The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
— Richard Buckminster Fuller
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do”
— David Foster Wallace
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Three magpies sit on the washing line, sharpening their beaks, while spring rain dots the concrete path.
And now you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream.
Love, pain and labour must sleep now.
The night turns on invisible wheels
and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber.
No one else will sleep in my dreams.
You will go — we will go — joined by the waters of time.
No one else will travel through shadows with me
only you — evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let fall their soft, drifting signs.
Your eyes closed like two grey wings,
while I follow the waters you bring that carry me onward:
Night, Earth, wind weave their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
— Pablo Neruda, a version based on multiple translations
If there is a point to this story about the Melbourne Cup, I fail to see it.
It’s easy to mock the sham glamour of the event. Horse racing (and the Melbourne Cup in particular) has always attracted the media hungry, the gauche, and the desperate minor celebrity. This in turn makes horse racing media-worthy — although it is hard to tell whether most people view attendees with interest or the appropriate degree of derision.
But it would be a fantasy to suggest that gambling, the media, the drunken events and their attendees, have somehow corrupted something pure, as though racing could ever be separate from all this. And the death of horses, too, is an inescapable part of horse racing.
The allegations of cruelty aren’t really about crippled horses that must be cordoned off and “destroyed”. But it is absurd to dismiss the possibility of cruelty because the “strapper, stablehand or equine vet” responsible for euthanizing a crippled horse, loves animals.
Put simply, the sport exists for people to gamble on animal cruelty.
The problem is that the author of the article doesn’t see the cruelty inherent in racing. A jockey may love horses, but it is a cruel and unusual love. To saddle a horse with leather, perhaps crafted from the skin of a dead horse, mount the horse and then beat it around a dirt track, is cruel.
Perhaps the death of one racehorse is not a tragedy. But it is senseless and unnecessary. The tragedy is that we continue to let it happen, for sport.
