Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zu Suzanne Vega's Song "Wooden Horse"

From: Robert P. King
Submitted: 3-AUG-1994 06:40:59.00
Subj: Caspar Hauser's Song (Long Interpretation)


I'm really glad someone asked about "Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song)," as it's my all-time favorite Suzanne Vega song and one that has never failed to move me since I first heard it seven years ago. (This song, along with "Queen and the Soldier," literally had chills running up and down my spine the last time I saw her perform them, back in 1990 in Tampa. A cliche, but true.)

Hauser, from what little I've read, was a German boy in the 19th century whose parents supposedly kept him locked alone in the basement until he was 17 or so, with only his toy wooden horse to keep him company. By itself it's a compelling story with elements of bizarre cruelty (in a sense, this is the second child-abuse song on the album, along with "Luka") and questions about what it means to grow up without human contact. Caspar certainly fits in well with the other wounded, skewed survivors who populate much of the Vega canon; and, as she often does, she tells it from the first person. She called it "a point of view I couldn't resist" when she performed the song in Phoenix in '87.

But ask yourself this as a little creative exercise: If you were to write a song about Caspar, how would you do it? Then look at what Suzanne wrote. If you need a demonstration of what a tremendously gifted artist she is (and no one on this list should), I think this is it: What a lesser songwriter would turn into a preachy ballad or weepy lamentation (imagine a guitar strumming while someone sings "17 years of darkness/no bright sun above me/no friends to play with/no kind hands to love me"), she has turned into a chilling, mystical song that's both universal and semi-autobiographical.

I think she sees herself in Caspar. Because of her song, I see myself in him as well. I think the song is about, generally, the wonder and fear of growing up and becoming a person -- and, specifically, about her own wonder and fear of the artistic gift she carries.

Consider these lines:

"I came out of the darkness" -- so did all of us: out of the womb, and out of the darkness of our earliest childhood, the part we no longer remember.

"Holding one thing
The small white wooden horse
I'd been holding inside."

-- Wood is dead, inanimate. Caspar held it inside his basement, a surrogate for the living friends he never had. Inside of _us_, it's our potential, whatever gift we've been blessed with, dead like a seed before it starts to germinate. In Suzanne it was the artistic gift that was to start showing itself when she began writing music.

"In the night the walls disappeared
In the day they returned."

-- These, two of the most perfect lines you will find in any song, are loaded with meaning. This was literally true for Caspar; at night he couldn't see his walls anymore. It's also true for us: the night, when we dream or lie awake with our dreams, is when we pass beyond the walls or limitations that surround us in the daylight world. I think it's especially true for children, whose waking lives are limited by the adults around them. Imagine the young Suzanne Vega in bed, dreaming up stories, dreaming of who she would become.

" 'I want to be a rider like my father'
Were the only words I could say."

-- Caspar's dream is to be a rider, with a living horse, and I also sense the longing for the absent father. It's sort of interesting that "rider" sounds like "writer"; isn't Suzanne's father a writer? (I mean the one who raised her.)

"Alive
And I fell under
A moving piece of sun
Freedom"

-- Pretty obvious, I think: Caspar emerges into the outside world. Suzanne discovers her ability to create. We discover whatever is bright and alive in us. This is the song's one fleeting moment of joy.

Then we go back to "I came out of the darkness/holding one thing", but end it with:

"I know I have this power
I'm afraid I may be killed."

-- This is kind of a bizarre couple of lines if the song is still about Caspar; my first reaction was "huh"? What power? Has Caspar's solitude turned him paranoid?

I believe it refers partly to Suzanne's power, the creative gift that allows her to form songs that take lives of their own and live in other people. It sounds to me that she is both joyous and in awe of this gift. To some, the ability to create life where none existed before belongs to God, or the gods; to have such a gift is to risk divine retribution. To have a great treasure is to fear that others will try to take it.

Maybe most of all, to know what a great power we have in being alive and human is to fear death, which can take it all away. Maybe the worst thing is to know how precious life is when it is about to end. Maybe Caspar, once he found the life he was deprived of, feared he was about to lose it.

I've saved the chorus for last:

"And when I'm dead
If you could tell them this
That what was wood became alive
What was wood became alive."

--- Rolling Stone sneered that these lines possibly referred to Suzanne livening up her "wooden" songwriting style, but then again, that magazine has never really seemed to have understood her (what can you say about a publication that knocked her for using the word "equivocate" in "When Heroes Go Down"?). But they might have blundered within a half-mile of the truth. For Suzanne, her songwriting, her artistic talent, _is_ what became alive; for all of us, it's whatever spark within us makes us uniquely human. This is the great secret, the great revelation she/Caspar wants to be remembered for after death. (And can anybody out there hear the words "And when I'm dead" without feeling like somebody somewhere just stepped over their future grave?)

Applied to Caspar literally, these lines again make him appear to have gone a little daft in his basement captivity, as if he is claiming that the toy horse literally became alive. Maybe he just means that his wooden existence underground took life once he joined the world.

But I get a sense of his solitude as a mystical experience: That horse did become alive, and if you don't understand, that's fine, but he wants you to know that it really happened. It _lived_. I get the idea that he understands that only because he was alone for so long; that's what made him able to see the life inside the wood.

Maybe it's the same thing that sets Suzanne apart and lets her see things most people miss. She seems to be saying something like that in "Solitude Standing," where Suzanne wants to be among the crowd in the dark, "gathered into one," but instead is with Solitude, who has her hand extended, who is there to "set a twisted thing straight" and "lighten this dark heart." Many see solitude as a curse, but sometimes it comes bearing gifts. Having chosen a less-traveled path (or maybe, it having chosen her), Suzanne is separate, in a sense, from the mass; in these songs she seems acutely aware of that fact.

Sorry this is so long, and I hope I haven't annoyed anyone too much. I really welcome anybody else's thoughts about this interpretation. My goal is not to kill the song with a barrage of over-analysis, but merely try to explain some fraction of what makes this song so special to me.

I could go on and on about how incredibly spare the song is, how it manages to say so much with so few words (a technique I know I should try to emulate), or about how that incredible drumbeat makes me see this terrifying image of a horse galloping out of the darkness -- but I won't.

Let me know what you think.

-- Bob
Bradenton, FL
bobking@well.sf.ca.us

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