Search for Collection E-Book

Paul Belasik

• Herausgeber: J A Allen
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

At the core of this book is a series of 'state of the art' experiments in which the author participated, designed to establish whether certain classical ideas about true collection could be scientifically proved. Discussion of the results leads into an exploration of how working towards collection informs the progression of training and the way in which the exercises are implemented. This pursuit of collection is likely to take a purer form if it is motivated by artistic values rather than by the rider's ego. In this fascinating and thoughtful book, the author urges readers to focus on their own individuality, rather than being motivated or misled by external pressures; to 'collect' or 'centre' themselves, as they work towards a similar state with their horses. A book for all serious riders who seek to align the physical and artistic elements of their training. Of great interest to all riders of all abilities, particularly those involved with dressage. Fully illustrated with a 4-page colour section.

Leseprobe

ASEARCHFORCOLLECTION

Science and Art in Riding

PAUL BELASIK

J. A. ALLEN

First published in Great Britain in 2008

by J.A. Allen, an imprint of

The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury

Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2018

Paperback edition 2018

© Julian Cremona 2018

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 90880 979 7

The right of Paul Belasik to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Design by Judy Linard

Photographs 1, 2 and 3 by Karl Leck, 4, 6 and 7 by Belasik Video Associates and 5 and 8 by Paul Belasik

Edited by Martin Diggle

Contents

CHAPTER   1 Learning to Choose Beautifully

CHAPTER   2 The Culture of Horses – ‘The Thin Layer of Domestication’

CHAPTER   3 The Art of Collection in Life and Riding

CHAPTER   4 The Levade

CHAPTER   5 Science – Measuring Collection

CHAPTER   6 Riding Inside the System – ‘A Model for Collection’

CHAPTER   7 All Roads Don’t Lead to Rome

CHAPTER   8 The Exercises

CHAPTER   9 The Dark Side of Science

CHAPTER 10 Science and Learning

CHAPTER 11 Science, Emotion and Art

INDEX

CHAPTER 1

Learning to Choose Beautifully

You are born with amnesia. People try to fill in the blanks. Who you are. What you are. What you are supposed to do. They try to do this by telling you stories of who your grandfather was. What your grandfather was. Where your mother grew up. What your father did for a living. All this biography may not help you, because you are unique. No one exactly like you was ever here before. You are not one of those people. I am not one of those people. You are a different person. I am a different person. Who are we? How do we find out?

The people who live here said that December was wetter than normal; as a result now, in January, the island is even more lush than usual. There are dressage horses in Hawaii. In part I’m here on holiday and I will also teach a couple of clinics on two of the islands. Since I am out of my usual routine of horse work, I run into town and back in the mornings for exercise.

Yesterday there was a storm with winds so strong they knocked out power on parts of the island near the volcano. This morning it is tropically beautiful again. Doves and pigeons hypnotically sound their plaintive low pipe notes. The narcotic perfume of plumeria and tube roses hangs in the air, which feels like lotion on your face. In the sky, luxuriant mountain slopes start falling steeply out of their personal clouds; bright green vegetation and wispy white steam patches cling to the descending knife edges, all the way down to a mascara line of road that seems to form a boundary as far as you can see at the blue surf’s edge. The slopes don’t stop there; they keep falling into the clear blue water. Coral replaces bushes; the surface of the mountain is now bathed in warm water instead of warm air. The sight of birds flying in the air is replaced by turtles and fish that fly in the water. Instead of the tones of elegiac doves, you hear the sonorous distant haunting cello sounds of hump-backed whales. Eventually the slope bottoms out and, miles away, it rises back up again, breaking through the surf into air somewhere to become another island with its own culture and even its own climate.

It is ironic, I think, as I run into town, that when you are inside the water, under the sea, you cannot smell the beautiful fragrances created by the water. Your senses place you and help define you, exalt you and, in the end, limit you. It is interesting how the sense of smell, the olfactory lobe in the brain itself and the cells that analyse smell, are the ancient root of our emotional life.1

Toward town I run past a church, all the doors and windows wide open. The definition of living or doing something inside or outside is so blurry here. The varnished, immaculate wood shines inside. In front, a man rakes palm fronds that were shaken down from the coconut tree onto the perfect lawn. I pass the elementary school with its open rooms, the playground is quiet – all the young students are in their classes, knapsacks hanging evenly in rows outside each classroom door. I wonder what kind of torture it is to be stuck in there, when on one side, in plain sight, are surfers, fishermen, whales breeching, and on the other side, mountains with blasting streams and steamy jungles full of animal spirits. I am not sure I understand school at all anymore; what is its real purpose?

