Episode 205: Salute before you cross swords with Damon Young

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My guest today, Damon Young, is an Australian philosopher, author and martial artist. He has written 14 books or so, including Philosophy in the Garden, Distraction, and On Getting Off: Sex and Philosophy. He has also edited a couple of books on philosophy and martial arts, such as Engagement: Philosophy and the Martial Arts, and Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness, perhaps my favourite title.

His latest work is Immortal Gestures, Journeys in the Unspoken.

You might remember Damon from his previous appearances on this show in Episode 31, Why Swords Are Cool, and again in Episode 44, What is a Sword?

Unfortunately for Damon, he’s not doing a lot of sword swinging at the moment because of an as yet unidentified issue with his arms. We discuss how he might get this issue sorted – which may involve flying to Helsinki – and how it can be tricky to prioritise your own health over other priorities and difficult life stuff.

We also revisit the definition of a sword. What is a sword? When is a sword-like object not a sword?

Damon’s new book is about gestures, and we talk about the weird politeness of a salute or a bow that’s absolutely essential before you try and murder someone with a kilo of sharp steel. A gesture can be an important symbol of trust and respect, and this courtesy separates martial arts or duels from a more bestial act or something a commoner might do.

Our conversation goes off in several tangents, discussing whether philosophy is a scam, pens, getting rid of stuff, cataloguing your book collection, notebooks and the history of sticking two fingers up to the French.

In case you want to see the pen tray Guy made for Damon, here it is:

Transcript

Guy Windsor 

I'm here today with Damon Young, who is an Australian philosopher, author and martial artist. He has written 14 books or so, including Philosophy in the Garden, Distraction, and On Getting Off: Sex and Philosophy. He has also edited a couple of books on philosophy and martial arts, such as Engagement: Philosophy and the Martial Arts, and Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness, perhaps my favourite title. His latest work is Immortal Gestures, Journeys in the Unspoken. Of course, his main claim to fame is appearing on this show in Episode 31, Why Swords Are Cool, and again in Episode 44, What is a Sword? So without further ado, Damon, welcome back.

 

Damon Young 

Thank you for having me.

 

Guy Windsor 

So just to orient everybody, whereabouts in the world, are you?

 

Damon Young 

So I'm in Hobart, which is the capital city of Tasmania. So if you think of the big island that is Australia, I'm on the small island at the bottom of the Big Island. Notably where Errol Flynn was born. We also have some of the cleanest air in the world.

 

Guy Windsor 

Really? I was not aware that Errol Flynn was born in Tasmania.

 

Damon Young 

Yes. In fact, I used to practice broadsword on a small reserve by the beach called Errol Flynn Reserve named because he was born not far away.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, wow. Okay, so suddenly Tasmania goes up in the world’s estimation, or at least the sword world’s estimation. I've been to Melbourne several times, but I've never quite made the hop over the over the straights to Tasmania.

 

Damon Young 

Well, it's lovely. Oh yeah. I mean, it's a gorgeous place, yeah, it's small and poor and doesn't have all the services and shops and infrastructure of the big cities like Melbourne, but it is a lovely place.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. And are you still swinging swords around?

 

Damon Young 

I'm not at the moment. I mean, privately, I am in my backyard.

 

Guy Windsor 

That counts. There are a lot of people listening who will be like, yeah, I live like five hours from my nearest historical martial arts club. I swing swords around in my backyard. That 100% counts.

 

Damon Young 

I grant that, I do. It's more that I live not far away from the Hobart branch of Stoccata, which is taught by Stephen Hand, who's quite well known in the international sword community. But I have something like tendinitis, which means that it just hurts to fence. So I had time off because I had frozen shoulder and bursitis in my right arm, so I couldn't fence. But then I came back, I did the monthly tournament that we have, and did quite well. I came equal second, which I was very happy with that, because I've had quite a bit of time off. And I was like, okay, I'm not as rusty as I thought. But I was in pain for every moment of every bout, and so I just thought, I need to stop.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, one middle aged man to another. What are you doing to get your joints into a condition where you can do the things you want to do?

 

Damon Young 

It's not joints. It feels like, well, the tendons, the muscles, the something. It gets the point where I can't even hold the hilt because my hand’s shaking so much. I didn't want to turn this into the Guy and Damon medical show, but that is what's stopping me fencing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, and what are you doing about it?

 

Damon Young 

I'm resting. Yeah, I have spoken to doctors. I've spoken to physiotherapists. They gave me nothing. They just said, we don't know. Have you tried stretching?

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, okay.

 

Damon Young 

Guy’s like, cancel this interview.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yes, yes. Honestly, priorities because, because what you're describing is really common. And the thing is, okay, there's one article of faith that I think is wise to adopt in this regard. Which is if you give your body the movement and sort of positive stresses that it needs, and the necessary rest and rehabilitation and nutrition that it needs, and you're sleeping right then, this is fixable. What those specific movements, what those specific stresses, what the specific nutrition and stuff may be that is something to be figured out that can take quite a while to get right. I mean, it took me three years to find the person who could figure out what was wrong with my knee, and then, literally, my knee was fixed in like three weeks, of doing one very basic stupid exercise. Three years of, if I'm not careful, my knee goes and I can barely walk, and I certainly can't do any swordy stuff, and it would just trigger for nothing. And then I went to the right physio who gave me the right exercise, and I did that exercise the way I was supposed to do it. And literally, in three weeks, a knee problem that had been plaguing me for three years was gone. Not just less – gone. The same bloke, because I had this long-term shoulder problem, which was so long term, I kind of just work around it and don't bother about it. So the next time I saw this bloke, I mentioned my shoulder. 15 years this has been a problem. And I thought it was one thing, but it turned out to be something else. It was my that one of the bicep tendons was in the wrong place. That's all it was. And he put it back in the right place, and showed me exercises for keeping it in the right place, and what to do if it came out of the right place, and how to notice if it was in the wrong place. And 15 years of having to fuck around with my shoulder: gone. And I'm actually pretty good at this sort of stuff. I'm pretty good at the whole self-maintenance and looking after myself and figuring out why my elbow’s hurting or why my wrist is hurting, or whatever. I'm actually pretty good at all of that, but sometimes it's just one specific thing that can take this ancient, long term, nasty problem. You know, I've seen doctors and I've seen physios and I've seen kung fu instructors and in fact, my first experience of this sort of thing was my wrists were so bad when I was a cabinet maker in the 90s. So in my early 20s, my wrists were so bad that I couldn't fence because if I did, the next day, my wrists would be so swollen I couldn't do my woodwork job. I was working as a cabinet maker at the time. And the doctors couldn't help and the physios couldn't help. And Kung Fu instructor, nasty massage, two basic exercises. And, yeah, if I neglect my exercises and I neglect my massage for a few weeks, my wrists will start to cause problems again, but a bit of basic maintenance, and honestly, my wrists are so good I can do push ups on the backs of my hands, no problem. So, the article of faith is you just have to find the right combination of exercises with the right rest and rehabilitation stuff, and whatever is screwing up your shoulders and your arms can be fixed. And it could be something completely weird. It could be something like your neck is in slightly the wrong position, and when you get your neck moving properly, all of those problems just disappear. Or it could be more likely, I would guess, related to your day job of basically sitting and reading books and writing and so there are postural issues and structural issues in the shoulders which need to be fixed, and forearm exercises to basically to train your body to be able to do your job without it getting injured. I mean, it does sound a lot to me like the sort of thing that people get because they're using a mouse. So the thing is, we just have to find what those exercises are. I would start by trying my forearm exercises, which are part of the Human Maintenance free courses on my platform. They may absolutely be the wrong thing for your particular thing, but start with those and see how they feel. And even if it doesn't actually help, getting a regular massage from someone who knows what they're doing is pleasant and healthy and is unlikely to do any harm, yet it might also help enormously, because you never know. And basically just coming up with a Keep Damon Living The Way He Wants To Live, physio package, seriously between, between 20 minutes and an hour of every fucking day of my life at 51 is neck mobilization exercises, knee exercises, hip exercises, spine exercises. Not actual training, not actually doing anything fun or interesting, but just doing the necessary like oil change and spark plug decarbonizing that allows me to do the actual training. It's annoying and it's ridiculous, but the choice is, either do it and be able to do the other stuff, or don't do it and not be able to do pretty much anything other than lie on the sofa and watch TV, which there are days when I do that. Article of Faith, I just want you to make that one article of faith, and then that will start you off on looking for the things that will make these problems at least manageable, if not completely go away.

