While the mob practices the evil arts to ritual perfection, the ?good? man or woman merely excels at the precarious business of being fully human?
Abandon all hope you who enter here . . . I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice. ? Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Robert Ecksel?s articles on the mob are thought provoking, and in many ways. Inherent in an understanding of things ?dark,? like the mob, is the mystery of its allure, as evil is parasitic on goodness, in much the way darkness is on light or cold on heat. If you think of it, evil, darkness and cold all have this factor in common ? they come into being only in the absence of their counterparts (goodness, light and heat). That is, evil, darkness and cold are voids, not positive entities in and of themselves. To illustrate, one can turn a light on in a dark room, but can?t turn the dark ?on? in a light room. Likewise, one can turn heat on in a cold room, but not the converse. Air-conditioning? A process that voids heat. Disease? A condition devoid of health. And fools? They rush in where the wise (and angels) fear to tread. The law of entropy (voids) everywhere abounds, and everywhere pathogens (evils) rush in to fill their gaping voids.
In order to maintain a central foothold within a person, ?goodness? is something that s/he must value and practice in order to be proficient at it, intending it to be dominative and prevailing. To be proficient at something takes practice; to be great at it takes more practice. Sort of like playing an instrument skillfully, keeping physically conditioned or mastering any endeavor that only comes with focused intent, discipline and practice.
While the mob practices the evil arts to ritual perfection, the ?good? man or woman merely excels at the precarious business of being fully human, allowing their good to prevail over their fiery/icy personal ?demons? via intention and practice, lest their fire consume them, or ice frost them over. As for fire and ice, perhaps that?s why Hell is depicted as an eternal combustion, or why zombies, vampires, ghouls and stone faced mob thugs look and feel so deathly cold. Recall, Richard Kuklinski, the mob?s notorious killer, is known as the ?Iceman.? Like Mother Teresa on the virtuous side of the good-evil spectrum, you wouldn?t find the ghoulish Kuklinski singing the National Anthem before many sporting events.
It seems those who become really brilliant at practicing the better angels of their nature ? the saints ? are the virtuosi of life, the Pavarottis, Mozarts, Alis and (cough) Mayweathers of virtue. By contrast, vicious people are those who, for one reason or another, never got the hang of the good side of human existence, say, as someone never got the hang of swimming, doing math or playing poker ? or more accurately, never valued those endeavors enough to learn or master them. They are on fire with negative passion or possessed of cold, calculating dispassion, rendering them oddities, mere freakish mutations.
Thus, as personified voids of the good, evil practicing folk aren?t really there, but remain caricatures of the good, unfinished sketches of fully alive human beings. Like ghosts, they hover closer to death than life, darkness than light, trapped in a dark limbo that cuts them off from the human world. As such, they populate a world of a different order ? the underworld. They may look human enough all right, and even sound that way, yet like aliens or zombies in a horror movie, their appearance is merely phony.
Evil folk find meaning only in feathering their own nest, advancing their heinous causes(s) and/or tearing others apart ? radically so. Their thoughts, words and acts are habitually life-diminishing, and in a wholesale way. Preferring the perfection of death to being fully alive, they are sadists, delighting in the morbid occupation of smashing all human meaning and value to pieces.
Aside from his impressive ring record, I?m convinced such was a, if not the, cardinal element in the allure and attraction of Mike Tyson, at least before his innate evil (the passion of raging fire and icy ring dispassion) got the best of him. Eventually, Tyson became a parody of himself, just another paradoxical, self-defeating, burned-out sports ?star,? fizzling after a meteoric rise.
In Middle Age architecture, particularly in churches, gargoyles were grotesque appearing creatures attached to towering cathedrals. They were sculpted and placed beneath Gothic spires to depict evil beings fleeing sacred spaces, as the sacred and profane can?t occupy the same throne at the same time. Like riding two horses or drawing two bows, serving two masters internally is a prohibitive impossibility. Sort of like a boxer throwing a roundhouse in pursuit of a one-punch KO ? on himself.
Says here, Mike Tyson fought with the fierce and menacing countenance of a gargoyle, the ferocity bent on literally destroying his opponents. Frankly, his terrifying intensities were fueled by and appeared to transcend levels of violence never before witnessed in the fight game, defeating most of his opponents before they even stepped into the ring. In this writer?s view, such is the primary reason Tyson?s countenance has become the face, not only of the dark side of boxing, but the demonic side of all of sport over the past twenty years.
Virtue may be adorable, but it?s vice that folk find sexy and alluring. Truth be told, good is viewed by the vast majority as restrictive and nerdy. One need only witness the public?s pleasure and excitement over minimally restrictive amusements and pastimes, the sadism and violence of which stimulates and arouses (fires) them en masse, or leaves them ogling with detached indifference or cold dispassion (ice).
Sport is life in microcosm. As such, Freddy Krueger appears again and again in many guises, with sport merely reflecting same, at its worst perpetuating our national and global Nightmare on Elm Street.
