(no subject)
I'm not sure what to write here. We know that horses are symbols, right? You say they didn't exist, so they must be, necessitate a, symbol. Some observations about horses:
• They are often used as analogies for freedom, speed. [That feeling you get when you rest the flat of your hand on a horse's long septum, like laying a hand on a warm human brow, molded and deformed.]
• They are delicate, our avatars of speed & our beasts of burden. The sanguine snow behind Southern barns in Appalachian winter, when the mountains dump snow so hard you can't see the legbreakers, the logs and holes that turn the forward momentum of that barrel body onto the pivot point in the chalk-dense leg. [It's your leg , it's not; a part of it. The reeling of careening out of control, the mindless scream from pained horse, so like a human squeal.]
What do your head-horses say about you - I'm not sure. I think they say that you have a keen sense of crisis, destruction, and momentum. I think that enters your life in many ways - a precise sense of unbalanced forces on their way to mutual negation. That's what thoroughbreds are - optimized front-movers, vulnerable from all sides but forward. I think that your sense of these things is keen enough to cut you, and I would like to offer an experience to blunt the knife. It's mine, but I put you in it, you're behind and watching in all these moments. Ready?
Percherons. They're a calm, kind breed - not like the animals we've been discussing. They exude heat, calm, a rocklike stolidity. We have only ten acres of pasture; that's a little more than three acres a horse - hardly enough to feed three 1,800-pound horses year 'round without haying. Luckily, a nearby farmer has a large pasture that he hasn't used since he retired. We ask if we could use the pasture for the Percherons during the winter when they'd run out of grass. You see his cataract-clouded eyes light up! He 's just turned 91 years old and mourns the day he sold his last team and converted to tractors. Yes, he says, he'd love to have the horses in his pasture.
October rolls around, and the horses finally eat the last stalk of grass in their field. We walk them down the road and let them into the large pasture which is knee-deep in lush forage.
January arrives: the horses have grown long, thick winter coats. The weather has been cold, but little in the way of snow. The field has a clump of trees in the middle and when it snows, the horses curdle together under a huge pine to sleep.
With the first big snow came trouble. We were sitting at the breakfast table when the phone rang. It was the lady who lived in a house next to the extra pasture. She wanted to know if we owned the big horses. No, we told her, we just helped take care of them for the owners. Was there something wrong? "The horses have no building to go into to get out of the snow," she said. We explained that they had the big trees to stand under, and that their dense coat was an excellent insulator. We assured her that the horses were quite comfortable. Semi-satisfied, she let us return to breakfast.
The midnight feedings are the best. We take the winter feed into the new field, moonlit and crisply chill. The snow blankets the reflection of sound from the mountain foothills in the distance. The crunch of farm boots is muted, as we walk to the soft shadows near center. The pine-boughs form an airlock, of sorts - inside, the snow melts, dripping silently. There is no light, but the heat beats against our eyelids, a light of its own. Pastel shadows, soft sighs, warm scents. Things move softly in the dark. Sometimes we put the feed bucket down, and wrap arms around a neck which radiates heat with an infernal beat. It is solid, and we can feel the solidity that moves up from feet to thick neck with the certainty of tree roots. The heat is so intense that we start to fade, a bit, the body-temperature barrier at skin divide fading away. Sometimes the shape shuffles a shoulder into our chest, leaning heavily, and we feel its granite weight, its organic permanence. When we emerge from between the tree branches, it feels like we're a breath of air released from the world's lungs, steaming. The light is stark, and things looks simple in their black and white clothes.
Then another storm hit that promised to be a keeper. With the temperature staying well below freezing, we know the snow won't melt for a while. Then at dawn, we get another phone call. "Your horses are on fire in the field!" She exclaims. It's early morning, and the odd magic of the midnight feeding time still sticks to the brain: anything seems plausible. The spike of panic has us out in the field in our boots and underwear, staring at 3 massive shapes contentedly munching grass as the sun rises behind them. Silhouetted, they appear inviolable, invulnerable - their shadows are huge, and their legs are treetrunks. Thick, obscuring columns of steam roll off their pelts as their skin roasts the winter air.
We turn slowly to gaze out over the lightening field.
I think that you felt the pain of the horses in your limbs when they got demolished. I think they're tied to your anatomy, I think there are little triggers that make you relive that sometimes. I think it's tied to some sense of forces unbalanced. But there is variation to this symbology - there are shades of different depth. "Horse" is just a shape which can hold many different things. If you take that in, I wonder if... it will change the things ingrained in your extremities, and grow you into new shapes.
Okay, now forget all that. First and foremost, this is a gift: an experience. It's yours.
This is so dumb, now that I read it completely.