 

Damon Young 

It doesn't need to be an article of faith for me, as it's something I've done before. So when I was in my 30s, I had a disc bulge, three, four vertebrae, chiefly from doing judo. And a combination of specialists, doctors, physiotherapists and so on essentially said, look, this is fine. You can work around it, but here's how you'll need to hold yourself. Here's what you'll need to avoid. Here's what you shouldn't do in the short term. Here's what you can do in the long term. And it was a matter of slowly working towards being able to lift weights or do martial arts or run without putting too much pressure on the discs and so on. So, yeah, I don't need faith. I just need possibilities. It's a matter of finding those possibilities in a small town and then realizing them, carefully, systematically.

 

Guy Windsor 

If I were you I would fly to Helsinki and see my chap there who fixed my knee and my shoulder. It's totally worth it. I mean, I think he's not that far from Tasmania. It's only other side of the planet. But that may be out of the question, but seriously, like, actually, if you had this disc bulge between c3 and c4… I'm not a physiotherapist or an osteopath or any of those sorts of things, and I'm certainly not a doctor, but those nerves coming out from that bit of your neck.

 

Damon Young 

It’s typically the other side. Left hand.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of connection there and get, maybe getting your neck.

 

Damon Young 

Quite possibly, yeah, maybe it's just the referred pain was always the left side. That's how I knew I had the injury. But look, it's all it's often connected. So it's quite possible that the other side is too.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so you're gonna do something about it, Damon?

 

Damon Young 

It's on my list, Guy.

 

Guy Windsor 

Dude, it should be top of your list, because if you break nothing works, you can't do all the other stuff. We should sort out your philosophy of life. You're a philosopher. You should know this stuff.

 

Damon Young 

There are many things I ought to do, and I agree this is one of them. And I already have, I have spoken to physiotherapists and doctors and specialists, okay, but sometimes other things have to take priority.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's one thing where I think we just have a philosophical difference of opinion, is that, okay, the things that will take priority over me keeping myself able to move, are urgent matters dealing to do with my children or my wife. Close family members, and that's it. I will happily delay a book launch by six months, if it means I need to avoid typing for a while because of something through with my fingers. Sure that happens, but I would, because books aren't that important. Keeping yourself like fit and healthy and able to actually do the things means you can produce more books in the future.

 

Damon Young 

You don't need to convince me of that. I completely agree. Another time I can tell you about the last five or six years.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. I'm sure you have good reasons, but you know, biology doesn't give a shit. Okay, all right, lecture over.

 

Damon Young 

No, I'm delighted to have afforded you this opportunity to do a miniature 15 lecture on the importance of prioritizing physical health.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, jolly good. All right, because the last time we chatted, we ended up going off on this great long tangent after the interview was over where we chatted for like an hour about trying to define what a sword actually is. I just happened by accident to leave the recording running, and so that ended up being a second podcast episode. So do we actually know what a sword is?

 

Damon Young 

Well, I was looking over my notes, and okay, I'm going to preface this by saying it's probably not that smart to have approached defining a sword the way I did, because philosophically, I know that in use, definitions are probably more Wittgensteinian, that is there a family resemblances between things or practices or ideas, and not every member of that family has all the characteristics of each other. So, it's a way of saying, in practice, in the life world of humans, there are kind of clusters of things that loosely hang together, that are not strictly logically defined into neat categories, but they hang together because parts of one thing perhaps align with parts of another.

 

Guy Windsor 

Give us an example?

 

Damon Young 

Sure, I suppose you could say that we call skipping rope a game, and we call playing Lego a game, and we call football a game, but they're not necessarily a game in the same way. So similarly, it might be that, well, there's sort of a loose cluster of things we call swords, but they're not all swords in the same way. So that might be a much clever and more wise way of going about what I did. But what I wanted to do was give a single, all encompassing definition of the sword, essentially as thought experiment to see if I could.

 

Guy Windsor 

What was your definition?

 

Damon Young 

So my definition was, a sword is a melee weapon configured to easily allow cutting and or puncturing beyond grappling range, with a point of balance in the half nearer to the butt, to the end that you're holding. Any object that meets that definition, it doesn't matter what its length is, its material is or the purposes of the maker: it's a sword. And so, if you remember it in the conversation, the idea was, you know, you've got to rule out an axe, and you've got to rule out a spear. And I also wanted to include blunt swords because we spoke about edge geometry, the idea is, plenty of actual swords were delivered to their purchaser blunt, and they had to have them sharpened, and yet they were still swords. So my idea there is, the point is that they were amenable to being sharpened and to being used in a sword-like way, whereas something that is just a blunt may not be, and something that is a toy sword will never be. So I had to include the notion of amenability to sword-like use in the definition.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, yeah, I think my definition is a little simpler. It's a bladed weapon in which it makes sense to divide the blade into the strong and the weak. So if it's shorter than that, it's a dagger. And if it's much longer than that, it's something else, like a pole arm or a spear, because if you have a sword blade on the end of a five foot long stick, you have a grave or a naginata or something like that. But you don't use the blade in strong or weak, you don't make that division in the actual metal bit you make you'd make it further down in what is effectively the handle. So that, I think I'm still quite comfortable with. Do you have any philosophical objections to it?

 

Damon Young 

I suppose the difficulty in that, for me, is how the strong and the weak is defined in practice, and whether you could use similar terminology for talking about something like an axe, for example, or a spear. Now, in swordsmanship we wouldn't, because we know exactly what we mean by the strong and the weak, because we use that in practice.

 

Guy Windsor 

okay, yeah, but with an axe, you can't, because the blade is not divided into strong and weak. And with a spear, you can't, because the blade is not divided into strong and weak, right? It’s the blade, if you need to divide the blade into the strong bit for parrying and covering and whatnot and the weak bit for striking and poking and whatnot, then it makes then it is a bladed object that fits my definition of sword.

 

Damon Young 

And how would you define the strong and the weak there?

 

Guy Windsor 

Where leverage is a significant component of defence. So like, if you're defending yourself with a four inch bladed knife, you absolutely don't need to distinguish between parrying close to the hand and parrying to the point, because it's close enough to the hand, it makes no difference. If it's three feet long, you absolutely can't parry with the last six inches of the blade. I mean, you can strike with it and sort of parry that way. I'm basically basing this on, like Fiore in the Morgan manuscript, divides the sword into the point, the middle, and the whole sword. So there's that sort of division. Tybalt famously divides it into 12 sections, because he likes that sort of thing. Capoferro divides it into strong and weak. But the point is, once it makes sense to divide the blade up by different purposes, of which the minimum number of divisions is two; strong and weak, then it makes sense to call it a sword to me, and I can't think of an exception to that.

 

Damon Young 

My problem’s, not so much whether it's wrong or right, but how much about the character of swords it misses. The range, for example.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's inherent, because the distinction only becomes important when the blade is long enough.

 

Damon Young 

It doesn't happen with knives.

 

Guy Windsor 

And if the blade is long enough, then you can use the weapon from further away, because it's long enough to cross the distance, although, I mean a Bronze Age sword, they're tiny, because bronze isn't particularly good at metal for making swords out of. So a bronze a sword will be what, I guess maximum, about 65 centimetres, something like that, which is at the very lower end of what I'd think of as the sword. And most egregiously, the Gladius itself is, by my definition, not a sword. It's a dagger.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, I did talk about that in the chapter. And I think that's partly what prompted me to talk about, you know, I've talked about where the point of balance is. You're speaking about the weak and the strong,  two slightly different things, because it has to do with the sword geometry. I mean, I like your definition. And I think what I was trying to do was include as many features of swordiness as possible, hence talking about the capacity to puncture or cut, for example, and the range that it includes. So it's a matter of saying, if you knew absolutely nothing about swords, but you needed to know the kinds of properties that adhere to swords in practice, I've tried to include that all in a single definition. So, yours is more elegant, as it should be, but I feel like mine is packed with more relevant properties.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and yours might suit a museum curator better, and mine certainly suits a fencer better. Which is unsurprising. Okay, let's leave swords behind just for a minute, we can come back to them at any time. Obviously, this is The Sword Guy, after all.

 

Damon Young 

We have and we will.

