together so many gerund phrases
is not bad style. If asked to translate
that, you might actually take some of my gerunds and turn them into verbs. For instance, you might render it like this:<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“He hesitated on the front stoop, holding each option in his
mind. Considering whether to knock or to
leave, he entered the house with trepidation.
He looked this way and that, trying to make as little noise as possible,
and crept through the empty rooms.”</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>And that might not be a bad translation at all, at least for
general purposes. Even though it isn’t
exactly “word for word,” it flows much better, and that’s not a quality to be
despised in a translation when none of the meaning has been lost.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the case of Ephesians 5:22, though, I submit that this
practice <i>has</i> resulted (all inadvertently, I am sure) in some meaning being lost. So let us return to that passage. Let me back up to what I think is the clear
start of a sentence and refuse to impose any punctuation after that. Keeping the verb forms as close to their
original as possible, I would translate that block of text (Ephesians 5:15-30) like this:<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Look extremely closely how you walk not as unwise but
rather as wise buying out the moment because the days are painful through this do
not become foolish but rather understand this the will of the lord and do not
become drunk with wine in which is wastefulness but rather be full in spirit saying
to each other psalms and hymns and spiritual songs singing and strumming your
hearts to the lord thanking always above all god the father in the name of our
lord jesus christ submitting to each other in fear of christ the wives to their
own husbands as to the lord because a husband is the head of his wife as christ
is the head of the church himself the savior of the body but rather as the
church submits to christ so also the wives to their husbands in all things husbands
love your wives just as christ loved the church and himself gave for her in
order that she be cleansed purified in a bath of water in the word so that he
might stand her esteemed the church not having either spot or wrinkle or any
such thing but rather so that sacred and blameless in this manner the husbands
must love their own wives as their own bodies he loving his wife as himself for
nobody ever hated his own flesh but rather rears and warms it just as christ
the church that we are limbs of his body …”</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>And so it goes on.
You can probably see several places where you might put punctuation in
that block of text. One thing I don’t
think you can get around, though, is this: “the wives to their husbands as to
the lord” is grammatically tied up with “submitting to each other in fear of
Christ.” That is where our translators
feel they have license to insert the word “submit” into Ephesians 5:22, and you
can see that for most general purposes it isn’t a bad translational choice at
all. Moreover, all translations are
careful to keep Ephesians 5:21 reading something like “… submitting to one
another in the fear of Christ.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I think is particularly noteworthy, though, is that the
omission of the verb from 5:22 makes it clear (to me, at least) that this whole
notion of wives submitting to their own husbands is simply an illustration of
the larger point about everybody submitting to one another. In other words, while it is true that wives
are told to submit to their own husbands, it is <i>equally</i> true that husbands are told to submit to
their wives, and in fact that all Christians are told to submit to each other.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am hardly the first person to have noticed that, but seeing where the verbs are (and are not) casts the various teachings I have heard about submission in a new light. In light of this new, more nuanced reading, I
think it is clear that when we exegete this passage by pointing out that the “submission”
referred to cuts both ways between married persons, we aren’t just making
frantic excuses for an inherently misogynist text. We are instead correctly pointing out that
the thrust of the text is not on wives at all, but on the entire body of
believers living in a state of submission.
And that too makes clear that when we talk about “submission” in lofty
spiritual terms and pooh-pooh the notion of a wife being subject to her husband’s
reign as a mere strawman, we actually aren’t just whistling in the dark. If the entire church is supposed to be
submitted one to another, then the “submission” being referred to really <i>can’t</i> be some
misogynist subjugation. Everybody can’t
be subjugated to everybody else. So if
everybody is “submitted” to everybody else, then clearly something less literal
than subjugation must be going on.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And although it’s been said many times by other people, I
suppose at this point it might be appropriate for me to offer up my own short
exegesis about what this “submission” is, if the context of the passage
precludes it from being literal subjugation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main thing I get from this block of text vis a vis “submission”
is that it is a desirable state for the entire church. But what else can we tell about it? It seems to be contrasted with the
wastefulness (dissipation, if you like) of being an alcoholic. Rather than that, Paul says, we should be filled
with the Holy Spirit, speaking psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to each
other, singing and making our hearts thrum (<i>psallontes </i>the heart,
playing it like a stringed instrument), giving thanks and submitting to one
another. To me, all these gerunds, with
their musical imagery, sound like they are being arrayed to describe the same
thing, a sort of spiritual harmony among persons. But what has submitting to do with music, or
harmony? At this juncture we might safely
observe that the word “submitting,” <i>hupotassetai</i>,
means “arraying under,” as one might “array” things in an orderly fashion, such
as a body of troops - we might observe this etymology without fear of being
told we are simply making excuses for the obvious misogynist meaning of the
text (we might also observe that another use of this verb is "to place in the shelter of"). This idea of arraying ourselves
under one another strengthens my opinion that the concept Paul is trying to get
across is not subjugation, one to another, but rather harmony and interleaving with each other.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still, of course, Paul does say, “the wives to their
husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is
the head of the church, himself the savior of the body.” So very well, we might object - insofar as
husbands and wives are a subset of everybody, clearly husbands are told to
place themselves in harmony with their wives.
And then wives are told to place themselves in harmony with their
husbands, because a husband is the head of his wife. What are we to make of that? We might observe that the very next words (in
the same sentence?) are, “But rather as the church <i>submits</i> to Christ, just so also the wives to
their husbands in all things.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are starting to get far afield from the point of this
post, which is that “modern” interpretations of submission as some sort of
spiritual harmony rather than misogynist subjugation are in fact much more
grounded in the text than they might first appear. But to carry things through to conclusion, at
this point we really must confront the issue of just how the church submits to
Christ. If we imagine that Christ is the
head of the church in that he gets to tell the Church what to do and what not
to do and sets punishments for the church when it contravenes his words, then I
suppose we really are in trouble. But I
don’t think that is either a textually or historically correct view of Christ’s
relationship with the church. Paul does
not define Christian morality in terms of obedience to Christ’s dictates (not
that Christ had a great many moral dictates in the first place, so far as we
know), but rather in terms of reaction to being. We <i>are</i> the church, and therefore we act in a certain way. I don’t want to further digress by backing up
that assertion with other examples from the Pauline corpus, but even the text before us, which has a certain moralistic cast (talking about how best to live life in the moment), has nothing to do with what Christ <i>tells</i> the church to do. If the reader can accept this morality-from-status assertion for now (cf. Ephesians 5:1-14, the lead-in to this whole thing, which also ties direct exhortation towards specific moral behavior not to the command of Christ, but to the status of the believer), we may observe that this
is a perfectly unobjectionable way for a married woman to model her life. She alters her behavior, to the extent that
she alters it, not because her husband <i>tells</i> her to do anything, but simply because she <i>is</i> married to the man she chose to marry. We
might object if he were ordering her about, but it would be quixotic if she
chose to marry him and that choice meant nothing to the way she acted.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet, I think, the egalitarian (feminist, if you like) objection
to this passage is not so much that it envisions a husband as his wife’s
dictator so much as that it envisions the husband as superior to the wife at
all (even if that superiority doesn’t involve subjugation). The response I am used to in sermons to this
objection is essentially incredulity: a reader who seriously thinks that Christ,
or even Paul, teaches that men are superior to women must simply not be very
familiar with the whole body of our extant texts. And I do think there is something to
that. It is difficult to imagine that the
man who wrote that there is neither man nor woman in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28) believed that
in the proper Godly order of things, men were superior to women.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still, let us consider the text before us in light of this
objection. It must be admitted, for one
thing, that Paul uses different language towards husbands and wives. Even if we don’t believe those exhortations
to set up an inherent superior-inferior relationship, they aren’t literally the <i>same</i>. Neither does Paul say, "... submitting to one another in fear of Christ, husbands and wives to each other ..." or something like that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the subject of sameness, however, we might observe that
the principle relationship between Christ and the church in this passage <i>is
</i>that the church is the same flesh as Christ: “That we are the limbs of his
body,” it says; and earlier, “himself the savior of the <i>body</i>.” Paul
is not here just trotting out his familiar turn of phrase for the church, “the
body of Christ.” He spends some time
discussing how, through Christ’s sacrifice of himself, the church becomes to
Christ as Christ himself. “Loving his
wife as himself,” he says, “for nobody ever hated his own flesh.” Again, the theme of spiritual harmony - and,
significantly, of equality (indeed, identity).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the church <i>is</i> Christ in all
respects, indistinguishable from God himself.
