Dysart knows that a normal life is a terrible life, he himself is living it. He is finding no satisfaction in Psychiatry and he tries to warn Alan about what his life will be. “When Equus leaves – if he leaves at all – it will be with your intestines in his teeth. And I don’t stock replacements…If you knew anything, you’d get up this minute and run from me as fast as you could.” (Pg. 107) The intestines are his originality again, when Dysart takes away Equus his originality will go with him. What he means when he says that he doesn’t stock replacements is that once your originality is gone there is no getting it back and even a psychiatrist can’t help you. Then the warning he gives sums up that fact that he knows that Psychiatry is really just a way to rob the passion from people. He tells Alan to get away, he knows that when he is done with him we will be normal. However Dysart doesn’t believe that is better. He has spent his whole life trying to find passion, how can he take Alan’s away.
Dysart learns more about himself in Equus than anything else. He finally learns that passion is obtainable and that Psychiatry is death to passion. It is ironic that the one thing had wants the one thing he is trained to destroy.
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Equus is a play that is filled with a few deranged characters that try to help each other come to his or her own senses. I find Alan strang to be the person with the most odd personality: in a normal sort of way. Hypothetically speaking, Alan’s name has a sort of “strange” ring to it. Because of his odd composure I am lead to believe that Alan himself is responsible for helping the “normal” people see the real world. He has had the most influence on Dysart, his psychiatrist.
Dysart comes off as an ordinary neutral psychiatrist that will not be swayed in his opinion of others or of himself. How very easily one can misjudge a character based on a first description. One may even relate to this misinterpretation as prejudice. Alan sees Dysart as the rest of the world does, but what he doesn’t seem to notice is how Dysarts' attitudes about his own life are influenced by what he sees in Alan. “Oh primitive world, I say. What instinctual truths were lost with it! And while I sit there, baiting a poor unimaginative woman with the word, that freaky boy tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soul of argos- and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field!…I watch that women kinitting, night after night- a women I haven’t kissed in years- and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek! Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of dionysus for luck- and go off to the hospital to treat him for insanity. Do you see?” (Dysart 82)
HA HA. And the tides have turned. Dysart is finding himself, a self that he had never known to exist, in a patient who he is treating for insanity. Alan has become his role model. He has showed Dysart a world where one can “undress completely in front of the horse. When he is finished, and obviously quite naked, he throws out his arms and shows himself fully to his God.” His passion for horses has opened a dimension of fantasy in the life of Dysart. He has brought to Dysart a new perspective to which one may live his life. A life in which Dysart had in the past taken so seriously: not to let loose and enjoy himself.
Alan’s “strangeness” has contributed a great deal to the plain and normal life of Dysart. Without Alan’s interference Dysart may have never come to the realization that his own life was rather pointless and boring. Although he never directly mentions this feeling, it can be perceived based upon his thoughts. Therefore Alan has been the patient that took over the role of Dysart and treated him for normality.
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Sacrifices to the Normal
The world is filled with passionless people. Each day they go about their way in the same routine. Each day they do mediocre things in the same way and every weekend they put on the same sweatshirt and read about things they could care less about. They worship nothing and no one and everything they do is the least amount possible. In every few hundred there is one person with a ounce of passion and worship. Alan Strang was one of these people. One of the few with passion and Dysart was wrong to take away Alan’s passions, even if they were for a horse. Having passion is the most important thing to a life.
Dysart knows that by taking these passions away Alan won’t be healed. Dysart can very easily break Alan down but he can’t build him back up as he describes on page 108 “Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created” Dysart can rid Alan of Equus easily. He can stop Alan from his midnight rides. He can remove words like man-bit, Gymkhana, Flecwus and Neckwus. Dysart can make him forget about the field of HA-HA and Nugget. All that is accomplished easily, but none of that can ever be replaced. He can give him multi-lane highways, horse tracks, a world were animals are killed anyways. All that but he can’t give him passion. Is normalcy a replacement for all of this? No. No one would drive a Geo metro after driving a Bentley. No one would want and oyster shell if they already have the pearl. Dysart says that in healing Alan all that he can do is “ make this boy into an ardent husband- a caring citizen- a worshiper of abstract and unifying God”(107) Dysart will not break Alan of fantasy, but simply replace his God with another God, another abstract fantasy. He can lead him from illusion to another. Dysart cannot truly heal Alan. He takes away the illness but he can’t stitch him back up. He can remove all that is not normal but leave a gaping hole. That is not healing, that is destroying.
Dysart knows that life is worthless with out passions. He lives a passionless life, with his passionless wife, reading his passionless books, and afraid of the passion he finds in Gods. Time and time again he has removed the passion from his patients “making sacrifices to the normal… I have cut form them parts sacred to the rarer and more wonderful Gods”(65) These parts that he cuts out are the passions that are sacred to the more hidden and more wonderful Gods, such as Equus. Dysart is a logical man, a scholar and a revered doctor. Yet there is something about Alan that he wants, as he describes here on page 82 “That boy has know a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it” Dysart is jealous of Alan’s passion. What worship has Dysart ever known? None. Dysart may be intelligent or well paid but he says, “With out worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that…I shrank my own life” (82) Dysart’s life is passionless because he has no worship. He knows no God. He travels each year to some tropical islands to a world rich with Gods but he can never seem to find them. He reads books and fantasies about the many Gods he could pray to, but never does, he has no passion because he has no worship. Alan, then, has more passion than anyone. Most just worship and pray to their Beliefs but Alan “Stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat of his God’s cheek”(page 83) nothing can have more passion than contact with your God. Dysart would settle just to have a God, just an ounce of that passion.
No one has the right to destroy someone’s God. There are many millions of people of people who worship a God of some sort. Sixty-tree million people in the United States alone worship a Christian God. Acts of violence are committed every day for supreme beings, and no one is seen as insane for doing them. Countless numbers were murdered in the Crusades in the name of the all holy God, and they were seen as heroes. Even Dysart himself has a calling to the Gods. Dysart often speaks of his fascination with the ancient gods of Greece. He even dreams of making sacrifices to these Gods. He speaks of the importance of gods on page 62 “Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods…worship as may as you can see- and more will appear” Dysart says himself that life is only understandable through a thousand Gods and one should worship as many as they can see to understand life better. That is precisely what Alan was doing. He formed and worshiped Equus so that he couldn’t understand the world around him and understand himself. Equus, with his resemblance to Jesus, was an attempt to deal with religion around him. Words like jodhpurs, or becoming one with the horse, were Alan reacting to his mother’s stories. The Chinkle Chankle in the horses’ mouth was a reaction to the memory of Trojan on the beach. All these things that Alan could comprehend made sense in Equus. Dysart admits this on page 81 “I only know that it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? …Many men have less vital with their wives” Equus is the core of Alan’s life, and Dysart knows that. Equus is that heart of Alan’s body. If the heart is removed the body cannot continue to live.
Dysart was wrong to remove Equus from Alan. He was wrong to kill the passions that he envied so much. All this for what? Normalcy. Dysart did not heal Alan he ravaged him. In a world devoid of passion, it is the most important thing one can have. Every day people go about their ways passionless and now Alan joins them.
