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Guy frequently keeps this blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Tag: video

Back from the dead: P.J.F. Girard’s Traite des Armes!

Last November I finally made a long-awaited pilgrimage to the antiquarian bookshop Collinge and Clark. They have by a long way the best collection of fencing treatises for sale in London; not one but two copies of Fabris, for instance. And the 1763 first edition (in French) of Domenico Angelo’s Ecole des Armes. I was in there for about three hours, chatting to Oliver Clark. And I looked at everything. Many times.

I was upfront about one thing though; I had promised my wife that there would be no more treatise purchases until after the new kitchen was bought, fitted, and paid for. So I wouldn't be buying anything. Really.

Then Oliver suddenly remembered something… At the back of a dusty drawer was a pile of unbound paper. I held my breath as he pulled them out and laid them on the table. It couldn’t be! It was! An unbound copy of the 1740 edition of P.J.F. Girard’s Traité des Armes, one of my absolute favourite fencing treatises. Not least because Girard was an officer in the marines, and includes such things as how to light and throw a grenade.

That is a man holding a ball full of gunpowder and a length of slow match. i.e. an open flame. Brave?

The pile was missing the title page and the dedication to the king, but other than that was complete.

So I asked him what he wanted for it, and he thought for a moment and came back with a very reasonable offer. But I am a man of my word, and asked him to please not sell it to anyone else until I’d fitted my bloody kitchen.

When I got back to my sister’s, I told her and her husband about my glorious find. And my sister, bless her, in a characteristic fit of generosity, offered to buy the pages for me for a Christmas present! I nearly collapsed in a paroxysm of glee.

But my promise still held; no treatises until after kitchen.

I spent much of May and some of June this year fitting a new kitchen, shiny and open and lovely. Really, it’s a nice kitchen. And I was soooo motivated to get it done. A family event took us back to London in July, and I was off like a shot to Collinge and Clark…

Oliver was unflatteringly surprised to see me. Perhaps he underestimated my kitchen-fitting skills?

I had Oliver send the pages to his preferred bookbinder, Chris Hicks. And it occurred to me that there was an opportunity to make the book whole again. Because in the Helsinki University Library special collection there are both the 1736 first edition, and the 1740 second edition, both in their original bindings. So I asked my friend Jaakko Tahkokallio, who just so happens to be the head of the collection, to scan the missing pages from the 1740, and the front matter from the 1736 (it has an additional one page preface, a snazzy etching of the author, and differs in some other minor details). I sent these scans to Chris, with a note about where they came from. Chris printed them out onto the right kind of paper, and put the title page and dedication at the front, then my note and the front matter from the 1736 at the back.

Then he bound the whole in quarter leather, and, as I asked him to, made it look like the bindings typical of the mid 18th century.

This glorious, restored, rebound book arrived on Monday last week. My goodness, that Mr Hicks knows his craft.

Here are some images from the book.

The cover; quarter leather with marbled paper.

The last page of the 1740, showing some of Chris' repair work.

The facing page is my explanatory text, detailing where I got the book and the missing pages. Classic stuff!

The spine, showing the black labels with gold lettering.

And you can download the complete book, which I scanned in last year for Phil Crawley (who was doing a translation, which you can get here), with this handy button from my webshop:

 


 

This project is right on every level. We (Oliver, Chris, my sister and I) have saved a valuable part of our shared martial heritage; we have supported a master craftsman in the practice of his work; we have brought a book back to glorious life.

 

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Audacious Freeplay Training

A good swordsman must be able to handle a range of different opponents, and so must train to face lots of different styles of attack and defence. This is quite difficult to accomplish within a relatively small group of training partners, which is one of the reasons that it’s a good idea to travel a lot to fence new people, and one of the reasons why I encourage my students to attend tournaments even though they are not our focus of study. But travel is time consuming and expensive, so it helps to have ways to shake things up a bit at home. We addressed this problem in last Monday’s class, so I thought I’d write up my class notes for you here.

We started as always with a quick chat about goals; what were the students currently working on? The answers ranged from the moral:

  • Win or lose, do it gracefully

To the general:

  • Closing the line to avoid double hits
  • Be more committed when attacking
  • Maintaining flow and stability under pressure

To the really specific:

  • Generate roverso attacks from my opponent onto my prepared parry-riposte.

They decided to start the class as normal, with breathing training and Syllabus form, and then kitted up for freeplay.

