A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Brewery ...

 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 have a life here. But of course that's not really true, and it really oughtn't to be true; you can't make your kid your life. I mean, your kid needs you to not make them your life. But I don't really have a life down here.

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 me to say, I mean, because I kind of ... really don't like church. Okay, that's not true. I like things about church. I like the rituals of church. Increasingly, I like all 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, Hello. I missed having this time together.

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 aren't that.

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 different they were from the standard campus Christian fellowships, and how much more intimate they felt. There was my church; there 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 idea of getting to do church with people you actually liked and respected was pretty powerful to me.

I guess that's the first time I've actually said that. I ... don't respect most Christians I've interacted with qua Christians, I suppose. Maybe that's a me problem.

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.

Here are the things that I would have said I was looking for in a church:

1. Sermons that aren't just self-help talks.
2. Musical worship that's mystic and alive.
3. Communion as an ordinary part of the liturgy.
4. A pastoral staff that lives and values the liberal arts and all that they entail.
5. A connection to and deep respect for Christian tradition.
6. 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.
7. 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.

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.

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 no idea 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 weren't 3-7.

#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.

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 feeling 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).

The sense of tug on my heart last night, that said, "Go on. Give it a try."

The sense of closing my eyes in the service today and reaching for the Spirit and saying, Hello. I missed having this time together.

I'll be back next week.

Jungle Cruises

I think I figured it out.

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.

Let me back up.

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 itself 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.

Oh, part of me is just mourning the loss of my trip to Disney. I was supposed 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 plan: 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.

It's not about getting to Galaxy's Edge. That I'll be back to, maybe this year. It's about the trip. 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.

But good luck finding another week I can afford to take to go to Orlando before my annual pass expires.

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.

What's really bothering me is that I feel like my job's being taken away from me, and I don't know what to do about it.

So let me back up and explain that.

I was telling Kara the other day that I never should have become a transactional lawyer. What I should 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 forget 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.

Should've been a tax attorney.

Or maybe not. Because then I probably never would've been a teacher. But that's kind of the point.

Because here's what's really bothering me: maybe I'm trying to be the wrong kind of teacher.

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 wildly 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.

Some of her motivations in making this move are benign; I recognize that. But only some of them. And regardless, it feels like she's taking away my kids and putting me in a situation in which I cannot possibly succeed. And the reason 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.

Now, I know that is bullshit, in lots of ways. I do connect with my kids. I give a damn, and they know it. I know that matters in ways that isn't going to show up in my principal's precious metrics. But I also know that I have 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 reading.

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 good at that. Better than most people who hold instructional positions. I know that. I am a teacher, and I always will be.

But am I trying to be the wrong kind of teacher?

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.

You get it, I assume.

I could have been a good lawyer ... but I spent ten years trying to be the wrong kind of lawyer.

I know I'm a good teacher ... but am I trying to be the wrong kind of teacher?

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 not suited to being, just like there were kinds of lawyer? I mean, if you put it that way, there are almost certainly types of teacher I'm not suited to being. What if I look back in another ten years and I'm paying the rent and I'm swallowing my pride and I'm working on the Jungle Cruise ride?

Would that be okay? I mean ... maybe? I just don't know that I'd be any good at it.

I don't know what to look for, and I don't even know how 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 looking 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?

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 this career wrong, too. I already lost the last two years of my marriage to this career transition, and for all I know, my chance to raise Meshparjai, too.

I'm pushing forty and, honestly, my working life feels like a failure. A lot of my life 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.

That's what's bothering me. At least I figured it out.

Now my hopes have all vanished and my dreams have all died

And I'll prob'ly work forever as a

Tour guide on the Jungle Cruise ride

Skipper Dan is the name

And I'm doing thirty-four shows every day

And every time it's the same

Look at those hippos! They're wigglin' their ears

Somebody shoot me, 'cause I'm bored to tears

Always said I'd be famous; I guess that I lied'

Cause I'm working on the Jungle Cruise ride.

Resignation

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 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.

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).

I have, as the kids say, all the feels.

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.

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 being 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.

I was proud to take these oaths.  They mean a lot to me.

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.

Or maybe what's really going on is I feel a need to understand how I'm going to uphold them when I'm not 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.

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.

The ABA has no actual authority over American attorneys, and the Model Rules are more like ... guidelines 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 my oaths.

