No, You Don't Know More than the Masters
Check Your Ego at the Segno
It's OK, People Have Always Had Their Heads Up Their Butts
There's been an interesting phenomenon in HEMA lately. OK, it's not lately. It goes back to the dawn of our modern discipline. Some practitioners and instructors have the idea that they know more about swordsmanship than the masters they purport to study. My first instructor (admittedly a very good sport fencer who decided to take up HEMA) would say things like "Don't read the manuals, I've read them all and will show you what you need to know", and "You have to trust your own intuition and knowledge rather than the manuals". Admittedly two contradictory statements from one person, but I'm not making this up. He also told me that in order to interpret the manuals you had to be "a special person, and I don't think you have that". At least he was right about me not being special. I'm not special, neither was he, and neither are you. The good news is you don't need to be special to do HEMA, or to work with the sources. You do need to be diligent, which is the next best thing. Or probably a better thing, now that I think about it.
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” - Epictetus
I have been so guilty of this, and I'm the first to admit it. Young men often (read: constantly) overestimate their knowledge, importance, and value. Patriarchy is a bitch. Fortunately now I'm an old man and at least have some idea of what I don't know. For the most part, HEMA practitioners are hobbyists. Almost no one does HEMA full time as their livelihood. The fact of the matter is, those who wrote the manuals like Fiore or Ringeck (or whoever) were professionals who did pursue this art as their livelihood, and were often trained from a young age. They also lived a more physically demanding lifestyle in their day to day existence than we do. There is simply no way a modern desk-jockey who started HEMA as a hobby at the age of 30, who has no real life experience of non-consensual violence, and maybe no prior martial arts training is going to come close to the level of knowledge attained by those that wrote the sources. If that were the case, people could start gymnastics at 30 and become Olympians. Go try that and tell me how it works out.
From my own experience, my background is in music. I have an honours degree in Jazz Performance, and worked in the industry as a professional musician for a decade touring, recording, and doing TV work. A person with literal gold records on his wall described my playing ability back then as "world class". That being said, I could not manage what the greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Jaco Pastorius and the like could do. I never got to their level, even having been trained as a professional, with a decade of full-time experience. So if a "world class" musician couldn't reach the level of the greats in a decade, maybe us HEMA folks can't equal Liechtenauer's level while training part time for a decade. Food for thought.
Preforming the Techniques Really Well is Just the Beginning
In classical Japanese martial arts, there are two terms used that I'd like to discuss: "kata" and "waza". Kata in the sense I'm talking about means "shape". As in the "kata" of a basketball is round. "Waza" means technique, and in this sense technique done correctly. It is entirely possible to perform a movement with correct kata but not waza. Say for example I do a simple diagonal cut with a passing step forward. I swing the sword forwards and down as I step, with cut and step landing together. To the casual observer, it might look perfect. It has the correct "kata". However, if the hips are not engaged, the fingers are not articulating properly, etc., it's nonsense. It's just empty movement with no meaning. It is not waza. We see this a lot in tournament fighting, where the goal is more to make a noise on an opponent's gear that the judges will notice rather than cut with power and core engagement to a target. That's a good thing for safety (don't hurt your friends!), but it results in cuts that are more kata than waza, if you catch my meaning. Since we don't have Lichtenauer or his lineage holders with us anymore, chances are we have a lot more kata than waza going on in our training. It won't always be that way, but let's be patient and do the work diligently, always questioning our own assumptions.
Your Knowledge Isn't as Deep as You Think it Is.
In the HEMA world, I'm part of the "Old Guard", as I started training in 2004. In the world of Koryu (classical) Japanese swordsmanship (which I've trained since 2008), I'm still a baby. The level of understanding that the older practitioners of these arts have is incredibly deep. My sensei is very well known in Koryu circles has enough black belt certificates to literally wallpaper a wall. I've seen them. I'm willing to bet most people reading this don't. I doubt he'd claim to have the level of skill that Musashi (the founder of the school we train in) did, and he's in his 70's. If that's the case, who are you or I to claim we have deeper knowledge than Fiore? Compared to the pool of knowledge in the world of classical martial arts, most established HEMA luminaries are mere neophytes in comparison. This is to be expected, as a good many HEMA practitioners have little experience of martial arts outside their discipline, and few have been training HEMA for 30 years or more.
I'm not saying we can't get there. The level of knowledge in our discipline is miles ahead of where we were 15 years ago, but the hubris seems to have not been dealt with. Sorry to break it to you, but none of us are Dan Inosanto or Imai Masayuki Nobukatsu. To be fair, those are extreme examples, but it's important to know where we stand in the greater context. None of us are there yet. If the most senior members of Hyoho Niten Ichi Ryu (Imai Soke was literally awarded with the Medal of the Blue Ribbon of Japan (Ranju Hosho) by the Emperor) still study Musashi's Book of Five Rings, who are we to think that we've absorbed all of the lessons of our own texts?
