Final Thoughts on Paul Porter's "The Bellatrix System" - Circles and Squares

I instruct only the passionate. I enlighten only the fervent. If a student cannot return with the other three corners of the square after I have shown them the first one, I will not repeat the lesson.

 - Confucius, Analects, Book 7, Chapter 8

I wouldn't usually lead with Confucius, especially with a saying that I consider to be bad teaching, but I think it is important to contrast with Paul Porter's approach.  The most consistently frustrating feature of the Bellatrix book is that he goes into endless detail about, for instance, variations on a flat snap.  The truth is, they're still flat snaps, and the body mechanics required to throw the first shot are the body mechanics required to throw the twentieth.  The section on shields - on all actions conducted with a shield, from selecting shield shape, size, and strapping, to how to use a shield - is shorter than the chapter on flat snaps.

To use Confucius, above, the student needs to be shown how to throw a flat snap.  That is the corner of the square that they must be shown, because the basic mechanics aren't something that are innate to most people.  The variations, on the other hand, can be mentioned, but don't need the level of elaboration laid on them.  He mentions that he identified nineteen separate variations on a hip return; this is inherently false, because there is no way that the hip is moving in twenty different ways.  He identified twenty different ways to apply the same motion.  Elaborating on those nineteen variations doesn't teach those variations to the student, especially when the same chapter says "you only need to master a couple of these."  Instead, it buries the student under information that obscures what the student actually needs to know - how to rotate their hip to get the sword back in action as quickly as possible.

I believe that the book would be better if it were half as long.  There are chapters, like the chapters on training and slow work, that are absolute gems.  There are parts of chapters, like the how-to-teach portion of the snap chapter, that justify everything around them.  Each of those changed the way I thought about training, and they're things I'm going to be integrating in my work.  The problem is that there is a tremendous amount of dross in with the gold.  The fully elaborated chapters on variations should have been written as sections of their relevant chapter, discussing how, once the basic technique is mastered, there are an infinite series of variations, but the most important things to know are the fundamentals.  By elevating them to chapter status, they get equal importance, and by layering them in so heavily, they obscure the importance of the fundamentals.  This is, I suspect, because he wanted to show what could be done with those fundamentals, but it is not the effect to the student.  Especially since the variations often boil down to "do it again, but on the other side of the body with the other hip," that level of detail is less valuable than a truly excellent foundational book.  By including both in one book, he manages to dodge being both an excellent foundation book, and being an excellent technique book.

This brings me to another criticism, from the section on tempo.  He says that defensive skills are harder to acquire than offensive skills; why, then, are defensive skills neglected so heavily in favor of offensive skills? It is one thing to say such a thing; it is like he said it without considering him where he'd put most of his teaching effort.  This is another example of the problem of too much and not enough.  If defensive skills are the harder to acquire, and need more attention to detail, then the level of attention paid to them should probably be greater than the forty-odd pages you lavished on a specific kind of offensive skill, one of several offensive skills that receive the same level of attention.  I understand why this is so, because offensive body mechanics, improperly executed, will injure both participants, but it is nevertheless jarring, after seeing the level of attention given to offense, to see such a statement without the same level of attention lavished on the supposedly more difficult task of not getting hit.

Related to the criticism on defensive skills, there is a specific technical detail I take issue with - that a center-grip shield is a static defensive barrier that a strapped shield is not.  Especially at the three-foot by two-foot heater dimensions he mentions, that's like claiming a barn door is more mobile than a barstool.  I fight with a center-grip, my knight fights with a center-grip, and I've watched a shift in fighters trying to learn not to rely on a static shield from straps to centers; everything in my experience says that a center-grip must be more dynamic than a strapped shield of similar size, because if nothing else, the center-grip shield is more likely to be manipulated by your opponent, and learning how the shield moves is a key part of learning how to read that fight.  A strapped shield doesn't behave the same way, and has fewer features that a fighter must learn to control.  Even beyond the logical problems with it, watching modern reconstructionists and teachers like Roland Warzecha makes it clear that a center-grip round is at least as dynamic as a strapped kite.  It is ironic that, given how much Porter emphasizes "don't do a thing just because it looks cool or feels good," much of his shield advice is very clearly based on personal preference.

For all of that, as should be obvious from the number of words I've spent on it, it's a solid addition to any library, and it is a solid teaching reference.  Its best portions are not the mechanics discussions, which are needlessly repetitive to the point of obscuring their base message, but the discussions of training methodology and why certain things work, especially in teaching or learning.  Where he is teaching how to hit people with sticks, he is maddening because the book overshoots its mark; where he is teaching how to train to hit people with sticks, he is at his absolute best.