EULOGY FOR MAÎTRE JEAN-CLAUDE RACINET
Jean-Claude Racinet has, as the expression in his adopted culture has it, passed away. And people in many very diverse walks of life have to take stock that he has not "simply passed", that he has not "passed through", come and now regrettably gone, but that he leaves us with an enormous and deep legacy. We are left without him, but by no means left by him. He has left us with a responsibility.
©C.Oberleitner-Schindlbeck
This is the mark of a Master: We,
who have had the privilege to learn from him, must carry on transforming the
answers he gave to our queries into further questions, instead of “leaving”
them as settled subject matters. Our responsibility to Jean-Claude is to
respond to interrogations raised by his very contribution by using what we
gleaned from his answers. Racinet was, in the most profound way, a practitioner
of never-ending Cartesian critical thinking, a Frenchman. If he came to be
known as a seeker and a questioner, and to some as a provider of answers, for
him the méthode was central: the
existential necessity to never stop, neither when confronted with a seemingly
unclarifiable question, nor to "rest" having found a seemingly
satisfactory answer. To question, to continue, to "advance", that was
the heart of Jean-Claude.
Jean-Claude Racinet was soft
and fierce, warm and aloof, single-minded and mercurial, complex and simple, he
was at times contrary and always utterly open-minded, in a word, by
"normal" standards, paradoxical. No wonder, then, that he was sometimes
misunderstood, not the least by those whose understanding of him appeared, to
them, the most certain, by those who thought they "knew Racinet": by
those who utterly disagreed with him (and didn't see that what he offered was
precisely that which would have made such disagreement entirely unnecessary)
and by those who, sometimes to the point of taking on the rôle of acolytes,
fervently agreed with him (and didn't see that such "servility",
although it certainly brought him joy and contentment, was in contradiction to
the critical questioning attitude which was at the heart of what he tried to
convey).
©C.Oberleitner-Schindlbeck
Maître was a title all too rarely given to Racinet in his life-time,
much too easily given to some who couldn’t hold a candle to Jean-Claude (a
title which he in his inimitable self-deprecatory manner "forbade" me
to employ, insisting we remain in our odd habit of mutual address which the
circumstances of our, in some way comparable, lives afforded us: always informal and American,
first-name based, sometimes European and formal-sounding, with sudden and marked shifts
between "toi" and "vous"). For most, Jean-Claude
will be remembered as a maître
d'équitation. How limitative such a vision of the man is! Today, that which
he brought to the field of horsemanship may be his most widely (and still much
too little) known contribution, but it does Racinet injustice to ignore or to
underrate his work as a writer of political and of literary texts or as a
composer of music, among many other things. He was not one of those
uni-dimensional "masters" whose excellence is measured by seminal
works in one domain only, in truth his mastery lies in the multi-dimensionality
of his life and work and in the struggle, and success, to integrate its
multifarious aspects. Such a way demands courage, perseverance, and focus, and,
above all, an unwavering sense of solidarity, solidarity with others,
commitment to self, and devotion to the causes chosen. Jean-Claude the family
man, the horseman, the military man, the artist, the colleague, the friend, the
sheer "human being", exemplified all these values. It is in that, as
a model of "doing life", that he was and remains an inspiration.
Racinet combined a staunch (in
the very best sense) "conservativism", a centredness and rootedness,
with a never-ceasing daring to "push the limits". His native
Normandie "peasant" stalwartness, his French urbaneness, his American
(and thus deeply "republican") love for, and ever-ready defense of,
freedom, made him, altogether, a sparkling, yet sometimes not easy to see “into”,
let alone to see through, person. His life was far from "easy", and
he wouldn't have wanted it any other way; he sometimes didn't make it easy on
himself, and couldn't have done it any other way. He had to "grit his
teeth", he fought hard, but knew that true "strategy" (and how
well he knew that!) always, to be
successful, had to incorporate (in his words) a Taoist softness. By taking nothing
lightly (nothing, except the insignificant), he knew how to come to légèreté (on matters of vapidness, he
could be "heavy").
©C.Oberleitner-Schindlbeck
Jean-Claude Racinet, the horseman, could not be anything else but a Baucherist. Maybe it could even be said that he couldn't be anything but a horseman in his "profession" (that it couldn’t also be music was his lifelong regret). He was a professor, even (and especially to those who could get an inkling of the man) a confessor: Be it in his inimitable writing or in his oral teaching, he (in the best sense of the word) not only professed, i.e. conveyed, held forth, and exemplified, but also confessed, avowed to his beliefs, made himself (and let himself be made) the voice of a creed. In that, he was a religious man - by no means a man of any "church" or institution, but one who always was aware of life's relatedness with and connection to "higher and deeper things". His scientifically-minded inquisitiveness and his gnostic leanings (the former "official" through his public contributions in books and teaching, the latter, more "private" and known only to few, in his final years' research into issues of "energetics" in the horse) were not only not in contradiction with each other, they indeed "fed and fertilized" each other. Baucher and Faverot de Kerbrech, his maîtres de pensée, had spoken of training and riding horses as eminently practical (free of what they considered the theorizing humbug of traditional dogma) and as "transcendental"; Racinet followed them in his apparently "elementary" practical, hands-on approach (there was no difference for him and with him between beginner and advanced, be it horse or rider), yet called it outright "esoteric". His critical assessment of the essence of "l'équitation de tradition française" (his conceptual evaluation and reorganization and further development of it which, and rightly so, was called "Baucher Third Manner" but which has, to date, not gained the notoriety it merits, except among a much too remote "underground") makes Racinet into one of the most important modern theoreticians of equestrianism - yet, he always (though not without a grin) expressed to me his "humility" in comparison to the "old masters", none of whom escaped his critical scrutiny. Similarly, he always, when we spoke of "real horse work", insisted that he was "not a master rider" (yet, what he may have – again, with a grin - shrugged off and what is too widely unknown among those who took and still take him to be a "dressage" expert, appears in a totally different light when one knows what masters such as Durand or Chapot, olympians of show jumping, think of his work with horses in that discipline!). It was always difficult to compliment Jean-Claude (and to not compliment him, to not show one's understanding of his seminal contribution, even worse). Racinet's humility was the fruit of his awareness that a man's contributions will be measured, maybe past his living time, by the value given to the cause, not by the more immediate usefulness and needs of contemporaries' interests. Provocative and exaggerating he may have seemed to some, irrelevant and marginal to others, speaker of truths, innovator and "breath of fresh air" to the few who could "hear" him - Jean-Claude took the measure of it all, followed his vocation, adhered to his calling, did what he must and never did less than the best he could. He was a man of measure.
