“Beauty is a sign – even a criterion – of truth.
But what is the craziness of a horse a warning against? I want to understand
this by examining some of the ways the trainer summons the beauty of the
horse.” – Vicki Hearne
I want to be quick to say that I am highly reactive
to the word beauty. Beauty, in a hierarchy, is defined by the perceiver with
the power. Perhaps I fear that if a horse is judged to be beautiful enough to
be trained for dressage, and I if I were I a horse, I would be pulling a plow,
or walking in endless circles with agitated children on my back. So, I had to
restrain my reactive nature, and assume a notion of beauty as something that
occurs when a being, equine or human, is fully engaged in expressing a talent.
The coercion
in horse training is like that of the Tango, in which a press of a hand, on the
small of a back, is coercive. Someone is leading, and someone is following, but
it is the context, the relationship in the dance, that makes a whole. What
beauty may be expressed requires both participants.
Coercion is not always a vertical relationship. A
trainer chasing a horse around, cracking a whip in the air, is not in a
position of power. In fact, Vicki Hearne tells us not to try this at home. It
was not a moment of technique, or method. It was a moment of instinct and risk,
in which both participants demanded to be perceived as unique. There were
qualities of mutuality, anthropomorphic as that may sound. The trainer seems to
create the context in which the horse can realize a talent. But the trainer’s
purpose is realized in the relationship.
Hearne’s experiment seems to involve engaging the
desire of the horse to participate in a relationship, in which order is an art
form. Foucault understood the sweetness
of coercion at the crack of a whip. In a 1973 interview he said, “Sade’s
great experiment was to introduce the disorder of desire into a world dominated
by order and classification.” Sade’s was “ an eroticism appropriate to a
disciplinary society: a regulated society, anatomical, hierarchalized, with its
carefully allotted times, it’s controlled spaces, its duties and
surveillances.”
Despite the order expressed in dressage, the
coercion of training has the mutuality of a horizontal relationship. In
Capitalism the coercion is vertical. An entire class of citizenry is coerced
into obedience, anesthetized by overly processed food, repetitive,
brain-numbing mimics of culture, exhausted by the effort to keep it all going.
Like Hans we learn to read minute changes in breathing and angles of eyebrows
for signs of our beauty.
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