Rather, I want to point out what Paul is pointing out. Paul is plainly using Christ’s relationship
with the church as a metaphor here, and I think it is an uncontroversial
assertion that when one uses a metaphor, one intends only to highlight certain
similarities and not others. When Lincoln used the metaphor of birth for the American War for Independence in the Gettysburg Address, he did not mean that the Revolution was like birth in all respects. Figuring out in what respects
a metaphor applies and in what respects it does not (for instance, presumably Lincoln did intend his birth metaphor to express the idea that a new entity was created through a tumultuous, blood-soaked process, but did not intend to express the idea that the new entity was incapable of existing on its own and would in fact be dependent upon its mother for a very long time, or that the new entity was incapable of rational thought) is something we have to do from context.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here, Paul spends all of his words highlighting one
particular similarity: that Christ went through a great deal of personal
trouble vis a vis humanity in order to bring about a state of such harmony between
man and God that humanity could be, as it were, Christ’s own flesh. We might expound on other similarities
between Christ-and-church and husband-and-wife, but this is the similarity that
<i>Paul</i> is
expounding, and I submit that if we take it farther than that we are simply
riffing on our own. To bring the
metaphor home, the text here is saying that husbands should love their wives in
such a way that they expend great effort, and brave what hazards may be, in
order to bring about such a state of harmony with their wives that they are as
inseparable as a person from his own body. Is that something that only a husband can do, while the wife simply waits to be integrated? I don't think so. As every married person knows, after all, the process of altering your identity in light of your spouse - that which "the wives" are called to do - is not only an exceptionally active one, it is the very means by which two spouses harmonize with and become inseparable from each other. The metaphors used when talking about wives and husbands are different, but the actual activity described is the same: husband and wife achieving a state of profound harmony, a metaphorical oneness. So I am not really very comfortable saying that the text here is setting
up some kind of second-class citizen status for wives.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what are we left with?
We begin with a depiction of “submission” as an example of the mystic
sort of harmony that is supposed to hold sway among all believers, which should
put us off the idea that “submission” means subjugation right away. Paul then goes on to give two more particular
examples of what this sort of submission looks like, or perhaps applications of
the principle. It is, he says, the sort
of thing that causes wives to care that they are married to their own husbands
(and here I think we perhaps see why the text bothers to say “their own
husbands,” instead of simply “their husbands,” as some translations have it -
implicit in this profound, life-shaping recognition of choice is the fact that <i>this</i> man, and not
just <i>any</i> man, is
the one that I married). It is, he says,
the sort of thing that causes husbands to chance any consequences in the goal
of achieving profound marital oneness.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I said, these are far from original thoughts, and I hope
that they are old hat to anybody who reads this. But I also hope that, having read this, the
reader may feel more confident that these are not attempts to dodge the real
thrust of the passage, motivated by a modernist or feminist desire to twist the
words of Scripture away from their original antiquated misogyny. They <i>are</i> the real thrust of the passage, and it is those who have attempted (and
attempt) to use the text to justify misogyny who do the twisting.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-88507599868729581362014-01-01T10:57:00.001-08:002014-01-01T10:57:55.385-08:00In which Silverway finally reaches its heroic tier finale<div class="MsoNormal">
The heroic tier finale of Silverway has finally come and
gone, after much delay and party-winnowing.
I was pretty happy with it.
Unusually for me, this encounter had been in the planning for several
months, and its final iteration was quite different from the original
conception. Instead of fighting through
a giant map of a ruined university quad, the entire finale ended up being
nothing but talking. I thought this was
fitting, since we’ve had a lot of combat set pieces in Silverway lately. This has been driven by the fact that the
D&D rules continue to be better at making a combat game than making any
other kind of game - I figured that since I was running a D&D game (and I
actually like the D&D 4e combat game), I might as well embrace it. This is also a significant departure from my other
current game, Skyfall (which follows a more traditional Natalian mix of lots of
character work occasionally punctuated by very short, very sharp combat), so it
offers me personally a nice balance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But at the end of the day, I don’t think that roleplaying is
about fighting. It’s about
storytelling. As a DM, that means
manipulating the emotions of your audience (the players) while they are at the
table in order to guide the production of a desired experience. As a player, that means inhabiting the
headspace of the game in order to experience the collectively shaped
experience. So much of the essence of
the game takes place in the players’ heads (which is one reason I like to talk
to my players about their experience - even as the DM, there is much of the
game that I am not directly privy to).
Sitting at a roleplaying table merely as an observer, even for an entire
session, is like hearing about a Broadway play from your friend who just got
back from New York. Hearing about a
roleplaying session after the fact is like hearing about that play from your
friend’s friend.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While the D&D combat game is fun, it is not particularly
good at facilitating different emotions (in fact, I would highlight this as the
key difference in design philosophy between Silverway/D&D and Skyfall/PhE
combat). Indeed, one reason I’ve had so
many set pieces in Silverway is that I’ve been experimenting with different
ways to make the D&D combat game an emotionally resonant experience. For the finale, though, I ultimately decided
to go with something more purely in the players’ heads.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ironically, this meant throwing out months of half-baked
encounter plans, so virtually the entire session was improvised. This too was a throwback to my usual style of
DMing, which I think was a nice touchstone for me. For me, improvised sessions and well-planned
sessions are like the difference between social dance and choreography. The one feels natural and spontaneous, and
there is the thrill of touching and adapting to something vital and alive and
instant. The other can be technically
impressive and may be artistically affecting for the audience, but feels dead
to perform. So it was nice to gin up ten
ghosts’ worth of plot-critical conversation on the spot (including two new
ghosts whose presence had not been foreseen until literally seconds before they
appeared in the narrative). Then I had
to gin up an audience/interrogation with the pantheon, which harkened back to
an experience in my very first D&D game with Twilight, and was even more
improvised than the university encounter.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This conversation with the gods was probably the biggest
moment of player choice I have ever managed to pull off. The party was presented with two stark
options, and they actually pretty much stuck to those two instead of trying to
find a hidden third, this-was-not-actually-hidden-and-it-destroys-all-the-plans
option (I held pretty much all the cards in the scenario, but then again, the
DM never holds all the cards). I have
had lots of player choice in my campaigns by now, but I have never before had a
single choice that so defined so much of the game. This choice determined not only the
goal/narrative arc but also the setting for the next ten levels. And then I all but told the party they would
have to give up their classes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whenever I need help planning Silverway I turn to Twilight,
Ayudaren, and The DM, and I had a lot of conversations with them leading up to
this moment. Class is fundamental to the
D&D game. The challenge of the game
is built around a proper mix of classes.
It’s baked into the way players design a character, and is often the
most important decision a player makes when designing a character (even
dominating such seemingly non-mechanical choices such as personality and
motivations). In fact, many character
concepts in a D&D game <i><i>begin</i></i>
with class: “I want to play a paladin,” or even just, “I want to play a
character who casts spells.” If the
party made one choice - the choice they made, as it happens - they would find
themselves cut off from all magic (I wouldn’t even have let Neani become a
psion, except that I really could find no way to make a martial incarnation of
her character that felt right). This
would invalidate virtually all of the class choices my players had made, and
force them to play new versions of their characters as interpreted through the
lens of a brand new class. It gave
mechanical bite to a momentous roleplaying decision, and clearly marked a major
transition in the mechanical progression of the game with an emotionally
memorable event. It was the right
decision. But would they go for it?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">I guess you never really know what’s going on in
your players’ minds, but I think they really did. It was angsty, but it was supposed to be. These moments are among the most satisfying
for me as a DM - when you do something that requires you to trust your players,
and they go with it.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-18139810630501878712013-12-27T18:13:00.004-08:002013-12-27T18:14:14.320-08:00Merry Christmas to Me<div class="MsoNormal">
Well, Christmas has come and gone, without a holiday post
from me. This year the big present not
under my tree was my Albion Liechtenauer trainer, which I’m not expecting until
about April. Since so many people contributed to it, though, I thought it deserved a post.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I thought a lot about what I wanted out of my first blunt. The ideal training tool, of course, would
basically be a sharp sword that is incapable of hurting people. It would flex as much (or as little,
depending on how you want to look at it) as a sharp, and when its edge met
another training tool it would “bite” and stick at the point of contact, just
as two sharps do. It would have the same
balance and percussion characteristics, with an identical crossguard, handle,
and pommel.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, such an object does not exist, and I’m not even
sure that creating one is technically possible at the moment. The main problem is the fact that the edges
of a blunt sword must not only be un-sharpened, but thick enough that they
won’t cleave when swung with force (a blunt sword can still cut; heck, even a round
wooden dowel can cut - think of the wounds a caning can leave). This obviously throws off the mass
distribution of the trainer, although clever use of a fuller (a channel down
the center of the blade) can help with that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The thick edges are also smooth (obviously they can’t be
serrated), which means that when two steel trainers contact each other there is
nothing to prevent the blades from sliding up and down each other. This can cause a technique that would have
worked with a real sword not to work, and that obviously makes it harder to
learn than it would be with a real sword (though it has compensatory
advantages, of course, such as little to no risk of dismemberment). It also presents a risk that one sword will
slide down the other and bang into the fingers.
