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.

Fencing Retrospective, Two Years

Two 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.

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 my 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.

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.

Am I any good?

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.

Am I better?

Absolutely.

I have now executed cuts that I couldn't execute a year ago.  The progress hasn't been entirely forward, but it has 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 hauptstücke, I can now just explain 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 tempi, the Italian concept that forms the basis of so much modern fencing theory, and instead think in terms of vor and nach, 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 feel pressure better than I could, which is just as important.

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.

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.

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.

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 will be a swordsman.  I am a swordsman - I'm just not a good one.

Three years to go.

Fencing Retrospective, A Year and Three Months

When I first came to New York, 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?

Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself able to answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.  Liechtenauer divides his unarmored longsword art into seventeen hauptstücke, high-level concepts that group together several individual plays or techniques.  I've now at least seen 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 hauptstücke 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.

I'm not really good 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 scary, 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.

That's pretty much what good 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 my 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.

And ... while I'm not there yet, you know what?  I think I am getting there.  And hey, there's another forty-five months to go.

Phoenix Earth

This 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.

My phoenix earth patches are representations of my arms as they have existed in my mind since some time in late undergrad: On a circular shield gules, a diminished bordure, a phoenix earth Or.  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.

Which ties into the phoenix earth itself.  The phoenix earth represents Earth after 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 saw a new heaven and a new earth, says Revelation 21, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

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.  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.”

Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

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 better 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 - all things, everything that makes life the bittersweet mixture of joy and sorrow that it is - are made new.

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 wrong.  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 alive life that my [probably metaphorical] ancestors experienced.

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 God makes things better.  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, life itself - can be fixed in Christ, then anything can be fixed in Christ.  And not only fixed, but made better than it was before.  No matter how bad a marriage is, it can be better than it was before.  No matter how broken a friendship, how sundered a family ... it can 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.

So what do my patches say?  They say, 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 everything 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.

That's what my phoenix earth patches are about.

Fechtschule New York 2014

This 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 did, and that makes it part of me as a fencer.  It's something I need to face if I'm going to get better.

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 want 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.

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 learn.  More than twenty years later, Alanna still calls to me to work, even at the things you aren't good at, to bend myself to my will through sheer bloody-mindedness:

“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 they don’t survive their first real fight. And then there’s some—”

“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.

“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.”

Alanna stared at the forest and thought this over. “It’s possible to learn to be natural?”

“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."

Merry Christmas to Me

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.

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.

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.

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 schilt (“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.

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.

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.

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 ernstfechten, 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

With all these thoughts in mind, I looked at the commercially available steel longsword trainers and settled on the Liechtenauer, for the following reasons.

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.

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 sharp 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Now the thing just has to arrive.

There are many like it ...

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.

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.

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 Akademie des Heiligen Schwertes, 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.

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 Akademie, it might not be my school forever.  This is really a pretty disquieting thought, because I actually do love the Akademie 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 that 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 …

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, This is me.  This is where I come from.  These people have supported my development as a martial artist, and I honor them.

If my jacket describes who I am as a fencer, my waster - my, well, my sword - 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.

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.

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.

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 just be classical.

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 Ijaa’bora - Duty.  After that, eventually, one with a blue handle, named Ruusaan - Reliable One.  But with green and blue taken, what color should my Pentti be?

Ultimately I decided to answer that question by asking what my Pentti means to me.

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.

So I no longer own just a Pentti+ Type III nylon waster.  I own Shereshoy, whose name means … well, shereshoy.  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 live.  Shereshoy means … I think the best literal translation is to seize life.  But what it really means is joy.

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 art that dignifies.

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: ner gai cuyi shereshoy - “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.

The Things We Wear

 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 shouldn’t 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.

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.

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 is 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.

Things I Learned in KDF Today Part 2

Last 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).

The first was what it means to "control" the enemy's blade.  Now, this is something I am really 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 zwerchau play that went like this: A throws a right zwerchau 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.

This is in the family of duplieren ("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?

The answer, Raab explained to me, was that I was merely flipping my sword over.  I was not simultaneously controlling my partner's blade.  Now, what does that mean in this context, "control?"  Master Meyer describes this play in these terms:

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.

Notice what Meyer says there: driving at the same time out with both arms (I feel I should point out that Tristan made this point also; I just didn't understand it until my duplieren 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 hitting the opponent's blade away, but pushing on it from a position of mechanical advantage - that was new to me.  I must learn more of this.

