The Horse as Emotional Signifier

I'm always fascinated by pop culture turning to horses when in need of emotional shorthand. Last year I wrote about the film Michael Clayton and its deliberate use of horses to convey the pain of someone finally facing the harsh, damaging reality of their circumstances. This morning I saw Rihanna's new music video, promoting the first single, Diamonds, to be released from her forthcoming record.

In this frame, Rihanna is turning in the vastness of an (inevitable) desert plain toward the vision of a shining black horse galloping over an open road toward another horse stretched flat out on the ground. The Diamonds video is broken into motifs, in a way, and the horses might be considered motif number two, with the other two being post-apocalyptic flamey and quiet bedroom pensive. Because I'm a cynic, I'm pretty sure Rihanna and the horses were never in the same place at the same time. She conveys her pathos screen right and the horses, they do their horse things screen left, signifying her emotion, enacting its essence.

I like Rihanna. I think she has talent bigger than her choices and may grow to be an astonishingly good singer eventually. She's devoted her last couple of albums to, in part, grinding over the controversial stories that have dogged her through the last few years. It's easy to watch any of her videos in that context, and Diamonds is no different. But in the end, it's just a love song, and it's the horses that gave me pause. Somehow, they often seem to be an easy choice when emotional resonance is what's on tap. But what does that say about them, especially to people that have never been next to one, patted one, sat on one?

I think of the crew in the L.A. editing room, too, cutting back and forth between Rihanna and the black horses for maximum effect. Because they could cut it like that, and did, as though images of horses are a powerful formula that always works well when applied by skilled hands. Do I have to assume, though, that the editors knew the thing that is horses and that they shivered at the beauty of the one running, his muscles literally rippling back in the light, or thrilled at the strength of the one rising up from the ground, dust encircling like smoke?

That's what I don't know. What if what they saw had nothing to do with them knowing horses at all? What is that, then? Whatever it is, it's what makes horses inherently compelling whether we know them or not. It's why some of us have to have them in our lives and why others cannily turn to them to express emotions otherwise elusive of words.

Postscript: Caring Into The Void

I felt compelled to write an e-mail to John Burns, the author of the article in the New York Times, just after I had read it the other day.

"Thank you for your heartbreaking article about the horses  of Ireland. I can't help but wonder what moved you to write it, when there are so many other points of darkness you might have chosen to illuminate with your words."

And yes, Virginia, it seems reporters sometimes care what readers think, even when they happen to be the London Bureau Chief. He wrote back:

"I saw the horses on that hill from a distance, against that twilight sky, and thought that it was a tragic metaphor for all that has gone in Ireland, for the people AND the horses. And, like all the normal, well-adjusted people I know, I am an animal lover, and feel that we humans owe, before God or Providence, a duty to look after them. I thought writing about them was the least I could do. I shall never forget the skewbald nuzzling her nose against my side in the Arctic wind, as if looking to me as the last court of appeal."

Caring Into the Void

The world is the world. I follow as much of it as I can. Because I was born in England, the concept of journeying to foreign shores was real to me. We arrived in America for the duration, but even as a child I never stopped looking back and looking out, to countries beyond my reach. Grown now, I follow stories of other places from the smallness of my own because the world is still the whole world to me. Within it, there is the horse as touchstone, as a common symbol that helps me feel connected even when I never will be. There's more power in that small commonality than I can find in We Are The World or Imagine.

Here's a Palestinian boy riding in beautiful balance alongside Israel's West Bank barrier. Lives still have to be lived.

Here, mounted policewomen patrol Stockholm astride big, beautiful warmbloods after the recent bombing.

I see horses present and useful in places affected by the consequences of seeming irreparable human conflict.

And then they're not. The New York Times published a heartbreaking article today, Hardships of a Nation Push Horses Out to Die. The piece, written by John F. Burns, describes what is happening to horses in Ireland as the country fights to prevent total economic collapse. It may be better not to know when there's nothing I can do, but I can't help dreaming of an airlift to pick these horses off the former landfill where they now wander. This is Ireland: horses run in the blood, they run deep as history.