Sor Juana died of the plague after treating others who succumbed to the same fate. Octavio Paz notes that at the time of her death in 1695, the disease was commonly treated by means of bloodletting. In addition, he writes, as a member of the convent, Sor Juana would likely have been required to engage in self-flagellation — as did other nuns — in times of plague. “As they wound their way through the corridors and patios of the convent, singing and praying, they scourged and lashed themselves,” Paz writes. “A Christian version of the bacchantes and maenads: the nuns in the night shadows, half naked, bodies bleeding, singing and wailing.”
It is sad to imagine the seventeenth-century nun drawing her own blood to renounce the life of letters. Did she cut a finger on the hand used for writing? Did she nick her arm or leg? Was she alone in her study, reaching for a private, hidden section of skin never seen by others? Sor Juana does not say where or how she cut herself, and does not speak of any pain it might have caused. I imagine she interpreted any such self-inflicted wound as a way of doing penance, prostrating herself before her maker. It seems to dovetail perfectly with Paz’s description of nuns flailing themselves and walking through the convent to wail and bleed under the cover of darkness. Some things feel safer in the absence of light. Removing our clothes. Kissing. Making love. And, for the Roman Catholic sisters of seventeenth-century Mexico, bleeding to pay for their sins.
Sor Juana has been the subject of countless essays, dissertations, and books. In 1990, the late Argentinian filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg released a feature film about Sor Juana, entitled Yo, la peor de todas. (In English, that means “I, the worst of all the world.”) The film’s title borrowed from some of the last words that Sor Juana wrote. They came after her renunciation of writing. After she gave up her books. As Paz notes in The Traps of Faith, a few months before she died, Sor Juana entered these lines into her convent’s Book of Professions: “In this place is to be noted the day, month and year of my death. For the love of God and his Most Holy Mother, I entreat my beloved sisters the nuns, who are here now and who shall be in the future, to commend me to God, for I have been and am the worst among them. Of them I ask forgiveness, for the love of God and his Mother. I, worst of all the world, Juana Inés de la Cruz.”
Why did Sor Juana go from being celebrated throughout the Spanish empire to being without books or writing implements in her final years, whispering toward the grave that she was the worst of all the world? Octavio Paz invokes two reasons. The first, he says, is the opposition between the intellectual life and the duties and obligations of the convent life. “The second is the fact that she was a woman,” he states. “The latter was the more decisive; if she had been a man, the zealous Princes of the Church would not have persecuted her.”
SOR JUANA SIGNED HER LETTER with her own blood to symbolize her sacrifice to God. Bloodshed usually shocks people. To be made socially acceptable, it must be marked by ritual. What might be illegal in one context — say, punching somebody in the eye and causing him to bleed profusely — will be cheered, praised, and remunerated if it unfolds during a heavyweight boxing match. Creating rules about bloodshed lets us quench our thirst for violence without self-castigation or concern that we are giving in to our most base instincts.
I want to examine the rituals governing bloodshed as a way of remembering that we always walk a razor’s edge when it comes to what is characterized as civilized or uncivilized behaviour.
Consider the tradition of duelling. A long-time indulgence among aristocrats and the wealthy in Europe and North America, duelling was bound by rules of blood. The duel was a strange thing. If you were a gentleman, you played by the rules — and there were plenty of them. You never challenged another man to a duel for pleasure, but rather, to correct an insult to your honour. If someone called you a fool, slapped your face, or was rumoured to have slept with your wife, then, by George, bring out the duelling swords. (Or, after the eighteenth century, pistols.) You had to select your duelling weapons, which were supposed to be equal and lethal. On May 3, 1803, one pair of duelling men fought from gas balloons floating some nine hundred metres above the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The duellists fired at each other with guns. One was reported to have “fired his piece ineffectually,” but his antagonist proved to be a better shot. He pierced his adversary’s balloon, which crashed down onto a house below, killing the opponent and his second. (In the world of duelling, a “second” is the person who escorts the duellist to and from his confrontation, and sees to it that the rituals are followed.)
Although the duel in balloons above the Tuileries ended the lives of two people, many other duels fought on the ground allowed an antagonist to save his honour and life by drawing his opponent’s blood, or by having some of his own drawn. At the first sight of blood, opponents were offered the opportunity to step back from hostilities and consider the matter resolved. Thus the notion of drawing “first blood” was a way to skirt death and end a duel civilly.
First blood has also come to be identified with the idea of being the first to aggrieve another, or the first to be aggrieved. If someone has drawn your blood first, you have licence to return the violence — often dishing out far more than you received. In the 1982 action film First Blood, Sylvester Stallone — acting as Rambo — tries to contain his emotions after being traumatized as an American soldier captured by enemy forces in the Vietnam War. When the movie begins, he is back at home in the United States, drifting and trying to stay out of trouble. Pent up with rage and frustration, Rambo keeps it together until he is picked on by a sheriff. Rambo keeps a lid on his emotion, and displays no sign of violence until the sheriff draws first blood. After that, it’s mayhem. Rambo carries out every manner of assault, death, and disorder, but the audience is led to root for him — and to accept the spectacle of violence that Rambo leaves in his wake — because his blood was drawn first.
