Return

On Friday I hooked the horse float to the car and then, a handful of oats in my pocket, walked out to catch Frank. It wasn’t early, I’d put in a few hours at my desk and Frank was up to his morning snooze. It was our first lesson of the year after a long summer break. I tied Frank to the garage door (actual stable is still a dream) and gave myself over to the gentle pleasure of getting ready.

I brushed his tail, teasing out the long dark strands until each hair shimmered. I picked out his hooves and oiled them. I polished his coat, trimmed his mane and stood back in delight as he glistened dark chocolate in the sun. He turned his head and I scratched his broad brown face, just where his double whorls almost touched.

All morning I’d sat at my desk and copied sentences, paragraphs, occasionally whole pages, out of Ali Smith’s Gliff into the notebook which is holding all the thoughts around the book I’m writing.

Here’s a passage with the first description of the horse at its centre, just so you get the sense…

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse […] It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree. […]

It had a line of lighter grey jagged like lightning down its nose and the flies rounding its head kept landing near its eye, maybe for a drink because the eye shone like a liquid source.

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and - what?

Politeness? Indifference? Distance?

I won’t know the word for it till now, years after, right this minute, walking to wherever in the dark and permitting myself to think back to the moment I first ever saw, so close to my own yes, any horse’s, this horse’s, eye.

The word is equanimity.

My sister was holding the grass out in her two clenched fists. The horse stood. It waited. Then it nudged one of her arms with its long face and nosed the back of her hand round and down.

Oh, she said. Oh. Right.

She opened her hand and it took the grass, the horse took it! […]

It watched us while it ate it with its big loose jaw moving.

The smell of the grass getting eaten filled the air round us with a strange sweetness. (p47/48)

This passage is doing so much. First I am seeing a horse, this being I know so well, with fresh eyes. How have I not thought its jaw was loose? Of the light in the dark? And also, in the middle of this acute description, Smith is doing something important with the story. We are in the present past when the children meet the horse, but also, in the present present where the story is told ‘wherever’. It’s effortless, (I imagine the writing was anything but).

*

I’ve written in earlier editions of TSS about how I’d promised myself a horse of my own after my children had grown up and how that horse came to be Frank and also how learning to ride again, finding my balance and confidence has been a rediscovery of my self on all sorts of levels, both personal and physical. I’ve written about how I’ve had to overcome fear and how I’ve had to plan and put support structures around my riding (hello brilliant riding coach and friends who ride etc) and how Frank gifted me another layer of experience of being and seeing on our farm and how moving up to this new place he has shown me more again.

And so, I find myself at the beginning of this year, the year of the novel, feeling the same sort of loss of confidence I had when I started riding Frank. I’m second guessing myself, wondering if my skill and determination, my passion, is up to the task. The idea of the novel has moved from something I talk about to something concrete. I have something to say and a compulsion to find the form to say it. There’s a deadline and a contract, I have people on board. But right here, at the start of this new year I wonder if I have the courage to begin.

I mean, do I even want to write a novel?

*

When we get to our lesson, the day has deteriorated. It’s windy, the sort of wind which whips words from your mouth and exfoliates your face. It’s the sort of wind I would have been nervous about riding in 18 months ago. Now we just get on with it. It’s like we haven’t had any time off. We jump with confidence (though I’m so unfit my heart is coming out of my chest at the end of the small course). The day, despite the wind, is a delight.

A few days later I saddle Frank and we walked out onto the flat to practice the exercises we did in our lesson. Things don’t go quite so well. It’s harder here. The ground is uneven. Frank is feeling well. He wants to go fast, to rush into the work and before long we are fighting each other. I’m cross and he’s shut down.

We stop. I take a few deep breaths. I get off, rub his face, check the girth, walk for a few moments. Both of us stand and then I turn and apologise. When I get back on we start at the walk and just walk and stop and walk and stop. And I’m not pulling on the reins, I’m just thinking stop, moving my feet forward a fraction, deepening my seat and sure enough when we start to trot we can do the same, bigger strides, smaller strides, down to a walk and back up and then we are trotting and cantering, a loop in the reins, balanced. Oh heaven will be like this, a feeling of connection bigger than myself, I am both made larger and smaller.

*

When I return to my desk I’m thinking about how long it has taken me to gather the confidence to find the connection I’ve needed with Frank. I’m thinking about our conversations which don’t involve any sort of words. I keep writing Ali Smith’s sentences into my notebook. Out the window the retirees are grazing. The big grey mare swishes the flies from her sides. The old grey pony puts his head sideways through the fence and, with lips extended, wraps them around a tendril of grass.

Let the voice come, walk, stop, walk, and then write a sentence as clean as a bone¹.

walk|stop|walk|stop|canter…

mm

Bits and Bobs

I finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, and though I have a few very good friends who LOVED this, I did not. I admired it on a technical level (his sentences are beautiful) and it is a sweep of a life, but in the end I ambled through. Ali Smith’s Gliff, on the other hand, was electrifying. It’s set in a world not very far from now and is about two children who become travellers. They meet a horse. Along the way they learn what makes meaning and how we are made meaningless. There’s allegory and word play and myth and somehow she pulls it off.

This interview with Bishop Mariann Budde after she showed us what Christianity could look like in America.

A couple of substacks I enjoy:

Alice on Sunday, by Alice Dark. I’m sure so many of you already subscribe, but just in case you don’t and you’re an artist/writer/person moving through the world - read this one on the importance of accepting being fallow.

I love the Metis poet Chris La Tray’s An Irritable Metis, often it is just a collection of sentences he writes in his notebook, but this week he wrote about recording his audiobook and it evoked a sort of wistfulness for a routine and a specific task.

This substack TodayonTrail about a father and son walking the Appalachian Trail (I cannot remember who linked to this, sorry and thank you if it was you), but I really enjoyed his reflection on parenting and letting go.

Finally, in keeping with this issue’s theme, I love Mallrat’s new song Horses (thank you Sophie Benjamin).

1. James Baldwin describing in the Paris Review how as he grows older all he wants to do is write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.