I had them start with our favourite set-up: hold the field. In this set-up, one person holds the field and is attacked in turn by each other member of the class. When they have faced everybody, the next fencer takes their place, and they join the queue to attack. I left them completely free to attack and defend as they pleased. (You can read more about freeplay set-ups in the third instalment of The Swordsman's Quick Guide.)

I then pulled out a deck of Audatia cards (the Galeazzo deck, if you’re interested), and separated out the posta (guard) cards. I used these as a randomiser; the defender had to wait in whatever guard I pulled from the deck. Oh, and of course I took out their usual favourites. This forced the defender to act from a less familiar position, and also the attacker got some variety.

After a round of that, I let the defender choose freely, and took the strike cards (with all the mandritti fendenti cards removed, because why not?) and the attackers had to attack with whatever card I drew for them. This generated even more variety than the guard restriction, and forced the attackers to be much more imaginative.

On the third round I added in the stretto plays cards, and each person (attackers and defender) drew a card; whatever they got, they were supposed to generate the conditions in which they could strike using that action. Mandritto mezano, not so difficult to engineer. Soprana tor di spada? Much more so. Incidentally, as they were all wearing gauntlets, I drew for them, and reshuffled between each draw.

This round was very interesting, and made certain gaps in our training curriculum quite clear. Also, in this round, the fencers could come and choose a new random card at any time.

This was perhaps the most difficult round for them, so we broke up into pairs once everyone had held the field, and they worked on how to generate the necessary conditions for whatever action they were trying to accomplish in freeplay.

Then the last five minutes was spent in freeplay, with the fencers either just letting off some steam, or carefully trying to get the action they had been working on, to work.

This sort of training is really useful (they all agreed, in the after-action review), because not only does it force the individual fencer to change their game a bit and try something different, but it also creates much more variety in opponents, without having to find new people.

Of course, to win fencing matches, you should get very good at a few favourite moves, and then learn how to make other fencers give you the necessary conditions for your move. (What Harmenberg describes as your “Area of Excellence” in Epee 2.0 (that's an affiliate link, BTW).) But it is also true that anything you don’t train against you are vulnerable to. We tend not to attack with sottani blows, because they are less powerful and harder to close the line with than fendente blows; they are less perfect actions for attacking with. But if you never train against sottani attacks, you will get hit by them every time. This may be why Vadi explicitly tells us how to defend against them, but not how to attack with them. (See chapter XV of De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, or pp. 99-102 of Veni Vadi Vici, or here on the wiki, for details.)

This sort of practical, in the salle, sword in hand application is one of the main purposes of Audatia; if it couldn’t be used to train students, I wouldn’t have gone to the effort of producing it. And oh my lord, what an effort it has been. But it was totally worthwhile, because not only does it work, but it has made a small but fierce cohort of seriously dedicated players very happy. I was inspired to use the cards this week in particular by an amazing video, so I would like to dedicate this blog post to its creators, Carlos Loscertales, João “Sig” Gregório, and Paulo Peixoto. I cannot tell you how pleased it makes me to see my game getting this kind of fan feedback.

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Violence, a Punch, and Three Broken Legs

As you may imagine, I think about violence a lot. It’s been my experience that most people in our society either embrace violence, or shy away from it, and it’s certainly the case that we are, as a culture, massively less tolerant of violence than we used to be. Physical violence, that is. The psychological violence of our culture is appalling; entire communities of perfectly decent people vilified for believing in the wrong god, or no god, or wanting to do sex differently, perhaps with the wrong sort of person, or whatever the hell else. And at the same time, despite prohibiting violence, we have boxing (aptly described in this fascinating article on martial arts and self defence here as “a brain-damage contest”), MMA, and we allow people to take part in all sorts of activities in which they might get very badly hurt. Driving cars, for instance.

In addition, we have political parties like UKIP and the “True” Finns who would send all immigrants back to whatever hell-hole they escaped from, non-violently of course (though god knows what sort of violence awaits most of them when they get there). But that’s fine (at least according to a depressingly large number of voters) because they are not advocating direct violence against these people.

So let’s take a concrete example of an act of violence.

I honestly believe that throwing a punch is not the worst thing you can do. And in some cases, it is utterly justified. I know that this is not a popular belief, but check out this video, in which Buzz Aldrin, an elderly man, is being bullied by an arrogant and entitled little shit of a conspiracy theorist, and resolves the situation by decking him.

https://youtu.be/wptn5RE2I-k

Nice punch, Colonel Aldrin, sir!

