2013/02/14 10:29
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Brenin liked fighting. I suspect he was happy when he was fighting. This was too bad, because I never let him do it. I tried to excise this aspect of personality, but without any real success. And it was only when he became old and weak that I could really trust him around other large male dogs. But while this wasn’t an aspect of his character that I, in any way, could commend, it was one that I did comprehend.
I was a pretty good amateur boxer when I was a kid and I used my skills as an occasional way of supplementing my income as a student unlicensed bouts held in undisclosed movable locations in areas like Ancoats and Moss Side though I tried to stay out of the latter; too many smart, fast black kids. You would put in fifty quid to enter and then fight several times during the night at least, if you were lucky. If you win your first fight, you get your fifty back. If you win the second, you double it. A third fight will take you up to 200?and that would keep me going for several months in those days. But as soon as you lose you’re out. My goal was to try and win three fights. Then in the forth fight I would cover up and run take the loss and try to get out of there without too much damage before I ran into the good fighters later on in the evening.
The crowd, of course, didn’t like it and would register their displeasure, in the time honoured way, with a chorus of boos, threats and questionings of my ancestry and sexuality. But what I remember most was not that, but the walk to the ring. The crowd would inevitably be baying for blood, and I would be so scared that my field of vision would close down into a narrow tunnel. My legs would feel awkward and hard to control. My breathing would be difficult and painful. And I would avoid vomiting only because I had already done so. These feelings and reactions would all persist through the preliminaries. But then, when I was standing in the corner of the ring, looking across at my opponent, just before the fight started and when any prospect of escape had vanished, there would be a wonderful feeling of calm that flowed through me, starting at my toes and fingers and washing all over me in waves.
It was a peculiar calm for the fear never went away. It just didn’t matter any more. When I fought, I was cocooned away inside a golden bubble of concentration. The fear was still there, but it was a calm and positive fear, and with it came a certain kind of exultation that is difficult to convey. The exultation stemmed from doing something that I did well, but at the same time knowing that I couldn’t afford to drop off one whit from the limits of my ability. Perhaps the best way I have of describing this exultation is as a kind of knowing.
Fighting was never personal. Inside the golden bubble, you feel no animosity. It is an impersonal intellectual endeavour. To describe it as intellectual seems strange, but I do so because fighting embodies a certain kind of knowledge. This knowledge is peculiar to fighting. There is no other way of acquiring it. You know just how long the opponent holds out his hand after he has jabbed. You know this even though you can’t see his hand. You know what he does with his feet when his throws his right cross and you know this even though you are not looking at his feet. In your bubble of concentration, and at the limits of your physical and emotional abilities, you can know things you otherwise wouldn’t know. He’s held his hand out a fraction of a second too long after his jab and you slip your head outside and counter with a left cross inside his arm(those of you who understand what is going on will be able to work out from this description that I was southpaw at least if we assume the other guy was orthodox). If your punch connects with his jaw, a crisp, clean, connection, then you feel exultation. This is not because you hate your opponent: on the contrary, in your bubble of concentration, you feel nothing, neither for him nor against. You feel exultation because you are coldly, and calmly, terrified out of your wits. To fight is predicament: it is to know that you are balanced on the edge of a precipice and that one false move in either direction will bring
disaster.
When life is at its most visceral, and therefore also at its most vibrant, it is not possible to separate exultation from terror. The knowledge that ruin haunts your every move not only makes possible the most powerful forms of exultation; it fuses with becomes part of that exultation. Terror and exultation are two sides of the same coin; two aspects of the same gestalt. Exultation is never purely pleasant it is necessarily also deeply unpleasant.
