Read Online The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lauren Slater
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pinks and reds and glory blues.
By the time I was old enough to understand the prevailing theory about females and equines, I was already sliding off the saddle and on to other adventures. For my daughter, though, I suspect riding will be a lifelong love, if only because we have bought a house in the country and will be moving there soon, the antique barn equipped with stalls, all ready for the pony we plan to purchase. My parents never encouraged my riding, believing it to be a fundamentally dirty sport, but for Clara, well, the case is very different, and it won’t be long before she’s old enough to understand, and worse internalize, the psychoanalytic viewpoint that I believe brings shame to the prismatic and fundamentally irreducible love a girl has for her horse.
I want alternative theories for my daughter. I believe the current understanding—the horse as phallus, the horse as practice for later heterosexual love—is not only wrong but—more problematically—damaging, transmogrifying a relationship packed with profundity of a highly unusual sort. And yet I’ve no choice but to admit that when I try to express what this profundity is, I come up tongue tied, stuttering, my head swirling with disparate images from my past; Rose riding Mr. K in the pasture stacked with cubes of hay; the glitter of the trees we raced towards; the flash of a stirrup, the resounding crack of her crop, rain on the roof of the barn, a deep-green show jacket lined with luminous yellow silk—thousands of images but nothing of substance to offer my daughter or any horse-loving girl. See her there, riding round and round the ring? See her, going in circles?
As for me, how odd to rediscover this love in my middle age, when I was so sure it had disappeared. Sometimes, during my daughter’s lesson, I sneak off to the barn and whisper to the piebald pony, combing his blond mane with my weathered fingers. And then sometimes I simply walk the aisles, reading the nameplates affixed to each stall door. I have always delighted in the way we name our equines:
Smokey Raindrops. Pride’s Starlight Tanya. A. M. White Night. Praise Be. World Peace. Lay Me Down. Amen.
And my favorite:
Sweet Revenge.
What do these names tell us? There are fourteen domesticated large land mammals—alpaca, cow, cat, goat, pig—to name a few, and I have never heard any of them referred to in such a, a … magisterial manner. Can you imagine a sheep called “Praise Be” or a dog called “World Peace”? The horse is the only domesticated mammal that can carry his ceremonial title; on any other it sounds absurd; it breaks the back. Were the bond primarily sexual would not a girl pick a designation that reflected lust rather than reverence? But what is this reverence made of, and why do boys in the presence of horses seem not to feel it, or to feel it less? I need to ride my mind back, and back, trying to find, in the scraps of my own particular past, alternative explanations for the bond between girls and horses.
So here I am, a girl of ten, then eleven, then twelve, a girl who saw in the hugeness of a horse terror and beauty both, a girl who felt, sitting up in that saddle, and only on my best days, that she had some kind of connection with an absolute
other
, and the elation that went with that, my body a bridge over which it seemed all the animals could come. And they did come, Clara, in some dream sense they did, and then later, back down on the ground, the ride now over, I’d open my hand clutching carrot peels, apple halves, or even a dark chunk of chocolate, the horse’s limber lips taking it in,
all gone
, but that small smear on my skin somehow proving it had happened, proving I’d been freed, if only for a moment, from the prison that a person is, my human halter off, my whole self dilated, trees and teeth, fur and wind and every kind of weather pouring through me.
2: Fire
According to myth, Pegasus lived a brief and noble life on earth before ascending
By the time I was old enough to understand the prevailing theory about females and equines, I was already sliding off the saddle and on to other adventures. For my daughter, though, I suspect riding will be a lifelong love, if only because we have bought a house in the country and will be moving there soon, the antique barn equipped with stalls, all ready for the pony we plan to purchase. My parents never encouraged my riding, believing it to be a fundamentally dirty sport, but for Clara, well, the case is very different, and it won’t be long before she’s old enough to understand, and worse internalize, the psychoanalytic viewpoint that I believe brings shame to the prismatic and fundamentally irreducible love a girl has for her horse.
I want alternative theories for my daughter. I believe the current understanding—the horse as phallus, the horse as practice for later heterosexual love—is not only wrong but—more problematically—damaging, transmogrifying a relationship packed with profundity of a highly unusual sort. And yet I’ve no choice but to admit that when I try to express what this profundity is, I come up tongue tied, stuttering, my head swirling with disparate images from my past; Rose riding Mr. K in the pasture stacked with cubes of hay; the glitter of the trees we raced towards; the flash of a stirrup, the resounding crack of her crop, rain on the roof of the barn, a deep-green show jacket lined with luminous yellow silk—thousands of images but nothing of substance to offer my daughter or any horse-loving girl. See her there, riding round and round the ring? See her, going in circles?
As for me, how odd to rediscover this love in my middle age, when I was so sure it had disappeared. Sometimes, during my daughter’s lesson, I sneak off to the barn and whisper to the piebald pony, combing his blond mane with my weathered fingers. And then sometimes I simply walk the aisles, reading the nameplates affixed to each stall door. I have always delighted in the way we name our equines:
Smokey Raindrops. Pride’s Starlight Tanya. A. M. White Night. Praise Be. World Peace. Lay Me Down. Amen.
And my favorite:
Sweet Revenge.
What do these names tell us? There are fourteen domesticated large land mammals—alpaca, cow, cat, goat, pig—to name a few, and I have never heard any of them referred to in such a, a … magisterial manner. Can you imagine a sheep called “Praise Be” or a dog called “World Peace”? The horse is the only domesticated mammal that can carry his ceremonial title; on any other it sounds absurd; it breaks the back. Were the bond primarily sexual would not a girl pick a designation that reflected lust rather than reverence? But what is this reverence made of, and why do boys in the presence of horses seem not to feel it, or to feel it less? I need to ride my mind back, and back, trying to find, in the scraps of my own particular past, alternative explanations for the bond between girls and horses.
So here I am, a girl of ten, then eleven, then twelve, a girl who saw in the hugeness of a horse terror and beauty both, a girl who felt, sitting up in that saddle, and only on my best days, that she had some kind of connection with an absolute
other
, and the elation that went with that, my body a bridge over which it seemed all the animals could come. And they did come, Clara, in some dream sense they did, and then later, back down on the ground, the ride now over, I’d open my hand clutching carrot peels, apple halves, or even a dark chunk of chocolate, the horse’s limber lips taking it in,
all gone
, but that small smear on my skin somehow proving it had happened, proving I’d been freed, if only for a moment, from the prison that a person is, my human halter off, my whole self dilated, trees and teeth, fur and wind and every kind of weather pouring through me.
2: Fire
According to myth, Pegasus lived a brief and noble life on earth before ascending
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