The Shape of Wisdom: Beauty, Truth, and Horses

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.   

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me   

And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

—James Wright

1.

If wisdom had a shape it might be the shape of a horse.

Not because a horse is smart; anyone who’s ridden knows that, as with humans, there is a very wide band of normal in the realm of intelligence. Wisdom might be horse-shaped because wisdom (as opposed to knowledge or data or expertise) is an art, not a science—a way of moving well in a world.  The shape of wisdom is the shape of a horse. Watch it canter toward you through the autumn grasses, and tell me the moment is not wise.

Sure it spooks easy. The pony, the moment, the wisdom of things. It’s vulnerable, intemperate, susceptible to all manner of ills. It’s stubborn and flukey and takes a while to want to do what you want it to do. But would you just look at it there in its pasture—that yearling, that gelding, that mare—or at that superannuated racehorse at his gathered canter in the yard. Imagine if you lived your life, made your decisions, spoke your lines, did your time, with that kind of grace. Such elegance and cool. Imagine if your days regularly hit that kind of groove.

Such a world would be a wiser world. Smarter, more handsome and exacting, but faster on its feet. Stupidity has many shapes, most of them human, others mechanical, digital, plastic. Horses in a field are the wisdom the world could do with more of.

2.

Let’s pretend with Keats, for a moment, that truth is beauty and beauty truth. Tell me: was there ever anything truer than a horse? A buckskin yearling grazing down the dusk.

Once, asked to stand in, late in the day, for a colleague at a festival, a session on the nature of beauty I found myself saying: with apologies to the cattle and all who love them, beauty is not a cow, but a horse in a field. A cow embodies something else, something sad and useful. But beauty is a horse. At a walk, or a tolt or a canter or a spook.

A horse, in other words—look at that dappled grey racehorse retired over there, for instance, in the shade—is improbably beautiful. You don’t have to be so well conformed to eat grass and run fast from predators. Your legs needn’t be so shapely or long, your neck so like a swan’s, your face so long and sculpted, your eyes so deep with melancholy and mischief, your flanks so toned, your fringe so long, your tail so like the wind made manifest. When we comment on the poetry of a car or a person or a moment or a phrase, what we mean is what a horse is and how it moves.

You’ll want to argue with me, of course, but if there’s a vote for the best poem the world ever wrote, I’m casting mine for the horse. Okay, the shortlist would be long, but I’d wager a horse would be high it. Higher, say, than most of us, even on a good day; up there with the eucalypt and the grasslands and the first coffee of the day

3.

A piece of cowboy wisdom I first heard, I think, in James Galvin’s novel Fencing the Sky, or in one of his poems: “god got it right with horses.”

Keen to source that truism, I googled just now and learned not, of course, who said it first, but how well the sentiment aligns with many understandings—aesthetic, theological and practical—articulated everywhere and over time. In the horse is divinity and utility, speed and power and courage, I learn from google. The horse, I also learn, is referenced 188 times in the Christian Bible. God, it seems, is keen for us to know how right she got it with horses. For instance, in the Book of Job, among the natural history lessons God offers his woebegone servant Job, as the poor man stumbles deeper into his midlife crisis, is that he might do well (we all might, is the implication) to see the horse as an image of the creative power and majesty of the almighty, and as reminder of the strength, fearlessness, and general magnificence each of us might attain if we could muster the imagination and courage.

4.

In a poem “Tusk,” I once wrote “An elephant is not a logical proposition.”  The poem is a paean to the elephant, a plea for an end to the trade in tusks that threatens it with extinction: I am not belittling that wisest and truest of beings. But an elephant is not a horse. In an elephant we might be reminded perhaps of the sometimes unbecoming stolidity of the truth, of the awkwardness and immovability of how things are, the way things stand, whether we like it or not. In the elephant we are asked to see a metaphor of acceptance of what we might otherwise like to deny. The dream of beauty, like the dream of safety, must disappear, the elephant tells us, riffing on Auden.

The horse, by contrast, is the possibility, in the world and in our lives, of unlikely accomplishment. The horse rebukes you for your cynicism, for aiming too low, for accepting the inevitability of ugliness, the monopoly brute force might sometimes seem to have on things, the stranglehold of death. The horse inspires faith in self and world. A world in which horses go through their paces as if it were nothing at all is a world that remains glorious and sensual and delightful and cool and kind—notwithstanding all the mounting evidence of cruelty, banality, violence, crudeness of thought, meanness of sprit in this era of the earth.

5.

 “There is something about the outside of a horse,” old Churchill said once, “that is good for the inside of a man.” And given his time again I’m sure he would have substituted “woman” or made it “human.”

And I’m not the only person to notice how good horses are for your mental health; I guess this is one thing Churchill meant. It now happens that Jodie and I can drive up the rough road on a property at Mandemar, where two of our horses are agisted, and watch them whinny and canter our way. I’m pretty sure their response to us, their coming our way with joy and sunset in their stride, has something to do with the apples we often bring (like James Wright and his friend), but it has something also to do with relationship (their connection to us, the regard in which we hold each other, the delight we mostly take in each other’s company). I can’t speak for the horses, except what their eyes say and their voices and their fast hoofs, but it seems to me that the relationship with the horses is a kind of finding oneself in another—a cross-species braiding of affection, a kinship, or a fellowship whose language is largely form and movement and presence. And there is no way it is not reciprocal. A sharing.

6.

To be someone to a horse is truly to be someone.

