Boxing Notes
Flicking through Charles Hoff’s work, I remembered I had jotted down miscellaneous notes on the subject of Boxing, some years ago when I was intrigued by it’s history and by the nature of the fascination it held for me. One of the reasons I became interested in boxing was that it presents itself as a lineage, a tradition, and that this tradition has it’s own ‘reading list’, the library of fight movies that are available from collectors. Times, places, protagonists, all captured on film, and part of a chronological order. I could set this reading list of fighters alongside and in parallel to the list of great 20th century poets. Both provide windows onto their times, particular points of entry into the strangeness of history. I had also been reading about the practical application of Zen to various arts, and was being made aware of the fact that there are many different kinds of intelligence, not simply the literary and philosophical, or mathematical and scientific. Takuan Soho [1573-1645] is particularly instructive on the application of Zen to fight strategy, the integration of bodily knowledge to the point where it’s execution is unselfconscious, where mind is no longer hindered and does not ‘stop’ anywhere, but responds instantly and appropriately to each situation. It seemed to me that the best boxers embodied principles similar to this. I’ve posted some of my jottings below. Does anyone remember Naseem Hamed? I wrote these before Barrera defeated him. It turned out that loss in the ring was something he could not rebound from, unlike Ali.
Boxing Notes
Boxing is a language, a physical language. It appears as a glissando of violence, but it has a depth of inscape equal to that of birdsong. What we hear of birdsong is the surface elision, not the vertical structure that playback at slower speeds reveals. The photographs of Charles Hoff read boxing vertically, as a composition of discrete moments. We have difficulty reading boxing in real times because of the sovereignty of it’s own means of expression, and the sheer speed of it’s utterance.
Boxing is primarily about biography, character, what it is that shapes a man, ands his training, his forging himself into an instrument.
Much of a boxer’s training and preparation has to do with an inward psychological bolstering against anticipated opponents. Note Ali’s love of the mirror. Joe Frazier shadow boxing: fractional movements, completed inwardly. A form of mental visualisation and interior rehearsal,. Joe Frazier: burrows forward under the surface of an opponents defence, like a mole, or man in the trenches. He undermines the walls of his opponents defense. Joe Louis: stalks his opponent, his cautious and remorselessly incremental crabwise approach.
Boxers invest so heavily in their self belief, and encourage others to do so, that when they say ‘I cannot be beaten’, they mean it, as an abbreviated form of ‘I cannot afford to be beaten’. This applies with particular relevance to Hamed. How will he react to his inevitable first defeat?
Naseem Hamed: ‘ticks over’as a way of maintaining reaction times, his entry to music and constant bravado, wiggling and posturing are a way of keeping the gap between will and act, conception and execution, closed.
For the boxer, reflexive analyses constitutes a hiatus.
Boxers must eliminate the gap between will and act, conception and execution. To do this, they first of all invest in their physicality through an act of will so that the body obeys the will. But what they are attempting to attain is a point in this process of investment at which the body repays with a surfeit of energy and response, when it blossoms with an embodied inspiration.
Boxers then think in the body, and reflexive analyses is replaced by interpretative action.
This constitutes the formalisation of instinct, it’s gardening, and is part of the grace of violence which is the attraction of boxing: the way training and discipline elevate a man above raw instinct in just a situation in which raw instinct is at it’s most insistent.
Raw instinct, untrained, is a weakness in a fighter. And there is a way in which each fight can be interpreted as a process of sounding out between opponents of each others’ depth of training. A fighter will attempt to elicit and map involuntary reactions in his opponent, in order to exploit these. He will attempt to attack up to, and past, the limits of his opponents defense, and then augment his attack manoeuvres with additional moves, in response to the blindspots and weaknesses thus revealed. The better a boxer is, the more disciplined, the more difficult it is for his opponent to force him to reveal his involuntary reactions, his raw, untrained instincts.
The space between two fighters…What is going on in that space? Ali: constant motion, circling his opponent. This charges the space between him and his opponent with a field of potential angles. As he moves, he is mapping these, examining their viability.
A ‘tight’ boxer, such as Ernie Terrel, or the Welsh boxer Steve Robinson from whom Naseem Hamed won the WBO title, operates wit thin a narrow cone of potential angles. When confronted with Hamed, Robinson was unable to focus him within the diameter of this cone. In addition, Hamed’s 360 degrees field of attack meant that Robinson was alternately blind to his approaches, or had his attention dispersed beyond the mechanics of his own counterattack. He couldn’t see to hit him, and when he could see him, he couldn’t hit him.
Muhammed Ali boxed on a bow wave of constant surprise, buoyed up and carried forward by a physical intelligence more spontaneous than incremental problem solving, which is a slave to terms dictated.
In the opening rounds a man is bright with fear. He is made of breath, a pulse, and powerful elastics. He bounces from foot to foot in a small, severe kingdom of vertical light, where details are registered with a micro-chisel and time has a paved, expansive feel to it.
He sharpens to acuity in his Cerebellum, reaches crisis by a process of radical deletion. He has his spine, and it’s pathways.
He faces a man as instrumental as himself. Who will try to beat him into pieces of thinking. The segments breaking off will destabilise his poise, and begin to wobble him toward total disintegration.
To avoid this, he periodically tests his body in the free spaces available to it, dipping, bobbing, dancing, healing it’s integrity between flurries of blows, or by armouring his advance, detaching himself from peripheral pain as if it were a bombardment on the distant horizon.
As the rounds advance, weariness begins to deposit it’s minerals.
His shoulder sockets begin to manifest themselves as iron, as do his ribs. The arch of each eye socket begins to heat into prominence, and a hot, ragged tar rises up in his lungs. He is lathed in veneers of sweat. Now the man is wearing a coat of meat, heavy, and the cables at the back of his heels are beginning to whine in distress. His consciousness begins to fog up like a bar room mirror.
Boxing is a form of self knowledge, a physical examination of conscience. Floyd Patterson knew this. Hence his provisional manner, the hesitancy of his character outside the ring, and the monastic, contemplative fervour of his training.
A man only knows himself in extremis, when he pushes, or is pushed, past his armchair conceptions of himself, to how he is revealed in the last analyses of his acts. The thing itself. Bathed in a Sui Generis light.
Each fight is an X-ray.
Each fight is a densely worded text, like a page of runes. It invites and resists decipherment. It attracts and appals, like barbarian metalwork, embryonic, animalmorphic, bubbling with chimeras struggling to get loose, and recycled under in the thrash of muscle.
A great fight demands total self-absorption in it’s riddle, and a solution to a problem with the same magnitude as life and death. The magnitudes are equal because the fighter has sacrificed everything to the riddle. He has invested his total psychic energy in it, it encapsulates his value system, is the absolute yardstick by which he will be judged. Everything else outside the ring floats free in a zero gravity, until that time the riddle is solved, temporarily.
