FURTHER THOUGHTS ON VIOLENCE AS SPORT

The previous post, THE LUCHA LIBRE SHOW, promted a response from Berone well worth posting here. His is the voice of the poet touching with gentle (or not so) precision the keys of the subject so that ones mind is stimulated to "see" the human truth and to "know" more than what has been said. The song of the poet, music, the most abstract and soulful of the arts.

Email to the Buffalo
11/16/2008 12:23 PM Bersone:

Dear buffalo,

I read the vital exchange between you and Larry that discussed violence, the ritualization of violence, the commercial promise of violence, the use of violence by the media to capture our senses, the glorification of violence, the violence in art, such as the murals, violence as a bonding medium between men and boys, the sexual spiciness of violence, the occult uses of violence, the righteousness we feel when we abhor violence, the communion we feel when we go to a game, the strange loss of entertainment value we feel when, for example, a running back, McGee, I think, audibly broke his leg on a run, effectively draining any enthusiasm the crowd had for the remainder of the game, the ability of violence to almost single-handedly sustain and propel the industry of computer games into perhaps our only example of a growing field, to except career opportunities in prison management, and I have read how inevitably the theme of violence turned to consider the relationship between the individual and the group, for witnessing a hanging (a popular event in the old west) or witnessing a whipping, or some poor soul yoked in stocks, his rear end vulnerably exposed to hectoring by children, the sacrifice of Inca individuals having their hearts ripped out of their chest while still alive to honor the Jaguar, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, of Obama on the campaign trail, and couldn't help thinking of the long line of individuals, for the savior is always an individual, whether he be Galileo or Rimbaud or Novice Theory or Jacqueline Kennedy, who has offered him or herself as a liaison between our everyday world and other worlds, real or imagined, which we long for and dread, such as the man singled out by the Dogun, a tribe in Africa that centers all its activities and structures, the arrangement of their huts, for example, on the orbit of the Dogstar, a star we were unable to detect until the nineteen thirties but which this tribe has worshipped and communicated with for god knows how long, singled out to sit on a ledge, where he sleeps and maintains communication with this star, whose meals are brought to him, and who must never be touched! and I am led back into painful disappointments I experienced as a child in the schoolyard when, swept down upon by the mob, to fight Huey Sullivan, for toughest kid in the fifth grade, Huey, a friend of mine, both of us at the mercy of the mob, feeling the murderous cowardice and unquenchable appetite for safe entertainment of the mob, faced with a no-win situation, for fight you must, one way or another: to fight and win, you lose a friend but gain a crowd, an insufferable master; fight and lose, perhaps deepen a friendship and lose the crowd's crown, no doubt made of thorns, saving the mob from its own cowardice; chicken out, which I did, and hurt yourself, which required a later fight for redemption, but chosen alone, after school, unseen by the crowd, a bitter fight but a respectful fight but a fight that left me still afraid of the crowd, and I thought of another fight, at YMCA camp, with a bully, rolling and spitting down a hillside, until asked by the counselors if I would enter the ring for the boxing tournament that culminated the camp, and refusing, which confused them, someone turning down their honor, for I felt behind their offer the urging of the crowd, and as I read of your exchange I was led through my memories through a string of fights, arguments, some violent some verbal, which can be even more vicious, some heroic, some cowardly, some chosen some imposed until I was led to consider how one fights, where one fights, how one chooses and accepts the arena, what one fights for, who one fights for and realize that to fight for life, for a truth beyond yourself is the difficult thing to do, although it may not lead to honor or victory or salvation: you can be burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, swept up in the Catholic Inquisition, or you can be peppered by the paparazzi, but to fight to be yourself, to fight to be heard, to fight to be seen with the mask ripped off, which ironically may require a mask being pulled on, to choose to fight, that is difficult indeed, to choose not to fight out of a higher awareness like Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps the most difficult path, for, as he has shown, both sides hate you, even though you fight for the deeper being with everyone, yes, as I read I felt the spiral that contemplation of violence revolves us in and am left with the dizzying confusion the bull must feel, taunted and speared into attack to play a part in what must be an ancient primitive ritual, the Bull, formidable but not a predator, a grazer, a prey animal, killed by a man in tight pants, tortured into a foaming wrath by incomprehensible motives stirring in the crowd of people around him, him, an individual bull against an individual man, whom we would love to see gored as we deserve to be gored, or transcendentally avoiding it by a deft pivot and sweep of the cape that resolves our terror in a beautiful gesture . . .

Mon 11/17/2008 8:36 AM Buff:

Phew! That’s one hell of a sentence! As your comments confirm, there is a mystical rapture for violence in the human soul and always has been. In this, nothing has changed since the emergence of primitive man to what we now call civilization, except perhaps the levels and forms of expression. We humans can imagine the potential for peace and love yet inevitably opt to grovel in the dust, stirred by this holy and dark longing for destruction, pain, and danger. Mysterious to me. When I was a skinny kid at Christian Brothers School in Sacramento our P.E. class was visited once by the famous boxer Max Baer, a pug nosed veteran of the ring with a kind heart a big smile and cauliflower ears. Somehow I found myself in those high waisted boxing shorts, black high ankle shoes and thick red boxing gloves stepping into the ring with another kid to receive some pointers from the Champ. Without waiting for the bell or a word from the Champ the kid attacked, pummeling me with flailing arms and leather gloves until I was on my back looking up at my assailant and an amused Max Baer while the mob of classmates cheered the action. Lesson learned. I would be a lover, not a fighter. I would rather wrestle under the sheets with a lovely than on the streets with a thug.

I don’t much understand the human animal, his motives and purposes. I don’t know where we come from or where we are going, nor do I grasp my role in all of this. I have always been in the crowd but not of the crowd, watching life swirl all around me while I seem to be standing still. It is quiet here in the eye of the storm where one hears the music of the river and the song of wildlife. And when the hawk suddenly swoops down through the glare of the sun to sink its talons into the body of the rabbit, as I witnessed recently near my house, there is grace to the lifting up into the air, the rabbit hanging limp and silent, grace to the rising and falling of the strong wings, the flying up and away. Violence seems to be uniquely human. Even the ferocity of a pack of hyenas ripping at the flesh of a struggling zebra calf has a form and purpose and sense to it that I just don’t find in two men fighting in a cage, the mob roaring in rage.

The sport of human violence is a form of entertainment, a source of human pleasure. We find joy in the pain of others, pleased to see the blood flow, to hear the crack of a bone, to see the agony in the face. We cheer this and then go home to kiss our children in their beds. Because of our physical adeptness and mental faculties we find ourselves at the top of the food chain, yet there is something dark in the human spirit that brings us down, down below all other forms of life and dooms us to the vagaries of greed, deceit, and violence, the Achilles Heel that may one day destroy our specie and life as we know it.

So it goes.