All Things Are One Thing

No longer what I could call a 'politically active' guy, I sometimes feel either confused or guilty about this. My anarchistic values remain more-or-less intact. My faith and interest in what largely passes for revolutionary activity, organizing, agitation or activism (call it what you will) is largely gone. Against the banality of what tends to pass for 'the struggle' in the West, and to be honest out of exhaustion and fear, I chose withdrawl over mediocrity. Instead of selling out my values and becoming a mediocre liberal out of political expediency I felt that to withdraw from the overt aspects of the social struggle would be more dignified. I threw myself into literature, athletics, combatives, meditation - the very things which my previously obsessive focus on political activity kept me from for a decade.

A number of my friends, mostly as they grew older, made a similar move as myself, not always deliberately and not always for the same reasons. My old comrade P. is one of these although I think maybe because he is a father he has a little more of himself remaining in the game than me. Anyways, P. has been digging into a collection of interviews with Allen Ginsberg and has been struck with how A.G. came to an engagement with politics through the realizations which he had first through drugs and then, increasingly, Buddhist meditation. The way P. explains it, it all seems logical to me. The premise that all things are one thing can certainly elicit certain commitments and any number of further investigations whci may take on a social, political and religious character.

Anyways, it is in this frame of mind that I found out this week that an old friend has been arrested in the U.S.A. and subpoenaed to a Grand Jury investigating the radical earth and animal liberation movements that have been a persistent bane to certain economic and legal bodies in that country.

If you are interested check out www.freedarren.org and maybe write him a letter or something. He is a decent man.

"Some of the intellectual lessons Joe Brown taught were brutally simple. In boxing, for example, he was fond of reminding his guys that to win in boxing you had to hit the other guy. To hit the other guy you had to move in close enough for him to hit you. No other way. One of the immutable lessons of boxing was that there was no free ride. No free lunch. To succeed you had to be at risk. You had to choose to be at risk. That choice was the chief act of will and courage. After that you might win or lose, on the basis of luck or skill, but the choice itself was all that mattered".

This comes from George Garrett's "My One-Eyed Coach," detailing the lessons of master-teacher and great man Joe Brown: fighter, coach, sculptor, and maybe artist in its fullest and best sense. Same Halpern/Oates book that I've been discussing the last few days here (page 257).

There's one more quote from the book that I 'd like to finsh up with. Michael Stephens this time, in his tough little piece "The Poetics of Boxing"(266):

"In the morning, I am forever kidded by my wife and daughter for the way I noisily breathe at night, all the results of those constant breaks to my nose. But then as a writer I see boxing today as a durable metaphor for a craft, and when it is done well, I recognize it as an art, and that these brutal men are artists. As Aristotle said, we humans are fascinated by imitation, and boxing's mimesis is a structured, patterned imitation of certain lives, those that were poor and tough, full of pity and terror, and capable of catharsis. This, too, is what Antonin Artaud might have meant by a theater of cruelty, the actor totally sacrificing himself to a deadly craft -- the boxer boxing".

"a great fighter redefines the possible"

After finishing Anasi's book I waited a while and then picked up a collection of writings edited by Joyce Carol Oates Daniel Halpern dating back to 1988, Reading the Fights. The essays have stirred up a number of questions for me to ponder, real fundamental stuff like why am I drawn to boxing, how do I reconcile my revulsion with the abject violence and class/racial exploitation for entertainment and profit within boxing with its powerful and dramatic aesthetics and morality of redemption? (I know, that's a rough sentence). My own relationship with boxing and combatives is so ultimately personal and so deeply rooted in my weather-beaten psychological matrix that it is damn hard to be honest or even clear-headed about it.

