Sunday, November 29, 2009
Language is a skin
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words." - Roland Barthes
In whispers
I had this exchange with a professor many years back:
She mentioned: "A student told me today that she is going into equine something-or-other psychotherapy. Horses as people whisperers, as I understood it."
"Yes," I replied. "The 'horse as people whisperers' is a sizeable (global) phenomenon. (I got criticized for that in my thesis-- colonialism of the horse, or something like that.) But," I continued, "there is much that a human can learn about themselves when relating to a horse. There's a lot of personal inner shifts that can go on. This whole movement started back in the 70s with a guy named Tom Dorrance. I got to meet him before he died. He was a simple cowboy with a simple way of relating to people and horses and had a keen sense of basic psychology. If he was working on a project with someone, he'd say "Man, I could really use a hammer for this..." instead of the alternative "Get me the goddam hammer." The jist of this work was to make the desire to do something come from the horse/human ("It has to come from the inside of the horse," he'd say) - to make it their idea instead of forcing or pressuring (or beating/abusing) them to do it. Another crux of his philosophy to working well with horses is 'feel, timing, and balance' -which creates lessons and workloads of personal work for any general human-bean to really "get." [ insert zen lesson here.] [ insert something about meditation and quiet minds here.] [insert something about letting go, or going with the flow - watered down Tao.] [ insert lessons to be learned about feelings --inside and outside (this is my personal favorite part, hence Merleau Ponty.)]...{and you can certainly see how this could be colonized/capitalized upon by trained therapists for troubled youth, prison inmates and cancer survivors.} In terms of the 'pop-culture horse-lit' that's out there, one book in particular, A Revolution in Horsemanship, states at the very end something along the lines of "the horse is here to change us..." - which was quite a salvific claim. ...Interesting things at work in this horse whispering industry."
She mentioned: "A student told me today that she is going into equine something-or-other psychotherapy. Horses as people whisperers, as I understood it."
"Yes," I replied. "The 'horse as people whisperers' is a sizeable (global) phenomenon. (I got criticized for that in my thesis-- colonialism of the horse, or something like that.) But," I continued, "there is much that a human can learn about themselves when relating to a horse. There's a lot of personal inner shifts that can go on. This whole movement started back in the 70s with a guy named Tom Dorrance. I got to meet him before he died. He was a simple cowboy with a simple way of relating to people and horses and had a keen sense of basic psychology. If he was working on a project with someone, he'd say "Man, I could really use a hammer for this..." instead of the alternative "Get me the goddam hammer." The jist of this work was to make the desire to do something come from the horse/human ("It has to come from the inside of the horse," he'd say) - to make it their idea instead of forcing or pressuring (or beating/abusing) them to do it. Another crux of his philosophy to working well with horses is 'feel, timing, and balance' -which creates lessons and workloads of personal work for any general human-bean to really "get." [ insert zen lesson here.] [ insert something about meditation and quiet minds here.] [insert something about letting go, or going with the flow - watered down Tao.] [ insert lessons to be learned about feelings --inside and outside (this is my personal favorite part, hence Merleau Ponty.)]...{and you can certainly see how this could be colonized/capitalized upon by trained therapists for troubled youth, prison inmates and cancer survivors.} In terms of the 'pop-culture horse-lit' that's out there, one book in particular, A Revolution in Horsemanship, states at the very end something along the lines of "the horse is here to change us..." - which was quite a salvific claim. ...Interesting things at work in this horse whispering industry."
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