A Facebook Album selection of artwork … cave paintings estimated from 15 to 32,000 years old, contrasted with work from the early 20th Century impressionist Franz Marc…
Category: Writing
Notes on “The Mageste Beste” excerpt: Humanity isn’t a constant
Civilization has not been a straight path upward: human empathy and progress have faltered before.
Humanity isn’t a constant; human consciousness ebbs and flows. The recent excerpt “The Mageste Beste” posted from “Eclipsed by Shadow” is written in Old English. Creating this passage from 1190 AD sent me off on a whole tangent of research.
History can scare you
Civilization has not been a straight path upward: human empathy and progress have faltered before. The last great ebb in Western Civilization was the Middle Ages, or medieval era, after the fall of ancient Rome, when humans lost civilization and reverted to brute conditions of bestial poverty.
Thoughts preserved in writings from ancient Rome are actually more modern than the more recent Middle Ages. As an example, the ancient historian, Tacitus (56-120 AD) is often insightful:
“Abuse, if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.”
“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
For comparison, the opening translated lines from the Old English work Beowulf, written 7 to 10 centuries after Rome — we aren’t even sure! — begin a work filled with homage to violence and patrimony:
“So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes…A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts beyond the whale-road had to yield to him and begin to pay tribute. That was a good king.“
Beowulf says this about human nature: “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.”
Centuries earlier, the old Roman Tacitus attempted an explanation: “Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.”
A difference in quality of thought becomes evident when reading translations from ancient Rome and those, centuries later, from the Middle Ages.
The BookExpo America (BEA) Experience
There aren’t many venues in which authors are the main attraction, and participating as the winner of the 2010 Mom’s Choice Award for YA Fantasy (for “Eclipsed by Shadow”) gave me a place to be and experienced veterans to learn from.
The recent BookExpo America (BEA) convention in New York City was the year’s largest book and publishing convention. This was my first time attending the frantic blur of 1500 exhibits and 30,000 people, and I have a few impressions to share.
First, the BEA was a networking dream/nightmare, a drinking-from-a-firehose experience of shaking hands and fumbling out “pitches” while exchanging business cards with smiling strangers. It took me several days to recover from the shock of being serially nice and cheerful, and will take me several weeks to follow up with everyone I met. I never thought being a writer would be such a social calling. I’m learning.
Second, it was fun! There aren’t many venues in which authors are the main attraction, and participating as the winner of the 2010 Mom’s Choice Award for YA Fantasy (for “Eclipsed by Shadow”) gave me a place to be and experienced veterans to learn from.
Third, and what surprised me most, was that the BEA was a readers’ event. The excitement coming from the public crowding the author signings and book giveaways gave the event an almost rock-concert atmosphere. It was not the usual thing for the book events I’ve been to, and a sign that perhaps the reports of the decline of reading might not be, if not greatly exaggerated, at least illumined with hope for the future.
That is what we’re after, isn’t it?
I’m very much in the hope business myself, though I lose sight of it. The BEA gave me a valuable reminder that reading is still a love – and alive! – for so many.
Equestrian Sport and the Next Generation
My 5-year-old niece watched the Rolex Kentucky 3-Day Event this weekend, and she was full of questions:
“Why are they jumping that?”
“Is that a boy or a girl horse?”
“Why do they go one at a time?”
“What’s on the horse’s legs?”
As intensely as she watched, my niece didn’t care about the teams or the scoring. She just loved seeing the horses.
We humans have had a long fascination with watching horses. Chariot racing, dressage, jousting, polo, flat racing are spectacles of past ages, and today newer sports like show jumping, reining and eventing reflect the athletic and humane partnership we’ve developed with the horse.
(This sport with cross-country jumps is still figuring out what to name itself, having been called the Military, horse trials, 3-Day, combined training, and — the name that seems to be winning — Eventing.)
Of course, horses are not part of our everyday lives as in the past. The challenge for equestrian sport today is to explain itself, to welcome the public to enjoy the beauty and excitement of horsemanship.