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 teaching 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 is, but why I think people ought to believe 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.

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.

I made a promise.

What Am I Doing Here? Church Edition

The 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).

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 value 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.

This really bothers me, of course.  To a pretty close approximation, Christianity cannot be done 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.

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."

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.  Church 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 analyzed.  I want to understand the text better.  I don't want some kind of "application" to my life.  If understanding the text happens to have application to my life, then great.  But the text - Scripture, the Word - that has to be the point.  Not my own circumstances.

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.

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 is 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.

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.

At the same time, this sort of liturgy is vulnerable to being ... well ... stupid.  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.

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 excellent, carefully grounded in the text and with many layers of function.  There is value in the sense of wholeness 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.

And as for the intellectual substance of the liturgy of the Word - something that, I find, all 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 nearly 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.

All three of these things are indispensable to my understanding of church - of what it means to just be 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 want to worship with my family.  I want to wallow in all the things that God has to offer.  I don't want to have to pick and choose.

And this doesn't even touch the community aspect of church.

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 appreciated community, is I guess what I'm saying.

And I don't know how to build it.  I don't know how to find a group of Christians who just happen to 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 and 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 clan.  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.

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 doing here?"

The Talhoffer Society, and On Killing

I just finished The Talhoffer Society.  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 excellent (italicized for the Natalian).

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.

TTS 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 Mortal Kombat 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.

( For those who are curious, competitive fighting with real swords is not entirely 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? )

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 practice, 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).

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 conclusions, not acts.  The act itself is simply killing.

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 toys, 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 not to get in touch with the stark, singular, solitary reality of killing?

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 particularly 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 TTS  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.

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 is 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 because 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 just 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 to kill someone?  Is it truly that the stark fact of biological existence is so all-fired important?  I'm certainly willing to say that death is bad ... but am I prepared to say that dealing 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 sometimes, 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 able 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.

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 ... esoteric, 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 not 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 hold her.

Holding On and Letting Go

"Nu gar cuyi ner burc'ya.
Ni kar'tayli gar gai sa ner aru'e.
Enteyo kyr'amur gar.
Ni cuyi kyr'am."

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.

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.

And yet ... I do 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."

I'm not there yet.  The art is coalescing in my head and my limbs and my hands; I can feel it.  I'm stronger and faster, less easily winded.  I can see better than I used to be able to, not only what happened and why but what is going 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 this moment, I can bring all these pieces together and fuse them into a single whole.  So yeah, I want to win.

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 letting go 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.

It's not a light switch yet.  I have to sink into this mental state slowly and deliberately.  Hence the mantra.  Nu gar cuyi ner burc'ya.  Ni kar'tayli gar gai sa ner aru'e.  Enteyo kyr'amur gar.  Ni cuyi kyr'am.  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 tells me to fence.  I gaze levelly at my opponent, feel my body arranged beneath me, the fit of Ijaat's handle in my grip.  You can't beat me.

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.

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.

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.

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 was doing, treating him like my last two opponents.  I was fighting the last war.  Dancing without sensing my partner.  I stopped seeing my opponent.

That's okay.  I will do better next time.  I've proven to myself that I can do it.  I am content.

Longpoint 2015

When 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.

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.

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 at will, 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 the 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.

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 else when they step into the ring, or before the cutting stand.  That somebody else is a significant part of why they win.

It was also a significant part of why I lost 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.

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 hit her."

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 knew she could take advantage of them - if she went in with the right attitude.

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.  "I found my inner bitch today," she said.  "And not just the one I fight health insurance companies with.  The one I fight with."

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 see, even in the pools, when she made the jump from fencer to fighting bitch.  But I was also kind of shaken.

Son of a bitch, I thought.  My kohai has found her killer instinct before me.

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 was, and that bothered me a lot more.  What is my inner bitch? I wondered.  What does she look like?

I tried to think back to the times I had 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.

If I ever kill someone, that is how I want it to be.  Cold.  Emotionless.  Certain.  Implacable.  That is how death should be dealt out, so far as I understand the morality of killing.  It's the kind of swordsman I want to be.

Maybe these thoughts are naive.  Almost certainly they are in at least some respect.  But it was something to start from.

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 knew that I was the student of one of the best longsword cutters in the world, that I really can 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 should 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 lazy.

Of course, a good headspace for cutting is not necessarily the same as a good headspace for fighting.  But we shall see.  We shall see.