 

Guy Windsor 

So your latest book, which you were very kind enough to send me a PDF of, and I immediately went and bought the hardcover, because it's better. Immortal Gestures. Why gestures?

 

Damon Young 

I suppose there are three reasons. The kind of broad reason is, as a philosopher, a lot of my books are about everyday activities. I want to sort of build thinking and reflection and research into just the things we do daily that are not kind of obscure or strange.

 

Guy Windsor 

Famously gardening and sex.

 

Damon Young 

Exactly. And also, reading, being distracted. And so gestures are something we do every day, often without thinking. They're actually something that are a constant complement to our speech. I'm doing them right now talking. So that seemed to be a way to ground philosophical activity in something that is very ordinary. Which leads to the second one, that's part of my job is to shed some light on what's taken for granted. And I do think that gestures are taken for granted. Then we know we often talk about just gesturing at something rather than doing the idea that a gesture is a trivial thing. I also think philosophy has a very long history of trivializing or denigrating the body. It's seen of something unreasonable or unthinkable.

 

Guy Windsor 

Or not given sufficient attention to maintain its health, for instance.

 

Damon Young 

I wouldn't know about that. I’m talking purely about the history of philosophy. That's a problem. It's a problem because the idea that the body is this sort of enemy of thought. At best, it's trivialized. At worst, it's actively vilified as something sort of oozing and nasty and bestial. So, I want to rehabilitate the body in philosophy, and I'm certainly not the first to do that. There's a lot of that in the 20th century and now, but I certainly see myself as part of that, saying no, the body is a sort of great intelligence that we need to take seriously. Also, there's a kind of vision of humanity that's still very popular, that's this highly individualist, highly ahistorical, that we're just these little billiard balls bouncing around the big green velvet table of the market. No history, no culture. We're just there to produce and consume. And I think that's a petty idea of what it is to be human. And so I want to counter that with the sense that even these brief, tiny movements that we do are connected to these much more vast cultural stories and movements. And I think the third reason’s sort of more personal and more nebulous, and that is, I think, over the past few years, I felt very small and very powerless and often quite alone, and I wanted to feel once again, connected to something more gigantic, to see myself as part of this unfolding story of History, rather than just this little fragment of being.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do you want to say something about what happened in the last few years?

 

Damon Young 

Not especially, but it's been rough.

 

Guy Windsor 

If we go somewhere you're not comfortable with, I can always cut it out later.

 

Damon Young 

Sure. No, no. My health, physically and psychologically in general, has been quite good. I've been quite lucky, but my family has not always been so lucky. And yeah, there has been a great deal of anguish and exhaustion and worry for the last, say, five or six years. And this is even putting aside the state of the world. This is merely at a familial level. It’s been quite rough.

 

Guy Windsor 

Which honestly, it's a lot more immediate. It matters more. I mean, in the broad historical scope of things, it maybe doesn't matter at all, but in the context of a human life, it is vastly more important what happens to your parents and your children and your spouse than it is what happens in some election in some other country?

 

Damon Young 

Yes. I mean, I feel at all, but of course, I feel my family more pressingly for obvious and quite reasonable reasons. And I think this book is partly a response to that. It's a sort of anchoring, a sense of seeing what I and what I think we are all partly connected to the idea that you can trace a movement back hundreds, sometimes thousands of years and watch its meanings develop and grow. It's a beautiful thing to be part of.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sure, and you know, from a martial artist's perspective and a sword fighter's perspective, there are a couple of chapters in the book that are particularly interesting. I mean, yes, actually, I'm not sure that my favourite one wasn't the one on the Vulcan greeting. Because there were all sorts of things in there I hadn't even thought that you'd include, and it went into all sorts of interesting spaces. But let's talk a little bit about the fencing salute, which is one of the gestures you go into some detail about.

 

Damon Young 

Sure. So as I said, I was practicing historical fencing with Stoccata, doing broadsword, doing rapier and sword and dagger, sword and shield and all that sort of thing, and loving it. And before each bout we would do a little movement, and as with the bow in martial arts, I was struck by this moment of high courtesy, because we are quite literally about to hit each other with, say, a kilogram of steel. It is genuine violence, albeit consenting. And I was struck by that moment of stillness and this offering of mutual respect. And I wondered, where on earth did this come from? What had to happen for an Australian guy in Tasmania to be doing this movement? And so part of that was looking at the origins of fencing, especially the duel coming out of Italy and the Renaissance, and how the duel was their remedy to a problem, and that problem was you had the aristocracy pressed on both sides, on one side by kings trying to consolidate their power. And on another side, by the bourgeoisie, whose power was gaining and already society was becoming less clan based, less feudal, more individualistic, and the duel arises as partly a solution to that problem. So if someone offends your honour, the aristocratic thing to do is, you know, bump them off. But if you bump them off, they're going to bump you off or a member of your family, and then that family will get on to someone in your family, and so on. It never ends. So the idea is, no, no, no, no, we have a way of solving this. You meet up, sword in hand, and there are rules, you know, first blood, or whatever it is, to the death, and then it stops there.

 

Guy Windsor 

You can kill the person who's offended you without starting a vendetta.

 

Damon Young 

Exactly. Now, what's appealing about this is not simply that it ends the bloodshed right there. What's also appealing is this is seen as a privilege. So you're not going to duel if you're a noble some commoner, you're not going to duel someone who's Jewish. You're not going to duel a woman if you're a man. This is your privilege as a member of this class, you get to toss your life away in this way to demonstrate your bravery.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, so we should just maybe just clarify. We're talking about like interpersonal duel, not a judicial combat, where you do see women and men fighting each other with very interesting setups like the man's in the hole in the ground and the woman has a rock in a veil.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, which is a slightly older custom, which already by this time, was seen as weird.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, judicial combat, trials by combat, they were separate thing. We're talking about what sort of evolved from there as the, you know, you bite your thumb at me, sir.

 

Damon Young 

That's exactly the thing. But already we're seeing one of the particularities of firstly of the aristocracy, secondly of the duel itself. And thirdly, I would say, of martial arts. It's the idea that this form of violence is ritualized. It's formalized. The whole idea is, as a member of this class, you hold yourself to a different standard of behaviour. You're supposed to be more restrained, more formal, you're supposed to be able to dance beautifully and ride beautifully and dress beautifully. Hopefully, you're supposed to kill beautifully, but at the very least you are supposed to stop, calm yourself, don't do any killing now, you will kill later, at dawn, at the appointed time and place. So it's essentially saying, all right, aristocrats, you can have your bestial urges. You can be savage. However you have to behave in keeping with our expectations for your class. And there is that combination of violence and etiquette, of violence and politeness that runs through the history of fencing, and we have that in the salute, which in, say, the 18th century, or early 19th century, was quite an elaborate formal affair with movements of the feet like a little dance, almost by the time we know it. It's just, you know, hand goes up to head and sweeps down, but it's still the idea that you must stop your violent urges, if only for a moment, recognize the other person as a member of your class or guild or common society of fraternity, then you may hit them with a lump of steel.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it's an interesting sort of weirdness.

 

Damon Young 

It is, and I'm one of the conclusions I came to in the chapter is, we no longer have a lot of the tight knit community expectations that we may have had centuries before. We don't have the same assumptions of class and character, certainly that they had say in the Renaissance and certainly not in the feudal period. Instead, we have to kind of rebuild these communities as individuals. We have to kind of rebuild this notion of mutual trust despite violence. I think that is what happens in every good fencing club every night, is that you stand before someone and you make your salute, and you're essentially saying, here we are, the two of us together. I trust you. I hope you trust me. I am saluting to you now to symbolize this mutual respect.

 

Guy Windsor 

Actually, it's one of the hallmarks of the difference between a well run tournament and a badly run tournament. Is in a well run tournament, it feels like everyone is working together towards a common goal. And everyone is we're in it together, and, yes, we're competing with each other, and some of us will get knocked out, and there's a risk of injury, and usually at the end, somebody wins, but we are all responsible for each other's wellbeing throughout that entire process, whereas you do occasionally come across a tournament where if your equipment doesn't keep you safe, and your parries don't keep you safe, well no one else is going to do it. It's perfectly all right to hit somebody as hard as you like, because if they don't parry, that's their problem, which is totally antithetical to the whole ethos of how martial arts training should be done.