Probably few people could have guessed 100 years ago, as the horse was being released from the plow and carriage, that a future generation would be still be watching horses — on a box of moving pictures, no less — asking the same questions they had once asked.
Horses and the Dark Ages of Man
Horses may have pulled and carried humanity up the long ascent from primitive cultures, but it wasn’t a straight line. Human societies have been subject to cycles of falling away from civilized life.
“Dark age” describes the lack of historical records from these periods, such as during the Bronze Age collapse about 1200 BC, which ended the Mycenaean culture and extinguished literacy for several centuries.
The most recent “dark age” of Western culture was the approximately 1000 years after the collapse of ancient Rome, or the Middle Ages. The wonders of ancient Rome included heated public Baths, running water and vast entertainments — the Middle Ages were marked with mud roads, illiteracy, poverty and disease.
What does this have to do with horses?
Horsemanship has been a slow road of progress from brutal subjugation to humane partnership. Understanding the horse, an excitable prey animal, has been a major exercise in empathy for human culture.
A new idea of riding was discovered by the ancient Greeks we now call dressage, which emphasizes the cooperation of the horse rather than forced submission. Dressage develops a harmonious partnership with the horse and provides greater control, balance and athleticism.
This civilized form of riding was lost during the Middle Ages; as humans reverted to illiteracy and brutality their riding became brutal as well.
It’s interesting to note that dressage was one of the earliest classical arts to be reborn in the European Renaissance. The return of humane horsemanship to the world coincided with the birth of the modern era in about the 17th century — not so long ago.
In a sense, good horsemanship is a celebration of empathy, and perhaps a barometer of its presence. Our relationship with the horse started before recorded history, but the goal of humane partnership as practiced today is only a few centuries old!
Little Horse on the Prairie
The horse is prey and never forgets it: his motto is to ‘run away to live another day.’
The horse is prey and never forgets it: his motto is to ‘run away to live another day.’
Horses are built for speed over distance, and with a good headstart he is safe from his natural predators.
The only hole in the equine’s survival program is the time it takes to reach top speed. To solve this problem horses come “fully-loaded” with highly advanced bio-technology to detect predators.
The Super-Human Horse
An equine’s sense of hearing and smell rivals that of a dog, with additions of swiveling ears and a canyon of a nose that sifts the wind with every breath. Their eyesight is much different than our own, featuring extreme motion-detection ability and a field of vision of almost 360 degrees, with only a few blank spots right behind and in front (which is why you never walk up behind a horse, and why jumping is such a challenge).
Equine abilities extend beyond the human experience. A horse’s legs serve as a sounding board to feel ground vibration, and can even recognize a person by their walk. Horses also have an amazing “photographic” memory and are able to see well at night.
Horses don’t see the world as humans see it
As you ride, the horse has mapped out the robin in the hedge 100 yards away, noted a freshly-painted mailbox and the spot where a dog barked seven years ago … even as feels the rumble of a distant train and responds to your cues.
We don’t share the outlook of horses, the same mind or same senses–we hardly share the same world. Yet somehow, implausibly, a close partnership was made … and is still kept.
Photo: Bureau of Land Management / Wikimedia / Public Domain
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Copyright © 2010 John Allen Royce, Jr.
The Wonderful Strangeness of Horses
Book II of my fiction trilogy about horses and history is being published soon. So why did I write about horses?
The main reason is they teach us about the world, and they’re lots of fun. Here are some reasons I think horses are an interesting subject:
Horses have always been with us
Since Stone Age man first put paint to rock, horses have fascinated and assisted mankind in some capacity: for food, weight-bearing, load-pulling, travel, status, inspiration, therapy, sports, recreation, gambling, war … it’s amazing how many roles the horse has taken.
The horse and our partnership is filled with paradoxes
So much of life isn’t what it seems and horses are no exception. For example:
– A timid prey animal, the horse was history’s most feared engine of war.
– A humble servant, the horse ennobles mankind.
– A century after engines made the horse “obsolete,” there are more horses than ever before.
