A Natural History of Love (34 page)

“I think the notion that horses are surrogate lovers is wrong. They’re surrogate selves.”

Fall leaves litter the bridle path, and the horses’ hooves make a dry, rhythmic
shushing
sound. Antique street lamps, winding down several lanes through the park, have come on with a golden glow. Birds throng overhead and among the bushes. Sparrows, finches, blue jays, and cardinals feed on the wild seeds and berries. Crows, pigeons, gulls, and other scavengers ransack the garbage bins. Woodpeckers and chickadees pull hibernating insects out of the trees. So much of the city is brick and steel that every bird for miles crams into the park, which also teems with bat and insect life. In this huge oasis, where wildlife clusters, the ancient dramas of nature play themselves out with simplicity and daring, as they would in any Alpine meadow, or deep in a New Mexico cavern. It is November,
wint-monat
or “wind month,” to the Anglo-Saxons, a time to light bonfires and worship ancestors, a chilling time, a killing time. Clouds curdle overhead, and the sun slices through in wide swords of light. Somewhere far away the city guns its giant engines, launches its new perfumes, aims its bright-red lasers, creates and computes; and love, like the stock market, rises and falls. As we canter along some of the paths, we can see the minarets of that high-tech mecca, but on others we are enforested, enmeadowed, and all alone, rustling through the fall leaves on a country lane.

“At my local stable in Colorado,” Jane Marie says, “the riders were almost all women, and what I noticed was that, for all those women, horses were metaphors of complex inner processes. For example, there was one woman in her fifties, an enormously fat woman who rode enormous horses. She was a nurse, someone trying to help people get in touch with their inner health. I noticed that she expressed that with everyone’s horses, too. Whenever a horse got injured, she would nurse it. When she talked about health and horses, she put it in terms of what she was teaching her nursing students at the university. She worked with disturbed children, and I noticed that she was really good with horses that were disturbed.”

As we trot briskly along a narrowing trail, bushes whip us like small wire whisks, and we tuck in our chins to protect our eyes.

“There was a sixteen-year-old girl, Kim, who had the best horse in the barn—a horse that had been a big-time show horse before she got it. Her aunt, who was not much older than she was, had been born badly handicapped—with one very short leg—but she got interested in horses, and her parents were wealthy, and they put a lot of energy and money into her riding, and she went all the way to becoming one of the top riders in the country. She simply rode with one stirrup short on one side. When she died, her niece, Kim, inherited a horse trailer, all the tack, and all the horses from this aunt who had made it to the nationals. Kim had wonderful horses and all this fantastic gear, but behind her horseback riding there was a sorrow at having lost an aunt she loved and felt compassion for. That sadness was never far from the surface; she often spoke of her aunt. So, for her, keeping up these horses was also a way to keep up the memory of her aunt. Everyone at the barn had good reasons to be riding, which sometimes meant an injured part of themselves that needed to be healed. I think a lot of people were constructing identities through their relationship with horses.”

“What kind of relationship did you form with your horse?” I ask, as we trot into the clear once more. A small flock of birds appears overhead like a shake of pepper, and a half-moon rises among the clouds. Still low in the sky, the moon seems to be caged in the branches of the trees. A familiar sight, it is the Chinese pictogram for “leisure.”

“He was three, an adolescent, and very much like a playmate. I named him Boo Radley, after the character in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. We had great adventures together, some of which were religious in their intensity. For example, I remember one evening I was riding him on top of a hill in Colorado, and suddenly this storm moved in quickly. Of course, everyone’s got a story about someone on a horse being struck by lightning. You’re riding around on this animal, you’re the tallest thing on the landscape, and you’ve got metal on the bridle and saddle. So I’m up on my horse, this storm moves in, and I know I am the highest thing on the horizon for a long ways, and I know that we are basically done for if we don’t get out of there. The horse wants to get out, and I decide I should just give the horse his head and hope for the best, and we start galloping at dead breakneck speed. And let me tell you, galloping down steep hills is dangerous. I’ve never been on a horse that moved so fast in all my life—and I used to ride racehorses when I was a kid—we were
flying
off the ground. When we got back to the barn at last, we were both sweating, and there was a sense that we had had an adventure together. We had a lot of adventures together, Boo and I.”