 

Damon Young 

Absolutely yes. And my interest in this aspect of etiquette and politeness came out of the Japanese martial arts. And I've written before on the importance of courtesy in the Japanese martial arts, the idea that you can't take this stuff for granted. Every time you step onto the mat, or every time you step into the salle or the fencing club, or whatever it is you do, you are collaborating to build a community of mutual trust, mutual respect. And so people can dismiss a lot of these little gestures and movements, whether it's bowing in, say, Japanese martial arts, or the salute in fencing or kneeling and stepping to the side if you've hurt someone, whatever it is. But I think these are vital to a healthy community, because they are how we express our esteem for someone.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and I guess it's like a salute in the military, where even if you don't like the person, and even if you think they're a complete scumbag, so long as they are there in front of you, you salute them, because you're saluting their willingness to show up and take the risk, or show up and give a decent fight.

 

Damon Young 

Yes. And in a way, you're saying this is bigger than the two of us.

 

Guy Windsor 

In fact, the most extreme version of this I've seen is when two of my students, who also do some of the really traditional Japanese stuff, they were just practicing their Japanese stuff in the salle because it happened to be empty. It's was Sunday morning or something. I just came in with some training, and there they were, and every iteration of every drill, they started out of measure. They come towards each other out of measure. They get that full kind of seated bow, and they get up and pick up their weapons. They come towards each other, they do one iteration of the drill, which includes getting back out of measure, as every sensible drill does. Then they bow again and get out of measure. Then they do the whole thing again. So every iteration of the drill doesn't just include repeating the drill and doesn't just include getting into measure and out of measure, which is basically where I do it, but they're basically saluting each other with the full kneeling bow thing at the beginning and the end of every iteration of the drill. On the one hand, I absolutely love it, and on the other hand, I just don't have time. I need to get more reps in. So yeah, it's interesting to see because it's from a very traditional art. We don't know for sure, but there's reason to believe that they were doing this sort of thing back when the people doing it had a reasonable expectation of actually having to kill somebody with a sword during their lifetime, probably more than one.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, and I would imagine that courtesy, etiquette, politeness, start to become quite pointed under those conditions.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. Okay, so I know you have an Asian martial arts background, and there's one chapter in the book I particularly liked about where you basically, you do this sort of move in a coffee shop, which is drawn from a karate cut. Would you like to tell us a bit about that?

 

Damon Young 

So I was in a cafe arguing with someone I didn't go to uni with, but he was at uni at the time. He might have been a PhD student. Perhaps I was, I can't remember, but he was definitely studying science. We were having this very abstract argument about the nature of the world. And I had got it. I had introduced an ancient paradox, and he was not ready for it. He was undone by it. And in that moment, I did a version of a gesture I had learned in a Japanese kata or form decades earlier. And it's really just this, this little movement where your right hand kind of sweeps across your opponent, then pulls back, and your left hand sort of jabs forward with the fingers. Now, what I was taught that it was, was you're essentially parrying a blow on their outside, jerking them towards you and then striking their ribs, which are now open. But what interests me about that was that for me, obviously, for me, symbolized winning an argument. It was so ingrained in my body that the idea of trapping someone with their own argument mapped onto trapping someone with their own force that I'd learned in that strike. And so in the chapter, I talk a lot about where I learned that, what it meant in the particular kind of karate that I did, and then I show how it didn't mean that at all. It could have meant any number of things, and the strike appears in any number.

 

Guy Windsor 

What I really like about that chapter, is you start going off about karate, and I'm like, Oh, God, Damon doesn't know his history. And then, you save yourself. It's like you're feinting I know my karate, but actually I don't. And then, actually, no, and you pull it all out and put it together, and there's the history and it's like, you pretended not to know what you were doing.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, I'm being honest about my former ignorance when I did not know about the history of karate. I did not know how it how it arose from, for example, the Chinese martial arts. I didn't know how it arose from Okinawa. I didn't know the history of colonialism. I didn't know any of that stuff. And I was carrying around this Orientalist fantasy of Japan as a land of fearless samurai and Ninja. And I was now an honorary Japanese.

 

Guy Windsor 

And there were some fearless Samurai, and they were definitely ninja, but that wasn't the whole story.

 

Damon Young 

No, exactly, yeah. And so I'm talking about essentially what this movement symbolized to me in the moment, but also what had to happen in the world for an Australian guy in Melbourne to be learning this movement behind a KFC, you know, a Kentucky Fried Chicken car park, and talking about this history of Orientalism that I was part of, where I believed the sales pitch that I'd been sold about Japan, and Japan had, in part, bought into. So, denying its Chinese history, denying what happened in Okinawa. So it was, for me, partly I was reflecting on my own arrogance and ignorance, but partly also reflecting on the state of the world over the past couple of centuries, a history of colonialism. And also, as an aside, reflecting on how I used to understand philosophy, which was as combat, the idea was for me to win.

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean, people do use philosophy for that, but it's odd. Just say a little bit more about that, because I have something that's like cracking in my head, but I can't quite get it out.

 

Damon Young 

Sure, I mean, it's partly about for me, at least, being an arrogant young man, and the idea that you can walk into any context and use just the raw genius power of your own intellect to overcome a person and master the situation, and a sense that because of this we're not collaborating, we're not working together. This isn't a situation of trust. I'm trying to beat you. And of course, what does that exclude? Well, it excludes trust for one. It excludes me necessarily learning anything from you. And I think it excludes curiosity, because the point there is not to find out something, not to seek something collaboratively, the point there is to win in that moment.

 

Guy Windsor 

It also excludes persuasion, because generally speaking, if you beat somebody up verbally and humiliate them by destroying their arguments. They very often will not then adopt your supposedly more correct arguments. They'll think you're an arsehole and disagree with you on principle.

 

Damon Young 

I mean, both have happened. I've certainly been in situations where I have persuaded someone by sheer force of argument, but I was wrong, and I shouldn't have been able to. I was using my own kind of raw cognitive power as a 20-something young man to demolish someone who may have known better and just not been as confident.

 

Guy Windsor 

And you see this in historical martial arts all the time. If you're a better fighter, you can persuade somebody that your interpretation is superior, because you can hit them with your interpretation, and this can't hit you with their interpretation. But that may be leaving out the fact that you have 10 years more fencing experience and 20 kilos more muscle.

 

Damon Young 

To me an even more similar example is when I was doing judo, there were higher belts than me that I could out wrestle because I was just bigger and stronger. They were not yet at the point where they could overcome my obvious advantages with technique. And it's a pathetic, petty, meaningless way to win, because I'm not learning anything and they're not going to learn anything either,

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and honestly, it's something where actual bladed weapons make a huge difference. If you have guns or swords or knives, it goes a long way to eliminating the size and strength advantage. Yes, technique has a lot more to do with it, but even then, particularly in a sword fight you need quite a lot more skill to be able to compensate for not that much more reach or speed.

 

Damon Young 

So there's a woman in my club who's older than I and slower than I and shorter than I. On paper, I should have been winning every bout, every time, and yet, when it came to putting that rapier’s point on my chest, her technique won.

 

Guy Windsor 

It can be done, but it takes quite a lot of extra skill.

 

Damon Young 

I couldn't brute force my way through, however long that rapier was.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent, these are the sorts of opponents that we require. Philosophy is not rhetoric. No, they overlap considerably.

 

Damon Young 

Yes. And look there is a history of performance like it or not. If you look at what Socrates was doing, he was putting on a show. He was appealing to the young Greek aristocrats’ love of spectacle and fighting. So they were like, phwoar, that's a bit of all right. Look what he did. So I'm not naive about philosophy. I think it does have this history of not always winning because it's cleverer or more honest, but because it's sort of faster or more brutal or more charismatic. But I do think at its best and certainly, what I love about philosophy, is encouraging curiosity, is working together to try to understand things better.

 

Guy Windsor 

Now I mentioned to my 16-year-old daughter that I was interviewing a philosopher this morning, and quite surprisingly, given some of the conversations we've had, she said, philosophy is just a scam, isn't it? I mean, like it's just thinking about thinking, and everyone thinks, and everyone's thought about thinking. So how can you possibly make it into an actual job? That's ridiculous. Now every now and then I'm not a completely crap parent. And I did not just demolish it. I said, oh, that's interesting. Why do you think that? And I kind of drew her out a little bit. And I was like, yeah, but you know, it can be useful. And she was unconvinced, okay, so I will absolutely not use anything you say, to demolish my child, but it would be nice to have some sort of, let me rephrase. How would you have responded to that challenge?