We even attribute honour to animals that shed blood for our entertainment. In the bullfight, before the matador prepares to plunge his sword into the charging bull, the animal has already been weakened by repeated attacks from picadors. These armed men stab the bull while on horseback, making it bleed heavily before the final charge. In the eye of the crowd, a noble bull will maintain its fury and aggression even after suffering attacks that have left large quantities of blood to stream down its ribs. Ideally, the animal will be weakened in body, but not in spirit. The noble bull mounts a final charge, desperate to gore the lithe, nimble man with the red cape.
Audiences that watch cockfights seem to appreciate the very same thing: the undiminished, murderous intent of the cock, which charges forward and fights to the death, even as it is bleeding and being dismembered by a superior opponent.
Other animals have been made to fight to the death too, for human entertainment: dogfights are popular in much of the western hemisphere, as well as in Pakistan, India, and Japan. Some people pay to watch pit bulls rip apart feral hogs. In bear-baiting, the bears often have their teeth removed and claws filed before being matched against fighting dogs. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild is narrated from the point of view of the dog Buck, who survives an attack by another dog and becomes an alpha male in a pack of sled dogs during the Yukon gold rush. Sled dogs then and now will rip each other to shreds if they spot a chance to pounce on another’s weakness and rise in the hierarchy of the pack, thus giving rise to the expression “it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”
THE THRILL OF WATCHING beasts fight with nobility, even as they bleed, transfers into the human arena. I can think of no other professional team sport so obsessed with violence, and in which violence has such an overtly sanctioned role, as professional hockey. True, fighting will earn you a penalty. But it’s part of the game, and fighting — along with the price of the penalty — is paradoxically used as a means to discipline players for displaying inappropriate aggression. Hockey teams even hire goons, whose primary role on the ice is to protect the more vulnerable members of their t
eams — the goalies and the high-scoring forwards — by fighting with those who dare to hurt them. The noise can be deafening in a hockey arena, but at no time is it more deafening than when two players break into a fight. The roar of the crowd makes me think of spectators at a gladiatorial duel in ancient Rome — but more on that later. Fighting is not countenanced in baseball, football, or basketball, but a hockey game without a fight will disappoint a diehard traditional fan.
Much has been written about the physical and psychological damage sustained by young men who are cast into the roles of hockey goons. In the summer of 2011, three former National Hockey League enforcers died: one from mixing painkillers with alcohol, one from suicide, and another from likely suicide. Despite the obvious dangers to the fighters, many hockey journalists, fans, coaches, and players continue to insist on the necessity of bloodshed. They claim that the threat of this violence prevents other violence from occurring on the ice.
Like duelling, fighting in hockey is highly ritualistic. Informal but very real rules are followed: each combatant should agree to fight, face the other directly, and drop his gloves; and it should end when the first fighter tumbles to the ice. Most fans and players accept fighting, and the misdemeanour usually warrants nothing more than a five-minute penalty. I cannot for the life of me understand why we allow men to brutalize each other like this in sport, and I do not believe for a moment that it is good for these combatants — in the moment, or later, when coping with head trauma and emotional stress.
Boxing and ultimate fighting (or fighting in cages) also stand out as some of the most bloodthirsty sports today. There are rules to be followed. You can throw a punch so hard that it kills your opponent — literally knocks him dead in the moment. That is within the rules. A knockout, or hitting an opponent so hard that he falls down and cannot get back up quickly and competently, is the ultimate and most manly way to win a boxing match. If you kill your opponent in the process, well, as long as it was a clean hit, it’s one of the risks of the sport. Many boxers have died after taking excessive punishment in the ring. In 1982, a twenty-three-year-old South Korean boxer named Kim Duk-Koo slipped into a coma minutes after he lost a technical knockout to Ray Mancini at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Kim, who had grown up poor and been a shoeshine boy before becoming a professional boxer at the age of nineteen, died four days after the bout. As well, in a heavyweight boxing match in the Manchester arena in Calgary in 1913, Canadian brawler Arthur Pelkey knocked out his Nebraska opponent Luther McCarty in the first round. McCarty, who had been dubbed the next “Great White Hope,” died in the ring. The Royal Northwest Mounted Police charged Pelkey with manslaughter. Jurors acquitted the boxer and shook his hand after rendering their verdict, but Pelkey had been traumatized by the event and never won another fight.
