Fencing Bear at Prayer

[Brother Luke to the 10-year-old Robin, whose legs have been paralyzed by illness and whom the friar has come to take to the convent of St. Mark's so that he will have a place to live while his parents are away]: "...Dost remember the long wall that is about the garden of thy father's house?" "Yes," said Robin, "of course. Why?" "Dost remember, too, the wall about the Tower or any other wall?" Robin nodded. "Have they not all a door somewhere?" "Yes," said Robin again. "Always remember that," said the friar. "Thou hast only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it." "I will remember," Robin promised, but he wasn't sure that he knew what Brother Luke meant to say. --Marguerite de Angeli, The Door in the Wall (New York: Doubleday, 1949), p. 16. [NB: I first read this book when I was in fourth or fifth grade. It, more than anything else, is probably the reason th...

My lesson at fencing last night was probably one I should--or "should"--have learned earlier, but there you go, we learn them when we can. My friend Ed (also a coach at Northwestern) was trying to get me to back up enough to be able to parry his attacks, but all I would ever do was take two steps forward, two steps back, stop at my on guard line--and get hit. "You have to be able to move out of your comfort zone," he told me. "Back up! Don't just stand there waiting to get hit." Now, as far as I was concerned, this was not what I was doing ("waiting to get hit"). What I thought I was doing was stopping in distance to be able to take the parry and still be close enough to hit him on the riposte, but what he saw--and my clubmate Alan confirmed--was that I was stopping before he did and that there was no way for me to avoid his attack if I didn't move further back. "But, but, but," I protested. They both shook their heads: ...

Our preacher Peter gave a very interesting sermon this morning. The text from was St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 1:18-25, where Paul cites Isaiah 29:14: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." "I hate being the fool," Peter opened. "I never want to be overdressed. I try never to sound pompous. I would rather be too little than 'too much.' To accomplish that, I have adopted something that I call the ' White Man Can't Jump ' fool avoidance strategy." You remember the story, right? I'm not sure I do (it's been awhile), but from what Peter said, I recall this much. Woody Harrelson's character would come to the basketball court pretending to know nothing about basketball and to do so, he dressed the fool: "random shoes, backwards baseball hat, ratty clothes. He [as Peter put it] made a calculated decision to lower expectations." This, Peter went o...

It's addictive, using these posts as a way to warm up for my writing each morning. I feel like I should be doing my morning pages--more private, less structured--but there is something about putting words on the page that you know others will read that makes it more vital, if nevertheless rather more constrained. If these were morning pages, I might start by writing about people with whom I am frustrated or things that I wish I could change about myself, but here, on the blog page, I am doing something different. Trying to communicate with you, my blog readers. Who are you?, I sometimes wonder. It is comforting to know (thanks to my sitemeter) that you're out there, but, no, it's not necessary that I meet all of you (although I am very grateful for all of your comments!). Reading someone else's words is at the same time a very public and a very private experience, something to be shared but also something to be cherished (or grimaced over) in solitude. One of my f...

What do you write about when you want to write but don't have anything very definite to say? I did my poetry exercise for the evening, but only came up with one decent line, a dactylic pentameter ending in a spondee: Sud denly one day in spring time the cows appeared in Grant Park . After which should come something about how cool it was returning to Chicago after a year down south at the Research Triangle to find statues of cows populating all of the sidewalks downtown. But nope, nothing. It's because I'm thinking too hard, of course. Nothing puts off the Muse better than wanting her to show up. It's not unlike what happens in fencing when you're trying to force the action: the harder you try, the more you get hit. And yet, last night one of my friends had me do a drill in which I would only score if I made the touch without any blade contact. The point of the drill was to force me to stop always trying to take the blade first, but how then was I supposed ...

Sitting in church yesterday morning, I started to think about how I would explain what I believe to my friends and family who are not Christians. The obvious place to start would seem to be the creed, that is, the trinitarian description of God as the creator who became incarnate, died and rose again for the salvation of humanity and then sent His Holy Spirit upon those who believed in Him, but this is rather like describing the point of fencing as hitting one's opponent with the tip of a metal stick. It is true, but almost laughably inadequate as an account of everything that makes attempting that action meaningful and worth years, perhaps even a lifetime, of practice. Yes, from the outside, all that seems to be happening in fencing is that two people are moving backwards and forwards along a narrow strip of ground, taking turns extending their arms towards each other while holding said sticks, sometimes hitting those sticks together, at other times landing the points of the sti...

I was getting into the car in the parking lot the other day, and as I was opening the door, it swung out and (gently) bumped the car parked next to me. As it turned out, there was a couple sitting in the next-door car, and when the woman in the passenger seat felt my door hit theirs, she turned on me a face of pure hatred and rage. Who did I think I was paying so little care for her property?, her face screamed. She rolled down the window and I asked if she wanted to check for scratches (none), at which point she shook her head and dismissed me with disgust. The incident passed, but as I got into my car and drove away, I was still writhing with indignation at the implication in her face. Her anger only fueled mine as I started to tell myself stories about how "women like that" always treat me. Imagine if I had played the moment somewhat differently. I might have been more careful about the car door, but the cars were really so close together, it was almost impossible to...

I have a confession to make: I was not entirely open with you in my post last Sunday about what I experienced in church . When I started writing, what I wanted to tell you about was the great joy I experienced in singing praises to God and realizing that this in itself was the way to free myself from the anxieties about my own performance, whether on the fencing strip or, as here, at the keyboard. But as I started writing, the anxiety returned, and gradually I realized I was no longer saying what I had set out to say. I was hiding and apologizing and doing everything I possibly could to avoid saying directly, "When I was singing in the midst of our church, I felt a great weight lift from me, and I knew, even if only for a moment, that this--praising God--was the real purpose of life, for which everything else is simply a preparation, not an end in itself." Even now, my words are inadequate, perhaps inevitably so, for, after all, what we were doing was singing and the only ...

Fencing changes your brain. Okay, I don't have neurological proof for this (yet), but I do know that since I have been fencing, it is difficult not to see my everyday interactions off the strip in terms of fencing. I would be tempted to call these "lessons for daily life" if that did not seem to imply that one could somehow take these observations and "apply" them without having to fence. I see what I see because I am fencing. Friends who do not fence are often mystified by what I am talking about. For example, fencers talk about "keeping distance". Now, I am by no means sure that even yet I know what this means, at least in the sense of being able to do it, but one of the things that I think it means is the sensation one has of pushing or being pushed. One fencer is moving in a way that forces the other to respond. Visually, at least to those who do not know how to keep distance, this can simply look like one fencer moving forward while the ...