I think as I run. The physical act of running is not very difficult, at least in most cases, night or day. I have little trouble maintaining control over my torso. It’s instinctual, relatively easy to steer with legs and hooves, outstretched as they are, above the ground.
Thoughts are otherwise, much harder to manage. Thoughts don’t run in formation but rise like imperfect atoms from the depths of horse-being, through and beyond the atmosphere of consciousness. They transcend the gravity of memory as often as not, dissipate like rays of light and are gone forever. Some remain, however, and those that remain are tangible. They merge and melt and run together like some psychic river, flood the cells and grottos of the mind and I am thereby afflicted, consumed by a mental miasma, an admixture of questions, answers, epiphanies, noise and drivel. I am lost within it as I mash the wide expanse with heavy hooves.
My thoughts coalesce within the broth like strands of stars through a cooling universe. I run and think of all of us, horses normal or not, dazzling or dull, dynamic, beleaguered, vital or frail, perverse or even-keeled. We are what we are, we always are. Said another way: we are this or that, this and that, one or the other and the other, present, evanescent, luminous and dim; colors mingled, features mangled, growing or dying as we ramble along the desert’s edge. Prowess, decrepitude, all of it, each and every differentiation, all derivative in the final analysis, basically the same notwithstanding the infinite avenues of creation that have brought us to this point and, having traveled from there to here, I conclude that we are standard, unassailably standard. Perhaps I am not standard. It’s a matter of degree, different but hardly different as you drift farther away from the here-and-now and day-to-day and the distance widens, expands as you circumnavigate the world, any world, the whole world so that the world you’ve chosen becomes so small and insignificant over time that it crumbles like alfalfa or melts like snow in your mouth. I love a placid sky, don’t you? I hate a placid sky, don’t you? Confusing. All these things merge as you waft away, wander farther, fade further until there comes a point at which it hardly matters because, at that point, you lack the capacity to discern a difference or, perhaps, you cease to care.
These are my thoughts, my horse-thoughts. I think of what we are: commonplace cataclysms, all alive until our bones chip and break beneath the weight, fibrous formulations of cellular strands and sinew, a throbbing net-like chain link fence in varied degrees of transmutation. We are horse-minded, unique but identical, distinctive but the same like rain and snow, all as all horses are, ever have been or will be: unique but the same like crisscross clouds in a trellis of clouds, wisps of ditty-dots across the crumpled sky.
We are indistinguishable yet our dissimilarities abound and, in fact, we notice the most minute differences. We compare and assess: color of hide, onset of limp, luxuriance of tail, length of stride and so on. We hear syncopated rhythms and sense the asymmetrical as the moments of one life forge forward and tousle with those of another; they interweave like pulsing veins, a writhing clutch like tangled snakes and nettles jumbled, a webbed array seeking air and light. We trample with dulled hooves. We ride like those who rode, the old herds that ran rampant like senseless schools of fish, hordes of insects, flies or ants headed every which way though different to the trained eye. Only the astute eye of one fish can see his reflection in the quivering eye of another. Only the glassine eye of a knowing fly can discern possibilities in another fly’s variegated eye. So it is that a horse, through his own bulbous eye, can glean the breadth and depth of the life that’s left in a faltering horse through the portal of his shrinking eye.
These thoughts pervade my thinking as I ramble along the desert’s edge, one facet of a maniacal collective, all of us together. There never seemed to be a reason to run, we just ran, but now there seems to be a reason — this is my thought of late — but I’ll address that later. We don’t stop. We run as one, staunch, impassive, each of us different, all the same: bay, roan, pinto, palomino, as many types as there are dreams imaginable but we rush as one array, jet-like above the gravely ground at horse-speed, a single panoply that thrusts forth in perpetual motion and straight pursuit, headlong into pitiless wind. We race at full pace, long furled bones stretched out like need across the footbridge of consciousness, tearing up the earth at speeds you could hardly imagine, hostage to some innate impetus, some inviolate sense of mission.
