The Nonhorse is an adversarial
image totem that either haunts me or galls me. I created it from using
the part of my mind I do not have direct access to. Images like
this are propagated by the mind for unknown reasons. Depending on the
kind of person you are, an image or presence can have an extreme or mundane
relationship to your “real” life. I make art, and have a
tendency to deal with things I find in the mind by putting it to use.
But Things can just as easily be left alone, and this is what most people
do with the inner weirdness, thank goodness. These are the two responses.
We can pretend everything is mundane and normal, or we can turn and mutually
acknowledge the slobbering horror standing quietly in the corner.
The Nonhorse appears in my dreams as a canceling stigma, a floating logo
of impossibility and breakdown of mutual understanding and confusion. A
state removed from the interconnectedness of all people, the foreboding
sensation when nothing actually has been evident to change but you know,
through the working of righteous paranoia, that things have just begun
the slid from ok to horribly wrong.
I encounter this feeling a lot in the trappings of the current complicated
time. Modern cultural messages are rich little packets of information,
and when they go wrong the go wrong in a big way. This is ironic, because
the science of “becoming understood” and “relating to
people” has never been more codified as it has now, with perfect
identity prescriptions for every demographic and the deep human understanding
of science and modern religion. Encountering a commercial, a movie,
or a new technology is an intense visceral experience with many layers
of stimulation, each little burst of information strives to be a whole
world. Asking for this level of engagement with even the most trifling
idea creates a kind of stress that must be distinctly modern. It’s
almost funny when a commercial that was clearly very expensive and time
consuming to produce fails to resemble anything even remotely human. Its
not just commercials, it is deeply hilarious we can’t connect even
with all our devices and sophisticated ways. The foreboding, the fear and
the basic ontological creepiness I feel when it becomes impossible to understand
or be understood is what the Nonhorse represents for me. In my dreams it
appears, saying nothing, with only the ringing of the wrong answer bell
and the black fire of the torches to comfort me.