Why do I approve? Because the person who got punched was using our culture’s restrictions on violence to get away with a different kind of violence. He had no right whatsoever to make Col. Aldrin listen to his importunate demands regarding the moon landings. He had no right to Col. Aldrin’s time, attention, or response. Yet he was aggressively invading Col. Aldrin’s personal space. Col. Aldrin tried to walk away. A hotel employee asked the entitled little prick to stop. Col. Aldrin asks him “can you please get away from me”. He finally calls Col. Aldrin a coward, a liar and a thief. And got what he entirely deserved.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here; I imagine that most of my readers, and indeed most martial artists, would see this punch as justified (as indeed local law enforcement did), and have thought a lot about things like self-defence, the right to bear arms, and so on.

But for those of you who are new to thinking about violence in anything other than black and white terms, I have a thought experiment for you, to demonstrate that any recoverable injuries sustained by violence are far less problematic than our emotional response to the violence itself. I call this “three broken legs.”

You wake up in hospital in a lot of pain. You have a broken leg.

1) You went skiing/hang-gliding/mountaineering/insert fun but dangerous activity of choice. You had an accident, and your leg is broken. It happens, you knew the risks and took them.

2) You were walking down the street one day, when somebody came up to you with a baseball bat, shouted hate into your face, and broke your leg with the bat.

3) You were walking down the same street one day, and saw a truck about to run over a child. You leap into action, you save the child, but the truck breaks your leg.

One of these injuries is neutral; one is likely to require some serious counselling and may result in long-term psychological problems, and one is a badge of honour that you will draw strength from for the rest of your life. The broken leg is the same in each case.

I suggest that your emotional response to the injury is at least as important as the injury itself. Deciding whether Buzz Aldrin’s punch was right or wrong requires that you take the context of it into account (I was careful to link to the version of the video that shows the build-up); and determining the damage done necessarily entails finding out how the prick (I will not call him a victim, because he was the victimiser, neither will I mention his name) responded emotionally to the violence. Did it give him nightmares? Probably not. He probably went back to his posse wearing his aching jaw as a badge of pride. Was it the best solution to the problem? Hard to say. Maybe, maybe not. But I see no reason why anyone should have to put up with behaviour like that, and I don’t see any available exit.

I do not require that my students hold one opinion or another about this sort of subject. I just require that they engage with this sort of question: “is this act of violence justified”?

And I would point out that except for extreme cases, resulting in permanent disability or death, the psychological violence we do to each other is potentially vastly more damaging than a bloody nose.

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Wrong again! First play first master zogho largo, revisited.

While I was at the Armizare 2015 event, I had a discussion about Fiore’s first play of the first master of zogho largo with Francesco Baselice. Let me summarise our interpretations, with reference to the text.

The first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo.
The first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo.

Qui cominza zogho di spada a doy man zogho largo. Questo magistro che qui incrosado cum questo zugadore in punta de spada, dise quando io son incrosado in punta de spada subito io do volta ala mia spada e filo fiero dalaltra parte cum lo fendente zo per la testa e per gli brazzi, overo che gli metto una punta in lo volto, come vederi qui dredo depinto.

Here begins the play of the sword in two hands, wide play. This Master that is here crossed with this player in the point of the sword, says “when I am crossed at the point of the sword, immediately I make a turn of my sword and strike with a cut from the other side with a fendente, thus to the head and to the arms; or I place a thrust in his face, as you will see depicted next.

The key point for our discussion was regarding on the other side of what? I read the line “I make a turn of my sword and strike with a cut from the other side [of the player’s sword].” Which lead to the interpretation you can see on pages 170-171 of The Medieval Longsword.

But Francesco read it as ““I make a turn of my sword and strike with a cut from the other side [of my body].” So instead of striking on the other side of the opponent’s sword, he was striking to the head with a roverso fendente.

I have shot a quick video of the two versions and uploaded it here for reference. Sorry for the crap quality.

After I got back to Finland, many of my students asked what my cryptic reference on this blog to “a very interesting discussion about the first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo” was about, and I explained it up to this point. And then began to dig…

Clearly, on the evidence above, it is impossible to choose one interpretation over the other. Both follow the text, and picture (the fendente isn’t shown), and similar actions can be found elsewhere in the manuscript. The first two plays of the sword in one hand show striking on one side of the player’s sword, or the other, after a parry; the first two plays of the second master of the zogho largo describe a cut followed by a thrust, on the same side.

The text of the second play, showing the thrust, was the next place to look for more data.

In the Getty MS, it reads:

Io to posta una punta in lo volto come lo magistro che denanci dise. Anchora poria aver fatto zo chello dise zoe aver tratto de mia spada subito quando io era apresso lo incrosare dela parte dritta. De laltra parte zoe de la stancha io debeva voltare la mia spada in lo fendente per la testa e per gli brazzi, como a ditto lo mio magistro che denanzi.

