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.

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.

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.

Today was a Day

I don't think I've done a "here's what happened today" post in years, but today was a pretty good day and people sometimes wonder what I'm up to when I'm not working (and I don't feel that there's much about work I can say in a forum like this), so I think I'm going to do one.

Today was a pretty good day.  I woke up fairly early, and decided not to go grocery shopping since I didn't want to risk delivery making me late for fencing.  Instead I made a list of things to do today on my special notepad (just a regular notepad, but one of the first things I bought in New York) with my special pen (just a regular pen that I keep in my pocket, but having a writing instrument be part of my everyday panoply makes me feel more like a man).  Since there was no work today, I could concentrate on housekeeping.

The first item of "housekeeping" was to get things ready for the Silverway session tomorrow.  At last my poor neglected D&D campaign can move forward, in our new DM-is-in-New-York format.  Part of successful DMing over a remote platform like roll20.net is getting the space set up beforehand, so I hopped online and got my digital house (or tabletop, I suppose) in order.  Then it was off to fencing.  I decided not to take chapter five of On Basilisk Station because I try not to print things here at the apartment, and I'm almost done with chapter five so I wanted to save what was left for Monday's commute.  I find the mando alphabet harder to read than the aurebesh.  At first I thought it was because I had more practice with aurebesh (yes, I go to Star Tours in part to practice reading a fictional script, and yes, I pause episodes of The Clone Wars to read the aurebesh), but by now I think I can say that's not the case.  I think it's just that more mando letters look similar to each other than in the aurebesh or English alphabet.  As a native English speaker it's hard to judge which English letters are confusingly similar (b, d, p and q, certainly, but what about, say, e and c?), but I feel like the aurebesh letters are fairly distinct from one another, whereas in the mando alphabet I still sometimes get confused between a and p, b and q, c, t, g and w, k and r, l and s, m and n, and u and x are all pretty similar to each other - that's virtually the entire alphabet.  Still, it's a fun project.  Practice practice.

Speaking of practice, today was my first time back to fencing in almost a month.  But I see that I have written many paragraphs about that, so let me skip fencing for now.  After class, I hung around a bit and actually got invited to go to the bar with the guys in what is apparently a post-fencing ritual.  That would be nice, but I don't know if I have the money for it.  Maybe I should try to make room for it.  It would be good to have friends outside of work.

At any rate, I went home, did my meager grocery shopping, and then finished up my laundry.  Turns out the massive cardboard flat that's been under the stairs in front of my apartment actually had a tiny label on it declaring that it was for me: my ironing board had arrived.  A full-size ironing board is not something that my housemates felt the need to find room for (and given their jobs, who can blame them?), but after trying to iron pants on a countertop ironing board I decided that enough was enough, and bought my own full-size ironing board.  Now my pants (and dry cleaning budget) can feel the firepower of this fully armed and operational ... clothes-pressing ... operation?  Anyway, since I have the apartment to myself I had a nice quiet time doing my ironing like a big boy and singing worship songs.  And that brings me to, well, now.  A nice, responsible day.

So ... I guess that brings me back to KDF.

Since I had been gone, I had ordered a fencing helmet (for some reason Raab Rashi, the studio owner/katana instructor - I use his name because I don't think he'd mind the modest advertising additional internet presence brings - refers to them as "helmets," instead of "fencing masks," though I suppose they do provide more throat, side, and back protection than a regular fencing mask) and picked up a cheap pair of lacrosse gloves in anticipation of the new advanced/sparring hour, as I had been told this was the minimum allowable safety equipment.  I am quite happy with the helmet, although I may have to invest in a set of contacts - only wearing them once a week, they should last me for quite a while.  I am really quite happy with the gloves, even though they're cheap by lacrosse standards, and even though at some point I'd like to upgrade to hard-shell gauntlets.  Since the studio now offers unlimited KDF training, today I was going to go to all three Saturday classes: beginning, open level, and advanced/sparring.

The beginning and open level classes were a lot of fun.  I try to work on keeping my face impassive during class, since facial expression can give away your intentions in a fight.  It is surprisingly difficult not to show in your face that you have mentally committed to hitting somebody, so it's something I try to practice whenever I have a sword in my hand or when I drill in the mornings.  Today, though, it was really hard to keep from grinning.  As we practiced our cuts in the beginning class and some zwerchau and scheitelhau plays ("plays" is the KDF term for "things you can do from a given position or with a given maneuver") in the open level, I could feel my pulse quicken, my airways open up, and my heart lift.  It was good, exciting, and alive.  I am starting to actually feel part of the class community, too, which is also good, exciting, and alive.

