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The Book

target="new">Click to download article for better viewing Excerpts from a book in progress* To Ride a Bronze Horse By John Sherrill Houser The life and circumstances that led to the creation of the world’s largest equestrian bronze, and into a political storm, furnish ample adventures for a novel. A look behind the scenes reveals the slow and determined growth necessary to the creation of monumental sculpture; the technical difficulties that must be overcome as well as the problems of dealing with the controversy that seems inseparable from large scale public work. This is the story of an artist's life and how a few words spoken in enthusiasm among friends grew into a project involving millions of dollars and the desperate efforts of many people to save a decade of sacrifice from disaster…as a colossal work of art nears completion. These stories provide insight into the unique background of an artist whose life began in the shadow of a mountain carving and carried him from the company of Italian street performers, through the mountains of Appalachia, into tropical jungles and on to the dark isolation of a seemingly interminable project from which there was no escape except through ultimate success or failure. The chapter below, A Prodigy of Nature, relates the experiences of John’s father, Ivan Houser, who was assistant sculptor to Gutzon Borglum for seven years in the carving of Mount Rushmore. Although John has many memories from his childhood in South Dakota the influence of Borglum on the future artist came mainly through his father, who was also closely associated with Borglum on other commissions as well as on trips to Washington D.C. for senate hearings and fund raising. Borglum’s life rocketed from controversy to controversy and his reputation as a difficult and contradictory individual was well known. It was perhaps Ivan’s salvation as an employee that he knew how to “stand-up in a hurricane”. Out of this turmoil Borglum producd a magnificent body of work and many stories. The names have been changed and the chapters have been taken at random but presented in sequence. COMING WITH THE RIVER is a poetic introduction to El Paso del Norte from the river's point of view. THE STORM NOBODY SAW is dramatic snapshot of studio life. IN THE BELLY OF THE HORSE describes the last days in the studio and GLANCING BACK is a nostalgic look at time-gone. To Ride a Bronze Horse, by John Sherrill Houser Summer, 1932 Mt. Rushmore, Keystone, SD A PRODIGY OF NATURE In our nation’s wilderness heart, a colossal mountain of granite rises against the sky like a primeval icon of time. With the passing of ten thousand years, the signature of storm winds and the whiplash of hail is too faint to be read upon its surface. Its rocky hump is blanketed with snow in winter and blasted by summer heat. It was ancient when pressures in the earth forced the Himalayas up from the northern swamps of the great Indian subcontinent. In the face of such immutability, the human mind conceives “eternity” and in the power of such form sculpture is born. A sprawling apron of granite chips fills the gully below; scattered by dynamite and jackhammer under the command of the Danish-American sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. Hoists and dangling cable chairs web the massive rock amid puffs of white smoke. Men call out and the rumble of dynamite echoes through the Black Hills of South Dakota. A prodigy of nature is slowly being transformed into a colossal human artifact. This is the age that severed the Americas with the Panama Canal, spanned North America with the railroad and christened the wind at Kitty Hawk. No vision is too big to dream and no mountain is too large to carve. Across the ravine a rustic studio looks back upon the emerging face of Jefferson, which is being carved a second time, more deeply into the cliff, in search of durable stone. His features are sixty-feet from chin to hairline. If he could burst the mountain in a shower of granite and rise to his full height, he would stand five hundred feet in the clear mountain air. Such is the stature of giants. To his right George Washington gazes mutely over a forest of miniature pines and to his left Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln wait patiently within the stone. This wilderness refuge of art and ambition stands in isolation from the Great Depression that rages across the country, sweeping the world towards the Second World War. Within the studio two men in their early thirties are working on a plaster model with faces, one tenth the size of the mountain carving. This “mid-size” maquette is the enlarging model. On a nearby table sit an earlier and still smaller model with