OF CUPS, HAMMERS, AND UNSEEN PACHYDERMS

The value of a person’s insight is inevitably limited by his or her level of real-world experience. On a few occasions, spectators at my public demonstrations of Acero Sevillano, or Andalusian edged weapons arts, have smugly remarked that our techniques resembled Filipino knife-fighting. The implication has been that what we are demonstrating are Filipino knife arts. Hmmm!

Obvious novices to the martial arts, perhaps these undiscriminating spectators have yet to embrace Bruce Lee’s maxim that, “The value of a cup is in its emptiness.”

Nor do they seem to be familiar with his parable of how five different martial artists once observed the same street fight and later described it with completely discrepant perspectives. To paraphrase Lee’s teaching anecdote, the boxer witnessing the fight mostly noted the punches he saw used. The karate-ka noticed the kicks that were used. The wrestler described the fight in terms of the grappling techniques he observed being applied, and so on. The point that Lee, a pioneer in the martial arts, was making is that most people see only what they gets filtered through their personal frame of reference.

This, of course, is much more than just a convenient teaching parable, however. It actually underscores a phenomenon that has been researched and documented by sociologists for decades: that is, we cannot accurately see or interpret things that exist outside of our frame of reference. To make sense of such unfamiliar things, we re-frame them as something that we are familiar with, even if means calling apples "oranges" (because we have never seen an apple.)

The phenomenon is so well-known that many ways have been developed to address and correct it. For example, there is the classic tale of the six blind men attempting to describe an elephant. While there exist myriad versions of this story, the essence of it goes as follows:

A king once gathered six blind men together and asked them to examine and describe an elephant. When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went to each one and asked: 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is it?"

The blind man who felt the animal’s torso described the elephant as a wall;
The blind man who felt the ear described the elephant as a fan;
The blind man who felt the tusk described the elephant as a plow;
The blind man who felt the trunk described the elephant as a water spout;
The blind man who felt the leg described the elephant as a pillar;
The blind man who felt the tip of the tail described the elephant as a brush.

The sightless men could not agree with one another and eventually came to blows over the question of what an elephant is really like. This delighed the king.

The story compares the six blind men to scholars and preachers who are blind and ignorant and hold to their own views: “Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus.”

The Buddha then speaks the following verse:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
In quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing

There is also the old saw, To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. How true; some opinionated spectators seem to be as intellectually dense as hammers. Clearly, those spectators at my demonstration were only familiar with the fighting arts of Eskrima and Kali and therefore blind to the fine points of other, non-Filipino, knife arts. They are victims of what one friend describes as “perceptual naiveté resulting from an absence of a referential basis.”

Although I have been active in the martial arts since 1967 I, too, am nonetheless susceptible to this phenomenon when viewing activities outside of my own frame of reference. When I visit another martial arts pioneer, Maestro Ramon Martinez, my students initially view the fencing taking place on the piste and see it only as “sword-fighting.” Yet, Maestro Martinez will later sit with us and identify that this “sword-fighting” is Spanish saber, and describe the many subtleties and nuances that distinguish it from Italian rapier or French small-sword.

Today, I believe I can appreciate and articulate the differences between Spanish, Italian, and French fencing. Still, I have yet to learn the distinctions between these styles in the different time periods during which they evolved. I don’t know these yet, but I am confident in the fact that I at least will not confuse them – as some of my spectators have – with Filipino knife-fighting.

SHARP KNIVES VS.DULL MINDS

Mention the carrying of a knife, and people snicker as if it's only Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne who have the wherewithal to use a knife for personal protection. Mention that there are non-fictional individuals who carry knives on a regular basis, and the same people will look to make some "witty" and disparaging remark on the matter, e.g. "What neighborhood do they live in?"

If you mistake these folks for open-minded people and mention that you sometimes prefer to go armed, you won't hear any commentary at all ... but they'll suddenly recall that they have somwhere else to be, e.g. "Excuse me but my teenage daughter is being fitted for a diaphragm today. Gotta be there to make sure it stays in place."

Where does this pathological blade phobia come from? There was a blade present at your birth. There was a blade present at your circumcision. There was a blade present at your first -- and subsequent -- haircuts. You use a blade to eat, shave, cut paper, and groom your nails. A doctor will use a blade in the most basic types of surgery, and the embalmer will ... well, you get the idea. Why then, does society seek to be so disconnected from something that is so fundamentally inextricable from our lives? Possibly because in this, as in many other areas, it is a disconnected society. Ironically, it is a society that is cut off from reality.

Some day, when it's much too late, these people will realize -- as many among them already do -- that it's better to have a knife and not need it than to ...

Keep your friends sharp, and stay away from the dull-witted.

HAVE NAVAJA, WILL TRAVEL

One of the obvious perks of being a World-Class knife-fighter is that you get paid to travel the globe, associate with other internationally-known individuals, train them and, if you are so moved (and why wouldn’t you be), learn from them as well. Apart from defensive tactics instructors in other lands who seek advanced training, there are innumerable members of the professional military, diplomatic corps, intelligence community, and “corporate expediters” who recognize that physical prowess is always limited and that firearms are unreliable within 21 feet.

Yet another perk of being an edged weapons training professional is that you do not have to put up with gawky tourists, snobby locals, or even embarrassing American liberals who travel unkempt, dress in Birkenstock sandals, Acorn T-shirts, and otherwise give us cosmopolitan New Yorkers a bad name. (Then again, for us that’s not so much a perk as it is a necessity.) Never underestimate the versatile and lasting value of our sharp and pointy companions.

Visiting the Mediterranean countries is especially gratifying because, while they now have very repressive knife laws in place, as a culture they nonetheless foster a knowing appreciation for the edged weapon. This is not only true in Spain, but throughout Portugal, Italy, France, Turkey, and Greece.

(Northern countries such as Britain and Germany tend to be significantly more – what’s the technical term – tight-assed when it comes to anything that might cut them (eek, eek), but this is slowly changing as martial artists continue to discover the importance of including edged weapons in their self-defense curricula. For the record, I’m not casting stones across the Pond; Americans too are quite pussified, that is, terrified, when one begins discussing the relative merits of edged and impact weapons – unless, of course, they’re being wielded by Matt Damon.)

In part, it was this innate Mediterranean appreciation for historical cut-and-thrust-arms that led Maestro Ramon Martinez, Maestro Jeannette Acosta-Martinez, and me to begin leading intensive workshops in Europe in 2006. For one week in June of that year we traveled to the Loire Valley, in the company of 25 other fencers, and held daily training from dawn till noon. Foil, epee, saber, smallsword, and navaja were covered in exhaustive detail.

The 2008 workshop took place in Sicily where, appropriately, the long dueling stiletto was added to the curriculum.

And so, we will now be traveling to Arcos de la Frontera, one of the beautiful Pueblos Blancos on the Andalusian coast, bringing back to them the gentlemanly arts of Spanish steel that originated here centuries ago but which – like too many other venerable and once-indispensable pursuits – have been largely abandoned by the sedentary video-driven generations.

Tune back in; there's more to come…