Historical training swords (what are now often called federschwerts,
though the use of that term to refer to a training sword is a neologism) had a
flared shield called a <i><i>schilt</i></i>
(“shield”) at the base of the blade to help prevent that - but this, of course,
further throws of the mass distribution of the blade, and adds a radical enough
amount of metal that the whole blade has to be reshaped.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there is the issue of thrusts. Many longsword techniques involve thrusting,
which is obviously not safe if one’s training sword has a pointy tip (as many
longswords did, a trend that became acute during Liechtenauer’s probable
lifetime). A pointy tip on a trainer,
obviously, is not safe to thrust into a sparring opponent, so the tip must be
blunted in some way. Some trainers
simply use a spatulate tip rather than a pointy one; others actually roll the
point back or flare out at the tip. Even
with a theoretically safe tip, though, most real swords are too stiff to safely
thrust into an opponent (even with the flexibility that is characteristic of
European swords in the late middle ages).
A training sword must therefore be somewhat more flexible than a real
sword, or at least on the flexible end of the spectrum. Too flexible, though, and the blade doesn’t
resist another blade the way it should.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The commercially available trainers all vary with respect to
these safety-necessitated features, as well as others such as blade and handle
length, grip material, and style and size of crossguard and pommel. It’s a lot to consider, especially for a
practitioner just starting out who doesn’t have (and doesn’t expect to have, at
least for a long time) an arsenal of different training tools with different
characteristics.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What ultimately governed my decision was this question: what
kind of fencing do I want to learn? I’ve
talked before about the level of martial authenticity I want in my fencing -
what the masters sometimes call <i>ernstfechten</i>,
fighting in earnest (as opposed to fighting to win a tournament, for exercise,
or even in self defense when you are actively trying not to kill your attacker,
which at least in some historical contexts was quite common). I haven’t talked a lot about the historical
side of things, though. In part this is
because I did not actually know a lot about the sociohistory of KDF, but I feel
like I now know enough that I can set my sights on a firm enough target to
guide my gear acquisition.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Insofar as we consider Liechtenauer’s art of fighting a
distinct martial tradition (which we do, more or less, not least because
Liechtenauer’s students considered it a distinct martial tradition and extant
sources from competing traditions with a different view are thin on the ground),
it arose or was codified in the mid- to late fourteenth century (the late
middle ages), as an art to be taught to and practiced by knights - men whose
job was, at least in theory, to be professional martial artists. The tradition was apparently successful
enough to survive into the Renaissance, and eventually became democratized enough
to be taught and practiced by non-artistocrats (an evolution that can be
viewed, I expect, as merely part of the larger democratization of violence during
the Military Revolution).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Within KDF, the longsword was, as almost all swords have
been at almost all times, a sidearm. It
was, in particular, an aristocrat’s sidearm (lower social orders generally
preferring the sword and buckler). To my
knowledge, no historical sources ever directly discuss why this was so,
although one suspects it had at least something to do with the fact that
aristocrats can generally afford better body armor. Of course, a longsword is perfectly capable
of killing a person stone cold dead with a single attack, but it was not likely
to be the weapon of choice for truly serious, premeditated violence. Nobody would feel fully armed going to war
armed with nothing but a longsword. It’s
a backup weapon, or a minimum level of weaponry, to which one might strip down
when traipsing about in body armor and armed to the teeth might be considered not
quite the thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Modern people tend to draw the lines between “longswords”
and “greatswords” (both words that were used historically, though not in the
way we now use them) as the line between about 40” of blade length and longer,
and between a balance and handle that can be used with one hand at need and one
that cannot. Within the family of weapon
characteristics that we presently recognize as a “longsword,” blade lengths seem
to have bottomed out at about 33” or so.
A very short longsword might be useful in a variety of circumstances,
particularly remembering that it was (i) a sidearm (enormous sidearms tending
to defeat the purpose of carrying a convenient backup weapon in the first
place) and (ii) an aristocrat’s sidearm (a somewhat shorter longsword being, so
I am told, handier to use as a sidearm on horseback, when one must worry about
hitting the horse’s neck with one’s sword).
I have also heard that shorter longswords seem to have been popular in
the Italian tradition, though I’m getting that rather secondhand.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The final piece of the buying puzzle for me was a reminder
in training that modern HEMA practitioners generally (including AHS) have three
legs to our training: cutting, drilling, and sparring. One cuts to understand how a sword
works. One drills to learn how to make a
sword work when the opponent is not cooperating. One spars to practice what one has learned in
the drills. No one leg is complete
martial arts practice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With all these thoughts in mind, I looked at the
commercially available steel longsword trainers and settled on the
Liechtenauer, for the following reasons.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First, it has no schilt.
There is an argument to be made, and I think it’s a strong one, that a
schilt is useful compensation for the fact that blunt steel does not bind in
the same way that sharp steel does, and is thus more apt to bash fingers. On the other hand, we use more robust hand
protection than historical practitioners did (in our unarmored fencing, that is),
and I actually want the challenge of learning to protect my fingers in a
suboptimal environment. Moreover, all
the blunts I’ve handled with schilts have a balance point that is quite near
the hilt. This makes them feel very
lively in the hand, but I would like to train with a weapon that is slightly
less nimble. This is because I know that
I already have a natural tendency to want to leave the bind in situations where
I know I should not, and the faster one’s sword is the easier it is to leave the
bind and land a successful follow-up cut.
This is the opposite of the sort of fencing I want to encourage in
myself; despite my natural aversion to it, fighting from the bind is one of the
parts of KDF that I like the most, and I want to get good at it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Second, the blade is about 36” long. The overall length of the sword is not too
long for me, but it is also not a short longsword. Perhaps Italian fencers or mounted fencers
could make good use of those, but as I am unlikely to train in either art, a
longer sword seems appropriate for me. At
the same time, it is not as long as many other commercially available blunts
(the current “trend” being towards longer blades). I am fine with this, since 36” is about the
length of my Pentti, Shereshoy, and about the length of the sharps I am most
interested in (in fact, there does not seem to be a corresponding trend towards
longer <i><i>sharp</i></i>
swords). This is good, since even though
I don’t own a sharp sword yet, I would want my wasters to resemble my sharps as
closely as possible - the sort of fencing I want to learn, after all, involves
a real sword. I don’t want to learn to
fence with a 40” blade unless I actually own a 40” live blade.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Third, the overall weight is about 3.5 lbs. This is on the heavier end for a longsword
(though by no means unhistorically weighty), on the heavier end for a
commercially available blunt, and probably a shade heavier than any of the
sharps I am likely to buy. Since this is
a training weapon, though, I’d rather err on the side of being heavier than the
real thing than being lighter. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fourth, and finally, the handle is not particularly long - pretty
much just enough room for two hands without gripping the pommel. There are some fencers, and some historical
masters, who prefer a long handle, as well as some fencers, and some historical
masters, who prefer gripping the pommel.
This appears to have been a matter of personal preference
historically. I, however, am being
taught by somebody who prefers (and primarily follows historically texts that
prefer) shorter handles and no pommel gripping, so it makes sense to me that I
should prefer a weapon that encourages that.