Until recently, the nature of that mission was a mystery to me. I may or may not understand it now, though it seems clearer to me today than it did yesterday. We run always except for the few moments we slow down, we trot, we stop along the desert’s edge, a thin isthmus, ribbed and rippled sand like a beach where hilly dunes die, line after line in a parade of minor tranches, never-ending, and we bend our heavy necks to sip from some paltry stream to quench the mad thirst that resounds within us. We feed on wild grasses, different types depending upon location, each blade different, each blade the same but grass notwithstanding, over and again.
Stop, drink, eat, sleep and, all the while, we never acknowledge one another but amble about as if we are alone, respectively. We know each other, we see each other, we study each other in painstaking detail, but we ignore each other. It is a strange proclivity that I don’t understand; it can’t be explained. There is no satisfactory explanation of one’s own nature, no way to escape the essence of one’s own horse-being, no way to undermine the absoluteness of one’s self. My horse-consciousness was somehow formulated and affixed to the floor of my being long before I was born. It is therefore not surprising that my hooves fit squarely within ancient prints imprinted in rock that once was mud through which horses ran eons ago. These ancient hooves continue to resound with the sound of horses rioting in even rhythm. They were horses: not fish-minded, not insect-minded, not other minded and it is the same with me because I am one in a long, long line, no different than any horse yet to be born. The beauty of it and the tragedy of it are inescapable, I cannot escape, I cannot free myself from the construct and stricture of my own premise though I may want, at times, to do just that. I know the world as only a horse can know it. It cannot be otherwise.
I try not to be out of mind, out of step. Out of mind is so demeaning, nothing more than a catchall to refer to personal thoughts and feelings that are distinctive and, consequently, threatening and dangerous to the enterprise at large, much like the smooth slope of boulders in the rain. Out of mind is akin to out of step: an admonishment, a condemnation but hardly possible to define because, after all, whose step is it to which we refer? Out of step, out of mind: non-standard.
I feel non-standard. Perhaps I am not differentiated and not non-standard but it seems to me to be otherwise. A queasy sadness lurks within me. It’s something I’ve never been able to shake, so unsettling, so debilitating. It pervades the inner sanctum of my being and manifests itself from time to time in varying degrees of severity. It defies definition but, for lack of a label, I refer to it as the condition it most closely resembles: nausea. It wanders within me by day, skulks like a shadow through the crux of my sleeping mind, penetrates the muscle of my back and the bulk of my belly, and runs through my veins from muzzle to tail. It is a simmering despondency, a private shadow, debilitating like profound loss without having lost anything: the strange sensation of emptiness without ever having been filled. The matter of running is one matter, mindset another, the conundrum of nausea yet one more.
I often wonder as I fly across the ground to keep up: why am I ill? Why am I condemned to transport this infirmity over and through untold miles of land and air? Why must I support it as though it were some elderly patron teetering on the brink? It afflicts only me, of that I am sure, and I am baffled. I am its guardian, I am its sole sentinel but there doesn’t seem to be a reason. This is quite an enigma because, as a rule, nausea is antithetical to horse-nature. I’ve seen the insanity in a thousand horse eyes, I’ve felt the resolution in the pounding of hooves and it is clear to me that there is no place for nausea in the heart of a horse. My heart, however, is defective as horse hearts go: it is, apparently, an unhappy hollow.
It is a burden. Perhaps you can imagine its impact though, of course, burden is a concept that can’t be understood unless you are a living horse living it. If there were horse-words through which to express it, perhaps I might rely upon those words and find relief, at least to some degree. I imagine there is comfort in the articulation of one’s burden. Genuine expression, it seems, would enable one to give and receive, come out of oneself, exceed oneself in order to accept oneself and connect with someone else. Words can be a field of grass, a cool breeze, I am sure of it. If horse-language existed through which I could convey the breadth of my burden or the character of my pathology, the voicing of those words or the scream of those syllables or resort to that idiom might cause this terrible thing, hardly describable, to be described. Perhaps, by describing it, I would mitigate its corrosive effect upon my core and thereby find some degree of solace. Unfortunately, no such language exists, at least to my knowledge. If it existed, it would languish forever because, simply stated, honest exchange is a luxury horses can’t afford. Horses are reticent and loathe to reveal themselves. Expression leads us astray in a literal sense: it causes us to lose focus, meander, lope and wander in languid rhythm across the sand in any which way. We would no longer ride as much as fall forward, each of us falling in a different direction, each of us alone and on our own. Reliance upon words would lead, inevitably, to the end of horsedom.