And he had his foibles, his idiosyncrasies,
his quirks. He was a man. He made mistakes, not the least the ones leading to
his fall. A saddening synchronicity it
is that when it all, all his life's (and not only equestrian life’s)
work, "came together", when he (as we, he and I, often remarked with
bepuzzlement and relief and joy!) came to the "lion's den" and
brought his teaching to Central Europe's riders, it led, by the obscure paths
of fate, to his leaving. It is we all
who fell with his demise, we the remaining "people of the horse".
But Jean-Claude Racinet, by
leaving, also raises us, he challenges us, still. We may have been few people,
during his lifetime, to come to understand what it was in what he brought to us
which elevated us: not his excellent methods nor the rightness of his
“contents”, but the “height” of his principles. His human principles were the
same as his equestrian principles. That is why “doing à la Racinet” with horses
while not doing it with our fellow human beings and with the universe we all
share, will be the sign of not having understood Master Racinet at all. We who
now carry on and take the responsibility he left us with, must not only not
forget the man and his work, but we must, most importantly, do his work, in the spirit of Jean-Claude Racinet: we
must be critical, questioning, open-minded, flexible, tolerant, devoted,
measured, principled. To relegate Racinet to the past would be as false to him
as to “borrow bits and pieces” from him for utilitarian purposes or even to make
him into an authority of a presumably unassailable truth.
A good many years ago, the
waitresses in the little restaurant in Oak Bay, Washington State, wondered what
these two "weird Frenchmen" were doing (as they seamlessly switched
from French to English to German - oh, yes, he knew German well - , from horse
talk to politics to music to gastronomy to linguistics, from serious talk to Homeric
laughter, from warm dialogue to seemingly fierce altercation, from shared
thoughts on Europe to disagreements on America, from memories of
Jean-Claude Racinet: He was a
man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
© Christian Kristen von Stetten
2009
A TRIBUTE TO JEAN-CLAUDE RACINETÉcuyer at the Cadre Noir, Saumur
It is the essence of those who have forever left us which we hope to
preserve: Their warmth of heart and kindness, their practical wisdom,
their insights, their sheer know-how in all its subtlety. And we also
deeply wish to remember the way in which they approached problems we
still have to tackle, how they thought about them and analyzed them,
how they solved them. Their spirit, then, it is which we long to see
alive and continuing, although they are gone.
Jean-Claude Racinet was with horses and on a horse when he started to
leave this world. All his life was defined by his relationship with the
horse, and so was his demise. He belongs to the lineage of masters of
the Baucherist school, of that equestrian philosophy which
fundamentally holds that the method suggested by the doctrine has to be
transcended and that one can and must discover one's own path and
manner. In that, Racinet has been eminently successful. Building on the
ostheopathic theory of Dr. Giniaux, he brought to modern riders the
means of the rational use of the techniques of the "mise en main", he
showed them how to effectively influence the totality of the horse's
movement mechanics and how to reduce those tensions which inhibit their
optimal functioning.
Racinet was the
living proof that Baucherism is on open system of thought to which
every true Master of riding can contribute in his most personal manner
and within which every rider of high calibre can invent his own
technical particularities. Everything and anything the rider does which
leads to the horse attaining a state of higher relaxation is acceptable
within the Baucherist framework. Baucherism is a never-ending
reinvention, it can even be said that its very condition of existence
is to be continuously recreated. For the baucherist rider and trainer
has no interest in movements, however exceptional or spectacular they
may be, which are not based on the horse's education, on the animal's
ever more refined understanding of the aids - any execution of
exercises which is not the product and the realization of such
refinement would be nothing but the mechanized repetition of
standardized gestures. In short, the baucherist approach is open to
differences in technique, it allows for variation in practice, it is a
humanist philosophy which has the personal development of the studious
rider, the well-being and the conservation of the horse, at heart.
Jean-Claude Racinet was such a humanist. Until his last breath, he
embodied and defended the very principles of French riding and as such
and for that he will remain forever in our memory.
©Patrice Franchet d'Espèrey
©Translation: Christian Kristen von Stetten
with the kind permission of the author
