Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for February 2017

Philippo Vadi has returned!

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My urgent desire to snuggle up to Philippo Vadi has been gratified, and now you can do the same too. This lovely facsimile went live today, and you can get it from Amazon US, Amazon UK, or order it from any bookshop with the ISBN: 978-9527157091 Not every online store stocks it, probably because it's in Italian.

This is a pure and beautiful facsimile, with no translation, transcription, commentary or introduction; just you and the book. I’m rewriting Veni Vadi Vici at the moment, including a massively improved translation, but until that’s ready you must content yourself with this free copy of my first translation attempt.

And as if that wasn’t enough: I’m planning a reproduction of Meyer’s lovely 1560 manuscript, but am running into trouble with the print options. The trouble is caused by the format of the book- it’s landscape (wider than it is tall) rather than the more usual portrait (taller than it is wide). I’ve put together a summary of the options in this handy form— if you have an opinion, please share it with me there!

Obedience is not a virtue

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My younger daughter is something of a handful, so I’ve been thinking a lot about things like obedience, virtue, loyalty, and authority lately. These are often associated with martial arts training, so I thought I’d share my views here.

I think it is important to distinguish between skills and virtues. Skills are abilities cultivated by practice, which are valued because of what they enable you to do, and should be deployed when its advantageous to do so. Virtues are inherent characteristics, which can be deepened or resisted through practice, but are considered good in and of themselves. A lot of trouble comes from confusing the two.

For example, obedience is not a virtue, but it is a very useful skill. A person who cannot behave obediently when necessary gets into all sorts of unnecessary trouble, and is excluded from all sorts of beneficial activities. For example, if you can’t follow orders, you’re not safe to have on a sailing boat. No sensible person would welcome you into any kind of dangerous activity if you are unable to follow safety regulations. Obedience is really useful, but obedience cultivated as a virtue is utterly deleterious. It is not virtuous to obey, it is virtuous to do the right thing.

Loyalty is a virtue that often gets confused with obedience. Let’s take it in a martial arts context. Many instructors of my acquaintance would say that a good student is loyal and obedient. I don’t agree; I think that a good student is loyal, yes, but obedience is grossly overrated.

Of course, a disloyal and disobedient student is a waste of everybody’s time. But a disloyal and obedient student is worse: they will follow your instructions right up to the point that you make a mistake; their thoughtless obedience prevents them from calling you on your mistake, and so they follow you blindly into error. Then their lack of loyalty leads them to cast you as a villain or a fool, and storm off in a huff. A loyal and obedient student makes things easy for an instructor, but their obedience prevents them from helping you to grow. The best students are loyal but disobedient. They are not inclined to blindly accept anything, and will call you on every error. But their loyalty keeps them training with you, and you grow together.

So when it comes to my kids, I try to teach them obedience as a skill to be practiced. It is really useful in all sorts of situations; the beginners’ course in any field; any time when you don’t have enough information or experience to make good decisions but you are with someone who does have the experience; any time you need to smooth over a petty tyrant because resistance is counter-productive. But it is a skill, not a virtue. I would never praise my children for being obedient; but I will praise them for practising obedience.

Perhaps the most famous discussion of virtue comes from Aristotle. Most interestingly, he determines virtues as the midpoint between two undesirable extremes. Courage is the midpoint between Rashness and Cowardice; Temperance the midpoint between Prodigality and Insensibility. This excellent table from The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nichomachaen Ethics shows them in their places on the spectrum:

from: https://www.cwu.edu/~warren/Unit1/aristotles_virtues_and_vices.htm

You’ll notice that “hard work” doesn’t appear anywhere on this list. Hard work is another example of something often taken as a virtue that really ought to be thought of as a skill. There is absolutely no inherent virtue in hard work; by itself, it means nothing. Let’s imagine for one second that you are a painter, and in three minutes you can dash off a glorious masterpiece that sets the art world alight. Great, lucky you. Now let us imagine that this masterpiece that sets the art world alight took you ten years of hard work. So what? Nobody cares how hard you worked. They care about the painting.

