HORSES - published in Audience Review Vol 2, Issue 3, 2007, NYC
My friend Thomas says he doesn’t think that horses have a place in the American psyche Hmmm…. well, I don’t quite know what to say. “Dogs,” he says, “I like dogs.” “You go to Revere Beach and you see a bunch of men running around with their dogs.” “Women, girls,” I say, “I think we like horses.” And Thomas agrees. “Well, you’ve got a point there.” “My sister, my cousins… yup, they love horses….I always thought, well, they’ll grow out of it.” And I offer, “Maybe horses are a bit more, uh, majestic than dogs?” “ I mean they can be dangerous but there is that combination of beauty and speed, utility and pleasure….I mean, you know?” He still shakes his head. “Well, you can’t keep a horse at home.” “ I mean, they’re not domestic.” “Well, no I guess not,” I offer. “Unless you own a ranch.”
Secretly, I’m thinking, “Is he kidding me?” How can you even compare the sleekest greyhound to a wild Palomino? The most loyal black lab to a mustang colt? I don’t get it. Doesn’t he realize that the whole nation was in agony over Barbaro’s injured hind leg and his having to be euthanized after winning two rounds of the Derby? Is this really a gender issue? No, for God’s sake there are plenty of men who would die for their steeds…But this shouldn’t be a battle of horses vs. dogs…dogs are cool with me; it’s a matter of the horses. Horses as mythic, as thoroughbreds, as laborers, as something larger than that….
We’ve gotten together for a writing session and my bid was to write an essay on horses. My question was, really, what place do horses have in the American psyche and are they a sacred animal to us like say, cows or elephants in India? Well, Thomas likes inside things, and not outside things, I guess. But it’s interesting that a creature I consider so quintessentially American, he considers so superfluous to the landscape....
From Patti Smith’s CD Horses, “Land:”
“When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he’s being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses,
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this…”
The mesmerizing poet-saint of rock and roll. This album – and I hear the word Arabian roll through my mind like a wave – became etched in my aura before I made my first solo CD, Being Visited with multiple voices and poetry cutting in and out of band tracks. Johnny’s horses stayed with me for a long time after hearing this song. Later I would arrange the well-known spiritual “All the Pretty Horses” on my second CD, “Spell on You.” In the break I sang:
“will you have all the pretty little horses, the horses, the horses
all the Palominos, the mustang chargers, will you have all the seahorses at the bottom of the ocean?”
(It’s a song about a white child who’s mammy chides it for not sleeping, and sings that when he wakes he will have “all the pretty horses” whereas the black child lying in the field will not….a strange lullabye from slavery times. The horses symbolize the wealth of white people…I just took it out a bit farther to encompass how high and low, sky and ocean, the horses could take a child’s imagination, our imaginations….)
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Where did the first horses come from? In fact horses evolved on the North American continent for over 50 million years and the wild ones with the conquistadors….long before we were here (barring the tenure of the Native Americans) and eventually they became like our uneasy immigrants, sleek or shoddy, but some fit the backsides of Irish cops on their beats in cities, some leapt through fire in circuses, some of them were bought and bred as thoroughbreds for track racing, and then the 100’s of 1000’s served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, with soldiers upon them, whipped and gasping for air. They are surrounded like ourselves in dream, in ether, in heroics, and in sweat and motion, on any given day. They are, I think, our supreme objects and occasionally our mirrors, both.
Take the 1961 movie “The Misfits.” It’s the last movie Gable and Monroe ever made. The title fits both the humans and the horses of the story as they both are cast outside of society, wild misfits unable to settle into a satisfying pattern of existence, predatory and preyed upon. It’s Monroe –at the end of her marriage to Arthur Miller, drinking and hooked on pills, arriving late to the set frequently – who convinces the band of over-the-hill cowboys to free the mustangs they rustle up for the slaughterhouses for a living. One NY Times reviewer claimed that it was the only scene in the film that worked, the climax, the scuffle in the Nevada desert when Monroe hysterically “kicks up a ruckus” that pulls down their horse-trapping scheme. She is the woman in love with the wild horses; she’s the beautiful wounded tramp who’s fading fast, but who still knows a creature who should be protected from a cheap death.
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What really kicked off the idea of this essay was one day last week when two female friends of mine transmitted via internet media, episodes about horses which piqued my interest again. Both women loved horses, only one was publicizing a candle-light vigil in New York City for a carriage-horse named Smoothie who’d died after running himself into a tree. Rebecca is a fellow vocal artist and friend from New York. She’s also a political activist who loves animals and identifies with them.
“PROTESTERS DEMAND BAN ON CARRIGE HORSES” the myspace blog reads, Special to amNewYork, September 21st 2007.
“Many in the crowd stood holding candles and sheets of paper with numbers representing the identification codes of horses removed from the carriage business over the past two years, for reasons as diverse as age, injury or infirmity. Lower East Side musician Rebecca Moore stood holding a candle next to the number 3001.”
“They’re not machines,” she said as others began lighting candles, “and to expect the horses to be in such a stressful situation all day, with noise, traffic and heat, is insane.”