 

Damon Young 

Honestly, I probably just would have asked a number of questions and worked through the issues and pointed out small problems, pointed out where they might have missed something or forgotten something, or overstated something, perhaps exaggerated, perhaps they left out a few things, and eventually I would be able to say what you're doing right now is philosophy.

 

Guy Windsor 

That would annoy her enormously.

 

Damon Young 

But it's true. I mean, this is like the people who claim to have anti-wrestling techniques, you know, anti-groundwork techniques. The only anti-wrestling or anti-groundwork techniques are wrestling and groundwork. You have to know what it is you're doing in order to escape from it, even if it's not your thing, you need a basic grounding in those principles in order to not be broken up into little pieces. And it's the same with philosophy. I think in order to pull off a really good case against philosophy you have to do some philosophy. It's philosophy all the way down, Guy.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think she would, she would respond quite well to that.

 

Damon Young 

And I think, you know, the short, pithy version is that I'm stealing from Alfred North Whitehead, is that I think philosophy is the critic of abstractions.

 

Guy Windsor 

I used that, because you said that in our first interview. I've hung on to it. And I was like, but you know, his job is critiquing abstractions so that you can, you can get a better understanding of how it is. Also, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are making decisions based on some kind of personal philosophy, and if you're not aware of it, then you may be acting on a philosophy you don't actually agree with. That did not fly at all. That was like, no, because I know what I think. She’s 16 and she’s in the middle of a whole very intense series of exams. So she's quite tired.

 

Damon Young 

Yes. I also have a 16 year old, so I understand. I think that the critic of abstractions thing is useful because it's just a most basic reminder that the things that are closest to us are most familiar, and we don't realize what our ideas are a lot of the time. And so the philosopher will say, well, hang on, let's have a look at this idea of yours. Does it fit with your other ideas? Does it fit with the world? Why not? What are you missing out? That is the basic principle. And usually, I think people are amenable to philosophy if they see it not as this system of dogma that's handed down from the ancients, but a living interpersonal practice that is informed by that tradition.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it's a process, like science is a process rather than a belief system.

 

Damon Young 

Yes. I mean, if you look at our conversation earlier about keeping the body healthy, for example. There's no point me arguing about that, because I agree with you on principle. You know what I mean,  the worst use of philosophy would be to say, oh, well, the body doesn't matter. What matters is the work of the soul or some such thing. But I agree with you, there's no point me arguing with you. It's just a matter of me incorporating your advice and trying to give that as much urgency as other things in my life. And I will add one more thing I do think, Plato had this idea that that all learning is just remembering, that we've been up to the heavens, we've seen the forms in a previous life, and then we come down and we recognize them through the mire of the everyday. Now I disagree with Plato, but I do think he's right, that sometimes the kind of best education or best life development or edification is reminding. It's a human to human process of saying, I know you know this, Damon, I know you know that you must keep your body in good condition to live a full life so that you can be the best husband, father and writer you want to be. I know you know that, but you've forgotten it because you're stuck in these everyday routines and these everyday concerns. So I'm just shifting your attention back to that vital principle. That's really important. We have to remind each other of things.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, very true. It's great talking to you, because I always get stuff to think about, and then very particular ways of phrasing these thoughts so that they can be kind of kept and unpacked later. Excellent. Okay, moving on slightly. There is one obvious lacuna in your book. I was surprised by the absence of in the same way that James Nestor wrote this brilliant book called Breathe, and it has all sorts of really cool stuff about breathing in it. It's got scientific stuff, and it's got practices from Germany and from India and all over the place, and at no point does it mention Qigong. So the whole Chinese breathing exercises, Qi exercise at all, not even mentioned. I was like, that's weird, because it is probably the most well known breathing practice in the world. But it's just absent from the book. And I was like, I got the book. I was like, where's the Qigong chapter? It doesn't make any sense. Whether you like it or not, whether you whether you think it's effective or not, you kind of have to mention it, because it's the breathing practice everyone thinks of and when people think gestures, they do think spin on it, or up yours. Yeah, exactly. So why is that absent?

 

Damon Young 

I did think about those, and I did some research on the single finger. Actually, I did some research on both, but the short answer is, we don't know enough. So on the single finger, for example, we know that the Greeks used the single finger, apotropaically, meaning as a warding off, as an act of defiance or ill luck, whether it's warding off the evil eye or wishing bad luck upon someone or just being crude, there was the finger, and it's obviously a phallic device. You might be able to make the argument that it's a horn as well, but the horn often collapses into a phallic device as well. But we don't know how they used it. We don't know whether they use it upright. We don't know whether they pointed with it. We don't know whether they wiggled it. We just don't know. And so it was one of those cases where there wasn't enough for me to satisfy my curiosity in researching that particular gesture any further than I already had. There wasn't an interesting story to tell about it.

 

Guy Windsor 

There isn't a bunch of anthropological research on rude gestures.

 

Damon Young 

There is. It's more a question of the historical record. So there's definitely all kinds of anthropological, sociological, linguistic research on how we would read rude gestures now and I'm sure for much of the 20th century, but there wasn't an interesting search for me on the origins of that gesture, because one of the things that appeals to me most is showing how things transform. Showing how, for example, the fencing gesture of the Regency transforms to what we have now, showing how the finger horns of, you know, “Rock on” go from being a kind of Mediterranean apotropaic gesture to being something you see on the catwalk.

 

Guy Windsor 

And also a very, very rude gesture. If you put it on your forehead, it's like the cuckold gesture. That's rude.

 

Damon Young 

Yeah, yes, exactly. Yes, I really, I really enjoyed that chapter, but I couldn't find a similar story to tell about the single finger. Now, the double finger, that very English, “Up yours, mate”. There's lots of Just So Stories,

 

Guy Windsor 

The legend is Agincourt. Like the French say, oh, every English archer we capture, we're going to cut off the first two fingers of their hands so they can't pull the bow anymore. After Agincourt, the archers are going, yeah, fuck you. I've still got my fingers. And that's that does seem a bit unlikely to me.

 

Damon Young 

What’s funny is, I swear I read an article on this talking about this particular gesture, a popular article, a newspaper article or website, and the person was saying, no, there's no evidence of this. We just don't know. There were still people in the comments saying, oh no, no, it's from bloody Agincourt innit. No, we beat the French, didn't we, and that's why we have the fingers up mate. And it's like, that's great for ultra nationalist reasons, but there's just no evidence of that. And so I would have loved to have had a chapter on that, but again, I just couldn't find anything to say. There was nothing for me to trace back, and it now, it could have been that at certain point, because there's always more research you can do, there's always more, there's always another book.

 

Guy Windsor 

I know a lot of books who are sitting in draft mode, because more research needs to be done. And in fact, the person has been researching for, like, 10 years and needs to get on and finish the bloody book.

 

Damon Young 

There's a photo on my Instagram, where I've got just the papers that I read to write Immortal Gestures, and it's like two feet of stacked papers in manila folders, so much so that my desk was bending. The end notes, which had to be separate as a PDF file because the publisher said, nope, too long. The end notes for this book are almost 70 pages. So it's a vast amount of research.

 

Guy Windsor 

But you don't have 70 pages of end notes.

 

Damon Young 

Exactly, because it's a PDF, because the publisher said, nope, too long. So you can download the end notes separately from the publisher's website or from my website.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do you publish that in the book? I missed that.

 

Damon Young 

I say that my publishers balk at its bulk. And so yes, what I give is a bibliographic essay where I talk about some of the highlights, which, again, was more work to do. It was essentially writing another chapter. But if you want all of the end notes, they are available for free, properly formatted, all nice, but it's my point there is, it was a massive amount of research, and going on yet another chapter about, say, the finger, or the double finger. At it at a certain point, I have to just say no more. 13 gestures is enough.

 

Guy Windsor 

And that is actually a very good number for gestures.

 

Damon Young 

I like it. And yes, in the publisher's defence, an extra, say, 70 pages, more to print, more to ship, adds to the weight, adds to the cost. And as far as they're concerned, your average nonfiction general reader is not going to want all of those end notes in the book.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think they may be right.

 

Damon Young 

So they're available for free to anyone who wants them. Certainly very important for me to show my working out. But I understand why the publisher said, God no, Damon, what is wrong with you?

