I-Thou-Equus

From the work of Martin Buber, The Horse:

"When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-gray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from teh still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvellously smooth-combed, at other times, just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself: and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me. The horse, even when I had not begun pouring oats for him into the manger, very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking, then snorted gently, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be recognizable only by his fellow-conspirator: and I was approved. But once -- i do not know what came over the child, at any rate it was childlike enough-- it struck me about stroking, what fun it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand. The game went on as before, but something had changed, it was no longer the same thing. And the next day, after giving him a rich feed, when I stroked my friend's head he did not raise his head. A few years later, when I thought back to the incident, I no longer supposed that the animal had noticed my defection. But at the time I considered myself judged."

A new religion that smells like horse

“I think I’ll start a new religion. I’ll call it “Houynnm-ism, ism, ism”
- from The Legend of Flying Horse.

Deification

"Deification is the ultimate distorting mirror that man has held up to the horse in our shared history. While the ancient elevation of the horse to the status of god is hardly a tradition that endures to affect modern-day attitudes toward the horse, it is nonetheless a reflection of the intense emotions that the horse was –and still is—capable of evoking. When the ancients were overwhelmed they found an outlet for their feelings in religious and magical terms; in our more competitive age we are perhaps more likely to impute our motives more crassly, for instance in wishing to believe that our horses love to win ribbons at horse shows. We may not literally worship horses anymore, yet the religious awe that the horse once evoked is testimony to a basic inability to see straight on this subject, which endures."
- Stephen Budiansky, The Nature of Horses

at once of nature and transcendent of nature

"It takes a harder heart and a stronger mind than I, for one, possess not to be dazzled by the pure beauty of man and horse working together. The almost magical cooperation of horse and rider is testimony both to the inventiveness of man and to the remarkable learning ability and physical prowess of the horse. It is art as much as science, a product of pure imagination as much as it is any predictable outcome of evolutionary biology. The thrill of watching the performance of a superb racehorse or jumper or cutting horse or polo pony or dressage horse come from the sense that these are creatures at once of nature and transcendent of nature."
- Steven Budiansky, The Nature of Horses

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

Integration of nervous systems

"The onlooker should have the impression that two creatures are fused together, one thinking, the other executing the thoughts." - Alois Podhajsky, The Riding Teacher