The Straight Line of Culture and the Curved Form of the Horse
Think about your horse for a second.
What is it that you love so much about their form? Perhaps their flowing mane and tail? Maybe they have a crested neck (too much spring grass!) but it just adds to their shapeliness and you can’t help but think they are an incredible work of art in motion. When they look at you with their liquid eye — so round and intelligent — you feel so proud.
Oh, not to mention that big, beautiful round butt!
Everything about a horse — about nature — is curved.
“The straight line belongs to men, the curved line to God.”
— Antoni Gaudí
It isn’t until we step in with our fences, reins, tight girths, and flash nose bands (yuck) that the straight line enters their existence.
But it is more than just the tools we use — the straight line exists within our own minds.
Symbolism of the Straight Line
It may be the quickest way to get from point A to point B — but there is something lost, something that has gone cold and limp on that pathway. The road that winds up and down, along steep hills and valleys is a metaphor for a journey that an embodied being takes.
The straight path is merely a track system for a machine.
Think of the train — the successor to the horse — it runs along straight railway lines. In the Industrial Revolution, the train increased productivity 100 fold, taking the representative horsepower to new heights and physical achievements. Every paved road, tall building, electrical pole, and water system in our culture has had a machine drive straight over, through and across it.
Everything in nature is curved
“The straight line is the line of power; the curve is the line of beauty.”
— William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 1753
Nothing about the way a horse moves is straight — even if you are riding down the centerline in a dressage test. The biomechanics of a horse going forward is cyclical. It’s opposites flowing together to produce forward motion.
A horse galloping freely is the most emotive and inspiring of scenes. Not only travelling forward, covering an immense amount of ground (a thing we long for), they have independent, free movement of their head as they swing their noses to the sky and snake their necks in playful exuberance.
They represent the curved chaos of nature.
The Psychology of the Straight Line
“We have made the straight line our god. But it is a dead god.”
— Friedensreich Hundertwasser
The straight line exists in places where our mind has grasped for control at the expense of aliveness. The straight line is the human attempt at containing nature. The straight line is always accompanied by a mindset of control and manipulation.
In Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s account of hemisphere theory, the left hemisphere pays attention to the world in a specific way — distinct from its counterpart — that filters everything into linearity.
“The left hemisphere sees things in parts, abstracted from context. It sees a fixed point as opposed to a flowing continuity. It prioritises things it can grab and use, as well as things that are mechanical.”
— The Master and His Emissary
When looking onto a scene — left hemispheric mediated attention will see what it knows, what it can grip onto in order so that it can use it for its own purposes of building and manipulating.
McGilchrist speaking on the left hemisphere’s proclivity for control:
“The idea of ‘grasping’ implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wrestling it away from its context, holding it fast, focussing on it. The grasp we have, our understanding in this sense, is the expression of our will, and it is the means to power. It is what enables us to ‘manipulate’ – literally to take a handful of whatever we need – and thereby to dominate the world around us.”
— The Master and His Emissary
So, you can see how the straight line is a favourite of the left hemisphere.
On the other side of things, we have the right hemisphere which although it cannot announce itself — verbal language resides in the left hemisphere — it sees the world through a much wider perspective.
The right hemisphere is associated with lived, embodied experience — that of your body coming into contact with the earth around itself and responding to it. Where the left can only ‘re-present’ aspects of what it sees, the right hemisphere is open to it all, just as it is. It has no purpose or will to impose onto the situation.
Empathy and the relations between things are right hemisphere mediated, whereas the left prefers something isolated and stripped of emotion – essential to be able to utilise.
“It is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience.”
— The Master and His Emissary
To build anything — a structure or system — the left hemisphere performs incredibly well at seeing the world through this goal and picks out what it needs — tools and strategies to help us to become efficient, effective and powerful, to sum its aim up.
Culture and the Horse
So now we can see that the culture we inhabit has been built through this mode of attention. Everything that has a straight line is related to culture.
This mode of attention doesn’t stop as soon as we walk outside the door into the field, however. We bring this linear psychology with us to our horses.
Just think of the last time you rode your horse:
— Where were they when you caught them? A fenced field or a boxed stall.
— What device did you use? A halter (just a fence for a horses face) to pull tight (straight) in order to enact a command.
— What tool did you grip onto when you rode them? Tight reins (Latin retinēre — to hold back, restrain)
— Did you get what you wanted out of the ride?
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong about riding for utility but ignorance will cause us to take it too far.
My horse has been extremely useful to me as a cow horse on the farm. I am pointing all of this out to highlight this type of attention because it has a tendency towards becoming overly dominant and controlling if we are ignorant to it.
Left (ha!) unchecked, this piece of our apparatus will restrict (rein in) the horse towards its own aims and will at the expense of the horses comfort, happiness and freedom.
When you are with your horse, ask yourself:
How much culture am I bringing to her and how much nature am I allowing to be?
Watch yourself and you can see when your actions are within the left hemispheric aim of control or the right hemisphere’s capacity for relationship. When two beings sit across from each other without a straight line to tie them — that is where real connection is found.