 

Guy Windsor 

See, this is one of the things I like about publishing my own stuff. I am the publisher, and if I want to spend more money printing an extra 50 pages of research that I think is important, then I'll damn well have it in my book. Thank you very much.

 

Damon Young 

Fight the power, Guy.

 

Guy Windsor 

I'd probably make more money if I was a bit more sensible.

 

Damon Young 

I mean, look, I write for a general audience. I have to think about what they may or may not want in a book, and I want them to know the research was done. I had a review recently by a linguist who specialized in gestures, saying, you know, this has been very well researched, but it's worn lightly, and that's exactly what I'm going for. You should know that the work's been done, but you shouldn't have to flick away an end note every few seconds.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s funny. Philosophy has this sometimes earned reputation of being extremely opaque and dense and difficult to read, and you slog through this giant book, and at the end of it, you decide that no meaningness is nothingness, and there's a whole bunch of other long words I can't even remember, right? And sure enough, some philosophy is like that, but it's the process of making it intelligible and clear, I think is, is really important if it's going to be of any use to anyone.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, I am sympathetic to the notion of specialist language. Every field has its own specialized language, and I don't have a problem with that, but there are certainly some philosophical authors who seem to have gone out of their way to be difficult to read. Immanuel Kant is an example of that. We know he could write. We know that he could write just fine. You know his essay on the Enlightenment, for example. It's quite beautifully done. No problem, very clear. But his main philosophical books are just awful to read. Now, I enjoyed them because I'm the kind of weirdo that actually gets pleasure out of out of watching Kant's mind work, but as prose, it's awful, and that's not how I want to write. Now there is a giant sized novelty dial that has perfectly clear Orwellian prose on one side and Heidegger on the other, or Henry James on the other, perhaps. And each one of my books is on a different point on that dial. So this, this book is slightly towards the Jamesian side, more than say How to Think About Exercise or Distraction, but it's still, you know, it's still in the region of clarity, because that's my job there.

 

Guy Windsor 

There are plenty of places where you could have used a 24 syllable word, but just chose not to.

 

Damon Young 

Thank you for noticing.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, I was admiring your restraint. I was like, dude, you have a have a commitment to clarity, which is admirable. Yes, I appreciate it. Now. The first time we talked, I did ask what was the best idea you hadn't acted on, and you said plushies for the characters from your children's books. And I do have to ask, it's been some years now, do we have any plushies yet?

 

Damon Young 

We do not. And I think the sticking point is that I'm not the illustrator. So it gets complicated, and possibly the time has passed. The first one, the most successful one, which is My Nana is a Ninja. That came out quite a while ago. It’s still selling. I still get royalty checks for it, but I think maybe the plushie time is over. Should I do another children's book I assure you that the plushie will be front and centre. No, that's not quite true. That's not quite true. It will be second under seeing a specialist about my forearms, I promise.

 

Guy Windsor 

And you know, I’m just curious, because, you know, when I get somebody back on the show, very often they've actually done the thing that they said was the best idea they hadn't acted on yet. I'm not surprised that the plushie thing hasn't come out yet. It's just a thought. Just for fun. Presumably, you know the illustrator.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, we haven't spoken in a while, but I do know him.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, you could, just for fun, get a couple of plushies made. There are plenty people, for example, Etsy, who will literally make teddy bears and stuff to order. Just get one for him and one for you made just so you can have one on your desk and see how it makes you feel. But if it makes you go, Oh, this is so cool, then, yeah, just try that.

 

Damon Young 

Yep, I don't disagree. It's a lovely idea.

 

Guy Windsor 

Float that out there. But of course, after you've done your forearm training, of course. Excellent. All right, so, Damon, where can people get your new book?

 

Damon Young 

So just in bookshops. It's out now in the UK, US and Australia, New Zealand, if your bookshop does not stock Immortal Gestures, then you can ask them to order it in if you don't want to order at your local bookshop, it's available online at all the usual places you can buy books online.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, I got mine from scribepublications.co.uk, that's Immortal Gestures, Journeys in the Unspoken. By Damon Young, excellent. Okay, so everyone who's listening to this, of course, is going to just immediately rush out and buy it. When you are exceptionally rich, you can use some of that money from all of those book sales to fly to Helsinki and see my physio chap.

 

Damon Young 

There is actually a visiting fellowship or studioship going on at Helsinki via Creative Australia, which is our national arts organization. And I did see that and had two thoughts. My first thought was, oh, that's where Guy goes. And then my second thought was, hmm, I wonder if that's possible. Okay, that's what the two thoughts, just know that a. I'm thinking of you, and b., I'm thinking of myself.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent now, just for my own curiosity, when I was sort of digging around on your website, looking for bio stuff and whatnot, and generally doing the internet stalky bit part of the whole running a podcast job. I mean, it's weird how much of what you have to do when you're running a podcast would just be creepy weirdness if you weren't running a podcast. So on your website, it’s damonyoung.com.au there's a picture of you, and you're holding a fountain pen. And because the picture is very arty, I can't identify what fountain pen that is, and that is bugging the shit out of me. Can you please tell me what it is?

 

Damon Young 

I'm surprised you couldn't tell it. It is a Pilot Custom 823.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ah, of course it is. Yeah, yes, absolutely.

 

Damon Young 

Cracker of a pen. Oh, it's gorgeous. It's the smoky kind of brown one.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it's, you can sort of see into the, yes, it's translucent barrel. Are they called demonstrator pens? My favourite demonstrator pens are the Twsbi. They are super cheap. I mean, I very much want a Pilot Custom 823. I really, really do, but I can't justify spending 200 quid, 300 quid on a pen when I have an entire drawer full of fountain pens, which I love and use, and I use them quite a lot. But, you know, for the demonstrator thing, these Twsbis are like a 10th of the price of a Custom.

 

Damon Young 

They're very well. I mean, they are, to me, equivalent to a Lamy. They're very well designed. In fact, I remember, I remember the beginnings of Twsbi on fountain pen network, the bulletin board, really. And when the chap from Twsbi came along and said, we are designing a pen, this was out of Singapore, I believe.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think it’s Taiwan.

 

Damon Young 

Maybe it is. But, you know, he essentially came along and said, look, we want to do this. We want to make an affordable, fine fountain pen. And you know, there was enormous goodwill in that community, because people like this sounds amazing. Here's what I want, here's what he wants, here's what she wants. And they did it.

 

Guy Windsor 

And they are incredibly good. This one, okay, this is absolutely genius, right? This is the Vac Mini, yes, comes with a special, stop me, if you know this already, a special ink bottle. Well, you don't have to buy it separately, right? But you know how when you're putting the pen in the ink bottle and doing the plungery thing and all that sort of stuff to fill up the pen, it's almost impossible to do that without getting ink all over your fingers. It's tricky. It's tricky, okay, but look, you unscrew the top, and you can unscrew this the second top. But then this kind of locks in right, screws into it, and you can turn it upside down and do the thing with the part that's already full, so I won't do it. Put it back like that, and not just the entire grip part of the pen. Yep, it's clean. That's lovely. It is an astonishing bit of design.

 

Damon Young 

Look, they're fantastic. I've tried them a few times. I had a friend who also had an interest in fountain pens. We would swap pens. I think he sold me my first Pelican, which was what I, what used to be my daily writer. And the fountain pen I mentioned in the chapter in Immortal Gestures is a is a Pelican M215, but I've since moved on to the pilot custom. But, yeah, I've got nothing against Twsbis. It's just the Pilot Custom 823 is just so nice, like I have no desire to get another pen.

 

Guy Windsor 

It has killed your pen collection.

 

Damon Young 

I have a Pelican M600 that I use for writing notes next to my computer, I have a Lamy that I use for editing in red. And the Pilot is my daily writer, and the power of this pen. It's just gliding, precision, Guy, I had this urge so I haven't studied Japanese since I was in high school, and upon picking up the Pilot, I had this overwhelming longing to write hiragana in a square ruled notebook, just to have tiny little Japanese characters inside those little boxes, which reminds me, I've booked in for an autism test. Which I'm having in the next few months, hopefully.

 

Guy Windsor 

Wanting to write very precisely little things with fancy fountain pens, I don't think that that is a classic sign of autism.

 

Damon Young 

No, but the notion of being very safe inside that little square, I think there's something to it.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what you're telling me, basically, Damon, is that everyone listening needs to buy your book first and then buy like, six of mine so that I can go to I can, like, celebrate the win by buying one of these Custom 823s. Is that what you're saying?