I have placed a thrust in the face as the master before me says. Also I could have done what he says, so, have struck with my sword immediately when I was near the crossing from the right side. From the other side, thus from the left, I would have to turn my sword in the fendente to the head and to the arms, as my master that is before me said.

Hmmm. That is inconclusive, but it appears that the strike should be done very early; as you get close to the crossing, or immediately that the crossing is made. And he mentions that the blow is done from the left side. “Stanca” in modern Italian means “tired”, and in this period, means “left hand side”. Two pages on from here, in the play of the colpo di villano, Fiore tells us to “await the peasant’s blow in a narrow stance with the left foot forwards”, with “lo pe stancho” for “the left foot”. (You definitely do not want to put your “tired food” forwards!) So perhaps “stancha” here is more likely to refer to the body than the sword, but it’s hard to say. After all, posta di donna on the left, is posta di donna la sinestra.

So let’s go to the Morgan Ms: the text in both paragraphs is identical except for a few variant spellings. No help there then. So how about the Pisani Dossi manuscript?

The same plays in the Pisano Dossi.
The same plays in the Pisano Dossi.

Over the master, the lines are:

Per incrosar cum ti a punta de spada/ De laltra parte la punta in lo peto to fermada.

By crossing with you at the point of the sword, from the other side I’ll strike you with a thrust in the chest.

The differences are obvious, I trust. No mention of the cut, and the thrust is to the chest, not face. But it’s still “de laltra parte”, from the other side.

And the next play, the strike itself:

Per lo ferir che dise el magistro che denanci posto/ in la golla to posta la punta de la spada tosto.

With the strike that the master before me said/ I have quickly put the point in your throat.

[Note, again not face, or chest!]

And the image is basically identical to the strike shown in the Getty ms, as you can see.

So here is the critical point for this discussion; “from the other side” is not being used here to mean the other side of the player’s sword. It is quite clearly describing a thrust that remains on the same side of the sword, so it is probably being used to refer to the way you make the blow. You got into the crossing with a blow from the right, and you leave it with a blow from the left (as all Audatia players should already know).

So, Francesco old chap, you were right. I take my hat off to you sir!

Hat off to Federico :)
Hat off to Francesco 🙂

And as I said on the day, looks like I’ll have to revise that bit of The Medieval Longsword.  Given that the final draft of the book was finished in April 2012, that makes it three years before a change to the interpretation was developed. Dammit, that’s too long; I’d hope for at least one new thing a year! It makes me wonder what other bits of my interpretation are due for review. This is one of those plays that I've been happy with since about 2004.

I should also note at this point that the interpretation we were using is the correct response to the context in which we do it; but that context is not what Fiore is showing us in this play. It seems that in both plays, it's the inside line that is open, not outside for the first, inside for the second. It remains to be seen what knock-on effects this will have to the rest of my interpretation; at present it seems to be fairly self-contained, but who knows what other doors this might open…

Let me summarise the steps that lead to this correction to my interpretation.

1) I published my interpretation. This meant that Francesco, and others like him, could see what I was thinking, and therefore check it against their own ideas.

2) Francesco brought his alternative interpretation to me, and showed me that it did not contradict the source. This was made much easier by our being at the same event; there is nothing like discussing these things sword-in-hand. Thanks again to Mauro and Andrea for organising Armizare 2015!

3) That lead to me re-examining my interpretation in the light of the sources themselves; we are very lucky to have more than one copy of the manuscript.

4) I now publish the corrected interpretation, here (and will update The Medieval Longsword in due course).

Readers of this blog will have seen the same procedure in the way I was totally wrong about the identity of the titimallo flower, used in the poison dust pollax play. I shamelessly published an idea, which generates responses, which lead to the idea being abandoned, confirmed or corrected as needed. That's how the process is supposed to work, folks.

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Armizare 2015 review

It has been a very long time since I last taught swordsmanship in Italy. This little gem of an event confirmed a suspicion that I have long held, that I need to spend more time in Italy, and cross swords with more Italians.

First up, the location, the Castello Savelli in Palombara Sabina, not too far from Rome. Oh my lord, what a lovely spot. A little castle at the top of a hill, with a view over the valley to the castle on the next hill, with the Italian countryside rolling in all directions. All the classes took place on the lawn outside, with this backdrop:

The most beautiful classroom in the world?
The most beautiful classroom in the world?

I’ll discuss the event in the order it occurred; my class was first. For the first time ever I taught in Italian; thanks to two months of one-to-one classes with Stefano, this was achievable, though far from easy. I have now taught a Fiore class in four languages; English, Finnish, Spanish and Italian; English is easiest, but there is a wonderful feeling to teach Fiore's art in his own language. My class covered my interpretation of Fiore’s Zogho Stretto; what it means, how you get there, and why. It seemed to be quite well received, and I very much enjoyed the enthusiastic participation of the students, and their help when I couldn’t find the right word in Italian!

After lunch, Lois Forster took the field. He began with a superb lecture on Burgundian duelling customs of the 15th century, focussing on Jacques Lalaing. This was perhaps the educational high-spot of the event for me; he has done some stellar research on what exactly these duels were like. Then he donned his armour, and taught a short pollax seminar, which he topped by fighting three opponents back-to-back, for his Emprise d’Arms (he wants 30 fights in his 30th year). I had the profound honour of marshalling the fights, and it was a delight to see such a faithful recreation of the tone and intent of the historical context. No winners were declared, simply honour was satisfied. I would just add that I hope to fight Lois in armour this year, and expect to end up lying on the ground with a headache. You can see him in action here:

Dinner followed, in a charming little place in the middle of nowhere; something of a logistical challenge! But an authentic Italian experience 🙂

Sunday’s classes began with a Fiore spear class from Nicola Gasparet, of Regia Turris, a group from Fiore’s home country, Cividale. Nicola’s group tends to focus on the tournament version of longsword, but this class was all about Fiore’s treatise, and Nicola and I seem to agree on a lot! It was enhanced by excellent graphics from the lovely Angelica Santarossa.

This was followed by a class by Mauro Carapacchi of Mos Ferri, one of the organisers of the event (and the man who invited me: thanks again, Mauro!), on the dagger techniques of the Gladiatoria Fechtbuch. He was ably assisted by Nicola Curini, and the class was very interesting; joint locks work very well in armour. I especially liked seeing Mauro teach his armoured dagger class in armour.

During the lunch break, I had a very interesting discussion about the first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo, with Francesco Baselice; if he’s right, I may be rewriting that bit of The Medieval Longsword… And then I had the pleasure of introducing Mauro to the fundamentals of takedowns, with a spot of grounding and joint locks. Lots of fun for all of us!

After lunch, Raniero Mariotti, of Ars Monomachia, taught a clear and well structured seminar on medieval German wrestling. My handwriting is awful, so I’m not sure from my notes which source it came from.

Actually, one of my favourite moments of the event happened during the clear-up. I had helped Mauro and Nicola with some of their gear, and going back for the next load, I thought for no particular reason that it would be fun to run back up the steep and winding streets to the castle; Nicola agreed it was an excellent plan, and so up we went. It was a lovely moment of training.

Dinner that evening was simply superb; I vote that we let Marco choose the restaurant at all future gatherings! A feast of local delicacies, including some dishes that I am very glad I have tried but might not order again 😉 served in a simply charming atmosphere.

I was not intending to pick up a sword while here in Italy, before my seminar in Seattle next weekend, but I am very glad that I did. This event was a lovely combination of delightful people (who were very patient with my clunky Italian skills), all passionate about the same arts as I am, in a stunning location, the sort of place that you can imagine Fiore himself giving a lesson. A big thank you to all the organisers (especially Andrea Conti, who I see hasn't been mentioned yet but without whom nothing would have happened), all my students, and my fellow instructors. Grazie mille!

[and a note to everyone I mention here: if you'd like me to link to your group page or personal website, please send me the url and I will embed it.]

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Get a Second Opinion!

Warning: major sword geekery alert. What follows is exactly the kind of nit-picking pedantry that in the end makes this the right job for me; because this is the only area in the world where I care this much about such apparently trivial or minor details. And what to you may seem a minor change is, to me, a huge and fundamental shift in my thinking.

What am I babbling about? The position of my tailbone when holding a rapier.

Those of you that have trained with me know that I am anal about my tailbone. Which makes sense, when you think about it. But what I mean is that the tailbone is the keystone of the arch of which your hands form one end, and your feet the other. It is where things often go wrong when grounding. What am I talking about? this video may help:

About four years ago, my friend and colleague Puck Curtis and I were discussing Spanish and Italian rapier systems, when he used a term I immediately adopted and put in capital letters: Primary Axis of Defence. This is just the default way any system of swordsmanship tends to organise its parries. In Angelo’s smallsword system (for which see his School of Fencing, 1787), it is abundantly clear that the Primary Axis of Defence is left-right, the shift between tierce and carte, or carte over the arm and carte.

