Reflections on a Photo of a Horse's Head - A Guest Post by Louise Mason

Horsehead (SA/2023)

 

 

Horses' heads vary hugely in their size, shape, and character, which partly explains why they have long fascinated artists ...

 

One thinks, for example, of the carved marble horse head by the Ancient Greek sculptor Pheidias; ears flattened, jaw gaping, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging, it's both beautiful and terrifying  at the same time. Believed to date to around 438-432 BC, it's said to be one of the noble nags that drew the chariot of the moon goddess Selene [1]. 

 

One thinks also of the far more recent work by Nic Fiddian-Green; a giant bronze sculpture of a horse's head entitled Still Water (2011). Located amidst the endless noise and movement of traffic in central London, it provides a pleasing contrast in its stillness and silence [2]. 

 

But, looking at the powerful image above by Stephen Alexander, primarily makes me think of the serpentine aspect of horses when they lower their "strangely naked equine heads" [3], press their ears back, and extend their long, muscular necks, moving the latter from side-to-side in an aggressive gesture known as snaking [4].

Notes

 

[1] Part of the Elgin Marbles, this sculpture - commonly known as the Selene Horse - can be found in the British Museum: click here for details.

 

[2] This free-standing work is 33ft high and weighs in at an impressive 20 tonnes. Originally installed at Marble Arch in 2011, it was relocated to Achille’s Way, near Hyde Park Corner, in May 2021. Fiddian-Green, is a British sculptor who specialises in making lifelike horses' heads, having been inspired whilst a student at Chelsea College of Arts by the Selene Horse. Click here to visit his website.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr, in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Bran Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 35. 

 

[4] Snaking is a common form of herding behavior, primarily displayed by stallions in the wild, keen to assert their dominance over mares. However, it has also been observed in domesticated horses, including geldings (castrated stallions).

 

  

I Had So Much Rather the Centaur Had Slain Hercules ...

"Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, 

at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, 

half immersed in nature, half transcending it." - Ortega y Gasset

 

 

On viewing an (unidentified) artistic representation of Hercules slaying Nessus [1], Lawrence writes: 

 

"I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they're the greatest ailment humanity ever had." [2] 

 

Whilst we might ponder what the link is between the killing of Nessus and the development of the human soul, I love these two short lines in which Lawrence recognises that the soul is a type of affliction and that mankind might have been happier and more beautiful - like flowers - had we never experimented with the internalisation of cruelty and subjected the flesh to psychology.  

 

One could quote Wilde at this point - or Nietzsche - but let's remind ourselves of Foucault's fascinating take on this question in Discipline and Punish which ends with a killer twist:

 

"It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised [...] This is the historical reality of [the] soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." [3]

 

In conclusion - and returning to Lawrence - it's obvious that he reads the slaying of the centaur as a triumph of human idealism over instinctive animality and, like Lou Carrington in St Mawr, he dreams of a time to come when men might untame themselves, regain their animal mystery and become-centaur ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In Greek mythology, Nessus, son of Centauros, was killed by Heracles with a poisoned arrow, after the latter saw the former attempt to rape his wife, Deianeira, having carried her across the river Evinos. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 143.  

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 29-30. 

Crawling on All Fours in Shaggy Inhumanity ...

William Blake: Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795-1805)

tate.org.uk

 

 

I. The Case of King Nebuchadnezzar

 

Most people are probably vaguely familiar with the figure of King Nebuchadnezzar who, if the Bible is to be believed, was deprived of his mind by God and forced to live like an animal as punishment for excessive pride or hubris. The fact that he destroyed Solomon's Temple and held God's chosen people captive probably didn't go down well either [1]. 

 

William Blake famously produced a large colour print depicting this Babylonian monarch reduced to the status of a mad beast. As can be seen, he looked pretty rough during this seven year period; almost like some sort of werewolf. Alexander Gilchrist writes that the picture shows Nebuchadnezzar: 

 

"crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures' talons, and his wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair, reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet." [2]

 

Happily for Nebuchadnezzar, at the end of the septennium he is restored to sanity and full human status - indeed, he even gets his kingdom back, having learned his lesson, so all's well that ends well in his case ...     

 

 

II. The Case of Robinson Crusoe

 

Despite what naturists may choose to believe, I'm not convinced there's anything positive to be gained from the experience of nudity; I certainly don't think that running about with your kit off in the woods or on the beach, makes you essentially healthier, happier, or more vital. 

 

Having stripped off his clothes in a heavy shower of rain, Robinson Crusoe later muses on this question of nakedness and the importance of garments: 

 

"It was true that neither the temperature nor any consideration of modesty required him to go about dressed in a civilized manner. Sheer habit had caused him to do so, but now in his despair he began to appreciate the value of that armour of wool and linen with which human society had hitherto protected him. Nakedness is a luxury in which a man may indulge himself without danger only when he is warmly surrounded by his fellow man. For Robinson [...] it was a trial of desperate temerity. Stripped of its threadbare garments - worn, tattered, and sullied, but the fruit of civilized millennia, and impreganted with human associations - his vulnerable body was at the mercy of every hostile element. The wind, the thorned shrubs, the rocks, and the pitiless light assailed and tormented their defenceless prey." [3] 

 

Clothes serve many important functions. But offering a degree of physical protection in a hard, sharp and dangerous world is by no means the least of these. However, as time passes on the island, Crusoe succumbs to the devastating effects of isolation and eventually finds himself as naked - and as bestial - as Nebuchadnezzar in Blake's famous print: 

 

"Robinson could not have said how long it was since he had left his last shred of clothing on some thornbush. In any case, the thought of sunburn no longer troubled him, since his back, flanks, and thighs were now protected by a thick coating of dried mud. His hair and beard had grown so long that his face was almost invisible beneathy their tangled mass. His hands had become mere forepaws used for walking, since it made him giddy to stand upright. His state of physical weakness [...] but above all the breaking of some little spring in his soul, had led him to move only on his hands and knees. He knew now that man [...] can only stay upright while the crowd packed densely around him continues to prop him up. Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as part of humanity without his realizing it, he felt he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement. He moved less and less, and his brief excursions always ended in his return to the mire. Here, in its warm coverlet of slime, his body lost all weight, while the toxic emanations from the stagnant water drugged his mind. Only his eyes, nose, and mouth were active, alert for edible weed and toad spawn drifting on the surface." [4] 

 

III. Lou Carrington's Contrasting Vision of the Pure Animal Man

 

Crusoe's experience of becoming-animal doesn't sound so great a life - and certainly puts being in a Covid lockdown into perspective. It obliges one also to reconsider D. H. Lawrence's fetishisation of the animal man, articulated, for example, in St. Mawr by Lou Carrington who informs her (somewhat sceptical) mother that she is tired of nice, clean men with minds and wants instead men full of their own animal mystery, burning with life:

 

"'A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves.'" [5]   

 

It's a lovely vision - in stark opposition to the image of Crusoe -  but one worries that just as the latter is the product of a fear of animality and the loss of humanity defined in moral-rational terms and related to the covering of one's nakedness, so Lawrence's fantasy is the product of his own romanticism and a longing for a natural paradise of some kind, in which man can dispense with clothing and his animal nature will no longer be corrupted and domesticated by civilisation.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers interested in the story of Nebuchadnezzar will find it in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, a collection of legendary tales and apocalyptic visions dating from the 2nd century BC. The consensus among scholars is that the work should obviously be read as historical fiction, rather than historical fact.   

 

[2] Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, (Dover Publications, 1998), p. 408-09. 

 

[3] Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 33.  

 

[4] Ibid., p. 40.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 62.       

Personal Love Counts So Little: Further Reflections on the Queer Case of Lou Carrington

Emerald Green Sacred Sex Graffiti (2015)
by Deprise Brescia / fineartamerica.com
 

As torpedophiles will recall, D. H. Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr is the story of a young woman who, having quickly exhausted the limits of love in a conventional (all-too-human) sense, embarks on an affair with a stallion.

However, her search for a form of transpersonal sex doesn't end in the stable. For ultimately, even a relationship with a handsome bay horse doesn't quite meet her needs. She yearns for something else, something bigger, something that can only be found perhaps beneath the radiation of new skies.

Thus it is that Lou ends up living on a small tumble-down ranch near Santa Fe. She hasn't got and doesn't want a man in her life: "She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul. [...] Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone." [137]

Lou adopts an asexual - almost anti-sexual - position, beyond man and beast, with spooky-erotic elements of spectrophilia:

"Because sex, mere sex, is repellent to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless something touches my very spirit, the very quick of me. I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give myself only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences." [138]

Unable to bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships - and finding that even a fling with a horse can only take you so far - Lou decides she will model her life henceforth on that of the Vestal Virgins:

"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]

And these unseen presences are manifested in the landscape of her new home; "it seemed to her that the hidden fire was alive and burning in this sky, over the desert, in the mountains. She felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere ..." This despite the tourists in their motor-cars, the "rather dreary Mexicans" and the Indians lurking with "something of a rat-like secretiveness and defeatedness in their bearing" [140].   