– Horses can gallop miles with a human on its back and pull tons of weight, but can perish of a missed feeding.
(And they let people ride them!)
Horses haven’t much changed since the Olden Days
Horses have been tamed, but they retain their basic character and instincts. Prehistoric man could have raised a prehistoric colt, put a saddle on him and trained him to gallop and jump. What is the difference between then and now?
It took thousands of years to learn to ride horses (and we seem to have forgotten several times). I wonder why it took so long to figure out … unless we had to change…
The First (Great) Horse
“The Legend of the Great Horse” trilogy is a journey through history by a modern horse-rider. The story begins with a foal being born to a family with a horse-crazy youngster, Meagan. This horse carries Meagan on an adventure through history.
“The Legend of the Great Horse” trilogy is a journey through history by a modern horse-rider. The story begins with a foal being born to a family with a horse-crazy youngster, Meagan. This horse carries Meagan on an adventure through history.
The new foal, Promise, is actually a Great Horse of legend with the ability to travel back to its previous lives. A mishap occurs and a frightened Promise bolts with her young rider back into time, galloping far into the distant past and leaving Meagan alone with only her horsemanship skills to help her survive.
The first horse of history that Meagan encounters is a small wild broodmare in a band being hunted by humans circa 20,000 BC. The reader knows this, but Meagan must make her own discovery that she has gone back in time.
Now, the wild broodmare isn’t talking (other than time-travel, the story is realistic and fact-based). The mare connects with Meagan through its natural curiosity, an important if perhaps unexpected trait of the species. Meagan remembers her own grandfather’s opinion that horses were the “nosiest animal in Creation.” He called curiosity a fatal weakness of the species … well, that and a fondness for oats.
The fact that a large prey animal would be so naturally curious is part of the mystery of the equine soul, but it is something we share in common. An interesting note is that the horse Meagan meets is not very different in character from the horses she knows from her own modern experience some twenty thousand years later. Horses are a much older species than humans, and their instincts as prey animals still survive.
The independence of the “wild” spirit of horses meant that mankind was forced to adapt to the horse in order to obtain the animal’s strength and speed. It is our genius as humans that we can “see” things from another’s perspective, and it was this ability that made our close partnership with horses possible. In the case of horses, we have not changed them: they have changed us…
China drafts first-ever animal protection laws
I found this to be a topic with some ugly background, but here’s good news … if it happens:
The legislation, drawn up in consultation with the RSPCA, will include provisions to both protect pets and cover how farm animals should be raised, transported and slaughtered. It will also deliver protection for captive wildlife and laboratory animals.
Past efforts to promote animal protection legislation in China have met with steady failure. Possibly, hopefully, this action will lead to a step forward. No great leap requested. We’ll see.
Further reading: “Chinese Animal Protection Law and Other Matters”
On the Trail of History
If history may be said to be the memory of the human race, it seems subject to many of the same failings of accuracy and interpretation. We see this even in our most recent history: for example a national self-image embraced by
some which holds America to be a militaristic warrior-race which “won” WWII, rather than the gentler truth that we were beloved as the good guys who did not continue war-making but instead helped rebuild Europe.
If even recent incidents can be mis-interpreted (or mal-interpreted), can events further in the past can be accurate and valuable?
An answer is in corroborative evidence that points to explanation, such as archaeological remains that support period documentation. Art is a hugely valuable window into the heart of a culture. Diaries, journals, new items, accounting records—there are many forms of documentation that can lend credence to historical truth.
Without honest inquiry none of this matters but, even with this impulse, how can one find relevance to our own experience? Is it relevant, say, that as our Roman forebears grew prosperous, a merchant class rose that militarized the culture, formed corporations to buy up land in Italy and dispossessed the working class farmers, replacing the food crops with vineyards which led to starvation and the grain dole and the creation of the infamous masses?
These things happened … do they matter today? If so, how to talk of this in a corporate world with a focus that leaves such history uncovered? Is it necessary to careen from disaster to disaster as humanity has done for millennia, or can we use history to connect the dots and create a better world for all of us?