So why do I bang on about hard work being a skill? Why do I praise my kids for the effort they put in more than the results that come out? Because almost nothing worthwhile can be accomplished without hard work. It is a necessary but not sufficient cause of just about every achievement. Yes, I think talent is a myth, and all success comes from hard work of one sort or another. Process beats outcome every time. But that only means that hard work is a necessary skill; it doesn't mean that industriousness should be cultivated as a virtue. I want my kids to be good at the skill of working hard when necessary, but I also want them to be able to choose wisely regarding where they place those efforts. I think the notion of hard work being inherently virtuous is a pernicious lie perpetuated by the rich and powerful to keep the poor in their place. The lie goes “It’s ok to be poor if you work hard. You’ll get rich/get to heaven eventually. Really. Honest, guv.” Meanwhile, bishops and bankers sit back in splendour drinking wine and smoking cigars that your hard work has paid for….

It’s like a real sword fight. I am not in the least bit interested in fighting hard. I just want to stab the other guy as quickly as possible. When one of you is standing and the other lying in a pool of blood, how hard the loser fought is entirely irrelevant. But your chances of being the one left standing are vastly increased if you have worked your arse off in training beforehand.

I know many of my readers will be leaping up and down right now going “what about the knightly virtues?” If that’s you, then you will probably be interested in this excellent article from Chivalry Today: http://chivalrytoday.com/knightly-virtues/

I wonder, what other “virtues” are really skills, and what skills really ought to be thought of as virtues?

 

Philippo Vadi, reborn!

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What's this? A new book? Or an old one? My recent fascination with producing affordable facsimiles of fencing manuscripts began with wanting to curl up in a chair with Vadi.

Mission accomplished.


The proof copy arrived this week, and I have released it for distribution. It will go on sale on February 28th. I set it that far ahead because it gives me some wiggle room in case I spot any errors in the print file, and because I imagine a lot of the people who bought Fiore's Il Fior di Battaglia will probably be interested in Vadi too, and it makes sense to space out these publications by a month. Fiore went out on the 28th January, so 28th February seemed auspicious.

You can preorder your full-colour hardback loveliness from Amazon US here. And from Amazon UK here.

Or use the isbn to search for it on any book store: 9789527157091

A loud shout-out to Bek Pickard of Zebedee Design who has made the book beautiful!

Do you want to be a [insert job description here]?

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A student once asked me, “when can I call myself a swordsman?” I think he was expecting my answer to be a certain number of years spent training, but I said “when swordsmanship is your primary means for analysing and solving problems.” This was not what he was expecting. It is why I think of myself as a swordsman, but it's not strictly true, either. You can call yourself anything you want, whenever you want.

The bigger question is why would you want to?

Not how I actually write my books. But it looks better than the truth.

I never set out to ‘be a swordsman'. I just spent so much time practicing and teaching swordsmanship that I just ended up being as much a swordsman as I am anything else. I never aspired to be a writer, either. After I had five books out, one of my friends chided me about my lack of typing skills, and used the phrase “you're a writer” to justify his criticism, and so I started using “writer” as a convenient, true but not accurate, shorthand answer for the question “what do you do?” when I don't want to have to explain the whole swords-books-courses-school thing.

I did once aspire to be a cabinet-maker. And I became one: it was my full-time employment from 1996-2001. But I wasn't actually very good at it (by the standards set by my colleagues. I was competent; they were astonishing), and wasn't very happy doing it. Being it. But because it was “who I was”, it was much harder to change than “what I do”.