A little further on, I go through the town square with its magnificent banyan tree, with arms that grow out hundreds of feet and arch back into the ground to become roots again – or is it roots that grow up out of the ground to become branches that make sweeping searches for the ground again? In being whatever it is, it leaves a maze of great arbour-shaded rooms, where artisans come to sell their work on the weekends under the live, bushy ceiling filled with a thousand chattering birds. I continue past the sea wall where several Hawaiians are fishing and then past a few more shops which thin out as I am on the other side of town. I turn around and head back. On the way home I lose my seriousness and drop down to a walk, detouring over to the wharfs where charter boats are preparing to go out. The light smell of diesel exhaust puffs over the dock. I see a small surf shop; there is a pile of used boards for sale stacked on top of each other. From a distance the smooth, shiny, interlocked white pile looks like the great weathered vertebrae that might mark the door of some ancient whaling shack. When I get there the door is open; I go inside. There is a young bohemian couple sitting on a beaten-up old couch intently watching a video on a small television. He tells me it’s a documentary about surfing thirty years ago. I know they have seen this film many times. Still they study it. The same way I have studied riding films, sometimes not even knowing what you are looking for, just watching for a sign, a clue, something to be revealed, sometimes watching a favourite moment over and over again, memorizing it.

I have been watching the surfers for a while; the young ones begin self-sculpting, seeing what their flesh, bones and the sea water will yield.

Suppose, whatever way it comes to you, it comes to you that you cannot see any difference between going to Harvard University and filling the vacancies of big businesses and governments or going to Hamburger University and filling the vacancies of McDonald’s. Somehow, it has come to you that your life is not a design project for someone else. The answer to who I am and what I am supposed to do cannot be satisfied by an address, a birth certificate or a social security number. To start to find out what to do with your life, you cannot go to a society whose primary goal is to homogenize minds so that they can easily be mobilized for its wars: class wars, school wars, gang wars, religious wars, corporate wars, world wars. Like a rat before a baited trap, you can feel this poison of propaganda with your whiskers, so you stay hungry and wonder.

The answer to who you are must be closer to such questions as: ‘Am I fearful?’ ‘Am I cautious?’ ‘Am I reckless or bold?’ ‘Am I compassionate?’ ‘Am I sick or am I well?’ When Sun Yat Sen wrote The Art of War, he should have written that the first battle will be to rid yourself of the guilt that will be put upon you as you go to work on yourself, and that this does not mean you are excluding all others. A psychological affirmation is not a societal rejection. If you want to know who you are and what you are supposed to do, you cannot really go even to the people who love you. It may be that they would rather see you safe than self-fulfilled. Mothers and fathers, families with mental or physical histories to uphold or redeem, pick acceptable careers and start you up a fish weir when you are very young. You get so far that you can’t be ungrateful and waste everything that has placed you where you are, so you die a little and begin to wonder if something else was really meant for you. You alter reality, because the reality presented to you is not real to you.

If you want to know something about yourself, you can’t start by asking someone who has a stake in the outcome. If you are a surfer, you go to the ocean. Nature is not a nation. Nature is not beneficent or cruel. It doesn’t care how much money you have, or what your pedigree is. It can present you with every range of power to test yourself. You can control just how much you want to learn. Nature has no stake in the outcome. Whatever you ask, the answer will be pure. If you go beyond your limits you will pay; if you stay under your limits all the time, your spirit and body will wither and weaken. To find out about yourself, to collect your own experiences, you will have to stay out on the ocean for a long time. In order to stay out there and not be killed, you will need technique. You will gain technique through practice. Through practice you will learn how to choose beautifully.

So my friends the surfers always go to the ocean, and my friends the riders have always gone to the horses; many of us have been hurt, and some even killed. As time goes by for me, two groups seem to have developed. For one, the principle connection will always be to other human beings. These people need external evaluation and validation. For them, to do a thing undocumented or unnoticed is not to do a thing at all. Who they are is always answered by other people – often people they don’t know. If lovers and therapists, enemies and friends – not an ocean or a horse – answer your questions, over a long time the birthright of your amnesia is superficially sated with a persona built upon cross-examinations of other people, held together by outside opinion. Yet, even if they do a good job, from time to time – in faint dreams, like a Zen koan – you wonder if you have a personality if no one is around and, deep inside, things still wobble a little if your describers fall down on the job. Obsolete rat whiskers, like phantom pain for an amputee, once in a while stir, but are quickly rationalized out of existence.

But there is the other group, and this group seems to fall in love with motion itself. They resist interpretations and explanations of what they do by other people. They need direct experience, and are suspicious when it is evaluated, translated, analysed, rewarded or punished. When you almost drown, no one has to tell you made a mistake; when you get thrown from a horse and break your ribs, no one has to explain the pain. It’s up to you to find out why, and whether you can do something better next time.

Like Don Quixote with his concussion, these people must find out every day who they are; their amnesia is not sated because they are not defined by anyone. They can have many names and at the same time they don’t seem to need any of them. They are like water, they are like horses; they change. Maybe they never had amnesia at all but they were told they did, over and over and over, so they would forget the possibilities.

1 D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books, 1995.