what a terrible horse it must be
Thank you all for so graciously receiving my last. Other doped-up cris de coeur on that subject will be confined to postscripts because the more sympathetic you are to my feelings about my lost little umbrella stand, my hop-frog, my round-bellied tea-kettle, my elzabelle, my famous grouse as I used to call her, the harder they are to take, I know. So much weeping and dramatics cannot be what you signed up for. but then it's not what I signed up to LIFE for, so we are all in the same sinking boat I guess.
This reminds me, forgive me for the pivot, of the way the Spanish Riding School in Vienna traditionally has one single bay horse hopping around on his hind legs along with all the standard greyish white ones, for luck. I learned this from Eva Ibbotson, who mentions it once per book whether she needs to or not, and who also originated for me Chopin’s belief that expending his masculine essence would deplete his creative faculties. “Every time he made love, he was depriving the world of an etude,” is how the drunken Viennese refugee puts it to the English natural scientist she later seduces. This fact is given as a report of third-hand speculation even in context, and is maybe not a going theory in the real-life musicological world outside of quaint children’s books — my learned piano teacher refused to confirm it for me when I asked him, but I believe he feels protective of the reputations of composers he esteems — but I believe it, it sounds like him.
Leaving Chopin to the side for now and going back to the horses: they know the bay is lucky because, they say, they didn't have a dark horse dancing in Vienna when Napoleon invaded, or Hitler, or during a few other bad times. See? they say. See what happens: no bay horse, bad luck.
But, this is the very important thing, they did have their precious symbolic bay horse in the horse corps de ballet in and right up to 1914, and it didn’t do anything at all to keep Archduke Ferdinand from being murdered or even all the rest of it. The luck horse failed. Abjectly! They don't talk about that when they explain the tradition to tourists, or Eva Ibbotson doesn’t say that they do, maybe because they feel badly for that horse. He had one job, this bay horse of 1914, and that job was to be a luck totem to maintain the Austro-Hungarian Empire in good working order, and he failed. spectacularly. If that horse is still alive, he is very old and and very guilty. He probably comes to confession each week and the priest sighs and groans to see him coming because it’s the same story every time, and then the priest has to feel guilty about that into the bargain. What a terrible horse it must be.
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I was excited to discuss with you Florence Stevenson’s OPHELIA, a notorious ‘70s semi-gothic paperback I got hold of even though it’s hard to come by and expensive when you do. It’s good! Ira Levin liked it enough to blurb it! but it deals with untimely cat death and transmigration of cat souls, so I got to put that off for a little while until I can stand to make jokes about it. you understand.