At work on a 15′ dining table at Patrick Baxter Furniture

I do understand when somebody asks me what they should do to “become a writer”. My best advice is this: don't. Don't try to “become a writer”. Write. Publish. Be read. And if you like it, keep doing it. What you are is a human being. What you do is “human stuff”. It's a fault in our language that we ascribe identity to actions. He is a shoe-mender. She is a police officer. Better to say “he mends shoes”, and “she polices”. I would extend this into most areas of life. “I am afraid” is a very different statement to “I feel fear”. “I am hungry” is different to “I am experiencing hunger”. One format identifies you with the feeling, the other does not. It's worthwhile being very careful about what you choose to identify as; so much so that it is probably better to avoid identifying as anything by default.

I know vastly more “writers” who don't actually write, than I know people who may or may not think of themselves as ‘a writer' but who do actually publish the things they have written.

If you want to “be a writer” more than you want to actually write, then “being a writer” will probably make you miserable. I suggest doing the things that you love, that feed you, that you believe are important, and leave the definitions of what that makes you out of it completely. Let other people define you (you can't stop them), and embrace those definitions if they please you. But for goodness' sake, don't aspire to “be” a thing. Just get on and do the things that you want to do.

It's like being a good person. Very, very hard to be good consistently. But behaving like a good person? Much easier. And from the outside, a well-behaved villain is indistinguishable from a good person.

Exciting times, for booky sword geeks anyway.

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About a month ago I was checking through a pdf of Vadi's De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, and thinking how lovely it would be to just pluck the manuscript off a shelf and curl up in an armchair with it. So I looked into getting a copy printed and bound locally. It was going to cost about £40. “Huh, that seems expensive” I thought to myself. “I wonder how much it would cost to get it printed by the company that does my print on demand publishing?” Then I thought- “you know what, I can't be the only person who wants one.” A quick email to my list triggered a deluge of “yes! do it! do it now! I want one!” responses, so I looked into the costs of getting it laid out and a cover designed.

Then it hit me that I really better do Il Fior di Battaglia first. That's a way more popular manuscript, and sales of it could very well subsidize producing Vadi… four weeks later, my facsimile of Fiore dei Liberi’s magisterial Il Fior di Battaglia is #1 in fencing on Amazon (where he assuredly belongs!) as well as #1 in “hot new releases” in martial arts!

The notion of a 600 year old book being a “hot new release” is gloriously ironic, but there you have it. The only modern text in the book is a note in the back saying where the manuscript is, and some details about it. I wanted to keep myself out of these books as far as possible; I mention my Mastering the Art of Arms books, of course, but also Bob Charrette's Armizare, Tom Leoni's translation of the text, and some other resources, on the grounds that most readers of the book will be interested. But this is Fiore's book, not mine. It is his manuscript, laid out, but not edited, translated or commented on. It's just its own pure gorgeous self.

 

Our spiffy logo

And now Vadi is laid out, uploaded to the printers, and I'm eagerly awaiting the proof copy.

The ease and sheer pleasure of producing these facsimiles has lead me to create a new imprint, Spada Press, which even has its own (very basic, don’t go there! ok, you can if you want, but I warned you) website up at www.spada.press  I expect I’ll shift all my book publishing over to that imprint, to help keep the various aspects of my work separate. Expect facsimiles of Meyer (the 1560 ms), at least one other Fiore ms, Marozzo, Fabris, and hopefully Capoferro, in the near future. I welcome requests!

On the subject of books: I have been delighted by the way my beta-readers have been responding to the first draft of The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts, which I released a 100 copies of recently. While they like the book, they have also made some really useful suggestions for improvement. I hope to get the book finished within the next four months or so. Also, the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici went to the editor at the end of last week— I have completely rewritten the book, reorganised it, and added a ton of material to the introduction. It’s probably 8 months or so from being published, but this was a major milestone in its production, and it is a much, much better book. Veni Vadi Vici was my first self-published book, and it really shows. The second edition has benefitted greatly from the constructive criticism of many readers, and the expert help of friends and colleagues. I hope it does them justice. I will be sending out ebook copies of the finished book to everyone who backed the crowdfunding campaign, and to everyone I can reach who has bought the well-meaning but flawed Veni Vadi Vici since it launched.

I would say that was a cracking start to 2017, wouldn't you?