A nightjar planes low over the trees as we leave the bridle path and head back to Claremont Academy. Flying with its mouth open, it sieves the air for insects just as a baleen whale sieves the ocean for krill. Any day now, when the last insects vanish from the sky, the nightjar will start migrating south.

“Galloping a horse in a lightning storm—that gives me a sense of what religious mystics are talking about,” Jane Marie says.

Yes, I think, so does going into a barn in the middle of the night, when the horses are sleeping, sitting down next to them, and waiting for them to wake up. Or seeing a horse die. When you have these experiences, there’s some sort of opening between your world and theirs, and their world, the animal world, suddenly becomes available.

As we pass one brownstone, a young man in a leather jacket, leaning insouciantly in a doorway, leers at us, at our riding crops and shiny black boots. Rolling a toothpick around in his mouth, he says, with a toss of the chin, “Hey, baby, now you know how to treat a husband.”

Farther along, three little girls gush with excitement as we pass. Even girls in big cities dream about horses, as do girls in a variety of cultures, whether or not they have contact with real horses. They fantasize about unicorns, or play with horse toys, the most recent of which are long-haired ponies they can brush and groom. There is an ancient connection, hidden deep in the collective unconscious, a place where horses fuel some of our most powerful obsessions and leave us gasping in religious ecstasy.

   Ancient horse worship was practiced throughout Europe, and thrived into the Christian era. In the twelfth century, Irish kings were still practicing ceremonies of symbolic rebirth from the callipygian body of their goddess Epona, the White Mare. Her chalk effigy, 350 feet long, surveys a hillside in Berkshire, England, and is much visited by tourists. In the Iron Age, people worshiped her throughout the western world. The Jutish king and queen (who ruled what is now Kent) were named Hengist and Horsa, that is, stallion and mare. Male, female, and androgynous horse gods bewitched the imagination with their explosive sensuality. Ripe, voluptuous-hipped, and intuitive, arriving in a cloud of dust as if conjured into being, accompanied by the rhythmic drumroll of their hooves, horses seemed possessed of magic. With a sense of smell more highly attuned than humans’, they could bolt in panic before the thunder ripped, foretell an earthquake, flee from an advancing but still-unseen predator. It made them seem prescient as wizards. A prey species, horses panic by design. Anything out of the ordinary alerts their senses, detonating a complex bomb of responses: shrieking, shying, rearing up, bolting away. They don’t wait around to analyze the threat. Reacting to dangers only they perceive—something as harmless as a wind blown leaf or a shadow flickering in moonlight—horses are flightiness on the hoof. In touch with invisible demons, they must have seemed to our ancestors four-legged emissaries from the ghost world. Humans are prone to feel unworthy, even in the eyes of animals they control. What could be more powerful an ideal than the courageous, ever-alert, heavily sexed horse, pawing the ground in defiance, its hooves all declaratives?

Sometimes votive horse heads decorated homes, for good luck, and religious dancers in Europe and Asia pretended to ride horse-headed sticks. Holding the horse god erect between their legs, shamans said they took flight and galloped across the sky until they reached heaven. When a warrior died, a horse in the funeral procession carried his ghost. His boots were arranged backward in the stirrups because ghosts supposedly had backward-facing feet. Throughout antiquity, horses carried the dead to the netherworld, as they do symbolically in state funerals today. Even the Norse god Odin figured in a vast horse cult that stretched all the way to India. Hindu gods took the shape of horses when they died; and, in an important fertility ritual, a Hindu queen pretending to be the mare goddess Saranyu would take the penis of a dead horse and dramatically plant it between her legs, while urging “the vigorous male” to “lay seed.” According to
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
,

This ancient ceremony explains one of Odin’s more puzzling titles, Volsi, meaning both “Son of God” and “Horse’s Penis.” The penis was the “son” worshipped by Iron Age equestrian tribes calling themselves Völsungs, descendents of Volsi. The cult was not confined to Scandinavia. The Welsh had the same ancestral horse-god, Waelsi or Waels. Slavs also worshipped him as Volos, a sacrificed horse whose entrails and blood were supposed to produce the water of life…. Volos was still incarnated in a ritually castrated and slaughtered stallion every spring, up to the eighteenth century
A.D.
Since the people insisted on worshipping him, he was converted into a Christian saint, Vlas, who had no real existence except as a pagan horse god…. Ancient Rome knew him as the October Horse…. The Taurians sacrificed to Artemis horses from whom “the member was cut off.”

