Born to ride bareback

doomed to drive a car

Last fall I wrote a Zine poem called “I Who Have Never Rode a Stallion.” In it, I describe my experience as a child watching the stallions roam the field of my great-grandmother’s farm in southern Indiana.

The stallions, when they arrived, if they arrived, arrived in spring. Like clockwork one would be led out to the field where a gathering of mares grazed on the grassy hillscape and in just this way, every few years, the mating season began.

My poem deliberately reads like the mind of a child. There is a child-like naivety and innocence that I had wished to capture in words. For example in writing “what was so important about the stallion / that he only came once every few years,” I imagined myself sharing in the indignant protests of young people everywhere who do not yet know how the world works, but have already found a reason for suspicion.

As a child, I loved riding the horses on the farm without a saddle, much to the annoyance of the adults in the room. Riding bareback meant substituting reins for mane and it requires especially strong legs, because in lieu of a saddle and stirrups, one has to fully wrap their thighs around the horse’s belly and grip down hard. For this reason, bareback also requires strong hand grip and good steering power.

Without reins, it is much harder to direct a horse and as a result, speed is often compromised. I could not move as fast riding bareback, but in feeling the horse beneath my thighs, I had much more tactile engagement, more contact points. Riding bareback is an intimate experience involving compatibility and care. Bonded with the right horse, I could anticipate a horse’s movements and respond accordingly.

There is strong philosophical purchase for my childhood experience. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato shares an analogy to horseback riding that equates a strong grip on a horse’s reins with having the ability to balance the soul between reason and emotion. Plato believed that a person’s ability to steer a horse well (or not) directly translated to their grip toward influencing the direction of their life.

Horseback riding is a solid analogy here because horses possesses a will of their own. In horseback riding as in life, understanding the movement and trajectory of yourself and others becomes critical to living happily and at peace. There’s a hint of radical acceptance at play here. Sometimes the horse just goes where it wants to go. People are like that too.

Humans in Ancient Greece mainly got around by chariot, a horse pulling a small carriage. The modern equivalent of a chariot is a car. Fundamentally though, driving a car carries much lower stakes and does not require the same level of skill. This is because cars do not posses a will of their own.

Some racecar drivers may beg to differ but the fact remains: cars, even those equipped with Tesla autopilot or separately, in the case of a Waymo, do not have a will independent of humans. Humans build cars. Therefore, the will of a car (however we want to understand this) is entirely predicated on human activity and intellect.

The word “will” in this context has a strange and even disturbing philosophical import and history. Implied in Plato, but unpacked much later by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the will has been interpreted - in contradictory ways - as having the quality of being both free and impositional. In Schopenhauer anyway, the interpretation is that these two features of the will sometimes obtain simultaneously.

The will can be impositional in the sense that, as in the case of the horseback riding example, with some effort and guidance one’s will can successfully be imposed upon the will of another. Though the example of horseback riding feels pretty innocuous, its underlying assumptions bring about what is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing aspects about human assumptions on the will.

Evidence for the impositional will can be found in unjust systems throughout human culture: slavery is the obvious example. But it is perhaps more squirmy and pervasive (more pernicious even) than that. An impositional will is also a feature of exploitative capitalism, whose systems function to reduce humans to cogs in a machine of profit and productivity. And it is a feature of everyday misogyny.

But there is a flipside and it is that the will is free in the sense that even in the presence of an imposing will, one can still make choices, frame and form decisions and enact agency. Likewise, imposing one’s will has limits as it assumes the possibility of failure, that one’s attempt to establish their preference over someone or something else will always be at risk of rejection.

I want to talk about feminism here, in an attempt to open new ground on its claims about human agency and freedom. One key assumption of the feminist movement is that men impose upon human culture their own preference for order and organization. At best, this imposition fails to account for women. At worst, it deliberately undermines their power.

As an example of the latter Catharine MacKinnon shows that this imposition appears in the law. And as Audre Lorde shows, the imposition of male power fundamentally erases genuine feeling.¹

Wrapping things up. My main conclusion is a basic analogy, and I’ll write it here: cars are to modern times what chariots were to ancient times. I argued that this statement is true, but only to a point. The point being that modern times and ancient times are not similar in all ways, or at least in all ways relevant to cars and chariots.

I showed that cars and chariots differ in the presence of an impositional will.

My favorite daydream involves me riding a horse bareback up a hill, my hair in braids that fly behind me in the wind and the soundtrack for the movie Django playing in my head. In the dream, I have no need to overrule the horse. Rather we are one, a perfect mix of bonded attachment and liberty, just as Plato probably intended.

1. I take Lorde to be saying as much in her rejection of pornography, the source quote reposted here for reference:

Sources

Phaedrus, Plato

On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche