“Putting on the Gloves”
I awoke from a dream in which I am being threatened by armies of stratum, syntax that escaped from some grammar hole, and angry breaths that seems to come from some distant horizon line. As I come to my senses I wonder if it’s time to “put the gloves on.” As is my habit, I settled into a deep breathing routine, trying to keep these dream armies at bay for the time being.
I have been recording my dreams for thirty-five years and regularly use them in my novels and poetry. They have become central to my creativity. Along the way I have received considerable help from course-work at the C.G. Jung Center in New York City. Jung provided a much richer dream aesthetic than Freud, moving beyond a narrow, ego-centered interpretation to a broader, more soulful approach.
Regarding the dream in question, I’m not surprised to being overrun by “armies of stratum,” syntax from a grammar hole, or “angry breaths.” I’m finishing two novels — “When War Becomes Us” and “Going Under: The Wound, the Dream and the Prayer,” as well as a poetry volume, centered on dreams, about embracing the feminine and the anima within that Jung’s describes as one of man’s central tasks.
Shortly after the dream I had a good laugh about resorting to the old London schoolboy’s habit of putting on the boxing gloves to settle an argument — and not being willing to embrace at the time the full psychology of the dream. That’s another story. Sometimes the metaphor takes over. Sometimes the flat-footed literalist wins, at least for the moment. And that’s another bout.
The above advice about putting on the gloves was initiated by my father, on a Christmas Eve when I was about twelve. Half-awake I saw him place something unwrapped next to my bed and my older brother’s. When my father left, we discovered boxing gloves. On Christmas day we provided in the kitchen of our North London home an unscripted, unschooled boxing exhibition for our parents.
My father was a gambler. He bet a lot on the horses, and even for a spell kept two greyhounds in our attic that he raced at a local arena. He was a heavy user of football betting “pools” that didn’t seem to put much bread and cheese on the table. He wanted his three sons to be athletes, if not priests. He regularly watched the two of us box in the boy scouts. In one bout I was hit below the belt and won on a foul. My father was furious and later I thought he must have placed a bet on the bout.
My father would write from America: “The boys will be better in the states.” He died three years after we arrived. We lived in a working-class area outside of Pittsburgh, PA. We were immigrants, spoke “funny” and were an easy target for some of the teenage mob. I put the gloves on again. By pure chance I encountered while delivering newspapers a customer who used to be an amateur boxer — his garage was full of his boxing photos. We got to talking and “Henry” said he’s be glad to help. I had at least a dozen lessons with him, joined a boxing crowd, and in large measure kept detractors at bay. I was bloodied here and there but managed to get through high school.
The U.S. Navy waited and was decent enough to accept an immigrant — and later my younger brother. The crew was a broader cultural mix than my Pittsburgh home and included a good number of Hispanics. I was stationed on an ammunition ship delivering bombs and weaponry to Asia, especially Vietnam. At our home port in Port Chicago, CA, anti-war demonstrations were beginning to leech into the ship. All ships have hierarchies, whether intended or not: officer and enlisted; petty officers and seamen; new seaman and the salts. It wasn’t exactly the best time to be African American or Latino aboard ship. Or an immigrant.
Ever since arriving in the states I had been the outsider or more accurately a “limey,” a term that harkens back to the time British sailors consumed lime to ward off scurvy. Aboard ship this usually consisted of below-decks episodes of finger-pointing, chatter and modest poetry (‘Blimey Limey, your face is grimy’). As luck would have it my ship would schedule, once at sea, “smokers,” boxing matches between crew members. So, I “put on the gloves” again and after a half-dozen bouts — and before we crossed the International Dateline, the “Limey” chatter had died down. I had to put up with a few bloody noses, especially from one very big guy from Texas.
As my father was dying of throat cancer, we would watch boxing matches together. At this time Rocky Marciano was in his prime and unstoppable. I stayed interested in the sport and boxed a little in college. I was an early fan of Muhammed Ali, even after he refused to respond to the Army draft, because of the Vietnam War. By this time, I had soured on the War and had completed my first book of poetry, “That Kingdom Coming Business,” that explored the religious overtones that seeped into some shipboard routines.
I would often visit Ali’s training camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, send a few fan letters, and watched almost all his fights. I watched one of his fights on a large screen in the late 1970s with friends in an agricultural hall. Here are a few lines from a poem I later wrote for him: “With Ali in Ag Hall.” I include the first and last stanza.
“We entered the closed-circuit stall
Cattle hair on the rafters, love juice passed in jugs,
The coffee smoke from barn-ripe joints
Made the market drunk. We rubbed our hands,
A can, a butt. You came on a wind.
You were our third wish, our first hope.
“Your wand of a right chilled the stutter-step
Of the butcher stroke which painted your inside.
And we were glad. Your journey to the well,
Your ragtime stint in Gethsemane,
Your toll, made the arena wail.”
Like a Times Square drunk
Who shifts the weight of his heart
From foot to foot.
By this time, it was becoming clear Ali was slowly down in the ring, but his influence and reputation grew as he spoke out against the Vietnam War and for human rights in general as a U.S, emissary for peace. He was unsteady lighting the Olympic torch in 1996. He died in 2016 at the age of seventy-four.
As the news of Ali’s worsening health problems became public, I lost all interest in boxing. I haven’t watched a bout in thirty years. The only time I put on boxing gloves these days is to punish the heavy bag in my basement.
And on reflection I realize that, while the dream nudged me back into the “ring” and a bout of hero worship, as Ali taught us, there are plenty of targets outside the ring that deserve our martial attention. His grace, stamina and commitment to peace have profoundly affected me, and what and how I give back to the world.
For me, that task is also addressed in my fiction and poetry that are laced with the influence of dreams. As mentioned earlier, next year I will publish two novels and a collection of poetry that deal with the ravages of the body and spirit that age, war and life bestow on us.
Muhammed Ali certainly knew something about these subjects, especially the “wounding.” I have learned much from this beautiful man.
