"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.
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.
posted by Billy Jack at 3:04 PM
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