Status Updates From Del boxeo

‘To watch boxing closely—seriously, is to risk moments of what might be called animal panic—one is an accomplice. This awareness—revelation, or weakness, or hairline split in one’s cuticle of a self can come unanticipated & unbidden—vertigo—breathlessness—a repugnance beyond language: a sheerly physical loathing. That it is also, or even primarily, self-loathing goes without saying. For boxing really isn’t metaphor—’

‘—to defend oneself at all times—is both a parody and a distillation of life. Where there is peace—warlike man attacks himself—Going to war—making millions of dollars from it is distinctly American—before Civil War—slave owners pitted slaves against one another—made bets on the results. To prevent the slaves’ escape—to make poetically graphic the circumstances of the black men’s degradation—fights were to the death.’

‘Private & public obsessions mimic one another but are not identical—Impoverished people prostitute themselves in ways available to them—boxing—offers—an opportunity—to make a living—if a boxer is fortunate & isn’t injured, boxing will pay him better wages than most of the jobs available to the unskilled & uneducated—The top of the pyramid is small, the base broad, shading out into the anonymous subsoil of humanity.’

‘No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring—the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship—the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight’s natural & violent movement toward the ‘knockout’: surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength & will.’

‘Boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilisation—before God was love—savage ceremony—rite of atonement—the futility of such gestures. For what possible atonement is the fight waged if it must shortly be waged—again? The boxing match—the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylised, of mankind’s collective aggression—ongoing historical madness—Pain, in the proper context, is something other than pain.’

‘The ceremonial ringing—a summoning to full wakefulness—It sets into motion—the authority of Time—& everything—exposed—including things about themselves they cannot fully realise—we're humanly responsible not only for our own acts but for those performed against us—Time, like the possibility of death, is the invisible adversary—I've no difficulty justifying boxing as—sport because I've never thought of it as a sport’

‘To write about boxing is to write about oneself—however elliptically—unintentionally. & to write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate—the perimeters of civilisation—what it is, or should be, to be human—Perhaps boxing has always been in crisis, a sport of crisis—I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.’