Moreover, a short handle makes sense to me for a sidearm - a really long
handle undoubtedly does have many positive attributes, but it seems to me that
it would also tend to make the sword rather clumsier when simply being worn.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Liechtenauer does have some negative attributes (to my
mind), but I decided that these four were more important to me as a training
tool. On the negative end of the scale,
the blade is somewhat less suitable for sparring. The edges are thinner than most other blunts,
and the blade is somewhat stiffer as well.
These mean that I will probably have to use more care when hitting and
thrusting with it in sparring than I otherwise would. I ultimately decided that this was an
acceptable tradeoff for a few reasons.
The first is that any steel sparring requires an artificial measure of
control - the safety gear simply doesn’t exist to permit full-power steel
sparring without turning it into armored fencing. The second is that I couldn’t find any
commercially available blunts that had a better combination of advantages and
drawbacks. The third is that it may not
be a “tournament legal” weapon at bring-your-own-sword steel sparring tournaments,
since it doesn’t have a schilt. On the
other hand, steel longsword tournaments are generally only for more advanced
fencers, and BYOS tournaments are not necessarily going to become the
norm. If they do, and if I regularly
compete in them, and if this blade is still not tournament legal, I can always
get a “tournament sword” at that time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the fourth is that, frankly, I already have a sparring
sword for full power (or closer to full power).
Shereshoy fills that role, and probably better than any steel waster
ever will. The role of my steel blunt
should be to provide a more accurate drilling experience, and secondarily to
provide a sparring experience that trades speed (and all the things that fast
sparring can improve, like proper form under pressure) for increased weapon
verimisilitude, and this - for the sort of fencing I want to practice, and in
my judgment - is the best available tool for me. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now the thing just has to arrive.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-7367353846117063942013-10-24T15:05:00.001-07:002013-10-24T15:05:21.186-07:00Remembering Scott BauerDeath has been much on my mind lately, and every time that happens I think of Pastor Scott. There have been other deaths in my life (not many, thankfully), and some of them have resulted in absences that I regret very much. But a fresh death, or the prospect of a fresh death, always brings me back to Scott in a way that those other deaths do not. I think it is because none of the others were so shocking to me, have felt so ... unfair.<br />
<br />
I never wrote much about Scott on this blog, or about his death (I checked, and I can only find <a href="http://dmeroit.blogspot.com/2003/10/im-flying-home-tonight-ive-got-ticket.html">this post</a>, <a href="http://dmeroit.blogspot.com/2002_06_01_archive.html">this one</a>, and <a href="http://dmeroit.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_archive.html">this one</a>. That's fine. As a record of my life, this blog quite intentionally has some very large holes in it. But today I think I need to fill that hole in a bit.<br />
<br />
He died ten years ago today. He would have been 59. When I got the news, all I could think of was Whitman's "Oh Captain! My Captain!" I remember Chariessa asking me in the dining hall if I was okay. I was not. I had <i>plans</i> for Scott! He was my pastor - the first person I ever felt was <i>my</i> pastor, who really cared about <i>me</i>. He was supposed to meet my wife (he died two years before I met her). He was supposed to watch me grow up. Oh, how I valued his approval!<br />
<br />
I remember him as a man full of prejudices - against videogames, against Catholicism, against Latino people. When I had been going to Chaminade for a while, we visited his house once. He stopped me in the foyer to ask me, in front of my parents, to do something Catholic. He was teasing, but only sort of. He was worried - genuinely, compassionately worried - about me becoming Catholicized. I wanted to die. I'm not sure I would have felt more uncomfortable if he'd called them Papists. I wasn't really around when his son started dating a Mexican girl, but I hear it was ... uncomfortable.<br />
<br />
But I also remember him as a man who overcame his prejudices. He learned Spanish - painfully, but doggedly - to better connect with the woman who would become his daughter-in-law. He built one of the largest Spanish-speaking congregations in Los Angeles. And in 2003, when I was wrestling with the challenges posed by Reformed theology, I wrote to Scott. I wish I still had the e-mail he wrote back to me. It was the last thing I ever heard from him. This was one of the men who taught me to be academic about my religion, and I can't do this final letter justice without the actual text. But the gist of it was that he didn't hold with Reformed doctrine himself ... but if Scripture truly foreclosed either possibility, we wouldn't still be discussing it 400 years later. I don't know if I can express how profound an impact it made on me to hear him say that. Hopefully you can see it in me.<br />
<br />
I remember the way he lead worship. I remember the way he was able to make church satisfy the heart and the mind without actually being <i>about</i> either of those things. I remember him being just square enough to be embarrassing (and that's coming from me, so ... you know). I remember his focused intensity. I remember the way everything was about Jesus to him, and how he could do that without being creepy. A little square, maybe. But he had the sort of faith you sometimes read about in books, the kind that you cannot engage with except by taking it seriously.<br />
<br />
I remember the way he looked at me one Sunday evening at our youth group and I realized that the man actually cared about me, personally. To my knowledge it was the first time a pastor had ever cared about me except in a general way. At his memorial services one of his sons said that Scott was a great man because he cared about people. This is true. He cared. He cared like Honor Harrington. He cared so much that it transcended adverbs. Scott simply <i>cared</i>.<br />
<br />
I think that is what I admired most about him. But what I <i>remember</i> most about him is the way he <i>changed</i>. As I said, as I child I remember him as a man full of prejudices. By the time he died, how he had changed in those regards! What impurities in that irrefutable care of his had he excised! But to say that he had excised them would be untrue. Scott is the reason I believe that people can change. He is also the reason I believe that people do not change people. <i>God</i> changes people. I have seen it. I never told him how absolutely clear it was to me that those prejudices were worked out of him not through the proximity of other opinions but through his continual, fumbling, earnest, <i>consistent</i> pursuit of communion with Jesus.<br />
<br />
When I was a younger man, I wanted Scott to look at my choice of bride and tell me I'd done well. I wanted him to be the one who married me, because I wanted him to know that I wouldn't have been the sort of person a woman would <i>want </i>to marry without his influence. These desires are a little embarrassing to remember - the sort of thing a young man is wont to imagine before he has quite realized that the young lady in his imagination is going to be a person, too. I don't know if Thayet would have liked Scott. Maybe not. I think he was the sort of person whose faith and general goodness sort of demanded respect, but certainly not to everybody's tastes.<br />
<br />
One thing about that is not embarrassing to remember. I do think that much of my problems with Thayet can essentially be attributed to a certain ... smallness of heart that my lady knight found rightly repellant. My prejudices are not the same as Scott's were, but I certainly had a lot of them, and Scott's example proved to me that authentic engagement with Jesus <i>enlarges</i> the heart. You can phrase this in a lot of ways. Some people would tell me that a person can't change unless they want to. Others would point out the influence of other people in my life in that time, or point to the seeds they had sown years before. Those things are all true. But what I would say is that none of it would have mattered without the work of the Holy Spirit. And I would say that I wouldn't have been open to that if not for the example I had seen in Scott Bauer.<br />
<br />
I wish he had known that.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-43578051920465942342013-10-08T07:12:00.001-07:002013-10-08T07:12:52.683-07:00There are many like it ...<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a long tradition in historical European martial
arts (well, as long a tradition as there can be for a practice that is really
only about thirty five years old) of modifying equipment. Mostly this is because even after thirty-five
years we are only just getting commercially produced practice gear specifically
for HEMA, so for most of the past four decades people have had no choice but to
repurpose other equipment. Sometimes
this results in less than satisfactory work-arounds. But what is satisfactory is the way in which even
small modifications can imbue a piece of gear with totemic significance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A few weeks ago my studio went to a tournament for the first
time (I should post more thoughts on tournaments later). In preparation for the tournament, we had
school patches ordered to put on our fencing jackets. I sort of expected to dismiss this as a
cynical marketing ploy. I was surprised
to discover that I didn’t.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Like a lot of my fellow students, I own an Axel Peterssen
Pro fencing jacket, which incorporates a leather plastron in the front. This poses certain difficulties from a sewing
perspective, as the whole point of the plastron is to resist penetration by a
sharp object (for instance, a steel trainer that breaks in the thrust rather
than flexing like it’s supposed to).
Some students decided to glue their patches on. Others decided to take it to a tailor. But I found that it mattered to me a lot that
I do it myself, the hard way, with needle and thread. This wasn’t just free advertising for
somebody’s business. This was an
expression of who I am as a fencer, and I needed to make it. I am a student of the <i>Akademie des Heiligen Schwertes</i>, and the crest of that school has
pride of place on the chest of my jacket.
