Jorses
Things that get revealed by typos
Jorses was a typo, yes, but quite meaningful nonetheless. I had serendipitously come upon a hinge word! The word swung open on well-oiled hinges, and instead of Horses, I saw an emerging body of Jorses, a word that advocates for the animal spirit of horses. There, in the collective of Jorses, is the resistance of a group of horses, jostling for space within the confined interstices of their thundering gallop across the plains. Oh, to experience the sheer majesty of a jorse! It’s an unforgettable sight!
Not that I had actually seen the sight. Not that at 14, I had even ever been physically close to a horse body. But when a horse figure materialized from the scrap of wire and metal that I had come across on the road, I was completely unprepared for its pure form, and unprepared for the beauty in what a form can capture and convey. I was impressed that I was able to shape a horse figure out of my unknowing hands, amazed at where this skill could come from, and fascinated that a scrap of metal could contain within it’s unruly coils the shape and power of a horse. That clearly, was a jorse spirit, manifesting, impatiently pushing itself out of my hands.
Soon, I even rode a jorse. I enrolled in riding classes, and I was assigned a free-spirited magnificent horse who galloped instead of trotting, who bucked and bolted at will, and who threw his head back to slather me with his spittle. His name was Kolahalla, which means Chaos. It quickly became clear how he came by his name.
So many swirling, unruly lines that crisscross over time, and they always come to embody some restless animal spirit. The same inexplicable skill manifested itself when a smerge of dogs got captured on paper. A smerge of dogs is a panting, jostling, snorting body of a group of dogs that emerge out of the smudges of charcoal.
