ABSTRACT
“So time does indeed heal all. Presumably Lucy is healing too, or if not healing, then forgetting, growing scar tissue around the memory of the day, sheathing it, sealing it off.” This quotation from J.M. Coetzee reappears in a volume entitled We Are All Flesh, in which excerpts from his works are combined with images of sculptures by the Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruckeyre. The first image in the collection is a close-up from an installation called “The Wound,” showing what appears to be a stitched and healing scar, here made of wax, wood, and cloth. Curiously, the volume moves from this notion of human scarring to images of the glossy, taxidermied coat of a horse, shot from angles that render their folded positions all but illegible. What is the relation of this fur to the idea of scarring? Do horses not scar and heal in the same way? Is this why they are “receptacles of the forgotten,” as Benjamin says, their wounds still open but hidden beneath their fur rather than stitched over by a healing and written history? These are some of the questions this chapter raises in moving between Coetzee, de Bruyckere, and nineteenth-century writings about memory, habits, and the training of horses.
