Equine Poetry in Motion
Edward Gal and Moorlands Totilas are seen here in this video of their world-record dressage performance in London.
For those new to dressage, this art and sport involve schooling a horse’s natural motion into a fluid near-ballet of precise communication between horse and rider. Teams are judged on suppleness, balance, and responsiveness. As the commentator on the video notes, this 9 year-old stallion may well be one of those “once in a lifetime” horses. Notice how still the rider seems–in fact, he is continually cuing the horse with his hands, legs and shifting his own balance in the saddle. At one point the horse seems to “skip.” What he’s doing is changing leads (the leg with which a horse steps forward in each stride of a canter,) every stride or two. The break in the middle of the exercise where the horse relaxes and walks is precisely to see if the team can shift from intense focus and collection (strides without much forward movement, like trotting in place,) to a relaxed uncollected gait, back to full working focus again. I wish my students–and I!–could make that transition so apparently effortlessly.
For anyone who has ever worked with horses, (especially stallions!) dressage at this level seems nearly miraculous. I present this video here on Commonweal (despite its lack of direct Catholic ecclessial reference,) as an interlude of stunning beauty on a sabbath afternoon. Because even though “The horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its might it cannot save,” (Ps. 33:17) still the lover in Song of Solomon compares the beloved’s beauty to that of “a horse among Pharaoh’s chariots.” (Song, 1:9.) And we glorify God not only for dappled things, but also for the grace and power of the natural world in collaboration with humankind.
Lisa –
Thank you. What a beautiful animal!
To me it seemed kind of small for a horse, at least relative to Mr. Gal (or is he just a huge man?). So I tried to check it out at Wikipedia. Lo and behold, it seems there have been only a few very rough biological classifications of horses, and they’re mostly extinct. Why is that do you think? Certainly some are more beautiful than others.
Another question: why did that sort of riding develop? The horse almost seems to enjoy doing it, but I daresay it didn’t invent the moves. Or . . .?
Very beautiful. Thank you, Lisa. I’m sending it out to my family, along with your commentary.
Hi Ann,
Moorlands Totila (“Toto” to his friends,) is listed at 1.75 m. tall, which translates to about 17 or 17.1 hands, or 5’8″ or 5’9″ at the withers (the top of the shoulder blade, the standard height measurement spot for quadrupeds) so actually pretty big. Indeed, Mr. Gal must be a tall cuss. Lipizzaners (the white horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, where they practice an advanced form of dressage,) run smaller, about 15 hands tall.
Dressage exercises were originally military moves–things you want your war-horse to be able to do. However, like fencing and some other martial arts, it has become more of an art and sport over time. The idea is that dressage exercises are natural movements, cultivated and refined for artistic merit. And of course done on command.
Biologically–indeed, the only successful species of wild equid is the zebra. Only a handful of wild horses exist, to my knowledge, the Przewalski horses in Mongolia, and they’re a different species. Regular horses are extinct in the wild. American mustangs are feral–descendants of domesticated horses that escaped. Anatomically, horses are prone to a number of painful and life-threatening medical conditions–they are one of the best arguments AGAINST intelligent design that I know. (Pardon the self-reference, but see my “God and the Case for Unintelligent Design” from a few years back.)
Lisa, thanks for this beautiful video. I hope that you can rest, assured that God is certainly intelligent enough to figure out His Design. Until that Day when the “lion will lay down with the lamb”, I would also like to share some “equine poetry in motion”, and remind all of us, that we are all winners if we but finish the Race:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dDwm3QIwfg
Thank you, Lisa. Now that I know how poorly made horses are I have even greater admiration for Totila the Beautiful.
oops, let’s try: Run For The Roses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9awpQyxN8Q
The International Equestrian Federation’s 2010 competition is being held in Kentucky this week. Guess who is winning the dressage competition at ths point — Edward Gal on Totilas :-) The competition isn’t over yet, thought.
http://www.eurodressage.com/equestrian/2010/09/27/scores-2010-world-equestrian-games
Being flesh, as we are, horseflesh must be heir to a “thousand natural shocks.” Like Felix Randal, that “great grey drayhorse” may have experienced in his last hours “some/ Fatal four disorders, fleshed there” in him contending.
The “designs” of genetic drift, random mutation, and natural selection, apparent only in retrospect, are evidently imperfect. Natural selection, in particular, sees to it that we reproduce successfully, then seemingly forgets all about us. Yet living things, while they last, are exquisitely well adapted to their evolutionary niches. That’s even true for Homo sapiens (much as we may sometimes question how well profits balanced losses when we became committed to large brains, mostly singleton births, prolonged dependency of the young, and –oh, my back –bipedalism).
We may well suspect that artificial selection is even more wasteful than the natural variety, with the successes even more ambiguous. But the horses, dogs, and other species that became our close companions can claim some admirable achievements, and dressage is only one. As regards horses, and their co-evolution with our own species, I am reminded of Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. In it GKC makes a number of points about victory and defeat, success and failure, extinction and survival, and the significance of our joint venture with our equine fellow creatures. The comments center about Hector “tamer of horses”:
Achilles had some status as a sort of demi-god in pagan times, but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat… The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending; for it is lifted up forever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope… And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight…we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter and that long leaping word [hippodamoio, “of (Hector) tamer of horses”] with which the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry.
We need hardly accept uncritically a rosy view of “chivalry” to appreciate the awe-inspiring union of strength and intelligence here evoked. I always thought that the sandworm-riders in Frank Herbert’s Dune were so memorable because they reawakened that awe.
It may not be immediately clear that the fourth paragraph in my previous post is an extended quotation. The indentation I tried to use did not survive transfer to the blog (nor did details like italics).
About centaurs == Edward Gal’s manner of sitting on Totilas almost seems to integrate them organically, and the impression of the whole is something like a centaur (if you ignore Toto’s head, of course). Weird but beautiful.
Well the Dutch won the team gold medal and Tolitas and Gal won the individual gold. Here’s what Gal said about riding him:
“Gal tried to describe the felling of riding Totilas, a 10-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion. “It’s so difficult to explain. You have to ride it to fell it, and I will not allow that,” he said with a smile. “He has so much energy and so much power, but you always have the feeling that you can control it. And he doesn’t want to make a mistake, ever. I don’t think I will ever get to ride another horse like him.””
It is fascinating to me that a horse would have some sort of standard of behavior. We really do have to revise our notions of just what sort of thinking and feeling animals are capable of. Yes. that dishonest Harvard prof made up some data about some animals and “moral” thinking, but it does seem to me that the “higher’ animals are more like us than we used to grant, and so they’re deserving of a lot more concern.