toward Eternity-

Dickinson was a horse girl

A horse girl, the story goes, prefers the company of equines to creatures of her own species. I was a horse girl. I had a pink t-shirt with a horse surrounded by glitter that read, in bubble letters, “horse fever,” purchased at that place in the mall where you could get the composed range of anything you wanted on a t shirt in the early 1980’s (in California, this was rock and roll, horses, and the beach) and as I say that I miss that modest range of choices, the smallness of that range, which now I perceive as an innocence, though such judgements aren’t really all that fair. Innocence? Is that really something lost by history? Everyone else seems to think so. “There may always be a time of innocence,” writes Wallace Stevens, “There is never a place.” Why on earth would that be true? What does innocence have to do with being a horse girl? Everything, everything, I want to say. “I’ll allow it,” my inner judge says, as I proceed with this line of self-questioning, “but show us the relevance.”

I submit that Emily Dickinson is also a horse girl, which can be clearly proven by one of her more well-known poems:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

We slowly drive—He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure, too,

For His Civility—

We passed the School, where children strove

At Recess – in the Ring—

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting sun

Or rather – He passed Us—

The Dews drew quivering and Chill—

For only Gossamer, my Gown—

My Tippet – only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground—

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity—

This poem wouldn’t be itself without its horses.

But she’s in a carriage, you say, she’s not actually on the horse! And this is an allegorical poem, and one so clearly about death, these are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – how can it be a poem about horses? And how could that possibly matter, with the greater issue of death at stake?

These were the sorts of voices in my head when I was writing my dissertation, and I have found it less useful to quell them than to live with their comedy, being a middle child and a Sagittarius, driven by the desire to mediate and the desire to have things out loud, in the open, in an open field.

And what is a poem but an open field, and what are interpretations but horses? I know I have a history of interpretation that stands before any institution and outside of it. And I have an early memory of this. I remember with the certain photographic fuzziness of early remembering, that in my crib, I looked at the shapes on the wallpaper and thought they were animals, they look like animals, I thought, and I bore the names in my head like little signs, held up, but couldn’t find the words in my mouth, and they kept shifting, anyway, from animal to animal. The polar bear I thought I saw became a crouching bird. This was one of my first memories, and I remember, as well, the debate I had, about a year later in the same room with my sister, about whether there were animals at all on the wallpaper, whether they could exist. A well-mannered debate as I remember, a speculation that held two alternatives: (1) shapes that look like animals are animals, (2) shapes that look like animals aren’t animals but have something to do with animals. Can’t good interpretations stand together in the field? And if they do, doesn’t it prove that a field exists, a place of immortality like the field of memory in which all my interpretations of that completely ordinary and no doubt not-in-any-way-immortal wallpaper exist together? I am aware of interpretation (3) shapes that look like animals don’t have anything to do with animals at all, but my field didn’t include it until a little bit later.

Field, from the Old English, feld, pasture or open land, a Germanic word, one of the most Germanic in the language though we’ve softened it with that little vowel duet which makes it seem French, blame the scribes who softened our voices, English has always been harder to hear than to write down. Field, as opposed to woodland, an open space, compare with the lovely Finnish pelto, another adaptation of the original that reminds us that a field is earth’s coat earth’s pelt, a metaphor I didn’t invent. In the poem, Dickinson becomes a field, so transparent are her garments: “The Dews drew quivering and Chill— / For only Gossamer, my gown -- / My tippet – only Tulle—” And at the end, she rides into the open, though you hear and feel that in the poem rather than see it. The perspective has shifted. To me, she’s changed her position twice. First, from a person outside a carriage to a person inside a carriage, and then, from a person inside a carriage to the person driving the horses, or even, maybe, just maybe, riding them, as close to those horse’s heads as possible, so close, she can finally see where she’s going, which arrives as the point of the poem, unknown at the start. It’s one of her poems of spiritual re-alignment, and a poem of transformation to boot, a loop of driver and rider, finally putting the horses in the middle.

Last year I rode a horse in Iceland, and it changed my life, or showed me something. It must have been a kind of pilgrimage. I don’t think of it as remotely personal. Everything about my movement towards that horse in Iceland I borrowed from someone else. My husband wanted to go on the trip, having visited Iceland before, he’d already understood the power of the place, and being a photographer, he seizes upon beauty shamelessly without my literary second-guessing. He didn’t mind at all that the island’s beauty had been doubly and triply seen – in fact he liked it. An image-maker understands, maybe more quickly than a writer, how this is part of things and can’t be evaded. The hunger for proximity to beauty persists and must be answered. The horseback writing was only my idea in the sense that I stole it from Pam Houston, whose subject it really is, and I stole everything from her – where to ride the horse, what tour to do, what day of the week to do it, where to stay. What I had – what was personal – was just enough saved resources to do it, an intentional plan. The part of me involved was, quite simply, money. Which is essentially luck, essentially chance or what other people right now call privilege.

