Equus

I'll start at the end, I suppose. Tonight I watched "Equus," the film of the play starring Richard Burton. I've seen and read the play; I hadn't seen the movie. What struck me, and Colleen as well, is how what is a mere undercurrent in the play, the boy's substitution of horse worship for an eviscerated Christianity, is made almost egregiously explicit. Now, I'm not one to throw out platitudes about how I like things to be left to the imagination, but the movie said too much. In being explicit it really took away from the psychiatrist's desire to know. In the play, Dysart's drive to probe this boy in session is spurred by the enigmatic nature of what he has to say. He is accustomed to being so far removed from the kind of passion the boy has, he is entirely ignorant of the stirring his own fervor when it comes upon him.

This morning, entirely coincidentally, I penciled the following, much to the chagrin of a neighboring student who genuinely thought I should be paying attention to a lecture I was hearing for the fourth time.

achilles

at least your horses were immortal, boy,
enough to eat the grass whose generations’
coming and leaving you would never see,
whose forgetting winter reminds you that
you are the undead caught somewhere
between the choices of life and the unchoices
of death, arching your neck to catch a glimpse
of uncorpses whinnying and shaking
their hoarse-hair plumes, that brush against the sun
and clear away the dust of prior sunsets,
the dust disguised among the talling weeds
whose shallow roots barely scratch the earth;
your neck a crane, an insufficient bird

At the time, I couldn't come up with a final line. I had in my mind the image I wanted, a neck craning up in a futile attempt to see past to the sun beyond. Even now I can visualize it so perfectly. I threw so many words at it to plumb its depths. None of them stuck. It wasn't until I gave up that image that I was able to pen a final final line.

to overcome the mounds of tombing dirt.

Sometimes in order to speak, to at least say something, we must bury what we can truly only see or feel. That's not necessarily in the movie, but there were horses.