The Tao of Davis Miller

In The Zen of Muhammad Ali and Other Obsessions you write about such figures of popular culture as Bruce Lee, various boxers, extensively on Ali, of course, and your own personal struggles; would you say the book is in some part an exploration of contemporary notions of heroism?

The book is about the classic ideal of the hero and our contemporary ideas of heroism, that which is affirming in the idea of heroism as well as that which is disturbing, those things that are both oddly substantive and profoundly (sometimes playfully) shallow.

You told Ali 'You made me believe I could do anything,' and after spending a day with him it was like going out into the world after making love for the first time. Have your feelings and views of Ali or maybe the myth or concept of Ali changed over the years?

I began writing about Ali in the late 1970s, when I was in my mid-twenties. My most recent Ali story, 'The Yin and the Yang of Muhammad Ali', was written late this past summer, a few weeks before the events of 11 September. And there's a thematic relationship between this new Ali story and what I find most troubling about Judaeo/Christian/Islamic mythology. The Ali stories in Zen of Ali are presented in chronological order and detail the maturation of my relationship with my childhood idol.

Why do you think the legend of Ali has such longevity and why do you think it has a kind of mystical significance for many people?

The best responses I have to those questions are inseparable from the stories I've written about Ali. Though I don't want to minimize what I feel by supplying a study guide answer, here are a few words about Ali that may have tangential relevance.
   Like almost everyone born before 1970, I can't help but remember a time when Ali appeared to be constantly moving inside a private and wondrous rhythm, when his eyes shone like electric blackberries, when heat shimmered from his almost perfectly symmetrical torso. The young Ali's seemingly endless energy promised that he'd never get old. Now, for more than a decade, he's been older than just about anyone his age. Yet Ali's current story is not tragic; indeed, there's a kind of beauty to it. People all around the world admire Ali, not only for the obvious reasons -- the singular grace with which he foughht for almost twenty-five years; his boastful, glowing 'prettiness'; his huge charm and presence; his contagious and distinctive humor; his brave stand against the Vietnam War; the great dignity with which he carried himself through his afflicted middle years -- but also because for five decades, no matter what outrageousness has leaped from his limbs and from his mouth, and regardless of how extensively he has been marketed and self-marketed, we recognize that Ali has always shown us something also intensely human, ringingly true, consummately us -- every person. And we well understand how uncommon this level of honesty is among public personalities.
     Over the past decade, it has become fashionable to regard Ali as a stricken, mute saint. That notion differs greatly from Muhammad Ali, the actual human being. The Ali I've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with is both meditative and manic, inane and insightful, observant and distracted, monastically quiet and riot-noisy, amazingly gentle and occasionally frightening, surprisingly brilliant and basically retarded, and, it often seems, commandingly well-balanced.
   A remarkable thing about Ali's Parkinson's syndrome is that it has allowed him to become an ailing family member to the world. To some of us he is father or grandfather; to others, he is uncle, cousin, brother, nephew. As has been true for so many of the numerous identities Ali has worn over all these decades, I know of no one else for whom this mythology has been true. As Ali long ago reinvented not only boxing but many of our ideas of celebrity, he is now reinventing our notions of personal illness. His own weighty yet gentle myth has become this: no one, not even the Greatest of All Time, can defy gravity.
    Appropriately, Ali's American Express card reads, G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time), Inc. "I ain't nothin' but an old goat," he explains with a chuckle. "It's the God in people that connects them to me."

Do you see your role as a writer on pop culture figures as a mixture of celebration and de-mystification?

I hope that the stories in Zen of Ali are groundingly celebratory. Part of my intent has been to come to people and their lives as nakedly as I can, to demythologize and then to remythologize, to look past unsatisfying cliches about for instance Ali or Bruce Lee -- and about what it means to be human, to be alive -- and to accurately explore these lives, ouur lives, in what I feel is a truthful, sustaining, substantive manner.

The third part of the book is called Personal Battles was writing many of these pieces a cathartic process? If so how?