And then we got to the sparring class.  This was still good, but much less thrilling.  I was expecting that, of course, since I didn't really feel ready for sparring.  I went because Raab recommended I do so for the sake of learning despite my comparative inexperience.  When to begin free fencing is a topic that I know many weapons instructors have different views on, but I figured that this was the opinion being expressed by my fencing authority (well, one of them), so I might as well go with it.  I went in expecting to get beat up a lot, and the fact that my right hand, left index finger, right pinky, and both forearms are still sore eight hours later is testament to the fact that I did.  For the record, getting walloped, even with the padded boffers I was using, hurts more than getting shot in paintball - or at least the soreness and tenderness lasts longer.  Since I do not yet own a fencing jacket I wasn't allowed to spar with nylon, and as much as I hate to shy away from bruises, I have to admit that was probably wise.

I would have liked a little more structure to the rules of sparring.  I have no interest in counting points or in deciding who "wins" a bout, of course, but I do have plenty of interest in learning how to do it for real.  For now, there is plenty for my brain to sponge up without worrying about that sort of thing, but for the future, I want to know - do we stop our rounds after a good hit has been landed, or only after a good hit has been landed and the attacker has successfully made it to safety?  Those seem to be the two major schools of thought.  To them I would add a third, or at least like to raise the question at some point: what about stopping our rounds only after a crippling hit has been landed?  We've already been taught a few cuts that are clearly not going to end a fight, but this point is bigger than that.  For instance, I get the impression that most practitioners would stop a bout (score a point, whatever) after a thrust that would run their opponent through the lung.  And that is certainly a good hit.  But of course, being impaled through the lungs is not crippling, and is not even especially likely to be mortal, so ... should we really stop sparring just because that's happened?  To put it another way, I suppose I'd like to have a clearer idea of what our sparring is trying to achieve ... which is probably a post for another time.

I'm still very glad I went, though.  We only had enough space for two pairs to be sparring at once, and as many of the guys (there are several women who are regulars in class, but none of them happened to be present for today's sparring class) had just gotten their fancy new fencing jackets, they were excited to be sparring with nylon.  That left me with a disproportionate amount of time with the boffers, which are heavy, imbalanced, and generally make me feel slow as molasses.  This in turn makes it extra difficult for me to remember what I know.  But that was perhaps a good thing, as the senior student I did two bouts with turned them into teaching experiences rather than just beating on me, and Tristan reminded me that I actually did know several plays applicable to the situations the aforesaid student was deliberately putting me into.  As before, when I was handling these same boffers in June, it all felt very serious.  I could feel my mind engage its learning mode, just trying to absorb as much data as possible.

I saw The Wolverine last weekend, and it reminded me how much fencing is not like dance.  I have a tendency to compare it to dance, because that's what I know, and it's a fairly well-established trope in fiction that a very skillful combatant looks like he or she is dancing.  It often looks that way in film, television, and stage, and those are generally the only ways most people see fencing.  But fencing is not dancing.  There is no rhythm to fencing, no internal metronome.  There is a metronome in fight choreographies, of course, because the performers need to synchronize their timing or the choreography would break down.  But when doing it for real, the metronome is replaced by asynchronous movement - not just asynchronous movements, but moving when and in a way for which one's opponent is not prepared - and speed, as much of it as one's mind, reflexes, and conditioning can muster - and if that is more speed than one's opponent can muster, too bad for him.

There are other ways in which I notice that fencing is not like dance.  One that's been deviling me is this: when I practice "leaping" to the side with my zwerchauen (that is, at least as I have been taught, simply taking a long lateral step), I have a tendency to recover by bringing my trailing foot too far - the instep of my trailing foot ends up directly aligned with the heel of my leading foot, so the two could be brought together to form a T.  This, of course, is because I practiced that very stance in college ad nauseum, attempting to ingrain in myself the classic stance of a 19th century gentleman at ease in a ballroom and presenting his silhouette to best advantage.  I guess it worked, because my trailing foot can find that position in my sleep.  For fencing, though, having both feet in line like that weakens one's balance.  I've been working on this minor thing all week, and I was very proud of myself the other day when I could finally throw a phantom right zwerchau at speed without falling into that T-stance ... only to discover that the problem had migrated to my left zwerchau.  Well, practice practice.

One thing that is like dance, though - so far, at least - is the mental process of learning.  The Dance Master always used to tell us that if we were having trouble learning a step, we should just go home and sleep on it - we'd find that it made more sense after giving our brains that time to process.  I've definitely experienced this in my park drills - on one day I just won't be able to keep from rising on the balls of my feet when I cut (another dance habit), and on the next day I can stay grounded.  I haven't had a chance to experience this in our open level drills and plays, because we haven't been repeating things from class to class (yet; perhaps this will change with the addition of Tuesday night classes), but I look forward to seeing it at least with respect to sparring.

And on that note, I should end this post and get to sleep.  Mental processing, and Silverway, await!