Through Tristan’s teaching, I am associated with the New York Historical
Fencing Association, and the crest of that school belongs on my left arm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then I realized that one day there might be others, and
the order of patches might need to change.
As much as I love the <i>Akademie</i>,
it might not be my school forever. This is
really a pretty disquieting thought, because I actually do love the <i>Akademie </i>a lot, but I am … well,
me. Whenever I leave, if I ever join
another school, it will be important to me that the crest of <i>that</i> school take its place on my chest,
and the AHS crest move to my arm. Which
of course will mean that the NYHFA crest move, and so on …<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I bought a leather needle and some upholstery thread,
bought or borrowed some Velcro, and I lovingly added Velcro to my patches and
jacket. The stitching is not fabulous,
but it is mine. And now my fencing
jacket is not just protective gear. My
jacket says, <i>This is me. This is where I come from. These people have supported my development as
a martial artist, and I honor them.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If my jacket describes who I am as a fencer, my waster - my,
well, my <i>sword</i> - describes what
fencing itself means to me. When I went
to fencing last week, my waster had a bright orange grip. It got a few looks. Of course there is a story behind it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I moved to New York, Blue Rose and Karyai gave me a
month’s worth of fencing lessons as a going-away present. I turned this into a Pentti+ Type III nylon
waster, which for a variety of reasons I am quite happy with both as a solo
drill and as a sparring tool. The only
thing I don’t like about it is the grip, which is more rectangular than oval (KDF
requires a loose grip on the sword that can slide easily around the handle, and
which rather awkward when the handle isn’t, you know, round). As far as I can tell, nobody likes the grips
on the Penttis, though they have enough other positive characteristics that
they are still the international standard in synthetic wasters. Some people (including some of my fellow
students) are of the opinion that since tournaments don’t allow you to compete
with your own Pentti, you might as well get used to the square grip. But most of those people have steel trainers
with much more realistic handles that they can use for drills. Since I’m not likely to have a steel sword
for a while, I decided to modify my Pentti’s handle.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The grip tape on mine was shredding anyway (nobody told me
you aren’t supposed to fence while wearing rings), so I decided to insert some
cardboard shims to round out the grip, and then rewrap the whole thing. And then I thought, since I was going to be
exposing the nylon of the handle anyway, maybe I should inscribe something on
it. Why?
I don’t know. Maybe I was
inspired by Shanah Van’s love tattoo. Or
maybe there’s just a universal impulse to inscribe things that are important to
us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I decided on a tennis overgrip for my new wrap, which in
turn meant I needed to decide which color I was going to get, because
apparently tennis overgrips come in a bewildering variety of colors. Naturally, this decision could only be made
from a heraldic standpoint, and naturally, the heraldry in question could not <i>just</i> be classical.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had recently decided that whenever I finally get my steel
trainers (I can only use one at a time, of course, but many people eventually
acquire two, to train with a partner) I wanted one to have a green grip and the
other a blue one. In classical heraldry
(much of which is surprisingly modern; of course I am aware medieval and even
Renaissance heraldry was much more practical than the symbolism-laden construct
that we have inherited), green is associated with hope, joy, and fidelity in
love; while blue is associated with truth and loyalty. In Mandalorian armor, green is associated
with duty, while blue is associated with reliability. These are fitting reminders for something
that supports me as an absent father and husband and as a lawyer. So I resolved to own a trainer with a green
handle, named <i>Ijaa’bora</i> - Duty. After that, eventually, one with a blue
handle, named <i>Ruusaan</i> - Reliable One. But with green and blue taken, what color
should my Pentti be?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ultimately I decided to answer that question by asking what
my Pentti means to me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Drilling with my Pentti is calm. Even if I am tired and cranky from my run up
and down the minor hills of Prospect Park, when I am on the knoll or in the
hollow where I drill my mind is quiet, like it is when I am painting. At the same time, it is deeply
invigorating. When I wield it during
warm-up cuts in class, I feel my muscles awaken and my breathing deepen as my
whole body looks forward to what is to come.
It is satisfying. The end of a
sparring session, when I have withstood an hour’s worth of sweat and blows and
know that I could keep going, feels like the end of a dance. And it is a symbol of my friends’ love for
me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I no longer own just a Pentti+ Type III nylon
waster. I own <i>Shereshoy</i>, whose name means … well, <i>shereshoy</i>. Openness to what
life will bring, and the groundedness to eagerly seek it out. The desire to live, and the drive forward
into the unknown - which is, really, simply another facet of the desire not
just to live but to <i>live</i>. <i>Shereshoy</i>
means … I think the best literal translation is to seize life. But what it really means is <i>joy</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In Mandalorian armor, the color associated with this lust
for life is orange. In classical
heraldry, orange is associated with worthy ambition - a fine synergy for this
foreign adventure of mine, and coincidentally related to Master Liechtenauer’s
characterization of the art of fighting as the <i>art that dignifies</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I took down my Pentti from its hook on my door and
carefully cut out the shims using a pattern cut from paper borrowed from my
Brooklyn roommates, from cardboard that came from the chair I bought when I
finally admitted in a deeper way that I am here, and not elsewhere. Beneath the shims I carefully inscribed the
handle with orange ink: <i>ner gai cuyi
shereshoy</i> - “my name is Joy.” I
wrote it in Mandalorian to remind me of family, in the style of Greek
dedications to remind me of friends. Then
I bound that up beneath my cardboard and sealed it with an orange tennis
overgrip, and I hung Joy upon my door.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-27634960725551067472013-10-08T07:09:00.002-07:002013-10-08T07:09:37.971-07:00The Things We Wear<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>I’ve spoken some about the types of training tools we use in
KDF in terms of swords and sword simulators, but I haven’t spoken much about
the protective gear we use. There are
different philosophies towards protective gear.
As far as I understand it, there are two arguments in favor of wearing
less gear. The first is that one should
train for the combat scenario one is ostensibly training for. If one is training to fight armored, then one
should wear armor; but if one is training to fight without armor (and unarmored
longsword fighting is considered the foundation of the whole art), then the
more armor one wears, the less realistic one’s training is and the more one’s
technique will be distorted. The second
is that we shouldn’t be afraid of getitng hurt.
It’s a martial art, after all - most martial artists expect to break
bones and otherwise injure themselves over the course of their training. Those injuries are thought by many to be a
good teaching tool.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In favor of protective gear is the fact that injuries can
prevent one from training at all, and that full-power sparring with wasters and
blunt steel is really quite dangerous - the moreso because of how many of our
techniques target parts of the body that are naturally not very padded, such as
the skull. I’ve cut a partner’s forearm
in drills with blunt steel; I don’t care to think what would happen if a full-powered
strike in sparring slipped through to hit somebody’s head or neck. This risk can be mitigated by partners
fencing at less than full speed or by pulling their strikes at the last
instant, but that too distorts technique.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As with the problems presented by the various types of
training swords, I think the answer is to practice in a variety of ways with a
variety of gear. This is the approach we
take, anyway. Sometimes we practice
slow, and sometimes we practice fast.
Sometimes we drill with no contact or light contact, wearing no
protective gear. Sometimes we drill with
full contact but in a very targeted way (practicing only strikes to the head,
say), wearing only partial gear. We only
ever spar at full speed, wearing full gear, which is one of the things I like
about my school. I do understand the
arguments for slow-speed freeform sparring in less than full gear, but I
personally feel like I have enough issues with aggression that I need to practice
at full speed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what is “full gear?”
As historical European martial arts becomes more of a commercial market,
that definition changes, but here is what it means to me right now. Here is the full panoply of protective gear
that I personally own or would like to own at some point.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first thing is a fencing helmet. I say “helmet” rather than “mask” because
head protection in HEMA should protect not just the face but also the side,
back, and top of the head - any of which might be targeted. I use a fencing helmet from Absolute Force. It shares a lot of construction details with
a traditional sport fencing mask, but it’s got a lot more structure on the
sides, back, and top. I haven’t taken a
full blow to the back of the head yet, but I have been hit pretty hard
everywhere else, and while some hits have stunned me, I haven’t yet sustained
even a minor head injury.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Most fencers seem to feel that the neck deserves special
protection, above and beyond the bib of a fencing helmet and a high-collared
fencing jacket with a blade catcher. I
don’t currently own a gorget, but at some point I would like to get one. I haven’t really identified a particular
model I’m interested in.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My torso is protected by a thickly quilted fencing jacket,
which is essentially a gambeson with that takes advantage of modern fasterners
like zippers and Velcro. I use an Axel
Peterssen Pro, which also has a leather plastron to offer extra protection
against accidental penetration. Like
most jackets, mine also covers my arms.
