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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Pugnation
Classic Gin
Tuesday, 2005-11-22 | Classic Gin
Of fighters and fighting little needs to be said.
Which is not to say that most people will miss an opportunity to valorize or defame combat and combatants. In fact, we might even conjecture that there is so little that must be said about fighting and fighters that people feel compelled to comment whenever they get the chance. Nature abhors a vacuum.
There are but two things that must be said. The first thing to say of combat and combatants follows the affirmation that violence (in the form of either physical assault or coercion) is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived and it is therefore that "fighting is the competition of two wills for dominance and fighters are agents either of their own will or of a superordinate will."
The second thing to say of fighters and fighting is that while fighting is in fact an art and fighters are indeed artists. This second thing to say of combat and combatants is as important as the first because everything that we can say about art we can correctly say about fighting. The 'art' of war is analogous to the 'art' of sculpture or the 'art' of cinema, etc.
Consider Achilles' Myrmidons. Their name comes from the word for "ant" and even those who don't know the Poet will be able to guess that Achilles' honor guard wasn't named thus because they were small or because they were easily trod upon. To the contrary, Achilles' Myrmidons were given their name because the legend held that they were ants shaped by the will of the immortal gods into men. While they had been given the shape and size of men, they retained many of their ant-like characteristics: they were relentless, possessed a single will and a singularity of purpose and were incredibly powerful. They say that an ant will fight against other insects (e.g. ants from foreign hives, beetles, etc.) past the point that its limbs have been rendered useless to the time when its brain stem is destroyed and it, literally, no longer exists. They also say that an ant can carry a burden many times its own weight.
The Myrmidons were feared not because they possessed strength in numbers; strength in numbers is easy to possess. Achilles' ant-men were the terror of the Trojan beachhead because of the fact that they possessed tremendous strength as individuals and the fact that these individuals possessed what seemed, on the battlefield, a single will. As we have said, all battles are contests of two wills and if you consider that one Trojan soldier possesses one will and 50 Myrmidons also possess one will, they represent a tremendous threat.
What about the Spartans? They're strong fighters. But are they artists?
What's important to remember about art--whenever you're attempting to diagnose a found object and you say, "yes, but is it art?"--is that nothing can be called art unless it 1.) is the work of humans and 2.) imitates, supplements or resists the work of nature. Considering fighting without considering the Spartans, those strong fighters, we can say that yes, fighting is the work of humans and yes that it both imitates and resists the work of nature (if we, fighters, understand that our opponents and teachers are naturally occurring).
Getting back to the Spartan 'art' of war, we see that their human work imitates the work of nature in that they would never take the field without favorable omens; if the Spartan haruspex saw a spotted liver or the Spartan augur didn't like what birds he saw, then there would be no fighting for at least another 24 hours. Their fighting imitates nature in that they take natural occurrences as their ques, fighting only when nature presented itself as a model.
The Spartan 'art' of war also supplements the work of nature in both the Malthusian sense and in the sense that the Spartan tendency towards isolationism and a militaristic society was, as any Spartan would admit, a product of the harsh and unforgiving landscape in which the ancient people made their home. We can also say of the Spartan of wearing crimson cloaks into battle that their 'art' resists the work of nature: refusing to allow an enemy the sight of Spartan blood by camouflaging it with material contrivances is a resistance of the natural tendency of blood to stand out from the surface onto which it has been spilt.
But I have already said too much that needn't be said--gilt for the Lilly. All that must be said of fighters and fighting is that battle is a contest of wills and combat is an art like any other.