New Every Morning

In the morning, I drag myself out of a surprisingly snuggly bed in my surprisingly dark room. I put on headphones given to me by my father and running shoes given to me by my wife, lock the door behind me with keys given to me by my landlord, and go running in a park given to me by a city that is home but not home. I pass the relief honoring the Marquis de Lafayette, with the tip of his sword shiny and bright from all the people that have rubbed it. I pound past the playground, across the grass and under the tree, wet my shoes and socks in the dew of the Long Meadow, and pass into the trees. I loop around and up the stone steps that sag in the middle back to the Long Meadow, and cross it until I reach my knoll. There my hands curl around empty air, and I begin to drill. There is no morning gloom, and Prospect Park is full of dogs and their people not far away, but this is still my space, and I am thankful. My muscles answer the thrill of the movements, and I am alone.

This is often the highlight of my day, and my days are actually not that bad. It will be another week or so before I can figure out for sure whether this is a sustainable activity, but I dearly hope that I may. This past Saturday was - I was about to say especially fun, but perhaps that is a silly thing to say given a history of only two actual lessons. It was, at any rate, exceptional in recent history. One of the things we got to do was practice unterhauen (cuts from below, beginning with the sword held down and behind), which was extra cool as I have been somewhat entranced by them ever since I discovered that you could strike from that position. But the really remarkable thing was that I found myself thinking of Tokyo Rose, someone I have not thought of in many years ... and I realized that I felt like I was in Social I again. I had that same excitement, the same eagerness to do more, to learn how it all fits together. I was, in the very Natalian sense, happy.

At my teacher's invitation I stayed to observe the open level class, which was equally exciting. The studio's kendo and siljun dobup sensei participated, and happened to be drilling right in front of my chair, so it was especially interesting to see the way he was able to teach his (much less experienced) partner about what they were doing and why. I find my own mind putting together what bits and pieces of information I have, trying them in various combinations looking for insight. One of the minor revelations was that we have actually practiced only two of the meisterhauen, and that the other cuts we have practiced were all simple oberhauen and unterhauen - whether delivered from the left, the right, or directly overhead.

The meisterhauen, I now realize/begin to suspect, are one of the organizing principles of KDF. To give a dance analogy, I break [rotary and Viennese] waltz variations into four basic categories: turns, pivots, redowa, and mazurka. Proficiency in all four of those categories (plus the basics of frame, balance, and rotation) is basically how I define proficiency in waltz itself. Yet they are categories, not individual steps or variations. I group them together partially because all the individual variations under those categories share certain physical similarities, and partially because they respond to the music in distinct ways - a musical phrase that says "redowa" to me might prompt any number of redowa variations, but it doesn't prompt a mazurka step. That phrase is not what mazurka is "for" in my head.

Similarly, KDF "cuts" do not seem to be listed by individual cut but rather by category of cut. I have practiced three individual cuts now that are all described with the word oberhau, two that are both unterhau, and so forth. Of the mastercuts I have definitely been exposed to, the scheitelhau (there seems to be no good translation; the scheitel is the crown of a hill, but also a mathematical apex, and also the part line in your hair) I have only done in one way but I suspect could be done in at least two, and the zwerchau can be done either from the left or from the right, with each individual variation performed in a slightly different way (a left zwerchau is not simply a mirror image of the right zwerchau). The jargon is not of individual moves but of categories of moves ... and so, I realize, my task as a student is to get it into my bones what these general categories are for. Just as this phrase may signify a redowa and not a mazurka, so this disposition of opponents signifies a zwerchau and not a ... well, whatever else it doesn't signify.

Interestingly, I begin to suspect (which is to say, I have read but cannot yet confirm through my own experience) that the meisterhauen are so-called because of their dual function. Prior to the smallsword revolution of the 17th century, people were generally taught to fence in what the Italians and English would call "single time," which is I think is a stupid terminology that simply means with single actions. If you wish to attack somebody with an arming sword, for instance, your sword only takes one action - the attack. It does not attempt to defeat your opponent's defense and then attack, as does a sport foil. If you wish to defeat your opponent's defense, you must do it with another weapon (such as the buckler in your left hand) or through movement. The meisterhauen, by contrast, take advantage of the longsword's greater length to become movements that are both attack and defense, in the same action - they are ways of moving your sword to attack such that your opponent's ability to counterattack is foreclosed, and ways to parry your opponent's attack in a way that simultaneously attacks him. This is, obviously, superior to a movement of the sword that only attacks or only defends - hence the description of these five categories of maneuver as "master."

Now I just need to learn how to, you know, do them. And when. While moving. When the blows are coming about once a second. I can't wait.

But enough of my amateur musings on the art of fighting. The point is, this makes me happy. And I am grateful to have it out here, where I can greet the day and its promise of mercies new with this one small mercy. There is city glass ground into the dirt beneath my feet, but the morning breeze blows through the trees, my muscles answer the thrill of the movements, and I am here.