Anyway there are a bunch of passages which I have noted and which I would like to propogate for your consideration. It is not that I necessarily agree with these, just that I find them provoking. I would like to start with this from Gerald Early, "I Only Like It Better When The Pain Comes" (p46):

"What is its secret, primeval appeal to its viewers? Part of the answer, no doubt, lies in the boxers puritanical regimen: the hard training, the abstinence of sex before a fight, the Spartan diet. The boxer's leanness and physical conditioning become a sign of his virtue, a virtue worth a great deal in a land where the fatness of sin is the sin of fatness".

The 'viewer' of boxing, eh? I find myself and I think most of my male friends who have an interest in boxing feel drawn to the training and practice of boxing as if they yearn for it themselves but, whether due to age or latent fear or maybe just wisdom do not pursue it. There seems to be something redemptive, something to identify with in the boxer and a concomitant longing for that toughness, that courage, that self-possession which is the domain of the fighter. As for myself as example, I love the training and am drawn to the martial arts, western and Asian. I am fearful of getting beaten, hit in the face, humiliated. I keep training, strengthening my body, my mind and seacrhing for what I think the fighter has. It's like an aspiration; I want to be capable of what the fighter does. I do not so much mean applying a beating but embodying some Spartan spirit or ideal of warriorship. In my own complicated schema to be able to fight equates with love and human courage. I am the last to deny the problems with such a logic. The fear of risk holds back the boxer, the wannabe fighter, the lover.

Ah yes, risk. Here is a quote from Ronald Levao, "Reading The Fights" (12):

"It may be, and perhaps should be, difficult to accept the notion that a prizefighter's work merits the same kind of attention we lavish on an artist's, but once we begin attending to and describing what he does in the ring, it becomes increasingly difficult to refuse the expenditure. The fighter creates a style in a world of risk and opportunity. His disciplined body assumes the essential postures of the mind: aggressive and defensive, elusively graceful with its shifts of direction, or struggling with all its stylistic resources against a resistant but, until the very end, alterable reality. A great fighter redefines the possible".

I should end this with one more comment. I do not mean to suggest that boxing should be regarded purely for its metaphoric value or for what it teaches us about something that is not boxing. Both of the quotes which I have selected hint at the essence of boxing as itself , which is very difficult to approach directly and there is much that one would like to ignore, overlook or wish away. There is some mysterious or at the least very difficult to apprehend aesthetic or lifeblood to boxing which makes it unique. Certainly other pursuits, many sports for example, invoke Spartan comparisons, involve profound training and preparation of the mind, body and spirit and thrown one into the world of risk. Still, however, we have boxing.

Sport of the Month is Boxing

Welcome to my overly earnest blog. Once in a while this will be funny.

So the sport of the month is boxing. It started with an excellent book:
The Gloves by New Yorker Robert Anasi. I won't go into a review here,
just a strong recommendation. Even if boxing doesn't interest you and
maybe especially if you hate it I suggest that this will be a worthwhile
read. Not a conventional 'journey into boxing' book for at least a couple
of reasons.
a) Anasi is (was?) an amateur boxer himself and this book is as much autobiographical as it it an insider look kind of thing. After laying off boxing for several years he is nagged with the feeling that he was never really a boxer because he never entered the Golden Gloves. At age 33, his last year of eligibility, he hooks up with a maverick trainer with maybe way too much personality and just goes for it.

b) This Anasi guy is just really interesting. I don't know of many boxers who cite French theory, Balzac, Susan Sontag in their books or in their blogs. He is also possessed by, lets call them doubts or maybe questions is easier, questions about his own masculinity and masculinity in the broader social context (and very much with masculinity and race). Add to this the persistent presence of his own aging body (or at least I think that he sees it that way, shit I hope that 33 does not constitute 'aging' but it is certainly a time of reflection for most and the physical body seems close to the apex), analysis of race and class in New York City and wonderful portraits of gym life, a few intangibles and a crisp prose style and you've got a really decent read. The most compelling boxing book I've read, well, maybe ever but I don't want to be too dramatic.

Check out his blog here.

I guess I did write a bit of a review.