heads no bigger than a human fist. This was Borglum’s first “concept” maquette from which the mountain carving has grown by increments. William Tallman, the lanky Superintendent of Enlarging, inclines slightly forward with a pair of compasses in one hand and a notebook in the other as he balances atop Washington’s six-foot head. A shorter man with straight, dark hair and a white smock stands on a stepladder mixing plaster. That man is my father, Ivan Houser, who was Assistant to Gutzon Borglum for seven years in the early carving of the mountain. Ivan and Bill confer from time to time. Each measurement they take is multiplied by ten and carefully recorded. These crucial notations will later be transcribed and given to the workmen on the mountain where they will be used in dictating the amount of stone to be removed. A single error could destroy months of work. The morning sun calls forth a flurry of activity from the little wooden shacks that haphazardly line the mountaintop and small figures move out across its surface. A huge beam supported by guyed cables swings out over the edge in marked degrees and from its end a plumb line of thin steel cable spools down into empty space. Workers, strapped in boson chairs, are lowered over the mountainside where they mark points for the drillers and blasters. Ivan and Bill are the link between the maquette and the mountain and there is a fearful significance in the little numbers they record. Art, engineering, mathematics are locked in a precise relationship to create a wonder of the modern world. Mt. Rushmore was begun in 1925, just before the Great Depression and proceeded through those years of crisis towards World War II, when it was concluded without warning in 1941. The finishing touch had been given not to the work but to the sculptor. Gutzon Borglum was dead. I don’t know whether Gutzon ever expected to complete his work on Mt. Rushmore. I suppose he did, but an artist’s vision is an elusive thing and it often happens that the more the work advances the farther the vision recedes. Occasionally, however, the artist may be caught unawares by the suggestion of an accidental effect that ensnares a vision beyond his expectations. “Catch these accidents and convert them into science,” said the great 19th century French sculptor, Rodin, who also declared that “The only thing “more beautiful than a beautiful thing is the ruin of a beautiful thing.” This is because it evokes a beauty than can only be realized in the imagination Conversely, one might also say that the only thing more beautiful than the creation of a beautiful thing is a beautiful thing still in creation, and for the same reason. In each case perfection is suggested either by what might have been or by what might yet become. Perfection is like the face of God. It can be only be intimated – never described. And, could it be realized, it would be a dead thing because perfection has no possibility for movement or growth, which is life’s essence. The creative act must be stopped before that final goal is reached. Sublime suggestion, not perfection, is the goal of art. Gutzon achieved this sublimity in many of his smaller works and he was struggling to find it within “his mountain.” On clear days and hazy ones he and Ivan would drive to distant viewing points, sometimes miles away, where they would study the colossal forms and exchange comments through the critique of binoculars. Upon returning, Borglum would order the removal of a little stone here or there and in this manner the heads groped towards refinement and a unity of effect that, even without the artist, might have been conferred eventually upon the work by time and nature… perhaps over eons. On one such occasion Borglum lowered the field glasses and stared silently at the mountain in grim frustration. Ivan pulled on impulse the small cast of a woman’s face from his coat pocket. It was the mask from “I have Piped,” one of Borglum’s most beautiful and moving works. Impelled by the sculptor’s intensity and perfectly attuned to his mood, Ivan raised the small mask to Gutzon’s view and said, “You have more art in this little head than you’ll ever have in that whole damned mountain”. The sculptor gazed into the distance, then pulled down his hat and headed towards the car. “I know it!” he said. In the rapid spontaneity of developing an intimate work of art, the excitement of creation may yield an expressive power and vitality that is not found in a more ambitious and labored work. These qualities are especially difficult to retain when a small work is enlarged to monumental size. A successful monument cannot simply be the mechanical enlargement of a small work because the increased scale demands changes in proportion to compensate for the magnified