Writing these stories was not particularly cathartic. And catharsis was not the intent. I write because I feel the need to write. I'm very grateful that readers like my stories, and hope that they help people connect with something marrow-deep in themselves. I should also say that although writing particular stories isn't cathartic, for me the act of writing is always liberative.

I thought your short story contained in the collection, Ellen, was particularly moving. Did you find it difficult to write?

I wrote a first draft of 'Ellen's, Christmas 1971' in the fall of 1981, shortly after my wife Lyn left me, taking our infant daughter Johanna with her. At the time, 'Ellen's' was the toughest and most deeply personal thing I had written. Maybe I needed the pain of (what would become the temporary) dissolution of my marriage to write 'Ellen's'; maybe writing it also helped me through that time.

Shortly after the watching the brutal contest between 35 year old Sugar Ray Robinson's (LEONARD'S) brutal defeat at the hands of the much younger, quicker Terry Norris you made a commitment to stop writing glorifying boxing stories for magazines and newspapers. Why did you do this and how difficult was this descion to make on a personal level and what kind of reaction did you get from other people?

There's a lot of destruction in the world. I work hard not to honour or otherwise contribute to that -- not to play Shiva any more than I have to. People around me are often puzzled and startled by how heartily I make decisions to further plunge myself into the waters of abject poverty.

In the book a couple of boxers talk about the power of control they want to exercise through their sport, do you think this compares with that of a writer and do you see many parallels between boxing and writing?

There are loads of parallels between personal combat and the act of writing. For me, the act of writing is athletic: I write with nearly every muscle fiber in my body. Fighting isn't important to me -- and never has been. Far more important are the bone-real relationships I first developed while 'moving around', while sparring, with other living, breathing human beings, with martial arts folks and boxers. Performing martial art also helped me learn the value of staying out of the way of both the story and the act of moving as an athlete, to let the activity have its own way, to let it preside.

In 1977 you eloped with your girlfriend and unsuccessfully tried to get married at the Ali-Earnie Shavers bout. How did you going about trying to do this? Any tips for people who want to do a similar thing?

The same response I give to people who tell me that they need to write: in some ways gravity isn't as big a deal as we make it to be. If you're passionate about a thing, step out of its way and let it happen.

Do you think there are any sporting stars round today that could have anywhere near the affect of Ali? Why or why not? How do today's boxers like Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson compare to Ali?

Muhammad Ali on boxing: 'It ain't nothin'. I always said it'd die when I was gone and it has.'

In The Zen of Muhammad Ali and Other Obsessions you write about the false mythologizing found in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story; do you think the same may happen with the 100 million dollar Ali film just about to be released? Are you looking forward to seeing it?

I'll not go see 'Ali'. I feel that you've hit on the reasons why.

How does it feel to make a living out of writing?

It's painful and beautiful, enormously gratifying and always almost impossibly hard. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

Which writers or journalists have greatly influenced or inspired you and why?

I'm not a fan of journalism or of the myth of journalistic objectivity. I read mostly fiction and literary nonfiction. My university writing teacher and friend, Terry Davis (the novels Vision Quest, Mysterious Ways, If Rock and Roll Were a Machine), has had the largest direct influence on my work. I first read his coming-of-age novel Vision Quest in 1979 and the experience was revelatory; I had no idea that serious literature could be so fun and accessible. I still find his work amazing in those ways. Other books I admire that have powerfully influenced my work: The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien; Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich; A Childhood: the biography of a place, Harry Crews; The Night in Question, Tobias Wolff; Rock Springs, Richard Ford; Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion.

You've published three books now, so what's going to be the fourth?

I'm working on a book called The Last Days and Nights of Bruce Lee. If Ali is the most famous person of the twentieth-century about whom we know the most, Lee is the one about whom we know the least. Other than my book The Tao of Bruce Lee, nothing's been written about Lee that isn't Elvisy/Jesusy myth. I aim to change that in my books and stories. I also want to have fun working on a road adventure book titled American Kama Sutra: a year in the erotic wilderness. Then there's a 'straight' memoir that will be the third in my trilogy of Tao books. And most importantly to me, I want to write a series of American love stories; I feel the need to write about that glowing arrogant forcefield around lovers, and about the new shining creature we become early in love relationships.