Pugilistic-19

During the past two weeks of the current, ah, crisis, I’ve been able to work from home quite a bit, and am grateful that I haven’t been laid off.

One of the fringe benefits of working at home has been getting to spend a lot of time with our dog Jinx. I can take a break any time I want, and usually my breaks include going outside to romp or walk with the spotted menace. Even though Jinx is mostly red heeler, I enjoy telling him regularly that his spots can be traced to disreputable Dalmatian genes. I also like advising him that it’s only an act of deliberate magnanimity on my part to assume the validity of his lineage. As I explained to him this morning, this means that I take it on faith that he is a red heeler and not a grossly inferior Dalmatian. Thus I conclude that he is a faith heeler.

Funny thing about red heelers. They can be quite moody…

On our long walks, Jinx generally trots just in front of me and switches back and forth on which side of the road he prefers. He takes great joy in everything around him, and likes to pounce on things — many of which I suspect are imaginary — in the tall grass in the culverts. My enjoyment comes from watching his exuberance and energy, noting the taut muscles beneath his bristly hide as he leaps and twists and gallops and points and prances.

Early this afternoon, our walk was temporarily interrupted when an enormous bull came down the side of one ridge fast enough to startle the pair of us. Only a single strand of electrified wire stretched between he and we. Jinx recovered rapidly from the shock of this black dinosaur’s appearance, and put himself between the bull and me. His hackles went up, and he half lunged up on his haunches, bellowing the deepest and most menacing bark I’ve yet heard from him. Naturally, the bull just gazed at the dog with bovine placidity, then turned and walked parallel to the wire for a few yards and began to crop grass.

I was delighted to watch the instinctive readiness to do battle in Jinx. He saw the bull as threatening me, and he didn’t hesitate for a second to do what he knew should be done. On the walk back to the house, I thought about what Jinx had done, what he’d been willing to do. I thought about fighting.

It seems to me in today’s soft culture, most men have no idea how to fight nor any inclination to do so, except when they’re adequately beered-up and someone insults their favorite sports team or catcalls the provocatively-dressed female they might be escorting at the moment.

The church and/or Christianity seems to have been very influential in this denaturing of male aggression during my lifetime. Indeed, most Christian men I know seem deeply uncomfortable discussing the topic of fighting or personal violence. This is a profound mystery to me.

Rail-thin as a teenager, I learned to fight early and got pretty handy at it. Violence was a natural part of my world, though the type of violence was a universe away from what transpires on the streets today. Most of my friends owned firearms; it was quite common to receive a .22 rifle or .410 shotgun as a twelfth birthday gift, whether new or handed down from father or grandfather. But not one incident of gun violence was ever recorded in my hometown when I was a teenager, even though we were all normal, healthy redneck boys. Nor were knives common. Almost all boys carried a pocketknife, but the idea of pulling one out during a fight was seen as cowardly, the sort of thing some oily Yankee hoodlum in Noo Yowrk City would do. The ability — and willingness — to dust knuckles was a mark of masculine virtue in the shaded, sidewalk-belted streets where I came of age.

And though I am old now, and if physically attacked would have to seriously harm the other person instead of just testing my abilities to put him on his backside (“fighting” per se is a young man’s game, as opposed to true physical combat), I often size up other men, watching how they move, how they carry themselves, where their eyes go, how focused or frivolous they seem to be, and I think, “I could take him,” or “That guy would fold me up and put me in his pocket if we buckled right here.” 

But I don’t sense this in most men these days, even those near my age. They seem to have been…bled out in some fashion. And younger men seem positively neutered. I watch men and wonder what they would do if someone menaced their woman or their children. I sincerely hope I’m wrong about my conclusions and assumptions.

There is a thrill, a savage kind of joy that overtakes a man in a real fight. The oft-repeated descriptions of tunnel vision in combat, that narrowing down of focus to the point where only the opponent exists –this is in my experience generally accurate. When that first blow is attempted and landed, the entire body seems to fill with blood and spirit, and time slows down, and all things become clear. When the first blow is received, the spirit fights its own instantaneous battle – do I fold, do I flee, do I counterattack? – and then that remarkable brew of experience, instinct, and bloodlust floods the body and seems to take over. Japan’s greatest feudal swordsman, the incomparable Miyamoto Musashi, once wrote,

“When I stand with my sword in hand against a foe, I become utterly unconscious of the enemy before me or even of my own self, in truth filled with the spirit of subjugating even earth and heaven.”

While I have never experienced a complete disconnect from the opponent before me, I have known something of the transport, the transcendence Musashi described. And those who have been taught or have somehow come to believe that violence is per se wrong and unChristian can only see physical combat as a negative thing, even sinful. This baffles me.

The genetic delicacy and preserve-my-life-and-health-at-all-costs mentality of today’s man is a pure impediment to his wholeness as a child of God. I believe this with my whole heart. But how to remedy it? I have no answers. Having lived a life full of conflict and having accepted it as natural and even good, my attempts to rouse a man’s interior martial spirit would be like trying to tell a deaf man to listen up.

Today’s men, those who have eschewed the martial spirit, are a curious, alien bunch to me. They lack something that I honestly didn’t think a man could live without. They worry me. But I worry even more about their women and their children. No man should ever fight another man over a sports team, or an insult, or a casual date. Likewise, wives and children should know absolutely for certain that their husband, their father, will maim any man who tries to harm them, or be maimed himself in the attempt. This is not phony-tough talk. This should be the reality of all those with a Y-chromosome into whom the living God has breathed His breath. It should be as natural as raised hackles.

~ S.K. Orr