A reading from my teenage years: Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, faced bull fighting as an art. From the perspective of esthetic pleasure provided by the crash of the bravery or nobility of the bull, and the killing skill of the matador.
About the matador's and the aficionado's life/death dicotomy, he wrote:
He must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. [...] One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, [...] is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death, thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death, he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes: that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Chap. 19.
The man had its issues...
7 comments:
I was reading Almudena Grandes´ yesterday interview with José Tomás re his return to bullfighting. It was in the Spanish paper (El País). Do they have bullfighting in Argentina? I know they do in, e.g. Colombia.
ps: i am assuming, from what you wrote, that you are not in favour of this "sport"? if you don´t have it in argentina, have you ever been to attend one someplace else? somehow i always associate horses with argentina, so maybe if there is corrida, there might be "corrida de a pie"? as you can tell, very curious. chau.
no, i meant, corrida de rejones. it´s monday: obviously confused :-)
No bull-fighting in Argentina. Not in favour of violating animal rights, also not in favour of erasing cultural heritage. Never attended to one; but I've seen several taped. No problem in attending to those, eventually.
I admit Hemingway thirst for blood had me hypnotized during teenage years.
We have world value horses here, but for Polo and races, "Invasor", from argentinian breed, stole the Dubai World Cup very recently; only one defeat in its career.
You associate horses with Argentina surely because of some cultural little fame.
Something else, it may be of interest, since it is not very spread around; is the complete scorn we feel here, as a community, for people who mistreat horses. Remember that from very little, when one drunk person, near to one place I lived at that moment, was lynched and the police saved its miserable life, after tying one horse's legs and hitting it wildly. I still remember that guy surname, and I was a little child.
Horses has some special soul, they are very deep beings. Our culture needed horses to survive the pampas, you know, we are very attached to them and we have excellent riders.
Hi runnerfrog, this is really interesting.
Thank you for sharing your art :)
My pleasure, G.
Is not big deal ;-)
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