Most fencers feel the arms deserve rigid protection over at least the
elbows and forearms (the elbows because they have so little natural padding,
and the forearms even though they have somewhat more padding because they are a
frequent target). My jacket incorporates
hard plastic plates all the way down the outside of the arms from shoulder to
forearm, which have so far prevented even bruising from the hardest strikes
I’ve received.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The hands are one area where I think HEMA is still
struggling for a really good commercially available solution. The difficulty is that there are not many
sports in which the hands must be dextrous (KDF requires a fairly loose grip on
the sword because the grip changes fairly frequently) and yet are expected to
take a hefty wallop on a regular basis.
A lot of fencers settled on lacrosse gloves as offering a good
compromise between padding and dexterity.
I use a cheap pair of Maverik lacrosse gloves, which I don’t really feel
are particularly adequate. Of course,
that’s not really a surprise - one doesn’t grip a lacrosse stick the way one
grips a sword, one doesn’t swing or check with a lacrosse stick the way one
swings a sword, and targeting the hands in lacrosse is against the rules (it is
often considered unwise in KDF, but not always, and it certainly isn’t off
limits). I haven’t broken any fingers in
my lacrosse gloves, but I regularly bruise in them even though I am getting
better at protecting my hands. What I’d
really like is a pair of five-finger hard-shell gloves, preferably with at
least some padding. Steel gauntlets are
one option, though they’re really expensive.
When I can afford them, I intend to pick up a pair of gloves by Black
Lance Technologies, which also protect the inside of the forearm (my jacket has
no plating on the inside of the forearm, only the outside), and can be bought
in a model without a palm glove, so the sword is still gripped more with bare
skin but the outside of the hand has protection. Black Lance is a very new company, but they
make the only non-steel fencing glove I’m aware of that fits all my criteria.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wear a pair of Absolute Force HEMA pants, which I am quite
happy with. They are close fitting but
allow my legs to move without binding, and are designed to stop a broken
fencing weapon from penetrating the legs.
They don’t have any padding except for a strip of dense foam to cover
the top of the hip bone, though, so I’d like to add a padded fencing skirt by
SPES to give my upper legs some more protection. I’ve never taken a truly solid hit to the
legs, but I’ve certainly delivered them, and the size and severity of the
bruises I’ve seen on legs have convinced me that actual padding around the
upper legs is probably a good idea. I
also wear a hard shell cup from Absolute Force, because I never want to hear my
doctor utter the words “penile fracture.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My lower legs are protected by a pair of SPES fencing socks,
which offer extra padding around the shins, and SPES shin guards. I am not entirely happy with the shin guards
in three respects. The first is that the
elastic straps that hold them in place need some extra Velcro to really be
cinched tight enough around my calves. I
can certainly do this; I just haven’t quite gotten around to it. The second deficiency is that they don’t
offer any ankle protection, the way that, say, proper riot gear does. Hitting the ankle with a sword is not exactly
easy, and perhaps not especially wise in most cases, but I have been hit there,
and I’m not really sure why HEMA shin guards <i>shouldn’t</i> protect the ankle.
The third deficiency is that they don’t really cover the knee - they are
tall enough to offer some knee protection, but at some point I think I should
pick up some actual kneepads. On the
other hand, I will say that I am happy with the level of wraparound protection
they offer (not just the front but the sides and back of the lower leg as
well), and their slim profile has never given me any problems while fencing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because I wear fencing socks with my shin guards, I need
something to give my feet some more grip.
We generally drill in bare feet, so I tried sparring in socks for a
while, but I found them much too slippery.
There doesn’t really seem to be much need for rigid protection over the
foot (and I don’t think there are any commercially available products for any
martial art that offers it, anyway), or even much padding beyond the socks -
it’s just a matter of grip. Some people
seem to like tae kwon do or other martial arts shoes, which are designed to
give grip but have as thin a sole as possible.
I’ve started using my old dance sneakers, reasoning that they’ve always
left me plenty light on my feet yet very connected to the floor. I’m not sure how well that’s going to work
out in the long run but I am hopeful.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
All
this gear - particularly the jacket and helmet - can get pretty sweaty,
especially since we generally don’t “gear up” with jackets unless we’re going
to spar, which is itself pretty winding.
Even with the gear, though, it isn’t as winding as a good polka (maybe
it should be and my form just isn’t quite there?), so I make it a policy not to
take any breaks during sparring except to let other students get their time on
the floor. After all, while I do want to
get good at the actual art of fighting (four years and nine months to go based
on my original challenge to myself), this is also about physical fitness. This <i>is
</i>a martial art, and the foundation of all martial arts is physical
fitness. Then too, even leaving aside
the martial arts aspect, it’s simply important to me that I at least be fit
enough to spar in full gear for an hour straight - just as it’s important to me
that I be at least fit enough to dance for three hours straight, or redowa for
five minutes without breathing hard. As Master
Döbringer said, exercise is better than art - for art without exercise is
useless, but exercise is beneficial even without art.<span style="font-family: "MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif"; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-35539055663146843482013-09-11T11:31:00.001-07:002013-09-11T11:34:11.527-07:00Things I Learned in KDF Today Part 2Last night in KDF I began to understand two things that have deviled me for a while now (I was going to say "a long time," but I guess I haven't really been doing this long enough for things to devil me for a long time).<br />
<br />
The first was what it means to "control" the enemy's blade. Now, this is something I am <i>really</i> just beginning to understand. Until last night, I did have a few rudiments. I understood "control" in the sense of bashing somebody's weapon out of the way (last night we looked at a play that may be my new favorite "coolest play I know," which actually did involve bashing somebody's weapon out of the way in an artful sense). But last night I think I may have begun to begin to understand it in a deeper way. We were looking at a <i>zwerchau </i>play that went like this: A throws a right <i>zwerchau </i>to the left side of B's head. B parries, fairly far from B's body. A's sword is now on the outside of B's sword, to B's left. A flips his sword over while still in contact with B's sword, and cuts B's neck.<br />
<i><br /></i>
This is in the family of <i>duplieren</i> ("doubling") plays, so-called apparently because A has attacked from one direction (B's left, A's right) and, after that attack is foiled, attacks from the same direction rather than trying a new one. This is, if one can permitted a degree of squee-ness, really super cool, and another example of the driving aggression that I really like about KDF. The trick is, half the time it didn't work for me. I would flip my sword over and find my sword in my opponent's neck while their sword was in my forehead. What went wrong?<br />
<br />
The answer, Raab explained to me, was that I was <i>merely</i> flipping my sword over. I was not simultaneously <i>controlling</i> my partner's blade. Now, what does that mean in this context, "control?" Master Meyer describes this play in these terms:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Strike first from your right to his ear, as then when the swords glide together, thrust your sword's pommel through under your right arm, driving at the same time out with both arms, and hit him with the short edge behind his blade onto his head.</blockquote>
Notice what Meyer says there: <i>driving at the same time out with both arms</i> (I feel I should point out that Tristan made this point also; I just didn't understand it until my <i>duplieren</i> wasn't keeping me safe). Now, as I said, I am only beginning to understand that, but the effect of this is to keep pressure on the opponent's blade - driving it back as yours is corkscrewing forward. This idea of keeping pressure on the blade is something that is new to me, and something I'm clearly going to have to refine my understanding of a lot. Questions immediately arise - if I'm putting pressure on his blade, shouldn't he be able to take off or deflect that somehow? How do I maintain pressure as I'm flipping my blade onto its other edge? Probably there is no single answer that applies to all the situations in which one must control the other person's blade. But the idea of keeping pressure on - not <i>hitting</i> the opponent's blade away, but <i>pushing</i> on it from a position of mechanical advantage - that was new to me. I must learn more of this.<br />
<br />
The second big thing I learned yesterday was about footwork. When throwing a <i>zwerchau</i>, one often steps to the side - for instance, if I throw a <i>zwerchau</i> from the right, my blade travels from right to left and I step from left to right, thus keeping my sword between me and my opponent. This is accompanied by a twist from right to left, in order to put the power of the hips behind the swing (in fact, as far as I can tell, that twist of the hips pretty much <i>is</i> the swing, or at least the vast majority of it). I have a pronounced tendency to end this movement having turned ninety degrees to my left (or, if throwing a left <i>zwerchau</i>, to my right), with my feet in a single line perpendicular to the path of travel. This is a clumsy position in which to end, and it's bugged me for a long time.<br />
<br />
It also turns out to be a clumsy way to cut. As Raab explained, your best cutting power is applied in a zone that is about a ninety-degree cone in front of your hips. Turn ninety degrees to your left, and your enemy (who is not actually <i>in</i> your path of travel, obviously, but in front of it) is outside that cone. I was over-rotating as I stepped, leaving me off-balance and cutting weakly or not at all.<br />
