Boxer at Rest, by Ivars Balkits

Boxer of Quirinal (Mys from Taranto), Greek statue 330 to 50 BC found in Rome in 1885. Livioandronico2013, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

 
Boxer at Rest
 
​"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

How tiredness looks. Slumped-over body. Rounded back. Arms dead weights on his thighs. Beaten raw. Bloody mouth and scars and his and the opponents’ blood spattered over his arms, shoulders and back. Facial wounds, called “ants,” still stinging. 
 
Coppery bronze with copper ore’s green patina, and bright flecks of refined copper for the gore. Hellenistic period sculptor Lysippus is credited as the artist by some. The majority of scholars will not commit and tend to agree there is no proof who made the Boxer at Rest. 
 
The sculpture exhibits the posture of one defeated, possibly, or alternately, dispirited. It may represent a victor who, though not once having lifted the index finger of submission in any bout, may be weary of the constant battering it is taking to remain on top. 
 
The bronze may be of Mys of Taranto, Italy, who reportedly lost every bout of his career except his final one and that at the Olympiad. As Mys, the bronze boxer may be showing reluctance to try once more for victory, wanting only to quit, yet urged on by his trainer or by his own nagging quest for glory.
 
One more time to lift myself up by the seat and engage with hope, though tired of hoping, tired of fighting, tired of outrage, tired of dysfunction, tired of misunderstanding, tired of confusing changes in people I love, tired of confusing changes in the political climate I was once certain I understood.
 
The sculpture could be of any one of a number of ancient Greek boxers: Glaukos of Kárystos, who fixed a bent plow blade with his bare fists as a boy and developed a top-of-the-head punch called the Plow Touch. Theagenes of Thassos,who as a boy also was able to lift and carry heavy bronze statues and as an adult purportedly ate an entire bull on a dare. Kleomedes of Astypálaia, who in a rage after being disqualified for killing a man in a fight, knocked down the pillar of a school building, killing sixty children inside. Boxers could be heroes, but at times problematic heroes.
 
With regard to Mys of Taranto, only one person that I can tell asserts he even existed. The reviewer for an archaeological magazine, this person also states the sculpture was found at the Baths of Caracalla. It was unearthed on Quirinale Hill in Rome in 1885, not far from the former site of the Baths of Constantine. 
 
I confess I am exploiting the boxer motif to express what I feel about leaving the fight. No more news, no more social media. No more activism as a result, maybe. Opting out of information and gossip spoon-fed by the algorithms. The need to keep up replaced by the need to drop out of the race. The need to know replaced by the certainty all is lost.  
 
Instead of “It’s time to return to the game,” this maybe merely-generic boxer may be hearing his time has passed, that the previous match was his final one. “No more. Retire.” It could be that. Note the age of the boxer. A veteran, he has been at it a long time. Maybe, by rote, he will stand up anyway and enter the sand pit once more to take and give a beating. Or he may agree it has come to an end.
 
Rather than stand up, I choose to remain unmoved. Movements cause pain, especially if they are the same movements. The always movements. Resulting too often in unresolved re-current outcomes. Fight 1 and then here’s Fight 2; and guess what, here is Fight 1 again. It goes from wrong to repeat, often in less than a generation. Life is heavier and needs witness, but is it my duty to point out always that Everything is spoiled?
 
It could still be Mys.
 
The skeleton of an ancient athlete was found in Taranto, buried with four amphorae depicting Olympic events, one of which was boxing. The unbattered condition of the bones suggests boxing may not have been that athlete’s main event, however – unless it is the skeleton of Melankomas from western Anatolia, who only ever fought defensively and wore out his opponents by sheer endurance, suffering no major injury himself. Ancient rope-a-dope. It could be him if he died in Taranto. 
 
He did not. 
 
In a time of troubles the Boxer at Rest went underground. Sifting the soil to keep it unscathed and whole, the inhabitants of Magna Graecia buried the statue and fled the barbarian hordes in the fifth century CE. 
 
Dug up, the boxer is shown in a photograph sitting on the ground. His head turned, as if questioning, wondering: “What happened to the temples and the Thermae Constantini, and where are the crowds?” A solitary, bewildered, dust-covered figure in a gray landscape, he has been placed to look exactly as he does, by Rudolfo Lanciani, principal archaeologist for the project.
 
How did the country transform so? How did the world? Insults as discourse. Dysfunction as entertainment. Celebrity as wisdom.  Is there anything left to be serious about? War, hunger, poverty, climate? I don’t know where they came from or what they came for. Weird rich powerful people, our collective problem. 
 
Foreskin tied with a knot. Nipples the colour of his broken mouth. Nose smashed entirely shut. Cheek under one eye inlaid with a darker alloy to represent a bruise. And the stitching on his hand wrappings of ox-hide, called himantes by some and caestus by others, bloodied red. Can he take much more? Watched over by the official with his cane. Struggling in the loose dirt of the skamma to maintain. No mercy if he falls. 
 
Anything becomes believable. The irrational, the couldn’t-be, the inconceivable, is. It exists in public life, exists in the minds of frightened (disgusted, angered) people ready to support any kind of retaliation on the enemy who has done nothing to them, who in a sense does not exist, who has been invented for them.
 
Gamblers, art-lovers, toss the divination dice. Rub the bronze boxer’s fingers and toes for luck. Will the Boxer at Rest throw in the towel, knuckle under, bow, buckle, fold? Return from the next fight to rest but then fight again? Will he go down and out and never return? What are the odds? Throw the knuckle bones to bet whether his knuckles hold out. Or his brain. 
 
As the world goes for broke, betting the climate will not crash, dazzled by the artificial and , literally entertained to death, with everyone buried neck-deep in their mind-phones, their senses atrophying, I am keen to spend more time in the here-now instead of the in-there. I aim to immerse myself in memories of our home in vegetable, mineral, and animal, to lift my head from civilized distractions, and reconnect with the mystery of being alive on this green and blue planet. 
 
It is now the moment for the Boxer to turn his head. It is critical he turn his head and look. It will complete an action that needs to happen, that may change everything. Who stands in the absence? The artist created an absence. The Boxer may be isolated now when once he was surrounded, his response somehow explained by the configuration of the figures no longer there.
 
To escape derives from meaning to remove one’s cloak or clothing, to become naked again. Like a boxer who has stopped picking a fight with himself, I aim to divest. To escape the ranks of the insane. That means limiting myself in exchanges with my outraged friends, dismayed and angry at how things are shaping up in the world – kicking (boxing, head-bumping) the junk news addiction.
 
Outrage fatigue. Everyone worthwhile has it. To escape it is rational. 
  
Ivars Balkits
 
A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published by Vernacular Journal, Meetinghouse Magazine, and Pnyx (Ozymandias Project) among other online literary magazines. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014. 

Boxer Excavation. Inconnu, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.