Friday, 30 July 2010
|
• VOLUME 44 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
HFL: I did want to take some time today, because in the past we’ve touched upon - but we haven’t gone into - any great detail about your work with the idea of the horse in mythology. I know many of our readers are interested in that aspect of it and I was wondering if we could go a little bit more in depth into that today. Would that be okay with you?
Klaus: Absolutely, please. HFL: When did you start becoming aware yourself about the connection between horses and myth? Klaus: Between horses and myth? For me my life was flashing in front of me quite early with this idea. When I became 11-12 years old, I started talking about this. I did split away from my father and some of my family, so I had to learn very quickly to live on my own, living as a musician earning money like this; living as a magician with rabbits and doves, producing them for whatever kind of act, etc. I had to take care of myself. In my milieu then it was popular to try to look behind the surface and find another meaning in life, rather than only being led by material promises. But all these people around me, or most of them, went to India and were influenced by cultures which have nothing to do with ours. For whatever reason, as a boy I was very much impressed by the idea of the knights and their way of living, by their way of being. I was impressed by our own history, the history of the ghosts, of the history of the Vikings. So this was already the beginning, in my childhood. Wherever you are, even in the simplest novel or the simplest comic, you will be connected with the idea of the horse, of the humans and of the very special meaning between man and horse.  Without any question, if we just look at the United States, if we look into the history of the horse as it appeared in North America, for example, because we know that [originally] in North America there were no horses, even on the whole continent of America; there were no horses. The whole conquering and the whole evolution over the last 500 years would not have been possible without horses, ending up in one of the most modern myths. The myths of the “cowboy” - of the person who is in some way superior, who is substituting the old idea of the knight. Clint Eastwood riding alone, the lonesome cowboy, into this small village - and he was asked by a journalist, in an interview about the idea of the next film he was doing, and he said “I’m just riding into a village and the rest is happening by itself.” So this myth of the cowboy connected with the horse is still one of the strongest myths rooted in the idea of the horse. And even if we look now towards modern society, modern Hollywood movies have the same thing. The only thing is that the horse is substituted by the car. But the car by itself, if the technology is very good or very bad is not as important as the make. So in the first scene someone is driving the car. Because the ingenuity of the technology is the first line, and this absolutely, scientifically proved, we are buying the make. For somebody who is driving a Mercedes, he is connecting himself with a different mythology, with different myths from somebody who is driving a Ferrari or a Porsche or a Fiat or whatever. As a boy I started very quickly to recognize the whole idea of the knights, the Templars, for example, the mythology of the horse is intuitively and cognitively absolutely not to be split from human beings. HFL: I thought something you said was interesting when you were talking about the cars and how we take on the mythology or the mystique of that particular vehicle and try to have it become part of our own persona. People do that, I think, within certain breeds of horses as well, don’t they?
|
|||||||
|
An Equestrian Legacy