This is a thought I find myself having many afternoons lately, returning the young horses to their field, or standing at the fence as they nuzzle and sniff out more carrots from our pockets.  To have them work with you and to seem to want to, though you know less, sometimes, than they do about the uses of the carriage whip and the lunge rope, is to be helped to stand more sturdily in your boots and more gratefully in your life. The whole thing, given their size and every other choice they might make than to work with you, is miraculous. And then there is the art of their letting us ride them: a wild gallop up the hill or a slow trot among sheoaks, the saddling up and the picking of the feet, and the rugging ahead of rain.

7.

Horses have been working with us for six thousand years, of course, and trade would not have started, nor travel, nor empire, nor what we like to call civilization, if one day a young boy or girl on the steppe had not decided to hop on the back of one of those small steppe horses and the idea of riding them, not eating them, had not taken hold. And some of that long dance of being with us is remembered in the horse—though it has to be coaxed and though it fights with dreams of freedom and the instinct to fly from predator species such as us—when you overcome your fear and ask them to run with you or halt or stand while you pick their hoofs.

When you learn to train a horse—which has been our privilege with the foal Alina this past year—what manifests is a shared recollection of the many thousand years of being with each other, of learning each other and entering into an arrangement to cooperate. It is likely that, hard as we’ve worked them and cruel though we have often been, horses are not only not extinct now, but larger and longer lived and more various and handsome, because they have learned to carry us and pull our loads and win our races and eat our hay and calm us in our stress.

Whether we often make their lives fuller or ease their anxiety is uncertain. But how they heal us, the medicine they are capable of delivering, along with the broken bones and empty bank accounts, has to do, I think, with the way that, with a horse, one is put back into a very old way not just of being in the world, but of being with the world—being one with this particular manifestation of the world the pony, one’s ancient ally.

But the healing of the horse also has to do with being asked to be at the same time very present and very calm. Alert but not alarmed. They know when your attention wanders back to worries or fears or abstractions. And you will find out quickly that they know. A horse is big and the fall is long. They have four strong legs and four hard hoofs and a head like a pumpjack. So you want to be looking out. If you’re with a horse, be nowhere else. To be with a horse happily is to be at once deeply with yourself in your body and also with the animal, noting its eyes, its gait, its vibe. To be with a horse well is to be both outside yourself and deep within it. It is to be no longer finished at the skin. Or more rightly, at the jagged edges of the ego. And you need to be present in the weather and the ground, in the surroundings, to all of which the horse is way wider awake than you are used to being. So to be with a horse well is to be given back to the rest of yourself: the world of ground and tree and snake and thunder and shade and cattle in the next paddock and eagle overhead.

8.

There are so many ways in which whoever laid this world out got right the piece of it we call the horse. And the being-with-the-horse. To be with a horse is to know the poetry inside all being; to share again in the rhythms of what is wholly real. The frequencies of eternity.

To riff on the surprising closing line another poem of James Wright’s (which has yesterday’s horse droppings in it, but not the horses themselves, this time), to have some acquaintance with horses, even to feed one an apple through a fence, is to know you have not (completely) wasted your life.

I have always intuited and now I know through my hands and arms and legs and eyes that a horse is to the natural world what poetry is to the human heart and mind. The horse is the poetry of the world. Some of its best lines. And it is poetry that keeps us sane and wise and deepens our days on earth and makes them almost rhyme with time.

9.

Now all this comes to mind because there are four horses (at least) in my life now, and because I have loved horses since I knew how to walk, and because my daughter gave me a lovely little book, Loving Animals Like the Ancients, for Christmas, reflections (from Aristotle, and Plutarch, and Aesop and Plutarch) on the long human interdependence with other animals, and of course, it has a horse on its cover.

But these thoughts come to mind mostly because later this year—the year, as it happens, of the horse (indeed of the Fire Horse)—we will be publishing at 5 Islands an anthology of horse poems. A gathering of horse poems should perhaps better be called a mob or a herd, a harras, a string, a rag, a team, a band, a tribe. But let’s call them what one usually calls such a collection of poems, as if each of them were a flower, an anthology.

The book is the idea of its editors Candida Baker and Robbie Coburn. Candy, a novelist, poet and journalist and the editor of The Penguin Book of the Horse, is also a horse woman of great accomplishment. Robbie, the poet, is famously a horse lover and recently the author of the beautiful YA verse novel, Foal in the Wire, where you will find the loveliest depiction of the process of human healing through care for a horse that you could hope to meet.

I was, of course, a pushover when Candy and Robbie proposed the book to us at the press. Steve Meyrick, who is the producer to my director at the press and not a horse lover, asked hard questions about the poems and the likelihood that horse lovers might want to read horse poems, and he indulged me, and he was persuaded—persuaded that not only would the poems be good and saleable, but that the book may be a Trojan horse: bearing poems, in the shape of horses, secretly into the horse-loving world. This is our hope. 

Watch out for the book this coming August. The first day of August is, as many would know, the official birthday of all horses in the Southern Hemisphere, so there could have been any other date for its release. The poems come from fine contemporary Australian poets and from poets around the world; most of the poems are new, but many, like those by Ted Hughes and James Wright, will be known to readers. A most beautiful book of poems about that most beautiful of all beings and that most beautiful of all ways of being with the world.

And then, the Horses

A  W I N D  bright as prayer flags tears the floodplain

    Apart. Mid-August never felt so warm.

Beside the car, unsteady in the wild air, my father seems uncertain

    Where he stands and what’s become of everything

He knew. Five miles north the mountain rests

    Like St Exupery’s hat.              

The gale blows the inland inside out

    And drops it here like silt across the afternoon.

And then, at the fence, among the peppermints, the horses,

    The foal, green in judgment, rolling in her mother’s feed—her salad days—

and beside me, my father, at his ancient ease again.