effects of foreshortening. To give “life” to art on a colossal scale means to cut loose its moorings from the maquette and create anew. Borglum’s maquettes for Rushmore were mere guides for his developing vision. His turning away from the spiritual power of that small mask in my father’s hand was an expression of the frustration felt by every serious artist in the battle between his vision and reality. (End of chapter) To Ride a Bronze Horse, by John Sherrill Houser November, 1988 The Rio Grande El Paso, Texas COMING TO EL PASO WITH THE RIVER After winter’s cold sleep, spring winds sweep violently over the Texas/Chihuahua desert and scour its surface like frantic old women with switch brooms. Great continents of dust lift in angry congregation to rend the earth and bite the air. With their high backs against the sun they move darkly across a landscape torn asunder. In the summer, small clouds fleece the sky and join together in wooly thunderheads to pound and nourish the earth. There is an aesthetic to every season, but in the fall a dazzling luminescence transforms the land. The brown waters of the Rio Grande flow out of New Mexico, turning east to form the US/Mexico border. The autumnal light rummages through dry weeds and coruscates across graveyards of broken auto glass. It settles in penumbras upon mountaintops and fills the west Texas sky. It is the qualification of a harsh land that transforms its blight to beauty. In this season of light we approach El Paso with the river from the west. We meander through the lush “upper valley” amid topsy-turvy reflections of flooded pecan orchards. We glide through green fields of cotton, dotted white, on to the outskirts of advancing suburbia and into a dry and rocky zone. Above us a monolithic Christ the King, stands on a desolate promontory, silhouetted against the lowering sun. It took Spanish sculptor, Urbici Soler, six years to carve his 42-foot Cristo Rey. It was dedicated in 1939 and stands with outstretched arms, like the Christ of the Andes, a project with which Urbici had assisted as a young man. Above viridian depths we flow past a brickyard into a region of dead hills where the Asarco smelter, rooted among rocks like some medieval relic, belches indigestible bits of fire from its dark past into the approaching night. Its soldierly stack rises seventy feet above the skeletal remains and unkempt graves of nearby Smelter Town. The river divides the twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, in the dusk, with a ribbon of silver. At nightfall, city lights, flung like diamonds upon black velvet, fill the valley with the illusion of blinding wealth. Only day reveals two stepsisters vying with each other across the insignificant and defeated trickle of a river; the Great River, the Rio Grande, reduced to a symbolic and politically contrived barrier, too weak to enforce a boundary mandate between nations or unite them in a common bond. Rail tracks along the northern bank bear freight from the Orient and hobos bracing against the wind. A sheltering overpass in the distance is known to the homeless as Hotel California. We flow by junkyards and a halfway house where men and women huddle against brick walls and rifle through paper bags for apples. Along the southern bank, adobe huts crowd the hills in the declining light and women haul buckets of water up dirt paths to dwellings where unemployment and poverty are the bedding ground for drugs and crime. We pass by the jumping-off-place where desperate men congregate under cover of darkness to push away from the shore in inner tubes. Once across they race over the Border Highway throwing covert Hail Marys over their shoulders as searchlights flash. A handful of men and boys fan out and scramble over fences, disappearing into labyrinth backyards. But the southern bank is transfigured when the sun, masked in red dust, falls over the mountain and naked bulbs on long poles wink to life. Inside adobe huts Kerosene lamps dip and dim as they are carried from room to room and in the warm evening children laugh and splash in the mud along the bank. Ahead seven international bridges link the culture and work of two nations. We pass beneath and enter the outlying farming districts to the east. The lights of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez grow distant as we glide with the stars through a canal of angled concrete. The night is open; the air is cool. We breathe “good-by and wish you well” upon the waters and return to the twin cities of The Pass, now aborning in the dawn. (end of chapter) To Ride a Bronze Horse, by John Sherrill Houser September 15, 2004 (A small municipality north of Mexico City) Atizapan de Zaragoza, Tlanepantla Mexico The Storm Nobody saw It was late afternoon