In Fiore’s Art of Arms, it is very clearly the fendente-sottano line; attacks are almost always beaten up or down. (I won’t justify this here, but suffice to say that if you disagree with that statement, you and I are so far apart in our interpretations that discussing them is probably a waste of time.) Puck said back then that the Spanish rapier sources he studies suggest something similar; the Primary Axis of Defence is up-down, along about the same diagonal lines as Fiore is using.

In 2005 I’d have said the same about Capoferro’s rapier system. But somewhere along the line since then, I slipped away into thinking of Capoferro’s Primary Axis of Defence as being like Angelo’s; left-right, between seconda and quarta. I don’t know how that happened, because in the text it’s pretty clear that this is not really the case. There is abundant evidence to suggest otherwise, not least the final chapter (A secure way to defend yourself against all sorts of blows). But this lead me into conceiving of the stringering as primarily left-right, not up-down.

One of the secrets of my success, if not the secret, is that I hire in lots of external instructors, whom I may agree with or not, but who always show me other ways of thinking about the things that I am doing. In this year alone (2014), we have had Jörg Bellinghausen teaching the messer; Devon Boorman teaching rapier; Roberto Laura teaching Italian knife; and we have Jessica Finley coming here in a couple of weeks to teach German medieval wrestling.

I cannot overstate how important this is; bringing in new ideas, new ways of doing things, and insights into other systems, are utterly critical to the development of my understanding of my Art.

And Devon’s rapier seminar is an excellent case in point. While we will probably always disagree about exactly how the turn of the back foot specified on plate 5 should be done (he rolls, I pivot on the ball),

Plate 5: the lunge!

his seminar emphasised a vertical Primary Axis of Defence (though I don't recall him using that term), so the stringering is about getting on top of your opponent’s sword, not keeping it off to one side. He also reminded us of the body-lean that I bang on about in The Duellist’s Companion but had let slide gently out of practice in the intervening 8 years. We are doing it a lot more now!

These are related, in that the body lean, and the vertically oriented Primary Axis of Defence lead us to a different orientation of the tailbone. Simply put, against vertical resistance (such as gravity acting on a barbell), your tailbone should be in neutral. Against horizontal resistance, such as someone pushing on your chest from in front, your tailbone should be tucked. Devon’s mechanics, and this is so important, allow us to retain a neutral tailbone position throughout. Which is better, easier, less fatiguing, and looks more like the pictures. Damn. That was money well spent!

This has had a knock-on effect; I am now looking at Fiore’s posta longa of the abrazare in a new light; he seems turned, and to lean, and in other words able to absorb incoming pressure with a neutral spine. Damn again.

Posta Longa

By finding ways to treat horizontal pressure as coming in from the side, not the front, you can get away with an awful lot of neutral spine positions, that otherwise you’d need to tuck for.

In case it’s not clear; when it comes to the study of my Art, I live for this shit. Apparently tiny tweaks that have major, major ramifications. So major that it’s taken me four months to absorb and digest them. So here you are. The take-home lessons are:

1) get as many second opinions as you can afford. I hire on average 4 external instructors per year, and have done since I opened the school.

2) always go back to the book. Check everything, because drift is inevitable.

3) The fundamentals (mechanics, timing, measure) do not change; they are like the laws of physics. But how they are expressed by any art may change hugely (planes and submarines are both governed by the same laws, but behave very differently).

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Begin Again: on being a beginner

As I slowly progress towards mastery in my chosen Art, I get further and further ahead of my beginners. This could lead to me getting out of touch with their needs. I also get accustomed to a certain routine, a set way of doing things. Both of these things are death to a good teacher. So I have made it a deliberate habit to be a beginner at something, all the time. From early 2001 to the end of 2003, I was a private student of an instructor in a very traditional kung-fu style; the same chap that fixed my wrists. The sort of school where to learn the inner secrets of the Art you have to be legally adopted by the grandmaster. Old School indeed. So much so that I will not identify the school here, because its internal politics are so damn Confucian that it may cause all sorts of trouble if I do. The training was not just profoundly uncomfortable, it was also hellishly painful, as this school included serious hardening training in its core curriculum. I would not normally touch hardening with a stick, as it is often a short-term unhealthy strategy, but in this case it went hand-in-hand with serious maintenance; specifically massage, breathing, and herbal medicine. So I ended up much healthier than I started, but also, and this is the point: from 7am to 9am three mornings a week, I was an absolute beginner. Which meant that when I was standing up in front of my class that evening, I had some sympathy for, and insight into, what my students were experiencing.

