Thursday, December 04, 2008
Stillness
Norman Mailer's description of George Foreman in The Fight:
Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence. One had not seen men like that for thirty years, or was it more? Not since Norman worked for a summer in a mental hospital had he been near anyone who could stand so long without moving, hands in pockets, vaults of silence for his private chamber. He had taken care then of catatonics who would not make a gesture from one meal to the next. One of them, hands contracted into fists, stood in the same position for months, only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant. Guards were always informing new guards that catatonics were the most dangerous of the patients. They were certainly the strongest. One did not need other attendants, however, to tell you. If a deer's posture in the forest can say, 'I am vulnerable, irreplaceable, and soon destroyed,' so the posture of a catatonic haunts the brain. 'Provided I do not move,' this posture says, 'all power will come to me.'

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