 

Damon Young 

Yes, or rather, well, look, all I'm really trying to do is have my pen collection live up to the pen tray insert that you made for me. You see? So it's not really about the pens, so buy my book so I can fill up Guy's pen tray.

 

Guy Windsor 

Just to put some context, I was appalled by the conditions in which Damon's pens were being kept, and so he posted me a piece of cardboard cut to fit inside the drawer he keeps his pens in. And I nipped into my shed and made a little kind of grooved thing with a leather cover so they can sit nicely in these little leather grooves. Because, honestly, pens like that do deserve a nice, comfortable house to live in.

 

Damon Young 

I mean, I did have them in in a reproduction Regency writing desk drawer with a ribbed bottom in it so it held the pens. Guy took one look at that and said, with amazing prescience, this is as bad as the state of your arms. I need to fix this. So he immediately put himself to work fixing it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Am I right in thinking that you actually have an ink bottle tattooed on your forearm?

 

Damon Young 

I do, yeah, yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

Every now and then you do, you make some gesture, yes, I see this. I thought that looks like an ink bottle.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, it's an Iroshizuku, the Japanese, you know, Pilot’s own specialized ink. If I hold it upside down, it looks like it's running down. And this one was actually a hand poked one, wasn't done with a machine. Did a lovely job. Really beautiful job.

 

Guy Windsor 

Was that in Japan or here?

 

Damon Young 

No, Hobart.

 

Guy Windsor 

It's a tiny little place with not you said, not all the modern amenities, but you have tattoo artists who will actually do it by hand. That must have hurt like hell.

 

Damon Young 

No, it really didn't. It's actually quite nice. On this you will recognize that as a Spanish style parrying dagger, which is actually my parrying dagger. That's the one I have. I got it on my arm. The bottle of ink, you can see that, a mortuary sword, yeah. And fountain pen.

 

Guy Windsor 

Any particular kind of fountain pen?

 

Damon Young 

Yes, that's a Pelican M215, on my forearm, yeah? So yes, my interests, I need more books and things on there. But that's got to start.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, the pen sort of includes the book, because that's its product.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, for me, at least.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it's funny, like the whole historical martial arts scene thing has a surprisingly large crossover with the fountain pen nerdery. The last time I was in New York was in 2019 and I went to the fountain pen hospital, just to go to the fountain pen hospital. And yes, I actually bought a couple of pens there. I got a Schaefer R2D2, some ordinary kind of kids’ fountain pen thing. Perfectly fine fountain pen. Nothing wrong with it. But I got it in the hopes that my kids, who were into Star Wars at that time, would steal it. Because that's one way to get children sort of inveigled into them all these things. And I got this beautiful antique. It was, it was mint, but it's like 70 years old, little vacu filler thing. It's like a Parker vacuumatic, but it's not sure what brand it is, but it's lovely little thing. Got those in the fountain pen hospital.

 

Damon Young 

Oh, very nice. Yes. I used to have a Duofold, one of a Duofold Junior, which was of similar age, I think. Gorgeous pen to write with, but again, I just didn't need it anymore. So I only have a limited number of fountain pens.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you can get, you can actually get rid of pens? How?

 

Damon Young 

Aside from my books, which you can see behind me, I'm really not that attached to objects. Okay, so a switch, just turns off and I'm happy to let things go.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do you sell them on the internet?

 

Damon Young 

Sure, yeah. Or to people I know, you know, sometimes I would put it on social media and just say, hey, I'm selling a pen. Anyone want a pen? Whereas my wife, her book is about objects and about how working with objects we're often quick to discard, to throw away, rather than having to think through the meaning of those objects, what they bring up in us.

 

Guy Windsor 

This sounds like entirely my kind of book. What's the name of the book and what's her name?

 

Damon Young 

Ruth Quibell is my wife's name.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, I'm gonna leap out immediately and buy this book you realize. What's the title?

 

Damon Young 

It's The Promise of Things.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's an excellent title.

 

Damon Young 

It is. It's a really great title. She's talking about these objects in her life or other people's lives and trying to think through their significance. Because there's been this trend of no, no, we must live minimally. We must throw away things if there's no joy, just get rid of stuff. Whereas her response is, no, sit with this stuff, why do you have it?

 

Guy Windsor 

I do get rid of stuff. My main hobbies are, like, woodwork is my main sort of hobby that's just genuinely a hobby. And I must have at least two metric tons, literally, two metric tons of tools and stuff, right? I mean, just my bench is, like, 400 kilograms, because you want a heavy bench, when you're planing and stuff on it. But if I've bought a tool because I really wanted it, and then it sits in my shed for like, a year or two, and it's not really getting any use. And I have similar ones that do the job, I let it go. So I'm not a tool collector. I'm not even a fountain pen collector, and I'm not a book collector. There are some books I will not let go, like my Capoferro that is supposedly published in 1610 but this particular copy is actually printed 1609. Yeah, that's mine. No fucker’s having that until I’m dead. But I get rid of maybe three or four large boxes of books every year. The house is still filling up, because they're coming in that slightly faster rate than they're going out. But I don't hold on to books in quite the way that a lot of people seem to think it's somehow sacrilegious to get rid of a book.

 

Damon Young 

Yeah, I don't. I mean, I will happily recycle books. I will put them in the recycling.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, really? So they get pulped.

 

Damon Young 

They're gonna get pulped anyway. Ultimately, this is the fate of so many of these objects. They're going to end up being pulped. I'm completely fine with a book becoming another book, or something else, or a packet or printer paper, or whatever it is. I don’t mind.

 

Guy Windsor 

Wow, no, that's taking it to a level I haven't quite achieved yet.

 

Damon Young 

Now, don't get me wrong. I have 2500 books in our home. And I know that because I have bookkeeping, I have an app that has all of my books in it.

 

Guy Windsor 

I tried that. I tried to keep a catalogue of my books, this is quite a while ago, and I even bought this sort of

scanner thing, because back then, phones couldn't do it. And thing is, maybe a quarter of my books don't have barcodes on them, because they're printed before barcodes were invented. So you have to input them manually then and then you have to when a new book comes in, you have to update, and when, yeah, goes away, you have to update. I can't do the updating. It's like my brain does not update databases.

 

Damon Young 

It’s such a thrill. Well, I enjoy it. A new book comes in beep or in it goes manually, and then I know what's there. What I love about this is I can mark the books that are on loan. So that when I say to such and such, have you got that copy of that Jane Austen, the little fancy one with the nice illustrations. Have you got that? No, I gave that back. Did you now? Let me just check the app.

 

Guy Windsor 

You see, in my case, their memory is going to be more reliable than my tendency to update the app.

 

Damon Young 

Right. Look, that's fair.

 

Guy Windsor 

What app are you using?

 

Damon Young 

I am using Book Buddy.

 

Guy Windsor 

Book buddy. I've never even heard of it. I would absolutely love to have an actual catalogue, because the thing is, I have built tons and tons of bookcases. In every room of the house, there are bookcases, and they're full of books, and in the loft there's another 1000 books or so, which I want to have them in the house, because there's a chance I might want to read them again, because I get this sense like I'm never gonna read that again, and I'm sometimes wrong, but I’m never gonna read again, but I can buy another one easily, I can let it go. But if I'm like, I may never read this again, but the chance of me even being able to find a copy if I want one is very low. Then I tend to keep it but so the loft is kind of full of boxes of books. And I don't know what books are up there, because I've forgotten, so you need to come to Helsinki to get your arms fixed, then come to Ipswich and catalogue the fuck out of all of my books.

 

Damon Young 

See, there's that passage that Dante's Divine Comedy begins with, where he says, “I was in the middle of my life. I got lost in a dark wood.” That's right, that's you when you don't have your books catalogued, Guy. That's when you don't know what you have.

 

Guy Windsor 

I feel it. Okay, I have just come up with a thought.

 

Damon Young 

Oh god

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. All right, if you get your shoulders and arms in a condition where you can fence at a tournament, and yeah, you'll be tired the next day, but it doesn't hurt. I will go into my loft and I will make a catalogue of every single book in the loft.

 

Damon Young 

Now I have two responses to this. No, I have three responses. The first response is, thank you. I appreciate this. The second response is, that's a very clever idea. The third response is, however, just like I should see to my arms for my own health and my family's wellbeing, you should see to your books for your own peace of mind and sanity, not because of some contract with me.