As I started to get emotionally comfortable with the kung fu, and so it lost some of its beginneriness (if you’ll allow me to coin a term), I took up something I’d wanted to learn since I was a little kid: bullwhip cracking. I loved loved loved Indiana Jones, and could think of no more apposite multi-purpose tool than a bullwhip. You can fend off baddies and swing across ravines with these things. Really, why doesn’t everyone carry one?

Indiana Jones

I met a professional performer at Hämeenlinna medieval market in 2002, Ari Lauanne, who taught me some basics; in half an hour I striped myself from knee to shoulder, and found out why they are not so commonly carried. They are damn hard to use! So I got a beauty made by Alex Cobra of Cobra Whips, just a six-footer to start with, and practised most nights before class. I got quite good, compared to a beginner (though I’m not in the same class as Alex, or Ari), and so while I keep up my skills every now and then, I needed to find something else. The essence of beginneriness is having no frames of reference with which to make difficulties approachable. The same is basically true for everything else; once people ask me what I’m doing and I can explain it properly, I’m no longer really in the true beginner state.

Around this time I started to seriously study Finnish. Now there is a language where you can stay a beginner for a very long time. I put in two years of real effort, and got to a very basic level of competence. Then my first daughter was born, and I had to make a decision; spend my now much more restricted time putting in another thousand hours or so getting to fluency; or spend that time writing a couple of books. I chose books, and while there are negative consequences to not being comfortable in Finnish, there are about five million people who can speak Finnish, but perhaps only fifty who can write books like mine on European swordsmanship. The world needs my books more than it needs me to speak Finnish. Another side-benefit of course is that I can step outside my comfort zone (I literally break into a cold sweat) by simply engaging a neighbour in basic conversation.

Being a parent is also a state of being a constant beginner. Just as you get competent at taking care of a baby, you’re suddenly running around after a toddler. They develop faster than you do. Excellent, long-term beginneriness. But like everything you do day-in, day-out, it gets easier.

In 2012 I was given a flying lesson in a light aircraft, by a friend of mine. Oh. My. God. It was terrifying, exhilarating, very, very challenging (like learning to drive a car in three dimensions instead of two, then multiplied by about a million), and I was literally giddy with it for days afterwards. But it will cost about 6,000 euros to get my license, so that will have to wait until one of my books goes all 50 Shades on me and I am rolling in cash. (No, I will NOT be adding tepid BDSM scenes to my next book. Nor torrid ones neither.) So in 2013 I took up the yo-yo. Yes, really. Very cheap, and really, really hard. There are some excellent tutorial videos online (go to André Boulay’s site yoyoexpert.com; there he has arranged a complete curriculum from beginner to master level, and explains every trick in detail. Check it out online to get some idea of what expertise in that field actually looks like). So for a thousandth of the cost of learning to fly, I was constantly working at, and failing at, something. And it was really fun.

This is about as far as I got:

http://youtu.be/Lav_uBPGYJM

This is what good looks like:

Then Audatia came along, and what a learning curve that was. I knew nothing about game design, or producing card games, and not much about any of the nitty gritty of getting a project like that done, with several different experts all working on it at the same time. But after the first decks are out and the rest are on their way, while it remains challenging, I’m not a proper beginner any more.

Of course, from the inside, I am a beginner whenever I pick up a sword. My errors of form and technique are as obvious to me as those of the clumsiest beginner. But I have a large store of experience to draw from when figuring out how to improve. The art is deeply familiar to me. Huge chunks of the relevant sources are just there in my head to read at leisure. So even though my skills are sadly lacking, from my perspective, that doesn’t give me a true insight into the beginner because the problems are well known to me, not confusingly new. I know exactly how to fix them, I just have to get on and do it.

Right now I am looking for the next activity to be a beginner in. It needs to be a) ethical b) affordable c) have a physical component other than using a computer d) clearly defined basics (success/failure states. Is the yoyo tangled? fail. Did the whip crack? success. Is the plane still in one piece? success. Is the whip wrapped round my own face? fail. And so on) and e) not require formal classes unless they happen in the mornings.  I welcome your suggestions!

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Training for Fear

I am writing up the Fear section of my new book, Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists. This particular section seemed like a useful snippet. About half the book is blog posts from here, so cannibalising a section of it to make a blog post seems, well, fair. Here goes.