With my chance, and my little family (my husband and my seven-year-old daughter), I arrived at Eldhestar on a day in which the most beautiful light and the worst possible weather came together like the marriage of two gods. Southern Iceland’s wide, sloping plain, the south side of Katla, the volcano, offers an unparalleled canvas for light, which moves alongside shadows as brushstrokes and even larger gestures, like a giant painting the side of his house. On a clear day like this one, the light felt huge. We squinted through our sunglasses. The farms we’d seen from the road were dotted with sheep and farmers wearing patterned sweaters made from sheep. Volcanic rocks dotted the landscape. They looked like an uncanny corollary to sheep, and my daughter kept mistaking them for sheep. And all these living and dormant creatures, animated by light, glinted and squinted and shimmered in the light. The corona of a farmer’s sweater hovered over a sheep as his hands reached around her belly, doing who knows what – as I drove past, he turned from the sheep, hopping over a length barbed wire, his white hair whipped into cream by the wind.

The wind blew with such force the features of my faces appeared to flatten. My husband’s hair covered his face nearly completely. Emily covered her face with her hands, walking blind towards the barn. We were in a state of disbelief – we were going to ride horses in this? We could barely walk in it. I credit children with a beautiful directness. Emily said, “I will blow away.”

When we got to the barn, everyone acted like the wind was completely normal, or within the range of normal. But let me pause on the barn – this structure was exquisite. Perfect. You walked through the stalls towards an indoor riding ring, passing horse after horse shaking their gorgeous manes. It felt like a church. The Plaza hotel. Muscle Shoals with two dozen Aretha Franklins. And the indoor exercise area? The outside brought inside. Dickinson writes:

We passed the School, where children strove

At Recess – in the Ring—

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting sun

Here at the horse barn in Iceland, these lines collapsed on each other, which to me is the way Dickinson must have wanted them to exist – the School not just passed but turned into the field, the Setting sun setting forever in a line of the poem. Two horses jumped softly in dance-like paces in the indoor arena, which we only glimpsed (I could feel that we were being allowed in exactly as much as we needed to be and no more). Their feet made such a soft sound as they moved, and no other sound seemed to be made there at all – their trainers worked so quietly and smoothly, we almost felt underwater.

They care for something like 300 horses at Eldhestar, but it doesn’t seem as if they care for them as much as give them a residency. These creatures inhabit this barn as one imagines angels to inhabit heaven – effortlessly. The people working there, who seemed to be all women (was this true or was I just imagining it?) greeted us with almost no language, got us suited up for our ride with almost no language, and showed us how to ride – or rather, how to be carried – by those Icelandic ponies with almost no language. And I didn’t get the idea that they did this because of the language barrier, as most Icelanders we met spoke English. They simply did it this way because they preferred to, or because it was a better way, or both.

Our getting-ready for our half-day ride on Katla’s plain felt like a fairy-tale transformation. We thought we’d suited Emily (age 7) well enough for the ride – the women disagreed, and took her into a room, bringing her out in a full body suit, helmet, and gloves. Their attention and her outfit bestowed upon her such authority that it did not surprise me when she walked over to her horse by herself as they pointed towards it (I think of her as a little shy). Hatted and suited, my husband and I were also somehow unrequired to speak – everyone was, it seemed, though American and German voices poked up through the group to announce themselves in those ways in which people like to make themselves known. And I would have done the same, except that I was now sitting on the back of the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, and there felt like there was so much addressing of the horse in my mind, in my wordy mind, that I didn’t think I could have anything to say to anyone else.

And then I realized, for the whole morning, I had literally been talking to the wind. I had been angry at it, reasoning with it, convincing it to blow less hard when we got out of the car, calling it names, comparing it to other winds (the High Mojave, where I used to live, also had ferocious winds at certain times), trying to see it the wind’s way, trying to get the wind to see it my way, wondering where it came from, wondering where it had to go. The wind – I don’t know how to say it, except to say, the wind was a person, though that feels inaccurate. The wind was what I had been talking to, a sentient and listening being. And the wind was now directing me to talk to the horse.

I wrote in the previous post that I’d tell the story of the time I saw the Northern Lights. I will - I meant to - I want to. But this part of the story seemed to have to be told first. So this is, without intending it to be, part 1 of something I’ll have to continue next time.

Storytelling should be the purpose of education in the humanities, shouldn’t it? Because part of what it teaches us is how to articulate transformation and change, and therefore how to bear it. Especially when it changes the story you’re telling into something else, which is surely part of what happened to me here.