You're Not the Sword Messiah
And neither am I. None of us are. There's still much more work to do. So let's put our collective noses to the grindstone, do the work, and approach the sources with humility and an open mind. That's the only way forward.
Hard to disagree, disregarding the masters is the height of foolishness, especially given how important they have been to creating HEMA in the first place.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think it may be worthwhile considering that HEMA may be at a point now where we may know more than the masters were able to teach us.
Consider a HEMA discipline that has several very similar living lineage arts; grappling. I have made a decent if certainly incomplete reading of the texts that cover grappling and in them I see every major concept that I am familiar with as a wrestler. But, the difference between a well written description of a technique (say a double leg takedown) and a wrestler who can land that move on any opponent at will is a massive amount of embodied knowledge. A kind of knowledge that is very hard to convey through text alone.
Hell, what HEMA practitioner wouldn't leap at the chance to travel through time and study under one of the old masters? Even someone like Meyer who is as exhaustive in his texts as almost anyone would be a thrill to learn from because we recognize that he must have had an incredible amount of embodied knowledge about the weapons he fought with. If we thought his text truly complete to every degree possible then who would want to go through all the hassle of breaking the laws of physics? But it's not, because it can't be.
I submit that there are practitioners who have studied and trained and learned enough that they have recreated some of the embodied knowledge that was almost certainly present in the old masters but wasn't able to be communicated to us down through text alone.
To write off the old masters is pure foolishness but to stop yourself from seeking their level of knowledge and experience by imagining that no wisdom in our fighting arts can be found outside the texts handed down to us is as extreme a position in my mind.
Hi Matt,
DeleteIt's Mark here, but the blog won't let me post as myself. Oh well. I'll have to say I have to "hard disagree" with the idea that we know more than the masters were able to teach us, but we may also be talking past each other here a bit as well. Bear with me here as I explain my reasoning: There's nothing wrong with "frog DNA" as we call it. It's necessary to fill in the blanks that are left by the sources. However, we need to be very conscious of our own biases when doing so, and this is where HEMA tends to have issues today. For example, I have a background in two living lineages of two-handed swordsmanship. I know "how to sword" in those contexts. I can see a lot in the manuals I recognize, or can relate to what I know. However, there is no concept of "true time" in either of my lineages. They are both "step in and cut" lineages. Also, the German manuals don't really talk about what we understand as True Time from reading Silver. That's in an inference from the Von Danzig manuscript mentioning that the foot follows the blow. It is also done in some living western living lineages such as foil which has "right of way" rules, and Hungarian sabre which does stress the blade preceding the body. If I were to approach HEMA from a purely JSA perspective, my interpretations would likely be very lacking. Likewise with our grappling backgrounds. Neither modern Judo or Wrestling are Ringen. They obviously share very significant similarities, but there are important differences to consider. Ringen often assumes a jacket is worn, which modern wrestling does not use. Judo does use a jacket, but it's not the same kind of jacket. Using your example of the double leg, there is a distinct difference between that shown in Fabian Von Auerswald and the one described in Ringeck (or is it Ott? Whatever, the one that puts the head on the abdomen of the opponent). Neither one is the same as the DLT found in MMA today. Auerswald's is essentially the same as the Judo version... or is it? Just because I "recognize" it and understand the Judo equivalent doesn't mean I know how to do it the way he did it. And that is the whole point of the reconstructive parts of the discipline: to get as close as we can to doing things the way they did it. One most both use and question our own pre-existing martial knowledge when applying it to HEMA. Tournaments are another beast. We don't fence the way they did competitively AT ALL. We have a quality of safety gear for fencing with feders they didn't, but that introduces artifacts of its own, doesn't it?
I'll stand by my skill level issue. Very few Olympians (if any) are doing HEMA. Certainly very of us can match the depth of training and understanding an Olympic wrestler or Judoka, or a high level Kendoka. We are hobbyists. As I said in the post, start gymnastics at age 30 part time and see if you make it to the Olympics. It's not gonna happen. Very few HEMA practitioners currently have a truly professional level of skill that would place them with the elite athletes of other disciplines. In addition to physical ability, there is the understanding that comes with long decades of practice. How old was Fiore when he wrote his manual? Likewise Lecküchner? Pretty old. In India, it takes 30-40 years to be considered a master musician. You can't even claim the title until then.
To quote Fiore himself: "But I will say this: if, instead of studying the Art of Armed Combat for 40 years, I had spent 40 years studying law, papal decrees, and medicine, then I would be ranked a Doctor in all three of these disciplines."
Ain't none of us doctors.