Not A Bicycle With Legs After All

[dr_pretentious]

I spent half an hour on an actual live horse and did not fall off. Of course, this accomplishment belongs mostly to my instructor. As it turns out, a horse isn't just a bicycle with legs. Not a canoe with legs, either, though I might be able to make a case for likening one to a sea kayak.

L chose for my half hour a very patient mare, 14 hands high at the shoulder if I remember right. By contrast, I am fifteen hands high in total. I had to stand on tiptoe to curry her. (Is that what I call it? Did I curry her? That sounds so carnivorous.) Babe's not that tall, as horses go, but she's a bulky draft horse. "Horses are perpetual two-year-olds," said L. "She'll test you. They're always testing their limits." Sure enough, while we led her from the stable to the barn, Babe tried to walk me into a couple of walls just to show me she knew I wasn't really the boss. L, Babe, and I were a herd of three, and L was at the top of the herd hierarchy, so Babe wanted to let me know I was at the bottom. I know what to do with that kind of behavior when I get it from my sister's labrador retriever, but it is a different dynamic with a draft horse. Fortunately, L kept Babe on a lunge line once I was actually in the saddle. "Our belief is that no one can be responsible for controlling a horse until they can control themselves on the horse," said L. I was very glad L was in charge, because if L hadn't been, Babe would have been.

It's true, what everyone says about how startlingly high off the ground you are the first time you're on a horse. Surely it must get less startling later.

The eighteen months of Tai Chi I have behind me now made everything easier. As far as I can figure it, proper position on a saddle is pretty much a Tai Chi stance, with the weight on the butt instead of on the feet. I haven't done a lot of Push Hands in Tai Chi, but riding seems to be a sort of partnered Tai Chi form. Push Spines, maybe?

Through the half hour it took us to ready the horse, and the half hour I spent not falling off the horse, and then the half hour it took us to tidy the horse up and put her away, L kept up a constant stream of wonderful chatter. We had the naming of parts, and bits of military history, and the teaching customs L picked up from her teacher, who was in the Chilean cavalry. I've done enough ethnography training that it pained me to have neither notebook nor tape recorder.

Some things are lodged permanently in my head, though.

Much of the rider's task is to keep the horse from recognizing that she is more powerful than the rider is. The moment a horse really catches on that she is larger and stronger than every one of the humans around her, she becomes irredeemably dangerous and has to be put down. The humans are responsible for protecting the horse from the mortal peril of understanding her strength. If the horse is lucky, she stays ignorant throughout a long life of one of the things she is actually capable of knowing.

Now I see how the protagonist of this little novel I've been working on since November will think about her predicament. The horse's problem is not really the problem Stisele has, but this is how she'll try to explain what she's leaving behind, when she finally does defect.

The prequel feels possible again. Not possible before June, but possible.

Comments

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

The few times I have been to the stable to spend an afternoon with my horse-owning friend and his trusty equine companion, I've sat on some of the world's tallest motorcycles, content to stay in first gear. (Hey, bicycles and kayaks for you, motorcycles for me.)

One memory that has stayed with me is that when P's horse was behaving like a two-year-old, horse-owner rode over to a tree, broke off a branch, and handed the branch to P.

"What's this?"
"A branch."
"What do I do with it?"
"The horse has seen me give it to you. Now it knows that I think that you know how to use a stick. Just keep holding it."

Not spoken out loud was the corollary: if the horse sees you drop the stick, it knows that you can't sit down and hold a stick (read, walk and chew gum) at the same time. Do not drop the stick.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That is too funny. I may have to steal it.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

You can't steal it -- it's been gift-wrapped and handed to you!

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Much of the rider's task is to keep the horse from recognizing that she is more powerful than the rider is.

there's a related strategy for negotiation (and warfare): acknowledge that the other side has a single good move, but remind them making it will cost them the game. a little harder to do with animals, tho.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Or try to trick them into thinking it will cost them the game, if it won't.

Now my brain is full of Clausewitz again.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

er, right. good ol' hard-style thinking. 's'why i wanted you to read clausewitz and not sun tzu for this one: the beltressan ruling class are not nice people.

otoh, looked at from game theory, clausewitz is literally true: the tools of normal politics continue to apply in all forms of conflict, even warfare. signalling intentions is just as important as bluffing, unless one of the players thinks "everybody dies" is a good move.

striking one's colors is probly the simplest example: it signals the intent to cease fighting. and most combatants -- even pirates -- recognized it, cause the cost of ignoring it (or signalling falsely) was just too high. (but that's late 20th c thinking. neither clausewitz nor the h-sisters would think that way.)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If I were going to read one book on game theory and warfare, which ought it to be? There should to be a Game Theory and Blowing Things Up for Dummies.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

if there is such a book, i don't know of it.

