Because You Never Asked

(6/06)

     I can hear you all now: bull fights, uggh! What a horrible, medieval, bloody spectacle; what sadistic torture of an innocent animal; what banal, sanguinary passions laid bare to see. This is the mob in all its savage degradation, a thumbs up-thumbs down gladiatorial blood feast that degrades the human condition as well as a noble beast. What sadistic perversion. What low brow cruelty. Uggh, when will they stop all this?

     I’m not here to defend the bull fight. My sensitivities run similar to those just expressed above. For me, the sight of an abandoned dog desperately looking for salvation is an image that can stay with me for days, upsetting my equilibrium in a very tangible way. It’s difficult to the verge of impossible for me to even watch those nature shows where the great predators single out their victim and chomp the life out of it in a lightening burst of athletic cruelty. Even more traumatic are those crafty hyenas and dingo dogs, who hunt so shrewdly in packs and can take hours to peck and bite the life out of an agonizing large animal. From the little I know about bull fights, I would never consider attending one. I can’t watch it on TV. If made to attend, I doubt if I could go 15 minutes without puking or fainting, if not both. I don’t consider this practice an enlightened example of the human spirit. I wish there were never another bull fight.

     But it’s not my call. Due to my close relationship with Spain, I know enough about it to at least bring to light the more noble aspects of all this. It is anything but a low brow exercise in blood thirsty cruelty. It is an extremely deeply layered ritual of undeniable sophistication, a ritual that has built upon itself like an old growth forest through countless generations of practice. Yes, the animal always dies, but it is not a totally one sided feast of sadistic human cruelty. Yes, it is a controlled exercise, but there is enough real danger to give a human being the chance to show unusual courage --- or palpable fear.

     What is unfortunate is how the animal must be provoked and “prepared” (a nice way to say weakened) in the bull ring in order to eventually provide this test of human courage. Even so, from the time the bull enters the ring to the time he is finished off only lasts about 20 minutes.

     Considering the eating habits of the average human being, there can be little doubt that almost all those who consider the bull fight an uncivilized spectacle of animal cruelty, are also gluttonous carnivores. The next time you gorge yourself on another roast beef sandwich, or defy cholesterol with a mouthful of one of those over ten billion sold things, perhaps you should give a bit of thought as to how that bloody morsel has arrived to your canine faculties. This tortured jail animal of mass consumption is stuffed into tiny spaces while wallowing in its own fecal matter. This factory animal is generally sick with a constipated ventosity caused by the unnatural diet of grain and hormones used to artificially fatten the animal in the shortest time. It is a wretched creature with almost no life at all. It lives a holocaust of animal cruelty few of us could even stand looking at.

     Pass the ketchup!

     The animal being prepared for the bull ring lives his life as a bull should. He is allowed to graze and feed on the food his organism was meant to eat. He knows the day from the night, the vista of a rural landscape, perhaps the sound of a babbling brook, and he will watch the seasons change for at least 5 years. Which animal would you rather be?

     The one advantage the factory animal might have is that it loses its life in a relatively painless way (in contrast to the sickening horror of the rest of his “life“). The bull ring animal is made to suffer the extended provocations of his day of reckoning, but he also gets the chance to get his revenge, a revenge which is often able to be taken. The whole idea is to put the “torero” (a bull fighter is rarely called a “matador” in Spain) in real danger. This is what the show is all about. The bull who killed “Manolete” now has a place in Spanish folklore similar to that of Babe Ruth in America.

     Over the course of the last half century, the bull fight has lost much of its protagonism in Spanish life. Since the death of Franco in 1975 and the institution of a prototypical so called democratic government, Spain has rushed headlong into the modern world. It has become a member of NATO and the European Community, and the isolation of the dictatorship is just a dim memory. The bull fight and its gruesome blood rite of ritual death and sacrifice does not fit easily into the sensitivities of this modern world. (The modern world prefers massive death with push button technology). The bull fight is a minority practice now, attached to a sub-culture of true “aficionados” who don’t represent the average Spaniard. But its roots are way too deep to ever die, and it still holds enough of a place in Spanish culture to get its coverage in the press and on TV as well. The article I’m about to quote from mentioned that the Plaza de las Ventas in Madrid (the Madison Square Garden of bull rings) had registered a “lleno” (full) that day.

     Spain’s serious press will cover the bull fighting season on a regular basis. It’s relevant to note that such coverage does not appear on the sports page, but in the cultural section with the reviews of cinema, theater, art and music (I decided to list it in the “Arts” section of this work for just that reason). In much the same way ballet could be considered athletic art (how about very athletic?), so too is the ritual theater of the bull ring. Although there is no script and the results vary from week to week, the performance is played out within the corral of extremely traditional guidelines. There is room for innovation and the personal style and charisma of a “torero” are at the heart of it all, but the deeply felt esthetics of a clean, proper kill must be adhered to.

     The article in question was typical: small in space, but concise and brutally honest in its assessment of the day in the bull ring. I will use it to give the uninitiated (which includes me as well) a rudimentary idea as to the depth of tradition and sophistication involved in bull fighting.

     Unlike other forms of “artistic athletics” such as figure skating or gymnastics, bull fighting is not a competitive sport of numerically valued winners and losers. The success or failure of a “torero” is decided by how he is received by the audience. His is much more a theatrical performance which must bring joy and admiration to the ambience, rather than the rigid, soulless idea of wins or losses. How this admiration is given is part of an eternal ritual of very specific and well understood reactions from a totally initiated audience.

     In the upper left hand corner of all bull fight journalism is a small space --- something like a box score of a baseball or basketball game --- which gives the reader the particulars of the day in its most skeletal form. It will always start with a description of the bulls used that day and the farm they came from. For example: “5 bulls from Lagunajanda. #’s1 and 5 sent back, uneven presentation, physically flawed, poor blood line, with the exception of #2, noble.” Another bull was described as “uninspired”, etc., and all these capsule descriptions will use a specific Spanish word in a standardized way. The “box score” will then briefly capsulate each “torero’s” performance and give the crowd’s reaction to it. A very specific word or short phrase will describe the bull fighter’s attempt to kill, followed by the public’s reaction, once again with the use of a standardized word in parenthesis. For example: “Eduardo Gallo: estocada,  (silencio)”.  (An “estocada” has something to do with the sword thrust used to kill the bull.)

     The more elaborate description of the day’s activities will follow in the text of the article. In this case, the piece was entitled “Simply Human”, by one Antonio Lorca, and it chronicles a particularly bad day in the bull ring, with virtually nothing positive to say about any of the 3 “toreros” who performed. I translate some of the more cogent remarks:

     “It is painful to imagine what had to be going through the mind of El Capea when the public so vibrantly expressed their discontent for his vulgar work of garbage with the noble 3^rd bull” (In the capsulated “box score”, the public’s reaction was described with the word “bronca”. This word loosely means some kind of fight or argument.)

     Continuing on, the writer says, “No less pitiful was the graveyard silence received by Eduardo Gallo as the only response for the cheap surgery he inflicted on the 2^nd bull.” But the commentary gets even worse. “Many of today’s young bull fighters seem born from a laboratory test tube. They enter the ring like they were battery driven, like automats, without vibration, without heart, with no sense of the heroic. (…) Have they never seen films of Diego Puerta, Paco Camino, El Viti, just to name a few great ones? Do they realize, perhaps, that these bull fighters are made of a different material? The public can feel such things: are you a bull fighter, or simply human? And what a difference there is!”

     But the critic’s utmost disgust with the performance that day came near the end in one short sentence. “They seem to be bull fighters that aren’t ready to die.”