Catching Up (2): The Death of Death in the Afternoon?

The other story that interested me on my travels was the decision by the Catalan parliament to ban bullfighting (the link has some dramatic pictures, which the BBC is required to warn you that you might find "disturbing").

The arguments over this are well known, and if you take the view that bullfighting is a "sport", then it is manifestly clear that it's a cruel one.

All I can say is that no one who hasn't been to a bullfight can really have a valid view.  It is a spectacle, and an experience, completely unlike any other.  I leave aside the opportunity it provides to witness physical courage, though the courage of a matador facing a fully grown and properly bred and presented bull - a truly terrifying wild animal - is very real.  (You will probably recognise just how real only if you attend a novada,  where trainee matadors learn their trade against young bulls, and where you will often see the (generally)  hilarious but sometimes painful (and occasionally even fatal) results of a lack of courage in front of a bull.)

But what makes bullfighting truly unique is that it offers an opportunity to open yourself to the reality of death; a reality that every other strand of our culture persuades us to deny and shy away from.  It was this aspect of bullfighting that led Hemingway to entitle his famous book on the subject Death in the Afternoon and to argue against the view that it is any kind of "sport", but rather a drama - and a tragedy in the sense that it can have only one outcome for the bull - that connects us (literally) viscerally to the finality of all earthly existence. 

I don't know whether the opportunity to have that connection is worth the life of an animal: though it can be argued that the free-range life and fighting death of a fighting bull is no worse - and may even be better, in the round - than the life and death of an intensively reared farm animal.  But I do know that our drift into the shallows of cultural entropy would be accelerated by a wider ban by Spain as a whole. So let's hope that, as it appears, this is just Catalan politics with a hypocritical overlay of animal rights-ism ...