“One of the many things that martial arts training can teach you is the ability to deal with fear: the ability to control your autonomic responses, the ability to choose all your actions from a position of confidence and strength, rather than just react out of fear and dread. [At this point I tell stories about the many times I have been variously anxious, frightened, terrified, and gibbering in panic, in hospitals, schools, fencing arenas and the mean streets of Sydney (yes, the Spider story) and Edinburgh.]

In addition to fear management strategies, it is also useful to actively practise handling fear. For this you will need one irrational fear inducing activity, ideally one that requires little cash or preparation, and a commitment to daily practice. One easy option is cold showers; not ideal, because most people are not actively afraid of cold water, they just don’t like it. But having the nerve to turn the tap all the way to cold and let it hit you, is a good start.

I personally have a wildly irrational fear of hanging off things. Especially upside down. I’m ok hanging off a pull-up bar by my hands, but jumping up to catch hold of it in the first place gives me a heart attack. In the back of my mind I am completely certain that if I miss my catch, the contact of my fingers on the bar will flip me upside-down, and I’ll fall on my head. Yes, really.

But I know that it isn’t so; the forces at work just cannot make that happen. My rational mind overrules my irrational body, in this case. So every day, I jump and catch the bar. And every day, I nearly die of fright. But it is much easier to handle now than it was a year ago. I can feel the dread building as I approach the bar, and steel myself to jump and catch. It’s horrible. But useful. And good practice.

Hanging upside down by my knees is another one. For the longest time, I could not do it. In my heart of hearts, I knew that if I let go with my hands, my legs would straighten, and I would fall. As if my legs were not under my control at all. And as if the teeny little muscles in my grip were somehow able to generate more force than the ginormous (in comparison to my forearms at least) muscles in my thighs.

My cousin is a professional aerialist (she organised the Mary Poppins’s at the London Olympics opening ceremony), and way back in 2005 she was performing in Berlin, doing scary-as-hell rope tricks. You can see her in action here:

http://youtu.be/http://youtu.be/e_SSEXF4kFM

I flew over to see her and while I was there she invited me along to their training hall, to have a go on ropes and trapezes. It was fantastic good fun. While she was teaching me to get onto a trapeze, I managed to get my legs over the bar, but I could not let go with my hands and hang down. No way. Instant fall onto head. So she shinned up the rope next to me, laid her arm on my shins and said “don’t worry, I won’t let you fall”. (The physics do not work, of course. She was about half my weight, and hanging off a rope. But irrational fears do not require rational solutions.) And so I let go, and after a moment, she could take her arm away, and there I was, hanging by my knees upside down for the first time ever.

Unfortunately, trapezes are quite tricky to find round here, so I didn’t do it again, until this summer. We have a climbing frame in our yard, and my eldest daughter and I were playing on it, and I did Katherine’s trick of holding her shins (though in this case the reassurance was backed up by physics!) and in short order, my 7-year old turned into a monkey, as regards hanging off stuff at least. So I decided to join her, and had my wife hold my shins, and I let go with my hands. After a few reps of that, I could do it without her. And now it’s easy. Scary, but easy. I still know in my bones that I’m about to fall, but I still do it. When that stops being scary enough, I’ll have to find something else to be frightened of. Because the benefits of daily overcoming terror are way too great.

photo credit: Sarah Frechette of Pikku Arkki.
photo credit: Sarah Frechette of Pikku Arkki.

So, give it a go. What are you afraid of?

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A sound investment. Really.

Thanks to the success of my recent crowdfunding campaign, where I actually got paid for writing one of my books (yes, it is unusual), I had some spare cash. I could have done something sensible, like drop it into the bottomless pit that is my mortgage, but inspired by my recent trip to Verona, I decided to invest it in a 16th or 17th century Italian swordsmanship manual. There was a copy of Achille Marozzo's Arte dell'Armi on sale at Eric Chaim Kline booksellers in Los Angeles, and thanks to the weak dollar, it was actually pretty cheap. For certain values of cheap. More than my car, less than my armour. (Which tells you something else about my priorities in life!)

One of the rationalisations that helped me to buy this book was the thought that my and my colleagues' work on historical swordsmanship actually increases the value of these books; for the same reason that famous paintings are worth more than unknown ones. So I can actually affect the value of this “investment”.

You can believe that if you like: I am certainly trying to.

Anyway, in the grand tradition of the internet, here is the now-obligatory unboxing video. Gosh, I wasn't excited at all!

http://youtu.be/PlF7JO7Bkmo

 

 

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Guy Windsor: a website all about the Renaissance Italian martial arts expert who blends historical accuracy with practical training.