in the Atizapan studio at the height of the rainy season when Mexico is pounded by the hurricanes that blow inland from the gulf. The colossal horse, modeled in plaster, reared against the far wall and a low light from the north facing windows at its rear, raked across its surface throwing the forms into high relief. The twelve feet long horse’s head rose soared above the two tall scaffolding towers that flanked its forelegs on either side. Beneath these arched limbs ran an adjoining bridge of heavy planking covered with plywood. I leaned out from the scaffolding with a tool in one hand working on the lateral muscles of the shoulder. Ethan was on the bridge below doing some finish modeling on the horse’s chest. The plywood at his feet was cluttered with buckets of water, open sacks of plaster, plastic mixing bowls, and assorted tools as Miguel, on his hands and knees, scraped away the treacherous slush of spent plaster that covered its surface. There was a splattering sound as it fell upon the plastic sheet on the floor below. The sky had been steadily darkening for over an hour and a sallow light invaded the studio as a great rolling storm approached ominously from the north. It was almost quitting time. I glanced through the window at the solid fortress of dark clouds and then down at Ethan in his cramped workspace, hemmed in between the giant forelegs on either side, his nose against the horse’s chest and his back to the wall. We had made our hourly commute in separate cars that morning so I suggested that he leave early to avoid the onslaught of the storm. He agreed, and as I heard him drive away our three-man crew began their nightly clean-up. I sat alone on my high perch mixing one last batch of plaster in the encroaching darkness, when a voice broke the silence. I peered down though a maze of scaffolding and hanging plastic to see two small figures standing with upturned faces in the shadows below. One man was shouting in Spanish. His words were muffled by the vastness of the studio space, but even from my odd perspective something about him seemed vaguely familiar and I signaled that I was coming down. As I descended, his words and tone of voice gained in clarity. "Pinche pendejo… Chingon…hasta la madre!" These insults, issued with an intensity of strong conviction, came from a bearded, stocky man in his late forties. He punctuated his obscenities with a shake of his fist as he clasped a black briefcase against his chest. What I had first assumed to be light-hearted banter was now revealed as a veritable tempest of rage coming from Arogante Fulmon, a rival sculptor first introduced to me by a mutual friend some years before. I knew him as a talented artist of monumental works and a prodigious worker but he was also a highly-strung individual with a jealous nature and a volcanic temperament. Our relationship had always been somewhat restrained but I had never seen him like this. The second man stood immediately behind him in the gloom. His tousled hair and the glint of a gold tooth indentified him as Viscoso Guzano, the foundry man from down the street, who was also our landlord. Suddenly there was a tremendous clap of thunder and a crucible of brilliance splashed across the night sky. This and the sudden hammering of rain on the corrugated roof wrenched me back to the reality of the storm that has at last broken in full force. Behind me, someone had placed a bucket on the floor to catch the water that was streaming down through a fissure in the skylight. Then the storm faded seamlessly back into the drama unfolding before us. Red-faced and taut with emotion, Fulmon was waving his arms as he walked up and down the studio. "This building, the scaffolding, the plastacene, everything here is mine, all mine…everything here belongs to ME!" he shouted. There was another clap of thunder followed by a deafening silence and Fulmon turned to address my astonished crew. “I am a patient man,” he began, with innocent irony. “I have waited over a year”…then to Miguel he bluntly demanded, “Give me the keys.” Miguel stared back in mute disbelief. Unable to force the issue, Fulmon turned his attention to the giant horse, towering above him. "I will destroy this pinche caballo," he announced and looked madly around for some instrument of attack. Finding only a thin stick he began striking vainly at the horse’s hock that was almost beyond his reach. But his strange fixation on ownership of the studio, mingled with his erratic, almost drugged-like behavior, hinted at a possible explanation. When I first came to Mexico City to enlarge the horse, almost a decade earlier, The XII Travelers volunteers in El Paso, Texas, who supported the project, paid $40,000.00 to the foundry man, Guzano, on contract to build an