Boxing is highly ritualistic too. The combatants salute each other before the fight begins. Their gloves are monitored and controlled for size and makeup. They wear mouthguards. We allow one licensed boxer to draw blood from another. We even allow for the shedding of much blood, provided that it doesn’t hinder a boxer’s sight. You can aim for a bloody spot and try to draw out more red stuff. You can hit a weaker boxer over and over to draw out the punishment. This brings to mind Muhammad Ali, calling out, “What’s my name?” as he spent fifteen rounds beating the stuffing out of Ernie Terrell in 1967, to avenge Terrell’s insistence on calling him Cassius Clay — the name he had before becoming a Muslim. You can coax the blood to flow and you can beat your opponent so badly that he is thoroughly humiliated as a form of public entertainment, but you cannot hit a boxer when he is down. That’s outside the rules. Not permitted by ritual. They stop every three minutes for a break so someone in their corner can try to staunch their bloody wounds. If blood is streaming down the face of a fighter, the fight goes on unless the bleeding fighter begins losing badly — perhaps because he cannot see his opponent properly — in which case the fight ends with a technical knockout.
In the year 1997, boxing fans witnessed what later became known as the “bite fight” — one of the most memorable fights in the past two decades. Boxers Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield squared off in Las Vegas, Nevada. The previous year, Holyfield had won — by TKO — a match in which Tyson had been heavily favoured. When they met again, Tyson began once again to lose badly. In the third round, he bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear — a big enough piece to spit onto the floor. Several minutes later, Tyson did it again. Shortly thereafter, Tyson was disqualified. He was also fined and had his licence revoked for a year. I’m not countenancing Tyson’s behaviour. However, I do find it fascinating that the “bite fight” garnered such huge attention, in a sport where combatants — generally young black men from poor communities, who are watched by fans who pay thousands of dollars to attend championship fights — are regularly knocked out and concussed. Some sustain serious brain damage. Some die right there on the sweat- and blood-soaked floor, and others die far sooner than they should. It is a blood sport. And we love it.
Boxing has suffered in public popularity of late, because it is insufficiently wild and violent in relation to ultimate fighting. Fought in cages, using mixed martial arts, this sport seems more intense, savage, and varied. You can punch and kick. You can attack almost any part of the body. There are far fewer reasons for a referee to intervene, slow the pace of bloodshed, or impede blood lust. I’m betting that as time goes on, we will find even more savage ways to allow men — and women — to draw each other’s blood and batter each other senseless.
WITH RESPECT TO CAUSING BLOODSHED, ritual forms the dividing line between criminal and honourable behaviour. We license the spilling of animal blood every day in most parts of the planet, but rules govern us every step of the way. In most wealthy nations, for example, you can no longer walk into a meat store and ask to have a chicken (or a larger animal) butchered before your eyes. For reasons of public health, and perhaps to accommodate public squeamishness, animals are to be killed and bled in slaughterhouses. This is meant to be carried out behind closed doors, and it is also designed to minimize the spread of bacteria to protect consumer safety. You will not be alarmed or surprised to see a truckload of pigs travelling at 110 kilometres an hour on the highway. It’s a common sight. You know where they are going. But if the driver stopped to slaughter and roast a pig at a roadside picnic stand, it wouldn’t take long for someone to call 911. Bloodshed is permitted. Bloodshed is necessary. But to win public sanction, it must follow an intricate set of rules and rituals.
Certain forms of bloodshed are not permitted, and warrant the maximum penalty imaginable. If you shoot and kill someone in a state where capital punishment is allowed — in Texas, for example — you stand a chance of being executed. We are back to Biblical references — many people these days rely on the dictum “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” If you bomb runners and bystanders at the 2013 Boston Marathon, taking three lives and spilling the blood of numerous other victims all over the street, many will clamour for your death, and the American government may take the unusual step of calling for the death penalty, even in a state that does not have capital punishment on the books. Bloodshed is permitted only in highly controlled rituals of publicly sanctioned violence. In such moments, we drink it up.
The regulated, ritualized, bizarrely accepted bloodshed haunts me all the more because of its contradictions. The English gentleman hunter on his horse is taken as the epitome of class, civility, and good breeding. Yet his joy consists of encouraging trained hounds to rip the stuffing from foxes. A gentleman keeps his salad plate on the left and his wineglass to the right. He marries well. He ensures that his children learn to read and write. But on Sundays, he indulges his love of fox blood.
Bloodhounds pursue more than red-coated foxes. They also carry the scent of humans in their noses when they famously pursue fugitive slaves and criminals. References exist to bloodhounds chasing men in medieval Scotland. In 1673, the Irish (or English, possibly)
philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle wrote about an incident in which a dog followed a man’s path over seven miles before locating him in a house.
The dog is, well, dogged in its pursuit of foxes and humans alike. In lore, the best way to shake him off your trail is to drag your body — blood included — through water. It takes one vital fluid to mask the scent of another.
The idea of dogs or monsters locking on to the scent of humans and then pursuing them with murderous intent is a terrifying thing to imagine. What avid child reader has not been captivated by the story of the giant’s blood lust in “Jack and the Beanstalk”? In this British fairy tale, the giant is unsettled when he enters his house in the clouds and detects the scent of human blood. Jack, as we know, has climbed the beanstalk and has been asking the giant’s wife for food.
The giant, sensing the story with his nose alone, roars:
Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread
Blood, alas, can give us away by its very scent. This serves as a warning to child readers, and to adults who can extrapolate and imagine the senseless assault and butchery that has plagued mankind since the dawn of “civilization.”
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