1.

When the fight finally starts, the crowd goes quiet — the only noises come from the trucks outside on Chicago Avenue, shifting gears, and the smack of rubber against bare, sweaty flesh. It’s almost a relief, the quiet — a relief to know that there are some things which are so visceral, so immediate, that they do not need commentary. I watch the crowd, mostly bros in loose shorts and basketball caps; big, busty girls in tight tank-tops and jeans with rhinestones on the back. After a while the fighters tire, and circle without coming close, breathing hard and loud. “Make some noise,” someone calls in back–still they lean forward, lock-jawed, silent–”Or don’t,” he concedes.

2.

The second fight is louder and faster–two big skinny guys who practically take turns standing and punching each other in the face. When the first guy falls, a college kid, wiry and tan, the crowd hoots and cheers. I think maybe there is something honest, even therapeutic about it: it’s hard not to admire the elegance of unrestrained violence, like watching the motion of a car engine — the hidden mechanism which underlies all things and makes them run. By the end of the fight, the college kid is bleeding, and yes, it looks like paint where it has smeared his opponent’s shirt.

3.
All the fights are draws. I don’t know much about the sport (ignorance never stops a poet), but the crowd seems to think this is a crime–an inexusable failure of the will. In the front row, girls get up and throw down their towels. What strikes me is not the fight itself but the fact of watching. I see a boxer, a short, skinny girl, kiss her grandfather–I see her friend, a provider in all things, ask, “Do you want some vitamin water? Do you want some vitamin water?” I see the fighter is crying — I see but I can’t tell why. Out in the ring, I see the judge, dragging a towel with his feet, mopping up somebody’s blood.

4.

I think of Pythagoras, of his famous, forced distinction between lives — those who play in the Olympics, naked, fit, gleaming; those who stand and sweat outside the stadium, selling little trinkets that only tourists buy; and those spectators, the ones who sit and watch, the theorists. (Theory comes from the Greek theoria which comes from theorizomai which means “to watch.”) “And this kind of life is best,” I tell myself, because after all these years of reading, it feels like revelation. And yet, this is what theory looks like: sitting in a hot gym, with St. Augustine in my bag, I write and write about a sport I don’t understand.

5.

I am trying out doubts, the way some people try on shoes — for the fun, for the attention, any reason, really, except the desire to buy things. But what doubt doesn’t flow from an unbroken, undivided certainty — the secret water beneath all inquiry? I can’t even imagine what the punches feel like. Some of the fighters seem to fight for the glory, raising their gloves and strutting between rounds; some out of an inexhaustible inner aggression, hunching low, throwing their whole being into their punches without guard or reserve. And some fight for the fun of it, smiling and hugging when the inevitable draw is called.

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