 

Guy Windsor 

True, but we all need…

 

Damon Young 

Leverage from social relations?

 

Guy Windsor 

No, no. We need positive constraints, and the thing is, if I've promised somebody, I'll do it if certain conditions are met. If those conditions are met, it requires very little discipline to actually do it, because now you have to do it. In the same way that you know I am, you know, I struggle with training motivation, because, you know, human being and all that. And so I have regular training sessions where students come, and if a student is present, I have to a) do it properly, and b) set a good example of how training should be done. And then also I can't be late, and I have to go the full hour. And whatever it takes away all of the self discipline required, because the presence of the student creates that expectation, which I just have to live up to.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, I mean, I agree, but you're missing the point that that wouldn't work on some people because they don't value those social relations. It's a form of leverage, because you're essentially using your identity as a teacher and your obligation to others as a way of having leverage over your less powerful aspects.

 

Guy Windsor 

But the fact is, I'm absolutely never going to go into my loft and catalogue all of those books unless there is some kind of leverage acting on this. It's not going to happen. Because we moved into this house six years ago now, and there were books in the loft from literally the first day we moved in. And there are just more and more and more and more and more of them.

 

Damon Young 

I still have books in the shed.

 

Guy Windsor 

Right, exactly. But you know also they are in the shed.

 

Damon Young 

Yes, they're my history books, comics and Martial Arts.

 

Guy Windsor 

And on your appy thing, it'll probably say even more or less, where it's located, right?

 

Damon Young 

I don't need it because I know. That's a good idea. I should put the location in the app. Thank you, Guy.

 

Guy Windsor 

You're welcome. Honestly, I'm surprised that you don't have it all with shelf numbers, because I've done this with my notebooks, right? You see that there's a wooden box over there. Underneath this cardboard box, there's a fancy wooden box that I originally made as a tool box, but actually now it is just stuffed full of notebooks going back 25 years. But over here, there's more notebooks over here, but these two, which all three next to each other on the shelf, but they're not, they are a catalogue of my notebooks.

 

Damon Young 

Oh, that's sexy.

 

Guy Windsor 

So, literally, I can just pull this one off, and they're catalogued by date and by format. You know, lots of different kinds of notebooks. So, all right, so A5 notebooks in the 2024 orange Fabriano. It's got strength training notes from the gym.

 

Damon Young 

This is like pornography. You're doing a voiceover to me of pornography. This is wonderful.

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean, in the yellow Moleskine Kaye, again, A5, approximately from September 2015 to February 2016, because, like, when you're digging through something, I mean, I can flick through these two, A4 Fabrianos quite quickly to find, let's say, if I'm like, I was thinking about this thing on a plane to Portugal. December, was it 2023. So I can flick through and find the relevant notebook really quickly, and then I can just dig through the box I know exactly what I'm looking for.

 

Damon Young 

That's wonderful. I have my notebooks organized by year. But the big dilemma for me, and I'm sure this will prove fascinating to your listeners.

 

Guy Windsor 

They all probably turned off ages ago.

 

Damon Young 

The paper in the Leuchtturm as the paper in a Clairefontaine or Rhodia, but the Leuchtturm has page numbers and a contents page. So the dilemma for me has always been better paper, slightly worse paper, but with contents and page numbers.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, these days I default to a Fabriano ecoqua because, firstly, Fabriano is one of the oldest paper companies in the world. Secondly, Michelangelo and Da Vinci got Fabriano paper, so clearly it's good enough. Thirdly, they are massively ecologically friendly. The whole paper making process is done with renewable fuels and renewable energy and that kind of stuff. So it's all super eco. And the paper quality is lovely for writing with a fountain pen. It's really good. But they are just super plain, ordinary. I use the ordinary lined ones because the line spacing is just right. There's no margin, and they just work. But here's the thing, you can always add page numbers and a table of contents by hand.

 

Damon Young 

I used to.

 

Guy Windsor 

You can’t affect the paper quality. So I would always go paper quality first. Paper quality and format first. But I am sufficiently fussy about these things that I very often bind my own because, if I want a particular size, or, I like everything stitched so that will lay flat. And these Fabrianos are 40 pages folded over, and it's just saddle stitch.

 

Damon Young 

So how are they bound?

 

Guy Windsor 

These are just saddle stitched.

 

Damon Young 

Can’t do that.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, yeah, they're crap for that. But generally speaking, I just open them up, and then I stitch them together into a proper like hardcover leather spine lie flat stitched book, and then they work beautifully.

 

Damon Young 

So my process now is, I have two kinds of notebooks. There's my kind of every day assorted notes and observations. That's one of these. I don't need to draft in that. It's just for odd ideas, chiefly to chiefly non fiction philosophy. That's a Rodia. And that's just continuing the Leuchtturm, Rhodia, Clairefontaine, all the same kind of thing. It's a little blue book. But when it comes to drafting fiction or nonfiction, I use the Clairefontaine A4 spiral bound notebook. So gorgeous paper, just stunning. The best paper I've ever written on. Nice borders, lined, because I can't do the infinite silence of a completely white page. But I think perhaps most importantly, lies completely flat, so that I can draft on a table, because I lose my mind writing into a seam.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, or a thing, you have to kind of hold open. It's worth taking up a bit of book binding just to kind of get it right.

 

Damon Young 

I'd really like to, in fact, yeah, I followed a chap who lives here, who is a book binder on Instagram in the hope that he would be having courses, but he hasn't. But rest assured that once I've had my arms seen to and then seen to the plushie, bookbinding is on my list of things too.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, guests who've come to visit me in Ipswich have often left because if they express an interest in book binding, then I teach them how to bind a notebook, and they leave my house with a notebook that they have made themselves. This is an important thing. It's an important life skill for literally every person, I think. But I'm not a great book binder. I'm not like a high end artist.

 

Damon Young 

It's like knowing how to fix the basics of a car.

 

Guy Windsor 

Which I can't, because that's I have professionals for that. But book binding…

 

Damon Young 

There are professionals for that too.

 

Guy Windsor 

I have some beautiful old books which are important to me. And when they when they need care and attention, they go to a professional who is really good in the same way that my car's brakes. I am not going to even look at them. I'm going to take them to a professional because if they don't go right, then people will die. So professional, but, no one's going to die if I, if I get a bit of glue on the spine of my notebook in the wrong place.

 

Damon Young 

Now, there is the premise for a story. Guy thought the stakes of his notebook buying were low.

 

Guy Windsor 

Have you read the book, The Notebook, a History of Thinking on Paper?

 

Damon Young 

No.

 

Guy Windsor 

I have interviewed him for this show, and it hasn't come out yet. Yeah, I'm getting a bunch of interviews ready, but I've interviewed the guy, Roland Allen, it's called The Notebook, a History of Thinking on Paper.

 

Damon Young 

Oh, that sounds lovely. He's a historian?

 

Guy Windsor 

He was actually in the publishing industry first, and you wouldn't know he wasn't a historian from reading the book. But it is super approachable, and it is absolutely stunningly fascinating and brilliant.

 

Damon Young 

Wow, that sounds great.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s 100% must read for anyone who can have a conversation with me for like 25 minutes about fountain pens and notebooks, you have to read this book. Oh, my. It will make you extremely happy.

 

Damon Young 

Number one in Amazon Renaissance art, number 11 in art history, number 11 in cultural anthropology. I think their categories could possibly do with a bit of work, but never mind.

 

Guy Windsor 

They could. But honestly, I just came across it in a bookshop in Helsinki and bought it on a whim. He has nothing to do with swords at all.

 

Damon Young 

Well, look, no one’s perfect.

 

Guy Windsor 

I know, I know, but I my first thing was, oh, my God, I want to talk to him. I've got a podcast. I have an excuse to contact him and see if he wants to talk to me. And he did. I'm not sure whether your episode’s going to come out before or after his, but yes, we have a chat on the show. And yeah, it's a stunningly good book.

 

Damon Young 

Thank you.

 

Guy Windsor 

You're very welcome. Okay, so on that absolute, complete, total digression.

 

Damon Young 

Not for the first time.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do you think we should maybe wrap this up?

 

Damon Young 

I think we should.

 

Guy Windsor 

Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me today, Damon. Lovely talking to you as always.

 

Damon Young 

Always a pleasure to be here. Thank you.