enlarging studio on a lot he owned across from his foundry. When the foundation was poured and the walls had risen to shoulder-height, Guzano defaulted and the money mysteriously disappeared. The foundry man wrongly assumed that his theft would send the gringos running back to the U.S. in defeat. Instead, the XII Travelers entered upon a course of litigation in the Mexican courts and seven months later was awarded possession of the premises for the duration of the project and the right to complete the studio at its own expense. This favorable judgment, however, also aggravated the existing animosity between landlord and tenant. Harassment by Guzano never stopped and the XII Travelers attorneys remained on perpetual retainer. Now it occurred to me that Guzano might have sold the studio to Fulmon, who was now trying to force us out. This, however, seemed of dubious legality. I needed to discuss it with our attorney, but my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an altercation. Above the beating of the rain, I heard Fulmon’s voice rise in anger against Guzano, "!Tu y tus pinches abogaditos! You and your f--ing little attorneys! This was sounding more and more like a bluff that wasn’t working. “Fulmon,” I said, “you had better talk with our attorney.” He stared at me, hesitated a moment before ordering Guzano to call Antonio Pina, the president of the XII Travelers in El Paso, on his cell phone. Fulmon turned. Puffing up to his maximum height and throwing out his chest, he charged towards me. I held my ground and met him as he came. We stood nose to nose, locked in brute confrontation. As the seconds stretched into minutes I realized that he was totally defenseless before me. Scenarios ran through my mind that would have taken him by surprise and left him writhing on the floor but it seemed more prudent to let the situation take its course. Tension continued to rise. Fulmon blew in my face, spun around, and walked away. I appeared to have won a victory of sorts. Then, as though seeking a chance to regain some lost advantage, he rushed for the stairs at the back of the studio and climbed to the balcony, ostensibly to examine the extent of his new property as I ducked into one of the small rooms off the stairs and called my attorney, who assured me that the studio was legally secure. In a few moments Fulmon came down and cornering Santiago, our youngest and newest worker, he demanded, "Who are you?" Without waiting for a reply he ordered him to, “Get out of here.” Santiago replied in a steady voice “I will leave when the rest of the crew leaves.” His bullying tactics were ebbing into frustration, pushing him to more desperate measures. He reached into his brief case and slowly removed a 38-caliber pistol. He inserted the clip and raised the gun, waving it menacingly at the three figures huddled against the wall. Suddenly Guzano’s voice rang out. “I can’t get through to Antonio Pina”, he announced -- and the spell was broken. As though recovering from a trance Fulmon put the pistol back into his brief case. He uttered one final threat, promising to return in the morning, and strode towards the door with Guzano in tow. Together they vanished in the night. All this had taken place in less than 40 minutes. The storm had come and gone, unnoticed. (end chapter) To Ride a Bronze Horse, by John Sherrill Houser November 10, 2004 (A small municipality north of Mexico City) Atizapan de Zaragoza, Tlanepantla Mexico INSIDE THE BELLY OF THE HORSE The little Colonia of San Jose del Jaral is part of the larger municipality of Atizapan de Zaragoza, which lies twenty minutes north of Mexico City off the highway to Queretaro. The cheap housing, the neglected roads, the cracked sidewalks and the high rock walls encrusted with peeling stucco all mark San Jose del Jaral as a poor working class barrio. Yet these walls are adorned with flourishes of crimson bougainvillea and a visit to the public mercado that comes to life along a small stretch of unpaved street every Thursday reveals the same bustle of communal activity and gossip that animated the native Mexican markets or tianguis before the conquest. Along the edge of the Colonia, Calle Apolinar de Mendoza slopes gently downward and ends in a gulley that is a graveyard for broken bottles, loose boards, and bits of snagged plastic on dry weeds. Half buried in the fill is a section of culvert from which a scrawny bitch, suckling her pups, stares out reproachfully at a hostile world. A berm behind the gully borders on an open field and in the distance a few thin smoke stacks leak a gray effluvium into the ochre sky. Along one side of the street, abutting this defile of refuse is a wall of faded blue scored with old graffiti. Chunks of broken glass are embedded in