Detail from an original artwork by James Walker / Izaak Bosman (2018)
See D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage: click here
According to D. H. Lawrence: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived" and in losing the horse - with the arrival of motor vehicles - we have lost ourselves.
For horses - as real flesh-and-blood creatures and not merely as symbols that roam in the "dark underworld meadows of the soul" - give us lordship and link us directly to the surging potency of the living cosmos, or what Lawrence sometimes refers to as God [1].
But what Lawrence doesn't mention is the great horse manure crisis of the 1890s. By this date, London and other large cities around the world faced the very real prospect of being buried beneath huge piles of horseshit.
On average, a horse will produce between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of faeces each day. So when you have tens of thousands of these animals transporting people and goods around a city the scale of the problem is significant.
(I'll not even mention the two pints of urine that every horse pisses out each day; nor the fact that many working horses who died on the job were often left to rot in the street before eventually being carted away.)
So whilst Lawrence might abhor the motorised traffic that has crushed all the living adventure out of London and which now rolls on massively and overwhemingly, going nowhere [2], it's worth considering the excremental reality of horses.
Further, it might help horse lovers out there to also reflect upon something pointed out by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk:
"Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn't it an odd comment on today's society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were [...] but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then [...] All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of - horses are the only ones for whom historical philosophy's dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility." [3]
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 101-02.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I Don't Like Living in London', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 121.
[3] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries (1999), in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 44.
I'm not entirely convinced that what Sloterdijk says here is correct; for example, there were an estimated 3.3 million horses in late-Victorian Britain, whereas in 2019 there were, according to the British Equestrian Trade Association, around 847,000 horses in the UK (down from 946,000 in 2015). The fact is, with the coming of the automobile, most horses were put out to graze - or sent to the knacker's yard.
For an equine journey through human history, see Susanna Forrest, The Age of the Horse, (Atlantic Books, 2016): for further details on both book and author, click here.