From the union of the bloody Horse Penis and the Earth Mother came a race of centaurs: gods half man, half horse. Indian myth called such beings Gandharvas, and both cultures credited them with wizardry, light-footed dancing, and perpetual lust. In Greece, Pegasus the winged horse carried heroes to heaven, while centaurs roamed the land, full of hot-blooded mischief, looking for new brides to abduct and rape. In Sweden, kings could be ripped apart by horse Valkyries, or by their witchlike priestesses, called Volvas, who wore horse masks.

As late as the sixteenth century, Europeans were bleeding horses on the day after Christmas, as a token sacrifice to the White Mare, and straddling “Old Hob” at New Year’s. Indeed, we still give our children “hobbyhorses” to ride, without realizing that it’s a carryover from the frenzied dancing of the pagan horse cult. The horseshoe we hang over a door for good luck symbolizes the vulva of the mare goddess. Ancient peoples, from the Celts to the Hindus, heeded this symbol, which they wore as amulets, and in whose shape they designed their temples. In fact, the earliest engravings known in the western world—Paleolithic carvings in the rock shelters of Castel-merle—are of vulvas. In Greece, the horse vulva shape became the omega, the final letter of the alphabet, which led around again to the alpha, completing the life sentence of rebirth. If decorating one’s house with images of mares’ genitals sounds odd, remember that ancient Romans dressed their children in penis amulets to ward off evil spirits, and medieval churches displayed symbols of female genitals (called “sheela-na-gigs”) on their doorways for the same purpose. “Horseshoe” was a slang term for the female genitals in eighteenth-century Europe (a seduced girl was said to have “lost a horseshoe”). Horses have always tantalized a wild and ancient part of us that worshiped the White Mare, symbolized by her genitals; in her secret cave, the male and female life forces united to restore nature with nuts and berries, herds of animals with young, and humans with the possibility of rebirth.

Some women embrace horses as a psychological prosthesis or as a mystic guide; for them, riding has to do with the perfection of the soul. For others, the connection is earthier and more sensual. But, for all, the infatuation begins early, in the foothills of adolescence.

   After leaving Claremont Academy, I catch a flight upstate into deep country, to visit a psychologist whose practice includes adolescent girls. She lives in a lakeside town with a bird sanctuary threading through it and farmlands surrounding it, where horses are so familiar that signs along the highway forbid horseback riding through the four lanes of catapulting traffic.

The towns of upstate New York are like railway stations, where at any moment hundreds of lives converge—people carrying small satchels of worry or disbelief, people racing down the slippery corridors of youth, people slowly dragging the steamer trunk of a trauma, people fresh from the suburbs of hope, people troubled by timetables, people keen to arrive, people whose minds are like small place settings, people whose aging faces are sundials, people desperate and alone who board a bullet train in the vastness of nothing and race hell-bent to the extremities of nowhere. At the edge of the town I live in, a converted depot restaurant called The Station reminds us of the time when train cars shuffled in a long conga line to Manhattan. In earlier days a clock outside the restaurant was frozen at 6:22, when the last iron fury left town. But the trains have never stopped running. People meet often in their narrow trembling cars. They hear the sleep-thick breathing of their neighbors in the next compartment. In time, everyone meets everyone, either by repute or in person in Ithaca’s equivalent of a dining car.

Downtown, in the center of a red-brick junior high school that has been converted to shops, the Café Dewitt consists of a scatter of bistro tables in a large open corridor; and it’s the place where everyone goes for lunch, because diners can watch and greet passersby on their way to errands. One day, I meet Linda there for lunch. A vibrant, pretty woman of fifty, with short, wavy blond hair and large penetrating eyes, she is a clinical psychologist who sees many girls and women in her practice. Over mozzarella-and-tomato salads and whole-wheat bread drizzled with honey, we discuss horse love. I grew up completely enraptured by horses. Although Linda didn’t, she has seen that rapture often among the girls she counsels.