<br />
Why was this? In pondering this question I made another dance-fencing connection. I instinctively swing ninety degrees when making this cut for the same reason I <i>always </i>swing ninety degrees - because I'm a waltzer, and being able to turn ninety degrees in a turning waltz is hugely important. I've spent twelve years drilling that swing-around into my body. It's one of those dancey habits I have to unlearn when I am fighting.<br />
<br />
At the same time, thinking in terms of having a firing arc (well, cutting arc) that rotates as my hips do is super helpful, and probably moreso <i>because</i> I have dancey habits. One of the major factors in that ninety-degree swing-around is keeping your hips pointed towards your partner. So okay, when I'm fencing and we are not physically connected, maybe I only swing forty-five degrees around - but the concept of keeping the hips pointed at the other person is essentially the same.<br />
<br />
I suspect, but will have to confirm as I progress, that the term "footwork" is as misleading in fencing as it is in most round dances. People just beginning to learn cross-step waltz often feel off-balance and clumsy, because they're trying to perform the steps <i>as</i> steps; teach them to rotate their hips with the steps and it all begins to flow together. In rotary waltz, beginners often ask where their feet should go on each count, and the truth is that it doesn't really matter - foot placement is the final ten or twenty percent of refinement. What matters much more than foot placement in a rotary waltz is that you are solidly connected to your partner through your arms, and that your hips and shoulders are square to each other. I begin to suspect that fencing footwork is much the same - when people say "footwork," what they are <i>really</i> talking about is the orientation of the hips (and maybe shoulders) in relation to the other person, and compared to that, the actual placement of the legs (and arms, in cutting) is merely refinement.* We shall have to explore this concept further and see how far it pans out.<br />
<br />
* Not to say, of course, that the refinement is unimportant - that last ten or twenty percent can be the difference between a pleasant musical diversion and a waltz that feels like sex. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's the difference between your sword merely cutting skin and going right through the other person, either. But in terms of the learning process, it's important to be able to understand where the work is really being done.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-18848609958182928142013-08-23T07:39:00.002-07:002013-08-23T07:57:18.105-07:00Bajur bal Beskar'gam<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
People sometimes ask how it is being separated from Thayet and Meshparjai. Not my favorite thing, I say. Not the worst thing, I say. I say that the necessity sort of crowds out other emotions. All these things are true. It is like going to work on the subway every day. It is like going back to the knoll every morning and the studio twice a week to have a sword in my hand. I don't tell them that it is a prison. I don't tell them what it is also like.</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
<br />
I am working out of San Francisco this week. This is not a vacation; I'm still going in to the office. I am working east coast time, of course. This makes my daily routine rise at 0400 for drill, be in the office at 0600, go to sleep at 2000.<br />
<br /></div>
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I had a dream last night. I was a sex slave in a townhouse run by three men. My chief captor looks like Tom Cruise in <i>Tropic Thunder </i>and is about as pleasant. There are a lot of us held there, maybe two dozen. I am one of the newer ones, new enough that despair has not yet overtaken the coldly furious need to split my captors' skulls. I have been there long enough for it to feel normal, though. We are let out of the house for errands and always trudge back. I think to myself one day as a group of us - mostly women - trudge to the downstairs library (apparently the townhouse has a library) - that people will wonder why we don't just walk out the door one day and never return. I observe with clinical detachment that the fact we don't means this has become our new normal. And it is not so bad, I tell myself. There is a couple here (in my dream they are played by friends) who were raised as slaves by another couple (played by the parents of a guy I havent seen since high school).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
In the library there is a book that has a few pages hollowed out for a plastic milk cap and a sticky note on which is written the number for the local police station. This is our escape route. Everybody knows about it. Nobody takes it. "Do you know how many calls like this they get each day?" asks one of the veteran women. "Like 700. And the penalty for trying is severe." She says this with a glance upstairs. I think about it for a long time. The odds are very against me. But I want to believe the police will come. I have been raised to believe they will come.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
In the end, I put the book back and trudge upstairs. It isn't so bad here, I tell myself. It is harrowing.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
I wake up to Meshparjai screaming for me. "Dad! Dad!"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
It is late. I stayed up late to watch Sesame Street with her (<i>Elmo's Elfabet Challenge</i>), then skipped morning drill to hold a sleeping Thayet for half an hour, and fell asleep with my arms around her. I should have been on the train half an hour ago.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
I hurry over to Meshparjai's room. Last night we talked about how I would already be at work when she woke up. She has been brave to stay in her bed like I told her to instead of running into our room. "Yes, ad'ika? Daddy is late for work. I need to take a shower and get ready to go."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She thinks about this. Her bottom lip quivers. "I'll come with you, " she declares. This will slow me down. I explain that Daddy needs to get ready to go very quickly.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She enunciates her response carefully. She is using a formulation I have never heard her use before, and wants to be certain I understand.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"I just ... need to."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
We head down the hall, and for a moment all other emotions are crowded out; she is filled with relief and happiness as only a fairy or toddler can be filled. She chants, "I'm following you, Dad!"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
The relief is ephemeral, as all such fillings must be. In the bathroom she finds sunglasses and puts them on against the sudden brightness. I throw myself into and out of the shower and find her curled up on the bathmat. She struggles to her feet, determined not to miss anything I do. I get dressed while Thayet slumbers, explaining to her what I am doing. The concept of work is new to her, and I want to reinforce it. "These are the clothes Daddy is going to wear to work." I debate saying I have to dress up for work.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"And that shirt?" she asks as I button my shirt.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"Yup," I say. "This is the shirt I will wear to work."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"You look cool, Dad," she says with a big smile.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
In the kitchen I explain that Daddy has to make breakfast and lunch because I will still be at work for lunch. "But where will I be for dinner?" She thinks but cannot remember or deduce. "Home. Home for dinner."<br />
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She has seen sandwiches before but is fascinated as I make mine. "You put butter on the bread?" she asks.<br />
<br />
Yup, the peanut butter goes on the bread. And the jam goes on the other side. Toddler mind blown.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
We go back to the bathroom to collect my electronics. I explain that, now that Daddy has his food packed, I have to pack my backpack. She frowns at this and looks like she is fighting back tears. She associates backpacks with trips, and she knows I am on a long trip somewhere far away from her. I am not going on a trip. I promised I would tell her before I go back on my trip so it would not be a surprise. I am going to <i>work</i>. I place a veritable snake's nest of power cords into my backpack. "See? Daddy is going to take his backpack to work." Oh. That's beginning to be okay.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
It's time to go. I pull her onto my lap on the couch. She is holding it together so far, and clearly tired, so I ask if she would like to go back to her own room to sleep. "Yes," she says with a little wail, but it costs her something. Her room is where she goes to be abandoned, a magical prison chamber from which she emerges to find parents missing. She knows it is what I want to hear, though. Her face begins to crumple.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
I can't take it. I've been trying to be quiet all morning because Thayet has been having trouble sleeping, joking in whispers with Meshparjai about not waking Mommy up, but for an instant all that flies out of my head. I am not thinking about how a crying girl will probably wake my wife up just as I have to leave. I only that my little girl is sad. <i>Ne'briikase</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"Or," I say, "you can sleep with Mommy, but you have to let her sleep." (This concession has helped me recover my wits somewhat.)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She jumps at that. "Okay," she sniffles. I lead her back to the bedroom and help her into bed. She tucks herself in, and I pull the covers up to her chin. Thayet stirs. "Remember," I whisper, "you have to let Mommy sleep."</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"Okay," she says. I can hear the dejectedness creeping into her voice.</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"And where is Daddy going?"</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She gets it now. "To work!" She has trouble forming the unfamiliar word, but she says it with a smile.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"And after work, where will I be?"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
