Coincidentally, last Monday I watched cafe-fighting videos with my friends, Arron and Seth. Fight Club is alive and thriving in the Indiana hinterlands. Their ultimate goal to go pro and fight on UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships for you that don't know), these young men fight mano a mano in a cage, no helmets, just gloves on, using whatever fight technique they know from boxing to wrestling and beyond. It is "full contact combat sport" that allows both striking and grappling technique and is said to have originated in mixed-style contests in Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim in the early 1900s. It became mainstream after the founding of UFC in 1993.
I've never been one to spend the afternoon watching football, much less a boxing event. Bloodletting and injuries are something to be prevented not willfully invited upon one's person but chilling with Arron and Seth last Monday surprisingly intrigued me. Arron's description of how he felt before, during and after a fight strongly reminded me of how I feel after a powerful sitting. The adrenaline rush creates a similar mental state as meditative absorption! In both states ego is relegated to the background or even temporarily disabled. There is only the complete experience of physical sensations held together by a seamlessly whole awareness and time stands still.
Japan's 20- and 30-year-old men are at one end and American cage-fighters at another but they are both expressions of masculinity in search of a character. In a post-nuclear age where battles are fought not in large-scale World-War type, heavy-armor-and-machinery warfare, where politics and religion play out man to naked man, men are re-inventing the masculine experience. We have no choice. The women have changed past recognition. Many of them, like the Japanese 'carnivore' women of Furosawa, have assumed the old-time fighting stance of what we now lambently call the patriarchal age. It looks to me like the eternal seesaw, the fragile dance of Yin and Yang that must preserve the Oneness. If it grows too big here, it must yield there. Or is this more of the hocus-pocus the Communists in China abandoned after its century of humiliation at the hands of the forward-thinking round-eyes, a painful cleansing that prepared the way for that country's current surge into an economic giant confounding the West's doctrine of requisite capitalism founded on democracy?
Just when we think we know it all, the world shows another room in its many mansions of which we were totally unaware and we are spellbound again by its incomprehensibility, an unending fascination that may be at the heart of being alive itself.
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