re: Riding Bareback

I'm surprised by Stephanie's characterization of Julie Brown's view of language ("I don’t believe communication is ultimately possible. But I believe it’s necessary to live as though it were.") as a statement of faith. What faith does the statement evince? It disavows faith in the possibility of communication. A comparable statement that showed faith might read, "I don't believe communication should ultimately be possible: it seems riddled with failure – and yet we do communicate." That would show faith in the existence of communication, whereas if Julie's statement shows faith, it must be in some form of human resilience, in our ability and continued willingness to behave as though we are communicating when really we aren't!

That said, I too am drawn to W. Bynner's "Horses." I'm not sure whether the poem works as a metaphor for words as signs, but it definitely has something interesting to say as a metaphor about words and their meanings. Let's take it apart carefully:

"Words are hoops," and, we as word-users, are like trained dogs or seals, or like anything that leaps through hoops. Pets leap through hoops in order to be rewarded. People leap through figurative hoops in order to get ahead. So catching meaning, or making meaning, is a reward or a success. So far the poem seems encouraging enough: to get ahead and get meaning (perhaps to communicate), we have to leap through the hoops of words. This devalues the word itself (just a hoop to jump through) and puts the weight appropriately enough on the meaning. Great! If I want to mean, now I know what to do.

But it's more complicated than this. Meanings, the metaphor says, "are horses' backs / Bare, moving." Hard not to think at once of the beauty of a barebacked horse in motion. So these valuable things we leap upon are beautiful, too. Excellent. But what is bare is vulnerable; and what is moving is hard to hold. The horse in this metaphor might be unbroken, even wild.

Words may be the way to leap upon such brilliant things as meanings, but we are leaping to a moving target, and the poem doesn't promise that we'll always land on the horse's back. It just tells us that the way there is through words. Meaning becomes beautiful, but very likely alterable and difficult to catch.

None of this addresses Stephanie's insight that this poem has something to say about subjectivity. What it says depends upon how we reading the barebacked, moving horse. If the motion is constant and inevitable, meanings must be somehow temporary – subjective even if we all (all the subjects) agree for the time being and communicate successfully. What if meanings move unpredictably, like bucking broncos? We might catch meanings only for ourselves, and sometimes it certainly feels that way. But then again, we might sometimes catch and bridle meanings once we've jumped onto them through hoops. Maybe we can all ride meanings easily into the sunset, beautifully, certainly, and with no possibility of a hangman's posse on our trail.

Riding Bareback

HORSES
[Witter Bynner]

Words are hoops
Through which to leap upon meanings,
Which are horses’ backs,
Bare, moving.

I love this poem for several reasons.

One: It is about horses. Or at least, has horses in it, and the writer has captured something of how horses move, and of what it feels like to ride bareback.

Two: It is a wise poem, in its laconic brevity. There is an authority in the description here that has to do with being willing to say one thing, precisely; one thing, not everything.

Three: The lineation. Each line is a simple, compelling statement, which builds on the previous thought but adds something distinctly new. Each line, in fact, has the quality good story endings are supposed to have, of feeling surprising yet inevitable.

Four: I read the whole poem as a metaphor for words as signs, for the relationship between signifier (word) and signified (meaning). Its brevity works for it here, too, in that it shapes the image, in four strokes, and leaves it there. In the debate over whether words have anything like an objective meaning, what I find interesting is the tension. Common sense seems to demand an acceptance, simultaneously, of both extremes: Words clearly do not mean the same thing to each subjective person, and the possible slippage, and failure in transfer of meaning, has no limits; and yet in experience there are moments, both mundane ones and transcendent ones, when words make that leap and land, against all the odds, on meaning. Julie Brown, a poet-critic friend, put another view of the paradox to me once: “I don’t believe communication is ultimately possible. But I believe it’s necessary to live as though it were.” Her faith here reminds me of the two central claims of Christianity, which are both unresolvable paradoxes: God is three, yet one. Christ is fully human, fully God. The orthodox creeds assert both extremes without seeking logical resolution. Similarly, the taut physicality of Bynner’s bareback metaphor, the leap that is at its center, rides the central paradox of what human words are capable and incapable of doing, and being, in the world.