I realized this recently. Something happened one evening as we ran at breakneck speed, mindless through the darkness. There was quite a bit of consternation when, all at once, we noticed the stars in the sky were moving. Stars in motion across the black blanket of the night: no one had seen this before and it was disconcerting. Why would stars move? Keep in mind that running, drinking, and eating require that we keep our eyes to the ground, either below or in front. We had always assumed that stars remain in place but, on that night, we glanced up for no particular reason. The stars advanced as one in jittery fashion, much like an array of spots that shift together across a horse’s hide, back and forth, as the dappled flesh stretches and retracts. The stars proceeded in unison, a glittery compendium of coincident points and, as a unit, they sauntered overhead from east to west along a subtle, curved path.
The passage of stars across the sky was frightening and we construed this phenomenon to be a portent of catastrophe. Fear infected the herd like disease run rampant, and it was too much to bear. We raced along to maintain our proper position beneath those stars but the faster we ran, the faster they seemed to run from us. The situation grew dire as the moon began to move, perhaps in pursuit of the stars as well. It flew ahead as if to taunt us. The cosmos appeared to be unraveling.
We rocketed over crags and ruts that seemed to swerve beneath our feet to avoid us as we strained forward, faster and faster through the winding cavern of the night. We trampled weed and root across the intractable, ever-widening landscape which resembled a separate world that had collapsed around us. The air was cool, and I was thankful for that but we hardly stopped to drink or breathe. We pounded the ground and raised plumes of dust from the hapless earth in our desperate attempt to keep pace with the stars and remain properly situated below them. Steamy breath rose from our wriggling snouts and open mouths, enveloping us in our own foggy ether. The moon turned bloody gold as we sped through the night but, over time, we fell further and further behind. By morning, we had lost it all: the stars were gone, the moon was gone. All that remained were cruel clouds like the scars of God plastered against the cudgeled sky.
We were overwrought and our collective panic overshadowed any sense of self or semblance of autonomy: communal desperation stifled each of us, respectively. Survival of the herd as an entity was all that mattered and I realized, at that hour, that my own struggle was irrelevant. I had no choice but to inter my illness within myself for all time to come; the name I had given it would die within me. Hope of salvation through language of any sort would be pointless and, in fact, would be dangerous and self-destructive. Self-expression was not an option. My universe — the horse-universe — required that I live and breathe in a manner that was ordinary and indistinguishable. I needed to be standard.
I am continually sick with the vague, unyielding nausea to which I am prone and carefully conceal. It rolls arrhythmically within me like a broken wheel over sand and rock. Nevertheless, I gallop at full speed, night after night, exhausted and consumed, driven by the irresistible force and perpetual inertia of horses ahead and behind. The stars recede with each leap of our arching bodies but we continue to chase them, no less determined than we were before. It is all we do, it is our essential reality. The effort may turn out to be futile but, in any event, it has become an existential imperative. This was not even imaginable years ago but things change over time, so it seems. Horse-nature may evolve to the point that the chasing of stars becomes instinctual. Possible, I suppose, but I have my doubts: the very last horse, I’m sure, will be no different than the first.
We run for days at a time. We drink from muddy puddles that punctuate the endless terrain, flat as forever. I, for one, can’t drink enough no matter how much I consume, beleaguered as I am by the cruel deficit that underlies my own horse-consciousness, aberrant but unapparent to my brothers and sisters as I drive through the night, each night the first of a thousand nights, evermore forward, hooves cracked, legs numb, out of step, out of mind, straining for breath.
Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. Until a few years ago, he wrote short stories exclusively but now divides his time equally between poetry and prose. Walter's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of literary publications including Lunch Ticket, The Carolina Quarterly, The Worcester Review, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Meniscus, Waxing and Waning and others. He is the author of "The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories" (Kelsay Books, 2023). More of Walter's work can be found at walterweinschenk.com.
Image credit: The King’s Arena Horse boarding stable