The question is: how do you come into touch with the spirit of place? That is to say, how does one polarise oneself with the vital effluence of the environment? It requires, as Lou recognises, submission above all else. One must consent to be seized by a new electricity and undergo a transformation of self - not just psychologically, but physically, as one's bones, blood, and flesh are all subject to a new molecular disposition.

It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.

The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.    

This is something that Lou, like the woman from New England who owned the ranch before her, will have to learn: that the dark gods and fanged demons to whom she wishes to submit were "grim and invidious and relentless, huger than man, and lower than man" [150].  

Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:

"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).  

For the earlier post in which I discuss Lou Carrington's affair with St. Mawr, click here.

For a post in which I discuss Lawrence's understanding of the spirit of place, click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Man's Becoming-Animal

Helmo: from the Bêtes de Mode series (2006)

I. Becoming All the Animals in Turn. 

Sick and tired of well-domesticated modern men like her husband, the female protagonist of Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr (1925), ponders if there mayn't be something else to marvel at in men besides "'mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness'" and that perhaps this something else is animality. 

Her mother, however, is unconvinced by this idea and imagines that her daughter secretly desires a caveman to club her over the head and carry her away. Angered that her suggestion has been misinterpreted as a vulgar rape fantasy, Lou responds:

"'Don't be silly, mother. That's much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind! I don't consider the caveman is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. [...] He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves."

Mrs. Witt, unnerved by this, argues that whatever else such a combination of man and beast would be, he'd certainly be dangerous. Lou, angry now with her mother, replies that be that as it may, she'd still rather live in a world of animal-men that one full of tame and humble half-men who are merely sentimental and spiteful.     

II. Not to Be a Man Anymore

Of course, D. H. Lawrence isn't the only writer to dream of man's becoming-animal, or, indeed, becoming-plant. So too does the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. In his first book, for example, published just ten years after Lawrence's St. Mawr, he writes these rather lovely lines:

"I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man. [...] If I could, I would choose every day another form, plant or animal, I would be all the flowers one by one: weed, thistle or rose [...] Let me live the life of every species , wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure."

But it's important to note that Cioran isn't looking to escape from or abandon his humanity once and for all, so much as to make it seem a newly attractive option once more:

"Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again."    

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-62, and E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 68-69. 

Note: Helmo is a French design studio established by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez. In the Bêtes de Mode project, they collaborated with Thomas Dimetto to produce a series of double-exposure photographs of man and beast, exhibited at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris, (2006). To see more of these images, click here. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-ash, should click here. 

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 

of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)

Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.

Equus Eroticus (1): The Case of Lady Carrington

In his short novel St Mawr, Lawrence examines a young woman's erotic and pagan fascination for a golden-red stallion, with brilliant black eyes. The horse challenges her to find something within herself that can answer to his own four-legged combination of virility and divinity and from their first encounter Lou is transfixed, transfigured, and turned-on:

"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her ... So slippery with vivid, hot life! ... Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in."

What exactly is Lou Carrington thinking of here? When Lawrence writes of this primal experience flooding into her female soul, what conclusion are we invited to arrive at other than this is essentially a carnal form of knowledge? I don't believe I'm being crassly reductive or offering a provocatively crude interpretation to insist on this fact. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-horse love affair in St. Mawr (as elsewhere in his work) and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of writing. The reason that he stresses the potent and dangerous maleness of the horse is because there is an unspoken desire for penetration.

But Lou would be right to be worried by the prospect of such. For as Bodil Joensen once warned in an interview, being fucked by a horse is always a risky business, even for those who are experienced in the practice. For not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick and suddenly thrust when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse's penis swells considerably and this can cause serious - if not fatal - internal damage.

Of course, having said this, Lou doesn't simply have the hots for St. Mawr. When she touches his body she feels herself brought mystically into connection with another world and another way of being; the horse answers to her need for some sense of religious wonder, as well as her desire for sexual fulfilment. When St. Mawr looks at her from out of the everlasting darkness, Lou feels he has uncanny authority over her and that she must worship him like some splendid god or demon.

In comparison, she finds her human relationships trivial and superficial; including her relationship with Rico, her husband, who is himself horse-like in his sensitivity, but forever "quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust" and fear that he attempts to mask with an anxious form of love and a clever niceness that is slowly driving Lou insane and into the hooves of St. Mawr.   

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Lou abandons Rico and runs off with her horse dreaming of a time to come when men might regain their animal mystery and nobility and become-centaur. 

- D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (CUP, 1983).