But as soon as the antagonistic element is added to the equation, an additional challenge is extended to the prospective fighter. At the core of the fighter's decision to join in antagonistic combat is the conscious willingness to take risks...

Taking risks is the privilege of the free spirit. In Beowulf, this attitude is called collen-ferth, bold in spirit. The Old English example implies that this is not so much a measure of guts but one of intellect: It requires the capability to assess a situation from all angles, to calculate different outcomes based on independet interpretation and evaluation of past experience, present situation, and reasonable expectation of future results-and to put both into a perspective that is immediately relevant to the present.

Its influence on the mind is latent, and many of those who faced off against another man for a Mensur never become fully aware of its effects. Only years of reflection, rumination, and re-evaluation of those few minutes you actually spent fighting an opponent with your wit, your conditioning, and a yard-long piece of sharp steel in your hand, can make you ralize the complex shift in your personality that is triggered the moment your second measures the distance between you and your opponent by jamming his blade in between you and your opponent.

Nick Evangelista probably expressed this core experience best in the closing words of his Art and Science of Fencing:

"To put yourself on the line, to go beuyond simple knee-yerk reactions of the everyday hum-drum, to rise to the occasion, to dredge up the best you have to offer and to look back on what you've done and say, ëI did that.' Fencing is one path to this end."³

There is something disturbing about facing the possibility of being permanently scarred or mutilated by a hideously sharp-looking blade. Feeling the fencing goggles tightened around your skull, you enter a twilight zone -- and you are uncertain how you will be emerging from it: A smooth-skinned, clean-shaven young man with all his boyish good looks intact. Or some patched-up, sewn-up Frankenstein with sutures across your mug.

(Oddly enough, once you've been hit, you don't really care any more. The scar becomes part of you, as much as the nose in your face. It is a mark of you breaking all dictates of what society passes as common sense, to see your place in the world as an individual, a solitary animal rather than part of a nodding herd.)

In his The Art and Science of Fencing, Nick Evangelista observes:

"I believe it is based on something real-universal principles dealing with the way human beings think and move. By mastering the application of these concepts, through long, hard study and practice, a fencing student is led logically to personal control -- first over himself, and then over his opponents."⁴

The Mensur adds a third dimension -- the realization that, if push comes to shove in un-friendly confrontation, skill and mastery in a human art may be no match for dumb luck... and perseverance. Or, as William H. McRaven put it in his exceptional study Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare, Theory and Practice:

After all, the Mensur is not a test of military mettle but a fundamentally civilian touchstone of the individual.

At the base of this experience is what Otto Julius Bierbaum called the "Principle of Overcoming Bodily Fear". This process of individual conquest demands the reduction of the individual to its core, undisguised by social status, rank, or pretense

Bodily Fear is not necessarily directed against the opponent. Because the Mensur is not the result of pre-existing quarrels, but matched fight between near-equal opponents who may not even know each other. The outlandish protective attire worn during the bout also obscures facial features. Add the limited visibility through the fencing goggles, and the opponent for stretches of the bout actually fades into oblivion, leaving you pretty much alone with your fears and objectives to somehow get through the whole affair as quickly as possible...

By readily accepting the reality and consequences of one's actions as a free man, one has a shot at liberating oneself of many of the misconceptions one has entertained about accepted and unquestioned notions of civilization and human nature.