The piece ends with the quote:
“Horses don’t belong on the streets in the 21st Century. Smoothie didn’t have to die.”
Three or four comments in support of ending this exploitation of horses follow and Rebecca appends several petitions to the City government to end the horse and buggy industry. She doesn’t mess around. An empathic artist, I know Rebecca sees something special and beautiful in many creatures and must have bonded mystically with Smoothie, even Smoothie’s ghost. She’s just like that. And an artist knows how fast they can be seen as valuable entertainment commodities one minute and disposed of in the infirmary the next. It’s a hazardous life.
In contrast, the other e-mail came from my old grade-school friend Liz Homans’ husband who wrote that his wife’s riding horse Caspian “knocked her down, stepped on her back with full weight, flipped her, and stepped on her right arm and left leg with less than full weight.” What followed, was a detailed medical description and diagnosis of Liz’ condition. She’s a pediatrician who’s loved and ridden horses since she was a young girl. Jeff wrote at the end of the email that Liz faced a “protracted and painful recovery.” Later he would joke that of course Liz forgave Caspian but that he was on thin ice and joked that if anything else happened, he might be on his way to the glue factory. Never was there any speculation as to why Caspian might have behaved that way in his stall toward his owner that day. It should be noted that Liz and I had had no contact in more than five years but that in the 5th or 6th grade Liz developed a rare virus that put her in a coma for several months. Upon recovery through a tracheotomy maneuver and luck, she went on to medical school as a partial penance to the doctors who saved her life. She and her husband, both doctors, live in Arizona and she rides horses for pleasure.
In 2005, I was asked to review a book by the famous female poet Lyn Lifshin, a prolific poet on the independent poetry scene with over 100 titles to her credit who had penned a book about a horse named, Ruffian. It was called, “The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian” on Texas Review Press. An incredibly intense book, Lifshin bonds with this star filly and tracks her development almost from birth until she becomes a formidable racer. Lifshin writes that at a young age, she is, “a horse that seems to dance on water.” Or, a dream-like apparition as in, “Some nights I think of Her…lying quietly all night/as if she knew, for the moment,/her body was her friend/A star on her forehead/A star inside her blood/Herons in the distance/gulls. Her star/color of the floating lily/….By Saratoga, Lifshin writes, “She danced to the gate quivering with eagerness, huge and glistening/as if she’d do this as an old mare too/…”And too the hint she’d run herself to death, stagger/to the finish line on three legs”/ I wrote in my review that the fate of the super filly was prophesied before it ended, like Giselle’s possession by the willies, like ballet, almost phonetic in its precision. And Lifshin remembers that, “On Ruffian’s last day, like today, sparrows were flying through the eaves at Belmont.”
There was almost a mother-daughter bond between the two, or fan-celebrity, something that certainly transcended the ordinary.
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Like Monroe in the Misfits, or Patti Smith’s rock and roll chanting, Rebecca’s moon-lit vigil for Smoothie….Lifshin went out of her way to express a large and sustained love for horses and for this particular horse, Ruffian. Something in the blood; something riveting and deep. For all these women, horses seem to have an extremely important place in the psyche, whether as martyred beasts of burden or mythic avengers, or magic thoroughbreds that win and die tragic but brave deaths. However, just because all these horse-lovers are women, doesn’t mean that all horse lovers are women.
Take the recent case of Barbaro the race horse who fell in the Belmont Stakes when his jockey Prado was riding him. He’d won the Preakness and the Triple Crown three weeks before. The owners decided that they had to give this particular horse, a powerful colt, every chance to live, despite an injury that usually spelled death to a race horse. Most of America was caught up in the saga of whether Barbaro would actually overcome this huge obstacle, the splintering of his right rear leg. Eventually he was euthanized by his owners who spent huge amounts of money trying to keep the colt alive. A horse is usually in too much pain from losing one of its legs. We know this even from that movie title about marathon dancing made in the 1930’s, “They shoot horses, don’t they?”
So, what does this amount to? Was it a silly question to begin with? Have we come to terms with how we treat our horses when they race and get hurt, when they hurt us, when they become destructive, when we love them too much? Are they sacred to us? Or do we expect them, like most of us in America, to be part of that crazy game of survival of the fittest, of having to prove their prowess and smarts and worth? And isn’t that the societal question we all face right now about America as a competitive society? When we ask “Is racing animals cruelty?” aren’t we sort of asking the same question Michael Moore’s asking about the health insurance industry being profit driven in his latest film, Sicko? Because yes, horses like Barbaro and Ruffian might be born to run, but what about the others who are bred to race and lose anyway? Who are we to know? But maybe that’s just the way the wheel is turning and maybe it’s progress from horses being sold as dog food or used in wars.
So, yes, I think horses are to Americans something like what elephants are to Indians. We are proud to have them on our land and we are proud of their beauty and their speed and power. They symbolize something grand and deeply identifiable to us. To take ownership of a horse is a great responsibility, greater than that of a dog or cat. There is something wild and spectacular and gentle and generous about riding a horse and bonding with him/her. Sometimes they kick back. Our humanity is part of the responsibility we take on.
That’s really all I know.
Lo Galluccio
October 7, 2007