concrete along its upper ridge and clusters of rebar, emerging at intervals in scraggly silhouette, let the tax collector know that it is still a work in progress. A watchman in coveralls sits tilted back in a chair against a broad metal gate. A jumble of upper and lower case letters on the wall reads, GuZAno y HiJos, BroncEs ArTisTicos (Guzano and sons, Artistic Bronzes). Inside is a foundry where Maestro Guzano and son (there is only one) cast bronze sculptures using the lost wax process. Their methods are primitive but suited to the resources available. Foundry work is a hot and dirty business. Dense clouds of black smoke are pumped daily into the already polluted sky. Within these walls ranchero music competes with the clanging of metal and from somewhere an essence of pigsty fills the air. At the upper end of the street, on the opposite side, is the XII Travelers enlarging studio, a square 40-foot-high structure, sheeted in corrugated plastic, which dominates a sea of single story cement-block dwellings. The studio’s big double doors are thrown open and the muffled excitement and high-pitched laughter of children fill the interior and overflow into the street. It is early morning and the local people hastening to work glance at one another and then towards the studio where a pale sculpture of a colossal rearing horse and rider rises to obscurity in the dim interior. But it is not the sound of children’s voices or the unusual size of the sculpture that has arrested the attention of these passers-by. It is the incongruity of children’s voices issuing from inside the belly of the horse. They are undersized for children and old for their years. Their hands aspire to men’s work and their childish faces mimic the seriousness of adults. They are seven, the demolition conscripts of the junk dealers who are buying the metal armature of the now completed giant sculpture for scrap. They come from “El Cierro,” the poor barrio that sprawls over the hill behind the studio. They arrive early with iron bars over their shoulders, in military fashion, and one by one, like little Jonahs, they climb the long ladder that leads to a narrow window cut into the belly of the horse. I watch the youngest, Jose Maria Gonzales y Munoz “para servirle” (at Your Service), who appears to be about eight years old but is probably closer to twelve. He plants his foot solidly on the bottom rung and climbs to the top. He is the last one up. He ducks into the opening and disappears. A moment later his small face re-emerges, framed against the darkness. He glances at the floor twenty feet below, spits manfully, waits until his spittle hits the concrete, turns away and is lost from view. The cavity in the horse that swallowed these small forms is as dark and cramped as the interior of a primitive submarine. A treacherous jumble of steel beams runs at odd angles, providing uncertain footing below and inadequate headroom above, but to these boys it is an adventure out of the ordinary. Who among them, or any of their young comrades, had ever climbed to such heights? Who among them had ever stood alongside the iron entrails of the world’s largest horse and who among them had ever been commissioned to destroy such a fabulous thing? This responsibility was, in itself, a matter of astonishment and pride. The studio and its statue were famous throughout the barrio. From infancy these children had watched the studio rise slowly from the dead turf of a vacant lot. Their parents and neighbors assisted in its construction. They saw coils of steel rebar cut, shaped and welded to form the cage-like skeleton of a giant horse. Before their eyes this monster acquired a rough skin of plaster and, finally, replete with muscles and surface detail, it become a rearing, gleaming, gigantic caballo blanco con jinete, white horse with rider, straining towards the heavens. This was the creation they were now commissioned to destroy. Who among them, indeed! This first morning they shout and laugh and call to one another exuberantly from inside the horse’s belly. Then, without warning, an iron bar breaks the outer surface of the horse and a shower of plaster fragments fall to the floor, then another, and another. As I listen to these children reveling in a perverse pleasure that will demolish almost a decade of artistic labor, I cannot hide my sense of misplaced resentment at their joy. The horse has served its purpose and the molds have been safely trucked to a foundry in New Mexico but here, crumbling before me, is the lone symbol of a significant portion of my life. I don’t think I would have the heart to wield that iron bar myself. Do these child-men think of the time and the talent that has gone so slowly and painfully into its creation? As the plaster