Fencing Bear at Prayer

"The elephant symbolizes the Virgin Mary. According to [Aristotle], the elephant has many commendable qualities: it is more obedient than other animals; it is strong in sense; it is easily tamed and lacking in bile, and it is the enemy of the dragon: therefore, the blessed Virgin may be compared to the elephant. "Firstly, the elephant is very obedient, because it is always obedient to its liberator. For it is said that when it is captured, it is beaten severely by the hunter, such that when someone approaches who wants to buy it, it imagines that he is the one who has set it free, and thus the elephant always loves him, and is always obedient to him. Such obedience was excellently [found] in the Blessed Virgin, who was not only obedient to her superior, that is God, when she said: 'Behold, the handmaid of the Lord' [Luke 1:38], but also to her inferior, that is Elizabeth, with whom she stayed three months, and served her as she gave birth. [The Virgin] was also ob...

A friend of mine has asked why, on my blog, at least, I take the form of a bear. The easy answer would be that someone was selling little white bears dressed as fencers at a tournament several years ago and I bought one and, in proper fencing fashion, put my name on its lame. But this is rather like saying that the reason I became a medieval historian was because I took Latin in high school. It would seem to explain something (why I have a toy fencing bear, why I am able to read the manuscripts that I have been looking at this week in the British Library), while in fact leaving everything of any real significance utterly opaque. What was I doing at the tournament in the first place? How, for that matter, did I come at age 38 to pick up a foil? What if, after we moved when I had just finished ninth grade, my new school had offered German (my original preference) rather than Latin? To what extent is the person that I have become an accident as opposed to a choice? According to the...

Although in human terms I am in what I sincerely hope to be my middle age, as a fencing bear I am only five years old. Being a bear hitherto more comfortable with a pen than a sword, one of the first things that I did as soon as I picked up a foil was to go to the martial arts section of my local Borders (plural) and look for books on how to think about fencing. Of course, I hoped, like all bookish bears, that there might be a book that would teach me the physical secrets of fencing, diagrams and all, but I was also hoping for something more meditative, on the psychological or spiritual effects of this martial sport. Imagine my dismay when I found the shelves groaning (do shelves groan?) with book after book on the "zen" of the martial arts of the East but only one, Nick Evangelista' s The Inner Game of Fencing , promising anything close to observations on how Western-style fencing affects the mind or the soul. Late night searches on the Internet found Aladar Kogler's...