The second big thing I learned yesterday was about footwork.  When throwing a zwerchau, one often steps to the side - for instance, if I throw a zwerchau 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 is 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 zwerchau, 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.

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 in 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.

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 always 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.

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 because 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.

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 as 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 really 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.

* 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.

The Things We Carry

I 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 no 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.

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.

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.

The first type of weapon we use is called a waster.  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 have 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 be a steel bar with razor-sharp edges), but it should try to come close.

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.

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).

Of course, one certainly could 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 reasonable - 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).

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:

A blunt steel sword (sometimes called a "steel trainer," simply a "blunt" or "steel," or a federschwert - 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.

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.

This last point is one that bears some explaining.  One of the concepts that the German masters harp on is called fühlen.  This means "feeling," but I think it is more easily explained as a sword of sword judo.  Fühlen 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), fühlen says you should let 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.

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 feel a thing (though you may see his movement).  Nothing helps the practitioner to acquire this critical fencing skill like the pressure of steel on steel.

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.

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 part 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.

Doing It For Real, or: What Are We Trying To Do?

When I meet new people (at work, say), they are often interested in my social dance hobby.  It is an interestingly difficult thing to describe.  "Dance" is certainly too broad for what I do, in that there are many kinds of dance I know virtually nothing about and in which I have no particular skill.  "Ballroom dance" is also too broad - as the Dance Master rightly points out, "ballroom dance" can be done in a competition setting, in a performance setting, or in a social setting.  I only really do the latter.  But of course, one of the things I liked most about dance at Stanford was that we were learning social dances as they were done in their heyday (we often called this approach "vintage" social dance); for instance, the Viennese Waltz that I know is actually not the same as the Viennese Waltz taught by, say, an Arthur Murray studio.  And yet, the Viennese Waltz that I actually dance is not the same as the Viennese Waltz as danced in 1804, or 1840, or 1880, or indeed any time period except my own; it incorporates at least some figures and features that are outside the figures and features within the range of "Viennese Waltz" in any meaningful historical time period (following the usage of some of the Dance Master's senior students, I sometimes call this "radical" vintage social dance).

I distinguish radical vintage social dance from vintage social dance or historical social dance in that radvin is informed by historical practice but goes beyond it.  It is not a reenactment discipline.  I learned the waltz of the 1810s, and I incorporate some of its features into my normal waltzing, but I almost never waltz like they actually did in the 1810s (and at this point I'd need to be reminded of many of the finer points in order to do so).  As in the physical movements of the dance, so in the philosophy - radvin waltzes to contemporary music because historically, waltz was done to contemporary music (whatever that meant at the time); we take to heart the admonitions of the 19th century masters about ballroom courtesy without adhering to all of their actual rules of courtesy, and so forth.

This is not a form of social dance that is widely practiced.  And yet, I sort of pride myself on my ability to dance both with historical reenactors and with modern ballroom students.  In fact, it is integral to my identity as a dancer.  When I say, "I know how to waltz," what I mean is that I can give pleasure to myself and my partner in a social, freestyle setting while engaged in a dance that both of us will recognize as "waltz," regardless of my partner's style, skill level, or training background.  That may sound very broad, but in many ways it is very narrow.  It doesn't include skill at recreating the waltz of any historical time period, whether modern or vintage; it doesn't include freestyle competition settings, or freestyle performance settings, or choreographies in any setting.

Yet this is the definition I incorporate into my identity as a dancer.  This is what intuitively feels to me like "doing it for real."  Now, I would dishonor my training if I were ever to say that somebody who defines their identity as a dancer in another way was not "doing it for real."  But whenever I want to know if I can dance something "for real," that is the meaning I use for myself - can I dance it in such a way as to bring pleasure to myself and my partner in a social, freestyle setting, regardless of my partner's style, skill level, or training background?

I am still formulating a definition of what "doing it for real" means to me in a fencing context, but I know that it shares at least some features of what it means to me in a dance context.  I know that it will be style- and background-agnostic.  To me, "doing it for real" with a sword means (among other things) being able to use it against weapons other than swords, against opponents who have primarily studied a different style or under a different teacher.

