Equine Pathos: A List

Lists are assimilable & discussable & consequently an optimal blog post format. So here's one about instances of horses figuring in 'oh the humanity' type scenarios in such a way as to make those scenarios seem tragic-er. Any I've missed?? By all means 'hit up' the comments.

The list's (by the way) to mark the having happened of something I've been waiting for: Jon Ronson's piece in the Guardian mag this saturday is the first time I've actually read the Christopher Foster case (the day before the bailiffs are due round, ruined businessman murders wife and daughter, kills pets and horses, torches mansion, stable and cars, shoots himself) framed as a prefigurement of financial catastrophe. I'm pretty sure its gonna become a component of the UK credit crunch ur-myth though.

Part of why the story's so susceptible to mythologization is because Foster offed the horses; while hardly worst thing he did, the venerable convention of troping them as sad-eyed and behoofed incarnations of all that's good in the human soul means violence against horses lends any tragedy a full-on last days of Rome-type resonance, as the following'll demonstrate: 

1.In Zola's Nana there's a dissipated scion of the aristocracy who immolates himself and his racehorses when a scheme to dodge bankruptcy fails. Witnesses attest to uncanny equine screams.

2. In Waltz with Bashir a soldier otherwise desensitized to the horrors of war is sickened by the sight of a derelict hippodrome full of dead and mutilated horses, the rotoscoped fly-crawling eyes and foaming lips of which are lingered on

3. Just how wrong-headed Macbeth's regicide is is suggested by accounts of horses going cannibal

4. When the town's pillaged in Andrei Rublev there's a shot of a horse falling downstairs, which you can't imagine PETA being cock-a-hoop about

5. Probably They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (though I've not seen/read it)

I think it says a lot that in order to convince people they should be as misanthropic as he was Swift devoted a quarter of Gulliver's Travels to describing self-righteous genocidal bigot horses. Maybe we should have an embargo on using them to make things seem kinda profound for a while.

Post Apocalyptate

Saw Tate Modern's new turbine hall installation last week, the one where its notionally 2058, London's drowned and sculptures by Moore, Bourgeois & Nauman taken in from the rain cohabit with refugees, on whose bunks there's strewn assorted classics of apocalypt-lit  - Ballard,* Wells, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc.

Basically it does the same thing I think Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor did more eloquently and economically, evoking a time when contemporary culture shalt be but relics and ruins, playing on that Tate as surrogate cathedral trope and the (not wholly unjustified) gloom w/r/t our civilization's/planet's long-term prospects we're all feeling right now.

:(

 The Tate also, you may remember, featured in a decline and fall context in Children of Men,** another work that tapped into this whole inverted Ozymandias complex we seem to have, whereby rather than being shamed into dumb humility by the monuments of long-vanished cultures we cultivate this vain curiosity about how we'll look to posterity, what future Hornbyesques will rank as our top 5 greatest hits - remember Michael Caine's adorable portrayal of an old geezer who gets dewy-eyed listening to Aphex Twin LPs from the turn of the century? Ahahaha.

*As a blogger from the London suburbs who's half-digested misc. modish Theory, I'm obligated here to mention the Kode9 & Spaceape LP - as inspired by Ballard's Drowned World  (the which maybe the next printing could synergistically say on a cover sticker?)

**which I didn't much like, to go on the record. Bladerunner or Alien or Terminator 2 are pretty outwardly straightforward but let you extrapolate this or that, whereas this film wanted to let you know that it was very densely and profoundly freighted with serious and courageous messages about weighty issues but was basically a thriller with cute sight gags (Did you peep that London 2012 hoodie!)

(Ballard & dubstep debated here, cracked ramp from here, mossed trunk from here, pseudo-Bourgeois arachnid of the post-cataclysm from the guardie, Napoleon/Sphinx tete-a-tete voici la (sic) )