Plath's Ariel, Nietzche's Horse, and a Parable by Nickole Brown [by Nin Andrews}

When I woke this morning my Amazfit (a cheapo fitness tracker) informed me, Your sleep score is lower than 80% of users. Did you eat before bed? Exercise? Drink? I noticed an elevated heartbeat in the middle of the night.

Yes, let me explain, I start to tell it. I know, it’s not normal to talk to your devices. But ever since I completed my memoir, I have a recurring dream of my father repeatedly beating his horse. Afterwards I can’t fall back to sleep. The dream is a replay of a scene I witnessed as a girl. No matter what I do in this dream, I am helpless to change it. If I scream, my words are soundless. If I run towards them, I become smaller as I run.

The recent leaked video of the ex-Olympian and dressage champion, Charlotte Dujardin, whipping a horse, might have triggered the dream as well.

It's just a dream, I tell myself when I wake, soaked in sweat.  If only the horses could fly away. Like Pegasus, the winged white horse that was born from the blood of Medusa, a woman who turned men into stone.  

A therapist once said the dream is a metaphor for abuse. A metaphor? I asked.  But my mother insisted, That never happened. You have an over-active imagination. Maybe you saw it in a movie or maybe it was someone else . . .

My mother was a Greek scholar who read me the myths over and over, and thanks to her I learned odd details such as: Pegasus’ hoofprints created a spring of fresh water—those who drank from it became poets.  

But my mother could have been right.  My father was not the only one I witnessed beating a horse. A lot of horse trainers, like Dujardin, find the whip a useful tool. And I am still haunted by a scene in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in which a man rides a mare towards an oncoming train, forcing it to gallop towards the roaring locomotive. The horse rears and whirls, whinnying in terror as the rider whips and beats her side with metal stirrups until her flanks bleed. Two women watch this scene. One seems aroused by it. The other screams, Stop it!

A college English professor described this scene as a depiction of male virility and domination. He pointed out that the rider took pleasure in the horse's suffering. (Where is Medusa when we need her?)

I think of all the mythic horses, usually white horses: Pegasus, Muhammed’s Burāq, Siddhartha’s Kanthaka, and the phrase in the Bible, Behold a white horse, associated with Christ. Add to that the tale of the white unicorn in Eden, the first named animal by Adam, the divine animal that was given the choice by God to stay in the Garden or follow man to earth, to a life of suffering and death. The unicorn, like a Buddha, chose to follow man out of compassion, devotion, love.

Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was also a white horse and seen by Plath as a potential savior/liberator. She took up riding in that cruel time after Ted Hughes left her for Assia Wevill. According to her letters, Plath was a victim of spousal abuse, but many literary critics have discredited her descriptions of her marriage. After all, how can you trust the words of a mad woman? 

So, what is true? How do we decide?

I am reminded of the legend of Nietzsche—he witnessed a coachman flogging a horse in a town square and tried and failed to rescue it, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck. Afterwards, he suffered a mental breakdown and descended into insanity. 

Scholars claim there is no proof this ever happened. They insist the story of Nietzsche’s horse was stolen from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov dreams he is a child again, witnessing a peasant beating an old horse. A crowd joins in and beats the horse to death—for the fun of it.

The scene is based on an experience from Dostoevsky’s own life; he wrote about it in his journal and also included it in his novel, The Brother’s Karamazov.

But do we really know what happened in Dostoevsky’s childhood? Who, after all, would want to beat a dead horse?

I thought I’d close this long, disjointed ramble with this stunning poem/parable by Nickole Brown.

Parable

Nickole Brown

Let us not with one stone kill one bird, 
much less two. Let us never put a cat 
in a bag nor skin them, regardless 
of how many ways there are to do so. 
And let us never take the bull, especially 
by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is 

we could watch our tongues or keep 
silent. What I mean is we could scrub 
the violence from our speech. And if we find
truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her

ground-down molars, no matter how 
old she is, especially if she was given 
as a gift. Again, let’s open her mouth——that of the horse, 
I mean——let us touch that interdental space where 
no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip. 
Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle 

empty between her incisors and molars, rub her 
aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her. 
Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call 
broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through 
two thirteen-year emergences of cicadas

and thought their rising a god infestation, 
thought each insect roiling up an iteration 
of the many names of god, because god to her is 
the grasses so what comes up from grass is
god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she

say the word cicada——words are hindrances 
to what can be spoken through the body, are 
what she tolerates when straddled, 
giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After, 
it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl, 
before the saddle sweat is rinsed cool 
with water from the hose and a carrot is offered 
flat from the palm. Yes, words being 

generally useless she listens instead 
to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun
burns overhead, when it’s warm enough
for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the 
dark and fill their wings to make them 
stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound 

of winter-coming in her mane 
or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane——
yes, that sound——a liquid shushing 
like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once 
but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall 
leaves. Yes, that sound, as they fill their new wings 
then lumber to the canopy to demand
come here, come here, come 
here, now come. 

If this is a parable you don’t understand, 
then, dear human, stop listening for words. 
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings, 
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings. 
The lesson here is of the mare 
and of the insects, even of the rooster 
puffed and strutting past. Because now, 
now there is only one thing worth hearing, 
and it is the plea of every living being in that field 
we call ours, is the two-word commandment 
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live. 
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.  

Comments

[Sally Bliumis-Dunn]

I love this entry. Nin. The whole line between dream and waking reality, the magic of myth, how to learn where to look for truth and Nickole Brown's meditation on language and the body and how to quench and examine our thirst for life.

[Karen Schubert]

So much to think about here, Nin, and this gorgeous poem. We just watched the spare and haunting Hungarian film The Turin Horse, which begins with the story about Nietzsche.