Imagine an image of a horse saddled up, bit in mouth, reins over neck, and blinders over eyes. Now imagine that same image, but with those elements removed. What do you see? Your mind is lying to you. You do not see a bare back unsaddled horse with bit and reigns removed, and you able to look deeply into its milky colourful iris. Those things do not exist in an image, and therefore cannot exist when certain parts of an image are taken away. What you see is a representation of an animal with a hole in its spine, missing eyes, and parts of its body dismembered by all the removed straps that belong to these tools of restraint.[a]
Which begs the question, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a whole animal anymore? Those pieces were never in the image to begin with; your brain just logically placed those missing pieces there so you wouldn’t die of a heart attack upon realizing such an animal would never be able to exist. Without those implements of restraint of modern man the horse becomes freakish, disturbing, and un-lifelike. Without those missing pieces filled in by the psyche the horse doesn’t make sense, all logic is lost and understanding falls apart. Your rules of logic do not exist in the world of vision and action. How far does the world of vision reach? How far reaching is action?
To the horse in the image it makes no difference if the reigns are there or not, because it still lives the same. To the horse, they are an external substance, which only visually connects the parts, because it really doesn’t live off real substance it can survive off none at all.
Is the horse even aware that the visual restrains have been removed? Would it act the same as if it had them, or would it come to some visual realization that it is now free, although it posses no eyes. Remember: the blinders are gone.
If the world were presented with the parts of a man, how would the members of the world react? Depends on which parts of the man, and how you define a man. What if it were only a half? Does a half imply a mere incision between the navel and the spine, drawn horizontally or vertically, or does it imply half of the mass, no matter which parts were presented? I can predict with almost certainty what the reaction would be to a half a man based upon his mass presented in random parts, and I can almost certainly predict which of those parts would have to be left out to decrease that reaction. There would be a degree of measure upon who he is based on what was given, if it were a hand, a leg, a penis, or a head with eyes still in their sockets. A torso would give a fair amount of information to an observer, the approximate height and weight of the man, what his habits were in life and how satisfied he was with the physical interaction he had with others. It could also tell you a great deal about the personality and psychology of the man as well, informing us of his common preferences for food, physical upkeep as far as strength and building of that physique he once owned.
What if this man was still whole, but his face was horrifically scarred by war? His youth and beauty stripped away by the duty fulfilled for his country. His pride reduced to an unimaginable disconnect with others, because of their inability to deal with his dehumanizing scars. Can he survive with out a face? Does it matter to him if his face is there or not? What would you say to his wide eyed compassionate bride, who married him upon his return? That single act of her marrying a man that she loves despite his physical appearance, no matter how macabre, is more courageous than most things you’ll do in life. She understands that there is something greater to a man than his appearance. I just hope she keeps that understanding always within view, planted and growing within her being.[b]
What if you changed your dismembered focus of this horse and man within your head to a woman? Remove her fabric restraints and her breasts disappear, vulva gone; those things that make her a woman disappear as instantly as the horse’s imagined spine and eyes, as quickly as a soldiers’ features melt under the heat of a bomb.
What makes a woman? Dismember her and see what parts you would pick out to determine her sex. You wouldn’t need to go far; a woman’s womanhood is stained within every cell of her body. Would you sever her brain open to determine how much of which hormones were running through her psyche to judge whether or not she was of much value in life? What if you discovered she was a drug addict? What would you think then? What if she were addicted to something far more discreet, like the internet, talking on chat rooms? Perhaps that is why she’s is in the predicament she is in, dismembered and dead. Perhaps she was enticed by what seemed to be a gentleman, perhaps the devil himself.
They say the devil is a gentleman. I believe that. How would he otherwise be able to woo so many into believing that shredding the tiniest and largest amounts of human dignity, by any and all means, to be right and correct?
This woman, having been enticed by the greatest gentleman of all, is now brought to your imagination to be analyzed and measured, to be drawn and separated, to be abused and misunderstood by your preconceived notions of what is and should be. What if this imagined image were the woman who married the marred soldier? Do you judge her? Do you spite her manifestation of Grace? Do you abhor her existence for encumbering your blinders? Do you hate her for being? Are you angry with her for having compassion upon the evidence of the devil’s work, successful in his mission?
