Caveat: Heavy drinking and significant amounts of TV watching, combined with occasional
perusals of assigned reading which involved concepts like "genetic epistemology," were all in play during the composition process.
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Thus we can readily learn all that Newton has set forth in his immortal work, in the Principle of Natural Philosophy, however great a hand was required to discover it, but we cannot learn to write spirited poetry, however express may be the precepts of art and however excellent its model.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
I have done differential calculus. I learned differential calculus under the influence of a crazy Canadian leftist graduate student whose specialty was topology, whom I remember most for wearing a shirt with a raised fist in whose clenched fingers lay a carrot. The fist was rendered in the style of socialist realism, the carrot as a Bugs Bunny prop. Aren’t aesthetic schemata instructive?
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This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed. See, here it is –
I hold it towards you.
- Jon Keats (allegedly)
The title of this blog is based on my attempt to ride a horse named Magic on a Montana day whose surreal spectrum contained sunlight, snow, hail, rain, and mist in the same frame. Magic is a paint with one blue eye and one brown eye. A “paint” is a kind of horse, a breed, much like – and here I might reach beyond my understanding of horses – a golden retriever or great dane. On this schizophrenic day, I “caught” Magic with the aid of his natural curiosity and the engrained concept he had acquired in his youth that an untied rope around his neck was the same as a lasso that would strangle him if he thought he could escape it. I led Magic to a post and tied his lead rope. The way it was tied, I could release him in a second but he couldn’t break loose without breaking the rope.
Prior to saddling a horse, one brushes and picks its feet. I brushed him down, fed him a few treats, and brought out the hoof picker. I let him smell it, reached down to his left foreleg, and picked it up. Horses wear shoes. They are half-circles of metal – iron perhaps, I don’t really know – that are pounded into their hooves. Picking hooves amounts to scraping horse shit out of the empty space that forms in the intersection of hoof and shoe.
Horses kill people. They dislodge their riders and proceed to stomp on them like a Blue Line train running over a depressed person who summoned the courage to jump. Picking hooves involves putting your head in a position within reach of their hooves. Horses’ hooves, more than anything else, are what kill people. Accordingly, picking hooves invokes a fear that one can suppress through trust. I trusted, and continue to trust, Magic. On that day, in my cowboy boots that don’t fit me physically and probably don’t fit me stylistically, I leaned down and picked up Magic’s right foreleg. He gave it to me, I cleaned the shit out of his hoof, and set it down. I went to his rear leg. He gave it to me, and I found a rock the size of my fist wedged in the space his hoof and shoe formed. I proceeded to work on dislodging the rock, with the image of myself falling on the ground and being pummeled into a bloody pulp by the horse I find more endearing than half of my co-workers.
I got the rock out, picked his left fore and rear legs, and placed Magic’s saddle blanket on his back. He snapped his head up and down, his eyes rolled back in his head, and I paused to rub his cheek. He calmed, I put his saddle on, tightened his cinch – which is like the equivalent of having a corset ratcheted around his gut – and walked away to smoke a cigarette. I am still a neophyte in riding horses, but I have been taught to give them time to accept the fact their will is about to be made subordinate to a being one fifth of their size. After stomping out the dislodged cherry of my cigarette, I untied Magic’s lead rope, walked him out of the corral, closed the gate, and re-tied him to another post. He whinnied, pawed the ground with his hooves, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
Inexperienced and trusting, I untied Magic and climbed up on his back with an unsubstantiated faith in his fidelity to my own purpose. I thought I had taken care of the rock in his hoof when I removed it. Thing is, it left a bruise. He had when walking around on the rock for the better part of two days. So when I got on his back, and he shifted his weight to that back left leg, his experience was something like that of a human who had taken a few shots to the heels with a hammer and then was made to stand on his own feet.
Magic was not happy about my being on his back. We pirouetted together – he snorted – I kicked him in the ribs to try to redirect him to where we should be headed – and we pirouetted again, in a tighter circle, and the divergence between his agenda and my own became clear. I almost fell – visions of having my brain come out my ears rising once again – he crowhopped - i really almost fell - i reined him in - we moved towards the corner post of the corral - and then I had the wisdom to call good enough good enough – I stepped off Magic, unsaddled him, and gave him a big bucket of oats.
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Three months before, I was assigned the task of feeding Magic and his four cohorts – Truman, Teddy, Manny, and Sapphire. Feeding the horses came to be my duty after the maintenance man fell on some ice and cracked his ribs. At first, the horses refused my initial advances and grew more cantankerous by the day, which led me to poetry. One day I woke up and took my $1 copy of Robert Frost’s North of Boston to work. I entered the corral, sized up the horses, read the first stanza of “Fences,” and proceeded with the feeding. Who knows whether they heard what I read, and to be honest who cares? One stanza calmed me enough to stay out of their way, to get done what needed to be done, and to exit once what needed to be done was done. One stanza got their attention, isolated where I was physically, and – as I continued to recite day after day – established a rhythm to which they could become habituated. I moved from Frost to Williams, and later to Auden, which was a mistake. They took to Auden like I take to penicillin – it’s on my chart, the nurses should know better, but they give it to me anyway. Two hour later my face is blotched with red streaks, my esophagus is half-closed, and cardiac arrest is two minutes away.
Auden says poetry makes nothing happen, which reminds me of those artist types who thrust their painting or whatever on you and say, “it’s really not good” or “I’m so unhappy with it,” and you know they expect you to come to the rescue with heartfelt disagreement. Auden's poetry - and I'm not speaking of the Icarus poem - literally sent the horses running into the back pasture, away from their food.
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Poets . . . .[BLAH BLAH BLAH something something Milton this Milton revolution is imminent] are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
- Pierce Shelley, In Defence of Poetry
Are terrorists, with their teleological theology of the damned and the saved, the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Are their counterparts in our country the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Are television programmers? Are pundits? Are cancer patients who want to kill themselves with drugs to head off the pain? Do you honestly give a fuck? About terrorists? About evangelicals? Programmers? Cancer patients? Poets?
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It is common nowadays to see “rollercoaster ride” invoked as a superlative in the blurbs on the backs of books of fiction. The thing about rollercoasters is you have some sense of what’s coming: you rise, you fall, and you glean enjoyment from the rising and falling. Poetry isn’t a rollercoaster ride, it’s a ride on a wounded horse. That sounds quaint and clever to me, and sentimental and facile to you, but I mean it: take that first step, and have what lies beneath you shift and turn and squirm, a half ton of something alive that you can attempt to lead but inevitably configures you and your range of motion to a sequence of events that challenges your expectations, gives you a different perspective, and leaves you hoping you won’t plummet.