I am also pretty sure that, like dance, I am interested in the historical texts as inspiration.  I don't want to fight like Joachim Meyer or Hans Talhoffer any more than I want to swing like Frankie Manning or waltz like Charles Durang.  I value the example of those masters (in dance and in KDF) because they know more than I do, had access to cultural context that I can never have, and you have to learn from somebody, but I want to dance, and fight, like me.  Not all historical fencers feel this way; there are those who prefer to ape a particular master because they think his teachings are superior to others (a claim that I think is structurally dubious), or because it serves an independent interest such as historical reenactment or historical research - which I think is a perfectly valid activity, even if it's not a project I wish to engage in.

I am also struck by the similarities between training for [freestyle, social] dance and fencing.  Current historical European martial arts training, regardless of system or tradition, consists of four general types of activities: solo drills, paired drills, free sparring, and test cutting.  Solo drills are fencing-related actions that can be performed by a single person with appropriate training equipment.  When I drill on the knoll in Prospect Park, I am doing solo drills - challenging myself to improve things like my footwork or my sword handling (it is surprisingly difficult to do even something as simple as swing a sword through thin air without having it wobble, for instance).  This isn't something that social dance training emphasizes much, in my experience, but it does exist.  Every approach I've seen to teaching the basic lindy hop swing-out, for instance, has the practitioners go through the motions without a partner before adding another person into the mix.

Paired drills are quite common in social dance training, since very few techniques are meant to be performed in isolation (there are a few, but in general, social dance is meant to be done with one or more partners).  The same is true of fencing - the fact that you have a sword in your hand implies that there is another human being in the picture, whom you intend to put in a wheelchair, coma, or body bag if necessary.  Except for those rare techniques that are meant to be performed in isolation (certain free spins in dance, for instance; or perhaps the act of drawing a weapon), the techniques of the art can only be understood with another person to work with.  Just as you cannot perform a dance figure on the fly without practicing it in isolation with a partner many times, neither can you perform a fencing technique.  By practicing families of related figures and techniques in a controlled, deliberate setting, you begin to break those figures and techniques down into their constituent parts, understanding the function of their individual pieces so that you can apply them in ways that you have never practiced.  I am best at this in cross-step waltz; partners ask me on a semi-regular basis "where I learned" a given figure, and at this point, I often can't tell.  It's entirely possible that I never learned that figure, but rather unconsciously assembled it on the occasion from my library of tiny, well-understood pieces of figures.  I don't think you can do that without lots of paired drills.  This is my favorite part of fencing class, because I derive a significant amount of satisfaction from this breaking-down process.

For some dancers, and fencers, that is enough - and I don't mean that in a derogatory way.  There is genuine thrill and achievement in a well-written and well-executed choreography, whether in dance or in fencing (choreographies being, essentially, very long custom-written drills).  The measure of skill that I want, though, is skill in a freestyle setting.  In dance, I think this offers a unique opportunity to experience the things that made social dance so popular in ages past - the social interaction, the romantic and sexual tensions, the athletic exertion sustained effort, the musical expression of interpreting music as you hear it - all the pieces are, or can be, present on the social dance floor.

For fencing, I value free sparring because it lets me discover whether I can perform my techniques spontaneously.  That is to say, it lets me know whether I understand the technique (and its constituent pieces) enough to know when to apply it without somebody telling me so, and whether I have physically mastered the technique enough to apply it against an opponent who is moving at full speed.  Whether I win or lose the bout is not really the point; I would rather win than lose, but competition in general makes me uncomfortable.  The pleasure is not so much in the interaction with my sparring opponent as in the opportunity to test my own mastery.

The last mode of training, which I don't think has any analogue in dancing, is test-cutting.  Test cutting is the practice of using sharp swords to cut targets (Japanese tatami mats, rolled and soaked in water, are common, and pig carcasses have many desirable qualities as practice targets, but anything that offers resistance to being cut will do in principle).  This is to cover an important hole in free sparring's coverage: nobody gets cut in sparring.  As a result, it's a fair question to ask ourselves whether any of the blows we strike in a sparring bout would actually have cut a real opponent.  If I throw a krumphau in sparring and it connects, would that same blow struck with a live blade have amputated my opponent's forearms, or simply bashed them?  Cutting things with a sword is hard, after all (there are eastern martial arts dedicated to nothing but learning how to cut with a sword).  Test cutting has its own limitations, of course - no matter how hard you may try to pretend that you are cutting an opponent instead of an inanimate object, the fact remains that there is no way to test cut an opponent.  It's not a substitute for the other three modes of training, merely a supplement to them.