Would you do the devils work differently? If so, you are the same, the same as Lucifer himself. You are just another person watching from outside the ring, shouting obscenities, and jeering for more violence, while the fighters dance for survival. Or perhaps you have been enticed by that same gentleman, but you yourself have given in, being won over to his side to be restrained, to perceive that the gold plated saddle he’s set you in with blinders to boot is a luxury and a pleasure to wear. You don’t have to witness the ugly side of life because he’s given you the chance to see only what you want to see, unless you accidentally venture too far into experience and the pages of learning, exceeding the amount of ignorance he restrains you to. That is not about to happen, though, because the endless drugs and meaningless entertainment he has prescribed you to have set you in an all too familiar headspace of complacency and dull wits.
Can you escape his mists of illusion, or do you have the will to do so? Is there any need for escape? Would life improve or change with an escape, with a unification of the parts, the seeing of the whole? The spaces between filled in magnificently with God and Grace, spaces you could not fill in with your own logic; spaces only possibly filled with the unifying explanation of the profane, the divine, and the elegant. What room would your separation have place for then? What about your degradation and objectification? You could no longer fling around parts of a human being like pieces of meat to analyze for pleasure or for terror. The power of hell could not forego its segregating will; it would have to obliterate its mission in full surrender.
Or would it? Is it the absolute element of hell within us that thing which supports the absolute possibility of exercising Grace?
Does it take more than your individuality to realize that you alone are insignificant? That you alone, without other people, would degrade to a state where life would be pointless. That the only sense that can be made in existence is only created and accomplished by unification?
Why then do you think the writers of the bible call it the At-One-Ment? Why not the Christ-save-ment?
Because it wasn’t about Christ. It was about you. He died so you could live for more than this life, than this existence, so you could learn that faith will be found in existence upon his return, and that hell will obliterate in surrender.
God came down and created the world in seven days, but will you lose faith and believe that he has abandoned this place after that? That the creation of this earth was something to be put up on the shelf, forgotten about or to be returned to at a later date, if at all? If His abandonment were true, He would not have stayed the hand of Abraham, later killing His Son. Action is further reaching than you think.
Weigh that while you’re weighing the worth of a man, the grace of a woman, with the image of the dismembered horse in the background.
Are you worth as much as another man’s life? Are you worth joining together with all the other men and women that ever lived or ever will live to become something far more wretched and beautiful for a purpose greater than you could possibly conceive? Forget just human existence; are you worth unifying with every other fibre vibrating in the entirety of everything that is incomprehensible? See that while you imagine your imaginary horse.
Are you worth the single most unifying action through the single most degrading event in history?
This is not to say that any other sorrowful historical event that occurred is not important, rather it is to say that they all occurred within Him. He unified the profane within Himself, within the divine and within His Grace.
Show that to your imagined beast of burden with no spine or eyes.
Tell that to the bride who marries her love who has been scarred by a war that is inspired of the politics of economy.
Remind yourself of that when considering one of the first things you do is throw out the rules of the game. Consider, are the rules worth discarding? In some situations perhaps, as long as it applies to your actions. Love the higher law. Imagine the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.[c] Don’t come into the temple and crawl. Stop thinking about the dismembered horse in your head, stop thinking about what judgements you have about another person, start doing something more than wander, start to see through the devil’s medicated mist.
[a] Josh Ritter, http://www.joshritter.com/ , Album Cover of “The Animal Years”.
[b] Nina Berman Photography http://www.ninaberman.com/ click on “Marine Wedding” to view image of Bride and Marine.
[c] Josh Ritter http://www.joshritter.com/album_animal.shtml Album “The Animal Years”, Song Girl in the War (mp3 available to listen to on this site.)
All footnote contents were originally read about on http://matthewgood.org/ in entries posted by Matthew Good dated and titled as follows:
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