Not A Bicycle With Legs After All
Apr. 13th, 2006 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousI 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-13 08:11 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2006-04-13 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-13 08:50 pm (UTC)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.)