falls away from the steel support do the more sensitive among them feel the slightest tinge of regret? I hoped for their sake that they did because behind their childish countenance I sensed the cold hint of grown men wreaking oblivion against art across history. Conquering civilizations destroying cultures to demoralize and subjugate a people is the sad history of human progress. The invaders of ancient Greece reduced marble masterpieces to mortar for siege walls and master works of bronze to molten metal for instruments of war. I wondered if these destroyers also laughed and called to one another in the darkness of their souls as they tore down a beauty that was beyond their understanding. The following morning only five boys returned and I noticed that the seriousness and difficulty of the task had subdued their laughter as it had also diminished their number. They worked in determined silence under the direction of an older boy who was already a working class veteran to his peers. The necessity to help their families had pulled them early into a life of toil and an inescapable destiny of marginal employment. Their little elbows pump like pistons and a growing litter of plaster covers the floor. On the third day the same five come back again and by the end of the afternoon, amid hanging bits of burlap and plaster, the armature ribs of the horse are exposed and steel beams can be seen within. On the fourth day their work is finished and they walk out into the street happily waving their pesos in the air like little flags. They have knocked away most of the plaster from the central section and the tightly woven rebar skeleton that lay beneath is everywhere in evidence. The remaining work is dangerous and difficult. The thick supporting beams of the horse’s body and hind legs, still festooned with shreds of debris, lean out at disconcerting angles like the masts of some storm-tossed wreck. Two men climb among the rigging with acetylene torches cutting away latticed chunks of rebar and steel. The main body frame, supported by the hind legs and three vertical struts, still projects a remaining foreleg into the air. The man with the torch leans out and after prolonged cutting, four hundred pounds of ragged metal suddenly falls away. Hanging by a thread of metal it swings wildly in diminishing periods, coming slowly to rest like a giant pendulum, eighteen-feet above the floor. The other man kicks it with his foot. It dangles precariously for a moment and then plunges into the sea of angry plaster below. (end of chapter) To Ride a Bronze Horse, by John Sherrill Houser Atizapan de Zaragoza Tlanepantla, Mexico November 17, 2004 GLANCING BACK It is one week later, Sunday, at four o’clock in the afternoon. I am in the studio alone. The sound of birds singing in the bouganvillea that crests the adobe wall across the street floats in through the big, clasped double doors. The relentless rains, pushed inland by the hurricanes that pummeled the Mayan coast this summer and flooded the studio, have long departed, and a cool light filters in through the north windows. Plaster rubble lies upon the floor in a now dead sea of exhausted violence. The birds have fallen silent and the presence of the Horse pervades the deserted workspace like a phantom limb, made all the more palpable by its absence. A steel shaft in the middle of the studio, once the revolving pivot of the enlarging platform, rises vertically three feet above the debris like a grave marker. The dying wreckage of twisted rebar and cantilevered beams that towered above a week ago has been taken down and trucked away by the junk dealers. I walk down a path cleared through the middle of the rubble to the back of the building and climb concrete steps to the mid-level walkway where I ascend a spiral of wrought iron stairs to the viewing deck. I move slowly under the weight of memory. I grasp the railing and stare into empty space like some forlorn Ahab contemplating the lost ghost of his obsession. After seven years the Horse has breached its stall to spread its still wet wings in flight, leaving an imprint of palpitating vacancy upon the air. Below, in defeated fragments, is the discarded chrysalis of his former self. As daylight fades, I am suddenly overcome with an emotion like dried leaves and must. I am standing with a beautiful woman upon a hillside in Magdalena, New Mexico, surrounded by a scruffy herd of Spanish-Barbs. It is November 7, 1997 -- seven years ago to the day. We laugh as wind blows through the tall grass. It is my first day of searching for the Horse…and I have found a new love instead. Now the Horse is gone. It will reappear, like Ben Franklin’s old book, “in a new and revised edition”… but where are the loves of yesteryear? (end chapter)