The Saccharine Science

On Boxing

I’ve read and reread the best boomer on the internet, Joyce Carol Oates, 1985 essay “On Boxing” a couple times now. I read it by myself, stoned at 4AM alone in my apartment. Being sad in the dark is a hobby of mine. I do a lot of good feeling around that time. It’s something I’m practicing - feeling. I’ve only recently learned its something that takes practice at all. It’s extraordinarily difficult to find time to feel these days. I think a lot of the time I spend doom scrolling is just trying to access that part of me that feels. Last night I was swiping through TikTok until something made me cry and then I fell asleep right after. The night before it was Joyce Carol Oates writing about punching.

I asked my partner if I could read it at her, which she agreed to probably because she likes the sound of my voice more than she hates when I talk about boxing. I’m very grateful. She very kindly listened and engaged and hated it still by the time I was done. Hated it more even. Funny, that. She’s always right and that makes me think about how wrong I am all the time. I know I’m not wrong about all the good boxing training and fighting has done for me recently but it makes me think about why I need boxing and if I’ll always need it.

The essay is clear in its analysis of the sport and the art of boxing. It says a lot about boxing I couldn’t ever say. It talks about the history and the persistence of the sport. The myriad of efforts to ban it. I and Joyce, however, are most interested in the paradox of it. The organized brutality of it. It’s sanctioned violence but there’s a referee and a clear set of enforced rules. All of this is true and obvious to the spectator, but you feel it tangibly when you participate in it. You need to be loose but tight. To use your anger, but keep your cool. The fastest way to get hit is to start worrying about getting hit. Being a boxer means leaning into the worst parts of yourself without letting them take over. Fight, but don’t fight. Don’t brawl, box.

I see that paradox now, more than I ever have. Not just in the sport but in myself. Joyce has the following to say on it:

“No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing. To write about boxing is to write about oneself however elliptically, and unintentionally.”

Boxing is brutal and violent but there’s rules. It’s a reflection of a bygone world of men where your value is tied to your ability to do violence. It’s placing suffering on a pedestal. The act of participating in it is an acknowledgment of the internal desire to cause pain, to dominate, to inflict yourself upon someone else. That’s not the whole of it - there’s competition, self-improvement, self-defense, you name it. But you must be willing to hurt and commit to it wholesale. You must have access to the part of you capable of violence and harm.

That’s the thing for me, that wisp of barbarism, to access it is to understand and to understand it is to gain mastery over it. Discipline for me is knowing when the limbic system is creeping its way in, and how to push it back. That’s what I need, that’s what I’ve been lacking for a long time. I think often to what the late Anthony Bourdain said:

"There's a guy in my head, and all he wants to do is lay in bed all day long, smoke pot, and watch old movies and cartoons. My life is a series of stratagems, to avoid, and outwit that guy.”

For now - boxing is one of those stratagems for me. “That guy” for me, is my shadow - that part of myself I need to outwit, avoid or, in my case, fight. Sloth is another name for it. It looks like bouts of insecurity and self-hatred and then leaning into comfort and disassociation. Not writing, and then hating myself for not writing and feeding into that cycle over and over. Or numbing myself to not feel it at all. The caveman in my head is always satiated. The comforts of modern society want him fat and lying around. There’s no fight to fight. No hunt to hunt. Just sit around the cave. Draw on the walls.

The same strength that boxing has taught me is what has me here writing this and not smoking weed and watching old movies. What does it mean for me personally that I need someone to punch me in the face to stop me from being lazy? I’m a stubborn ox who has to be slapped in order to keep his guard up, to keep going. The self-mortification of boxing brings clarity. There’s always a reason you got hit. You were thinking too much or too little. You moved too much or not enough. You reacted too early or too late. Honing that focus, the edge of that knife, has been essential for me.

This tool of discipline of, of self-control, of being able to look at the void and resist it transfers from boxing to self-examination. When you feel like you have the tools to touch the shadow in yourself you find it’s not a shadow but the mouth of a cave. There’s more than just a lazy but quick to anger caveman inside - there’s also a scared, sensitive kid. It’s the same kid who wrote poetry and felt big things fully and starting to have him back has been a revelation. I feel strongly I have, at least in part, boxing to thank for that.

Now back to the questions at hand - is this the only way and, more important, why my partner is all like, “Hey stop doing it that way dummy.” I think when I first read the essay I was sure anyone who did would be convinced of the essentialness and the rightness of boxing. Surely she would hear this precise distillation of the essence of the art and be swayed by it, right? How it’s a metaphor for life, for man’s battle against himself, a homoerotic male pseudo-sexual dance, a route into accessing and harnessing the darkest parts of oneself, etcetera, etcetera. All that depth and complexity and paradox - who wouldn’t be entranced by that?

If you believe, as I do, the ends don’t justify the means you must also believe that a violent, imperfect art cannot be the best tool. The presence of paradox is a paradox unto itself. It’s unknowableness itself a trap, a distraction. To know thyself is to know there is no self. There’s no calm or rest to be had at the edge of the void even if it’s where you feel the most you, because the goal at the end is to not concern yourself with “you”. To put the ego to rest. To take the kid out of the cave, carry him to bed and then walk into the light.

Right now I’m still adding to the toolbox. I found the kid but I think I might need some other tools to get him out. I’m testing out meditation, devotion to a partner, even a bit of the ole’ Protestant Work Ethic - elbow grease. What a mighty fine tool I found to get here though - surgical and blunt, elegant and brutal. A real work of art, the sweet science. I’ll hold on to it for a while, and then maybe, at some point, toss it into the depths and carry out the more important things.