I’ve lamented multiple times about how poor our language is when it comes to describing violence. People will say that soldiers killing each other in battle is “murder,” that a man walking toward a police officer with knife in hand “wasn’t doing anything,” that “silence is violence,” or that abortion is “child sacrifice” (in child sacrifice the children are named and acknowledged as people with discrete, and high, value, hence their worth as sacrificial victims). Violence continues to elude language for two reasons:
- People who are good at violence usually have inadequate language skills to describe and process violence, and
- People who are a good at language are unwilling or unable to perform acts of violence, giving them no opportunity to describe them.
So we have two great opportunities here: teach violence-capable people (martial artists, military, police, violent criminals) good grammar and language so they can grammarize their actions, and put linguists into boxing classes or have them do ridealongs with police or military so they can experience, and parse, real violence.
But these things rarely happen. When they do, they’re stellar. For example, I’m reading Bill Buford’s Beyond the Thugs, and his descriptions of violence are the best I’ve ever read:
Directly in front of me-so close I could almost reach out to touch his face-a young Italian, a boy really, had been knocked down. As he was getting up, an English supporter pushed the boy down again, ramming his flat hand against the boy’s face. He fell back and his head hit the pavement, the back of it bouncing slightly.
Two other Manchester United supporters appeared. One kicked the boy in the ribs. It was a soft sound, which surprised me. You could hear the impact of the shoe on the fabric of the boy’s clothing. He was kicked again-this time very hard-and still soft, muted. The boy reached down the sound to was protect himself, to guard his ribs, and the other English supporter then kicked him in the face. This was soft sound 2 well, but it was different: you could tell that it was his face that had been kicked and not his body and not something protected by clothing It sounded gritry. The boy tried to get up and he was Pushed back down-sloppily, without much force. Another Manchester United supporter appeared and another and then a third. There were now six, and they all started kicking the boy on the ground. The boy covered his face. I was surprised that I could tell, from the sound, when someone’s shoe missed or when it struck the fingers and not the forehead or the nose.
I was transfixed. I suppose, thinking about this incident now, I was close enough to have stopped the kicking. Everyone there was off-balance – with one leg swinging back and forth – and it wouldn’t have taken much to have saved the boy. But I didn’t. I don’t think the thought occurred to me. It was as if time had dramatically slowed down, and each second had a distinct beginning and end, like a sequence of images on a roll of film, and I was mesmerized by each image I saw. Two more Manchester United supporters appeared-there must have been eight by now. It was getting crowded and difficult to get at the boy: they were bumping into each other, tussling slightly. It was hard for me to get a clear view or to say where exactly the boy was now being kicked, but it looked like there were three people kicking him in the head, and the others were kicking him in the body-mainly the ribs but I couldn’t be sure. I am astonished by the detail I can recall. For instance, there was no speech, only that soft, yielding sound-although sometimes it was a gravlly, scraping one-of the blows, one after another. The moments berween the kicks seemed to increase in duration, to stretch elastically, as each person’s leg was retracted and then released for another blow.
The thought of it: eight people kicking the boy at once. At what point is the job completed?
It went on.
The boy continued to try to cushion the blows, moving his hands around to cover the spot were he had just been struck, but he was being hit in too many places to be able to protect himself. His face was now covered with blood, which came from his nose and his mouth, and his hair was matted and wet. Blood was all over his clothing. The kicking went on. On and on and on, that terrible soft sound, with the boy saying nothing, only wriggling on the ground.
A policeman appeared, but only one. Where were the other police? There had been so many before. The policeman came running hard and knocked over two of the supporters, and the others fled, and then time accelerated, no longer slow motion time, but time moving very fast. We ran off.
I don’t know what happened to the boy. I then noticed that all around me there were others like him, others who had been ripped up and had their faces kicked; I had to side step a body on the ground to avoid running on top of it.
In the vernacular of the supporters, it had now gone off.” With that first violent exchange, some kind of threshold had been crossed, some notional boundary: on one side of that boundary had been a sense of limits, an ordinary understanding -even among this lot-of what you didn’t do; we were now someplace where there would be few limits, where the sense that there were things you didn’t do had ceased to exist. It became very violent.
Writing like this is compelling because it bridges two islands that nobody tends to bridge: language and violence.
Another example is Alice Miller, whose book For Your Own Good documents the childhoods of various Third Reich officials, which were usually structured around some form of physical abuse and emotional neglect, and how this was a good fit for German society as a whole which had generally the same child-rearing practices.
Miller doesn’t say so explicitly, but child abuse has a network effect that operates the same way kinship does: abuse your child, and your child will abuse his/her children, etc. They will be compatible with certain people, restricting marriage, which will crystallize into certain forms that will soon demonstrate a clear structure. If your leaders have been raised under a similar system, then there’s a match. When the abusive kinship of the leadership matches the abusive kinship of the commoners, then you things like the Holocaust seem natural, like it’s just another institution in the network like the DMV or a soup kitchen.
But Miller’s terminology is unique, and violence continues to suffer from bad definitions. There’s not enough cross-training.
Being in the stunt business, I would encourage stunt performers to stop binging shows and instead spend a couple hours reading 50 pages a day. Read books, not blogs. Read books over 80 pages long because this will force you to get into the author’s head. Especially read books you disagree with, and from a bygone era. Read history’s losers. They’re the best sparring partners. This will train your grammarizer. The world needs you to start processing the stuff you do and put it into words.
I would also encourage my non-stunt colleagues (who are all smarter than me) to take some boxing or fencing classes or something. Or come to my gym and I’ll give you a tutorial of some kind.
And then, email me and we can collaborate on a book. Nobody is writing this stuff, folks.