She thinks about that one. She doesn't know.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">
"Home."</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402.post-44545456695195941572013-08-19T13:54:00.003-07:002013-08-20T10:06:29.894-07:00The Things We CarryI hope the profusion of KDF posts lately is not boring to people, but I've gotten some positive feedback about these posts, and as I generally receive <i>no</i> feedback on my blog posts, I'm going to take that as a sign that I can continue to ... do whatever it is I do here.<br />
<br />
It occurred to me that I haven't spoken much about the training gear we use in KDF, or at Sword Class NYC specifically, since it probably isn't totally obvious to everybody.<br />
<br />
There are three general types of weapons any modern KDF practitioner uses (I call them "weapons" following the usage of my sport fencing coach at Stanford, who was very insistent that a foil should be treated like a deadly weapon - "Is weapon!" While not all training aids are "weapons" in the sense of being objects designed to forcibly incapacitate a human being, they present the same moral obligations and responsibilities as such objects, so I think this is an appropriate term). These don't have to be acquired at the same time (I personally only own one of the three), but a complete training regimen will eventually incorporate all three. At Sword Class NYC we only use the first two, although I know there are discussions underway for when and how to add test cutting to our training regimen.<br />
<br />
The first type of weapon we use is called a <i>waster</i>. This is a practice sword (or sword simulator, if you prefer) made of a material other than steel. A waster has or should have a variety of desirable qualities. The first is that it is cheap - roughly 25% the price of a good steel training sword (more on which below). In addition to being cheaper to acquire, a waster is easier to maintain - steel needs to be oiled after use or it will rust, for instance. It should have the same general anatomy as a sharp sword, allowing the practitioner to use it as a stand-in for the real thing. You cannot practice proper placement of your crossguard with a training weapon that doesn't <i>have</i> a crossguard, for instance. No training weapon will ever have the exact same mass distribution (i.e., balance and handling characteristics) as a live blade (the only way to recreate the mass distribution of a steel bar with razor-sharp edges, after all, is to <i>be </i>a steel bar with razor-sharp edges), but it should try to come close.<br />
<br />
Wasters are useful in everything but test cutting, but I think they are most useful in sparring. Hitting another person with a steel bar - even a blunt steel bar - poses greater potential for injury than hitting another person than hitting another person with a lighter object that has wider edges. People can and do spar with steel, but wasters allow sparring closer to full speed with less protective gear for a given risk of injury. This is important, since the only way to know if you can apply techniques with the speed and spontaneity a real fight would require is to try them at full speed in an unstructured sparring environment. I was gratified to learn that at Sword Class NYC we spar at full speed on a regular basis (i.e., every week). Full-speed sparring has revealed plenty of gaps in my knowledge and technique that I simply wouldn't have realized in paired drills as quickly, or with the same clarity.<br />
<br />
Historically, wasters were constructed of wood. Wood is cheap, sturdy, and has the historical cachet of being what our ancestors actually made their wasters out of. It has the disadvantages of being quite inflexible, which means that not all techniques can be performed at full speed with wooden wasters. Stabbing somebody at full speed with a wooden waster is more than most protective gear can handle; in fact, as I understand it, Meyer doesn't teach thrusting techniques in his longsword manual precisely because there is no practical way to safely practice full-speed thrusting against a practice partner using a wooden waster. Even cutting techniques can be dangerous (imagine "practice" hitting somebody with a wooden baseball bat as fast as you would if you meant to kill them).<br />
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Of course, one certainly <i>could </i>fashion practice gear that can handle the abuse of wooden wasters in full speed sparring. It is not particularly difficult to make armor that will laugh off the best that a sharp sword can do, let alone a sword made of wood. The trouble is that such gear is (i) expensive to acquire, and (ii) can be physically restrictive, which distorts the very techniques one is trying to practice. When I started reading about historical European martial arts in high school, practitioners were still talking about how to make padded foam wasters in their quest for practice weapons that could be used at full speed with an acceptable minimum of safety equipment. The trouble with padding is that it tends to radically distort the mass distribution of the weapon towards the blade. You can't pad the blade without adding mass to it, after all. Today, "synthetic" wasters use plastic blades, which give a reasonable facsimile of proper mass distribution, flex safely when you stab them into a practice partner (think of the way a fencing foil is designed to bend when it hits the target), and can be whacked into a partner with reasonable safety (emphasis on the <i>reasonable</i> - as Tristan has pointed out several times, even synthetic weapons can and have caused serious injuries. High-tech safety gear is no excuse to recklessly endanger your sparring partner, or yourself).<br />
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Synthetic wasters are not without their own drawbacks, of course. But to see those drawbacks more clearly, it will be useful to discuss the second major type of practice weapon, which is:<br />
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A <i>blunt steel </i>sword (sometimes called a "steel trainer," simply a "blunt" or "steel," or a <i>federschwert</i> - which, at least in its modern HEMA usage, is a neologism, but probably a useful one) is a training weapon made of steel but without a sharp edge. At least some historical blunts may have been live swords earlier in their lives, but modern commercially available steel blunts are purpose-built as training weapons. A steel training sword more closely approximates the mass and mass distribution of a live word (wasters, being made of material less dense than steel by definition, tend to be on the light side - the Pentti+ Type III synthetic waster I use tries to compensate by incorporating stainless steel pieces into the hilt, but it's still on the lighter end of the range of historical longsword weights), but steel's greatest advantage over a waster is the way it handles when it meets another steel blade.<br />
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I can't speak as much for wooden blades, but synthetic waster blades have several undesirable characteristics when they hit each other. The first is that their collisions tend to be more elastic than steel, meaning they can actually rebound. The second is that, because they tend not to acquire the tiny divots and nicks that wood or steel can acquire, they tend to slide up and down each other much more than is realistic. The third is that the very flexibility that makes them safer to use in full-speed sparring causes them to flex unrealistically against each other.<br />
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This last point is one that bears some explaining. One of the concepts that the German masters harp on is called <i>fühlen</i>. This means "feeling," but I think it is more easily explained as a sword of sword judo. <i>Fühlen</i> is the art of sensing, based on the pressure (or lack thereof) of your opponent's blade on yours, what your opponent is about to do. This is not so that you can oppose his action, but rather so you can exploit it. If he is about to forcefully shove his weapon in one direction (hoping to move your blade out of position, say), <i>fühlen </i>says you should <i>let</i> him - only your sword should no longer be there to be shoved. While his weapon goes shooting off in one direction, yours is busy cutting him down. Just like in empty hand combat, you exploit his momentum to leave him defenseless.<br />
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Of course, in order to feel your opponent's momentum through your sword, it needs to have a certain amount of stiffness. If he pushes against your sword and it simply bends out of the way, you don't <i>feel</i> a thing (though you may <i>see</i> his movement). Nothing helps the practitioner to acquire this critical fencing skill like the pressure of steel on steel.<br />
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These characteristics make blunt steel particularly desirable for solo and paired drills. This is not to say that they can't be used in sparring, of course. A real steel trainer should be heat-treated such that the blade can flex in the last third or so of its length. Combined with blunt edges and a rounded tip, this means that the weapon can be used in sparring. Protective gear is still necessary to spar with steel, but with the right gear, steel can be used in full-speed sparring, or nearly so. This gear is more expensive than what is required to spar with synthetic blades, and arguably distorts technique by encumbering the practitioner with padding and rigid protection. On the other hand, steel sparring offers a higher-fidelity experience in terms of how the actual weapons feel and handle against each other.<br />
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The third type of training aid we use is a sharp steel sword. Sharp steel can be used in solo drills, provided there are no spectators or bystanders who might blunder into the path of the sword, but it is especially valued because only sharp steel can be used for test cutting. As I said in my last post, test cutting is not the apex of KDF practice - one does not graduate from solo drills to paired drills to sparring to test cutting or anything like that - but it is a critical <i>part</i> of complete practice. The only way to know that you can throw a cut (or a thrust, or a slice) that would actually cut something is to ... practice cutting things. If you can reliably win sparring bouts but can't actually cut anything, then you are practicing the techniques of a very oddly shaped stick, not the techniques of the sword.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0