It’s eight in the morning, first of October, the day before I turn fifty-three, and I am psyching myself up to return to the boxing gym for the first time since the pandemic. Five years ago I started training at a gym in Evanston to research for a piece I wanted to write—have wanted to write, have in a sense been writing, for twenty years—about my paternal grandmother Lillian’s first cousin, the boxer Barney Ross. (In 1999 I wrote a sequence of about thirty sonnets, of all things, about him, that I called Maxwell Street Sonnets. They got me into the Stegner program at Stanford, in spite or because of the fact they were wildly uncharacteristic of the Language-inflected poetry I was mostly writing back then, and continued to write for most of the aughts. But that’s a different story.) Back in 2018 I thought I would take a few classes, just for the summer, so that I would have at least some embodied idea of what it was like to put on a pair of gloves, throw punches, and maybe even spar a little. For three or four times a week, all summer long, I did just that, working harder and more physically intense hours than I, a habitually sedentary and cerebral being, had ever before worked in my life. I wrote the piece, “Lightweight,” which took the form of a digital essay that you can read here. Then, when autumn came, I just kept going. And it wasn’t until the spring of 2020, when everything ground to a halt, that I stopped.
That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working out—I’ve got a heavy bag and a speed bag in my basement, and I get down there sporadically—but it does mean that what I’ve been doing can’t be described as boxing. As intense as the workouts can be—and I’ve come to believe that there’s no better sport for keeping in shape, with surprisingly little stress on my middle-aged body—there can be no comparison between hitting a bag and hitting (or trying to hit) a live opponent. During my time at the now sadly shuttered Tier One Training I probably only sparred half a dozen times, but those times were revelatory. As an adult I’d never experienced a more full and complete experience of embodiment and presence as I did during those seemingly endless three-minute rounds in which I and another man, usually half my age, circled one another within a ring of spectators, jabbing and ducking and feeling the sharp sting in my eyes when the other guy booped me on the nose.
There’s no time for self-consciousness in the ring. All my attention focused on trying to remember what I’d learned while reacting to the movements and blows of the guy in front of me. Of course that divides attention made me painfully slow and east to hit! It wasn’t until my last sparring session, just a few weeks as I remember before the pandemic, that I was able to glimpse what it might be like to be a fighter who had so deeply internalized the fundamental movements that he thought with his body and not with any consciousness at all.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot describes the development of the artist as “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” In On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates (one of the few women to have written about boxing with appreciation for the sport) remarks on the artist’s fascination with boxing as having some “kinship… in this matter of training. This fanatic subordination of the self in terms of a wished-for destiny.” What many other writers and artists—male writers and artists—seem to see in boxing is an extinction not of personality, but of anxiety—particularly the anxiety we effete ink-stained wretches tend to have about our bona fides as men. My favorite boxing story concerning writers has to be the possible apocryphal account of the poet Wallace Stevens knocking down Ernest Hemingway at a bar in Key West. Score one for the poets! And it somehow pleases me all the more that a writer so dandyish in his extravagant language, if not in his person, should strike the decisive blow against the most self-consciously macho man in the history of American letters, Norman Mailer notwithstanding.
There’s a new, or newish, gym here in Evanston that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while; they have a class this morning. Im going to head over there and see what it’s like, find out if I can still move the way you’re supposed to, and whether there’s still room for an aging man of letters in the ring of total escape. I’ll let you know how it goes.