there's a pretty large gap between the game theorists and everybody else. "practical" people consider game theory to be too woolly for everyday use. outside of economics, game theorists often have trouble talking the talk well enuf for anybody to take them seriously.

soldiers, unfortunately, are generally pretty bad at viewing war as game-playing. current bleeding-edge training for officers is to consider the consequences of their actions beyond merely blowing up the enemy real good (israeli and british counter-insurgency doctrine, which we're slowly learning from them).

if i know anything about how game theory relates to warfare, it's from scattered lectures and articles, with occasional book chapters thrown in. for example, in kahn's the codebreakers there's a short discussion of our decision to shoot down yamamoto's plane, having decoded his itinerary. our generals used very early game theory to analyze possible japanese responses (who would take over from him; would they realize we'd broken their codes and switch to more secure ones) and our counters to those, and concluded that a) the japanese lacked a good replacement and b) even if they immediately started to use unbreakable codes, we'd be better off having killed yamamoto.

i'll page thru the bibilography of leonhard's maneuver warfare and see if he's cited anything with an obvious title. (he's an interesting war theorist, having commanded one of the divisions in operation desert manhood 1.)

[methastra.livejournal.com]

> Much of the rider's task is to keep the horse from recognizing that she is more powerful than the rider is. The moment a horse really catches on that she is larger and stronger than every one of the humans around her, she becomes irredeemably dangerous and has to be put down. The humans are responsible for protecting the horse from the mortal peril of understanding her strength. If the horse is lucky, she stays ignorant throughout a long life of one of the things she is actually capable of knowing.

Wow, powerfully stated.

It's a shame this applies to most of our "civilized" world, too.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the range of potential allegories here is pretty demoralizing.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

Aren't horses wonderful? I recall a line from "A Man for All Seasons" in which Sir Thomas Moore artfully states, "Our job is to tell the king what he should do, not what he can do."

I've spent many long and wonderful hours in the company of my horse (sadly I had to leave her in Indiana in 1991, but she is still fondly remembered). She was also of the sort who knew so well what she should do that she kindly did it no matter how inexperienced the rider who was on her. As a result, she taught many young 4-H-ers how to ride, turn barrels and poles, cut cattle, etc. And she had a but that was wide enough to serve a picnic lunch on--just an added benefit. I miss Peanuts.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

Sorry, left her in Minnesota. Forgot what state I was in at the time.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Finally, I understand what all those girls I went to school with were getting out of the horse-obsession phase. I missed the standard early adolescent horse obsession, being already fixated on books.

Last night, my dinner companions traded stories of their first times on horseback. Most of them were memories of being not yet in their teens at scout camp, being plopped onto a horse and handed the reins, and then being sent off to ride without further instruction. It's a wonder anyone who goes to scout camp lives to adulthood.

It's probably too late for me to get good at riding, but I definitely liked it enough to do it again. A horse may not have consciousness, but it certainly has a subjectivity, and the effort of communicating with that massive, alien subjectivity, without recourse to language, is really intriguing. Even my sea kayak can't give me that.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

BTW, in case you haven't already been told, when you greet you horse, blow gently toward her nostrils. Horses can recognize and identify people quickly by the scent of their breath. This is especially good to do when you are doing something the horse really likes, like currying or generally pampering her. She associates you then with the good things in life and recognizes you. My wife visited our horses with our daughter after we'd been gone ten years. The horses trotted right up to her nickering and willingly took my daughter for a little ride. Mine was close to thirty years old by that time!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That's a useful tip, and one I'd never have guessed. Thanks!

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

You can let the horse sniff your palm. Keep your fingers together, my mother always told me. But blowing lightly sounds so intimate. It's what they do for each other to say hello.

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily too late, Sarah, if you care enough to put in a lot of hours. If you don't care that much, that's ok too. But it's not like ballet or something, where starting young is essential to the operation. It just takes a long time to learn to ride well. If you get started at age 5 you don't notice how long it takes, or so I imagine.

I forgot to say, I'm intrigued by your comparison between riding and tai chi. I did a tiny bit of beginning tai chi, and it seemed that part of the point was to get you to think about your balance, as you shift it from foot to foot. Riding also demands thinking about your balance, but with that added touch of urgency. ;) Also that added touch of unpredictability.

It sounds like a dressage barn was exactly the right place for your sample lesson. All riders have to think about balance and about communication, but dressage riders are the ones doing those things for their own sake and their intrinsic interest, instead of for the sake of bounding over fences or racing around barrels.

[skyefyr.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous. It's been way too long since I've been on the back of a horse. I might have to rectify that soon.

Although since right now I'm working on fire-arms skills again and getting them up to snuff, that might have to wait.

So in the meantime, be sure to tell us all our adventures so I can ride vicariously through you. :-)

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

Ditto.