There is a passage in Ned Rorem’s Paris Diary from July of 1951 that is in quotation marks. I find this particular passage quite disturbing, and I hope that the quotation marks mean that he is referencing someone else’s story. This entry deals with him (if it is indeed him) as a boy spending summers on a farm where he can’t control his violent tendencies towards animals. When kicking the chickens doesn’t satisfy him any longer, he stabs a horse between the shoulders with a birch spear. Granted, it’s not as bad as his original plan: “my precocious intention was to thrust these (six sharp birch spears) into six parts of the horse: the two eyes, the nose, the spine, the genitals, the mouth.” Coming from a family of horse lovers, I just can’t wrap my brain around someone taking pleasure from anything like this.
I guess I’m in this to learn about a man’s life as I learn his music. I’m not here to gain a deeper respect for someone just for the sake of it. His character, or what I’ll be able to gather from his writings, will have to earn that.
Tags: animal cruelty, Ned Rorem, Paris Diary
September 11, 2009 at 6:48 am |
Maybe it means he simply poked the horse with a stick? He was a boy, right? I think it would take quite a bit of strength to actually stab a horse with a stick and have that stick penetrate the hide and do damage.
I do seem to recall, nearly 20 years ago, 2 small children in my front yard taking a great deal of pleasure in systematically killing snails. Maybe Rorem is simply recording a time in his life when he was similarly fascinated by his fearsome powers to inflict pain.
At least one of those little snail-torturers grew out of that phase. Presumably, Rorem (if he indeed was the horse-tormentor) grew out of his sadistic period too.
Cheers,
DaveR
September 11, 2009 at 2:35 pm |
Snails shmails….
Anyway, I’ll give you the passage here and you can decide for yourself:
Ned Rorem’s Paris Diary (Da Capo Press, 1998):
“I tensed, and took one of my spears and sunk it deeply between the animal’s shoulders. (I wanted, you see, I wanted this horse to pay attention to me!) Fright. He reared foaming and bellowed and shook and couldn’t escape, quivering as he was with hurt. And I, fearful, slid from the loft and began running from the barn, but at the door stopped to look back. The horse was upright, shaking, his hooves crossed upon the gate of his stall, and large tears flowed on his face. And he said: ‘Little boy, don’t run away or be afraid. If I reared up it was only because the pain of your weapon shocked me so. I was not going to hurt you. O, come back.’ … But I walked from the barn, and went slowly into the hills that surrounded my young father’s farm. Here I sat beneath a pine and felt absolutely nothing and breathed the odor of needles and cones. Far below I could see the barn and still hear howling as the horse tried to extract the spear from his back. Then the noise became more and more feeble until it died away all together…. But like unexpected thunder an insane shriek occurred and I knew the horse had forced himself through the wooden doorway. I waited for his revenge. But he went free, escaped to die, whinnying off through the trees in the opposite direction instead of galloping over to stamp out my small life.”