Love and Loss

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

- Norman Cousins

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating (and thereby admitting the existence of) something that, in its eyes, does not exist. However, do we believe in it? In Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973), the police ask Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, to treat the seventeen year old Alan Strand who, inexplicably, has blinded six horses at the stable where he worked. Dysart discovers that, when Alan was a child, his mother, a devout Catholic, read to him from the Bible, while his atheist father, concerned that Alan was taking an unhealthy interest in the more violent aspects of the Bible, destroyed a picture of the crucifixion that Alan had at the foot of his bed, replacing it with one of a horse. The father tells Dysart that one night he saw Alan kneeling in front of the picture of the horse, chanting a made-up genealogy of the horses parodying that of Christ in the Bible, which ends up with "Equus" -- Alan deified horses to make up for his failure to integrate paternal authority. naturally, Alan gets a job at a stable, where he becomes erotically fixated on a stallion called Nugget, secretly taking him for midnigt rides, riding him bareback and naked, enjoying the feeling of the power of the animal and the smell of sweat. One evening, Jill, a fellow co-worker, suggests that they go to the stable to have sex; but as Alan hears the horses moving around, his nervousness makes him unable to get an erection. He threatens Jill with a hoof pick; after she escapes, he blames the spirit of Equus for his embarrassment, and punishes the six horses by blinding them for seeing his shame. At the end of the play, Dysart doubts whether he can really help Alan: his treatment would stamp out Alan's intense sexual-religious life. But Dysart also notices how, although he is deeply interested in old pagan spirituality, his own life is sterile, since it took him such a long time to recognize in front of him, in Alan, the living presence of what he was searching for in old artifacts, 17

When the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the Bamiyan statues, were we, the benevolent Western observers outraged by this horror, not all Dysarts?18

17. although the best known Dysart was Richard Burton, who played the role on Broadway and in the cinema version, two other actors who have played the part evoke much more interesting associations: Anthony Hopkins and Anthony Perkins -- Dysart: between Hannibal Lector and Norman Bates!

18. Equus is usually read in a New Age way, as a play celebrating the living force of re-awakened pagan spirituality: however, the play's narrative sustains the opposite message: pagan spirituality explodes when our western (Christian) religion fails, when the symbolic Law it guarantees collapses. What appears more "primordial" is thus a secondary reaction, a myth concocted to fill in the hole of the suspended paternal Law. In a way, Alan is a "horseman" like the little Hans, Freud's child patient -- with the key difference that here the horse is not an object of phobia but an object of eccessive jouissance, of the non-castrated paternal libido.

Slavoj Zizek, "Living in the End Times"