Daniel Radcliffe: Photo by Uli Weber (2007)
If the combination of sex, religion, and horse-mania comes together even more disturbingly than in Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr, it is in Peter Shaffer's play Equus (1973). Shaffer claims that he was inspired to write the work after being told by a friend of an apparently senseless and horrific act of horse-ripping. Without knowing any of the specific details of the case, he set out to imaginatively interpret the event.
The play opens with seventeen-year-old Alan Strang being admitted to a psychiatric hospital following his conviction for the blinding of six horses with a metal spike. This act of zoosadism obliges us to examine the human capacity for cruelty and sacrificial violence. It certainly forces the middle-aged doctor who is treating Alan to confront his own spiritual atrophy and question the value of a life lived in a world from which all gods are absent. At the end of the play Dr. Dysart shamefully confesses that he envies the ferocious passion and religious frenzy experienced by his young patient.
However, his friend Hesther Salomon, the local magistrate who sent Alan to him, isn't having any of this. She points out that the boy is in fact mentally ill and clearly suffering from delusions. Further, she makes the perfectly valid point that one does not need to gallop naked on horseback at midnight or indulge in grotesque acts of Dionysian madness in order to live a rich and fulfilling life: failure to torture and kill animals or children does not make one 'pallid and provincial' despite what religious lunatics like to believe.
There are certainly other ways in which one might experience intensity and become-centaur without engaging in sex with horses, or slashing them with a knife. The popular form of BDSM known as pony-play is one such method. It remains an erotic and ritualistic activity, but is far more refined and philosophically of interest. If only Lady Carrington and her husband could have followed a programme similar to the one set out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, then maybe she wouldn't have needed to run off with St. Mawr. And if only Jill the stable girl could have seduced Alan Strang into the world of pony-play, then perhaps he would never have committed his terrible deed.
Just to be clear on this for those unfamiliar with pony-play: it's not a question of simply imitating a horse and submitting to the authority of a mistress or master. It is rather a question of exchanging forces. To be more precise, it's a question of destroying instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. The equestrian ensures this conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. Deleuze and Guattari quote the following rather beautiful passages in which a masochist in the process of becoming-animal speaks to his mistress:
"'At night, put the on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly ... Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and the thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheaf. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the mistress wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The mistress will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mistress will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.'"
"'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours ... Thus at the mere thought of your riding boots ... I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me an imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise."
Doesn't this sound far lovelier than the all-too-literal understanding of zoophilia we find in bestial pornography which continues to fixate on organs and acts of penetration? And surely fetishistic joy is better too than religious ecstasy which invariably results in horror and vile atrocity, rather than a new form of love.
There are certainly other ways in which one might experience intensity and become-centaur without engaging in sex with horses, or slashing them with a knife. The popular form of BDSM known as pony-play is one such method. It remains an erotic and ritualistic activity, but is far more refined and philosophically of interest. If only Lady Carrington and her husband could have followed a programme similar to the one set out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, then maybe she wouldn't have needed to run off with St. Mawr. And if only Jill the stable girl could have seduced Alan Strang into the world of pony-play, then perhaps he would never have committed his terrible deed.
Just to be clear on this for those unfamiliar with pony-play: it's not a question of simply imitating a horse and submitting to the authority of a mistress or master. It is rather a question of exchanging forces. To be more precise, it's a question of destroying instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. The equestrian ensures this conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. Deleuze and Guattari quote the following rather beautiful passages in which a masochist in the process of becoming-animal speaks to his mistress:
"'At night, put the on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly ... Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and the thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheaf. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the mistress wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The mistress will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mistress will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.'"
"'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours ... Thus at the mere thought of your riding boots ... I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me an imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise."
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 155, 156.
Doesn't this sound far lovelier than the all-too-literal understanding of zoophilia we find in bestial pornography which continues to fixate on organs and acts of penetration? And surely fetishistic joy is better too than religious ecstasy which invariably results in horror and vile atrocity, rather than a new form of love.
